Everything I Found on the Beach (22 page)

He remembered getting on the DART, Stringer losing his temper with the ticket machine. The big man had always liked trains, whatever sort. He'd felt calm on it, not like on the damned boat. There was something he liked perhaps about the fact that a train could only go along the track that was put down for it, and you knew where that went from the start.

They went out of the stop and out along the line past the waterfront, the long, wide stretch of water spanning out to the horizon, a strange mobile emptiness seeming to have this serene sense of success to it against the aspiration of the town. He'd felt somehow childlike going on this trip, though he knew, looking out over the water, of the unusual brutal purpose behind it.

“I've never been out of Ireland before,” he'd thought to himself. Stringer was looking up at the line map, counting off the stops, but it was hours until the ferry.

“I've hardly been out of the city,” he'd thought. He'd looked at the water and thought of his brother. “He was different,” he thought. “He had ambition. He tried to get out. I never had that.”

The big man had this crushing knowledge of what he was. And he couldn't do anything about it. He felt the useless guilt. “Things changed,” he said to himself. “I just followed you in, Da, but things had changed.”

He could still taste the tuna from the sandwiches, and kept finding little gouts of bread and fish cemented up in his teeth.

He'd sat there, riding the DART, happy looking for bits of sandwich with his tongue.

Hold stopped the van and took the bag and got out and tasted immediately the sea in the rolling thick fog and followed the wooden arrowpost that marked the way up the mountain.

“There's a way,” he told himself.

He went slowly and blindly through the fog and here and there in patches it broke to give a sense of the surrounding ground, but then it souped again, and thickened.

He went slowly up the rising ground and halted at the outcrops of rock and at the busted gorse roots and at anywhere he thought might be secure and in the future locatable and then he stopped and just held the
bag uselessly and realized the uselessness of the idea, that there was only one way to close this.

And the life of the other guy's family.
The words stuck in his mind, seeped into him as if they came from the fog.

He stood for a long time, then he went back to finish things.

The big man felt too big for the space in the boat.

“What if I don't know when to go?” he thought. “I can't look up from here. I have to do all this with my ears. There's always something… I have to get together though. Get ready now.”

From somewhere the smell of old fish came to him. It brought back the ferry ride. He hadn't eaten anything for hours and had been sick and his body was confused at the emptiness and at the same time the sickness at the thought of food. He could feel the aches setting in where his big body pressed up against the insides of the boat.

He thought of his brother. Boom. The maudlin call of the foghorn came again. “He'd have fitted better in the boat,” thought the big man. He was more like Stringer, smaller and wiry. He partly put up with Stringer because of the likeness.

He thought of his brother's body being hauled out of the water, the strange bloated whiteness of the corpse, the odd feet. He tensed as he waited for the foghorn to sound, as if his body had fallen reluctantly in line with
its rhythm. It was like being driven slowly mad. “It's always me,” he thought. Then he heard the little chorus again, felt this friendly little knowledge. “I'm better at it, I guess.” He felt a comfort going into it, reducing himself once more to an instrument. “Think now, and be ready. I'm a natural.”

Hold pressed send. For what it was worth.

He did not abandon you. He tried to help. He tried to change it all for you. Do not hate him.

It was as if he could feel the text message dissipate out into the sky around him, like some great religious thing somehow. Like it rolled out and out across the island and out over the channel to the mountains, rolling and rolling. And then the phone rang.

Hold pressed down the Jiffy bag and wrote down the address on the front. He wondered briefly about writing something, some explanation but he could not, and then he just took the boy's knife which he had wrapped in tissue and dropped it into the Jiffy bag.

He held the envelope for a while. “There'll be the postmark. If something happens. If something happens and… There will be the postmark.”

“I can't write anything. If I write something there will be a finalism to it. If I don't write, I can just say I
didn't want to take the knife into town. That they were checking vehicles going in. It's believable. I can go back from that. But if I write something…”

Then he dropped the Jiffy bag into the post.

“She'll understand,” he said. Inside he said that. “She'll read it.”

The fog had kind of solidified into a slow, thick rain that came sideways off the sea. The man was standing on his own and Hold watched him from a distance. He couldn't see anyone else. As soon as he knew where it was to happen, he'd posted the knife and then got to the small beach and waited and watched the man come onto the beach by himself. The call had come and they had told him where to be and he had lied and said he was farther away than he was, to give himself some time. “I want somewhere more public,” he'd asked. It was still early, the fog discouraging, no one else about.

“You have an hour,” the Irishman had said.

He'd got there immediately, watched. Waited, and seen the man arrive. No one else.

Hold looked away from the binoculars and studied everything he could. He could feel inside him the physical sensing that he had on the cliffs with the gun. A heightened sense. He looked into the few cars parked along the road and looked down at the small scab that was drying over the sore on his thumb. All the cars were empty.

“Why would they?” he was saying. “Why would they do anything?” He could see the man getting impatient in the rain. He kept telling himself: “It's worth forty thousand to them. Why would they do anything? Just think of the one thing now.”

He brought the binoculars down. He could see the faint powdery white rimes on the grips that the salt had left from using them on the boat, remembered the view of the cliffs from the sea. On the dashboard, the beetle reappeared.

“I meant to put you out,” said Hold silently to it.

The beetle seemed to listen, gave the illusion of it, tasting the air. “I'll do it when I get back,” he thought. It was like he was setting a superstitious trick for himself. “I'll do it when I come back.”

He thought of Cara and Jake and he thought of his box of things tucked on the shelf amongst the tins in Danny's shed. He thought of the trailer and of rebuilding the house and he thought of the woman's voice on the phone and of the text message spreading out in the sky to her and of the thin undernourished prostitute and of the dead man. And then he made himself the way he was in the moments after he had pulled a trigger and he said, “Okay, let's do this.”

He came up from the low part of the little dock and looked down at the sand for signs of anything. Any
footprints, any signals. Anyone who might have gone on farther than the man waiting there in the rain. There was nothing. The shore was lined with some of the first boats back into the water and they sat on the sand in the low tide. Along the line of seaweed there were the desiccated shells of sea potatoes, most of them broken.

The two men came together until they stood in the slow thick rain. Hold looked at the man. “Well, if it's coming, it's coming now,” he thought.

“I guess that would be it.” The small man nodded at the bag. Hold nodded. He held it up and the rain made snapping noises on the carrier bag and then he slung it to the man a few feet from him.

The man's hand came out of his pockets for the first time and Hold noticed the black gloves and the man bent down watchfully and looked into the carrier bag. He wrapped up the bag and put it under his arm and stood up.

“Now it might come,” thought Hold.

The man unbuttoned his coat a way and reached in and took out a Jiffy bag and threw it to Hold.

“Seven thousand,” said the man.

The man waited a moment. “You can count it if you want, but it's raining.”

He turned round and started walking off.

“That's it?” called Hold.

“That's it,” said the man over his shoulder.

Hold could feel the Jiffy bag give slightly and then the hard pad inside. It was as if, as the man walked off,
he could hear the call of the packages receding. As if it was the sound of some transport going off into the distance.

It was dizzying almost, a vertigo, the relief and the completion of it.

He watched the man go through the rain and held the envelope in his hands. He felt soiled by it. And he knew then that he would find the address of the woman, who in his head he now called Ani, and give it all to her. He knew very clearly that he didn't want it, and that he had very nearly died for it.