Cynan Jones - Everything I Found on the Beach

The baby was being fed when the row broke out and he started to scream immediately when their voices went up and the other boy, too, started to cry. Started to cry just with the sheer completeness of everyone’s upset, his baby brother wailing, his mother covering herself angrily and reddening and launching into one of those shapeless female arguments that is just a letting go of all the exhausting little frustrations. And his father just emitting this great, weary uselessness at everything, as if it all fell on him, looking like he was taking in her words like they were something foul he had in his mouth and was deciding on whether to spit up.

They can be vicious in argument, women, and she sliced into him over and over, and all his weaknesses that he had offered up to her, in some great amnesty of masculinity, that he had offered her as signs of his true scale as nothing more than a simple man, she sliced at and tore into. And his children yelled, as if they watched this flaying of their father.

He had not seen her like this before. He realized they had never really argued, and all of this was pouring out of her. She even looked ugly to him, the way she was then.

“You promised things,” she said. “I left everything behind. You promised we would have things.”

He felt all the weight of that.

“You promised things.”

He knocked and came in through the porch, taking off his shoes, and went through to the kitchen and put the fillets in their newspaper down on the side and she met him in almost a sedate way. When Hold had been on the sea, he smelled of Danny to her and it was difficult for her not to react at that so she quite often had this distant thing about her. She was just making tea and fetched down another cup automatically and put in a teabag and poured on the still boiled water from the kettle that puffed steam up into the underside of the hanging unit. Then she took up her own cup and held it and blew over it and looked at the parcel on the worktop.

“Present,” said Hold.

Cara took out the teabag and squeezed it against the side of the cup and lifted it out to the little plastic food tray she had for compost to throw on the border. She bent for the milk from the fridge and he watched deliberately, instead, the steam come off the teabag and curl up amongst the broken eggshells and peelings there like some far away sign. Like the engine smoking across the top of the boat.

She put in the milk and passed him the cup and he looked down at the fillets on the side, looking at the newspaper they were wrapped in, the black print furring out from itself, leaving some chromatogram-like aura around the words.

“Bass,” he said, and she nodded. Her sleeves were rolled up, like she’d been doing kitchen work and hadn’t had time to change her clothes. Hold looked at the way she was dressed in the respectable clothes and said, “How was the bank?”

She gave the slightest shake of her head.

He put the tea down and opened a cupboard, mainly so she couldn’t see the flash of anger on his face.

“How was the sea today?” she said to him. He was going through the cupboards like the house was his own.

“She’s getting up. Not so soon, though. Be a few days.”

“Thanks for the fish.”

“It’s good fish,” he said. He was thinking of the house, and how he had promised Danny he would have it for the boy. “Where’s he at?”

“He’s out on his bike.” There was a moment of space. They both noticed at the same time and were uncomfortable with it.

“Are you looking for biscuits?”

“It’s fine.”

She looked apologetic that there were no biscuits. Like she had let him down. There was no play. None of the bantered flirting there used to be, while Danny was still with her; none of the soft edgemanship they both harmlessly enjoyed, like dogs chasing the same ball in a park. None of what was just gentle rhythmic chemistry, a safe peacefulness to it when Danny was alive and could watch it, and valued it in some way as this great reassurance of his choice in her that his friend could have this intentless thing with her.

He looked down at the sore welling on his thumb. It was one of those small things. He picked at it.

“Do you have a needle?” he asked.

Cara took his hand and looked at it. “It’s not ready yet. You’ll just dig into yourself. Leave it. It will lift.”

Hold nodded at her.

“You should let me take him out soon,” he said.

And she nearly called him Danny but then she said, “Holden, he’s too young. And it’s a school night.”

They sipped their tea awhile.

“You’ve got the nets out?”

“I’ve just set them.”

He had gone from the quay and driven over to the beach and taken the net over his shoulder out along the shore in the tough old spoil bag. It made sense if he was coming for rabbits on the cliff that night to have some point to aim for and work down to, but more than this physical excuse it was that something went from him on the beach.

Danny’s death had become a great thing, and a point of time from which all things seemed to be measured. Hold felt very strongly the responsibility to create some new point for things to come from, some positive beginning point like the birth of a child to a couple. He had a vision of them all sitting on a bench in the sunshine outside the finished house. He felt as if he needed some sign to have that purpose. He felt greatly that a renewed energy was needed, and that perhaps from this positive thing, in this good momentum, it would not be the betrayal to go with her as it would be from hurt, in this space of damage. If it grew out of something good and new they had built for themselves and wasn’t simply them falling into the space that Danny’s death had created.

The bass hunt side to side, zigzagging for things disturbed along the breaking lip of the inward tide, so the gill net is laid across the beach, right-angled to the sea over the uncovered pools to catch them as they follow the water in. Once they choose a course, if the net is there, they hit it.

In the rushing water, the nylon would be invisible to the fish and Hold could imagine them striking the net, that first moment of bloody confusion and the increased power to swim on, driving them further into the mesh, the scales shed in the water, the line fitting fatally behind their gills. He pushed the thought away.

As he had left the beach the sun was starting to bleed out into the evening. The warmth hadn’t come into things yet and he knew it would be a cool night. Again, the peregrine had come off the cliffs and for a while circled over him as he lay the net, in witness, the hunter come to watch the hunter. There was a real definition to the thing against the thinning evening light.

“You should come out again. You and Jake.”

And he remembered then, in full detail, her shoulders, bare, the thin open shirt licking out in the wind, the surprise freckles on her shoulders seeming to flush then merge under the sun, like drops of something onto clean cloth; and Danny drove the boat head on to the waves and got her jumping, with the childishness over her face at the enjoyment of it; and Danny, so proud. And it seemed like Hold had only understood that word proud then for the first time. That pride in his friend. And Hold knew that he would have a care for this girl that was like that close care for a friend’s child, and that she was partly his to look after.