Everything I Found on the Beach (3 page)

As he headed back in, Hold took five or six of the fish and laid them on the gunwale. They were medium-sized fish and he held them down on the gunwale and descaled them with the back of the knife, working in little jerking strokes. Then he moved the descaled fish to a board on the gunwale and took off the flesh, working from the head down along the spine then slipping out the rib bones from the severed flanks and putting the fillets into a box. It was a rhythmic and calm process and he moved easily with the boat as it headed in and he could feel the course of the boat just with his body. He had taken bass and codling in the net and it was the bass he filleted.

When he had taken the fillets, he cut out the intestines into a pile. Then he cut off the translucent meat and the flaps of foily skin and cut the heads from the thick spines and threw all of that into one of the bait tubs for the pots. The bass had big heads for their size and this was good bait and lasted a long time in the pots
in the water. He did this with a kind of mechanism and it was part of him to invent little rituals and to give himself small lectures.

Above him, a string of gulls had come on, and he flicked off the rich pile of intestines from the gunwale and the gulls dropped into the water after the sinking guts. In amongst the bright-white adults, some of the gulls still had the juvenile plumage they would have until some summers further on. Hold had noticed how the younger gulls had rich brown eyes, with something almost mammalian in them, but that the older gulls' eyes were cold, yellow, as if something had gone out of them. Some of the adult gulls were so close he could see clearly the red spot on their beak that the chicks would tap to make them regurgitate food, and while he did not care for the yellow eyes, he liked this mechanism in them.

He hauled a bucket of water and washed the scales and the rust-like blood down off the gunwale and cleaned the cutting board and his knife then washed the blood and scales off his hands with the seawater, which was the best way. He could feel a chop starting in the sea that would mean the weather getting up in the next few days, the sea here filling with the beginnings of an energy nascent hundreds of miles away. Some Bahamian storm or seeming emotional reaction to change in pressure days away from here. He could feel that there was great power and swell in the sea, though it was calm out on the water,
and the lifting of the waves at the shore had the power of a prowling animal about it, and some male thing, like someone who hopes someone will fight them.

He took a long drink of clean water and cut a sliver off one of the fillets and chewed the virile and strong raw flesh and counted in his head, as he chewed, the likely take from the day's catch.

He got a percentage of the price of the fish at sale and a flat rate every time he took the boat out. The owner covered all the costs and handled the license and never came out on the boat.

After getting fired from the fish factory, Hold had looked into trying to set up on his own boat, but the sums were simply too big. It was getting started, that was the thing. If you didn't have anything you just couldn't start up.

He'd made the right choice with the factory. It would have been worse if Danny had gone. He was always a joker. That kind of thing came with his basic sense of adventure and it wasn't the first time Hold had taken the fall for him. But Danny had the wife and family. There was a lot of seasonal stuff about, but work wasn't easy round here. It was better that Hold took the hit.

He gave up the bedsit and moved into the trailer. That suited, with the work they were trying to get done on the house. Cara was furious with Danny for letting Hold take the fall, but what could you do? You couldn't get that furious with Danny, you never could.

He thought of it and smiled even now. There was an energy and hurry always as they loaded the trays of crabs onto the racks for the blast freezer, a compulsive clonking sound to the cooked pasty-like shells knocking together as they handled the crabs, a fresh baity smell. It was crazy work and it could easily breed a silliness and it was just one of those moments Danny was prone to.

When the guy came out of the blast freezer he was frosted, like he'd been dipped in wet sugar. He could hardly move. Funny as it was, it could have killed him. His apron had been blasted out and stood solid, straight out like a shelf in front of him. That set the men off.

When the supervisor arrived it was pretty inevitable. The guys were still laughing, some of them uncontrollably. It was the apron. They just couldn't get over that.

“Who was it?”

“It was me,” Hold had said. That was that. But he laughed about it even now. “That was Danny,” he thought. “I couldn't have let him lose his job.”

After that he worked for two years in the cheese factory in the valley, and took the shift work that came with it and the pay, which was good for the area. But it was futile, monotonous work that seemed to be nothing but moving cheese around. Not many people lasted long at it. Work's work, he had told himself, trying to get through it, setting up little purposes, timescales, the tricks we play on ourselves to get through things. But Danny dying had been a wake-up call, and he just couldn't do it anymore.
He couldn't pretend that he was going to work there in that way for years and save money then buy a boat that he could take out and make a little money on, fishing or taking out trips. Anything could take you. He knew that now. And he wouldn't do things he could see no value in or not get something back from. He looked at the knife that his friend had given him and he looked at it still in his hand and smiled at the thought of the apron again. The money he had was not very much. That was that. But he could cope with the things he did to get it.

He could hear the cattle lowing through the walls, this strange muted sound from the sheds where the vets rhythmically checked the animals, seemingly calm and oblivious. From home, Grzegorz knew how the smell would be in there. How the warm, manurey smell of cattle would be different to the sharp, chemical tang around him. There was something low and maternal about the sound to Grzegorz as he stood in the blood-letting bay, something that would not fit against the men in white overalls, the white rubber boots and white helmets, the strange medicalness of that. He was used to the idea of animals as products, but he was trying to adjust to the clinicality of it. Cows were better than sheep though. When the sheep came through there was something more startled to them, a horror in the number. It was more of a cull and the sheep seemed always to sense that
with this contagious and wide fear. He'd heard someone say they killed twenty-five thousand sheep a week here. That didn't seem possible.

When the bigger animals came through the pen the sound was more that of a long queue. It reminded Grzegorz of waiting on the gangplank of the ferry when they came over, finally off the cramped bus after hours of travel. There was the odd sound of metal clanking, as now and then the cattle brushed the railings of the four-meter walkway. They didn't have the panicked, startled look of the lambs. They were droll. There was a checkpoint, and as the cows came through one of the men stopped each animal and checked its ear to see that the tag and passport corresponded and then moved it along up the ramp.

They came up docile and oblivious, with the kind of calm factuality of big, heavy animals, and one by one they stepped into the kill pen.

There was the grating sound of the metal end door as it slid up and the cow went in, then it clanged down and the animal, unable to move in the small pen, stayed calm. The first metal plate rose up onto the animal's nose and it seemed to sit down and crumple, as if it had chosen to rest for a while. Then the second plate came up onto the animal's chest and the cow shook for a few seconds then went still.

It was the strange, detached process of the electricity that Grzegorz could not get used to, the passivity of the
whole thing. Then the side door of the pen slid up and the animal fell on its side and rolled out onto the counter in front of him.

“I can't do this,” thought Grzegorz. “I don't know how much longer I can do this. Not for what I'm getting back from it.” The blood from the animal was washing into the gutters and into the drains. He thought about the rich scents of his grandparents' farm and the intimacy of it and of the mists coming with the cow's breath in the early morning. Of the humble pace. “That wasn't enough,” he thought. “That could never have been enough. We could never have kept it. Not the way the world's gone now. It was never enough anyway.” He thought of the long, flat, difficult land.

His wife had been dropped to two shifts at the factory but they still had to pay the week up front to keep the places in childcare that the agency organized. It's oversubscribed, they said. You can't pick and choose. He was working all the time he could. “I have to get ahead,” he thought. “I just have to get my nose ahead then we can move on to the next step. We can get out of the shared house and have some room of our own.”

Around him, as the carcass disappeared, he could hear the men sharpening their knives. Then he heard the metal scrape and clang, and another animal went into the kill pen.

Hold steered the boat in to the quay and the man was there waiting for him. The group of seagulls that had followed him in stopped at the harbor mouth as if there was some line there, invisible. He could feel the boat surf a little in the swell into the harbor mouth.

There were a few people walking about and you could hear the bigger traffic going past on the road even over the engine of the boat. It tocked and splashed as he slowed it up and the smell of it came to him as he cranked the propeller into reverse to stop the boat and then idled it and threw up the rope-line to the man.

“How's the sea?” said the man. He knew he didn't know his own boat. His ownership was of the idea of the boat.

Hold looked up at him. “Getting up a little.” The man was on the quay wrapping the rope around the iron cleat.

“Tomorrow?” said the man.

He stood up from the rope. There were a few people stopped on the quay looking down into the boat at the coiled lines and the bounty of fish and at the spider crabs and the one big lobster.

The man was looking down into the boat at the boxes of fish. They were so fresh they hadn't started to lose their color yet and in the light the fish were very fine things, and there was something somehow religious about them.

“It's your boat,” Hold said up.

“You're in it,” said the man.

Hold looked out at the sea rising slightly in a swell. “I'm happy to take her out tomorrow.”

They'd loaded the fish up onto the quay and the man had gone into the hotel there and the restaurant manager had come out with him and chosen the fish he wanted. It was a public act and it was a very good advertisement for the hotel to the few early tourists. In the summer, the tourists were bolder and would gather like gulls and they would sell direct to them, setting the scales up on the quay wall.

The manager wanted the fish and the lobster and gave the man cash for them and the man wrote it down in a duplicate book and gave a copy back to the manager. Then he counted off the percentage of the money and added the fee to it and wrote it down and gave it to Hold.

“I took some fillets,” Hold said. He was very clear like that.

“Fine,” said the man.

“Drink, guys?” the hotel manager said.

They both declined and the restaurant manager said to Hold, “Could you get some rabbits for me? Dozen?” and Hold said he could. And the manager said, “For Friday.”

“Okay,” said Hold. “I'll go out tonight. I'll bring some in the morning or the morning after.” He knew it was a full moon and not a good night for it but figured that over two nights even with bad shooting he could get a dozen.

Every now and then he rubbed the nub of his thumb where something he'd got under his skin was swelling into a small sore. “It's a bit of fish bone,” he thought. Or perhaps something off the boat. He examined it casually and scratched at it with his other thumbnail but the skin didn't lift.