217 Babel Street | The Beach
Death should be abrupt. It should just come in a miscalculation on a slippery bend, an underwrapped baby in unexpected temperatures, a chest pain on the stairs, in a cack-handed overdose. Oh fuck it. We have been allowed foresight, and it stinks. Didn’t the Greeks believe that knowing the date of your own death was the greatest curse that could be visited on mankind? And now fucking look at us all. You shouldn’t be allowed the time to get your affairs in order. It shouldn’t be bloody allowed. People who get their affairs in order trade their fury at losing control of their own lives for the solace of controlling the lives of others; the things the ones who love them must do to satisfy the dead.
As he digs his final hole on the beach, Harry’s thoughts are something like this, not quite as precise, but every bit as resentful.
Have you ever tried to dig holes in a shingle beach, pebbles constantly backfilling the depression? Bad enough in daylight, but it feels a senseless thing to do in a cold wind at 2am, tears on cheeks.
On previous occasions, he’d dug out of love. He’d dug holes to cheer Margaret, a pathetic to try to cheat death. Now he digs because all that failed, came to bugger all, and she is dead and she has left her instructions for him.
He stops, feels in his jacket pocket for the box. She loved games. She loved hiding things.