For years Phillip Tennent lived at the edge of the sea, where artefacts were washed up every day. Scavengers, professional and otherwise, came and went. Turnover was higher than you’d expect given the relaxed lifestyle, the constant good weather, the ease with which some sort of existence could be pursued.
Most of the beachcombers took away the first item they could easily carry and sold it on elsewhere. If you had contacts in the hinterland, there was no doubt about how slickly that could be done. But the hard core like Tennent hung on, out there dawn and dusk, shine or shine, throwing the small ones back, waiting for an item that would give them pause for thought. They were committed. They could be seen from orbit. Their living structures glowed at night a hundred miles up and down the coast. By day you saw that temporary qualities had defined over the decades a permanent aesthetic: bothies and benders made of whitened sticks; mirrors and bits of rag; almost anything the tide left, although to incorporate an artefact would have been considered bad taste as much as bad luck. The beachcombers had their limits. Their superstitions gave the tideline its social structures and distinctive quality on the palate.
Further back from the shore, the hinterland was dark, a little more threatening, with its flattened hashmark of streets and its differing sets of rules. There was a lot of poured cement and half-functioning neon, a lot of territoriality; you had to talk your way through the bars, blockhouses and abandoned car parks to get your item out to market.
Coming up from the intertidal, out of the dusty salt wind with his latest find under one arm, Tennent met a woman on her way down. She looked at the object – which was at that time about the size of a baby, and which he had wrapped in some bleached-out rags – and nodded with a kind of measured approval. They studied the horizon together for a moment, and she asked him what condition the sea was in down there that day.
‘Eventually it’ll turn into speech,’ Tennent said, without knowing why.
They both laughed.
She was carrying a week’s groceries in a bag for life with a broken handle. No one was eating much down there. He thought he’d seen her before, living mostly on her own in a hut a hundred or so metres south of his.
‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘Take anything you want of mine. If you need anything, it’s yours.’
Loose white sand blew into the air and whirled around at the edge of the sea like a fog. They turned to face it with similar body language – expectant, alert, anxiety tempered with what could only be described as longing. For a moment Tennent had a sense that something huge was approaching over the water; something fast, which hadn’t been there – or indeed anywhere – a minute or two before. But it never arrived, and the woman shrugged.
‘You’ll be back,’ she predicted. ‘No, I won’t.’
They laughed again and she walked away towards the tide across the perfect sand, the sound her feet made reminding him suddenly of the sound of feet on snow. She waved without looking back.
*
The strip was another kind of tideline, facing both the ocean and the dry land, the way they always do.
Tennent had a relative there, an aunt of his called Marnie, a painter who occupied an old terraced townhouse on an elbow of raised ground at the outer edge of the town, where the cross streets turned to dirt tracks and fused themselves into the dissected chalk plateau inland. By day, you could look out to sea from the top floor of the house, or, landward, across the curve of a narrow little estuary, at mudbanks, a bridge, an island, levels of water according to the state of the tide, and on the far bank, ruderal scrub from which emerged the remains of buildings. At night, you chose between the faltering neon messages of the Strip, or, in the other direction, darkness.
Marnie had washed up there from London a generation ago, when the Strip was still a thriving arts community, before the crashed airliner raised its buckled starboard wing like a temporary modernist shelter across the gardens on the other side of the road. Seventy years old now, still in some way the repository of Tennent’s adolescence and the social structures which had supported it, she seemed lively and determined one minute, precarious the next. Fragility had set in behind the skin of her cheekbones, but she still made art. Her eyes remained clear and she retained an unimpatient sense of her own worth.
‘It’s sad to think,’ he remembered her saying when he was seventeen or eighteen, ‘that people have stopped making full use of you as a human being. You feel as if you’ve let them down by somehow not being persuasive enough.’
Now she stood stiffly at the door and for a moment it seemed to Tennent as if she might not invite him in.
‘What’s that you have with you?’ she said.
In the confusion following the arrival of the iGhetti, he had found his way to her along the coast as if blindfold, relying on some internal compass of nostalgia. As they emerged from the months of collective trauma that blunted the country’s understanding of what had happened, unsure where – or perhaps even who – they were, the two of them had been able to do little but sit and talk. It had been a comfort to rehearse their memories of his childhood holidays in Marnie’s house when the world was still good, still intact – ‘Still blown,’ as she had put it, ‘like a stream of bubbles, by all that money.’ But in the years since he went to live on the tideline, things had changed between them. For him, the house’s value lay in its proximity to the sea, and in its basement – essentially a garage, with good lighting and an inspection pit – which connected to the coast road along a short steep concrete ramp. He kept some of his belongings there, and called in only rarely to check on their condition.
‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s just something I picked up.’ ‘But now it’s in my house.’
‘You haven’t even seen it,’ he said. ‘All you’ve seen is a pile of rags.’
‘We agreed you wouldn’t bring anything here. It’s more than what you see: it’s growing. It’s grown in the minutes you’ve been standing at my door wondering whether to knock.’ They stared at one another, both rendered uncertain by the strength of her feelings. Eventually she stood away to let him enter, adding: ‘I never go near the sea. I know what you do down there.’
‘It’s just some kind of flotsam,’ Tennent reassured her. ‘Or is it jetsam? I can never remember which is which, can you?’
‘You’re not a teenager any more, Phillip.’
Later, she gave him baked beans on toast. Squalls swung in across the north bank and obscured the river. They sat looking out of the window, listening to the rain and talking in low voices. Evening came on; behind the remains of the summer house, the tide could be heard rushing up the estuary. The artefact lay under its wraps in a corner, shifting occasionally as they talked. Every so often, Marnie glanced at it and shuddered, but after a while, appearing to lose interest, she closed her eyes and fell silent. Tennent got to his feet.
‘I’m just going down to the garage,’ he said.
At that, she clutched his arm. ‘One of the things I find myself thinking about,’ she whispered, ‘is how wonderful it would be to fly.’
He stared down at her. He wasn’t sure if she was actually awake.
‘This morning,’ she went on, ‘my kitchen doorway was crawling with ants. A bird came in to eat them. It was – what? – one of those little birds with a red breast. Such an opportunist!’ The creature had whirred in and out of the kitchen all morning, she said, making itself quite at home. It was on the doormat, on the refrigerator, on the back of a chair, cocking its dark little eye sidewise at everything. ‘Sharp as its own beak! Now, tell me: what kind of bird is that?’ Memory loss was both a curse and a blessing to her. Sometimes she offered it with a smile – not as an explanation but as a habitation, the place she was speaking from – at others, it simply left her impatient. ‘A robin, Marnie. You’ve always had robins in the garden.’ She nodded thoughtfully; then, after a pause, said in a completely different tone of voice: ‘I have my own problems, Phillip. I’ve had to work quite hard to keep this place. I’ve sometimes had to be tougher than I wanted.’
Down in the garage he pulled the dust cover off the bonnet of the vehicle he kept there. Its patchy, matt grey bodywork absorbed the strip light and didn’t give much back. Everything still seemed dry and good. Tennent smiled. He fetched the escape kit he kept in a tarpaulin duffle under some carefully curated rubbish in the corner; while he was stowing the bag in the boot of the car, he thought he heard the front door open. ‘Marnie?’ he called. ‘Marnie!’ When no answer came, he went back up into the house to collect the artefact. ‘Marnie? I’m going now.’
He thought she had fallen asleep again, but she was waiting for him in the hall by the front door. The door hung open. Damp night air was blowing in.
‘I set it free,’ she said. ‘It didn’t want to stay and – Phillip? – I didn’t want it here.’
‘Christ!’ said Tennent. ‘Free? What are you talking about?’ And when she looked away from him: ‘Which direction did it go? Did you see?’
She shrugged. ‘I know what you’re doing down there.’
She wouldn’t say what she meant by that, and he returned to the basement, where he got into the car and started it. It wasn’t until much later that he discovered that the tarpaulin bag had been opened since his last visit, and one of his pistols was missing.
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From The End of Everything by M John Harrison. Copyright © 2026 by M. John Harrison. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.