Cynan Jones - Everything I Found on the Beach

The two men came together until they stood in the slow thick rain. Hold looked at the man. “Well, if it’s coming, it’s coming now,” he thought.

“I guess that would be it.” The small man nodded at the bag. Hold nodded. He held it up and the rain made snapping noises on the carrier bag and then he slung it to the man a few feet from him.

The man’s hand came out of his pockets for the first time and Hold noticed the black gloves and the man bent down watchfully and looked into the carrier bag. He wrapped up the bag and put it under his arm and stood up.

“Now it might come,” thought Hold.

The man unbuttoned his coat a way and reached in and took out a Jiffy bag and threw it to Hold.

“Seven thousand,” said the man.

The man waited a moment. “You can count it if you want, but it’s raining.”

He turned round and started walking off.

“That’s it?” called Hold.

“That’s it,” said the man over his shoulder.

Hold could feel the Jiffy bag give slightly and then the hard pad inside. It was as if, as the man walked off, he could hear the call of the packages receding. As if it was the sound of some transport going off into the distance.

It was dizzying almost, a vertigo, the relief and the completion of it.

He watched the man go through the rain and held the envelope in his hands. He felt soiled by it. And he knew then that he would find the address of the woman, who in his head he now called Ani, and give it all to her. He knew very clearly that he didn’t want it, and that he had very nearly died for it.

As he turned to leave the beach a strange thing happened. He remembered some things very clearly. He remembered the whale that washed up on the shore when he was just a boy and how there had been a great gathering of people to help lift it back to the water, and how he had thought then that there was a great sense in people of the right to life. He remembered the first time, with Danny’s father, the man sitting on the side of the boat and passing him the raw fish on the knife and his first nervous taste of it and his dislike of it at first, and he was sure he tasted it then, though he might have tasted no more than the salt rain driving thickly off the sea. And he thought of watching the hares fighting, and how he was sure he had felt that fight somehow in the ground as he watched them. This life fight, he thought. Just things trying to live. And he thought of Danny, and he thought of her, her lifting shirt in the breeze and the surprise of her freckles, and he remembered intently the sense of pride that was in his friend and that he would never do anything to damage. It was Cara’s face, though, when the flash came.

He heard this thump. The thud of a body landing. Hold could feel coming from himself this sense of a completion, and it came with something that felt like a permanence of himself. He felt the great human sense he had when he released fish back into the water, of letting a life go free for the few moments before they swam down from the surface. Then he saw her face briefly with this great desperate clearness and thought, “That’s it.” He heard the suck of wet sand as the man jumped down. “You’re free. You’re free of me now.” He had this strange sense of relief, as if a responsibility was leaving him, but it was colored with this great and massive sadness.

The big man seemed to hesitate clumsily in front of Hold as if he was caught for a moment in the solidity of the man before him; and then he shot him. He shot him through the envelope and into the face and after Hold hit the ground there were little bits of Jiffy bag and tiny specks of money hanging in the air for a while like feathers, like a big bird of prey had just hit something mid-flight.

The crash of the shot in the bay shifted out, Ventriloqual in the thinning fog and abstracted, and by the time it reached people it was shapeless and indistinguishable from the noises of the port.

It didn’t feel right not using the silencer and the big man had hesitated clumsily and braced himself for the noise and then shot and the crash of the shot sat in the bay of the beach.

There was an obliteration to it and some vague prettiness with the flakes of money falling down.

The man called Stringer came back down the beach and picked up the destroyed envelope furiously and took the phone from the dead man and he stuffed them into his coat with the drug packets.

“He was nobody,” Stringer was thinking. “He was just a flunky.”

Then he took the gun off the big man and they went back up toward the taxi.

The big man was beginning to worry about getting back on the boat already and the ring of the shot still sat in his ears. He was getting the chills already thinking of the trip and looked disturbed.

“What’s up with you?” asked Stringer.

The two men got into the taxi and it started off and went on toward the port.

By the time the tide turned, as the water slid finally across their footprints and the body on the beach, the Irishmen were gone.

Inside the window of the van, the beetle lifted itself to taste the air and stilled itself as it sensed the movement of the taxi going past.

It scuttled to the edge of the window against the seal and worked along looking for an exit. No way out. It sensed that. Once in it, there’s no way out.

On the beach, from the wet body, the blood soaked into the sand.

The card seemed reluctant to catch and curled almost coyly from the lighter then the flame gripped it and the cover blistered, the gold line of the eagle deforming in some grotesque spasm as the passport caught fire.

The pages inside sucked up the flame and the man dropped it onto the damp ground. It burned for a while against the harbor sand, the covers more resistant, coughing up spells of flame in the ground-level breeze, the ashes kicking away from the pile.

As its weight lessened the passport turned two somersaults and sat tent-like on the sand and the cover burnt anew, a violet flame budding along the document’s spine. The eagle curled in one final arch as both covers yielded to the catastrophe and crumpled into fire, and there, on the sand, Grzegorz’s face looked briefly back to the man, wrinkled in the heat into this extraordinary grief, and then ignited.

The man put his foot on the remaining pile and crushed the glowing ashes into the sand.

Stringer stood on the boat and looked down at the wet and damaged money and felt this spit of fury. He thought about the crash of the shot and whether the body had been found and steeled himself for the call.

I’ll just tell him we did exactly as he said. He wouldn’t know I’d taken them. The tide could have got them. I just have to be careful moving them on.

He could feel the drugs taped under his arms and they seemed to exaggerate his heartbeat. They seemed to call to him somehow, egg his little germ on.

There’s just the big man.

He turned round and saw the big man prone on the bench and sick and drained and then he looked down at the destroyed money furiously again. They were just recently out of port and he could see the myriad lights that were on in the fog.

“I could put it through the wash,” he thought. “I could put it in some tights and put it through the wash. I’m sure they’d change it then. They’d just think it was damaged in the wash. I could send it in in little lumps.”