Cove

  ALSO BY CYNAN JONES

  The Long Dry

  Everything I Found on the Beach

  Bird, Blood, Snow

  The Dig

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2016 by Cynan Jones

  Originally published in English by Granta Publications, under the title Cove

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Granta Books

  First published in the United States in 2018 by Catapult (catapult.co)

  All rights reserved

  A short story drawn from this novel was published as “The Edge of the Shoal” in The New Yorker in December 2017.

  ISBN: 978-1-936787-84-5

  Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by

  Publishers Group West

  Phone: 866-400-5351

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950938

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Ch.

  Cove1 (kәυv) n. a small bay or inlet; a sheltered place.

  Cove2 (kәυv) n. a fellow; a man.

  You hear, on the slight breeze, the tunt tunt, tunt tunt before you see the boat. You feel illicit.

  When the boat comes alongside they cut the engine. Shout.

  Waves break, the breeze. You don’t hear. Swash filters in the pools.

  A man in the prow carries a boat hook as if it’s a harpoon. They are in drysuits, white helmets, bright life jackets.

  One of the crew seats himself on the gunwale and pushes himself into the water. He swims strangely, held up by the life jacket, lifted and pushed by the water. Like a spaceman.

  You are not sure whether the kick comes from the baby or the sureness he has news.

  When he comes from the water he stumbles and trips on the stones, clearing his nose of seawater. As if refinding himself.

  For some reason he takes off his gloves as he talks.

  “Have you been on the beach?” he asks.

  You nod. Say, “Yes.” You cannot hide the subtle bell of your stomach now. “I was on the fields for a while but came down. Around the point.”

  When he moves the water falls from inside his life jacket. He seems to wait for it.

  “There’s a missing child,” he says.

  The boat floats behind the man, prey, unpowered, to the shift and swell. You hear the engine crack, rattle off the high shale cliffs. The crew bring the boat around. Then cut the motor again.

  The man’s face is reddened, shocked-looking after the water.

  You went down to the beach after finding the pigeon.

  First the burst of feathers; farther on, the wing, torn off at the shoulder. It had blown across the field like a sail, the sinews and scraps of it dried translucent in the sun.

  The rest of the bird was by the stile.

  The head was gone, the meat of its chest. The breastbone oddly, industriously clean.

  Then you saw the rings. One blue, one red. The red slightly split. The blue one glassy and unnatural on the leg.

  You had a strange sense of horror from the pigeon. That it knew before being struck. Of it trying to get home. Of something throwing it off course.

  You feel you must return the rings. Let the person it belongs to know.

  You pull the leg, try to break the joint. Pull more strongly until the limb rips from the socket. A peregrine, you think. Try to snap the knee with the act of loosening wire.

  In the end, you use a stone to crush the leg repeatedly until the rings slip off.

  You go onto the beach to clean your hands.

  The sand is wet, intimate. There is the faint sugary crunch, the smallest suction under your feet, the wash, the wish of the sea.

  Turnstones rise and peep ahead, flashing for a moment before they drop a few yards on. And because you did so as a child, you go to the seaweed strewn at the high-water line and turn it with your feet. Sandhoppers flick chaotically.

  The water is cool on your hands, your bending awkward now. With your thumb you rub a toffee of dark blood away and it seems to unfurl in the salt water, thread out in the pool.

  A little way off you see something you think is a wetsuit shoe and the world tips, until you realize it’s a sneaker, colorful, like a tiny shelduck.

  When you stand, where you held your weight against a rock, the dents of barnacles are in your skin.

  The man speaks into his radio, pinches the handset on his chest and speaks. You see the crew receive him, answer, hear the boat motor in the radio, as if you suddenly hear the man’s organs, his heart.

  “No. It’s clear,” he says.

  The wear of the slow search crosses his eyes. As if, for a split second, it is very early morning.

  He puts his gloves back on and nods, steps back into the sea.

  As he swims you see them dip the boat hook, pull something from the water. They examine it then throw it back and it bobs like a duck.

  They help the man back in. You see him shake his head and point.

  Then you watch them as they head out, in a line across the bay.

  It’s only when they’ve gone you realize they’ve missed something, there, at the edge of the tide.

  When you get to it, it is a doll.

  He is holding his hands in the water, rubbing the blood from them, when the hairs on his arms stand up. They sway briefly, like seaweed in the current. Then lie down again.

  He looks up. A strange ruffle come across the surface.

  The birds had lifted suddenly and gone away. As if there were some signal. They are flecks now, a hiatus disappearing against the light off the sea.

  He is far enough out for the land to have paled in view.

  The first lightning strikes out somewhere past the horizon. At first he thinks it some sudden glint. The thunder happens moments later, and he feels sick in his guts.

  A metallic sheen comes to the water, like cutlery. Like metal much touched. The white clouds glow, go a sort of leaden at the edge.

  There was a delay, he thinks. Enough delay. Sees the rain as a thick dark band, moving in. Starts to paddle.

  Then there is a wire of electric brightness . . . Three. Four . . . A rumble that seems to echo off the surface of the water.

  He counts automatically, assesses the distance to land. An-other throb of light. The coast still a thin, wood-colored line.

  The wind picks up, cold air moving in front of the storm.

  And then there is a basal roll. The sound of a great weight landing. A slow tearing in the sky.

  One repeated word now. No, no, no.

  When it hits him there is a bright white light.

  • • •

  He swings the fish from the water, a wild stripe flicking and flashing into the boat, and grabs the line, twisting the hook out, holding the fish down in the footrests. It gasps, thrashes. Drums. Something rapid and primal, ceremonial, in the shallow of the open boat.

  Flecks of blood and scales loosen, as if turning to rainbows in his hands as he picks up the fish and breaks its neck, feels the minute rim of teeth inside its jaw on the pad of his forefinger, puts his thumb behind the head and snaps.

  The jaw splits and the gills splay, like an opening flower.

  He was sure he would catch fish. He left just a simple note, “Pick salad x.”

  He looks briefly toward the inland cliffs, hoping the peregrine might be there, scanning as he patiently undoes the knot of traces, pares the feathers away from each other until they are free and feeds them out. The boat is flecked. Glittered. A heat come to the morning now, convincing and thick.

  The kayak lilts. Weed floats. He thinks of her hair in water. The same darkene
d blond color.

  It’s unusual to catch only one. Or it was just a straggler. The edge of the shoal.

  He retrieves a plastic shopping bag from the drybag in back and puts the fish safe, the metal of it dulling immediately to cloth in his hands. Then he bails out the blood-rusted water that has come into the boat.

  Fish don’t have eyelids, remember. In this bright water, it’s likely they are deeper out.

  He’s been hearing his father’s voice for the last few weeks now.

  I’ve got this one, though. That’s enough. That’s lunch anyway.

  The bay lay just a little way north. It was a short paddle from the flat beach inland of him, with the vacation trailers on the low fields above, but it felt private.

  His father long ago had told him that they were the only ones who knew about the bay, and that was a good thing between them to believe.

  You’ll set the pan on a small fire and cook the mackerel as you used to do together, in the pats of butter you took from the roadside café. The butter will be liquid by now, and you will have to squeeze it from the wrapper like an ointment.

  He smiled at catching the fish. That part of the day safe.

  I should bring her here. All these years and I haven’t. It’s different now. I should bring her.

  The bones in the cooling pan, fingers sticky with the toffee of burned butter.

  He was not a talker. But he couldn’t imagine sitting in the bay and not talking to his father.

  There was a strange gurgle, a razorbill appeared, shuddered off the water, flicked its head, and preened. It looked at him, head cocked, turned, looked over its shoulder as it paddled off a few yards. Then it dived again, was gone.

  He took the plastic container from the front stow. It had warmed in the morning sun, and it seemed wrong and strange to him that it was warm. It was as if the ashes still had heat.

  He unscrewed the lid partially, caught out by a sudden fear. That he would release some djinn, a ghost, the fatal germ. No. They’re sterile. He threw science at the fear.

  He’d had to go through so many possessions, things that exploded smally with memories over the last few weeks; but it was the opposite with the ashes. He was trying to hold away the fact that they knew nothing of what they were.

  Their value, he knew, was that they caused him to come out here. Something he had not done for a very long time. He found himself wanting to remind the ashes of events, things. He had to make them the physical thing of his father.

  After the brief doubt he relaxed again. He could feel the current arc him out, its subtle shift away from shore. A strong draw to the seemingly still water.

  He had a sense, out here, of peace. He could feel not only the proximity of the bay but a proximity to himself. He thought: Why do we stop doing the things we enjoy and the things we know are good for us?

  When he had fetched the kayak out from under the tarp, there had been cobwebs, and earwigs were in amongst the hatch straps.

  It’s not such a bad day.

  He had not told her he was going. He’d expected it to be a weight he wanted to lift by himself.

  There was a piping of oystercatchers, a clap of water as a fish jumped. He saw it for a moment, a silver nail. A thing deliberately, for a brief astounding moment, broken from its element.

  He fades the kayak, lets it drift around the promontory, wiggling his ankles, working his feet loose with arrival. The water beneath him suddenly aglut. Sentinel somehow, with jellyfish. He wonders if they are a sign, of some increasing heat perhaps; but just as he feels a sense of settlement, the sound of music hits him.

  A child knee-high in the water, slapping at the waves. Another coming tentatively down the stones. A mother changing inside a towel.

  The ashes sit perfectly in the drinks holder by his legs.

  Laid out farther off, a girl, at adolescent distance. The sound of her radio traveling. A pile of bright things.

  The kayak jumps a little over the brief waves bouncing around the point, the sea seeming to goose-bump for a moment, as if cold air goes across it. A kick under his hand, the ocean of her stomach.

  The child has found a whip of kelp and slaps at the waves.

  It’s okay, Dad, he says. We’ll come back later.

  The sound of a Jet Ski, from the beach in front of the trailers. An urban, invasive sound.

  We’ll come back when they’ve gone.

  Out in the distance, a small cloud. A white flurry. A crowd of diving birds.

  They won’t be here all day.

  Then he paddles, the ashes by his legs, in a straight line out to sea.

  *

  He wakes floating on his back, caught on a cleat by the elastic toggle of his wetsuit shoe. Around him hailstones melt and sink. They are scattered on the kayak, roll off as it bobs on the slight waves. There is a hissing sound. The hailstones melting in the water.

  He stares around, shell-shocked, trying to understand, a layer of ash on the surface of the water. He cannot move his arms. They are held out before him as if beseeching the sky.

  Dead fish lie around him in the water.

  He gets himself to the boat, the boat to him, drawing it with his leg, shaking until he frees the lace, turns, kicks, twists, trying to lever with his useless arms. Somehow tips himself into the boat. A primal instinct to make land.

  Live, he’s thinking. Live.

  A loud bell sounding in his head. The shock of an alarm.

  His fishing rod on fire upon the water as he slips off the world again, and passes out.

  His mouth is crusted with salt. He does not know where he is. There is a pyroclast of fine dried ash across his skin.

  When he comes to, the strongest thing he feels is the tingling in his hands. It feels as if they are distant things, strange ringing bells. Finds out anew he cannot move his arms. He does not remember getting back into the kayak. Does not understand. The ground is moving. Is sure that if he moves he will abolish himself. Holds on to himself like a thought coming out of sleep.

  He moves because he coughs, a cough made of glass. Slowly lifts himself. One eye closed with salt. Does not know why, why it will not open. His face has been on the deck of the kayak and the salt is from the evaporated water. The sun had come out hard after the storm and had evaporated the water, leaving the salt. It is in a crust on his eye. When he opens the other, the light blinds him.

  It hurt to breathe because his whole body hurt. As if he had suffered a massive fall.

  He blinked and struggled to raise himself a little more, the kayak shifting below him. The world slipping, rocking.

  He felt the briefest flicker in his right arm, a wave of something, and it spasmed, smashed unfeelingly against the inside of the boat and went dead again, fell now against his side, a fish flicking after suffocating. The other arm still stood out in front of him as if waiting to receive something. The tingling remained, like the pain when you crack your knee.

  There was a ringing in his ears, a high, insecty whine. He felt drunk. His head pumped full with something. He let the light in bit by bit, as if sipping it with his eye, raised his head and saw the water. For a moment he thought he was in some way blind; but then he understood: there was just the water, there was nothing else to see.

  He processed the fact. Felt the languid rocking of the boat. For a while he stared at his knuckle. It had split and opened on the boat and bled thickly through his hand, but he could not feel it.

  His legs seemed strong. They seemed strong in a way that made him think they were not part of his body. Like they were tools he had. He got them against the end of the cockpit and pushed himself up. Then sat, as if after being stunned.

  The heat from the sun hit his face and he tried to move his head away, as if it were a bee worrying him. Then he closed his eye again. It was worse, the rocking and slipping under him. He felt sick with his eye closed.

  He let it open, adjust again to the light. The light was coming down from the sky and up off the water, so there was n
o place without light to look. After a while his eye accepted it.

  The whine in his ears was predominant and the sea sound came to him as if from a shell.

  He tried to open his mouth, suddenly aware of thirst.

  What happened? What happened? His consciousness a snapped cord his mind was trying to pull back together.

  He looks down at his left hand, a strange sense that looking at it will bring it back, will help him move it. It is fractaled with a strange blue pattern, seems tattooed, a pattern the way ice forms on airplane glass.

  He does not understand.

  Feels he must have been in some great crash.

  His right arm comes back to him with the pain of releasing a trapped finger.

  For a while it is wayward. Movable, but numb, clumsy. He watches his hand as if it’s a machine. Practices operating it, gripping, releasing, gripping. At first it is just an action, but gradually he registers the pressure of his grip. The tingling stays, but he has movement. The feel of it is like the sound that comes through the whining in his ears. Something acknowledged. A view through thick white glass.

  He does not know how long he has been like this. Who he is. It could be moments. Days.

  He sees a rouge burn through the dry salt on the muscle of his forearm, sees the line of his shinbone startled and red. Feels his face. Like something felt through packaging with his hand as it is. He hears more than properly feels the paper of his dry cracked lips. He has the strange conviction that if he opens his other eye he will see what happened.

  As he tries again it’s as if the eye leaves his face and flutters by him. A butterfly.

  It takes him a while to focus, to believe it. Has forgotten there is other life. It puppets around him.

  He cannot believe that a thing so small, breakable, is out here. A thing that cannot put down on the water. How far must we be from land? The butterfly settles on the bright lettering of the boat. He watches it open and close its wings in the sun. Opens and closes his good hand.

  I might make the difference. I might be, out here, the freak thing that saves it. (Does he believe in purpose? He cannot remember. It feels now that he does.) It has to stay with me. I have to get it back.