Free The Dig by Cynan Jones

its neck and it let go of the dog which was whining and bleedingand dragging itself pathetically hurt around the floor of the pit. And there was a crazed sound from the men then.
    First dog, called the man. Any bets?
    The tongs had been welded for the job and were seven or eight feet long and they dragged out the badger and held it. While the bets went down they tore out its front claws. Then they held up its head and held its jaw open with a jemmy and smashed the front teeth. The badger was bloodied and struggling and the whole forty pounds of it trying to resist but the three or four men held it down while they did this and then they put it back in the pit.
    The dogs were incensed now and in that deafening noise and light the big man looked down at the badger with a slow glee. One of the men had knelt on its back while they stretched out its legs and used the fencing pliers to tear out the claws and some of the claws had splintered and split rather than come free.
    The man on its back had knelt hard on it while it struggled and grunted and humphed underneath him and he seemed to get something carnal and delicious from that. There was a steady buzz. There was a bloody smell in the room now.

    He felt a well of company. The group’s hungry cruelty seemed familial and safe to him and he felt for a moment his desires were not outlawed amongst them. He made their shouts internally, through his clenched teeth.
    And then something changed. It came back at him.
    The dogs were in cages at the far wall and the barred cages were in a row. People’s skin under the brutal white light looked unnatural.
    It was the gangness of it and the group of men and his outsideness of it; and he remembered the jail. There, staring into the pit, a brief dizziness came.
    It’s that police, he said. There was a holding to the way he talked to himself.
    After an hour or so the men were drunk and baying as a pack. The badger could hardly fight anymore. Its chest heaved. It lay stupidly in the pit. A beer can was thrown in for encouragement, then another.
    When finally it stirred, they put the dogs in again.

chapter one

    D ANIEL SAT IN the pickup in the car park looking out over the sea and he couldn’t bring himself to open the door. He had meant to park in town but had driven through the sheer activity of cars and people with an alienated numbness and had gone on to the beach car park. The school was out on lunch and there were kids everywhere in the small town and it was all too much for him. He sat there staring out over the gray, heavy water.
    He had realized that morning that there was no more toilet paper and could hardly believe that this would be the thing to drive him out.
    People were walking their dogs along the seafront. They looked red faced, braced against the tide somehow with the gulls lifting and dropping over the water behind them. Cars were parked around him and people sat in them drinking from flasks and watching the waves, the windows misting with condensation, and it was visible to him the quiet companionship of the old couples there, their simple togetherness act of getting out of the house to go for a drive and watch the waves awhile. They seemedto have the same comfortable look together as he had felt with her in the shed when it rained. He felt the great missingness of her then, watching the sea.
    He’d had nothing substantial to eat for days. He was becoming conscious of his cheeks, as if they were somehow sucked in like they are in the cold, and there was a continual hollow sickness in his stomach. His teeth had begun to hurt.
    There was a much greater breeze here than inland, and flecks of froth came off the waves into the wind. He thought about walking into the waves until he disappeared. It was the picture of himself old and alone. He felt he would be about as substantial as those flecks. When she asked him if he loved her, he had often said and said sincerely that he could not imagine being old without