Everything I Found on the Beach Read Online Free Page B

the sharp, chemical tang around him. There was something low and maternal about the sound to Grzegorz as he stood in the blood-letting bay, something that would not fit against the men in white overalls, the white rubber boots and white helmets, the strange medicalness of that. He was used to the idea of animals as products, but he was trying to adjust to the clinicality of it. Cows were better than sheep though. When the sheep came through there was something more startled to them, a horror in the number. It was more of a cull and the sheep seemed always to sense thatwith this contagious and wide fear. He’d heard someone say they killed twenty-five thousand sheep a week here. That didn’t seem possible.
    When the bigger animals came through the pen the sound was more that of a long queue. It reminded Grzegorz of waiting on the gangplank of the ferry when they came over, finally off the cramped bus after hours of travel. There was the odd sound of metal clanking, as now and then the cattle brushed the railings of the four-meter walkway. They didn’t have the panicked, startled look of the lambs. They were droll. There was a checkpoint, and as the cows came through one of the men stopped each animal and checked its ear to see that the tag and passport corresponded and then moved it along up the ramp.
    They came up docile and oblivious, with the kind of calm factuality of big, heavy animals, and one by one they stepped into the kill pen.
    There was the grating sound of the metal end door as it slid up and the cow went in, then it clanged down and the animal, unable to move in the small pen, stayed calm. The first metal plate rose up onto the animal’s nose and it seemed to sit down and crumple, as if it had chosen to rest for a while. Then the second plate came up onto the animal’s chest and the cow shook for a few seconds then went still.
    It was the strange, detached process of the electricity that Grzegorz could not get used to, the passivity of thewhole thing. Then the side door of the pen slid up and the animal fell on its side and rolled out onto the counter in front of him.
    â€œI can’t do this,” thought Grzegorz. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this. Not for what I’m getting back from it.” The blood from the animal was washing into the gutters and into the drains. He thought about the rich scents of his grandparents’ farm and the intimacy of it and of the mists coming with the cow’s breath in the early morning. Of the humble pace. “That wasn’t enough,” he thought. “That could never have been enough. We could never have kept it. Not the way the world’s gone now. It was never enough anyway.” He thought of the long, flat, difficult land.
    His wife had been dropped to two shifts at the factory but they still had to pay the week up front to keep the places in childcare that the agency organized. It’s oversubscribed, they said. You can’t pick and choose. He was working all the time he could. “I have to get ahead,” he thought. “I just have to get my nose ahead then we can move on to the next step. We can get out of the shared house and have some room of our own.”
    Around him, as the carcass disappeared, he could hear the men sharpening their knives. Then he heard the metal scrape and clang, and another animal went into the kill pen.

    Hold steered the boat in to the quay and the man was there waiting for him. The group of seagulls that had followed him in stopped at the harbor mouth as if there was some line there, invisible. He could feel the boat surf a little in the swell into the harbor mouth.
    There were a few people walking about and you could hear the bigger traffic going past on the road even over the engine of the boat. It tocked and splashed as he slowed it up and the smell of it came to him as he cranked the propeller into reverse to stop the boat and then idled it and threw up the