Everything I Found on the Beach (6 page)

And that same image had balled at them, then, in that one phrase he had said. That she should come out. And they had understood, together, that at all costs there must be no private space. Not to walk too close to the edge of the cliff.

“Will you do the window for me?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said. “You think it was kids?”

She nodded. She felt the need to explain. “I still can't go in there.”

“It's fine,” he said.

He went into the shed and put the padlock with the key still in it down on the shelf by the broken window. Glass had gone over the shelf and onto the floor and Holden could see the tarmac-covered chipping that had come through the window.

Dust was on the other window panels and looked scaly in the last of the sun. At the window corners the sun caught in the spiderwebs, vaguely bluish.

Hold picked up the chipping and threw it from the door and brushed off the glass splinters from the window shelf.

He could feel Danny's presence here. Or the absence of him that he could usually avoid.

The dust had settled quickly over the place. “I know how it will go. She will do her best to carry on, to stay positive. But this will come down on her, this dust. This tiredness and lack of use. And then she'll be dry and worn out and beaten.” He felt great pain at knowing this with such certainty.

“I should have been firmer,” he said to himself. “I should have insisted he got it checked out. The one time
I didn't push, that I took a step back. It was part of his character too,” thought Hold. “To bury his head in the sand. Not face responsibility. But he should have got it looked at. I should have pushed him harder.”

He tipped one tub of screws into another to empty a tub and put into it the broken glass and squatted and picked up the larger fragments from the floor.

The rods and tools were around the walls.

He went through a pile of wood and picked out some hardboard and took down a saw from a nail and found in the rack of small tools a measuring tape.

He cut the piece to the size of the window panel, measuring with the rusted tape and marking his measures with a nail, and he set the cut piece into the hole and pinned it up.

“This is not good, us both like this,” he said, and pushed that out from his mind. “This?” he asked himself. “There isn't a this.”

He gave one of the uprights an absent push, as if to see that the shed had solidity, and perhaps in some way in that act he was testing his own strength.

I wonder if Jake comes in here. I wonder if he comes in here to his father's things. I wonder if he remembers. I wonder if he knows where the key is and comes secretly in here and feels okay.

Hold looked at the things. Such strange refuse we leave. In the corner, the hexagons of an old wasps' nest, husks of paper.

He looked at the old bait fridge, all pitted and measled with rust, and looked in it and seeing it empty found the plug and unplugged it.

He picked up the old metal detector and switched it on to see if it worked and waved it about and it sang shrilly at the metal but it was somehow as if it was Danny the machine detected.

“Hey, Danny,” he said. And there was thirty years in it, and all the three years of his absence.

He took the metal detector with him, and locked up the shed.

“Why don't you stay for supper?” she said.

“I have the nets out.”

“Doesn't stop you eating supper,” Cara said.

“Are you shooting tonight?” asked the kid.

“No, Jake,” said his mother, not as the answer, just to stop him before he started. But he had his father's irresistible capacity.

“Yeah, I'm shooting tonight.”

He felt Cara look at him. “It won't be such a good night,” he said to put the boy off. “Too much moon. That's good for the nets though.” He was trying to feed the boy little knowledges always. “Something draws them. I don't know what it is. But something draws them up in that moon.”

The kid was looking at him. He was ignoring the
mysterious thing Hold was doing. “Why isn't it good for shooting?” It was all about the gun. It was like he didn't want to know about the fish.

“If you're staying, that's it with the talk,” Cara said.

They took the tripe home in a black bin sack. On the women's orders they took it into the garden and hung it like some great shroud and then washed the clinging gouts of cud and the stomach liquids off then they carried it inside like some foul painter's sheet and butchered it up on the table.

The place stank for weeks with the intestinal, unmistakable odor of the tripe cooking but it was good solid food. It had this strange effect on the house, like the bringing home of a big fish, and Grzegorz felt a type of pride. All the time, they brought back what they could without morally resorting in their minds to stealing. It was just the leftover stuff, the things gone to waste, the heavy, clubby bones of beef that they put into the
flaczki,
the rich tripe soup.

There was the odor, though, the odor that stuck about the house as if it had crept into the fabrics of the place and mixed up with the sharp permanent smell of the vinegar from always pickling vegetables, the smells of the habit of storage, of having to make it through winter. To Grzegorz, it was the smell of poorness, of home. Of the leaden humbleness of his grandparents.
Of his own naivety to think that he could live that way, with that little, in the world as it was now.

He thought of the farm. “It would not be possible,” he thought. “We've seen other things now, we want other things. It would never have been possible to stay there.”

One by one the tiny farms, most of them less than ten acres, had folded in. At first, it was like watching candles guttering out; but then, with the big European supermarkets moving into the town suburbs with their cheaper prices, the farms just seemed to be snuffed, one by one, by this unbeatable instrument of economy wielded at arm's length. “We are a poor people, we have to buy the cheapest,” thought Grzegorz. “You couldn't expect people to fight them.” He thought bitterly of the old timber house, the warm, sweet smell of animals, the constant smell of food cooking, like now, food with this lingering odor.

The government was trying to force the farms to consolidate, trying to ball them all up and remold them into bigger, more competitive units so it could feasibly ask for European grants. But the people involved were balled up in the wax of these policies. Now the foreigners were coming in and buying up vast tracts of land that cost them next to nothing, turning them into holiday resorts and golf courses. “We could never have stayed,” he told himself. These farms, some two million or so of them, had survived the Russians, the Germans, and Communism but could not beat this simple mathematical
annihilation, this new invasion of wealthy outsiders. He knew in his heart, with a stench of guilt, that they could never have taken on the farm anyway, that it was an illusion, that it was better the choice had been crushed.

“We want more now,” said Grzegorz. “We're not so simple. We can't be happy living the old way any more. It is better to be here. Poland can rot.”

On the stove, the tripe boiled, and the stench went through the house.

He watched her cook. She had the apron on and doubled at the waist with the cord around it and her collar stayed off her shoulders and he saw the surprise freckles there, starting just on her shoulders. He stopped himself. He had fantasized about her a lot when Danny was alive but after he died had stopped himself, refused to let himself, as if it was some kind of bigger betrayal.

He was drinking one of the beers she always kept in the fridge for him and could hear in the next room Jake going round with the metal detector finding the metal things he had hidden about.

He watched Cara put the fillets into the butter in the pan and they arched slightly as the skin burned, and relaxed again. She levered them over and he looked at the beautiful netted skin of the fish, emphasized in its burning.

She stooped down and opened the oven and flicked her hair over her ear and with the oven gloves shook up
the tray of oven chips and turned the tray of the loose chips round and slid it back in and shut the oven again. When she turned the fish over once more the meat was bright white.

Hold went through and helped Jake clear up the metal things all around and ready the table and she brought the plates through with the fish on and put the chips and the peas on the table. Looking at the fish, Hold had this bizarre thing that it was some white affinity that drew the fish to the moon. A sense of light.

The metal detector was in the corner and needed to be cleaned up after all the time in the shed and Hold decided he would take it and clean it.

He remembered the time Danny had hidden things about the garden for the boy, all sorts of metal objects, planting them under stones, burying them at the foot of the hedgerow. The way Danny could bring a sense of adventure into something.

The boy was younger then and every time he found something he came running to them. The find of the day had been the brooch. It was a beautiful, intricate, and damaged thing. The boy gave it to his mum.

“That's pretty cool,” Hold had said.

“I didn't put that there,” said Danny secretively. He had this massive, victorious wide grin.

The boy noticed Hold looking at the instrument.

“We could go treasure hunting,” said the boy, and Hold looked thoughtfully at him.

“Maybe there's treasure on the beach.”

“Maybe there is,” said Hold. “Maybe there's ambergris.”

The word had this kind of magic sense to it.

“What's ambergris?” asked the boy.

Jake was picking at the chips with his hands and his mother gave him a look that stopped him.

“Ambergris?” said Hold. The boy was looking at him. He remembered Danny's newspaper cutting, the way he had waved it with this intent belief they could find some, that it would fall to them. More, that he lived always with this chorus behind him, “What if?,” always, “What if?”

“It's whale sick,” said Hold. The boy eew-ed and laughed and did not believe him and thought he was starting one of those games grown-ups do.

“It's whale sick and it smells of cow poo. Cow poo and perfume. Like a farm girl on a night out.” The boy was delighted.

Cara was trying to be stern but was smiling and warm at seeing the boy laugh. “Men bring an irreverence,” she thought. “It's good to have that.” She looked at Hold ladling mayonnaise onto his plate and missed the capableness and the solidity that can be in a man's hands.

“It's something very rare,” said Hold, getting serious. “It's grayish, and it stinks, and a piece the size of your plate is worth more than a new car.”

The boy's eyes went cartoon wide. “No way,” he said.

“Look it up,” Holden said. “Maybe there's some on the beach.” He thought of Danny's chorus: never rule
out maybe. What if? What if, really? What would he do for the chance to be able to lift all this, lift her and the boy off the tracks they were stuck on?