He wanted to live by the sea

He wanted to live by the sea.

The house stood solitary and vertical, jutting out both natural and constructed, a solid moment of skyline against a flat horizon of sea and sand and grass. A single tremor on a graph, the one yellow incisor nestling in a tramp’s otherwise bleeding and empty gums, someone’s flicked middle finger swearing to the clouds that formed in spiral galaxies out to sea, and to the birds that hovered and circled around them.

Rising up in three storeys, it lended itself to appear a little too tall and unstable. It looked over both the beach and the flats and grasslands that preceded it, like a lighthouse in miniature or a model always about to fall. It was cancerous and abandoned inside, in the way a tree having been struck by lightning and dead within, still stands upright without falling. The salt that hung invisible in the air here had eaten at timber and paintwork long neglected before his arrival, and the once all white house was chipped and faded. Inside he had found hundreds of old tv guides and newspapers, faded and disintegrating they had been placed over holes and cracks in walls and floors.

A small wooden boat sat out front, holes like shotgun blasts in her chest, lying amongst the long dead detritus of fishing nets and cages. Threads in the nets had unravelled, been pecked at by birds and baked in the sun. They were slowly falling back down into the sands, returning back into he compounds and molecules of the beach.

He had arrived on his motorbike in autumn with just one bag. Having bought the house with the money from the will, he had sold everything else. The beach; deserted at the best times was blessed with biting winds coming off the surf, it was never warm enough for sunbathing, and as such served nobody other than the odd dog walker or bird watcher. He watched them, the dogwalkers, early in the mornings whilst boiling water for coffee. They came in their wax jackets and gloves, throwing sticks and driftwood for wiry spaniels and jack russels to fetch and return. There were sometimes couples, but the far majority were alone with their dogs, walking at a strange steady and content pace. A silent commute across the sand and rocks, dog leading man on it’s own invisible path, allowing him to wander and look at things beneath his feet or further away.

The season was all change and impermeance, days of rain and catching water dripping through broken beams in old saucepans. Of sleeping in a red sleeping bag shaped like sarcophagus on the floor of a bed-less room. Weeks of surviving on noodles and ground coffee. Of thunder storms that rose out of the ground and ripped the sky highlighter pink and purple, like an old t-shirt running in the wash, staining all the clouds and reflecting in the oscilloscope waves underneath. Wind would rattle sills and loose pains of glass at night, and each morning he would wake to sunlight that would reveal more holes and things to put right and fix with his home. He lived for storms, for getting up every morning after they had passed, with the house not having fallen or burned down. For going up onto the roof, or onto the sand, trying to catch that occasional bolt of lightning that would smash onto the quill ink black sea, reflecting in both water and sky at once, a giant root or the mis-stroke of some luminous pen.

Throughout the autumn and into winter he worked. He sanded down the walls and bought more timber. He painted and plastered and worked. He plugged holes with sealant, and cashed in favours with locals who fixed roofs and staircases. And after, he would sit on the step of the porch drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, in a midwinter so bitter that the beer could be left outside and would remain perfectly cold. Watching a sun fall down through it’s degrees of descent, a slow motion parachutist or a far off crash landing.

He saw through Christmas alone for the first time. Collecting and drying driftwood before mixing it with charcoal, six months of newspapers, firelighters and kerosene; then building it all up into a small pyramid in a hollow of dry sand, before setting it alight at midnight. Watching glowing red sparks rising and circling like dust caught in the shaft of sunlight through a window, he thought that this was what he had wanted when he had bought the house. This sitting and waiting under a black sheet stabbed with a pin, the light shining through all the holes. Waiting next to his house; half built and eternally suspect, liable to let in draughts and soak up rainwater and salt, this house that when having spent all day in the sun even began to smell of the sea itself. But it was still his own, and the renovation and the fixing and the painting of walls and the wood and the plaster, was - he realised - halfway done. Both he and the house still stood upright, the house for the last sixty years had managed, he less so, but they had become intertwined like the ropes on the sand or the bits of glass and metal washed upon the beach, and upon inspection had been smoothed over by the constancy of the waves. They were both like the wrecks revealed by low tides, the beams of wood and cuts of metal oxidised and ionised by a life underwater. Now colonised by fish and barnacles they had been transformed into homes themselves, they were slowly being rendered apart and made new by water and currents that had once crossed continents.

By the summer the house would be complete, he thought, and he would paint it all over white, outside and in. Then people would come to visit, ten, twenty or more. And they would light a bonfire that would dwarf this one, play guitar and drink beer on the porch. And there would be stories, both real and false, ones told that had not been told before amongst friends. Then they would fall asleep one by one in their sleeping bags, outside on the deck or on the sand, criss crossed like fallen corpses shaped into x’s that had been dropped from aeroplanes. Except the light would finally wake them; tired and with sand and salt in their hair, they would rise, collect their bottles and empties, and watch the sea crawl back up the sand and reclaim the ashes of the bonfire they had made.