Carver Johnston lived in a little cottage, close to the sea. It had been a preconceived idyll, a sort of laundry list that he'd used to check off when he was younger -- the ultimate item of ownership, a little cottage close to the sea. The little cottage was on the outskirts of town, and nobody told him that the soothing noise of waves pounding against the rocks soon became a lonely gnawing and grinding sound that kept you up at night. The ocean churned and groaned. There were no little lapping waves delicately licking at the beach. That had all been a lie.
Every morning he put on his coat and he walked along the beach: he crunched the rough spinifex grass that grew on the dunes beneath his boots and felt a little vaguely bad for it, the way he felt vaguely bad when he drowned a spider or killed an ant. Karmic shame? Carver always dwelled on whatever life he had just ended for sixty seconds' more than anyone else ever dwelled on a dead moth, rinsing it away out of sight and out of mind. Gone down the unfriendly sink pipe, a soapy funeral barge to follow as he bleached his basin. He hated dead things: he hated killing things. He had picked to build his cottage on the one beach where whales came to commit suicide, and in the summer went with his rainslicker and his rubber boots to haplessly spray the morbidly depressed beached creatures with water until they could be towed back into the ocean. He would stay with the other volunteers until his hands were raw and he was tired, but he would sleep easy that night.
He was very alone in the cottage, and life was loud. The clock ticked like a percussion instrument. The ocean creaked outside his windows. When it rained, a thousand tiny lead weights exploded into watery shrapnel on his roof, keeping him wide-eyed and awake. He sometimes thought about getting a dog, but worried about it.
English had not been Carver's first language. When he had been learning it, all that time ago with a man who purported to be his worst enemy but had slid up the scale to only friend, he'd neatly set it out in his head. Carver learnt things by rote, by logical order. It was how he lived his life: the cottage by the sea had been unusual frivolousness, really. But he'd learned English and so had A -- so had his friend, and they had both one night over a beer picked their favourite words: his friend's had been incipient. Carver had said his had been gossamer, but in the truth of his heart his favourite word was surrender.
He liked it, he liked its parts: render, to surrender, like failure was being torn to pieces. He liked the sound. Victory had a hard-edged face.
When you lived alone in an idyllic seaside cottage, there were a few things it seemed apt to keep: a diary was his. Sometimes he worried that a storm would carry him and his cottage into the sea -- not that he worried about this as an inevitable end, but that he would be washed away with no sight or sound and no footprints left behind; but the weight of his words in his journal would mean there would be a sodden book left behind as a clue. Not that he wrote anything in it that meant anything. Friday. Dinner -- corn dahl soup. No cigarettes. The sea was loud today. A little sad.
And at night he took his walk again, as he did twice a day, along the black oily stretch of the sea at nighttime. No tourists went on his beach and there were no lights for miles; once you passed out the head and out of sight of his house it was as though nobody else in the universe existed, no electricity and so dark you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. Back in the city, if you'd fallen over you would have come into contact with a light switch. Carver liked the sensation of being swallowed up by that inscrutable dark.
He was a little crazy now, when all was said and done. That seemed frivolous too.
