Everything I Found on the Beach

by Cynan Jones

  He held the gun in one hand and went almost crab-like on his bent legs and outstretched other arm, keeping his head low and trying to gauge where he reached the crest of the slope. The field was the highest part of the farmland and the view from it could take your breath sometimes. The barley shoots were all shaking in the breeze.

  He had stopped for a while and had no idea what to do. He could see just above the crest and the two rabbits were between the rows of barley going from shoot to shoot. His heart was beating unreasonably and there was something in the feel and smell of the damp warm soil under his hands and the moisture from the earth coming through his trousers as he knelt that put him back to childhood. Doing this thing was a very new thing for him and he had no knowledge of what would happen next and in this the expectancy was very pure like a child’s.

  Crouched as he was, he could hear the barley shoots rattle in the breeze. He had no idea what to do. As soon as he moved, the rabbits would go. There was a reason for shooting the rabbits. He wanted to cook them and he wanted that very much after hearing the old guy in the pub talk of the rabbit trains they used to send full of meat to London in the war; how no one seemed to use the things around them any more. It was a responsibility he wanted to take. He clicked off the safety.

  When he stood up, the rabbits ran. What happened was very quick, but it had never left him. He shot the furthest one and it balled into the ground and went still and then he shot the second one mid-leap and it hit the soil and squealed and bucked into the air and he watched it as it hit the ground and volleyed again horribly into the air over and over, writhing and leaping down the field as if it was on a string held by some sick god, the way we dangle a toy for a cat. And he cracked open the gun and shook as he rushed for more cartridges walking almost hypnotized toward the rabbit, and he swallowed in the horror of it with some bizarre pragmatism he did not know he had.

  And then the rabbit was on the ground and kicked up scuffs of soil it loosened as it fought and he leveled the gun and just held it there, sick with his own heartbeat, not knowing whether to fire or not, then the rabbit went still. The space around it was smashed and all the barley shoots were ripped out.

  He collected the two rabbits and took them down and the old farmer showed him how to skin them and he never told anyone about the puppet rabbit.

  He hoped very much when he shot again that it would not reoccur, and he had never again managed to hit two things with each barrel in succession like that. He was young and it had come to him as another big lesson in responsibility, but there was a relief in it. He understood it as a different type of responsibility.

  It was an outward symbol of the capacity to take liability. It seemed manly, and yet it was a responsibility which ended with the result of one quick action. There was not the responsibility that comes with love or ambition, of having to maintain the determination and energy toward the thing you chose to achieve. The thing or person. This responsibility ended with the death you had decided to mete out. You didn’t have to risk watching the ideal decay.

  Hold put the headlamp on and walked down the field and stopped, sensing the rabbits scutter and shift ahead of him, seeing him first in the moonlight. He flicked on the headlamp and scanned the space in front in a slow, sweeping arc and the rabbits looked back at him, their misunderstanding eyeshine reflected back in pinkish discs.

  The bullet spat through the silencer and in the scope he saw the rabbit turn over and shake and die, its mouth still working for a second, then its back leg kicking automatically out in the final statement of its instinct like some unwound spring, and he lowered the scope and switched off the beam so as not to see the final parts of its life shudder out of it. He went over the tide times in his mind and worked out how long he had to work his way down to the nets on the beach.

  You could leave the nets there and let them be exposed but there was always the chance that something would get into them if you had any fish. There wouldn’t be birds in the night, not before dawn, but a fox would go down there, and even a polecat, or otter, which they said were getting stronger again and would follow the freshwater streams down to the shore and hunt there. On the big tides like this, the sea went out quickly for the first important distance and this was where his nets were set, at the edge of the high water mark, so he calculated they would be lying open three hours before the low tide.

  Early in the year, sometimes he had risked leaving the nets down for two tides, leaving them in the midnight ebbs, and the fish that had lain in the net from the first tide would be clean inside, with their vents dug out where the minute crabs had gone into them and eaten the guts of them out. Birds generally went for the heads and he hadn’t had a bird caught in the net ever and he was thankful for that because it was a small dread to him.

  He could see the scallopers out on the five-mile line and he thought of the great difference between pulling a trigger and pulling a dredger, and of the personal deliberateness in one and the indiscrimination of the other.

  They opened up the beds, and the scallop boats on the horizon had arrived strangely one night as a line of lights almost like a village strung out along the furthest line of sight. At Christmas they were joined by further boats and the sea at night looked decorated. They had worked the beds for months, dredging with heavy nets loaded down with iron frames.

  A month or so ago, a man went overboard. After searching for hours, all the boats came in from respect, and Hold had some sense that something in that man must have wanted to have gone, because, Hold thought, it must be difficult to fall into the sea from a big boat.

  He thought of the dredgers and he thought of their netted iron buckets smashing blindly over the seabed and how the men on the boats did not have to see the making of the desert they would bring about; and he thought: there are forces that work that way in everything that happens.

  And perhaps in that moonlight he thought too much. And he thought whether it was better to make choices, and to take directions and risk a net being there; or whether it was best to stay bedded somewhere, and risk some great thing being dragged through you. And he thought how Danny had died, and how that was like some great thing dragged through him, and how it had left the bed he’d made smashed and damaged and dis-anchored. And how, for a very long time afterwards, the people who were close to him couldn’t see where they were in the sand.

  He collected the three rabbits he had shot and laid them out side by side on the turf and put the bag onto the grass and went down on his haunches using the rifle for balance. He took out the gun bag and checked the rifle over once more and then put it away and lay the gun bag down.

  It was important to paunch the rabbits immediately so the meat would not change, and one by one he took the rabbits and cleaned them, cutting the glistening ropes of gut and the stomachs out to lie on the ground as some bonanza of his surgery. It was an unusual thing to use the knife of his friend which was usually for fish but he had found a way with it, and he used it out of sentiment and a sense from somewhere that a man did not need more than one knife.

  For a moment, there was moonlight, the inside of a shell, some shard caught in the dark mass of that eye, a part moon reflected as he held the rabbit down.

  He knelt in the cropped turf and dry sea thrift and finished the last rabbit and, before cutting them, with his thumb he had peed the rabbits by forcing out the last urine from their bladder.

  There was a constancy without rhythm to the sea below, swelling and crushing with almost a machinelike quality with that same sense it had contained within itself for days. Like some broken metronome for the earth. Just from the sound he knew how the breakers would look, moving up from the fluid sea as if great boastful shoulders were beneath them, then crushing down. It was like a wrestler throwing someone. It was as if Hold acknowledged those thuds somewhere inside him, like acknowledging a stronger man.

  He could see the clouds scud slightly and lift in the sky and start to move, and knew they would come over in a little while a
nd wondered if, after he’d worked the nets, it would be darker and easier to shoot on the cliffs afterwards. But there was something inside him this night that did not feel like shooting, and it was part of the same thing that had stopped him waking the boy.

  He wiped the oily blood and fluids off his hands in the short dew-covered grass and knelt on the bag for a while looking at the rabbits. The guts were warm, and steamed. He was suddenly and briefly tired. And in that moonlight he felt it would be nice to build a house around himself and sleep. He pushed from his mind the thought that it would have been nice to walk into that room and lie down with her and begin something. He hoped it would stay brotherly. He hoped they could keep it like that.

  He got up and picked up the rabbits and had the emptiness for them that he had momentarily with the wild things he killed, because of the perfection they had and which tame things could never possess. The white in their fur showed up in the moon and they were the color of fish for a moment, glistening silver. Then they seemed to dull, to become dark patches in his hands.

  He put the rabbits in the bag and clipped it up and took out the headlamp and shone it just from his hands and went on down toward the cliff path to the beach. Here and there on the coast that swept the bay, towns showed like the last glowing ashes of settling fireplaces. The rest of the coast was dark, permanent, impassive to the pleading sea, which beat in with a steady, repeated argument against the wreck of the shore.

  He could imagine, years ago, the sea, its temper lost in storm and the dark chaos of that bay. And he saw in his mind the huge fires lit on the headlands, the lost ship come to those false beacons and dashed in those waves against the coast, its goods torn out and strewn upon the shore. And he reflected how, for this to happen, there must have been whole villages treacherous for this collection, who were not pirates in their minds, but who were like fishermen or farmers in their industry. He thought of the boy and of what he had said and of the possibility that there was treasure on the beach from this great slaughter, and as he passed, in a field he saw a herd of curlew over the ground, and they were ghostly and strange in that light.

  He cut down to the beach in that dark tunnel of light, with the scree of rock ancient-formed, split and busted down the edge of the path. The iron rust showed in the rock and the smooth shale bedewed reflected and he felt for once that it was he the strange thing here. How the curlews had undone their compactness at him, and lost their peace as if he was not something fearful, but to them impossible.

  He hopped down the foot or so drop from where the cliff fell away to the beach and the sense of the beach was immediate, like jumping into water. A change underfoot in the clack of the flat and uneven conglomerate beach stones where he stepped. He turned off the headlamp and let his eyes adjust as if coming out of that tunnel of light. It was as if the types of light that night had been stored here, and were being harbored, or here and there given back by the lines of quartz in the fallen rock, and the flat wet stones. There was a strong smell of salt.

  He walked up the beach, arcing out from the cliff-side to where there was enough blue, predominant light to see by, and taxied his way over the uneven stones at the edge of the pools.

  The sea had been up high leaving little of the beach clear and the tidemark was lost in the shadow of the cliffs where the moonlight didn’t reach. The beach changed quickly and he turned on the headlamp again and came off the rocks and up a bank of gravel and onto the long, feminine shapes of sea-smoothened fallen shale that stretched under the cliffs to the point.

  Whenever he stood here, he felt some sense of affinity. The shapes were amazing in that strange light. It was an affinity of place and time. Some gentle sense that he was simply part of a process. Then he felt it, and it was very brief. That he was being watched.

  He stopped and listened. Just the sea. The hollow boom of the rocks it moved as it broke and sucked at the beach. The trinkets of sound where water sheeted down the cliffs, running spare off the fields above. Nothing. Just the white sense of it.

  There had been some change. A drop in temperature, an increase in the breeze, and his heightened senses had felt it. It was childlike. Some greater adrenaline in him. Something he could not stop when he went to the nets, an expectation that did not exist anywhere else in his life. He was unwatched. He was sure of that. Unwatched. That he was simply imagining.

  In the moonlight you could make out the beach and have a sense of it, but when you switched on the beam there was just the tunnel of light, and everything outside it stopped existing. And while there was reassurance in this stretch of light, it was work not to think of those things that could suddenly be possible beyond it.

  When his father was at home, he’d had to develop a way to survive the otherwise destructive atmosphere he brought and it had become like a mechanism in him, this ability to force out thought. It was what allowed him to do what he did, and helped him not to tear himself up. Sometimes this worked against him, but it helped him to exist his way. He knew that you just had to push out indecision and distractions in the way you had to not be scared of the dark. He was very determined in this and, in the light of the choices he made, everything around these choices disappeared.

  He went on over the big rocks, the cragged and damaged boulders where the beach turned round to make a little false bay, and he saw the white floats of the net laid out across the pools.

  He could see the turned and roping line where the net was and that there was a fish in it, against the black stone a broad scimitar silver in that moonlight. An earring of metal. He thrilled to see it early.

  He kept beneath the cliff and would not look again from some self-invented ritual and got to the end of the net and took off the gun and the game bag. Then he walked up the net picking round the dark heaps of wrack and the light-emitting pools. There were three fish low in the net. A big mullet and two bass, and higher up the net the bass he had seen immediately. At the moment the bass would not be in shoals and it was more usual to catch this many fish, not the vast catch of them you could get later on. He knew from gutting them that they were coming in for the early peeler crab, hunting the soft shells of their growing bodies.

  At the top of the net was a spider crab, insectile, like some long, mechanical thing that had flown into a web. Just beyond the net the rocks were cemented with sand that looked like a grater with the riddles of sandworms. The sea breaking on it made a sound like the airbrakes of a big truck. The sound was more of a smash out by the spit of rocks which broke sublittoral out of the sea some hundred yards away and that you could see now and were uncovered in this massive tide.

  He felt this sense again, of being watched. It was unlike him. He looked down at the spider crab. He had no sympathy with them in the way he did with other things. The other crabs had been in the pots that were some way out and this was the first really close in this year. It was early and it was unnerving in its earliness, but there would be more. A swarm, so much more efficient than our native crabs, that comes inshore from the deeper water as the water warms. They were aliens. Something sent. They seemed built for some other purpose and to exist in some mass. He could see the gulls and kittiwakes white against the cliffs and was sure, by some sense, that something passed on the sea, some cloud of shearwaters nocturnal.

  He chilled, and chided himself. There was some portentous thing on the beach that night, and he had to say to himself: “If I am watched it is by fox or bird, not man, and there is nothing but fox or bird or man or things of their material, there can be nothing else.” Just then a breaker thudded. A seventh wave perhaps. And it was a very big sound. The pullback had a brag to it.

  He headed back to the bottom of the net, picking his way with the lamp beam over the awkward pools that stretched the thirty meters back. There were weird patches of dark and light in the sky where the moon came or not through the shifting cloud now and, with the headlamp on, the beach looked very dark. It gave it even more of a sense of enclosure with the white sound of the sea. Like th
ere was a presence very close around you.

  Hold put the bands of the headlamp around his head and crouched down to the net and started to work the fish out, undoing the problem in his head, working the looped nylon over the fins, away from the hard lids of the gills, out from the articulate bones of the mouth. You had to try to see how the fish had hit. Whether it had writhed and spun or tried to go on. Then you took it out, freeing the net, as if you were swimming it backwards. He worked with that flat deliberate patience you have to have and, in that cave of light he made for himself, there was just this in his mind and it was a great easing to do just the one thing.

  The mullet came free and he held it by the great bony head so its thick lips seemed to pout at him and he lay it down and in the headlamp light its loosened scales reflected back off his hands. It was a big heavy fish and the scales were bigger than thumbnails and he knew that the meat would be very good. They were difficult to sell because of the flavor of soil and the disturbing muddiness of flesh that mullet had when you caught them in estuaries or harbors, where they filtered sewage and pastes for food. But when you caught them on the rocks like this the flesh was firm and white and strong and froze well enough.

  He went on to the bass. There was a ferocity to it even lying there, some angular, predatory quality. Blood rimed the gills and the torn fins where it had refused to stop fighting the net, recusant of the fact that once it had turned into it, it was caught and there was no fight it could make. There seemed still fury in its eye that would not forgive itself, as if it scoured itself for some signal it had missed that would have shown the net was there. Yet, there has to be decision. A way must be taken. He thought for a moment that the fish might still be alive. He kept coming back to that eye, so different it was from the droll, herbivorous eye of the mullet. Hunter or gatherer, both had turned themselves into the net. The mullet had looked more at peace with itself though, as if it believed though saddened and ended that it had made the choice in the best of faiths. As he undid the bass from some last traps of nylon, Hold knew that these thoughts were a ridiculous romanticism, and that there could be no peace in dying in this way. He had killed them, that was his responsibility.