Everything I Found on the Beach

  EVERYTHING I FOUND ON THE BEACH

  Also by Cynan Jones

  The Dig

  The Long Dry

  Copyright © 2016 by Cynan Jones

  Co-published in Great Britain by Granta Books and Parthian Books, 2014

  First published in Great Britain by Parthian Books, 2011, with the financial support of the Welsh Books Council

  Cover illustration and design by Sarah Evenson

  Interior production by Bookmobile Design & Digital Publisher Services

  Author photograph © Alice Fiorilli

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to info@coffeehousepress.org.

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Jones, Cynan, 1975–

  Title: Everything I found on the beach / Cynan Jones.

  Description: Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015036029 | ISBN 9781566894371 (eBook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Polish people—Wales—Fiction. | Fishers—Wales—Fiction. | Irish—Wales—Fiction. | Drug traffic—Wales—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Crime.

  Classification: LCC PR6110.O624 E94 2016 | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036029

  232221201918171612345678

  This edition for Jane Alchermes, as she was, and again for Coram, Alex, Tom, and Emlyn Llewelyn, my brother

  He had said, “I am a man,” and that meant certain things.… It meant that he was half insane and half god.

  John Steinbeck, The Pearl

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Funder Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  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.

  PART ONE

  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 t
he 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.

  The men laughed and drank but as they went along Grzegorz thought of the long space of the beach, the flat sands and that sense of peace when he was cockle digging. He could never afford land, but the beach had a common right and he could work it. It would be the closest thing to a farm. He just needed to set himself up.

  It was over an hour before they got to the dock and the men got gratefully off the bus. The mood was different now.

  A guy came out of the shed and talked to them in Polish and then the whole group of them went into the shed.

  Grzegorz remembered what his friend had said. The only tricky bit is the boat, but it’s simple. It’s like steering a plow really. It’s the only difficult part.

  Grzegorz stood there with the others listening to a man who spoke to them from behind a desk that looked odd in the otherwise empty boatshed. Grzegorz’s English was still poor and he understood only some of what was said, but then the Pole who had spoken to them outside barked out the translation. He was skin-headed and brutal looking. A football hooligan. Grzegorz felt a sense of unrealness, this new and hollow fear at the idea of the black sea they had seen from the bus. They’d been asked once and simply outside the shed if they wanted to back out. “Once you’re in the shed you’re in everything,” said the Pole. “You back out then, there’ll be consequences.” No one had backed out.

  The men went up individually and showed their identification to the man behind the desk and he took the passports and ID cards in this strange formal way and put them all together in a strongbox. “You’ll get them when you get back,” he said.

  For each of them who went up, the man behind the desk flashed a square of paper. This visible change came over the men who had gone up then and they moved off.

  The skinhead stood close to the desk, just out of the light. He was like some kind of unnerving scavenger. Grzegorz felt him almost, rather than saw him, had this rip of gall go through him at the irreversibility of this thing he was doing. For a moment he had the taste of the horrible liquor come up in his mouth again, but he swallowed it down. It was like the sick feeling he had as a child before he used to jump off the bridge into the cold pool of the river by his grandparents’ farm. He was one of the youngest of the kids who played, and always the first to be made to jump. He swallowed the fear back, the same way he used to, with this childish determination to do something he knew was dangerous and stupid. For what? For the chance to be something.

  Grzegorz stepped up and handed over his passport to the man and looked up at the skin-headed man, trying not to show the nervous rush that was going through him.

  The man looked at the outline of the eagle on the passport then at the name, then ran his finger down a list in front of him with this surreal-seeming officiousness. Then he drew out a photograph and showed Grzegorz a picture of his wife pushing the pram. This sick feeling came up hard in Grzegorz.

  The skin-headed Pole was acting as translator.

  “Can you drive a boat?”

  Grzegorz nodded numbly.

  “Yes. I can drive a boat.”

  Hold sat on the upturned crate and cut down the spine of the fish and let the boat bob and tremble around him in the water. He held the fish down on the board and cut behind the gills and then turned the knife stiffly in the flesh and cut through the rib bones and drew off the fillet. Intact but for this loin of it gone, the fish looked still alive it was so fresh.

  Hold sliced away the spurs of rib that had come off in the smooth cut of the fillet and threw them into the water; then he pared the flesh finally from the skin and threw the skin too into the water. Then he cut the fillet and took up the pieces one by one and ate them richly, chewing and savoring them.

  It was the early mixed-up warmth of spring, and the colder breeze could not get into the boat the way it faced, so the space inside was warm and was one of the first warmths of the year to him.

  He ate the fish and got up and took the boiled kettle from the gimballed stove and made a black coffee and sat back on the crate in the strange created warmth and felt the boat and felt the sea get up slightly beneath him.

  Holden looked at the knife and cleaned it on his pant leg and tested its edge with his thumbprint and tried it against the hairs of his arm and looked up from the boat at the cliffs and at the pale kittiwakes circling off them.

  Three years ago, Danny had died and had left him this knife. Hold had taken the knife but there was inside him the sense that he was keeping it in trust for Jake, and that he would pass it on when the boy was old enough.

  It was as if the continued use of the knife was vital in keeping the sense of his friend around him. He’d give it to Jake. He’d made that decision straight off. He’d give it to Danny’s boy Jake when he got old enough.

  When Grzegorz brought his child back newly from the hospital there was a celebration. Already, the traditional red ribbon he had been given when they went off to the hospital in the taxi was tied around the little boy’s wrist. Everyone held his new son, and it was like delivering him to some huge, surrogate family.

  He’d waited at the door for a moment, as if getting his breath, letting his wife go in with the baby to the initial greetings. “This is not right,” Grzegorz thought. “It is not right to bring a son into this. He should have a real home, a place better than this.” He stood in the doorway of the bleak place and looked blankly at the artless graffiti that went across the broken brick wall in front of him. “Polish out.”

  He thought of the boy taking his first steps here, uttering his first words. “No,” Grzegorz thought. “It is okay now, he is too small for anything. But I have to get out before he starts to grow up, before he walks. I want his first steps to be around a table that is ours. That belongs to us. I want him to have a room of his own with his brother. I didn’t come here for this.” He felt a strange, tired relief and joy and emptiness.

  He went upstairs. His son was in the big maternal arms of one of the heavier older women and he saw his wife tired, uncertain, this look of things slipping away. That should be my grandmother, holding him there, my new son. He looked at his wife and met her eyes. He loo
ked fascinated at his wife’s strangely deflated stomach after all the months of fullness. She was like a child against the big, heavy woman. “This should be happier,” he thought. “This should be happier than this.” He thought of the humiliating, horrible thing of the waters breaking there in the room full of people.

  A man came in and put three ducks down on the table. Grzegorz looked at the birds, limp and distraught, river mud in amongst the oiled colors of their feathers. He looked at the very orange legs of the wild ducks and wondered, detachedly, how the man could have caught them. And then the man put down bottles on the table and there came a sudden activity, glasses banging on the table, the birds swept up.

  At the beginning there had been exactly this kind of vibrant energy to the house. There was the sense of the beginning of a party, of some great feast a big family had come together for. There was a common purpose to all the people who had arrived, who had come on the two buses, the men to jobs allocated them by the agency. Then the weight of it had sunk in.

  He did not know they would be there for so long, stuck, suspended somehow in this no-man’s-land between Poland and what they had held as an ideal new world. It was more than a year now. The baby, product of that first new vibrant energy, a momentous piece of life that they felt was a sign of the newness and change of everything, came now not with celebration but as an extra weight. He had bought into a vision of this country that did not fit. He was unnerved by the dullness of the buildings, the latent fatigue of the place, colorless shops with broken signage. It didn’t tally with the view he’d had of the place. He was perturbed by some strange lack he could not pin down here.

  He felt at the same time this tired, trapped fear alongside this great and in some way desperate gratitude for this accidental family around him. “They are good people; we’re all in the same boat here,” he thought. “All reliant on the agency still, as if they hold us in some grip.” Because of the break when they’d laid them off for three weeks, he hadn’t quite clocked up the twelve months’ unbroken work that would make him eligible for benefits, so he couldn’t move out of the house yet, not on the money he had. There was talk that the agency had organized this break deliberately so they didn’t have a choice but to accept the work and the stoppages in their paychecks—the deductions for rent, for the transport to work that was laid on, for house cleaning, though none of them had ever seen a cleaner. “But it’s just talk,” thought Grzegorz. “We’re responsible for ourselves.”