Everything I Found on the Beach (11 page)

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.”