Cynan Jones - Everything I Found on the Beach

He hopped down the foot or so drop from where the cliff fell away to the beach and the sense of the beach was immediate, like jumping into water. A change underfoot in the clack of the flat and uneven conglomerate beach stones where he stepped. He turned off the headlamp and let his eyes adjust as if coming out of that tunnel of light. It was as if the types of light that night had been stored here, and were being harbored, or here and there given back by the lines of quartz in the fallen rock, and the flat wet stones. There was a strong smell of salt.

He walked up the beach, arcing out from the cliff-side to where there was enough blue, predominant light to see by, and taxied his way over the uneven stones at the edge of the pools.

The sea had been up high leaving little of the beach clear and the tidemark was lost in the shadow of the cliffs where the moonlight didn’t reach. The beach changed quickly and he turned on the headlamp again and came off the rocks and up a bank of gravel and onto the long, feminine shapes of sea-smoothened fallen shale that stretched under the cliffs to the point.

Whenever he stood here, he felt some sense of affinity. The shapes were amazing in that strange light. It was an affinity of place and time. Some gentle sense that he was simply part of a process. Then he felt it, and it was very brief. That he was being watched.

He stopped and listened. Just the sea. The hollow boom of the rocks it moved as it broke and sucked at the beach. The trinkets of sound where water sheeted down the cliffs, running spare off the fields above. Nothing. Just the white sense of it.

There had been some change. A drop in temperature, an increase in the breeze, and his heightened senses had felt it. It was childlike. Some greater adrenaline in him. Something he could not stop when he went to the nets, an expectation that did not exist anywhere else in his life. He was unwatched. He was sure of that. Unwatched. That he was simply imagining.

In the moonlight you could make out the beach and have a sense of it, but when you switched on the beam there was just the tunnel of light, and everything outside it stopped existing. And while there was reassurance in this stretch of light, it was work not to think of those things that could suddenly be possible beyond it.

When his father was at home, he’d had to develop a way to survive the otherwise destructive atmosphere he brought and it had become like a mechanism in him, this ability to force out thought. It was what allowed him to do what he did, and helped him not to tear himself up. Sometimes this worked against him, but it helped him to exist his way. He knew that you just had to push out indecision and distractions in the way you had to not be scared of the dark. He was very determined in this and, in the light of the choices he made, everything around these choices disappeared.

He went on over the big rocks, the cragged and damaged boulders where the beach turned round to make a little false bay, and he saw the white floats of the net laid out across the pools.

He could see the turned and roping line where the net was and that there was a fish in it, against the black stone a broad scimitar silver in that moonlight. An earring of metal. He thrilled to see it early.

He kept beneath the cliff and would not look again from some self-invented ritual and got to the end of the net and took off the gun and the game bag. Then he walked up the net picking round the dark heaps of wrack and the light-emitting pools. There were three fish low in the net. A big mullet and two bass, and higher up the net the bass he had seen immediately. At the moment the bass would not be in shoals and it was more usual to catch this many fish, not the vast catch of them you could get later on. He knew from gutting them that they were coming in for the early peeler crab, hunting the soft shells of their growing bodies.

At the top of the net was a spider crab, insectile, like some long, mechanical thing that had flown into a web. Just beyond the net the rocks were cemented with sand that looked like a grater with the riddles of sandworms. The sea breaking on it made a sound like the airbrakes of a big truck. The sound was more of a smash out by the spit of rocks which broke sublittoral out of the sea some hundred yards away and that you could see now and were uncovered in this massive tide.

He felt this sense again, of being watched. It was unlike him. He looked down at the spider crab. He had no sympathy with them in the way he did with other things. The other crabs had been in the pots that were some way out and this was the first really close in this year. It was early and it was unnerving in its earliness, but there would be more. A swarm, so much more efficient than our native crabs, that comes inshore from the deeper water as the water warms. They were aliens. Something sent. They seemed built for some other purpose and to exist in some mass. He could see the gulls and kittiwakes white against the cliffs and was sure, by some sense, that something passed on the sea, some cloud of shearwaters nocturnal.

He chilled, and chided himself. There was some portentous thing on the beach that night, and he had to say to himself: “If I am watched it is by fox or bird, not man, and there is nothing but fox or bird or man or things of their material, there can be nothing else.” Just then a breaker thudded. A seventh wave perhaps. And it was a very big sound. The pullback had a brag to it.

He headed back to the bottom of the net, picking his way with the lamp beam over the awkward pools that stretched the thirty meters back. There were weird patches of dark and light in the sky where the moon came or not through the shifting cloud now and, with the headlamp on, the beach looked very dark. It gave it even more of a sense of enclosure with the white sound of the sea. Like there was a presence very close around you.

Hold put the bands of the headlamp around his head and crouched down to the net and started to work the fish out, undoing the problem in his head, working the looped nylon over the fins, away from the hard lids of the gills, out from the articulate bones of the mouth. You had to try to see how the fish had hit. Whether it had writhed and spun or tried to go on. Then you took it out, freeing the net, as if you were swimming it backwards. He worked with that flat deliberate patience you have to have and, in that cave of light he made for himself, there was just this in his mind and it was a great easing to do just the one thing.

The mullet came free and he held it by the great bony head so its thick lips seemed to pout at him and he lay it down and in the headlamp light its loosened scales reflected back off his hands. It was a big heavy fish and the scales were bigger than thumbnails and he knew that the meat would be very good. They were difficult to sell because of the flavor of soil and the disturbing muddiness of flesh that mullet had when you caught them in estuaries or harbors, where they filtered sewage and pastes for food. But when you caught them on the rocks like this the flesh was firm and white and strong and froze well enough.

He went on to the bass. There was a ferocity to it even lying there, some angular, predatory quality. Blood rimed the gills and the torn fins where it had refused to stop fighting the net, recusant of the fact that once it had turned into it, it was caught and there was no fight it could make. There seemed still fury in its eye that would not forgive itself, as if it scoured itself for some signal it had missed that would have shown the net was there. Yet, there has to be decision. A way must be taken. He thought for a moment that the fish might still be alive. He kept coming back to that eye, so different it was from the droll, herbivorous eye of the mullet. Hunter or gatherer, both had turned themselves into the net. The mullet had looked more at peace with itself though, as if it believed though saddened and ended that it had made the choice in the best of faiths. As he undid the bass from some last traps of nylon, Hold knew that these thoughts were a ridiculous romanticism, and that there could be no peace in dying in this way. He had killed them, that was his responsibility.