For years, Phillip Tennent lived at the edge of the sea where scavengers gathered daily. While many casual beachcombers quickly sold off items to contacts in the hinterland, the hard core like Tennent hung on through dawn and dusk, throwing back smaller pieces while waiting for items that demanded deeper thought. Their living structures glowed at night, and decades of temporary qualities had coalesced into a permanent aesthetic built from whitened sticks, mirrors, and bits of rag.
Coming up from the intertidal zone with a find wrapped in bleached-out rags, Tennent encountered a woman carrying a week’s groceries in a bag for life with a broken handle. They discussed the condition of the sea and briefly shared a sense that something huge and fast was approaching over the water before it vanished. Leaving her behind with an offer to take anything of his, Tennent navigated toward the strip to find his aunt Marnie, a painter who occupied an old terraced townhouse on an outer edge of town.
Marnie had washed up from London a generation ago when the strip was still a thriving arts community, before a crashed airliner raised its buckled starboard wing across nearby gardens. Now seventy years old, she maintained her artistic practice despite the fragility that had set in. In the confusion following the arrival of the iGhetti, Tennent had found his way back to her home, relying on an internal compass of nostalgia as they emerged from months of collective trauma.
Relations between the two had changed since Tennent moved to the tideline, though he utilized the basement of her townhouse—a garage with an inspection pit connecting to the coast road via a concrete ramp—to store some of his belongings. Standing at her door with his latest wrapped find, Tennent faced Marnie’s immediate resistance. Despite her initial reluctance, she eventually let him enter, noting that the wrapped object appeared to be growing even as they stood outside.
Later, Marnie served baked beans on toast as squalls swung in across the north bank to obscure the river. As they sat looking out the window and talking in low voices while rain fell, the mysterious wrapped artefact shifted occasionally in the corner.