Cynan Jones - Everything I Found on the Beach

“Jesus, have a fucking cigarette,” said Stringer.

“I can’t smoke,” said the big man.

The slow ferry loped on, with its puking and petting and playing passengers, regardless of them all, through a sea that was getting up, a sea that had, it seemed, some sense of duty, a vital job, as if, should it stop, the world would stop. For a while there had been a brief squall of rain but it had no feeling to the ferry at all. It just plodded on toward the port where the other man was waiting, taking the two men toward him.

He took the rabbits and the money and everything else he had in the car and left the car parked up just off the bridge. Then he tucked himself into an alley between the big wheelie bins. He threw the keys into the bin.

Initially he’d got the car to make the handover in, just so they couldn’t trace him back after. He was sure the gang would have connections with the police. He’d even felt a small guilt considering they might work back to the boy and the mother he’d got the car off, but this was an outside chance, he told himself. They’d work it out, surely.

It was only when the call had come, the bombshell of the seven thousand, that he’d thought of trying to sell the drugs himself. The plan was deranged from the start and not thought out, he saw that now. To try and get to some local drug pusher by assuming the girls would be involved. “It’s not a film. It’s not a goddamned film,” he told himself. Asking for the foreign girl had been a spur of the moment thing.

In a while a car came along and stopped, and reversed back to the Fiesta with the broken rear light. Two guys got out. They looked over the car. Then they worked it over with baseball bats and drove off.

“I guess that’s it,” said Hold to himself. “I’ll see it through now. That was just an idea. It was just a nervous mistake, thinking I could get the drugs moved on another way. The best is if I just see it through now.”

After a while he came out from the alley and walked a little way and went up the pedestrianized area and to the church and rested on the old wall and looked at the rabbits. Seven thousand. That was the way it was going to be. He studied the herringbone pattern of the stones. He just wanted it over now.

He thought of the wide face of the girl. He thought of the Pole making his ten thousand pound shot. “Ten thousand isn’t enough. It’s nothing,” he thought. “Seven thousand. It won’t change anything. Not one time only.”

He worked out in his head that if his story about the fish had been true, he could have got close to a thousand. Somehow that figure seemed more real. “Maybe I could get my own boat with seven thousand,” he was thinking. “Try and work something out about the house with Danny’s sister.”

The huge ferry had just come in and the cars started to come past him on the road just below and filter out, most of them heading south off the island. The noises of the unloading boomed comfortably round the dock. The ferry was truly immense. Watching the cars come out and spread lithely away, Hold thought of the mouth-brooding fish who keep their young safe in their mouths when there’s danger. He felt some sense of safety, of comfort in the decision just to finish this. He could put the money away for the boy, or take some to go game fishing with in Florida. Imagine that. Imagine a big marlin coming out of the water. That would be something, just once in your life. To see something like that, magnificent in its own element — I couldn’t kill it though. Maybe I couldn’t even fish it. What would it be for, really? It would just be to see it, and I don’t know if there’s any other way to see it than to fish it.

The big floodlights lit up the ship like a cathedral. He watched the cars unload for a long time, saw the huge boat lift in the water as it gradually shed its load. Tired as he was, there was something mesmeric about it.

The two men came off the ferry. It looked odd, Stringer helping the huge big man down the gangway, as if he was some kind of handler of a big, dangerous animal made drowsy with something.

Around the boat, the foot passengers spread out across the quay. The priest-like man helped the big man along, and amongst the crowd of the tired and drunk and of the people confused by the strange process of travel they were simply another exhibit.

The priest-like figure left the big man afloat on the wide tarmac of the disembarkation area for a while and went over to a taxi driver who was parked among a flock of cars that looked bizarre and luminous under the spilling bright floodlights.

They talked briefly, and then Stringer went over and collected the suffering big man and got him in the taxi, and the three characters headed off away from the port.

From the taxi, Stringer saw a guy leaned up on the wall staring out over the still emptying ferry. He looked odd up there, alone, somehow painted on against the floodlights that lit up the church behind.

The bag next to the man on the wall seemed to give out some light of its own in the residual floodlight from the church, some beckoning statement.

It was kind of mesmeric and eyedrawing in the strangeness of it.

“I’m tired,” thought Stringer. He was tired on many levels.

They drove on under the wall, and the man glanced down only briefly as the taxi went past and went away out of sight.

The big man was in the front seat. He was still ill.

Stringer spoke. “Drive around a bit,” he said in his nervous Irish voice to the owlish man at the wheel. “I want to see where to do this.”

The two men sat in a café. Both men wore gloves. They were thin leather gloves and they looked somehow feminine on the big man.

It was early and gray fog came in from the port and messed the light about. It was dismal. The big man still looked rough as hell. They sat in the back of the café and could smell the kitchen through the door.

The man had met them as arranged. It was disorienting to come off the boat at that time of night. The man, done up like a regular taxi driver, had given them the black sports bag and the bag was now under the table by Stringer’s feet. He was looking at the menu card. Up by the windows there were a few men sitting at tables on their own eating. They looked like truck drivers. It was a fairly plastic place.

The waitress came up and asked them what they wanted. She was not pretty but she had a big chest. Stringer had a thing for that, as if he missed his mother. It was difficult to see how it would work with him being as small as he was.

The girl with the big chest came over and put some toast down on the table and asked what they wanted.

“What’s a full Welsh?” asked Stringer.

“It’s like a full English,” said the girl.

“Okay. I’ll have a full Welsh.”

The girl went away. The big man had just shaken his head. The girl thought that maybe the gloves were because they were queers or something.

“You should eat,” Stringer said. He took a piece of toast and started to spread it still with his gloves on. The toast was so cold the butter didn’t melt on it. The big man looked horrific.

“Some scary bastard you are,” Stringer said. The big man looked at Stringer then and something went through Stringer and he couldn’t have said what it was. It made him look down at the bag under the table then away at the men at the other tables but it was like the big man’s eyes had been horribly left in him. Like they were rolling about inside him as he held the toast. That hadn’t happened to Stringer before with anyone.