The Thing on the Shore (27 page)

Were all call centers like this? Sometimes it felt like
everybody
worked in a call center. When Diane looked at job vacancies located in the cities, all of the job titles were different but they all sounded the same; when you got right down to it, so many of them looked like jobs where you spent all day either ringing people up or answering the phone. Were people potatofying all over the country? Diane had actually had nightmares where she was walking through an office space in which all the chairs were occupied by white, pasty lumps with uneven and mottled skin, rather than by people. As if the entire purpose of the place were to turn people into potatoes, as if it were some kind of giant potato farm. As if the employees were merely objects—or even the product.

Diane knew that when she went back to work—which she would have to do, tomorrow or the day after—she would become transfixed once more by the shape of people.
The waddle of girls who had once been svelte, their bulky asses, their flat hair. The sagging jowls of men who'd arrived there with sharp, vibrant features. The total breakdown of some of them—like that freak, Harry. He could probably still have been semi-respectable if he'd worked somewhere else.

Diane curled in on herself and pulled the duvet tighter. She had been hoping that the
Saw
films—
Saw III
, she was on now—would distract her somewhat. But they weren't. She was still feeling pretty scared.

“I think I'm going to be sick,” Arthur said. “Please, Artemis, let me go to the toilets.”

“We need to talk about this some more,” Artemis replied. “Maybe when you're not feeling so weak.”

“Yeah,” Arthur agreed. “Maybe. I don't care. Yes, please.” He could feel everything in him start to contract, and his vision was paling, as it did whenever he had not eaten enough. His skin was getting clammy in a way that evoked memories of drunken vomiting.

“Go on, then,” Artemis said, with the hint of a sneer in his voice. “And then go home. You're no good to me like this.”

Arthur got up and scrambled out of the pod without another word. Artemis listened as he ran from the pods area, his footsteps receding into the background murmur of the work floor.

“Pathetic,” he said quietly. “Absolutely pathetic.”

*

Thankfully, Yasmin wasn't at her desk as Arthur ran past it, his hand clasped over his mouth. She must have gone to get a drink or something. He didn't really want to talk to anybody or see anybody, or have to explain anything. Various people did turn in their seats to watch him go, of course, any such drama being magnified by an urgent desire to relieve the daily tedium, but as long as nobody shouted his name or put their hand out to stop him, then he was OK with that.

Nobody did try to stop him. Clearly, everybody could tell that he really needed to get to the toilets.

He didn't quite make it to a cubicle, and instead threw up in one of the sinks. It was a raw, violent thing, loud and convulsive. He felt as if his body were trying to burst him open to expel something, but his throat and his mouth weren't big enough. After a few minutes the violent feeling subsided; it had merely been the sensation of his body and muscles contracting. It left him feeling ragged and rough. He paused, head bowed, over the sink for a short while, getting his breath back, and then turned on both taps to rinse the mess away. He even scooped the bigger bits out of the plughole with his fingers and threw them in the bin. Arthur wasn't really squeamish about vomit, since he'd cleared his father's sick from the sink numerous times on mornings after the karaoke nights at the Vine.

After cleaning up, Arthur looked into the mirror and inhaled sharply. He staggered backward and coughed. Then he moved forward again, getting right up close to
the mirror, and stared, horrified and almost on the verge of tears, into the glass.

The white of his left eye was turning red, the red clouding up from the bottom. Blood—he assumed it was blood—was creeping across the white of his eye like night over the surface of the Earth. What was this? What was happening to him?

The toilet door opened and Johnny entered. He was approaching Arthur from the right, so Arthur just turned his head slightly to the left to hide his red eye, and hoped that Johnny wouldn't look in the mirror.

“Just bin on the phone ter bloody India!” Johnny said, shaking his head as he launched straight into his gripe. His big mustache twitched. “Oh, it wis a struggle. He bloody spoke like an outboard motor. Bloody
put-put-put-put-put.
Couldn't mek out a bloody word!”

Arthur didn't say anything.

“Y'is alreet, lad?” Johnny asked, moving closer.

“Yep,” Arthur said, nodding. “Yes, thanks. Just … think I'm going to go home. Feel a bit sick.”

“Gone pale as a fish,” Johnny said. “Git yersel away.”

“Yeah,” Arthur said, “I will. Thanks, Johnny.”

“Nae bother, lad,” Johnny said. He disappeared into a cubicle. They were the kind of cubicles composed of just panels of wood in a metal frame, not really self-contained or at all private. Johnny evidently didn't mind, though. The moment the sound of his defecation started, Arthur knew he had to leave or he was going to be sick again.

Sometimes dehumanization was so normal, so commonplace, that you didn't really notice it.

The feel of the cool breeze on Arthur's face was immediately pleasurable. It seemed to blow the sweat and the clamminess away, drying him out and bringing him round from what had been—although he hadn't really realized it—a less than fully conscious state. He stumbled, head down, along North Shore Road, away from the hulking white shed of the call center. Then, as he passed the Tesco's car park, the harbor opened out before him. There was only one place he could go to really get his head back, and it wasn't home—it wasn't home to his father, who was having a rest day and was probably already drunk, or trying to heat up some baked beans and burning them, or shivering and crying in his bed, or deluding himself that he was talking on the phone to …

To his wife, Arthur's mother. That was the one place Arthur could go. To the end of the pier. Jesus Christ, why wasn't it his mother there in the Scape? Why, instead, was it that fucking horrible
thing
?

Arthur stopped walking. How could he accuse his dad of deluding himself, now that Arthur had seen what he'd seen and been where he'd been? Surely there was a possibility that his dad wasn't as deluded as Arthur had always thought. Still though, he didn't feel up to having that conversation just yet. He fixed his gaze on the lighthouse, gleaming white out there above the navy blue water, and narrowed his eyes. He looked out over the sea. Clouds
reared up over the horizon. They were so big that they looked much closer than they actually were. The sun was behind them, so that their edges were shining yellow, but their mass was an intensely dark, matte gray. Out there, below the clouds, the surface of the sea looked black. How was the lighthouse so bright when those clouds were in the way of the sun? Arthur had long ago stopped trying to work out the passage of light near the sea, though. It never really did what you would expect it to.

The pier was relatively busy with people fishing, from young teenagers through to very old-looking men who seemed incredibly fit for their age. Or maybe they weren't that old. Maybe they just looked old because they sat out in every kind of weather all the time. Anyway, on his way out to the lighthouse, Arthur passed numerous people and groups of people who sat dangling their legs off the edge of the pier. It wasn't very warm but it wasn't wet either, and the wind wasn't powerful enough to pose any kind of risk—not unless you were a child or a waif and risked standing too close to the drop—so it was a pretty good day for fishing. Yeah, once upon a time Harry would have been out here, too, but not any more.

People were smoking and drinking and eating. Arthur knew that after they were all gone, a fair amount of their rubbish would be left behind. The seagulls loved it, especially the gory remnants left by those who had killed and gutted their catches on the spot. The scavenging birds peppered the sky.

God it was beautiful if you let yourself feel it.

Arthur kept his head bowed because he didn't want anybody to see his blood-red eye. He had been thinking about it, the eye, and had calmed down a little bit. He had seen something like it before on Facebook at Bony's house. Somebody had posted a picture of herself with a red eye like his, adding a comment about how she'd got so drunk that she'd been sick—violently enough to burst a blood vessel in one eye. That was it, then—a burst blood vessel. That was all it was. Like a nosebleed, but inside the eyeball. Nothing to worry about.

A wave of nausea rolled over him, and he stood still until it passed.

It discolored your eye, but then eventually it went away. That's what had happened to the girl on Facebook, anyway. No permanent damage.

Arthur hadn't ventured out here since that night with the crab. He found himself thinking about it and the way it had moaned.

Reaching the lighthouse, he extended the palms of both hands against it and stretched himself. He was aware of probably looking like some sort of freak; he would probably always look like some kind of freak. He didn't have the energy right then to worry too much about how other people must perceive him. He wondered if he would ever have that kind of energy again. This was probably how people became strange and lonely and troubled. Through preoccupation.

Well of course it fucking was. That went without saying,
didn't it? Arthur shook his head. He couldn't tell whether such thoughts were blatantly obvious or totally nonsensical. Somewhere in between had to be insight; he doubted very much that he was achieving insight, though.

The wind was bringing those clouds closer, quite quickly.

He needed to stop thinking for a while. He just needed to be somewhere and not think. He turned away from the lighthouse and went to sit on the edge of the pier, away from the west-facing wall over which the fishermen leaned. He sat at the very tip of the pier, where there was no wall, facing north. In fact, he was almost facing the call center, which was still all too visible, even at this remove. Maybe that was because it was white: a great, big, white, barnlike structure against a slope of brown and yellow grass.

Arthur looked away from the call center and down toward the water lapping at the stone beneath him. The movement of the liquid was hypnotic. The way something natural could possess such a regular rhythm was fascinating. Incredible. Arthur watched it, and watched it. If he let it, it would draw him in; physically draw his body forward. The lure of the sea. He had always acknowledged that as something real, something dangerous. Well, since his mum had thrown herself into it, anyway.

Something moved beneath him. Not the water, but something else, something not part of the rhythm of the water. It was this dissonance that made it visible. Because, when he looked for it, looked for the thing that was moving but was not the water, he couldn't see it. It was the movement he had seen, not the thing itself. He frowned and
maintained his focus. He was peering through the surface of the water now, since whatever had moved must have been beneath it.

Minutes passed. A few of the fishermen pointed at the approaching clouds and started reeling in, disassembling their rods. The seagulls above wheeled and laughed.

There! There it was again! Arthur opened his mouth slightly and leaned forward a little more. Whatever it was, it was clinging to the stonework of the pier, moving along it, or maybe … maybe even
up
the wall itself. Its color was barely distinguishable from the color of the depths in which it crept.

It reached up and broke the surface.

The crab! It was that fucking crab again. Or … no, it was a similar crab but it was different. It was bigger. Or was it even a crab?

Had that other thing, the other night, been a crab?

This thing was bigger than the kind of crab you found in British waters, and it didn't look like it had enough legs to be a crab, anyway. And it moved in the wrong way. It maybe moved more like an octopus or something, as if its limbs were arms instead of legs—as if it were pulling itself along with arms, not walking with legs—but these limbs, these arms, were jointed and hard-looking, not like the tentacles of a cephalopod. And how many limbs were there? Four? No, five. With those massive crab-like claws, which it was using to climb steadily, dextrously, intelligently.
Five
limbs? What the fuck kind of number was that? Maybe it had lost one. Jesus Christ. It was only moving
slowly but it was fucking disgusting. Its head was more prominent than that of a crab. It protruded, rounded and bulbous, from the center, whereas the head or face of a crab was, of course, a small, well-protected thing tucked away on the side of the body. Could this be the same creature he'd seen previously? That had looked more like a crab, whereas this … it was about the size of a child, for a start, a three- or four-year-old child.

It was dark green and slimy-looking. Its body appeared to be mostly a kind of hub for the limbs and a … a socket, almost, for the face. The face itself seemed to be looking directly up at Arthur. He was still sitting on the edge, legs dangling, bent over at the waist, looking straight down at the crab thing, and it seemed to be looking right back up, as if it were conscious of him. It moved in a horribly deliberate way.

It moaned—with the same weary, almost bored sound that Arthur remembered from that moonlit night when he'd last been out here. It was the deep sigh of a depressive. The throaty gasp of a heavy smoker suddenly shocked or winded. Then it made a sound like coughing, but it wasn't coughing. It was a sharp, regular, hacking sound.

Arthur's head was swimming. It was all he could do to prevent himself from pitching forward face-first into the creature, and into the sea. It was only when its front claw, the largest, tentatively nudged his foot that Arthur wailed. He scrambled backward, his heels kicking against the stone, and rose to his feet.