Cynan Jones - Everything I Found on the Beach

It cut out through the water over the waves like some thing released and he watched it until it was way out in its straight line. Then he got out of the water, took his things, and watched until he couldn’t see the boat any more. Then he walked laden off the beach.

He dropped the net by the van.

He was shaking with exhaustion and cold and nervous and he could hardly move. His arms were numb with the effort of carrying the wet net.

He got the net in the back of the van and took out an old sack and spread it automatically on the driver’s seat. The places his body hurt were becoming known to him one by one as the anesthetic effects of the adrenaline and the shock settled into a low, sick-tasting weight in his stomach.

“Don’t do this,” he thought. “Take it to the police and turn it all in now.”

It was light now, and the blackbirds and thrushes were vibrant with sound. He sat there for a while. He thought of Danny and his belief in the outside chance.

“No,” he thought. “It’s fallen to you. You kind of asked for something like this. You have to take it on now.”

He drove back to the trailer and took the rabbits in and put them on the unit in the bag. He took out the phone from the pocket in the bag and dried it and put it from some inexplicable paranoia inside the grill section of the cooker. Then he took out the rabbits from the bag and looked at them and then he took them out and hung them in the van back thinking that would be natural, and that the van was most difficult to get into. “I cannot be too careful now,” he thought. “There is no part of me that can miss something.”

He was sure he was not seen but he understood what he had done and what he had started and how he had come into something very dangerous. He looked around the trailer. He locked the door and then he took the ball of string he’d hung the rabbits up with and he ran a line from the handle of the door to the open bathroom door and pushed the bathroom door back until the line was tight and then he wedged the bathroom door. He took the rifle from the case and checked it and laid it down on the unit by the bathroom door with its chamber open and he left the silencer off. I cannot at any point let myself think that I am being too paranoid. The extra sound of the unsilenced gun might give me split seconds if it happened. He looked around again and checked the line to see that it was tight enough to pull the bathroom door if the front door opened. He put a handful of cartridges on the shelf by the bathroom door, took the rifle, and went into the shower.

“This involves only me,” he had thought. “This will only affect me, and if I do it right it will solve everything.” He had sat on the rock, not really feeling the cold as if it was a thing far distant from himself, as if he had become his own voice of fate.

He knew. He simply knew he would take the parcels and that the boat had been delivered up to him and all that was left was to articulate this knowing in himself. Things come along and the rest of everything depends on what we can do with the things that come along, and we shouldn’t make decisions out of fear.

He thought of the pointless death of the man and of the boat being delivered up to him on the beach and thought vaguely that the death would take on purpose if it was to secure things for Cara and Jake.

He knew what he should do. Secure the boat and call the police. But for what, then? Even as he had these arguments with himself he went through the things he needed to do and the way he would do them. The old mechanisms of surviving his father were already kicking in.

He looked down at the packages. He thought wildly about buying a boat, but first of the responsibility towards Cara and Jake. “Think of the solution this represents to them,” he thought. It was one big answer, if he could see it through. “It involves only me. There is a limit to how wrong it can go.”

He had to find strength to take his clothes off. They peeled off in drunk layers leaving his body stinging with the air on it.

Naked, he sat and rubbed off the sand and grit that had stuck in the congealing grazes at his ankles where the tops of his shoes had been. His feet had swollen with the water and were raw and angry and blistered.

He washed off the dried blood from his hand in the sink and looked at the precise, deep scoring cut. He felt a deadweight in his arms, like a bruising, and knew this was just tiredness. He could see on his hip the love bite marks of the rock where he had smashed into it holding the boat and could feel the same dull, burning throb of pain in the shoulder that would come out as bruising in a few days; and then he stepped into the shower and just let all of those places hurt and sting as his body slowly came back to him.

He stayed in the shower until the tank ran out and then he took his towel and dried himself and went through to the bed and, exhausted, lay down.

When he woke up he was violently sick. He was woken by the screeching of magpies and the panicking clicking of the small birds as they raided their new nests. He had slept for barely an hour, and the sleep was something he could do nothing about.

When he had finished being sick he washed out his mouth and stood up. That was the last of it. “That’s it, gone now,” he told himself. The bullets and the gun were still in the bathroom and he put them away methodically.

He took some painkillers and ate some plain ham from the fridge and made a coffee and sat down. The trailer was like a goldfish bowl. “Everywhere’s going to feel that way for a while,” he thought.

He finished the coffee and got some money and put the rifle in the van and drove out. He went to the garage and bought a cooler and some antiseptic cream and a multiple phone charger and filled up the van and asked to use the telephone directory. He said he had to find some numbers for a driving instructor for a friend and he pretended to find that and on his way wrote down the number that he wanted.

He drove out of the town to a phone booth that he knew and he called the number.

When he came out of the phone booth he sat in the car for a while and just looked out down the road and watched the clouds bunch up over the mountains inland. “Well, I’m in it now,” he said. Then he started the van up and took the back roads home.

Grzegorz stood in the office.

“What have you got to say for yourself?”

His line manager, another Pole, translated, even though Grzegorz got the drift. His line manager acted like some kind of self-appointed union man. He had it in for Grzegorz. Grzegorz had no idea why.

“It was being thrown out,” said Grzegorz. The line manager translated. “It was going into the bins. I didn’t steal it.”

“Don’t we pay you enough?”

Actually, the pay was pretty good. It was as much as he could expect without any formal skills. “I didn’t steal. I wouldn’t steal,” said Grzegorz.

He was careful to look remorseful but underneath was this bitter anger. He wanted to throw things back in the man’s face. He saw his job disappearing, felt this humiliating fury that they had this power over him. That they could dangle him on a string. They could change his life, just like that.

“We’re quite clear on such things. It’s a criminal offence.”

The line manager didn’t translate, but talked back to the man. He was donning this friendship with Grzegorz and it made him sick. “Now I’ll owe him,” he thought. “He thinks he’s fatherly. He’ll push me round all the more.” He felt he wanted to smash the two men’s faces together. Grzegorz listened with this blurred concentration as the two men talked about him, juggled with his life as if it were a toy. “They always have to keep you in line,” he thought to himself, angrily.