Cynan Jones - Everything I Found on the Beach

“I had to do something, Da,” he said inside, “and I never knew how to do anything else.” He’d kind of lost anchor when his brother had died and that’s why he stuck to Stringer. “I’m an instrument. A big, blunt instrument,” he thought. That wasn’t so bad though. “Like String says, I’m a natural.”

Hold pushed open the door and expected there to be the dull clang of a shop bell or something to announce him but there was nothing, and he stood in the hallway with the bag of rabbits and looked at the information leaflets that were on a table and the thin corridor and the stairs right in front of him. There was a sign saying “out by ten.” He felt the cold in the place and glanced down at his coat still over the cooler to hide the rabbits. The hallway was the kind of place that never got the sun and it seemed to hold this coldness.

He went up the stairs. There was an egg smell from the café next door. The steps were carpeted and had the little metal arms for holding the carpet down at the edges just like in the old house. The stairs were loud with the hollowness of what he thought was a cwtch beneath them, and there were uneven pictures on the wall, the kind you could buy from a supermarket. Then, someone called to him below.

He stopped on the stairs and went down and there was a gray, pinched looking woman and he didn’t know where she’d come from. She looked at him incuriously and nodded.

“ Oes ’stafell ’da chi? ”

“ Oes. Am faint? ” There was the nasal North Walian sound.

“Just henno .”

She looked at the bag he was carrying and asked him if he had any other bags to go and get and he said he didn’t and she nodded and gestured passively at the stairs.

The room was cheap and she asked him to pay up front and opened one of the rooms with a bunch of keys from her apron and put the money and the keys back in the apron.

“ Brecwast? ” he asked.

“Drws nesa. Cyn naw. Mas erbyn deg.”

The woman nodded again and pointed passively at the key that was on the bed with an oversized fob.

“Leave it in the room when you go,” she said in English. It was like she wanted him to know it was clear he didn’t speak Welsh all the time.

He went into the room and heard her go away. The carpet was worn in front of the door. The bed sagged.

He went into the bathroom. The bathroom was just a box with no window or ventilation and the toilet paper was all curled up at the two edges with the steam that had been in the place previously.

He used the toilet and it flushed weakly and he went back into the room and took the oversized fob off the key and put the key in his pocket.

He sat on the bed and it gave unconvincingly under him and he looked round the room. There was a deal table by the window and a tired chair and this thing that he didn’t understand with a frame and straps of seatbelt material. There was a wardrobe and the kettle and tea were on the floor on a tray by a socket. There were big gaps around the bottom and top of the door like it had been planed down to fit and round the lock there were coverings of extra paint. He looked at the thing with the seatbelt straps. He put the rabbits on the floor by the bed and looked at them for a long time, then he looked out of the window.

He sat down on the chair. He looked at the strange metal bar over the head of the bed with its cushions hanging from it in place of a headboard.

He took out the phone. The noise of the homeward traffic came from down the street.

He looked at the embroidered scenes on the cushions that showed a stag hunt, the stag twisted and leaping.

“Maybe I should have brought the gun,” he thought.

Stringer seethed at the traffic. In the last ten or fifteen years the city had exploded. The growth had been ferocious in this period they talked about as the Celtic Tiger. To Stringer, the city was like a child he used to play with who had suddenly grown up, that he didn’t recognize any more. In the time he’d been inside, things had changed, as if it had done so while his back was turned, played a cheap kid’s trick on him. He was waiting for the Tiger to turn round and bite them, hoped for it with this mean little glee.

The standard of living had gone up drastically, seeming to put this new coat of paint on the people in the city, but the cost of living had soared too. That opened it up for incomers, people who didn’t understand the place, thought Stringer. People who were there to take from it. He’d read somewhere that it had got to be one of the richest cities in the world, and it was like the child he couldn’t recognize any more going on to stardom, leaving him behind. Not wanting to recognize a dirty cousin would be closer to the truth, he thought. He couldn’t stand other people’s success. He cursed inside at the traffic, the shiny new cars with their EU number plates, the new mobility of the place. He could see from where they were, through the low buildings, the tall cone of the Spire. “Look at that,” he thought. “Look at that pointless thing. The tallest street sculpture in the world,” he thought with disgust. “The stiletto in the ghetto.” He nearly spat that thought. One hundred and twenty meters of brushed steel. It always looked different, depending on the light, and unlike Stringer, it seemed to light up in dull conditions. He hated what it represented, this reaching for the skies of the new city. He felt angry at losing his sense of identity. “Aren’t we smart,” he thought. He felt the place had the sick broadcast of the reformed. “It’s not lasting though,” thought Stringer with this secret hope. “I learned some things inside.” He prided himself on his little intelligences. “This won’t last. It happened too quickly, there’s nothing behind it. Like a bolted plant. The honey’ll run out and it will collapse in.” He thought about all the books he’d read inside. Reading was the only way to feel like you were moving in there. “I have acumen,” he thought. He said that word in his mind again, savoring it. “All that European money getting pumped in. It’s like a big guy on steroids, the muscles won’t work properly.” Already the paint’s flaking off.

He’d been thinking. He’d been letting the petty jealousy of the warm little house fester in him. “It’s okay for him,” he thought, “that big overgrown bastard. His da got them out.” He could smell the tuna paste sandwiches. “Putting a kid in those places, that’s like putting horseshit round a plant. It makes them grow. If I’d have had that, I’d have made more of myself instead of always having to scrap around. I’ve got brains,” he thought.

He thought back to Blessington Street, the way they were weeded out of the slums into the corporation housing, the hideous blocks and boarded-up lower stories of Dominick Street. He thought of the stints as a kid in the industrial schools, the horror of the Brothers. He looked at the big man in the front seat eating through the sandwiches. “How has he never been inside?” he thought. He looked at him like he was some big, passive forty-year-old child and he was disgusted by him.

“I got overlooked. I should have been up for one of the big strokes.”

He stared furiously out of the window at the immobile traffic.

“There’s the explosion,” thought Stringer, “and then there’s the in-suck as things collapse in the vacuum, the lack of anything these booms can make.” Stringer congratulated himself on this little speech he’d just made. “Either way, it suits us. Bring in the money, and the cocaine market thrives, the disposable income goes where people want to dispose of it. Bring things down, and you got disillusion, heroin, people taking their escapes any way they could. They were wrong, those old guys, not to get involved. It’s sure-fire, this business,” thought Stringer. “It’s a business now, that’s why I studied things inside. I thought I’d get my chance at a crew. I’ve got brains.”