Everything I Found on the Beach (19 page)

He thought back to Blessington Street, the way they were weeded out of the slums into the corporation housing, the hideous blocks and boarded-up lower stories of Dominick Street. He thought of the stints as a kid in the industrial schools, the horror of the Brothers. He looked at the big man in the front seat eating through the sandwiches. “How has he never been inside?” he thought. He looked at him like he was some big, passive forty-year-old child and he was disgusted by him.

“I got overlooked. I should have been up for one of the big strokes.”

He stared furiously out of the window at the immobile traffic.

“There's the explosion,” thought Stringer, “and then there's the in-suck as things collapse in the vacuum, the lack of anything these booms can make.” Stringer congratulated himself on this little speech he'd just made. “Either way, it suits us. Bring in the money, and the cocaine market thrives, the disposable income goes where people want to dispose of it. Bring things down, and you got disillusion, heroin, people taking their escapes any way they could. They were wrong, those old guys, not to get involved. It's sure-fire, this business,” thought Stringer. “It's a business now, that's why I studied things inside. I thought I'd get my chance at a crew. I've got brains.”

Stringer thought bitterly of the others, all up there now while he'd done his time, the stretch in the Joy, in Portlaoise.

“Seven years,” he thought. “Seven years of emptying out my own piss-pot every morning.”

“I put it in,” he felt. “I deserve a shot at a big stroke. It's all politics
now
,” he thought bitterly again. He could hear the driver and the big man talking about hurling teams but was in a world of his own. “He deserved it,” he told himself. “That culchie. He shouldn't have pushed me. I couldn't just ignore it.” He was looking at the flaky skin on the driver's shoulders. He seemed to focus on it slowly.

“Seven years' head start they got on me. And they don't have my brains. I deserve a chance to make something of myself.”

They hadn't moved for ten minutes or so and then they heard the sirens and the half-still cars seemed to peel to the sides of the road like an opening zipper and the ambulance went past them dangerously fast.

The crash had happened farther on, out of sight, and the traffic had solidified. It brought Stringer back round. He hated to stay still. He was like a shark, something that had to keep moving. The germ of a little idea was getting hold of Stringer and he was letting it, as if he was happy watching it grow. “It's just about getting myself some start.”

“We'll have to take the DART,” he said.

The two men got out of the car and started to head to the station on foot through the stilled traffic. Stringer was walking quickly and funnily like he wouldn't wait for the big man, like a parent fed up of a kid dawdling in a shopping street. The big man trotted behind. He'd left the rest of the sandwiches in the car as some kind of apology.

The red-faced man watched them go and absently scratched his eczema. “That Stringer's a prick,” he muttered, through one of the big man's sandwiches.

Hold went out to get some food. He left the rabbits in the bag in the room. “I have to eat,” he told himself. It's just basic discipline. He had to still think, force himself to stay sharp. With the waiting there were no tests and he knew he had to put them upon himself, to keep sharp.

As he swallowed the mug of stale coffee he thought hard about just going. He knew that he had in some way left the rabbits in the room so that he could. So that he could simply get in the van and drive away now. He imagined the woman finding the bag in the wardrobe and cursing, and assuming he'd forgotten them. There was nothing to connect him. The key would be gone, but that would be just another lock change, if she bothered. He banked she'd throw the rabbits. He imagined the high, dismembered carcasses rotting down on some council dump. The crows picking over them and the forty thousand pound packages falling from the split middles.

“Eat, you have to eat,” he told himself. “Don't think like this. You know you're doing this so don't get distracted. Don't take your eyes off it. Get some food.”

He finished the coffee and went over to the Spar and bought a hot pasty. He stood outside the shop looking down the street to the rooming house, half expecting to see someone come from it with the bag.

He turned round and read the window cards and saw an advertisement for a car for two hundred pounds. It seemed to unlock an idea that was already in him. He read the card again then he took down the number. He went down the street between the stallholders, who were dismantling the market now, and found a cash machine. Two hundred quid. It was pretty much everything he had. If it can get me out of this, that's what it'll take.

“It'll do me well,” he thought, “to have another car. If anything goes wrong they can't trace me that way. They can't get back to Cara and Jake. They'd have people in the police. There are bent people everywhere. I can't leave an obvious link back to them.” He thought of being stopped earlier, of the documents in the box again. “I don't want them to be able to trace me.”

He was close to a fish van and they were packing up for the day and he got the smell of the tired fish and thought of the bait pots and was suddenly in his mind back on the boat. He had a brief longing for that freedom.

He took the money and went to a phone booth.

The two men were outside a bar and looked out over the port and at the big waiting ferry. There was a chill breeze.

“What's that smell?” asked the big man. He screwed up his big face a bit, like he was squinting, like he couldn't sniff properly.

“That's the sea,” said Stringer. “I'm surprised you can smell anything with those things.”

The big man smoked and Stringer bullied him about it. There was a chill to the air of the port and the big man was trying to light the big gas patio heater.

The ticking of the lighter was going over and over. There was something unpredictable about the smaller man. He was sitting there all compacted in his long coat.

“Give it up,” he said. The big man didn't know whether he was talking about the smoking or trying to light the heater but he stopped trying to light the heater and just smoked.

Stringer was bald and small and criminal looking. He was like a rat. They could see the cars lining up to go onto the ferry.

“What you want to smoke for? It's freezing right now.” There were the clanks and echoes of the port.

“I won't be able to smoke on the boat.”

“You can go outside to smoke on the boat.”

“I've never been over before.”

Stringer looked at him with this kind of quiet disbelief.

“Well, you can smoke on the boat.”

Stringer looked out over the port. He thought back to the strokes, to the stroke that had put him inside, properly inside, for the first time. It didn't happen here, but the wet-salt smell in the air and the round metallic sounds of loading were the same as the docks.

It was simple. They had bogus documentation, fitted the trucks with false plates, and just drove in and hooked up to the containers. Then they just drove out. Rossi had connections, of course, on the docks, but it was an easy stroke.

Rossi wouldn't like what's happened, thought Stringer. The drugs. He was always against them. His neighbors down on Pearse Street saw him as some kind of guardian, this necessary evil, like some Robin Hood. He kept the dealers out. Everybody feared him.

Stringer wanted to be feared. He wanted to be powerful. He sat there with his little clock of fury ticking away. “I went down for one of his strokes,” he said to himself. “I never said a word. I deserve more than I got.”

He looked at the big man smoking. “You big overgrown bastard,” he thought.

“Maybe we shouldn't have got here so early,” thought Stringer. He could feel his energies festering in him.

He thought back to that first stretch. Somehow the thoughts of the industrial schools and the borstals were dormant in his mind, as if he had removed the animation from them. Those were factual things of his past
and seemed to be all one thing that sat distastefully in his head like a stuffed family pet in a cabinet. But the Joy was different. That seven years. The way the culchie's face had started to come open.

He looked out over the port, cold, cursing inside at the necessity for the big man. “I liked that cold, when I first got out,” he remembered to himself. “No one tells you that. You expect to miss the rides, beer, a proper bed. A bathroom to yourself. But no one can tell you the other things. When you come out after a long time you're like a kid for weeks with everything. Cold air, natural cold air like this. Opening a fridge door.”

“Freedom is a funny thing,” thought Stringer. “We're all in prison, some way or another. Just you don't see it.” He thought of the books he'd read. “There's four walls round all of us, and some screw who pushes a tray through your door. That's it. Even the top guys have got it that way.”

He looked out and watched as a guy walked past the pub wall with his wife, two kids, and a dog. “That's four walls right there,” said Stringer to himself. “A wife, two kids, and a dog. That's enough to keep you in it.”

The big man was trying with the lighter again, the patio heater clicking and clicking.

“Give that up, will you,” Stringer said. The big man gave up. He looked at Stringer forlornly. At the port, they were starting to roll the trucks onto the ferry and there were low, booming echoes going round. By now, the big
man was losing his sense of excitement and was mildly nervous of the sea. He was nervous of Stringer too. He could be unpredictable. What could you do? He'd been good to his brother. Family was important to the big man.

Stringer watched the family with the dog head down the steps to the port.

“We're all in it,” thought Stringer. “Even the guys at the top.”

The man closed the bag.

“How is he?” asked the Scouser.

The man made a noncommittal face. “You never know with him,” he said. The bag sat heavily on his lap. “I think he's enjoying the sun out there.”

“Thank him. For the opportunity,” said the Scouser. If you wanted to operate here, you had to buy the right. You could try to just muscle your way in but the business way was better. There was a hierarchy. Respect was important, he understood that.

“Just keep making the money.” The man made the non-committal face again. “Is there anything you need?”

“No,” said the Scouser. “We've had a few problems, a few missing packets, but we're handling it.”

“You can't let that get out of hand,” said the man.

He felt the needles. He let them go through his body deliciously and thought of the Irishmen, soon to be on the water. There was kind of a fine meanness to him.

The man was looking at him.

“No,” said the Scouser. “It's under control.”