Cynan Jones: Everything I Found on the Beach

He watched the coast receding, the lights that were coming on in the late afternoon blinking and then dropping in the stretched distance.

The man was in a kind of numb, tired shock.

“What did I do?” he asked. There was just this widening gray sea out there and the rain, blurring the last visible lights now.

There was no choice. I had to do that. I didn’t have a choice.

He considered what he had done.

“I didn’t have a choice,” he told himself.

He stood on the deck for a long while and just watched the coast thinning and receding. But he couldn’t get rid of the question.

“What is it that I’ve done?”

The sergeant was on the beach and looked down at the body and the younger policeman Morgan was with him and it was the first time for him, seeing something so severe.

The body had most of the fingers of one hand off and there was a big wound to the face and out through the back of the head.

The tide had lapped up on the body and the salt water had swelled the edges of the big wound. It was early but the birds had been awake and the eyes were already gone. It was really severe to look at.

The owlish man got out of the taxi that he’d just rolled up along the little slip to the beach and came down the slip and called out to the young policeman.

The sergeant looked up tiredly. “Christ,” said the sergeant. “Keep him away.”

The young policeman saw a small crab scuttle from under the face of the body and it seemed to dislodge the balance of the head so it rolled slightly, as if it moved in its sleep. It made the young policeman feel sick.

“What have you got, Morgan?”

The young policeman went up to the owlish man who was standing by the blue and white tape the other police had put up. The owlish man was pecky and curious looking.

“What have you got?” he asked again.

Morgan shrugged. “We don’t know yet. We’re not sure.” He looked very pale and sick.

The sand beach was long and slightly curved and the water hissed where the edge of the tide petered out. They were putting up a screen now around the body and the owlish man was looking, trying to see whatever he could.

“When did you find him?” asked the owlish man.

“Right early. Someone walking a dog.”

The old guy had been walking his dog and described how the dog had run up to the corpse and scattered the birds and the idea of the birds pecking at the face made Morgan sick inside again.

“You look paler than when I picked you up the other night,” said the owlish taxi driver, trying to be light.

The owlish man could just see the legs of the body now. The legs looked distraught and wet like the tide had been over them, and he noticed the kind of shapeless deadness to them as if they weren’t real.

“Any explanation? Nothing on him?” asked the man.

“No.” The policeman had swallowed down his sickness once more. “No. Unless the tide took it. He could have been washed up. We’re not sure yet.”

“Didn’t happen here then?”

“We don’t know,” said the policeman. He thought about the fingers missing and about the big wound to the face. He wanted to go back to the body. It was easier actually being by it and looking at it like a big fact. There was something unreal and factual and more dead about the body that way and it was easier to deal with.

The sergeant called up to the young policeman.

“I shouldn’t be talking to you,” Morgan said to the owlish man. He got more formal. “I can’t give you any information at the present time. I’ll have to ask you to leave the scene.”

Other men had parked up and were coming down the slipway in white forensics suits onto the beach. There was something weird about the beach that looked like it had been busier at one time, some time in the distant past. But then it had been abandoned, fallen out of favor.

“You don’t know who it is then?” asked the owlish man.

The young policeman had turned to go back.

“No.” He had the thought of the gulls pulling at the dead face. “We’ve got no idea who it is yet.”

Some hours down the coast the woman opened the envelope and in the moment when she saw inside it felt this terrible and overwhelming relief at the answer and finality there, and then the emotion hit her and flooded out every other thing.

The sun seemed to drop quickly this time of year and it made an unattractive light against the gates of the slaughterhouse.

Grzegorz waited with a group of other men. He was just off shift and he still had rimes of dried blood around his fingernails and the smell of the place was still on him. He was seemingly wakened to the smell all over again by being outside, as if he smelt it for the first time. It was crisp, cold almost. He didn’t feel that he had come anywhere. He was tired. It was cold. Just like Poland.

Grzegorz watched the light slide down the zinc gates and took the cigarette his friend offered him and they smoked like the others, waiting for the bus and watching the trucks go into the factory. There were eight men, and every now and then, with the fickle breeze, they got the stench of the incinerator. It was getting cold quickly. It was that time of year still.

When the bus arrived the guy driving pulled up on the other side of the road and beeped twice and still smoking the men got on. The bus seemed too small for the eight men and the driver. The driver told them they might as well get comfortable. He said the trip would be at least an hour.

Grzegorz was still angry at the argument. Another one today. He couldn’t tell what he had done but the line manager really had it in for him. He was tired of that. He thought he had left that behind in Poland.

“They just want to keep you constantly down,” he thought. “Keep you scared. So you just get on and follow the line. Just like those stupid obedient cows who wander along the line into the stun, as if it was the only way their life would ever have gone. Well, I’m over that. You see a chance, you have to take it.”

Some of the men had set up a card game and they were passing round a bottle of something homemade. Grzegorz took a swig. The alcohol was vicious and orangey and amateur. Underneath the noise on the bus there was this odd sense among the men. Grzegorz thought back to Poland and being picked up for the village football team as a kid, this sense of imposed mirth existing over a nervousness before the game.

He looked down at his phone, flicked through the pictures of Ana and his two sons. He thought of the fee, what it could represent, here in this country let alone in Poland. “This is for them,” he thought. “This could change it all for them.” He looked for a long while at the picture of his wife.

“What did you tell her?” asked his friend, nodding down at the phone. Grzegorz realized he’d been on some kind of small absence when the noise and motion of the bus had seemed to fade.

“I told her I was working a triple shift,” Grzegorz said. He hid the picture on his phone.

His friend nodded. “Me too,” he said. He dug in his bag. “Look at the quantity of sandwiches she made me.”

The men laughed and sat eating the sandwiches and smoking and drinking and through the windows of the moving bus the last bit of light seemed to have an unnatural persistence.