Everything I Found on the Beach by Cynan Jones Page A

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 thedraw 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.
    The body was by his face now. “Christ,” Hold was thinking. “I guess here it is.” He could see the man heaped in the boat. The man wore all black, or so it looked in that light, with a big puffer jacket that gave him a comfortable, sleeping look. He shook him. He thought again about the rifle on the shore. He leaned as far as he could and punched the leg. Hold grabbed the collar andpulled the man and sat him up and the head came up and sat itself up as if against a pillow and it was like the broken neck of a bird. He had the high cheekbones and wide face of a Slav.
    The boat seemed to be suspended in that patch of water, and the two men were going up and down with the swell. Hold called at the man and then pulled his ear and just stood there holding the boat knowing the man was dead. He just tried to hold on, with the stinging water hitting him, and it was like his ability to make a decision was in the same suspended place as the boat.
    What the hell had happened here? A scalloper? He knew that there were crew from all over, perhaps going between ships for something. The boat was bare and without markings. Had he run out of fuel? Hold stretched to the motor pump and squeezed the bulb and felt some resistance that meant there was a little fuel at least, and then saw the can and tried to reach it with an outstretched finger. It was full.
    In the light from the headlamp the face looked very white and flat. “I have to get him ashore,” thought Hold. “I have to find something more from myself and get him ashore.”
    He felt this sudden massive emptying tiredness