Everything I Found on the Beach (16 page)

He crossed the pedestrian area, passed the closed Woolworth, and followed the natural draw downhill and went through an alleyway onto a new bridge and over the road. It was odd, this beautiful bridge against the wasted buildings of the town.

He stood for a while in the sun on the new incongruous bridge watching the cars beneath on the road, trying to get a sense of the place all the time; then he headed over the bridge, over the railway tracks and the still span of enclosed water to the ferry complex on the other side. There was this reassuring salt smell off the bay.

“I could just go,” he thought. “Nobody knows about Cara and Jake. I could just go.” He looked out, feeling the calm sense of the water, and he was unused to feeling this in a town. This wasn't his environment. He did
not have a natural understanding of it, how to fit into it, but he felt the sense of the water and of the sun. “No,” he said. He looked back at the dirty town buildings by the road. “I don't have my passport. Do I need a passport for Ireland? You wouldn't go anyway. Stop thinking the thing. You're just going to see this through.”

He went in to the Tourist Information Office and found some maps, a town guide.

“Would you like any help?” the girl asked pleasantly but it was strange in the nasal North Walian whine.

“No, I'm fine,” Hold said. “I don't need anything.”

The place was full of Welsh dragons and fudge. He looked at a rack of postcards, jokes, women in stovepipe hats. All these clichés. “Maybe I should let her know,” he thought, thinking of Cara. He did not articulate the thought in his own mind: in case I don't come back. “That's a cliché too,” he thought. “Stop thinking like you're in some cowboy film.” He felt like he needed a conversation with himself. “Just get it done,” he said.

He went out of the Information Center and walked back toward the bridge. “I have to know this place,” he thought. He felt this need for proactivity. “I have to get to know this place.” He checked the phone with a sudden thought that he might have somehow missed a call, or not have a signal.
No. It was fine.
He looked for a while at the train lines and considered how the meeting would happen, where the men would come from. Then he went back over the bridge.

The thickset redhead stood in the station by the information boards with the black leather sports bag cradled on the floor between his feet. He stood under the paneled glass roof staring up at the great structure of the strut work and held the cardboard cup full of coffee.

The station throbbed and rushed with people. Some scallies were shouting and pranking over by the palm trees that grew surreally inside the station and two uniformed policemen stood there tiredly watching. The man thought of the bag between his feet and imagined he could sense a heat off it. The scallies were shouting and yelping formlessly. They all wore hoods and looked the same. You could tell what the police wanted to do. He wanted to do it himself. He imagined cracking their heads together in an effective way. Time was when he would have done that, maybe even the police would have, but not now. Now it was all business.

He watched the crowd, imagining himself stepping down the aisle to the center of the hall, climbing into the ring, all these people here to watch him, his name announced. “If it wasn't for this nose,” he thought. He saw himself spit blood carelessly into the basin and held the coffee cup to his mouth with two hands, as if it had a spout to drink through. Left, right, left, left, right. “If it wasn't for this nose,” he thought. He'd moved on from the scallies, and in his mind they were big opponents,
and he was laying them out, one by one, to the cheers of the crowd.

He felt the three bleats of his phone in his pocket and picked up the black sports bag and went out to the drop-off point and over to the taxi that was pulled up. He got in and put the bag on his lap. The car filled up with the smell of the coffee. The driver nodded. He'd met him before. Always a taxi driver, wherever they were. It was a simple and clever way of getting under things. He was the boss's man at the port a few hours away where the boat from Ireland got in. He had a strange face like a dieting owl.

“They're coming over tonight,” the thickset redhead said. “You're clear on what to do?”

The owlish man nodded.

“Pick them up from the ferry.”

The thickset redhead got out, leaving the black sports bag on the seat.

As he left the car he was stepping from the limo, a girl on either arm. They were like models. Sequined dresses. The flashbulbs crashing off like a firework celebration, wearing the sharp dinner jacket and the heavy belt about his waist like a cummerbund.

He walked into the station to meet his crowd again and behind him the owlish man drove off. The redhead was holding the cup as if it were a mic. “My nose held up,” he told the reporters, “I had to protect it, but I kept it clean and it held up.”

Stringer went up and knocked at the door and the big man's mother opened it. In his long black coat, Stringer had a look of priest-like officiousness, of a finicky clerk. It was a thing for him to try to dress well after growing up where he did, like hiding a damp bit of wall with a painting.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Gleeson.” He beamed. The smile didn't suit Stringer's face. It made him look odd, like a man wearing the wrong hat.

The big man appeared behind his mother in the corridor of the small house. He was dabbing at his mouth with a napkin with the same strange deft way he had rolled the cigarettes. “Will you come in, Declan? And your friend,” asked the mother. She looked past Stringer at the driver in the car. You could just see him through the window, scratching at his red face.

“I think we're ready to go,” he said. He was thinking of getting to the port and of the few hours' trip after that on the ferry.

“Get away! You just go back and finish your tea there, Galen.” The big man looked bashfully at Stringer. “You can't work without your tea.”

The big man went through back to the kitchen and Stringer followed him in. There was no arguing with her.

“Will your friend not come in?” said the mother.

“No,” said Stringer. “He's fine.” He wanted to say: “He's not house-trained.” He had this thing against the lower ranks.

“Will you have some food?”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Gleeson,” said Stringer. He was swallowing these big bags of impatience and he thought of the driver waiting in the car. He studied the woman, trying to work out how she could produce such a thing as the big man. Then he looked down at the big man's plate. “It'll be the food,” he thought. There was a pile of boxty and the grotesque looking stew. Stringer glued this ridiculous smile on, like a salesman.

“Will you not even have a cuppa?”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Gleeson. We ought to be going.” He looked daggers at the big man. He was wolfing the huge plate of food. He couldn't eat any quicker.

“Don't you rush,” said his mother. “You'll get the wind. I've not made your sandwiches yet.” She was busy with the bread and the stuff on the unit. It was like she was under some sort of automatic order to feed things.

“Will you want some sandwiches too, there, Declan?”

“No,” said Stringer.

“There's plenty here.”

He pulled himself up. “No, thank you, Mrs. Gleeson.”

Stringer could feel the time peeling away. He sat and stared nastily at the big man and looked round the room. There was the sound of the mother making sandwiches. Stringer thought of the trip ahead. He understood the
need to keep up the pressure of fear and the engine that had to drive that. His devoted little furiousness at it came mostly from the stupidity of people. They knew the score, why did they have to test it? The engine was relentless. You just did not get away with it, it couldn't be allowed, so why did they test it? That was what he did. He kept the machine oiled.

He looked around the warm little room. There were pictures of the two boys, the other one much more normal sized, much more his size, more natural to the woman, he thought. There was a picture of the woman's late husband and an Irish flag in the corner. Stringer felt this pang of jealousy at the pride in the house. He felt a jealousy at the familial love it represented. He didn't understand this Catholic thing. He'd always felt like an outsider to it. He'd like to have grown up here, not on the dingy, hungry street he did. Here and there around the place were silly little shamrock ornaments and leprechauns. Against that, the big man was like some big overgrown child.

Hold walked out over to the marina, the water calmed inside the vast breakwater truly seagreen, settled.

The beach was strange to him sitting against the town because the town had a strange, spread-out look here. He took it in. Thin shores of white, flinty pebbles. A low howl across the water he could not place at first, eerie,
that seemed to be some premonitory message from the sea beyond the break.

“I have to keep a feeling of strength now,” he told himself. “Keep that strength, that feeling of strength. Just concentrate on holding that.” He thought of it as something he was carrying, that he couldn't put down however heavy it got.

He looked out, onto the mainland and the mountains, could see the clouds smudging up with a later promise of rain. He knew the sort. It would be flat, light rhythmic rain, and it would come over, almost like a tired patch, later in the afternoon.

He looked at the breakwater a while then walked a little way farther and sat and put the bag with the rabbits down beside him and pushed it with his foot out of the sun under the bench. He looked absently at the plaque on the bench,
in memory.
He thought of someone who must have loved to sit and watch this view. “It has to happen somewhere public,” he thought. “Somewhere like this.”

He looked down at the sore on his thumb, lifted now and raised into an angry welt. He pushed at it with the finger and thumb of his other hand and it swelled with tension. The pain was sharp and small and focused and he picked at the top of the welt with his rough thumbnail until the skin split. The ring of buttermilk pus gave through the skin with a minute breaking of tension, and
the splinter lifted in the fluid and spilled out onto Hold's hand. He picked it up. He rubbed the pus and the pink water off his hand and looked at the shard. Brick. “It's brick from the house,” he thought.