Cynan Jones - Everything I Found on the Beach

There was a scrape of stones beyond his sight and he looked up to the cliffs and saw nothing, simply the impassivity responding. Again the sound came and the loose shale flashed in his headlight and he looked up the scree to see a rabbit bump away to some safer bank. Then he saw it, as he turned his head back out to sea. Something on the water. He ripped off the headlamp and hid its light against him and crouched and had no idea why this was his reaction. He turned the light off, holding the net as if it was some safe thing.

As his eyes altered to the dark, the small landscape grew back round him, coming in patches as his eyes focused. The humps of wrack. The pools. The grated sand. Dawn had brought a preminiscent light to the horizon which hid the scallop lights and which somehow made the sea look darker. There was light from the moon, some thin aureole, misting into the shifted clouds. He heard the rubber hit the rock, the strange, stretching sound like a creaking floor and he felt himself fizz with electricity. It could be someone come to poach the nets. He thought often about things coming to that, about that challenge coming like a violent dog. Don’t back down. And he turned on the light and stood up.

His face was set. He was ready to respond, or to call out, and he put all the look he could into his shoulders and his arms, and the pump of the breaker came loudly and he set his feet and then the sound again came, an unmistakable impact, over the rising beat of his heart. He thought of the gun back on the stones above the pools.

The inflatable was spinning slowly by the rocks. The army gray of it full and neutral at the edge of the lamp beam. It looked unmanned, but it was in the end of the beam, as if it consumed the light. Like something circling the edge of a clearing. He saw a flash of engine, some red perhaps as the boat swung. And then a heap. A dark mass in the belly of the boat and he knew immediately it was a man.

He could feel the adrenaline surge through him and his mind turned to one repeated curse word but there was something in that very clear. He put on the headlamp and went out, footing over the rocks to the easier sand and then he went into the sea, stumbling under the power of the breakers for safe space for his feet. There was real strength in the water and the waves were high and big and it took a few seconds for the cold water to get through his clothes and the extreme cold was like a shock that his adrenaline fought.

He waded at the boat through the tunnel of light he made, having to fight the push and draw of the water, the cold sting and salt reaching his thighs as he went out. He hardly had any thought, it was just an automatic thing to do.

The boat was a few meters away and moving out and he was slow, putting his feet down blindly through the dragging water, and the swell was much bigger by the rocks. The water smashed him, one big wave that nearly took him over, and he found a handhold half submerged against the rock and held on and then he went out with the draw of the tide half floating at the boat which was very close now. It came at him with a thump and hit him hard and he held to it with the wind hit half out of him and went backwards with it, his legs sucked underneath its hull. Then the sea sighed again as if setting itself and he scrambled for a footing and dug his fingers into the cord around the gunwale and tried to go with the boat in the new onrush of water. He reached the rock and clung hard against the dragging ebb and the boat stayed with him this time. He was up to his stomach in water on some unseen risen stone or slope of grit and it was like the boat would come no further with the draw of that outward tide too strong a force of gravity for him to beat.

His breath came spitting through his teeth and his eyes stung and it was all he could do to hold the boat there with the cold starting to wear through the thin, fleeting first retch of adrenaline. He tried to swallow in strength from the air and the lamp beam moved as his head did, up into the air for breath in a disorienting way. “I have to still,” he thought. “Still. Just still a minute.” He held the boat going up and lowering on the swell with all his muscles stubborn and hoping that he could get more from himself. He held it for a while until he could get some clarity, as if the energy would go out of the boat like holding down a brawling man. He tried to keep his head steady.

Behind him the waves were busting on the reef of sand and tearing out past him and driving shards of gravel into him. Salt stung in a graze he hadn’t noticed. And then the boat seemed to make its own decision and wrenched round and lodged itself on a point of rock, and it too seemed to still, as if it needed breath.

The body was by his face now. “Christ,” Hold was thinking. “I guess here it is.” He could see the man heaped in the boat. The man wore all black, or so it looked in that light, with a big puffer jacket that gave him a comfortable, sleeping look. He shook him. He thought again about the rifle on the shore. He leaned as far as he could and punched the leg. Hold grabbed the collar and pulled the man and sat him up and the head came up and sat itself up as if against a pillow and it was like the broken neck of a bird. He had the high cheekbones and wide face of a Slav.

The boat seemed to be suspended in that patch of water, and the two men were going up and down with the swell. Hold called at the man and then pulled his ear and just stood there holding the boat knowing the man was dead. He just tried to hold on, with the stinging water hitting him, and it was like his ability to make a decision was in the same suspended place as the boat.

What the hell had happened here? A scalloper? He knew that there were crew from all over, perhaps going between ships for something. The boat was bare and without markings. Had he run out of fuel? Hold stretched to the motor pump and squeezed the bulb and felt some resistance that meant there was a little fuel at least, and then saw the can and tried to reach it with an outstretched finger. It was full.

In the light from the headlamp the face looked very white and flat. “I have to get him ashore,” thought Hold. “I have to find something more from myself and get him ashore.”

He felt this sudden massive emptying tiredness as if this one thing was finally too much. Then it rang. He saw the glow first, a white shade. He half leapt at the man to reach him, draw him closer, and went for the pocket and the phone fell into the boat, flashing soundlessly, then there were three pitching beeps and the battery went. “Shit,” said Hold, out loud. And then it all came to him, in the first relief of this first utterance and he swore and swore out loud and hit the side of the boat in his futility.

In his anger, the boat was starting to go out again and he couldn’t hold it, but the anger itself came into him like this extra fuel. I have to think quickly now. Think. Come on. It’s happened now, you’re in it. Do something, even if you can’t hold the boat.

He braced himself against the rock and held the cord and unzipped the man’s jacket and felt inside for wallet or card, the water starting to beat him again, for some sign of his name. And then he felt the water get a purchase and pull him off the rock and in his new found anger he got a strength in him and felt all the sick, balling fear in him alight and he yanked the boat and went into the water holding it, and up to his chest he spat his defiance at the sea as it came in through his gritted teeth and finding the ground under his feet he dragged the boat like some furious and stubborn horse and went toward the dark beach with everything he had, cursing and screaming.

When he got the boat nearly to the reef of sand it came finally with him in an angry run, knocking him to the stones as it beached itself. It had taken on water. On the beach the cold hit Hold. He tried to get his head round that and just held it like some solid fact to deal with later. “You have to get up,” he said. “Don’t get cold. You have to get up.”