Everything I Found on the Beach (9 page)

He put the rabbits in the bag and clipped it up and took out the headlamp and shone it just from his hands and went on down toward the cliff path to the beach. Here and there on the coast that swept the bay, towns showed like the last glowing ashes of settling fireplaces. The rest of the coast was dark, permanent, impassive to
the pleading sea, which beat in with a steady, repeated argument against the wreck of the shore.

He could imagine, years ago, the sea, its temper lost in storm and the dark chaos of that bay. And he saw in his mind the huge fires lit on the headlands, the lost ship come to those false beacons and dashed in those waves against the coast, its goods torn out and strewn upon the shore. And he reflected how, for this to happen, there must have been whole villages treacherous for this collection, who were not pirates in their minds, but who were like fishermen or farmers in their industry. He thought of the boy and of what he had said and of the possibility that there was treasure on the beach from this great slaughter, and as he passed, in a field he saw a herd of curlew over the ground, and they were ghostly and strange in that light.

He cut down to the beach in that dark tunnel of light, with the scree of rock ancient-formed, split and busted down the edge of the path. The iron rust showed in the rock and the smooth shale bedewed reflected and he felt for once that it was he the strange thing here. How the curlews had undone their compactness at him, and lost their peace as if he was not something fearful, but to them impossible.

He hopped down the foot or so drop from where the cliff fell away to the beach and the sense of the beach was immediate, like jumping into water. A change underfoot
in the clack of the flat and uneven conglomerate beach stones where he stepped. He turned off the headlamp and let his eyes adjust as if coming out of that tunnel of light. It was as if the types of light that night had been stored here, and were being harbored, or here and there given back by the lines of quartz in the fallen rock, and the flat wet stones. There was a strong smell of salt.

He walked up the beach, arcing out from the cliff-side to where there was enough blue, predominant light to see by, and taxied his way over the uneven stones at the edge of the pools.

The sea had been up high leaving little of the beach clear and the tidemark was lost in the shadow of the cliffs where the moonlight didn't reach. The beach changed quickly and he turned on the headlamp again and came off the rocks and up a bank of gravel and onto the long, feminine shapes of sea-smoothened fallen shale that stretched under the cliffs to the point.

Whenever he stood here, he felt some sense of affinity. The shapes were amazing in that strange light. It was an affinity of place and time. Some gentle sense that he was simply part of a process. Then he felt it, and it was very brief. That he was being watched.

He stopped and listened. Just the sea. The hollow boom of the rocks it moved as it broke and sucked at the beach. The trinkets of sound where water sheeted down the cliffs, running spare off the fields above. Nothing. Just the white sense of it.

There had been some change. A drop in temperature, an increase in the breeze, and his heightened senses had felt it. It was childlike. Some greater adrenaline in him. Something he could not stop when he went to the nets, an expectation that did not exist anywhere else in his life. He was unwatched. He was sure of that. Unwatched. That he was simply imagining.

In the moonlight you could make out the beach and have a sense of it, but when you switched on the beam there was just the tunnel of light, and everything outside it stopped existing. And while there was reassurance in this stretch of light, it was work not to think of those things that could suddenly be possible beyond it.

When his father was at home, he'd had to develop a way to survive the otherwise destructive atmosphere he brought and it had become like a mechanism in him, this ability to force out thought. It was what allowed him to do what he did, and helped him not to tear himself up. Sometimes this worked against him, but it helped him to exist his way. He knew that you just had to push out indecision and distractions in the way you had to not be scared of the dark. He was very determined in this and, in the light of the choices he made, everything around these choices disappeared.

He went on over the big rocks, the cragged and damaged boulders where the beach turned round to make a little false bay, and he saw the white floats of the net laid out across the pools.

He could see the turned and roping line where the net was and that there was a fish in it, against the black stone a broad scimitar silver in that moonlight. An earring of metal. He thrilled to see it early.

He kept beneath the cliff and would not look again from some self-invented ritual and got to the end of the net and took off the gun and the game bag. Then he walked up the net picking round the dark heaps of wrack and the light-emitting pools. There were three fish low in the net. A big mullet and two bass, and higher up the net the bass he had seen immediately. At the moment the bass would not be in shoals and it was more usual to catch this many fish, not the vast catch of them you could get later on. He knew from gutting them that they were coming in for the early peeler crab, hunting the soft shells of their growing bodies.

At the top of the net was a spider crab, insectile, like some long, mechanical thing that had flown into a web. Just beyond the net the rocks were cemented with sand that looked like a grater with the riddles of sandworms. The sea breaking on it made a sound like the airbrakes of a big truck. The sound was more of a smash out by the spit of rocks which broke sublittoral out of the sea some hundred yards away and that you could see now and were uncovered in this massive tide.

He felt this sense again, of being watched. It was unlike him. He looked down at the spider crab. He had no sympathy with them in the way he did with other things.
The other crabs had been in the pots that were some way out and this was the first really close in this year. It was early and it was unnerving in its earliness, but there would be more. A swarm, so much more efficient than our native crabs, that comes inshore from the deeper water as the water warms. They were aliens. Something sent. They seemed built for some other purpose and to exist in some mass. He could see the gulls and kittiwakes white against the cliffs and was sure, by some sense, that something passed on the sea, some cloud of shearwaters nocturnal.

He chilled, and chided himself. There was some portentous thing on the beach that night, and he had to say to himself: “If I am watched it is by fox or bird, not man, and there is nothing but fox or bird or man or things of their material, there can be nothing else.” Just then a breaker thudded. A seventh wave perhaps. And it was a very big sound. The pullback had a brag to it.

He headed back to the bottom of the net, picking his way with the lamp beam over the awkward pools that stretched the thirty meters back. There were weird patches of dark and light in the sky where the moon came or not through the shifting cloud now and, with the headlamp on, the beach looked very dark. It gave it even more of a sense of enclosure with the white sound of the sea. Like there was a presence very close around you.

Hold put the bands of the headlamp around his head and crouched down to the net and started to work
the fish out, undoing the problem in his head, working the looped nylon over the fins, away from the hard lids of the gills, out from the articulate bones of the mouth. You had to try to see how the fish had hit. Whether it had writhed and spun or tried to go on. Then you took it out, freeing the net, as if you were swimming it backwards. He worked with that flat deliberate patience you have to have and, in that cave of light he made for himself, there was just this in his mind and it was a great easing to do just the one thing.

The mullet came free and he held it by the great bony head so its thick lips seemed to pout at him and he lay it down and in the headlamp light its loosened scales reflected back off his hands. It was a big heavy fish and the scales were bigger than thumbnails and he knew that the meat would be very good. They were difficult to sell because of the flavor of soil and the disturbing muddiness of flesh that mullet had when you caught them in estuaries or harbors, where they filtered sewage and pastes for food. But when you caught them on the rocks like this the flesh was firm and white and strong and froze well enough.

He went on to the bass. There was a ferocity to it even lying there, some angular, predatory quality. Blood rimed the gills and the torn fins where it had refused to stop fighting the net, recusant of the fact that once it had turned into it, it was caught and there was no fight it could make. There seemed still fury in its eye that would
not forgive itself, as if it scoured itself for some signal it had missed that would have shown the net was there. Yet, there has to be decision. A way must be taken. He thought for a moment that the fish might still be alive. He kept coming back to that eye, so different it was from the droll, herbivorous eye of the mullet. Hunter or gatherer, both had turned themselves into the net. The mullet had looked more at peace with itself though, as if it believed though saddened and ended that it had made the choice in the best of faiths. As he undid the bass from some last traps of nylon, Hold knew that these thoughts were a ridiculous romanticism, and that there could be no peace in dying in this way. He had killed them, that was his responsibility.

There was a scrape of stones beyond his sight and he looked up to the cliffs and saw nothing, simply the impassivity responding. Again the sound came and the loose shale flashed in his headlight and he looked up the scree to see a rabbit bump away to some safer bank. Then he saw it, as he turned his head back out to sea. Something on the water. He ripped off the headlamp and hid its light against him and crouched and had no idea why this was his reaction. He turned the light off, holding the net as if it was some safe thing.

As his eyes altered to the dark, the small landscape grew back round him, coming in patches as his eyes focused. The humps of wrack. The pools. The grated sand. Dawn had brought a preminiscent light to the horizon
which hid the scallop lights and which somehow made the sea look darker. There was light from the moon, some thin aureole, misting into the shifted clouds. He heard the rubber hit the rock, the strange, stretching sound like a creaking floor and he felt himself fizz with electricity. It could be someone come to poach the nets. He thought often about things coming to that, about that challenge coming like a violent dog. Don't back down. And he turned on the light and stood up.

His face was set. He was ready to respond, or to call out, and he put all the look he could into his shoulders and his arms, and the pump of the breaker came loudly and he set his feet and then the sound again came, an unmistakable impact, over the rising beat of his heart. He thought of the gun back on the stones above the pools.

The inflatable was spinning slowly by the rocks. The army gray of it full and neutral at the edge of the lamp beam. It looked unmanned, but it was in the end of the beam, as if it consumed the light. Like something circling the edge of a clearing. He saw a flash of engine, some red perhaps as the boat swung. And then a heap. A dark mass in the belly of the boat and he knew immediately it was a man.

He could feel the adrenaline surge through him and his mind turned to one repeated curse word but there was something in that very clear. He put on the headlamp and went out, footing over the rocks to the easier sand and then he went into the sea, stumbling under the
power of the breakers for safe space for his feet. There was real strength in the water and the waves were high and big and it took a few seconds for the cold water to get through his clothes and the extreme cold was like a shock that his adrenaline fought.

He waded at the boat through the tunnel of light he made, having to fight the push and draw of the water, the cold sting and salt reaching his thighs as he went out. He hardly had any thought, it was just an automatic thing to do.

The boat was a few meters away and moving out and he was slow, putting his feet down blindly through the dragging water, and the swell was much bigger by the rocks. The water smashed him, one big wave that nearly took him over, and he found a handhold half submerged against the rock and held on and then he went out with the draw of the tide half floating at the boat which was very close now. It came at him with a thump and hit him hard and he held to it with the wind hit half out of him and went backwards with it, his legs sucked underneath its hull. Then the sea sighed again as if setting itself and he scrambled for a footing and dug his fingers into the cord around the gunwale and tried to go with the boat in the new onrush of water. He reached the rock and clung hard against the dragging ebb and the boat stayed with him this time. He was up to his stomach in water on some unseen risen stone or slope of grit and it was like the boat would come no further with the
draw of that outward tide too strong a force of gravity for him to beat.

His breath came spitting through his teeth and his eyes stung and it was all he could do to hold the boat there with the cold starting to wear through the thin, fleeting first retch of adrenaline. He tried to swallow in strength from the air and the lamp beam moved as his head did, up into the air for breath in a disorienting way. “I have to still,” he thought. “Still. Just still a minute.” He held the boat going up and lowering on the swell with all his muscles stubborn and hoping that he could get more from himself. He held it for a while until he could get some clarity, as if the energy would go out of the boat like holding down a brawling man. He tried to keep his head steady.

Behind him the waves were busting on the reef of sand and tearing out past him and driving shards of gravel into him. Salt stung in a graze he hadn't noticed. And then the boat seemed to make its own decision and wrenched round and lodged itself on a point of rock, and it too seemed to still, as if it needed breath.