Driftwood Deeds(3)

“Is it just for looking or are we going down there?” I asked pointing at the little rocky outcrop to our right that seemed like the easiest way down and into the thicket of old sea rubbish. I could be adventurous for an afternoon even if it was just to charm my interviewee.

I walked ahead, clung to rocks and carefully felt for the outcrop in Paul Archer’s oversized Wellingtons. It was easier than I had feared and my heart leaped when he looked down at me with a satisfied grin before he followed.

“It’s the biggest treasure trove around,” he explained now that we were picking a path between upturned rowboats in various states of decay. Differently colored nets were still the most prominent of sights but on closer inspection, they were intricately interwoven with rough rope that snaked along the ground, sometimes vanishing into the sand, never to emerge again. We saw rusty anchors, cans of all descriptions, gloves and boots and windbreakers, buoys in different sizes and colors like so many beach balls lining the sand. Over, under and between everything was the ever present sight of driftwood—some new and jarring, some old, sanded down and beautiful.

“What is this place?” I managed to ask, a little afraid of stepping into something sharp, even as it all started to exude a certain unexpected charm.

“What used to be a small fishing community,” he replied with a shrug and squatted down to pull on a particularly impressive knotted and frayed rope. The beach clung to it harder than he could pull and he gave up. “Stopped being profitable years and years ago. Most left, others kept it up until retirement, nobody cared what they left behind. The rest was done by high tides, storms, a fire here and there,” still on the ground, he pointed to the blackened ruins of a small cabin in the distance, “and, of course, people like me: scavengers. Some of us are less respectful than others.”

Emerging from the ground with a flat, almost circular shell, Paul Archer smiled again. “It’s where I get most of the raw materials I need—for stories and anything else I like to do.”

“Like your furniture and all the decorations?” I remembered the knotted driftwood coat hanger, the strange wood and sea-glass lampshade and all the other things I’d seen in his cottage. He nodded and gave me a revealing smile.

“I like ravaged things. Things with history—and I don’t mean a history of standing in someone’s house for years before some antiques dealer snatched them at an estate sale.”

“A history a little... darker?” I asked with a half-smile, wishing he’d let me take the tape recorder.

“Something like that.”

Trying not to grin, I picked my way through the rubble towards a small ship lying half on its side in the rubble. Her name had faded into a sunset of rust, a color-spectrum from white to deep, dried-blood brown. My hand found its way into the rough surface and a little rust came off with my touch. In a hundred years, it would be covered in it, in a thousand the decay would have scattered all these little atoms around the beach, into the ocean, around the world in a gargantuan circle of entropy.

“That’s why I picked you,” he went on and I turned around. I rubbed my fingers on my blazer and frowned. “For the interview, and why I brought you here.”

I nodded, confused, and aware that my face likely betrayed it. Of course. The interview.

“It is quite clear from your reviews and the way you write about characters that you have that same appreciation.”

There was a sudden impulse to deny it. I hadn’t seen anything, had just forged ahead down onto the beach to prove him right about me. But then I looked back at the ship and then down at my feet and shrugged. On the ground, just in front of my clownishly huge boot, lay something shiny, just distracting enough to spare me an answer when I bent down to pick it up. It was a piece of glittering metal, light, thin and about the length of my thumb. Fixed to its base was a three-pronged hook, curving upwards in still wickedly sharp looking, barbed points.

“Careful with that,” Paul said quietly, “they can give you nasty infections.”

With a little rubbing, dry sand and earth came off revealing the makeshift fish-eye on the side. It proved all too easy to turn me into a fellow treasure hunter on no-man’s-land beach.





III





Back in his cottage, he served more tea and led me into the small living room. It smelled like wood and leather and the ocean. I couldn’t see any of the living room features or furniture I had come to expect in post-student living arrangements, though. There was no couch and no television, no game console hidden away in some IKEA sideboard. There were more stacks of books instead, a small fireplace and art on the walls, none of which was framed or really went together—more inspiration board than comfortable living room walls. In the center stood a low coffee table on a threadbare oriental rug, around it were placed a couple of leather ottomans to sit on. Paul Archer pulled one out for me, I slipped out of his boots and two layers of socks and then lowered myself down, careful to keep my skirt over my thighs and not to open my legs too wide. When I looked down on the table, I could see through the glass surface into an array of beach treasures he kept in the metal box below. There was more sea glass like the pieces in my pocket we had found between the rubble, but these had special shapes or colors; there were old coins and shells, corral and shark teeth.