Everything I Found on the Beach Read Online Free PDF Page B

city boy like them. I never learned to be aggressive like that.”
    He looked up at his wife. She was shushing the baby in this kind of worn-out way, the other people in thekitchen moving round her. He was losing hope, he could feel that. He could feel the energy that came with that first, excited belief disappearing. And she seemed to be disappearing with it.
    At first, there had been something alive in the snatched, silenced embraces they had stolen in the crowded house. This fresh sense of newness about everything. Now they were too tired, too ashamed, too aware of the eleven other beds in the room, the baby in the basket by their bed. He thought of the farm, his own childhood. Whatever it lacked, of the richness of the space. “To bring a baby up here, in this,” he thought.
    He pushed the food around his plate, bumped and jostled as others cooked and ate in the small kitchen.
    He could see out of the window the big graffiti saying “Polish out,” and could hear his wife chuck to the baby. He felt this loss of her happening.
    â€œ Wciąż się kłócimy ,” he thought. We are always quarreling now.
    He could feel the drudgery come round him the way it had become at home, as if it was something physical that could happen to you. The automaticness to just get through.
    â€œIt doesn’t change,” he thought. “Life stays the same, relatively. Unless you get one big chance to get yourself ahead, properly ahead, then it just stays the same.”
    It was getting enough to make the next step, that’s all it was. They put what they could away, but it washemorrhaging with what everything cost here. It was all relative. He believed it was just the next step, then he could change everything.
    â€œI didn’t expect to be here for so long,” he thought. He meant the house. He looked at his wife. He could see she looked visibly older.

    Hold drove the old van back. There was the sense that the van somehow hung together around him. The repairs Hold had made himself were all over and there were many patches of gaffer tape spread over the van like a kid who had come off his bike. He was never someone who had craved great amounts of money but it was tiring to not be able to afford simple things anytime, like a pair of new boots, or to have the money just to fix up the van.
    Of course, there was always the dream of a fortune, just to make everything safe and fix up the place, but it was not a wistfulness in him. But now came this. This need for big money, or the house would go.
    He pulled up by the trailer and got out and then rethought and leaned back in to pick up the fillets from the front seat, as the sun warmed in through the windshield. He took the fillets and went into his trailer and put them in the paper in the fridge and he looked down at some of the stray scales still on his hands and went into the shower.

    The house had been Danny’s grandparents’, and as they had aged they had sold off the land and the bungalow they had built on it but had kept the old house. For the first ten years of their life, the place had been their universe, Danny’s and his, and Danny had been crushed by the selling of it. For a child, it was not possible that things could not be permanent. With the money from selling off the land, his grandparents had rented a small place in the village, and the old house decayed on the plot. The dream in the family was that one day they could rebuild it and move into it in a kind of reclamation, and it had been Danny’s great hope that he would be able to do this.
    Danny was a dreamer. That is not to say he was not a determined man, but he was a man who set up great dream-like things all the time and had this refusal to accept the unlikeliness of them. Often in the sight of the big idea, Danny would overlook the processional steps you needed, the simple things to get somewhere. There was something childlike in this, but he had a great way