by Cynan Jones
He thought of his brother. Boom. The maudlin call of the foghorn came again. “He’d have fitted better in the boat,” thought the big man. He was more like Stringer, smaller and wiry. He partly put up with Stringer because of the likeness.
He thought of his brother’s body being hauled out of the water, the strange bloated whiteness of the corpse, the odd feet. He tensed as he waited for the foghorn to sound, as if his body had fallen reluctantly in line with its rhythm. It was like being driven slowly mad. “It’s always me,” he thought. Then he heard the little chorus again, felt this friendly little knowledge. “I’m better at it, I guess.” He felt a comfort going into it, reducing himself once more to an instrument. “Think now, and be ready. I’m a natural.”
Hold pressed send. For what it was worth.
He did not abandon you. He tried to help. He tried to change it all for you. Do not hate him.
It was as if he could feel the text message dissipate out into the sky around him, like some great religious thing somehow. Like it rolled out and out across the island and out over the channel to the mountains, rolling and rolling. And then the phone rang.
Hold pressed down the Jiffy bag and wrote down the address on the front. He wondered briefly about writing something, some explanation but he could not, and then he just took the boy’s knife which he had wrapped in tissue and dropped it into the Jiffy bag.
He held the envelope for a while. “There’ll be the postmark. If something happens. If something happens and… There will be the postmark.”
“I can’t write anything. If I write something there will be a finalism to it. If I don’t write, I can just say I didn’t want to take the knife into town. That they were checking vehicles going in. It’s believable. I can go back from that. But if I write something…”
Then he dropped the Jiffy bag into the post.
“She’ll understand,” he said. Inside he said that. “She’ll read it.”
The fog had kind of solidified into a slow, thick rain that came sideways off the sea. The man was standing on his own and Hold watched him from a distance. He couldn’t see anyone else. As soon as he knew where it was to happen, he’d posted the knife and then got to the small beach and waited and watched the man come onto the beach by himself. The call had come and they had told him where to be and he had lied and said he was farther away than he was, to give himself some time. “I want somewhere more public,” he’d asked. It was still early, the fog discouraging, no one else about.
“You have an hour,” the Irishman had said.
He’d got there immediately, watched. Waited, and seen the man arrive. No one else.
Hold looked away from the binoculars and studied everything he could. He could feel inside him the physical sensing that he had on the cliffs with the gun. A heightened sense. He looked into the few cars parked along the road and looked down at the small scab that was drying over the sore on his thumb. All the cars were empty.
“Why would they?” he was saying. “Why would they do anything?” He could see the man getting impatient in the rain. He kept telling himself: “It’s worth forty thousand to them. Why would they do anything? Just think of the one thing now.”
He brought the binoculars down. He could see the faint powdery white rimes on the grips that the salt had left from using them on the boat, remembered the view of the cliffs from the sea. On the dashboard, the beetle reappeared.
“I meant to put you out,” said Hold silently to it.
The beetle seemed to listen, gave the illusion of it, tasting the air. “I’ll do it when I get back,” he thought. It was like he was setting a superstitious trick for himself. “I’ll do it when I come back.”
He thought of Cara and Jake and he thought of his box of things tucked on the shelf amongst the tins in Danny’s shed. He thought of the trailer and of rebuilding the house and he thought of the woman’s voice on the phone and of the text message spreading out in the sky to her and of the thin undernourished prostitute and of the dead man. And then he made himself the way he was in the moments after he had pulled a trigger and he said, “Okay, let’s do this.”
He came up from the low part of the little dock and looked down at the sand for signs of anything. Any footprints, any signals. Anyone who might have gone on farther than the man waiting there in the rain. There was nothing. The shore was lined with some of the first boats back into the water and they sat on the sand in the low tide. Along the line of seaweed there were the desiccated shells of sea potatoes, most of them broken.
The two men came together until they stood in the slow thick rain. Hold looked at the man. “Well, if it’s coming, it’s coming now,” he thought.
“I guess that would be it.” The small man nodded at the bag. Hold nodded. He held it up and the rain made snapping noises on the carrier bag and then he slung it to the man a few feet from him.
The man’s hand came out of his pockets for the first time and Hold noticed the black gloves and the man bent down watchfully and looked into the carrier bag. He wrapped up the bag and put it under his arm and stood up.
“Now it might come,” thought Hold.
The man unbuttoned his coat a way and reached in and took out a Jiffy bag and threw it to Hold.
“Seven thousand,” said the man.
The man waited a moment. “You can count it if you want, but it’s raining.”
He turned round and started walking off.
“That’s it?” called Hold.
“That’s it,” said the man over his shoulder.
Hold could feel the Jiffy bag give slightly and then the hard pad inside. It was as if, as the man walked off, he could hear the call of the packages receding. As if it was the sound of some transport going off into the distance.
It was dizzying almost, a vertigo, the relief and the completion of it.
He watched the man go through the rain and held the envelope in his hands. He felt soiled by it. And he knew then that he would find the address of the woman, who in his head he now called Ani, and give it all to her. He knew very clearly that he didn’t want it, and that he had very nearly died for it.
As he turned to leave the beach a strange thing happened. He remembered some things very clearly. He remembered the whale that washed up on the shore when he was just a boy and how there had been a great gathering of people to help lift it back to the water, and how he had thought then that there was a great sense in people of the right to life. He remembered the first time, with Danny’s father, the man sitting on the side of the boat and passing him the raw fish on the knife and his first nervous taste of it and his dislike of it at first, and he was sure he tasted it then, though he might have tasted no more than the salt rain driving thickly off the sea. And he thought of watching the hares fighting, and how he was sure he had felt that fight somehow in the ground as he watched them. This life fight, he thought. Just things trying to live. And he thought of Danny, and he thought of her, her lifting shirt in the breeze and the surprise of her freckles, and he remembered intently the sense of pride that was in his friend and that he would never do anything to damage. It was Cara’s face, though, when the flash came.
He heard this thump. The thud of a body landing. Hold could feel coming from himself this sense of a completion, and it came with something that felt like a permanence of himself. He felt the great human sense he had when he released fish back into the water, of letting a life go free for the few moments before they swam down from the surface. Then he saw her face briefly with this great desperate clearness and thought, “That’s it.” He heard the suck of wet sand as the man jumped down. “You’re free. You’re free of me now.” He had this strange sense of relief, as if a responsibility was leaving him, but it was colored with this great and massive sadness.
The big man seemed to hesitate clumsily in front of Hold as if he was caught for a moment in the solidity of the man before him; and then he shot him. He shot him through the envelope and into the face and after Hold hit the ground
there were little bits of Jiffy bag and tiny specks of money hanging in the air for a while like feathers, like a big bird of prey had just hit something mid-flight.
The crash of the shot in the bay shifted out, Ventriloqual in the thinning fog and abstracted, and by the time it reached people it was shapeless and indistinguishable from the noises of the port.
It didn’t feel right not using the silencer and the big man had hesitated clumsily and braced himself for the noise and then shot and the crash of the shot sat in the bay of the beach.
There was an obliteration to it and some vague prettiness with the flakes of money falling down.
The man called Stringer came back down the beach and picked up the destroyed envelope furiously and took the phone from the dead man and he stuffed them into his coat with the drug packets.
“He was nobody,” Stringer was thinking. “He was just a flunky.”
Then he took the gun off the big man and they went back up toward the taxi.
The big man was beginning to worry about getting back on the boat already and the ring of the shot still sat in his ears. He was getting the chills already thinking of the trip and looked disturbed.
“What’s up with you?” asked Stringer.
The two men got into the taxi and it started off and went on toward the port.
By the time the tide turned, as the water slid finally across their footprints and the body on the beach, the Irishmen were gone.
Inside the window of the van, the beetle lifted itself to taste the air and stilled itself as it sensed the movement of the taxi going past.
It scuttled to the edge of the window against the seal and worked along looking for an exit. No way out. It sensed that. Once in it, there’s no way out.
On the beach, from the wet body, the blood soaked into the sand.
The card seemed reluctant to catch and curled almost coyly from the lighter then the flame gripped it and the cover blistered, the gold line of the eagle deforming in some grotesque spasm as the passport caught fire.
The pages inside sucked up the flame and the man dropped it onto the damp ground. It burned for a while against the harbor sand, the covers more resistant, coughing up spells of flame in the ground-level breeze, the ashes kicking away from the pile.
As its weight lessened the passport turned two somersaults and sat tent-like on the sand and the cover burnt anew, a violet flame budding along the document’s spine. The eagle curled in one final arch as both covers yielded to the catastrophe and crumpled into fire, and there, on the sand, Grzegorz’s face looked briefly back to the man, wrinkled in the heat into this extraordinary grief, and then ignited.
The man put his foot on the remaining pile and crushed the glowing ashes into the sand.
EPILOGUE
Stringer stood on the boat and looked down at the wet and damaged money and felt this spit of fury. He thought about the crash of the shot and whether the body had been found and steeled himself for the call.
I’ll just tell him we did exactly as he said. He wouldn’t know I’d taken them. The tide could have got them. I just have to be careful moving them on.
He could feel the drugs taped under his arms and they seemed to exaggerate his heartbeat. They seemed to call to him somehow, egg his little germ on.
There’s just the big man.
He turned round and saw the big man prone on the bench and sick and drained and then he looked down at the destroyed money furiously again. They were just recently out of port and he could see the myriad lights that were on in the fog.
“I could put it through the wash,” he thought. “I could put it in some tights and put it through the wash. I’m sure they’d change it then. They’d just think it was damaged in the wash. I could send it in in little lumps.”
He felt proud at the idea. “I’ve got brains,” he thought. “I’m going to get ahead now.”
He took the heavy liter bottle out of the ferry shop carrier bag and peeled off the gloves and put them into the bag with the phones and the torn Jiffy bag and then he took the round beach stones from his pocket and put them also in the bag, tied the top and threw it out into the water. It fell for some time and for a moment ballooned and struggled as it hit the water and then it was swallowed up and disappeared.
Stringer looked around him. The light was fading now and it was unpleasant with the rain and the light faded early in the unpleasant weather. There was no one else on deck, just the big man.
“Jesus, look at you,” he called over. The big man called Galen was cowed and shaking on the bench under the air vent, his big bulk looking strange and in some ways childlike to be so vulnerable, as if he had been weeping.
The packages seemed to throb with their own heartbeat against the chest of the small priest-like man.
“Come here,” he called. “Get some proper air. You’re getting all the fumes there.” Both men were wet from the unpleasant thin rain.
“It’s my break right here,” thought Stringer. “I’ve got some catch up.”
The packages seemed to have a willful energy of their own now, as if some need to progress, and they seemed to call to Stringer. He could hear this voice.
The big man looked up. It was as if he was bereft of some great thing. He looked up at the small man standing by the railings.
Below the men, a raft of guillemot scattered off the water as the huge boat went by, inexplicable to them the fifty thousand tons of metal cruising through the saltened water. They circled for a while as the thing went past, skimming low over the waves as the thing proceeded, and then, one by one, they dropped back into the water, having seen some thing of wonder.
“Come on,” called Stringer. The big man had got up now and was coming awkwardly toward him and as he came the small man braced himself. The big man’s face was wet with rain and he looked dampened down and somehow smallened. He remembered those eyes, the way the big man seemed to leave them in him that time in the café, but he braced himself.
“Just hit him hard,” he thought.
His grip tightened on the neck of the bottle.
“There’s just him now.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Jacob, for help with the key Polish phrases, which were vrooj prosser checkham and gzie yestesh? They mean, in turn, “come back to me” and “where are you?”
Also, thanks to Simon for the chat about the boat, and in a roundabout way to Mick Kelly, who gave me my first net.
As always, C. H. Thanks also to Caroline Oakley, more for the quiet egging on than anything, and to Euan, for the long game.
FUNDER ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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