The Thing on the Shore (11 page)

“You should go home,” Arthur said. “Go home and try to get some rest. You can't be in the right frame of mind for work.”

“I can't go home. There's no availability for leave, and they say it's not policy to give compassionate leave for this.”

Arthur didn't say anything to that. Instead he looked at the telephone on his desk and steeled himself to lift the receiver and log in. He stared at it, and stared at it.

“Oh,” Tiffany said, “I've just remembered. I'm sorry, Arthur, but I can't cover for your dad any more. They're changing the call requirements now this Artemis feller's arrived, and Harry, bless him, doesn't do any of the things he's meant to do according to this new script. It's going to be too obvious. I reckon you're going to have to have a word with him.”

Arthur stared blankly across at her and—after a moment or two during which Tiffany wasn't sure he'd heard her—he nodded. Then he put his headset on.

Even though Arthur was busy dealing with customers himself, he was still aware of Tiffany becoming more and more panicked. She was too tired to think as quickly as the impatient customers expected of her, and too distracted to notice some of the important details of their accounts. Every customer who displayed anger or outright rudeness put her in an even worse state to deal with the next. She ended up aggravating people by saying things like, “I'm sorry, I got that wrong,” or, “Well, I'm buggered if I can understand this one myself.” As the day progressed, she started repeating, “I'm sorry, please bear with me,” while she stared at her screen trying to remember what it was the customer had originally asked for.

Inevitably, her callers became more and more pissed off, until they were regularly demanding to speak to her supervisor. Even this was proving difficult, as Tiffany kept pressing the wrong button—or the right button at the wrong time—and disconnecting them. Arthur
could tell when it happened, because her teary eyes widened and her hand flew to her mouth. At one point he looked up and was startled to see Artemis Black standing behind Tiffany's chair, looking down at her with a mixture of curiosity and disgust. She didn't know he was there, and Arthur hadn't noticed his arrival either. Arthur's eyes returned to his screen, then looked back, and found that Artemis had gone again as silently as he had appeared.

Later, in the canteen, Arthur overheard a conversation between Diane and a relatively new employee called Oscar. Diane was sitting with her back to him and Oscar was sitting opposite her. Behind Oscar was a small poster Blu-Tacked to the glass.

Arthur looked at the poster, while listening to Diane and Oscar talk. It read:

Bums off Seats—Control, Alt, Delete

It was one of many carrying the same message, and they were supposed to help people to remember to lock their computers while they were not at their desks. The words had been burned into everybody's brains just through this constant exposure. By the constant repetition.

“I was late on t'dinner because I had a proper fucked-up account just,” Diane announced. “Some right bitch screaming that she wanted to speak to Harry. He's proper messed it up, he has.”

“Who's Harry?” Oscar asked.

“He's this weird old twat. You'll soon recognize him: flaky skin, smells of meat.” Diane lowered her voice. “Everybody says he's a pedophile. Got sacked from his last job because they found stuff on his computer. He's a fucking freak.”

“He got sacked from his last job because he had a mental breakdown,” Arthur interrupted. “He's never been accused of pedophilia.”

“Well,” said Diane, turning to face Arthur, “that's what people say. And I heard that's why he smells of meat. I'm just saying.”

Arthur put down his sandwich and swallowed. He stretched out his fingers and looked at them. “You know that what you're saying is nowhere near true, but you're saying it anyway,” he said.

Diane shrugged.

“You're a spiteful, nasty little maggot,” Arthur continued. “You're malicious and small-minded, and what you think and what you say count for nothing good. Don't you
dare
reiterate such vile, destructive
shit
about my dad.” He stood up. “You're a fucking disgrace,” he concluded, then picked up her cardboard mug of tea and poured it all over her plate of chips.

Diane stood up and jabbed a long, sharp fingernail at Arthur's chest. She screwed up her mouth to speak just as Arthur felt a hand fall on his shoulder.

“Arthur! What the hell are you doing?”

Arthur turned to see Bracket's pale, dark-eyed, stubbly face looking at him in confusion.

“Sorry,” Arthur said, quietly. “She was being very cruel.”

“Come with me,” Bracket said. “Now.”

Arthur left work that day with a warning. “One foot wrong and you're gone,” Artemis had told him. Interext wouldn't tolerate such deplorable behavior.

He hurried along by the harbor to the Vagabond, passing elderly couples sitting on benches while eating bags of chips from Crosby's. It was a clear day, but breezy, and everybody seemed to be wearing heavy beige coats. He could tell that Old Man Easy was out and about, as he could hear music drifting across the marina. Just before he got to the pub he kicked out at a big metal sculpture of a knotted rope, one of several rising from the promenade at regular intervals. Yasmin finished half an hour after he did, and had told him she would meet him there. He was about to go inside and buy a drink when he saw Old Man Easy ambling toward him down the Sugar Tongue. He carried his knackered, fuzzy-sounding stereo in his right hand, as ever, while he murmured along to the Engelbert Humperdinck tape he was playing at full volume. He wore a pair of glasses that he'd covered in Sellotape to turn them into sunglasses. He nodded and smiled at Arthur as he passed. He gestured at his glasses with his left hand, and puffed out his already sizeable chest.

“Better than my own eyes, these are,” he declared. That
was what he always said. Or, at least, that was all Arthur had ever heard him say.

Arthur nodded and entered the pub.

“It's not a good time to be pissing them off,” Yasmin said, staring at her empty wine glass.

“I know,” Arthur said. “I know, but I didn't do it on purpose.”

“What's wrong?”

“I shouted at Dad this morning.”

“Don't worry about it,” Yasmin said, and she put her hand on Arthur's arm. “I used to argue with my parents all the time when I lived with them.”

“I'm worried about him,” Arthur said. He shook his head. “He talks to Mum on the telephone. I shouted at him because he thinks
I'm
imagining things, and yet he talks to Mum on the telephone.”

“Maybe it's just his way of coping.”

“Maybe,” Arthur said, “but I don't think he's coping at all.”

“How do you cope?”

“You know how I cope.” Arthur looked up at Yasmin and grinned. “I go out during storms and look for her.”

“Oh, yeah,” Yasmin snorted. “Well, maybe you shouldn't go pointing the finger at your dad. You're both pretty weird.”

“Thank you, Yasmin,” Arthur said.

“What is it you're imagining, anyway?”

“I'm not imagining anything! There are little worms in
the bathroom walls. They drive me mad, but Dad can't see them, at least not without his glasses.”

Yasmin pulled a face.

“I know,” Arthur said. “It sounds disgusting.” He looked at his hands. “Jesus fucking Christ, I want to
do
something, Yasmin.”

“What?”

“I don't know! Anything! I've read so many books about so many things, but they're only books, and I feel like I'm only scratching the surface of things.”

“Why don't you go to university?”

“But I don't know what I'd want to study.”

“What are you interested in?” Yasmin asked.

“I'm interested in everything,” Arthur said. “Everything. But I could only study one thing at a time, really. And that would be after a few years of saving.”

“You could study one thing and then go on to another.”

“That would be very expensive,” Arthur replied. “And I also wouldn't have time.”

“What do you mean, you wouldn't have time?”

“To fit it all in before I die. I could live another hundred years and I wouldn't understand half of what I want to understand.”

The two of them were sitting at a table by the window. Arthur looked out through the glass.

“You'll just have to accept a certain lack of understanding, then,” Yasmin said.

“Really?” asked Arthur. “You think university is the only way?”

“Do I fuck think that. Anyway, maybe you could upload.”

“What do you mean, upload?”

“Save your consciousness to a computer and live forever. That way you could learn just as much as you want.”

“What are you on about?” Arthur asked, laughing.

“I don't really understand it,” Yasmin confessed. “I read about it a while ago though, and it made sense at the time. My avatar would have pointed ears.”

“You do talk some bollocks.”

“Arthur,” Yasmin said, “is Bony coming through tonight?”

“I haven't heard from him today.”

“I want to see him. Do you think he could be interested in me?”

Arthur looked at her, suddenly feeling very conscious of the expression on his face. “Why?” he asked. “Are you interested in him?”

Yasmin nodded.

“Bony's a bit odd when it comes to these things,” Arthur said. “He's not really into women.”

“What?” Yasmin laughed incredulously. “You're not telling me that Bony's gay?”

“No,” Arthur said, “he just isn't really attracted to anybody. Anybody real, I mean. He likes you as a friend, I know that much. He thinks you're great. And don't let me put you off making a move. He just … his most intense feelings are for
things
… and fictional characters. He likes fictional characters. Especially video-game characters.”

“Wow,” Yasmin said.

“Don't tell him I told you,” Arthur said. “He gets paranoid that people might think he's some sort of freak.”

“No,” Yasmin shook her head. “I know people just like him online. I don't think he's a freak.”

“He's tried in the past,” Arthur continued, “but ultimately people are just objects to him, and eventually they get tired of just being that.”

She bit her lip. “Excuse me.” She got up and headed off in the direction of the toilet.

Arthur looked back out of the window. He wanted to get up and leave, right there and then.

Bony set off walking down the road from the level crossing in the direction of the beach. It was a narrow, unmarked road, and was longer than it looked. Bony wasn't deceived by that, though, because he walked it frequently.

In front of him there was the road, and to the right of the road there was a tall metal fence that marked the edge of the Nuclear Decommisioning Authority site that was the Drigg low-level waste repository. To the left of the road there were green fields dotted with white sheep. And at that point where the road disappeared there was a wavy line of sand-dunes. Above it all was a bright, mottled-white sky. Bony felt like the last human being alive.

The road twisted a couple of times before ending in a small car park, usually occupied at that time of day, during the week, by the vehicles of people walking their dogs. There were no cars there at the moment, though.

Next to the car park—which wasn't really a car park, more of a lay-by—there was a huge black shed with no
windows, boxed in by another high metal fence. The shed shared this enclosure with a moldy old caravan and a pile of wood, stacked up as if for a bonfire. Bony had never seen anybody actually inside that fence, although the padlock on the gate—which Bony examined regularly—always seemed to show signs of recent use.

There was another gate, which barred the road, and it was this gate that Bony paid a visit to each day. Or, rather, it was the left-hand gatepost: a tall, wide metal pipe with a hole in it. Bony sat down with his back to the pipe, and positioned his head near the hole. The gatepost sang to him. Well, not just to him, he reflected, it could be to anybody, but he was the only one who sat and listened. The gate was located where the road and the fields terminated at a narrow stretch of sand dunes. Bony gazed along the dunes stretching to the north, the long grass on their spines rippling in the cold wind. The sky was huge. Just inland from the dunes, in that direction, the terrain was marshy—a Site of Special Scientific Interest due to the population of natterjack toads. The gatepost sang tunelessly but hauntingly; it had a deep, sad, fluting voice. Bony stood up and ran his hand over the top of it. He held himself close to it and felt the subtle resonance. He then walked through the gate, closed it behind him, and picked his way down the path toward the sand. The path also served as a run-off for water draining off the dunes, and as such it was often more of a stream than a path—a stream of water that was orangey-red, for reasons that Bony did not understand.

*

The beach was empty and the tide was out. The sky was even bigger now—a colossal wall of gray and white, rearing up beyond the sea and curving overhead. The sea itself was just a thick black line above the distant silvery expanse of flat sand. In places the level surface of the beach was interrupted by stretches of smooth stones or by large, jagged lumps of concrete. Nearer the water there rose a huge concrete cube, half buried, with a tall metal pole protruding from the top of it. This was Barnscar, and how such a small spot of land had earned its own name was a mystery to Bony, but the pole was a mark, a warning—the indicator of an area where it was easy to get caught out by the tide coming in fast. Somebody had drowned there once, hence the pole; that much he knew.