by Cynan Jones
“This involves only me,” he had thought. “This will only affect me, and if I do it right it will solve everything.” He had sat on the rock, not really feeling the cold as if it was a thing far distant from himself, as if he had become his own voice of fate.
He knew. He simply knew he would take the parcels and that the boat had been delivered up to him and all that was left was to articulate this knowing in himself. Things come along and the rest of everything depends on what we can do with the things that come along, and we shouldn’t make decisions out of fear.
He thought of the pointless death of the man and of the boat being delivered up to him on the beach and thought vaguely that the death would take on purpose if it was to secure things for Cara and Jake.
He knew what he should do. Secure the boat and call the police. But for what, then? Even as he had these arguments with himself he went through the things he needed to do and the way he would do them. The old mechanisms of surviving his father were already kicking in.
He looked down at the packages. He thought wildly about buying a boat, but first of the responsibility towards Cara and Jake. “Think of the solution this represents to them,” he thought. It was one big answer, if he could see it through. “It involves only me. There is a limit to how wrong it can go.”
He had to find strength to take his clothes off. They peeled off in drunk layers leaving his body stinging with the air on it.
Naked, he sat and rubbed off the sand and grit that had stuck in the congealing grazes at his ankles where the tops of his shoes had been. His feet had swollen with the water and were raw and angry and blistered.
He washed off the dried blood from his hand in the sink and looked at the precise, deep scoring cut. He felt a deadweight in his arms, like a bruising, and knew this was just tiredness. He could see on his hip the love bite marks of the rock where he had smashed into it holding the boat and could feel the same dull, burning throb of pain in the shoulder that would come out as bruising in a few days; and then he stepped into the shower and just let all of those places hurt and sting as his body slowly came back to him.
He stayed in the shower until the tank ran out and then he took his towel and dried himself and went through to the bed and, exhausted, lay down.
When he woke up he was violently sick. He was woken by the screeching of magpies and the panicking clicking of the small birds as they raided their new nests. He had slept for barely an hour, and the sleep was something he could do nothing about.
When he had finished being sick he washed out his mouth and stood up. That was the last of it. “That’s it, gone now,” he told himself. The bullets and the gun were still in the bathroom and he put them away methodically.
He took some painkillers and ate some plain ham from the fridge and made a coffee and sat down. The trailer was like a goldfish bowl. “Everywhere’s going to feel that way for a while,” he thought.
He finished the coffee and got some money and put the rifle in the van and drove out. He went to the garage and bought a cooler and some antiseptic cream and a multiple phone charger and filled up the van and asked to use the telephone directory. He said he had to find some numbers for a driving instructor for a friend and he pretended to find that and on his way wrote down the number that he wanted.
He drove out of the town to a phone booth that he knew and he called the number.
When he came out of the phone booth he sat in the car for a while and just looked out down the road and watched the clouds bunch up over the mountains inland. “Well, I’m in it now,” he said. Then he started the van up and took the back roads home.
Grzegorz stood in the office.
“What have you got to say for yourself?”
His line manager, another Pole, translated, even though Grzegorz got the drift. His line manager acted like some kind of self-appointed union man. He had it in for Grzegorz. Grzegorz had no idea why.
“It was being thrown out,” said Grzegorz. The line manager translated. “It was going into the bins. I didn’t steal it.”
“Don’t we pay you enough?”
Actually, the pay was pretty good. It was as much as he could expect without any formal skills. “I didn’t steal. I wouldn’t steal,” said Grzegorz.
He was careful to look remorseful but underneath was this bitter anger. He wanted to throw things back in the man’s face. He saw his job disappearing, felt this humiliating fury that they had this power over him. That they could dangle him on a string. They could change his life, just like that.
“We’re quite clear on such things. It’s a criminal offence.”
The line manager didn’t translate, but talked back to the man. He was donning this friendship with Grzegorz and it made him sick. “Now I’ll owe him,” he thought. “He thinks he’s fatherly. He’ll push me round all the more.” He felt he wanted to smash the two men’s faces together. Grzegorz listened with this blurred concentration as the two men talked about him, juggled with his life as if it were a toy. “They always have to keep you in line,” he thought to himself, angrily.
“It’s okay, we’ve had a talk,” said the line manager to Grzegorz in Polish.
“We could dismiss you for this,” said the man. Grzegorz ignored him.
“He’s dropping you to minimum shifts.”
He’d been working all the hours he could, trying to build up a nest egg. They were laying people off at his wife’s factory as well.
“They just want to keep you down,” he thought.
“Minimum shifts,” said the man. “There’s plenty of men want the work.”
Grzegorz had a vision of strangling the man with the tripe. He was sure he could smell it on his clothes now. That was the smell of poorness. It was in everything. You couldn’t get it out.
The remnants of snowdrops were still up and, in the woods just at the end of the farm lane, the late crocuses were through and the pigeon pecked at the little flags of petal, ruining them.
The woodpigeon cooed briefly and found a stick from the ivy and the leaves on the ground and lifted it with his beak and measured its weight, getting the stick balanced like a trapeze artist would. He could hear the van some way off and it was part of the world’s noises to him. He dropped the stick and went back to ruining the crocuses. He could hear the van come closer down the thin road, and hear its engine change tone with the gear changes.
The road was flanked on one side by blackthorn, and on the other by the steep bank that was the edge of a woodland and that would be all bluebells come May. On the bank were strangles of holly and the oak and beech leaves had fallen and the snowdrops were secretly amongst them.
The other side, beyond the blackthorn hedge, there were a few slim and damp-looking fields that made a skirt against the river, flanked mostly by oak and hazel that had grown thin and twisted up and unmanaged so close to the water.
The small river rose in the hills and began its way as a thin white stream that very quickly clattered over rocks before spreading out into a shallow bed and meandering into the small and severe valley that was the cwm.
By the time it reached the valley floor, the river was less urgent and slid gently past the road to the sea. It was this river that came out near the beach where Hold fished, and because the salmon and sewin ran that river, he had to keep the nets a certain way from its mouth.
Hold took the van over the little hump of the stone bridge and glimpsed the river as he went over and saw the syrupy look of it, and here and there the white, bursting energy.
The pigeon flicked up off the floor to a nearby tree, puffing his deep breast. He scanned the pale-gray road. The gray of the asphalt was a very dead gray compared to him.
The van got closer. You could hear the gears shifting down in sound at the wide corner a small way off. The pigeon looked back at the crocuses on the end of the farm lane that had been planted there deliberately along with tiny narcissi. The little narcissi were almost open and you could sense the energy from underground in them.
The pigeon cooed and the white van appeared on the corner and the pigeon could see the roadside reflected off the sheen of the windshield and the man driving. At this strange thing, the pigeon took off in a clatter of sticks.
Hold shifted gears, changed down again as the van complained, and chided himself for not having his mind on the driving, and for a split second, in that change of gear, there was a stall in momentum. No motion.
The pigeon crashed out from the trees in front of the van and, suddenly panicked by the open space before him to the river, tried to cut back into the cover of the woods. He was instantly aware of the mistake in that split second decision and the sparrowhawk hit him.
The sparrowhawk had driven the pigeon into the open space and hit him with the concentrated impact of an ambush.
The pigeon had a quick vision of the sparrowhawk then the thing hit him, and he felt his light bones smash under the force, and his proud chest burst, and his neck broke in the whiplash of the hit.
The bird seemed to burst in front of Hold and the pigeon went sideways like a ball hit from a bat. He flicked the brake and went under the feathers, which seemed to hang in the air, and in the corner of his eye he saw the pigeon crash off the crown of blackthorn and go over into the field.
In the mirror he could just see the feathers come down and behind them the strewn crocuses on the farm lane, and he held the van steady on the road.
“One wrong move,” he thought. “That’s all it takes. One wrong move.”
The phone call had been to an anonymous drugs advice service and the rigmarole of acting as if he thought his son was selling drugs led up to that one question:
“How much per kilo, if it is cocaine?”
It had sounded like it was cocaine. The white, pearly powder.
“Forty to fifty thousand.”
He was on the beach digging cockles. There were about forty of them and they’d picked them up with a bus and driven them down to the beach. The sea looked very distant but they were warned of the speed the tide would come in. “It’s faster than a horse,” they said. Then they unloaded the rakes and buckets and walked out onto the long, flat sand.
He could handle this. This was outdoor work. It was backbreaking, working quickly in the gap of the tide, but against the ache he could always look up from the rucked wet sand to the sea far out, catching the light with this sense of massive space. It was like the flat fields of home, just this endless, empty plain. It was nice to be amongst things that did not belong to man.
He raked up the top few inches of sand, hearing the shells of the cockles click ceramically on the tines of the rake, then he gathered them into the bucket. He could do this work well, but it was sporadic and not reliable. It was a good extra, but that was it. It was off the books, undeclared income and he knew there was a risk if he was caught that they would send him back. But he needed the money. And by now, he had grown a defiant little seed against things.
He stopped for a drink and watched the gulls off on the sandbank away from them. There was the sound all round him of the work, the workers dotted about the beach, and there was the feeling of practical calmness that is in very old types of work.
“I could do this. I could do this thing,” he thought.
The man came up and took Grzegorz’s bucket and put down an empty. He checked the weight of the bucket.
“You do this work well,” said the man. It was all in Polish.
“It’s just like soil,” Grzegorz said.
The man hefted the bucket again and assessed Grzegorz.
“What’s your name?” he asked. Grzegorz told him, and he told him where he was from out of the now automatic habit of saying it.
“You’re a farmer, Grzegorz Przybylski,” said the man.
“I was,” Grzegorz said.
“And now?”
“Slaughterhouse,” Grzegorz said. He could feel his body cementing up from the uneasy half-bent position of the raking and wanted to get on with the work before he got cold. They were paid by their weights, he didn’t have time to talk.
The man nodded. “Family?”
“Yes,” said Grzegorz. “I have a wife, two boys.” He was suspicious of the man, knowing the danger of the undeclared work.
“And where are you living?”
“In one of the agency houses.” He bent to work again.
“Still?” said the man. “How many?”
“There’s twenty-eight of us there,” Grzegorz said.
The man nodded. Then he looked over Grzegorz and walked away.
“This could be the thing,” thought Grzegorz. “You wouldn’t need much. You’d just need a rake, a bucket, some transport, and someone to buy the shells off you. A man on his own probably couldn’t do much, but if there was a group of us. Four or five people, two carloads maybe.” He’d heard of the cockle beds farther north. They were public land. He’d heard that up there, they reckoned there was half a million pounds worth of cockles in the bay at any one time. “Half a million pounds. Even Ana could work. We could be together. She could go back and forth with the buckets. The kids when they are old enough, when they’re not in school. How much would it cost, really?” he thought. “To set that up. Not much.”
“Did the man talk to you?” Harry said on the bus.
“No,” said Grzegorz. “Which man?”
“The bucket man.”
“Maybe I had a different bucket man from you,” he said.
“Well, he asked if I knew you.”
“What did he want?” The bus smelled of the muddy saltness. There was a group of Asians in the back and they made a strange, alien noise in their talk.
“He said he was going to talk to you. He said if he didn’t get a chance I should talk to you.”
Grzegorz could feel the tiredness from the work growing in him. He was trying to hold on to the sense of the long space of the beach. He thought of the idea of his own business, the little money he’d need for that.
“They’re looking for some men to do a job.”
He plugged in the mobile and switched on the socket and put it down on the unit and saw the bars appear on it, pulsing like something medical as if it registered his pulse. He switched it on.
He scanned awkwardly through the missed calls and dialed numbers and the message alert flashed and vibrated. The text said the voicemail box was filled with voicemails. He pressed okay but that didn’t take him to them.
He flicked through until he found the text messages and tried to read them. Most of the messages were signed with an A. They were not in English. He found the sent messages box and read the foreign words meaninglessly in the one sent message. He felt nervous and wrong with the phone.
He looked through at the times of the calls and saw they were from all times of day and that they stopped three days ago. He flicked through to the photographs. He guessed the woman was A.
There were a few shots of her. Her face was plain and strong and looked like it had been through things. In some of the shots she had a baby and there was another young child, and there was one shot of the child sitting with the baby like he’d been made to sit there for the photograph. He had the high, broad cheekbones of the man in the boat.
Hold took off the back of the phone and undid the battery and looked at the SIM card for the provider and then he used his own mobile to call for the number of a phone shop. “Anywhere,” he said. “Okay. Manchester.”
He wrote down the number and called the shop and said that he’d bought a new phone and forgotten his voicemail number and they told him the number to dial from the handset to get the messages.
He put the other phone back together and switched it back on and had to go through some procedure to reset the language and time and date because he’d taken off the battery.
He dialed the number the phone shop had given him and listened to the voice telling him how many messages he had and went through them one by one. A few of the messages were just silence, for just a few seconds. Th
e others all were foreign. The first one or two messages sounded light, happy, and the kid came on for one of them and he could make out that he said “tata” and instinctively knew it was like saying “daddy.” Then he listened as the woman broke down. He listened as with each message the woman broke up into smaller and smaller pieces into the useless, unanswered phone.
When he sat down, he felt he had killed the man.
He switched the phone off. His head had started swimming with the harrowing grief of the woman, and he had had to go cold, like when he had to kill things. One phrase, that she said over and over, had stuck itself into his mind, and it was difficult to forget and like seeing the eye of an animal you are about to kill look right in you. He couldn’t make it out. Vrooj prosser checkham. She said it over and over. And gzie yestesh. He wondered if checkham was the man’s name. He couldn’t shake the sound of it. In some ways that helped. It was helping him go cold, giving him that solid thing to react to.
He turned the phone back on. He had the speech in his head. Make the call, wait. He was sure he would know when he’d dialed the right number from the list and it took him a moment to register that taking out the battery had cleared the call history and he had no way of getting it back.
He’d tried the voicemails again, hoped he could press something to recall the sender. But the numbers in the silent messages didn’t allow it. He sat there looking at the phone. It was as if it was waiting to hatch. He knew it would ring eventually.
After a few hours it did and he stood there for what seemed like a very long time looking at it ring and not answering. He recognised her number from the text messages.
He picked it up and pressed the button and the sound of her crashing relief in that language almost threw him and he said, “English, English,” very slowly.