Everything I Found on the Beach by Cynan Jones Page A

mostly by oak and hazel that had grown thin and twisted up and unmanaged so close to the water.
    The small river rose in the hills and began its way as a thin white stream that very quickly clattered over rocks before spreading out into a shallow bed and meandering into the small and severe valley that was the cwm.
    By the time it reached the valley floor, the river was less urgent and slid gently past the road to the sea. It was this river that came out near the beach where Hold fished, and because the salmon and sewin ran that river, he had to keep the nets a certain way from its mouth.
    Hold took the van over the little hump of the stone bridge and glimpsed the river as he went over and saw the syrupy look of it, and here and there the white, bursting energy.
    The pigeon flicked up off the floor to a nearby tree, puffing his deep breast. He scanned the pale-gray road. The gray of the asphalt was a very dead gray compared to him.
    The van got closer. You could hear the gears shifting down in sound at the wide corner a small way off. The pigeon looked back at the crocuses on the end of the farm lane that had been planted there deliberately along with tiny narcissi. The little narcissi were almost open and you could sense the energy from underground in them.
    The pigeon cooed and the white van appeared on the corner and the pigeon could see the roadside reflected off the sheen of the windshield and the man driving. At this strange thing, the pigeon took off in a clatter of sticks.
    Hold shifted gears, changed down again as the van complained, and chided himself for not having his mind on the driving, and for a split second, in that change of gear, there was a stall in momentum. No motion.
    The pigeon crashed out from the trees in front of the van and, suddenly panicked by the open space before him to the river, tried to cut back into the cover of the woods. He was instantly aware of the mistake in that split second decision and the sparrowhawk hit him.
    The sparrowhawk had driven the pigeon into the open space and hit him with the concentrated impact of an ambush.
    The pigeon had a quick vision of the sparrowhawk then the thing hit him, and he felt his light bones smash under the force, and his proud chest burst, and his neck broke in the whiplash of the hit.
    The bird seemed to burst in front of Hold and the pigeon went sideways like a ball hit from a bat. He flicked the brake and went under the feathers, which seemed to hang in the air, and in the corner of his eye he saw the pigeon crash off the crown of blackthorn and go over into the field.
    In the mirror he could just see the feathers come down and behind them the strewn crocuses on the farm lane, and he held the van steady on the road.
    â€œOne wrong move,” he thought. “That’s all it takes. One wrong move.”
    The phone call had been to an anonymous drugs advice service and the rigmarole of acting as if he thought his son was selling drugs led up to that one question:
    â€œHow much per kilo, if it is cocaine?”
    It had sounded like it was cocaine. The white, pearly powder.
    â€œForty to fifty thousand.”

    He was on the beach digging cockles. There were about forty of them and they’d picked them up with a bus and driven them down to the beach. The sea looked very distant but they were warned of the speed the tide would come in. “It’s faster than a horse,” they said. Then they unloaded the rakes and buckets and walked out onto the long, flat sand.
    He could handle this. This was outdoor work. It was backbreaking, working quickly in the gap of the tide, but against the ache he could always look up from the rucked wet sand to the sea far out, catching the light with this sense of massive space. It was like the flat fields of home, just this endless, empty plain. It was nice to be amongst things that did not belong to man.
    He raked up the top few inches of sand, hearing the shells of the cockles click ceramically on the