Everything I Found on the Beach (5 page)

“I want to give him something to belong to,” said Danny.

“I'll do that,” Hold said. “I'll do that thing.”

Since then, any money he had he put into the things he needed for the house, and it was coming, bit by bit. He had long resolved for it to be a far-off thing to achieve, but now had come the bombshell. Danny's sister wanted her share of the money from the place. It was like she'd
held out while Danny was alive, swayed by his promises that he'd find the money to buy her out. Then had come her divorce, and then Danny had gone. She needed the money, now. It was like this giant, final, impassable wall.

Hold had tried everything he could. He had submitted a business plan to the bank himself, for a boat of his own, the likely return after three and five years, all as it said in the book he'd bought. He had been cautious and harsh with the plan but the figures still looked good, but the bank had simply refused. You have nothing. We can't lend without security.

His idea had been to borrow the money for the startup but to siphon some off and arrange to buy her out bit by bit, as the money came in. But Cara wouldn't consider it. It was enough for her to know he had worked on the house for Jake. All these things he did were for Jake, they both had to believe that. It was academic anyway. He couldn't raise the money.

He took a sliver off one of the fillets and took it outside and gave the sliver to the stray. He had to choke down this moment of sudden anger at knowing that the house was going to slip away because of the one thing he could not compete on, money, and that this castle they'd played in would be knocked down and rebuilt and sold off to the highest bidder, almost certainly as a second home. He saw the two of them inside, juvenile, the dangerous fires they had lit there in secret, the things they'd invented with great weaponry value
hidden there, the plans they'd made, the first girlfriends they had brought there.

“I could change it, if I had just one chance,” he thought. “If just one chance came along.” He watched the cat eat the fillet, half bolt it, the way the opportunist has to take his chance. He felt this great draw, this need to go to them, and he knew that taking the fillets was just yet another excuse, but there was a magnetism working, as if he was sucked into the great void of his friend at this time. It was like he felt the need to apologize for his failure to keep the house, but could not find the words. In this sudden failure there was some sort of need to be close to them, as if he wanted some sort of forgiveness from Danny.

“I'll take the fillets along,” he thought. “I'll put out the shore nets. I could do with the space of the beach.”

The baby was being fed when the row broke out and he started to scream immediately when their voices went up and the other boy, too, started to cry. Started to cry just with the sheer completeness of everyone's upset, his baby brother wailing, his mother covering herself angrily and reddening and launching into one of those shapeless female arguments that is just a letting go of all the exhausting little frustrations. And his father just emitting this great, weary uselessness at everything, as if it all fell on him, looking like he was taking in her words like they
were something foul he had in his mouth and was deciding on whether to spit up.

They can be vicious in argument, women, and she sliced into him over and over, and all his weaknesses that he had offered up to her, in some great amnesty of masculinity, that he had offered her as signs of his true scale as nothing more than a simple man, she sliced at and tore into. And his children yelled, as if they watched this flaying of their father.

He had not seen her like this before. He realized they had never really argued, and all of this was pouring out of her. She even looked ugly to him, the way she was then.

“You promised things,” she said. “I left everything behind. You promised we would have things.”

He felt all the weight of that.

“You promised things.”

He knocked and came in through the porch, taking off his shoes, and went through to the kitchen and put the fillets in their newspaper down on the side and she met him in almost a sedate way. When Hold had been on the sea, he smelled of Danny to her and it was difficult for her not to react at that so she quite often had this distant thing about her. She was just making tea and fetched down another cup automatically and put in a teabag and poured on the still boiled water from the kettle that puffed steam
up into the underside of the hanging unit. Then she took up her own cup and held it and blew over it and looked at the parcel on the worktop.

“Present,” said Hold.

Cara took out the teabag and squeezed it against the side of the cup and lifted it out to the little plastic food tray she had for compost to throw on the border. She bent for the milk from the fridge and he watched deliberately, instead, the steam come off the teabag and curl up amongst the broken eggshells and peelings there like some far away sign. Like the engine smoking across the top of the boat.

She put in the milk and passed him the cup and he looked down at the fillets on the side, looking at the newspaper they were wrapped in, the black print furring out from itself, leaving some chromatogram-like aura around the words.

“Bass,” he said, and she nodded. Her sleeves were rolled up, like she'd been doing kitchen work and hadn't had time to change her clothes. Hold looked at the way she was dressed in the respectable clothes and said, “How was the bank?”

She gave the slightest shake of her head.

He put the tea down and opened a cupboard, mainly so she couldn't see the flash of anger on his face.

“How was the sea today?” she said to him. He was going through the cupboards like the house was his own.

“She's getting up. Not so soon, though. Be a few days.”

“Thanks for the fish.”

“It's good fish,” he said. He was thinking of the house, and how he had promised Danny he would have it for the boy. “Where's he at?”

“He's out on his bike.” There was a moment of space. They both noticed at the same time and were uncomfortable with it.

“Are you looking for biscuits?”

“It's fine.”

She looked apologetic that there were no biscuits. Like she had let him down. There was no play. None of the bantered flirting there used to be, while Danny was still with her; none of the soft edgemanship they both harmlessly enjoyed, like dogs chasing the same ball in a park. None of what was just gentle rhythmic chemistry, a safe peacefulness to it when Danny was alive and could watch it, and valued it in some way as this great reassurance of his choice in her that his friend could have this intentless thing with her.

He looked down at the sore welling on his thumb. It was one of those small things. He picked at it.

“Do you have a needle?” he asked.

Cara took his hand and looked at it. “It's not ready yet. You'll just dig into yourself. Leave it. It will lift.”

Hold nodded at her.

“You should let me take him out soon,” he said.

And she nearly called him Danny but then she said, “Holden, he's too young. And it's a school night.”

They sipped their tea awhile.

“You've got the nets out?”

“I've just set them.”

He had gone from the quay and driven over to the beach and taken the net over his shoulder out along the shore in the tough old spoil bag. It made sense if he was coming for rabbits on the cliff that night to have some point to aim for and work down to, but more than this physical excuse it was that something went from him on the beach.

Danny's death had become a great thing, and a point of time from which all things seemed to be measured. Hold felt very strongly the responsibility to create some new point for things to come from, some positive beginning point like the birth of a child to a couple. He had a vision of them all sitting on a bench in the sunshine outside the finished house. He felt as if he needed some sign to have that purpose. He felt greatly that a renewed energy was needed, and that perhaps from this positive thing, in this good momentum, it would not be the betrayal to go with her as it would be from hurt, in this space of damage. If it grew out of something good and new they had built for themselves and wasn't simply them falling into the space that Danny's death had created.

The bass hunt side to side, zigzagging for things disturbed along the breaking lip of the inward tide, so the
gill net is laid across the beach, right-angled to the sea over the uncovered pools to catch them as they follow the water in. Once they choose a course, if the net is there, they hit it.

In the rushing water, the nylon would be invisible to the fish and Hold could imagine them striking the net, that first moment of bloody confusion and the increased power to swim on, driving them further into the mesh, the scales shed in the water, the line fitting fatally behind their gills. He pushed the thought away.

As he had left the beach the sun was starting to bleed out into the evening. The warmth hadn't come into things yet and he knew it would be a cool night. Again, the peregrine had come off the cliffs and for a while circled over him as he lay the net, in witness, the hunter come to watch the hunter. There was a real definition to the thing against the thinning evening light.

“You should come out again. You and Jake.”

And he remembered then, in full detail, her shoulders, bare, the thin open shirt licking out in the wind, the surprise freckles on her shoulders seeming to flush then merge under the sun, like drops of something onto clean cloth; and Danny drove the boat head on to the waves and got her jumping, with the childishness over her face at the enjoyment of it; and Danny, so proud.
And it seemed like Hold had only understood that word
proud
then for the first time. That pride in his friend. And Hold knew that he would have a care for this girl that was like that close care for a friend's child, and that she was partly his to look after.

And she remembered him. This friend of Danny's with his strange-meaning name. How he was more methodical and quiet than Danny, and less flashy. And how he brought up the fish, and helped her with the rod when she caught her first string of mackerel and they came wheeling and flapping into the boat and she was screaming and laughing and seeing the broad, proud smile of her man. But how Hold had taken the rod without taking it off her and brought in the line and flicked off the mackerel with some calm respect and sense of his own place that she felt this richness of, as Danny steered the boat idling through the water. And she had felt from this man she was meeting for the first time great patience and great solidity and some great power of decision that made her feel very safe around him, as if she knew he would never alter his mind about her. And it made her love Danny more, that he had a friend like this.