Cynan Jones - Everything I Found on the Beach

Over the causeway he came into the mouth of the town. After the long, straight drive it was a kind of shock. The busyness of the signage and the choices to make almost caught him off guard.

There was something beckoning and mesmeric about the way to the dock but he bore left into the town with this uneasy feeling of nervous avoidance he didn’t understand fully. Then the idea of the police and the customs officers at the port sat up in him like something remembered suddenly and he thought of the rabbits and their vital insides. “That was it,” he thought. “That was what is strange about the land here. The whole place looks like it’s been cropped by rabbits.”

After the busyness and internationalism of the roads that went off to the port, Hold expected the town to be bigger and he seemed immediately to be headed up out of the place almost as soon as he’d turned into it. The houses and shops around him were rough and hard and salty looking.

He went up a short climb out of what must have been the heart of the town and parked. He was uneasy. “Come on, focus,” he thought. He thought the town would be bigger and hold an anonymity for him but he felt exposed already. He parked, feeling that the van drew attention to him. “It is what it is,” he told himself. “You can’t make assumptions.” Everything seemed to be private houses, people’s homes. A place people worked, he thought, not a place people fed off. The sort of place people get noticed. It had a mixed-up oldness and newness, a kind of utility to it.

He saw a sign for Ucheldre and knew he was in the high part of the town. He took the things he needed from the van and put them into the small bag and slung it over his shoulder and went to the parking meter then came back and put in the ticket and took up the bag of rabbits and looked around for the way into town.

He walked away from the van and looked back at it as if checking to see if it looked anonymous and he realized that he was tired now from the driving. He could feel this warm, comfortable spring sun on him like a little gift. He put his coat over the rabbits, hiding them in the bag that wouldn’t close.

“It’s fine,” he thought. “You need to relax.” He could feel the weight of the rabbits and the kilo of drugs and looked around and tried to get some sense of the place, of the layout. Then he followed the signs into town.

His mind drifted. It seemed to come into color, warmed by the sun, like a scent lifting. He thought of the drugs being tracked and remembered the metal detector all over again and thought of the time Danny had hidden things and of the brooch, and then of the time Danny had got some shark’s teeth from a souvenir shop and hidden them around. “Rare as a hen’s teeth,” he had said to the boy. “I bet you could find some hen’s teeth if you looked, as long as you believed in them,” and he gave Jake ten pence for each one he found. “I guess he never stopped believing in treasure, Danny,” thought Hold. “I guess none of us really do.”

He walked into the center of the small town to the pedestrian area and was startled again by the market, as he had been by the choice of roads. He felt overaware of the bag he carried, he felt watched. “You can’t be,” he said. “They don’t know you. They don’t know who you are. Just be natural,” he thought. It was like he existed in a kind of pod.

He crossed the pedestrian area, passed the closed Woolworth, and followed the natural draw downhill and went through an alleyway onto a new bridge and over the road. It was odd, this beautiful bridge against the wasted buildings of the town.

He stood for a while in the sun on the new incongruous bridge watching the cars beneath on the road, trying to get a sense of the place all the time; then he headed over the bridge, over the railway tracks and the still span of enclosed water to the ferry complex on the other side. There was this reassuring salt smell off the bay.

“I could just go,” he thought. “Nobody knows about Cara and Jake. I could just go.” He looked out, feeling the calm sense of the water, and he was unused to feeling this in a town. This wasn’t his environment. He did not have a natural understanding of it, how to fit into it, but he felt the sense of the water and of the sun. “No,” he said. He looked back at the dirty town buildings by the road. “I don’t have my passport. Do I need a passport for Ireland? You wouldn’t go anyway. Stop thinking the thing. You’re just going to see this through.”

He went in to the Tourist Information Office and found some maps, a town guide.

“Would you like any help?” the girl asked pleasantly but it was strange in the nasal North Walian whine.

“No, I’m fine,” Hold said. “I don’t need anything.”

The place was full of Welsh dragons and fudge. He looked at a rack of postcards, jokes, women in stovepipe hats. All these clichés. “Maybe I should let her know,” he thought, thinking of Cara. He did not articulate the thought in his own mind: in case I don’t come back. “That’s a cliché too,” he thought. “Stop thinking like you’re in some cowboy film.” He felt like he needed a conversation with himself. “Just get it done,” he said.

He went out of the Information Center and walked back toward the bridge. “I have to know this place,” he thought. He felt this need for proactivity. “I have to get to know this place.” He checked the phone with a sudden thought that he might have somehow missed a call, or not have a signal. No. It was fine. He looked for a while at the train lines and considered how the meeting would happen, where the men would come from. Then he went back over the bridge.

The thickset redhead stood in the station by the information boards with the black leather sports bag cradled on the floor between his feet. He stood under the paneled glass roof staring up at the great structure of the strut work and held the cardboard cup full of coffee.

The station throbbed and rushed with people. Some scallies were shouting and pranking over by the palm trees that grew surreally inside the station and two uniformed policemen stood there tiredly watching. The man thought of the bag between his feet and imagined he could sense a heat off it. The scallies were shouting and yelping formlessly. They all wore hoods and looked the same. You could tell what the police wanted to do. He wanted to do it himself. He imagined cracking their heads together in an effective way. Time was when he would have done that, maybe even the police would have, but not now. Now it was all business.

He watched the crowd, imagining himself stepping down the aisle to the center of the hall, climbing into the ring, all these people here to watch him, his name announced. “If it wasn’t for this nose,” he thought. He saw himself spit blood carelessly into the basin and held the coffee cup to his mouth with two hands, as if it had a spout to drink through. Left, right, left, left, right. “If it wasn’t for this nose,” he thought. He’d moved on from the scallies, and in his mind they were big opponents, and he was laying them out, one by one, to the cheers of the crowd.

He felt the three bleats of his phone in his pocket and picked up the black sports bag and went out to the drop-off point and over to the taxi that was pulled up. He got in and put the bag on his lap. The car filled up with the smell of the coffee. The driver nodded. He’d met him before. Always a taxi driver, wherever they were. It was a simple and clever way of getting under things. He was the boss’s man at the port a few hours away where the boat from Ireland got in. He had a strange face like a dieting owl.

“They’re coming over tonight,” the thickset redhead said. “You’re clear on what to do?”