by Cynan Jones
He watched the crowd, imagining himself stepping down the aisle to the center of the hall, climbing into the ring, all these people here to watch him, his name announced. “If it wasn’t for this nose,” he thought. He saw himself spit blood carelessly into the basin and held the coffee cup to his mouth with two hands, as if it had a spout to drink through. Left, right, left, left, right. “If it wasn’t for this nose,” he thought. He’d moved on from the scallies, and in his mind they were big opponents, and he was laying them out, one by one, to the cheers of the crowd.
He felt the three bleats of his phone in his pocket and picked up the black sports bag and went out to the drop-off point and over to the taxi that was pulled up. He got in and put the bag on his lap. The car filled up with the smell of the coffee. The driver nodded. He’d met him before. Always a taxi driver, wherever they were. It was a simple and clever way of getting under things. He was the boss’s man at the port a few hours away where the boat from Ireland got in. He had a strange face like a dieting owl.
“They’re coming over tonight,” the thickset redhead said. “You’re clear on what to do?”
The owlish man nodded.
“Pick them up from the ferry.”
The thickset redhead got out, leaving the black sports bag on the seat.
As he left the car he was stepping from the limo, a girl on either arm. They were like models. Sequined dresses. The flashbulbs crashing off like a firework celebration, wearing the sharp dinner jacket and the heavy belt about his waist like a cummerbund.
He walked into the station to meet his crowd again and behind him the owlish man drove off. The redhead was holding the cup as if it were a mic. “My nose held up,” he told the reporters, “I had to protect it, but I kept it clean and it held up.”
Stringer went up and knocked at the door and the big man’s mother opened it. In his long black coat, Stringer had a look of priest-like officiousness, of a finicky clerk. It was a thing for him to try to dress well after growing up where he did, like hiding a damp bit of wall with a painting.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Gleeson.” He beamed. The smile didn’t suit Stringer’s face. It made him look odd, like a man wearing the wrong hat.
The big man appeared behind his mother in the corridor of the small house. He was dabbing at his mouth with a napkin with the same strange deft way he had rolled the cigarettes. “Will you come in, Declan? And your friend,” asked the mother. She looked past Stringer at the driver in the car. You could just see him through the window, scratching at his red face.
“I think we’re ready to go,” he said. He was thinking of getting to the port and of the few hours’ trip after that on the ferry.
“Get away! You just go back and finish your tea there, Galen.” The big man looked bashfully at Stringer. “You can’t work without your tea.”
The big man went through back to the kitchen and Stringer followed him in. There was no arguing with her.
“Will your friend not come in?” said the mother.
“No,” said Stringer. “He’s fine.” He wanted to say: “He’s not house-trained.” He had this thing against the lower ranks.
“Will you have some food?”
“No, thank you, Mrs. Gleeson,” said Stringer. He was swallowing these big bags of impatience and he thought of the driver waiting in the car. He studied the woman, trying to work out how she could produce such a thing as the big man. Then he looked down at the big man’s plate. “It’ll be the food,” he thought. There was a pile of boxty and the grotesque looking stew. Stringer glued this ridiculous smile on, like a salesman.
“Will you not even have a cuppa?”
“No, thank you, Mrs. Gleeson. We ought to be going.” He looked daggers at the big man. He was wolfing the huge plate of food. He couldn’t eat any quicker.
“Don’t you rush,” said his mother. “You’ll get the wind. I’ve not made your sandwiches yet.” She was busy with the bread and the stuff on the unit. It was like she was under some sort of automatic order to feed things.
“Will you want some sandwiches too, there, Declan?”
“No,” said Stringer.
“There’s plenty here.”
He pulled himself up. “No, thank you, Mrs. Gleeson.”
Stringer could feel the time peeling away. He sat and stared nastily at the big man and looked round the room. There was the sound of the mother making sandwiches. Stringer thought of the trip ahead. He understood the need to keep up the pressure of fear and the engine that had to drive that. His devoted little furiousness at it came mostly from the stupidity of people. They knew the score, why did they have to test it? The engine was relentless. You just did not get away with it, it couldn’t be allowed, so why did they test it? That was what he did. He kept the machine oiled.
He looked around the warm little room. There were pictures of the two boys, the other one much more normal sized, much more his size, more natural to the woman, he thought. There was a picture of the woman’s late husband and an Irish flag in the corner. Stringer felt this pang of jealousy at the pride in the house. He felt a jealousy at the familial love it represented. He didn’t understand this Catholic thing. He’d always felt like an outsider to it. He’d like to have grown up here, not on the dingy, hungry street he did. Here and there around the place were silly little shamrock ornaments and leprechauns. Against that, the big man was like some big overgrown child.
Hold walked out over to the marina, the water calmed inside the vast breakwater truly seagreen, settled.
The beach was strange to him sitting against the town because the town had a strange, spread-out look here. He took it in. Thin shores of white, flinty pebbles. A low howl across the water he could not place at first, eerie, that seemed to be some premonitory message from the sea beyond the break.
“I have to keep a feeling of strength now,” he told himself. “Keep that strength, that feeling of strength. Just concentrate on holding that.” He thought of it as something he was carrying, that he couldn’t put down however heavy it got.
He looked out, onto the mainland and the mountains, could see the clouds smudging up with a later promise of rain. He knew the sort. It would be flat, light rhythmic rain, and it would come over, almost like a tired patch, later in the afternoon.
He looked at the breakwater a while then walked a little way farther and sat and put the bag with the rabbits down beside him and pushed it with his foot out of the sun under the bench. He looked absently at the plaque on the bench, in memory. He thought of someone who must have loved to sit and watch this view. “It has to happen somewhere public,” he thought. “Somewhere like this.”
He looked down at the sore on his thumb, lifted now and raised into an angry welt. He pushed at it with the finger and thumb of his other hand and it swelled with tension. The pain was sharp and small and focused and he picked at the top of the welt with his rough thumbnail until the skin split. The ring of buttermilk pus gave through the skin with a minute breaking of tension, and the splinter lifted in the fluid and spilled out onto Hold’s hand. He picked it up. He rubbed the pus and the pink water off his hand and looked at the shard. Brick. “It’s brick from the house,” he thought.
He turned round and took in the one mountain, rising strangely out of the flat ground of the island. “That would be a good place to get to, to get an idea of the land,” he thought. “It won’t happen there though. It has to be somewhere like this.” He turned back and scanned the promenade, wiped his hand clean again, and flicked the splinter of brick out at the beach. Here, the bluish rock was igneous and looked liquefied, twisted under geology’s great pain rather than snapped like the rocks on the beach he was used to.
The watery pus was running a little on his hand and he stared at it, this repellent stuff from inside himself. He could have no idea where this thing would be. He could not second guess them. Why would it be different from selling anything else? I have what they want. If it falls to me to pick it, I’ll pick somewhere like t
his. Somewhere exposed. Somewhere where I’m in sight of people. He fought the urge to get up and go down to the beach and put his hand in the water.
They sat in the car and went off, the red-faced man driving them out past the tidily careful small gardens. In the back, Stringer felt the little hatred again, a strange despising jealousy at the tame houses. He felt there was a kind of ridiculous Easter egg prettiness to them. It had riled him, being called Declan. He was Stringer to everyone now. But something was always there, bringing you back to what you were, not letting you move on. It was humiliating. A wagging finger.
They went on into the inner city. Instantly the slow urban traffic thickened and Stringer cursed. They had time before the ferry, but he hated to put the simple parts of a thing in jeopardy, like getting to the ferry on time to get the tickets, to take stock. “I’m a professional,” he thought. “That mostly means not getting the simple bits wrong.”
“This goddamned traffic,” he said out loud. They ground into it and stop-started. He had this nervous energy and he hated to stay still.
“I hate to be cooped up. That was the worst thing about the stretch,” he thought. He seethed and felt this anger come up. For him it was like some weird beast from outside. “That’s it. That’s it right there.” He was angry even at his own anger. “If it wasn’t for that I’d have been out in half the time. But that culchie deserved it.” He remembered melting the blade into the toothbrush handle, the way the plastic choked and bubbled like something lunar and seemed to paste itself into the razor to hold it fast.
“You couldn’t take that lip off someone and not do something about it. He deserved it,” Stringer told himself. “That culchie. He shouldn’t have pushed me.”
Stringer looked out at the streets. The people moving on them were bizarre colors against the cement. It was turning back into a dirty city, Stringer could feel it. Now the money was leaching away, the services were being sucked out like suds down the plughole of an emptying bath. The litter was collecting, the dog shit. The stones layering again with a mild soot. Just the colorful corner pubs were there, men smoking outside them. We got treated to a health spa, that’s all. It was just a visit. He felt a cruel joy at that.
“I should have got some kind of promotion, for keeping my mouth shut. I should have been fast-tracked when I got out. I deserve more than this, doing cleanup jobs with this big monkey. They got seven years’ head start on me, those others, and they left me behind. Seven years out while I was sitting around keeping my mouth shut. Just like getting stuck in traffic. Well, I’ve got brains of my own. I’m tired of this. Stuck in traffic. I deserve a chance to make something of myself.”
He fell to staring out of the window, a kind of heavy glass-like quality to him.
Hold was of singular purpose now. Some strong thing in him felt as if he could see those things before him that were about to come, but at the same time he felt this as a paper shadow, and that at any time that feeling of strength could blow down.
He thought back to home. He thought of Cara’s freckles, the secret freckles on her shoulders, and felt again that great brotherly love for her. He imagined Jake in the house, the sun coming in through the window of the new bedroom, the attic room where they’d had their den, he and Danny.
He imagined a busyness of men there, working on the house, the garden cleared, his hands stained with soil as he put in the shrubs and dug out the old borders. He wanted very much to have, at the end of this, the sense that he had done something complete, and turned someone’s life around.
“Where will I go,” he thought. “I don’t care, I can’t answer that. I’d like a small place right up the valley, and a boat.” He laughed gently at himself. “It won’t be enough for that. It won’t be enough for any of it, but it’s a start. It will secure the place and give us a start. Maybe I could get a boat though, start getting the money in for myself.” He felt wistful, thoughtful, philosophical. As if the determination was safe in him now.
He looked at the great ship sitting there at the terminal and had this picture of departure, what it must take to leave a thing. “Is that harder in the end than sticking with it?” he thought. “No.” He thought of his father. “No, following things through is harder. Keeping at them. Or maybe it’s just how we’re geared,” he thought. “We get to be a way, after a certain time, and we can’t be any other way however much we try.”
There are hundreds of driving forces, just another one of which is the desire to provide. And this was Hold. He could no more have walked away from the beach empty-handed than years ago refused his mother a drink. And in him too was a great sense of guilt at anything he took for himself. It was his will to provide without taking. It was, in a way, a form of self-harm. He had missed that vital stage where we learn that we must be able to allow others to know that we take from them.
He thought of the Pole’s wife and family and how they must have come on some big boat or plane like that but he did not think of them in any sad way. He thought of them just in the way that they were part of this thing, now—that everything was. That there was this massive great world out there and men were just the little things of what happened in it and that there was no difference between them and him or everyone else involved in this and that it was just some big process that he could or could not have set into motion, and he’d chosen to do it. Now here they all were.
He watched for a while a mother and child throw bread to a gaggle of ducks that gathered chocking on the promenade. “I didn’t choose that,” he thought, looking at the simple happiness of the mother and child. “I chose not to have that.”
He walked out past the boat store, looking back to the parked, restive ferries at their terminal, and stood awhile looking out across the bay. There were one or two people working on their boats where they stood propped on the hard ground, and the smell of paint and anti-foul drifted to him. The breeze licked in, and a pasty green weed skinned the rocks flattening out into the still water. Faintly, someone had a radio on and within that noise he placed finally the low howl, the hollow mewl of the wind through the masts seeming to amplify the little breeze.
He looked out at the sea. “I need that. I need that the sea is there,” he thought, looking over the water. “I need the knowledge of the presence of this. Sometimes it doesn’t look real. It is important. I cannot imagine being away from it. It seems impossible that we can exist at the same time as it.”
Hold looked at a big, new fishing boat. It was fresh with paint and the paint caught the sun with a wet look it was so fresh. Even the railings and the metalwork reflected, so new was it that it hadn’t been in the water yet, and the salt hadn’t mottled the zinc into a white, stone-like look.
The idea of the ownership of it came to him surreally, gave him a sense this was all strange, dream-like.
“I wonder how much she’d cost,” thought Hold.
He walked on, taking a path he thought would follow the coast, checking now and then that he still had a signal on his phone. He wanted to walk, felt he could walk for days.
Around him the gorse warmed and smelled of coconut. He was thinking of the new boat and, for some reason, fresh paint on the old house window frames and the suddenness of the place he came to took him by surprise, a strange dishevelled overgrown space. It just didn’t feel real, as if he was thrown into some kind of film again.
It looked like an old hotel, some abandoned edifice once grand, a Hollywood set somehow reasonless here. Its windows were shut up with blocks and graffitied over, like strange mascara on its eyes. There was a wonderment to it, a surrealness, as if someone had fixed up a backdrop. Something in him had this weird sentiment that this was where it could happen, referred back again to the sense he couldn’t help feeling, that all this was just a film.
Hold could feel his focus blurring. He had this odd sense of things being put in place around him. “It’s just a surprise,” he said. “It’s just a surprise to find it here.” Rabbits scattered, and there was evidence o
f them everywhere. There was something human and physical about the place, something in the curled hair of dead bracken that lay across the slope. As if the whole place wanted to stand up and pour its heart out.
He went up the tumbled steps that seemed to be of marble and stood in the space before the house on the broken shells and bits of colored glass scattered there in the grit. It played with his sense, as if he had fallen out of another time here. Looking at the broken glass he thought again of the beetle that had been caught in the van. The tiny, reflective color of it. I could have put it out, he thought. I could have stopped and put it out.
Around the place was a busted garden. Fingers of escaped rhododendron went supplicant into the sky from the dying grass, and limbs of trees were rolled into half-burned fires long out, as if some effort of clearing had been made once and then been given up because the place itself had refused the help. A lone iron streetlamp stood there, bewildering somehow in the shrinking space.
He walked on unnerved and followed a rough track out onto a wooden jetty and looked back into a muddy bay and the hulk of a wrecked boat in it, behind it a strange building like a toy castle, some unreal film backdrop again. He looked at the red boat and its muted reflection in the thin water and the gorse growing on the bank behind it. He knew inside that he had no notion of how to do this thing he was about to do, nor of this place he had come to, no sense of it.
He walked down onto the little beach of mud where the wreck sat disproportionate and turned onto the road back into the town. He passed a house, a child’s swing rope in the garden. It looked in that light like a hangman’s noose. In his hand he realized he held some pebbles he had reached down for absently, as if he had needed some hard reality, some contact with the earth. He held them in his hand, blued and shot with quartz, glistening and powdered with fool’s gold that was like a dust in them.
