Everything I Found on the Beach Page 15

Stringer came out from the gambling room and found the big man and saw that he had got the shakes. Stringer blasphemed at him.

  The big man couldn’t get the stink of sick out of his hands. He hadn’t brought a toothbrush, nothing to wash with, and he felt a strange embarrassment at the idea of buying a toothbrush, a vulnerableness in society. Things that had always been done for him by his mother. He welcomed the cold, trying to numb himself.

  “Jesus, have a fucking cigarette,” said Stringer.

  “I can’t smoke,” said the big man.

  The slow ferry loped on, with its puking and petting and playing passengers, regardless of them all, through a sea that was getting up, a sea that had, it seemed, some sense of duty, a vital job, as if, should it stop, the world would stop. For a while there had been a brief squall of rain but it had no feeling to the ferry at all. It just plodded on toward the port where the other man was waiting, taking the two men toward him.

  He took the rabbits and the money and everything else he had in the car and left the car parked up just off the bridge. Then he tucked himself into an alley between the big wheelie bins. He threw the keys into the bin.

  Initially he’d got the car to make the handover in, just so they couldn’t trace him back after. He was sure the gang would have connections with the police. He’d even felt a small guilt considering they might work back to the boy and the mother he’d got the car off, but this was an outside chance, he told himself. They’d work it out, surely.

  It was only when the call had come, the bombshell of the seven thousand, that he’d thought of trying to sell the drugs himself. The plan was deranged from the start and not thought out, he saw that now. To try and get to some local drug pusher by assuming the girls would be involved. “It’s not a film. It’s not a goddamned film,” he told himself. Asking for the foreign girl had been a spur of the moment thing.

  In a while a car came along and stopped, and reversed back to the Fiesta with the broken rear light. Two guys got out. They looked over the car. Then they worked it over with baseball bats and drove off.

  “I guess that’s it,” said Hold to himself. “I’ll see it through now. That was just an idea. It was just a nervous mistake, thinking I could get the drugs moved on another way. The best is if I just see it through now.”

  After a while he came out from the alley and walked a little way and went up the pedestrianized area and to the church and rested on the old wall and looked at the rabbits. Seven thousand. That was the way it was going to be. He studied the herringbone pattern of the stones. He just wanted it over now.

  He thought of the wide face of the girl. He thought of the Pole making his ten thousand pound shot. “Ten thousand isn’t enough. It’s nothing,” he thought. “Seven thousand. It won’t change anything. Not one time only.”

  He worked out in his head that if his story about the fish had been true, he could have got close to a thousand. Somehow that figure seemed more real. “Maybe I could get my own boat with seven thousand,” he was thinking. “Try and work something out about the house with Danny’s sister.”

  The huge ferry had just come in and the cars started to come past him on the road just below and filter out, most of them heading south off the island. The noises of the unloading boomed comfortably round the dock. The ferry was truly immense. Watching the cars come out and spread lithely away, Hold thought of the mouth-brooding fish who keep their young safe in their mouths when there’s danger. He felt some sense of safety, of comfort in the decision just to finish this. He could put the money away for the boy, or take some to go game fishing with in Florida. Imagine that. Imagine a big marlin coming out of the water. That would be something, just once in your life. To see something like that, magnificent in its own element—I couldn’t kill it though. Maybe I couldn’t even fish it. What would it be for, really? It would just be to see it, and I don’t know if there’s any other way to see it than to fish it.

  The big floodlights lit up the ship like a cathedral. He watched the cars unload for a long time, saw the huge boat lift in the water as it gradually shed its load. Tired as he was, there was something mesmeric about it.

  The two men came off the ferry. It looked odd, Stringer helping the huge big man down the gangway, as if he was some kind of handler of a big, dangerous animal made drowsy with something.

  Around the boat, the foot passengers spread out across the quay. The priest-like man helped the big man along, and amongst the crowd of the tired and drunk and of the people confused by the strange process of travel they were simply another exhibit.

  The priest-like figure left the big man afloat on the wide tarmac of the disembarkation area for a while and went over to a taxi driver who was parked among a flock of cars that looked bizarre and luminous under the spilling bright floodlights.

  They talked briefly, and then Stringer went over and collected the suffering big man and got him in the taxi, and the three characters headed off away from the port.

  From the taxi, Stringer saw a guy leaned up on the wall staring out over the still emptying ferry. He looked odd up there, alone, somehow painted on against the floodlights that lit up the church behind.

  The bag next to the man on the wall seemed to give out some light of its own in the residual floodlight from the church, some beckoning statement.

  It was kind of mesmeric and eyedrawing in the strangeness of it.

  “I’m tired,” thought Stringer. He was tired on many levels.

  They drove on under the wall, and the man glanced down only briefly as the taxi went past and went away out of sight.

  The big man was in the front seat. He was still ill.

  Stringer spoke. “Drive around a bit,” he said in his nervous Irish voice to the owlish man at the wheel. “I want to see where to do this.”

  PART FOUR

  The two men sat in a café. Both men wore gloves. They were thin leather gloves and they looked somehow feminine on the big man.

  It was early and gray fog came in from the port and messed the light about. It was dismal. The big man still looked rough as hell. They sat in the back of the café and could smell the kitchen through the door.

  The man had met them as arranged. It was disorienting to come off the boat at that time of night. The man, done up like a regular taxi driver, had given them the black sports bag and the bag was now under the table by Stringer’s feet. He was looking at the menu card. Up by the windows there were a few men sitting at tables on their own eating. They looked like truck drivers. It was a fairly plastic place.

  The waitress came up and asked them what they wanted. She was not pretty but she had a big chest. Stringer had a thing for that, as if he missed his mother. It was difficult to see how it would work with him being as small as he was.

  The girl with the big chest came over and put some toast down on the table and asked what they wanted.

  “What’s a full Welsh?” asked Stringer.

  “It’s like a full English,” said the girl.

  “Okay. I’ll have a full Welsh.”

  The girl went away. The big man had just shaken his head. The girl thought that maybe the gloves were because they were queers or something.

  “You should eat,” Stringer said. He took a piece of toast and started to spread it still with his gloves on. The toast was so cold the butter didn’t melt on it. The big man looked horrific.

  “Some scary bastard you are,” Stringer said. The big man looked at Stringer then and something went through Stringer and he couldn’t have said what it was. It made him look down at the bag under the table then away at the men at the other tables but it was like the big man’s eyes had been horribly left in him. Like they were rolling about inside him as he held the toast. That hadn’t happened to Stringer before with anyone.

  “Eat breakfast, you scary fuck!” he said.

  Hold got up and gathered up the bag of rabbits and left the key on the bed and went out. He had not slept.

  He went out onto the street. The thick m
ist sat in the street and he could see the minute drops shift in front of him with this great individuality. He was tired from not sleeping and spaced somehow and felt in some ways a great and dangerous carelessness now.

  He went up out of the street to the van and got in and then turned on the engine and headed out of the town slowly in the fog.

  “There’s a way out,” he said. “I don’t need the money. It’s not worth the risk. And I don’t want these any more, it’s like they’ve become some part of me.” It was as if the drugs had some voice to him now, as if they had taken on a little song.

  He drove out of the town with this numb decisive sense and headed into the island and it was as if the fog thickened and the farther he got the less he could see.

  “It’s closing around me,” he thought.

  “And you’re sure it’s clear?” said Stringer. He thought of the big man getting to the boat.

  “It’s better in the day,” said the owlish man. “Kids in school. People in work. And we should use this.” The owlish man gestured at the fog.

  “What about the water?” The man from the city did not know about the tides so well.

  “It shouldn’t be enough to move the body much. But you’ll have to make sure the stuff stays with him.”

  That had been the Scouser’s call. Leave the link there. Make it clear the thing was drug related, send a little ripple out.

  “We’ll make sure,” said Stringer. But there was this growing germ in him.

  The big man waded through the knee-deep water. He could feel the slight tug of the water as the tide went out. The fog licked around him, and every half a minute or so came the far off sound of the foghorn from the Stack. It was like some slow pulse, some clock.

  He swung the bag into the boat and climbed himself with the surprising agility he had up the thin aluminum ladder at the back and got out of the water and uncertainly in. As soon as his legs were out of the water he could feel the cold on them. He sat on the side of the boat looking much too big for it and the boat shifted strangely under him, half afloat in the shallow water. He took off his shoes and emptied out the water over the side of the boat. Then he peeled off his socks and wrung them out over the side into the ebbing water. He looked down at the bag as if checking it was safe.

  The fog came round him and the boats in the line around seemed to peer oddly at the big man sitting there unsteadily on the boat. They appeared like half-colored shapes through an opaque window. He could feel the boat lull and bounce unexpectedly with the water and hunkered, as if his big weight could keep the boat still. Already the memory of the sick came to him like a taste.

  “It’s always me,” thought the big man to himself. He could feel the cold getting into the bones of his feet. His toes looked strange to him, bleached and drained of blood in the water.

  He looked at the way the boats in-line appeared oddly through the fog and remembered the guy in the sauna at the massage parlor, the way his face seemed to form out of the thin steam when he’d gone in to get him, the scorched meaty smell of his face on the coals, the force he’d had to use to get him off the coals afterwards like it was an egg stuck to a pan.

  “There’s always something,” he thought. “Always some little thing to put up with.” The foghorn came again, repetitively. It could grate on you. He remembered the irritation of the sweat pouring into his eyes as he did the sauna job. “This time it’s just cold. And these damn boats,” he thought. “There’s always something.”

  He looked back down at his feet. “They look like a dead man’s feet,” he thought. “They look like Mikey’s feet when they pulled him out of the Liffey.” He reached for his socks and put the wet socks on again to cover up his feet, thinking of his dead brother. Then he put his shoes on and got down in the belly of the boat.

  Hold pulled the van up in the shallow gateway at the side of the road. He took the knife and slit open the rabbits, nicking the nylon stitches that had bitten into the hardening flaps of skin and were sunk down hidden in the fur. The icepacks had long since lost the ice and the inside of the bag had gone warm and the smell was starting to come off the rabbits. The condensation from the temperature changing in the bag had stuck their fur in clumps and they looked bedraggled and undignified now, like wet leaves.

  It was very early and the first light was stretching out and amplified by the fog and it was white and directionless. Every thirty seconds or so, Hold could hear the low moan of the lighthouse foghorn, but it was faint, almost imperceptible.

  Then there on the side of the road, Hold wet some toilet paper he had taken from the room and wiped off the blood that had dried chocolate red on the packages and put the three packages in a carrier bag.

  He looked out over the field disappearing into the fog with the light coming up and thought back. He thought back to the similarly short rabbit-cropped grass of the slopes above the cliffs, of the gull-dropped shells and desiccated mermaid’s purses, the broken bits of crab that scattered about in the short grass, bleaching in the salt and light. He thought of the slow uncoiling of the rabbits when they were shot, this kind of easement of the tension something hunted must live under and he felt the bedraggled, dampened carcasses there in his hands.

  “Maybe it can be the same,” he thought. “This money won’t change anything, it’s not enough. It is only I that know about this, and if I can close that away somewhere so no one else can see it, then there’s no reason why things can’t just be the same.”

  He thought back over the long distance of the last day.

  “No one is affected by this, nothing changes,” he thought. “I can just go back to how it was. I was right. I was right not to bring the gun.”

  He sat in the van for a while, not focusing anywhere. He was back on the boat, running the knife through the fillets, feeling the minute bump of the knife break through the glaceous rib bones with this train-track rhythm.

  He noted the foghorn again and somewhere an oystercatcher called, startled. He could feel himself gathering, coming together. Just one thing to think of, then he could return to it all. There would be other ways to sort the problems, or other things that grew from whatever happened in the wake of them. But there would always be the beach, the long nets, the company of the tides. “You can’t rescue everyone,” he thought. “People survive their own way.” He felt the gathering, the coming together. “I was right not to bring the gun.” He looked down at the rabbits prone there in his hands.

  “One last thing,” he said. “One more thing. This is the last part.”

  Then he threw the empty rabbits into the field.

  After a while the call of the foghorn got to the big man as he lay in the boat and he had started to wait for the sound like the tick of some slowed-down clock, like a drip of tap water. It was a small torture. The tide had gone out. He could feel the boat bump and settle under him, and even though the lurches were brief and small they had been tiring and made him nervy, every time thinking the boat would go over. He was cold and sick feeling and could feel the insipid fog seep into him. “This is the last time with the boats,” he thought. “I feel like I’ve been in it for hours.”

  He remembered getting on the DART, Stringer losing his temper with the ticket machine. The big man had always liked trains, whatever sort. He’d felt calm on it, not like on the damned boat. There was something he liked perhaps about the fact that a train could only go along the track that was put down for it, and you knew where that went from the start.

  They went out of the stop and out along the line past the waterfront, the long, wide stretch of water spanning out to the horizon, a strange mobile emptiness seeming to have this serene sense of success to it against the aspiration of the town. He’d felt somehow childlike going on this trip, though he knew, looking out over the water, of the unusual brutal purpose behind it.

  “I’ve never been out of Ireland before,” he’d thought to himself. Stringer was looking up at the line map, counting off the stops, but it was hours until the
ferry.

  “I’ve hardly been out of the city,” he’d thought. He’d looked at the water and thought of his brother. “He was different,” he thought. “He had ambition. He tried to get out. I never had that.”

  The big man had this crushing knowledge of what he was. And he couldn’t do anything about it. He felt the useless guilt. “Things changed,” he said to himself. “I just followed you in, Da, but things had changed.”

  He could still taste the tuna from the sandwiches, and kept finding little gouts of bread and fish cemented up in his teeth.

  He’d sat there, riding the DART, happy looking for bits of sandwich with his tongue.

  Hold stopped the van and took the bag and got out and tasted immediately the sea in the rolling thick fog and followed the wooden arrowpost that marked the way up the mountain.

  “There’s a way,” he told himself.

  He went slowly and blindly through the fog and here and there in patches it broke to give a sense of the surrounding ground, but then it souped again, and thickened.

  He went slowly up the rising ground and halted at the outcrops of rock and at the busted gorse roots and at anywhere he thought might be secure and in the future locatable and then he stopped and just held the bag uselessly and realized the uselessness of the idea, that there was only one way to close this.

  And the life of the other guy’s family. The words stuck in his mind, seeped into him as if they came from the fog.

  He stood for a long time, then he went back to finish things.

  The big man felt too big for the space in the boat.

  “What if I don’t know when to go?” he thought. “I can’t look up from here. I have to do all this with my ears. There’s always something… I have to get together though. Get ready now.”

  From somewhere the smell of old fish came to him. It brought back the ferry ride. He hadn’t eaten anything for hours and had been sick and his body was confused at the emptiness and at the same time the sickness at the thought of food. He could feel the aches setting in where his big body pressed up against the insides of the boat.