Everything I Found on the Beach by Cynan Jones

garage and bought a cooler and some antiseptic cream and a multiple phone charger and filled up the van and asked to use the telephone directory. He said he had to find some numbers for a driving instructor for a friend and he pretended to find that and on his way wrote down the number that he wanted.
    He drove out of the town to a phone booth that he knew and he called the number.
    When he came out of the phone booth he sat in the car for a while and just looked out down the road and watched the clouds bunch up over the mountains inland. “Well, I’m in it now,” he said. Then he started the van up and took the back roads home.

    Grzegorz stood in the office.
    â€œWhat have you got to say for yourself?”
    His line manager, another Pole, translated, even though Grzegorz got the drift. His line manager acted like some kind of self-appointed union man. He had it in for Grzegorz. Grzegorz had no idea why.
    â€œIt was being thrown out,” said Grzegorz. The line manager translated. “It was going into the bins. I didn’t steal it.”
    â€œDon’t we pay you enough?”
    Actually, the pay was pretty good. It was as much as he could expect without any formal skills. “I didn’t steal. I wouldn’t steal,” said Grzegorz.
    He was careful to look remorseful but underneath was this bitter anger. He wanted to throw things back in the man’s face. He saw his job disappearing, felt this humiliating fury that they had this power over him. That they could dangle him on a string. They could change his life, just like that.
    â€œWe’re quite clear on such things. It’s a criminal offence.”
    The line manager didn’t translate, but talked back to the man. He was donning this friendship with Grzegorz and it made him sick. “Now I’ll owe him,” he thought. “He thinks he’s fatherly. He’ll push me round all the more.” He felt he wanted to smash the two men’s faces together. Grzegorz listened with this blurred concentration as the two men talked about him, juggled with his life as if it were a toy. “They always have to keep you in line,” he thought to himself, angrily.
    â€œIt’s okay, we’ve had a talk,” said the line manager to Grzegorz in Polish.
    â€œWe could dismiss you for this,” said the man. Grzegorz ignored him.
    â€œHe’s dropping you to minimum shifts.”
    He’d been working all the hours he could, trying to build up a nest egg. They were laying people off at his wife’s factory as well.
    â€œThey just want to keep you down,” he thought.
    â€œMinimum shifts,” said the man. “There’s plenty of men want the work.”
    Grzegorz had a vision of strangling the man with the tripe. He was sure he could smell it on his clothes now. That was the smell of poorness. It was in everything. You couldn’t get it out.

    The remnants of snowdrops were still up and, in the woods just at the end of the farm lane, the late crocuses were through and the pigeon pecked at the little flags of petal, ruining them.
    The woodpigeon cooed briefly and found a stick from the ivy and the leaves on the ground and lifted it with his beak and measured its weight, getting the stick balanced like a trapeze artist would. He could hear the van some way off and it was part of the world’s noises to him. He dropped the stick and went back to ruining the crocuses. He could hear the van come closer down the thin road, and hear its engine change tone with the gear changes.
    The road was flanked on one side by blackthorn, and on the other by the steep bank that was the edge of a woodland and that would be all bluebells come May. On the bank were strangles of holly and the oak and beech leaves had fallen and the snowdrops were secretly amongst them.
    The other side, beyond the blackthorn hedge, there were a few slim and damp-looking fields that made a skirt against the river, flanked