Everything I Found on the Beach (4 page)

“Do you want the crab?” asked the man.

The restaurant manager looked at them and looked back at the hotel doubtfully and said, “They're fiddly as hell…” And Hold said, “They're in early. Really early this year.”

“I'll take them,” said the manager. Their meat was very sweet and of great flavor, but it was work to get the meat out in terms of time. “I'll cook them up,” the manager said.

“You can have them,” said the man, and looked at Hold as if to check it with him. Hold shrugged. He flicked with his nail at the little sore again, trying to see what it was that was under his skin. He was perturbed at the crab being in so early. Usually it was from May they came in any numbers.

Hold put the tub of spider crabs on the quay wall and they loaded the rest of the fish into the 4 x 4 and poured over them the crushed ice that was softening in a plastic sack in the back of the vehicle. Then the man drove off with them. People were staring into the big tub of spider crabs. The crabs looked very alien there on the quay wall.

Hold unwound the rope-line and cast it down into the boat and went down the ladder, kicking off the heavy boat from the wall, and the restaurant manager came out and took the crabs to cook.

Big mullet were coming in on the tide and grazing the harbor wall and people were remarking on it.

Hold headed the boat over to her mooring and tied her up and took the fillets he had cut and his water bottle and rowed the tender over to the slipway and got out. There were mullet pecking at the slipway. Around all the motors of the boats there were little rainbowed pools of oil like liquid peacock feathers lain on the water. Hold could still taste the fish in his mouth. It was a hell of a fish this way. It made it a shame to cook it.

The waste was difficult to accept. He thought woefully of how his grandparents would be horrified by the wasteful policies of the place, of the perfectly good meat that was thrown away here.

“This is a comfortable culture,” Grzegorz thought. “It is a comfortable culture and a culture that doesn't have time for food that takes hours to prepare. People here can choose not to eat meat. They are actually comfortable enough to be able to say ‘I won't eat meat.'”

He thought of the feet, the cow's lips, all the slow-cooked things of his upbringing, with the better cuts being sold. He saw all these unwanted organs thrown
into bins and dye tipped over them, things perfectly good to eat.

“It is not what we do in this country,” he told himself. “There is enough here.” He thought bitterly of the useless farm back home, the place he had always imagined himself staying. Felt the dagger of his naivety in that. “We have to move on. Get more sophisticated.”

Most of the farms round here were small. Not by Polish standards, but they were small and they sold through organizations that had contracts with the big supermarkets. For most people, there was no getting away from that if they wanted to make the farm work.

When a supermarket put in a big order for something they wanted to sell on offer, they got the animals they needed in and took just those parts and threw the rest of the animal away. The supermarkets, for example, would want lamb chops, so they'd extract the chops and send them on down to the packing line and the rest of the sheep would be tossed, and the dye thrown on it. Then the chops would be driven for hundreds of miles around the country.

The suppliers and the farmers would have to take the financial hit on the offer or risk losing the supermarket contract, and if any of the product was left unsold when the offer ran out, the supplier had to buy it back.

Grzegorz thought of the animals butchered in the old kitchen, the pig hanging from its sinews by the big iron hooks and his grandfather's saw cutting down through
the ribs, the collected pudding of the blood, the rich, powerful smell of the fresh offal on the wood-fired stove. “This gratefulness to an animal,” he thought, “is what's gone here. There is a sorrow for it, as there always is, but it is without gratefulness and eventually you just go numb to it. It's the way you have to feel about crowds of people, about strangers. You can't care for them. You can't let yourself. There's too many of them.”

Much of the meat that should have been destroyed went missing. You couldn't work in that wastefulness and go home and see people eating poorly, counting their pennies. That was one thing about the house, despite the lack of ready money—they ate well. At least, they ate richly from the cuts the men could bring. Last week a whole truckload of chops had come back. They'd gone all the way through, through the packing lines and onto the truck and the hundreds of miles to the supermarket depot and they were rejected because the rind of fat was half a centimeter too thick. They had to be destroyed. The supervisor came out to oversee that one and they had to watch the whole lot go to waste. It was perfectly good meat.

He thought tiredly of the dressing down again. The bullying, as it was, by his line manager. “Maybe I attract it,” he thought. “Maybe I attract that kind of thing. They think I'm weak because I'm quiet. I'm not a city boy like them. I never learned to be aggressive like that.”

He looked up at his wife. She was shushing the baby in this kind of worn-out way, the other people in the
kitchen moving round her. He was losing hope, he could feel that. He could feel the energy that came with that first, excited belief disappearing. And she seemed to be disappearing with it.

At first, there had been something alive in the snatched, silenced embraces they had stolen in the crowded house. This fresh sense of newness about everything. Now they were too tired, too ashamed, too aware of the eleven other beds in the room, the baby in the basket by their bed. He thought of the farm, his own childhood. Whatever it lacked, of the richness of the space. “To bring a baby up here, in this,” he thought.

He pushed the food around his plate, bumped and jostled as others cooked and ate in the small kitchen.

He could see out of the window the big graffiti saying “Polish out,” and could hear his wife chuck to the baby. He felt this loss of her happening.

“
Wciąż się kłócimy
,” he thought. We are always quarreling now.

He could feel the drudgery come round him the way it had become at home, as if it was something physical that could happen to you. The automaticness to just get through.

“It doesn't change,” he thought. “Life stays the same, relatively. Unless you get one big chance to get yourself ahead, properly ahead, then it just stays the same.”

It was getting enough to make the next step, that's all it was. They put what they could away, but it was
hemorrhaging with what everything cost here. It was all relative. He believed it was just the next step, then he could change everything.

“I didn't expect to be here for so long,” he thought. He meant the house. He looked at his wife. He could see she looked visibly older.

Hold drove the old van back. There was the sense that the van somehow hung together around him. The repairs Hold had made himself were all over and there were many patches of gaffer tape spread over the van like a kid who had come off his bike. He was never someone who had craved great amounts of money but it was tiring to not be able to afford simple things anytime, like a pair of new boots, or to have the money just to fix up the van.

Of course, there was always the dream of a fortune, just to make everything safe and fix up the place, but it was not a wistfulness in him. But now came this. This need for big money, or the house would go.

He pulled up by the trailer and got out and then rethought and leaned back in to pick up the fillets from the front seat, as the sun warmed in through the windshield. He took the fillets and went into his trailer and put them in the paper in the fridge and he looked down at some of the stray scales still on his hands and went into the shower.

The house had been Danny's grandparents', and as they had aged they had sold off the land and the bungalow they had built on it but had kept the old house. For the first ten years of their life, the place had been their universe, Danny's and his, and Danny had been crushed by the selling of it. For a child, it was not possible that things could not be permanent. With the money from selling off the land, his grandparents had rented a small place in the village, and the old house decayed on the plot. The dream in the family was that one day they could rebuild it and move into it in a kind of reclamation, and it had been Danny's great hope that he would be able to do this.

Danny was a dreamer. That is not to say he was not a determined man, but he was a man who set up great dream-like things all the time and had this refusal to accept the unlikeliness of them. Often in the sight of the big idea, Danny would overlook the processional steps you needed, the simple things to get somewhere. There was something childlike in this, but he had a great way of bringing you with him, so even when you knew the end was not possible you would get caught up in the getting there. It was a very contagious thing. There was something in his belief that was very contagious and made you wish you didn't have an idea of reality sometimes. But the house was not an impossibility. The house just
needed the hours spent, the materials gathered, the skills applied.

Hold came out of the shower and stood in the steam that roiled out of the small shower room and watched the motes of moisture catch the incoming light. Through the window he could see the house and there was, every time he looked at it, this recall of the promise he'd made. This unmovable, stone-built thing of it.

“Finish it for him. Finish it for Jake.” Hold had sat by the bed, his wasting friend seeming to desiccate before him, and him hardly able to take in the actuality of it.

He looked now at the way some of the limed whitewash was lifting, aged, off the wallstones and thought of his friend's skin seeming to dry off, to flake away as he lay there. He looked out and saw that the stray cat had come to sit on the van bonnet for the dissolving warmth of the engine. He was always taking in strays; he preferred it to the responsibility of ownership.