Cynan Jones - Everything I Found on the Beach

He went up the tumbled steps that seemed to be of marble and stood in the space before the house on the broken shells and bits of colored glass scattered there in the grit. It played with his sense, as if he had fallen out of another time here. Looking at the broken glass he thought again of the beetle that had been caught in the van. The tiny, reflective color of it. I could have put it out, he thought. I could have stopped and put it out.

Around the place was a busted garden. Fingers of escaped rhododendron went supplicant into the sky from the dying grass, and limbs of trees were rolled into half-burned fires long out, as if some effort of clearing had been made once and then been given up because the place itself had refused the help. A lone iron streetlamp stood there, bewildering somehow in the shrinking space.

He walked on unnerved and followed a rough track out onto a wooden jetty and looked back into a muddy bay and the hulk of a wrecked boat in it, behind it a strange building like a toy castle, some unreal film backdrop again. He looked at the red boat and its muted reflection in the thin water and the gorse growing on the bank behind it. He knew inside that he had no notion of how to do this thing he was about to do, nor of this place he had come to, no sense of it.

He walked down onto the little beach of mud where the wreck sat disproportionate and turned onto the road back into the town. He passed a house, a child’s swing rope in the garden. It looked in that light like a hangman’s noose. In his hand he realized he held some pebbles he had reached down for absently, as if he had needed some hard reality, some contact with the earth. He held them in his hand, blued and shot with quartz, glistening and powdered with fool’s gold that was like a dust in them.

He looked at the fool’s gold and remembered the piece of shale he’d left for Jake, thought of the muddy smell of shale in the rain.

“I have no idea here. I have no idea what will happen now.”

The big man sat with the pile of sandwiches on his lap and after a while he started to eat them.

“You want one?” he asked Stringer.

“No,” said Stringer.

“You want one?” he asked the driver. The driver was scratching the eczema on his face absently. “Yes,” he said, to the sandwiches.

“There’s cheese, tuna paste, or corned beef,” said the big man. “What do you want?”

“I don’t know. Surprise me,” said the driver.

The big man passed a sandwich over without looking, like it was a nice game, and they went along stopping and starting in the traffic, the driver and the big man eating the sandwiches.

“These are good sandwiches,” the driver said. He had the kind of strange slowness of his body that people who drive a lot have.

For the big man this was like a day trip. He chewed at the sandwiches, getting the paste stuck up in his teeth, and looked out at the city, as if he’d never seen it this way, by being driven round in a car, before. It was still a low city and let a lot of light in. He had this small excitement going on at the idea of the boat, and had it all down pat in his head.

“You going over for long?” asked the driver. The big man started to answer.

“Why ask?” said Stringer from the back, sharply.

“Nothing, Stringer, just talking. Sorry.”

The big man saw the driver’s face go extra red and felt guilty for it, like it was his fault, going to answer the question. He felt sorry for the driver seeing the heat go up in him. The driver was the kind of guy you could tell had a family, thought the big man. There was a kind of scared domesticity to him, and Stringer knew it and preyed on it, like he preyed on the big man for being less smart than him. There was this ticking unpredictability coming off Stringer in the back, this kind of fermentation. It made a horribleness in the car.

“That’s Mister fucking Stringer,” Stringer said in this way, under his breath.

They pulled to a halt behind the continually stalling traffic. Around the entrance to the pub they were alongside, men were busily going in and out. It was restless, like at the entrance of a beehive.

“You want another sandwich?” said the big man. He was trying to restore things. It had been okay before in the car, eating the sandwiches.

The driver looked cowed. “No,” he said. It was like it had spoiled everything. “Nah.”

The big man felt deflated. He sat back in his seat and stared out of the window. He watched a kid dodge through the traffic, banging needlessly on the bonnets as he wound through the slow cars. Mildly, the big man remembered the last job. It was just a battering. A soft lesson. That kid’s pant legs were tucked in his socks, and he wore a baseball cap, just the same as the one he was watching go through the traffic. There were always these knackers to put down. “It’s like they didn’t get the lessons,” thought the big man.

He remembered his father’s principles. The way he dished up the basics around the dinner table. “Don’t get involved in the drugs,” he’d said, he’d been firm on that. His da even had some respect for the residents who had come out and picketed the dealers’ houses, shamed criminals at their own front door. The big man felt a useless guilt about it, but what else was there now? You couldn’t be a so-called “Ordinary Decent Criminal” any more. They were being squeezed out by the big drug gangs the way chain stores were killing local businesses. He’d heard one of the old-timers say that.

In his da’s day, early on, there had just been the pickpockets and burglars. It had been altogether sleepier, old-fashioned. But they took it ahead a level, in the seventies, with the police caught up in the Troubles. They moved it up to armed robbery. All that aside, they resisted drugs. They knew it would come down in their back garden. The “blaggers,” there was something clean and romantic to that, doing over a bank. Something heroic somehow. His da got out after the Athy gang were taken down. That was a bloodbath. But he spoke about the scores with a kind of moral pride. “It was us against the banks,” he used to say, “us against the government.” Like some great big story, thought the big man. Now we’re all against each other. You don’t know who you can trust. You just have to keep your head down. Stay out of the other guy’s patch. Everything’s changed now.

“Da never would have lasted in it,” he thought. “He had too much conscience. Those young blaggers that started with him became the grown-up drug barons. They moved things on as well,” he thought. “It’s natural. After those Dunnes flooded it all up with heroin, you couldn’t turn that round. Things had changed. Then all this wealth came in. It kind of made a niche for me. There wasn’t any of this killing work before the drugs.” He chewed the tuna paste sandwich. Da would have understood that; but he felt this guilt.

“It’ll disease the community,” his father had said. The big man felt the useless guilt again. It was a different age, the way things had gone. “Maybe it’s lucky Da went before all of this,” he thought.

He watched the boy in the tracksuit disappear down the street, saw the traffic lights up ahead go amber then green like some kind of Catholic parade. There was still this violence coming off Stringer.

He thought of the traffic lights and the color of the flag and of his father’s great pride in the place. “He tried to get us out,” he thought. “I always knew where I was with his lessons. And then with Mikey. But now I feel like a big crashed-down tree floating around in the ocean. It’s just too big out here. The world’s too big.” He looked out at the overwhelming street. “I’m floating in it and I have no idea what to do unless someone tells me.” He knew underneath he was an instrument. He knew ultimately he was one of those men to be wielded, not the arm behind those men.