BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
I found him on the third of December, on the jagged slate below the harbour wall. W12 – so-called for the zinc marked ring some do-gooding knave in sandals had clamped to his leg, turning a sovereign into a specimen. The tide had receded, leaving him arranged there with terrible finality: a crumpled monograph of salt and hunger, one wing extended in a last, futile argument with physics. The fierce and cantankerous intelligence that had once conducted itself directly into my mind was absent. In its place: a silence so complete it seemed to swallow the very crash of the waves. In life, he had been vast—a white tempest of want. In death, he was a clutch of feathers, startlingly slight against the indifferent stone.
Our acquaintance was a brief seminar in applied avarice, conducted through a one-way telepathy of sublime, single-minded greed. He first appeared at my Cornish window in May, not as a petitioner but as a quartermaster presenting his credentials. His consciousness arrived before him—a series of crisp, imperious impressions: an audit of my larder, an appraisal of my crumbs. He evaluated a leftover baguette with the discernment of a critic, his psychic signature tinged with profound disappointment at its lack of structural integrity or butter. He would broadcast vignettes of his reign: the tactical dismantling of a pasty crust on a windy bench, the majestic, contemptuous theft of a toast soldier from my daughter’s very fingers. His existence was a relentless, joyous calculus of acquisition. He wasn’t merely hungry; he was a philosopher-king of appetite, committed to the ontological principle of more.
In his way, he spoke of the winter sea as a ‘lean distributor’, of land-dwellers as ‘soft patrons’. My windowsill was merely Station Seven on his coastal patrol. I was not a host, but a reliable tributary state. The psychic echo of his presence was one of furious, vibrant entitlement—a feathered embodiment of pure, unsentimental want. Save for one deranged ascetic I once met in Madras, he was the most gloriously unapologetic beggar I had ever known.
And now, he was this. An object. The furious engine of his will had cut out. I knelt on the cold stone, the salt wind worrying my coat, and felt not disgust, but a devastating, quiet vacancy. The tragedy was not the biological conclusion, which awaits all wild things. The tragedy was the extinguishing of that unique, irascible point of view—a complete Weltanschauung where our bin lid was a tactical puzzle, a digestive biscuit a divine right, and a human a soft-skinned vending machine awaiting the correct sequence of psychic nudges. A whole universe of strategy and desire, gone.
What is a self, if not a particular pattern of hunger? His was magnificent in its specificity. He trafficked in no philosophy but appetite, acknowledged no morality but opportunity. In a world drowning in curated sentiment and lies, his honesty was brutal and pristine. He did not mourn the past or dread the future; he existed in the fierce, present perfect tense of the secured meal; of Truth. And now that relentless present was over.
I did not bury him. Burial felt a land-lubber’s sentiment, a pathetic fallacy. Instead, I lifted his light body on a shield of driftwood and committed him to the suck of the incoming tide. The icy water took him back with a solemn, grey-green embrace. He would become crab-meal, then fish-food, part of the very nutrient chain he had so expertly and ruthlessly exploited. There was a dreadful, circular rightness to it—the consumer, consumed.
Walking back to my now silent house, the absence was a presence. The window remained, but it was now merely glass. The psychic static of the world had dropped by one vital, raucous channel. I realised his constant, greedy telepathy had been a perverse kind of companionship. He had framed my own irrelevance with perfect clarity: I was a landmark on the map of his endeavours, a node in his network of want. It was humbling, and strangely freeing.
Now, there is only the wind at the glass, which makes no demands and offers no critiques. I miss the tap-tap-tapping of his indomitable will, especially during ‘important’ Zoom calls. The world is quieter, poorer, and infinitely more polite. And I find, to my surprise, that I would trade every rasher in my larder, every future silent sunset, to hear that scratchy, magnificent, selfish voice in my head just once more, projecting its simple, magnificent creed into the gathering dark: More. Now.
Reincarnate, my friend, as a sperm whale. Trade the tinny clatter of the harbour for the crushing, resonant dark of the abyss. Let your scavenger’s greed become a sovereign’s hunger. Dive a mile deep on the pulse of your own furious sonar—that telepathic tap-tap-tap now a killing click mapping the void—and wrestle monsters in the blackness. Surface only to breathe a geyser of spent breath into the indifferent air, a mountain of fulfilled appetite, your scars the only leg ring you’ll ever need. Let your creed echo now not at a pane of glass, but through the very bones of the sea.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024).