For years Phillip Tennent lived at the edge of the sea, where artefacts were washed up every day. Scavengers, professional and otherwise, came and went. Turnover was higher than you’d expect given the relaxed lifestyle, the constant good weather, the ease with which some sort of existence could be pursued.

Most of the beachcombers took away the first item they could easily carry and sold it on elsewhere. If you had contacts in the hinterland, there was no doubt about how slickly that could be done. But the hard core like Tennent hung on, out there dawn and dusk, shine or shine, throwing the small ones back, waiting for an item that would give them pause for thought. They were committed. They could be seen from orbit. Their living structures glowed at night a hundred miles up and down the coast. By day you saw that temporary qualities had defined over the decades a permanent aesthetic: bothies and benders made of whitened sticks; mirrors and bits of rag; almost anything the tide left, although to incorporate an artefact would have been considered bad taste as much as bad luck. The beachcombers had their limits. Their superstitions gave the tideline its social structures and distinctive quality on the palate.

Further back from the shore, the hinterland was dark, a little more threatening, with its flattened hashmark of streets and its differing sets of rules. There was a lot of poured cement and half-functioning neon, a lot of territoriality; you had to talk your way through the bars, blockhouses and abandoned car parks to get your item out to market.

Coming up from the intertidal, out of the dusty salt wind with his latest find under one arm, Tennent met a woman on her way down. She looked at the object – which was at that time about the size of a baby, and which he had wrapped in some bleached-out rags – and nodded with a kind of measured approval. They studied the horizon together for a moment, and she asked him what condition the sea was in down there that day.

‘Eventually it’ll turn into speech,’ Tennent said, without knowing why.

She was carrying a week’s groceries in a bag for life with a broken handle. No one was eating much down there. He thought he’d seen her before, living mostly on her own in a hut a hundred or so metres south of his.

‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘Take anything you want of mine. If you need anything, it’s yours.’

Loose white sand blew into the air and whirled around at the edge of the sea like a fog. They turned to face it with similar body language – expectant, alert, anxiety tempered with what could only be described as longing. For a moment Tennent had a sense that something huge was approaching over the water; something fast, which hadn’t been there – or indeed anywhere – a minute or two before. But it never arrived, and the woman shrugged.