He ignored them. He could understand their language, but he pretended not to. He knew that the ever-changing population of the parktown inland called him the tree-man, because they liked to imagine he had put down roots like his wheel-less shack had. He was usually out when they came to the shack, anyway. They lost interest in it fairly quickly, he found; they went to the shore line to shriek when they got their feet wet, and throw stones at the waves, and build little cars in the sand; then they climbed back into their home-cars, and went sputtering and creaking back inland, lights flashing, horns honking, leaving him alone again.
He found dead seabirds all the time, and the washed-up carcases of sea mammals every few days. Beachweed and sea-flowers lay strewn like party streamers over the sands, and – when they dried – rippled in the wind and slowly unravelled, finally disintegrating to be blown out to sea or far inland in bright clouds of colour and decay.
Once he found a dead sailor, lying washed and bloated by the ocean, extremities nibbled, one leg moving to the slow foamy beat of the sea. He stood and looked at the man for a while, then emptied his canvas bag of its flotsam booty, tore it flat, and gently covered the man’s head and upper torso with it. The tide was ebbing, so he did not drag the body further up the beach. He walked to the parktown, for once not pushing his little wooden cart of tide treasure before him, and told the sheriff there.
The day he found the little chair he ignored it, but it was still there when he walked back past that stretch of beach on his return. He went on, and the next day combed in the other direction towards a different flat horizon, and thought the gale the following night would have removed it, but found it there again, the next day, and so took it, and in his shack repaired it with twine and a new leg made from a washed-up branch, and put it by the door of the shack, but never sat in it.
A woman came to the shack, every five or six days. He’d met her in parktown, soon after he’d arrived, on the third or fourth day of a drinking binge. He paid her in the mornings, always more than he thought she expected, because he knew she was frightened by the strange, unmoving shack,
She’d talk to him about her old loves and old hopes and new hopes and he half listened, knowing she thought he didn’t really understand what she was saying. When he talked it was in another language, and the story was even less believeable. The woman would lie close to him, her head on his smooth and unscarred chest, while he talked into the dark air above the bed, his voice not echoing in the wood-flimsy space of the shack, and he’d tell her, in words she would never understand, about the magic land where everyone was a wizard and nobody ever had terrible choices to make, and guilt was almost unknown, and poverty and degradation were things you had to teach children about to let them understand how fortunate they were, and where no hearts broke.
He told her about a man, a warrior, who’d worked for the wizard doing things they could or would not bring themselves to do, and who eventually could work for them no more, because in the course of some driven, personal campaign to rid himself of a burden he would not admit to – and even the wizards had not discovered – he found, in the end, that he had only added to that weight, and his ability to bear was not without limit after all.
And he told her, sometimes, about another time and another place, far away in space and far away in time and even further away in history, where four children had played together in a huge and wonderful garden, but seen their idyll destroyed with gunfire, and of the boy who became a youth and then a man, but who for ever after carried more than love for a girl in his heart. Years later, he would tell her, a small but terrible war was waged in this faraway place, and the garden itself laid waste. (And, eventually, the man did lose the girl from his heart.) Finally, when he had almost talked himself to sleep, and the night was at its darkest, and the girl was long since gone to the land of dreams, sometimes he would whisper to her about a great warship, a great metal warship, becalmed in stone but still dreadful and awful and potent, and about the two sisters who were the balance of that warship’s fate, and about their own fates, and about the Chair, and the Chairmaker.
Then he would sleep, and when he woke, each time, the girl and the money would be gone.
He would turn back to the dark tar-paper walls then, and seek sleep, but not find it, and so rise and dress and go out, and comb the horizon-wide beach again, under the blue skies or the black skies, beneath the wheeling seabirds screaming their meaningless songs to the sea and the brine-charged breeze.
The weather varied, and because he’d never bothered to find out, he never knew what season it was, but the weather swung between warm and bright and cold and dull, and sometimes sleet came, chilling him, and winds blew around the dark hut, keening through the gaps in the planks and the tar-paper, and stirring the slack disturbances of sand on the floor inside the shack like abraded memories.
Sand would build up inside the hut, blown in from one direction or another, and he would scoop it carefully, throw it out the door to the wind like an offering, and wait for the next storm.
He always suspected there was a pattern to these slow sandy inundations, but he could not bring himself to try to work out what that pattern was. Anyway, every few days he had to trundle his little wooden cart into the parktown, and sell his sea-begotten wares, and collect money, and so food, and so the girl that came to the shack every five days or six.
The parktown changed every time he went there, streets being created or evaporating as the home cars arrived or departed; it all depended where people chose to park. There were some fairly static landmarks, like the sheriff’s compound and the fuel stockade and the smithy wagon and the area where the light-engineering caravans set up shop, but even those changed slowly, and all about them was in constant flux, so that the geography of the parktown was never the same on two visits. He drew a secret satisfaction from this inchoate permanence, and did not hate going there as much as he pretended.
The track there was rutted and soft, and never got any shorter; he always hoped the random shiftings of the parktown might slowly draw its bustle and light closer to him, but it never happened, and he would console himself with the thought that if the parktown came closer then so would the people, and their bumbling inquisitiveness.
There was a girl in the parktown, the daughter of one of the dealers he traded with, who seemed to care for him more than the others; she made him drinks and brought him sweetmeats from her father’s caravan, and seldom said anything, but slipped the food to him, and smiled shyly and walked quickly off again, her pet seabird – flightless, half of each wing cut off – waddling after her, squawking.
He said nothing to her that he didn’t have to say, and always averted his eyes from her slim brown shape. He did not know what the courting laws were in this place, and while accepting the drink and food always seemed the easiest course, he did not want to intrude any more than he had to in the lives of these people. He told himself she and her family would move away soon, and accepted the offerings she brought him with a nod but no smile or word, and did not always finish what he was given. He noticed there was a young man who always seemed to be around whenever the girl served him, and he caught the boy’s eyes a few times, and knew that the youth wanted the girl, and looked away each time.
The young man came after him one day when he was on his way back to the shack within the dunes. The youth walked in front of him and tried to make him talk; hit him on the shoulder, shouting into his face. He feigned incomprehension. The young man drew lines in the sand in front of him which he duly plodded over with his cart and stood looking, blinking at the youth, both hands still on the handles of the cart, while the boy shouted louder and drew another line on the sand between them.