Cynan Jones - Everything I Found on the Beach

“Did the man talk to you?” Harry said on the bus.

“No,” said Grzegorz. “Which man?”

“The bucket man.”

“Maybe I had a different bucket man from you,” he said.

“Well, he asked if I knew you.”

“What did he want?” The bus smelled of the muddy saltness. There was a group of Asians in the back and they made a strange, alien noise in their talk.

“He said he was going to talk to you. He said if he didn’t get a chance I should talk to you.”

Grzegorz could feel the tiredness from the work growing in him. He was trying to hold on to the sense of the long space of the beach. He thought of the idea of his own business, the little money he’d need for that.

“They’re looking for some men to do a job.”

He plugged in the mobile and switched on the socket and put it down on the unit and saw the bars appear on it, pulsing like something medical as if it registered his pulse. He switched it on.

He scanned awkwardly through the missed calls and dialed numbers and the message alert flashed and vibrated. The text said the voicemail box was filled with voicemails. He pressed okay but that didn’t take him to them.

He flicked through until he found the text messages and tried to read them. Most of the messages were signed with an A. They were not in English. He found the sent messages box and read the foreign words meaninglessly in the one sent message. He felt nervous and wrong with the phone.

He looked through at the times of the calls and saw they were from all times of day and that they stopped three days ago. He flicked through to the photographs. He guessed the woman was A.

There were a few shots of her. Her face was plain and strong and looked like it had been through things. In some of the shots she had a baby and there was another young child, and there was one shot of the child sitting with the baby like he’d been made to sit there for the photograph. He had the high, broad cheekbones of the man in the boat.

Hold took off the back of the phone and undid the battery and looked at the SIM card for the provider and then he used his own mobile to call for the number of a phone shop. “Anywhere,” he said. “Okay. Manchester.”

He wrote down the number and called the shop and said that he’d bought a new phone and forgotten his voicemail number and they told him the number to dial from the handset to get the messages.

He put the other phone back together and switched it back on and had to go through some procedure to reset the language and time and date because he’d taken off the battery.

He dialed the number the phone shop had given him and listened to the voice telling him how many messages he had and went through them one by one. A few of the messages were just silence, for just a few seconds. The others all were foreign. The first one or two messages sounded light, happy, and the kid came on for one of them and he could make out that he said “ tata ” and instinctively knew it was like saying “daddy.” Then he listened as the woman broke down. He listened as with each message the woman broke up into smaller and smaller pieces into the useless, unanswered phone.

When he sat down, he felt he had killed the man.

He switched the phone off. His head had started swimming with the harrowing grief of the woman, and he had had to go cold, like when he had to kill things. One phrase, that she said over and over, had stuck itself into his mind, and it was difficult to forget and like seeing the eye of an animal you are about to kill look right in you. He couldn’t make it out. Vrooj prosser checkham. She said it over and over. And gzie yestesh. He wondered if checkham was the man’s name. He couldn’t shake the sound of it. In some ways that helped. It was helping him go cold, giving him that solid thing to react to.

He turned the phone back on. He had the speech in his head. Make the call, wait. He was sure he would know when he’d dialed the right number from the list and it took him a moment to register that taking out the battery had cleared the call history and he had no way of getting it back.

He’d tried the voicemails again, hoped he could press something to recall the sender. But the numbers in the silent messages didn’t allow it. He sat there looking at the phone. It was as if it was waiting to hatch. He knew it would ring eventually.

After a few hours it did and he stood there for what seemed like a very long time looking at it ring and not answering. He recognised her number from the text messages.

He picked it up and pressed the button and the sound of her crashing relief in that language almost threw him and he said, “English, English,” very slowly.

Her words were desperate and broken.

“He’s dead.”

And there was just this collapsed sound. “He’s dead.” And she was quiet for a while.

“What’s your address?” he said. “Your address?”

And the strange language came again, harrowed, pleading over him in a wave, and he said, “I want to send you some money,” and then there were sounds that were not words and were like the grating of a tide going out and he put down the phone.

He kept waiting. He realized that if the phone didn’t ring he had no idea what to do with the packages. He thought of throwing them somewhere, of taking them and the phone on the boat and dumping them but he knew he couldn’t. Some definite thing had taken him. He was prepared for moments of fear. He had to hold on to one belief. He kept thinking of the solution it would be, and of how it would change everything.

At one stage he texted her number with the message: Send your address and I can send you money. I am sorry about him. He realized he should never have sent it. Hearing that desperation he went in another notch, and felt how deeply he was in this thing.

He let two calls come through on his own phone without answering and picked up the voicemails. The man was worried that he hadn’t taken out the boat, and Cara called to say the man had called her. She was worried if he was all right after knowing he was out last night. He phoned them both back and told them that he’d caught a chill.

Again, immediately, he knew it was a mistake. He didn’t get chills. He didn’t even use the word. He was making little mistakes. Simple mistakes. He should have called the man about the boat this morning. He should have called on Cara after the garage. Acted normally. He thought about the pigeon, about the falling feathers.

He forced himself to think. No more tiny mistakes. I have to think of everything.

For a while he sat there convinced they were stalling, giving themselves time to home in to the phone with some locator. That he would know nothing about it, they would track him. But he told himself that this was another phase of fear. He made himself eat. “You have to be prepared for fear,” he said. “And you have to ride it out.” He grilled the fillets he had caught yesterday and drank water and took more painkillers. The pain he could deal with but he wanted to keep the swelling down in case he had to move quickly. He was trying to think of everything. He was trying to be as methodical as he was with the gun.

When they called it was nearly dark.

“Where have you been?”

Hold waited, he felt okay. He could feel this mechanism in him.

“I have the package,” he said.

The voice said nothing for a moment, seemed to hover like somebody assessing a flavor.

“If you’re using his phone you’re an idiot. We already know where you are.”