The Thing on the Shore (15 page)

“What's wrong?” she asked. “What's wrong enough for you to feel like that?”

“I don't know,” Arthur said. “I don't know what to do with myself in the evenings. Everything feels like a bit of a waste of time.”

“Do things you enjoy,” Yasmin said. “That's not wasting time. Even try doing the things that you enjoyed when you were a kid.”

Arthur nodded. There were other things bothering him, of course, but he didn't want to go on.

That evening—after Arthur had passed out and then gone home, and Yasmin had finished work—she went back to her flat and looked out of the window at the sea, and got stoned on her own. She listened to the whole of
Oracular Spectacular
by MGMT. Just sat and listened to it. Sitting and listening to music without doing anything else was something she frequently did, but she was aware that most people stopped doing that after they emerged from adolescence. The sun was now setting and the evening had fallen still. The music was warm and slightly psychedelic but also slightly sad. Her flat felt warm and was lit softly pink by the last of the daylight.

That day she had noticed that Paula was back at work. Paula had been away for a while and it was obvious now that she'd been off work to have breast augmentation surgery. She'd been wearing a low-cut top so that her breasts had heaved up like pale, blind, aggressive sea-creatures. They'd actually looked hard, like dead jellyfish.
Yasmin had never been a fan of breast surgery, but she wanted her ears done, so … well. Her ambition was no less cosmetic, no less vain, if she was honest. Breasts, ears. It was all just meat.

Some people objected on the basis of cost: if you've got that money to spare, do something beneficial with it. But where was the line? As far as Yasmin was concerned, you could say the same about make-up, or haircuts, or piercings, or new clothes, or CDs, or furniture. Where was the line? The line was probably concurrent with your skin, as far as most people were concerned. Maybe it was some deep-seated cultural anxiety rooted in religion.
Don't mess with what God gave you. God made you the way He wanted you to be.
Yasmin touched her ears. Maybe, for her, breast surgery just wasn't dramatic or obvious enough. You still looked human afterward, if a slightly modified kind of human. That was probably it: Yasmin wanted to look non-human. Inhuman? Whatever.

Out on the horizon there was some great gray beast of a ship, one bright light like a star balancing on the prow. Maybe the future would be like life aboard an oil tanker. Everything gray, everything metal, everything floating on the surface of a new, worldwide ocean, everything lit only by vaguely pink or orange electric lights. Nothing to do with your life but work to keep the boat afloat.

What was she doing, spending all her waking hours at the call center? What was she doing it for?

Yasmin had never known what people meant when they
said that this or that objectifies women, or men, or whoever. People
were
objects. People
were
sex objects. Everybody was a sex object and, yeah they might be something more than that, but still. They were just bodies, just objects, and that's why they got hungry, and that's why they needed roofs over their heads, and that's why they broke. Eventually people would realize this, that they were just physical objects to be manipulated and modified at will. People would eventually forget what a “natural” body or mind was, as they augmented and reduced and stimulated and tranquilized and accentuated and implanted and removed one piece or another, and any stigma would fall away. Anyway, if there was one thing in this world that drove this home it wasn't sex, or lust, or body modification. It was work. The work culture. Work, eat, sleep. Total reduction to function. It depended on what your job was, Yasmin supposed, but if your job was something that didn't allow you to be you, then basically you would never be you. You would be body object through and through.

Bony understood, by the sound of it. What had Arthur said?

Yasmin couldn't put her finger on why, but Bony did something to her.

She realized that the CD had finished and got up to make a cup of coffee. She put the kettle on, and then she turned on her laptop and searched for Interext. She found a bland, corporate website, all white and blue and gray, kind of sleek-looking, full of photos and promo videos of smartly dressed, grinning employees who were so smooth-skinned
and dead behind the eyes that they looked more like CGI constructs than the people she actually interacted with. It was terrifyingly boring. Almost nauseatingly boring.

Was something awful happening? Or had this kind of entity always existed, and always held such power?
Or
, Yasmin wondered,
am I reading too much into just a few photos?

She studied the website for a few minutes longer, but it gave no clue to what Interext actually did. She began to feel cold and hopeless and terribly depressed.

The kettle started to boil.

It was gone midnight and Arthur was sitting on the edge of North Pier, his legs dangling over the side, his heels kicking against the ancient stonework. To his left, some steps descended into the water, hugging the inside wall. There was a small bright green plastic bucket beside him, the kind that they sell at sea-front stalls for kids to make sandcastles with. The color of it looked subdued in the moonlight. Arthur was facing inland, so that Whitehaven lay spread out before him. Black clouds were strung out thinly across a sparsely starred night sky. Their edges shone silver. The lights of cars moved up and down the roads leading into and out of town. Occasionally people passed him, walking their dogs the length of the harbor.

In his hand, Arthur held the neon-green plastic handle of the crab-line he'd searched out earlier that day. The line itself trailed into the water lapping the wall beneath his feet. The sea was dark—or, really, he reckoned, it was
black. Few things were really black but, to Arthur, water at night was one of them.

He had decided that Yasmin's advice—about doing things that you'd enjoyed as a child—was good advice.

Arthur was crab-fishing. On the end of the crab-line he'd hooked a cube of raw chicken from the plastic tray he'd bought at the 24-hour Tesco's. Then he'd gently lowered it until the line had gone slack. And since then he'd been waiting for something to scuttle across the silty ocean floor and start chewing with its overly complicated mouth parts, causing the line to tense, and prompting him to raise it quickly, before shaking the creature into the green bucket, its legs waving and claws snapping. But, so far, that hadn't happened.

Arthur remembered a crab-fishing competition from many years ago, when he'd been very young, maybe only five or six. They had been on holiday in Cornwall, and the sun was beating down, the sky clearest blue, the sea below their feet a clear turquoise. His mother had organized it, and Arthur, his father and a couple of friends had fished. He couldn't remember the friends clearly. They may even have been cousins. The seagulls had been loud and bold, and local fishing boats had gone puttering past non-stop. They'd used dry, vacuum-packed pieces of fish as bait, and the crabs had bitten eagerly. Arthur clearly remembered himself squealing as he raised them up out of the water, partly with delight but partly with fear, scared of dropping them into his lap rather than into the bucket. There had been loads of them, too. They'd filled their
buckets with lively little specimens, mostly red in color, and then finally tipped them all back into the sea. His was the same bucket he was using now.

Tonight, though, he hadn't caught a thing. Not a single nip. Maybe it was because there weren't any crabs there. This was not Cornwall, after all. Or maybe it was because crabs slept at night, although Arthur doubted that.

As Arthur watched the white nylon wire of his fishing line, he became aware of his mother observing him from somewhere behind, but he couldn't spot her anywhere when he turned around. He felt almost as if he were appearing on TV or in a film, and she was only watching him on screen. That was OK, though. That was enough. He smiled and waggled the crab-fishing line's handle, hoping that she'd notice it and remember the same holiday that he had been thinking about.

After a while he found himself specifically watching the spot where the nylon wire entered the water. He wondered how long he'd been sitting there. He even started to wonder if he'd been asleep. He'd been having a conversation with his mum about something, but he couldn't remember what. It felt like it had lasted a long time though. There was a milky glow staining the horizon to the west, and he watched its thin light waver uncertainly, as if it were cast not by a star but by a candle placed in a draft.

Something pulled suddenly on the line. Arthur sniffed, and for a moment he couldn't remember what that meant
or what he had to do, but then he began furiously rotating the handle, wrapping the line back around it, standing up at the edge of the high stone wall, and smiling. A slight breeze moved his long black hair half-heartedly around his head, as his hands moved quickly and rhythmically, turning the handle this way and that so the motion remained smooth and constant. Whatever he'd caught felt quite heavy, and he wondered if it might be some kind of fish rather than one of those little orangered crabs he'd seen people catching in Whitehaven before. He noticed that the water no longer looked completely black, but a dark and muddy army green, while the sky above was rapidly turning pale gray.

Arthur started to wonder if he'd merely caught the hook in a mass of seaweed or something, as he hadn't felt any further movement on the line since that initial jerk. He watched intently as whatever it was now broke the surface of the water. At first he thought that he'd been right—it was just an accumulation of weed and mud and mollusks, the center of which tangle he'd accidentally snagged. It measured about a foot across, and strands of something trailed beneath it. It was only seaweed, Arthur knew, though it looked like hair. He considered just shaking it free, but that would have felt wrong.

The greenish bundle was dangling at about the level of Arthur's ankles when it suddenly moved. Arthur jumped backward but didn't let go of the line, so the thing swayed with him, bumping into his shins. It wriggled and quivered against his jeans. He yelped, dropping the handle
and moving further away. The object sat motionless again in the gray predawn dimness, and Arthur still couldn't tell what it was. He didn't move either; he just stared at the thing. After a moment, it started to unfurl, seeming somehow to widen and thin out. Two ungainly claws extended themselves from either side, whereupon the weed and mud fell away to reveal that it was a crab after all—just an especially big one. One of its claws was about the size of Arthur's own hand, and the other was even larger. It looked uncomfortable, as if it were too heavy. The crab itself was a sickly green color, like pea soup, and its shell seemed misshapen and swollen. The word that Arthur kept trying to dismiss was “fat.” The crab was
fat.

Arthur stared at the crab, and he knew that the crab was staring back at him. The white nylon line led from the crab-line's handle into the murky depths of the creature's machine-like mouth. It must have ingested the hook and Arthur felt sick at the thought. The crab-line and the bucket had been bought for him by his mother. He couldn't lose them. He went to grab the handle, intending to just yank the line until the crab relinquished the hook, but at the same time the crab started scuttling away, dragging the handle along with it toward the edge of the pier. It moved at an unnerving, spidery speed, but also with a sick scraping sound, as if it were dragging a considerable belly along the ground. Arthur missed the handle and stumbled forward to grab for it again. But he was already too late, and he saw the crab go plunging over
the edge and the handle whipping after it. Instead of the muted splash he was expecting, though, he heard only a wet crunch. He perceived it with his stomach, rather than with his ears, and blinked nervously.

He crept forward and peered over the edge.

The tide had gone out a little, revealing the lower level of the steps built against the pier. The crab lay on its back on the bottom step, its thick little legs whirring like those of a beetle. Looking down at it in the morning gloom was like gazing down into some kind of mechanical grinder. Arthur thought about going down to try once more to retrieve the crab-line, but then the crab started groaning like a man. A tired man with a sore throat. Arthur's spine stiffened. He stood up and ran away, his old trainers slapping loudly against the pitted stone surface of the pier, the groans of the crab becoming less audible as he put some distance behind him. He imagined himself completely alone, running along the top of an endless wall which bisected an endless ocean. He had tears in his eyes, worried that he'd betrayed the memory of his mother.

The sky grew whiter. The voice of the sea was quiet and kind.

Harry was woken by Arthur entering the house in the early hours. Harry didn't cope with the nighttime very well; he tried to spend it drunkenly, if possible, so that there was little chance of waking up before the alarm clock went off.

This time, though, he did wake up and, once awake, there was nothing he could do about it. He lay there in the dark, surrounded by piles of clothes. After Arthur did the washing, he would hang the clothes up on radiators all around the house and then collect them and sort them. He'd pile Harry's clothes up on his bed, but Harry never put them away. He didn't even move them, just crawled under the covers and let the piles topple over. Harry tended to dump his dirty garments on the bedroom floor as well, so they were all mixed up. He didn't know how Arthur knew which ones to wash, and quailed at the thought of Arthur having to sort them by smell. At times like this he knew he had to sort himself out, do a better job, not
just of being a parent but of being an independent human entity. But by the time he'd got up and gone to work and then come back from work, a quivering wreck, anything resembling resolve or pride or rationality had gone, replaced by an unintelligible mess of anger and shame and confusion and exhaustion and desperation. It wasn't that he looked at his clean washing and then decided against putting it away. It wasn't laziness. He just didn't even see the washing. He didn't see the washing up either. He didn't see the grease on the kitchen surfaces, or the limescale in the bathroom sink. Part of it, of course, was that he always removed his glasses upon entering the house, and so everything appeared pretty blurred.