Cynan Jones - Everything I Found on the Beach

He felt proud at the idea. “I’ve got brains,” he thought. “I’m going to get ahead now.”

He took the heavy liter bottle out of the ferry shop carrier bag and peeled off the gloves and put them into the bag with the phones and the torn Jiffy bag and then he took the round beach stones from his pocket and put them also in the bag, tied the top and threw it out into the water. It fell for some time and for a moment ballooned and struggled as it hit the water and then it was swallowed up and disappeared.

Stringer looked around him. The light was fading now and it was unpleasant with the rain and the light faded early in the unpleasant weather. There was no one else on deck, just the big man.

“Jesus, look at you,” he called over. The big man called Galen was cowed and shaking on the bench under the air vent, his big bulk looking strange and in some ways childlike to be so vulnerable, as if he had been weeping.

The packages seemed to throb with their own heartbeat against the chest of the small priest-like man.

“Come here,” he called. “Get some proper air. You’re getting all the fumes there.” Both men were wet from the unpleasant thin rain.

“It’s my break right here,” thought Stringer. “I’ve got some catch up.”

The packages seemed to have a willful energy of their own now, as if some need to progress, and they seemed to call to Stringer. He could hear this voice.

The big man looked up. It was as if he was bereft of some great thing. He looked up at the small man standing by the railings.

Below the men, a raft of guillemot scattered off the water as the huge boat went by, inexplicable to them the fifty thousand tons of metal cruising through the saltened water. They circled for a while as the thing went past, skimming low over the waves as the thing proceeded, and then, one by one, they dropped back into the water, having seen some thing of wonder.

“Come on,” called Stringer. The big man had got up now and was coming awkwardly toward him and as he came the small man braced himself. The big man’s face was wet with rain and he looked dampened down and somehow smallened. He remembered those eyes, the way the big man seemed to leave them in him that time in the café, but he braced himself.

“Just hit him hard,” he thought.

His grip tightened on the neck of the bottle.

“There’s just him now.”

Thanks to Jacob, for help with the key Polish phrases, which were vrooj prosser checkham and gzie yestesh? They mean, in turn, “come back to me” and “where are you?”

Also, thanks to Simon for the chat about the boat, and in a roundabout way to Mick Kelly, who gave me my first net.

As always, C. H. Thanks also to Caroline Oakley, more for the quiet egging on than anything, and to Euan, for the long game.

CYNAN JONES was born near Aberaeron on the west coast of Wales in 1975. He is the author of four short novels, most recently The Dig (Coffee House Press, 2014), which won a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize in 2014 and the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize in 2015. His work has been translated into several languages, and his short stories have aired on BBC Radio and appeared in a number of anthologies and publications including Granta. Everything I Found on the Beach is the second of three U.S. releases of his work by Coffee House Press.