The Thing on the Shore (5 page)

“I've got some news,” she said.

“Good,” said Bracket. “I want some news. I want something that will change everything.”

“It will change everything,” said Isobel, and she laughed suddenly and brightly. “It will. Bracket, I'm pregnant. We're pregnant.”

Bracket laughed too. He reached out and held her close to him. “Isobel,” he said. “Oh, Isobel.”

He closed his eyes and stroked her hair. He allowed himself to believe that the entire world was completely silent.

He clipped the lead on to Yorkie's collar, filled his coat pockets with carrier bags and slipped out the back door, into the still night. Inside the house, Isobel was getting ready for bed, and before he could join her he had to take the dog out for its evening walk. Yorkie was an old, ugly little dog that was quite short-bodied for a dachshund. Bracket had suggested “Meatball” as a name when they'd first acquired him as a puppy.

Beneath the streetlights the tarmac shone a wet yellow color, still slick with the rain from earlier in the day. The sandstone terraces lining the street contained large, comfortable townhouses that implied a certain understated wealth. They spoke of a more prosperous era, having been built when Whitehaven was an important trading port. Nowadays they were mostly bought and paid for by Sellafield wages. Cozy light shone from the gaps around or between heavy, expensive-looking curtains. Bracket could hear the constant traffic traveling along the nearby A595, and the ever-present seagulls yammering on. He headed down the road toward the Tesco supermarket, which he passed at least twice a day on his way to work and back. There he bought some cigarettes at the petrol station, and made his way on to the harbor. He stroked Yorkie's head, let him off the lead, and watched as the dog ambled off to piss against the railings which prevented unwary people from falling into the oily water. He didn't
often talk to his dog, like some people did, but he was concerned about the decrepit little creature dying on him. He liked having a non-verbal relationship and could spend hours with the dog, just thinking. He worried that after the dog died he wouldn't be able to think at all.

The clouds were being torn into blue-edged tatters by some high-up wind, and between them the crescent moon was visible. Bracket walked a little way along the harbor and sat down on one of the big wooden benches, where he lit his first cigarette in six years. He narrowed his eyes against the smoke and scratched his nose with his thumbnail. His parka was closely bunched around him, as the cold always headed in from the sea at night. He gazed at the masts and rigging of the old fishing boats and yachts moored in the marina, and then beyond them toward a row of tiny lights far out to sea. Only visible sometimes, they were the lights of a town or village on the Isle of Man.

He finished his cigarette.
A baby! Good God.
He laughed a little and then stood up—then saw Yorkie and grimaced. Yorkie was crouching, further along the side of the harbor, and unloading what looked like about half his body weight in loose feces. Bracket fished a carrier bag from his parka pocket.

Just beyond where Yorkie was defecating was “The Wave.” It was a sculpture installed as part of the harbor's Millennium regeneration, and took the form of a long, curvy, white metal bar supported on white metal legs. It ran the entire length of the Lime Tongue, the jetty on to
which ships had once unloaded their cargoes of limes. The Wave had neon lights embedded along its structure, so that blue neon shone on one side and green neon on the other. At least half of the time one of the neon bulbs had blown so the whole thing was switched off, but tonight it was fully operational.

Bracket studied it as he waited for Yorkie to finish his massive job and, as he admired the bright blue and green ripples in the water on either side of it, he suddenly became aware of somebody else standing on the harbor, near the far end of The Wave. Not just another dog-walker, which would not have been unusual, but a strikingly large man dressed in a black suit. He kept scraping one foot backward across the ground, like a cartoon bull about to charge. A sizeable black suitcase rested beside him. The blue neon gleamed off his bald head and it took Bracket a few seconds to work out why he looked familiar, but then it clicked.
Artemis Black.
The man was Artemis Black.

Bracket's heart scuttled out of its shell and right down through his body, to seek refuge in his shoe. He turned away and was all set to scuttle off himself, but then realized that Yorkie, incredibly, still hadn't finished shitting. What the fuck was wrong with that dog? Internally it must have been just a pea-sized brain packed in amongst a maze of intestines. Nothing but stomach and guts. Stupid fucking meatball.

And then Artemis was walking toward him. Not walking but
striding
—marching, almost—bearing down like one of those minotaur things from the old
Doom
games
that Bracket still played sometimes when alone in the house. He didn't look happy. As he got close Bracket saw that he looked distinctly unhappy, in fact.

“I've got dog shit on my shoe,” declared Artemis. “It's disgusting. This is the first time I've ever set foot in this town, if you can even call it that, and on my way to the hotel, on the very first journey I make, I tread in a pile of dog shit.”

“It wasn't me,” said Bracket.

“No,” replied Artemis. “Glad to hear it. But was it your
dog
?” He was speaking through gritted teeth, and slowly, like he was trying to tell off a three-year-old child while suffering from a terrible headache.

“No,” said Bracket. He raised his right hand, which was holding an orange carrier bag already inside out. “I pick his up. I mean, when he's finished. He hasn't even finished yet.”

Artemis gazed down at Yorkie with such a sneer of disgust that Bracket flinched. Yorkie looked up, made a last explosive moist sound, and wagged his tail. “He stinks,” said Artemis.

“He's an old dog,” said Bracket.

“What's this thing, anyway?” Artemis pointed over his shoulder with his thumb toward The Wave.

“It's a sculpture,” said Bracket.

“It's fucking bollocks, is what it is,” said Artemis. There was a silence as if he expected a response. Bracket just let his eyes slide from Artemis's face toward the neon lights, and didn't say anything. Beyond The Wave, the
harbor continued on down to the burned-out hotel, and the hill with that rough residential estate at the top of it.

“Have you been crying?” asked Artemis, after it became evident that Bracket wasn't about to agree with him.

“No,” said Bracket.

“You have,” said Artemis, leaning forward and peering into Bracket's face. “You've been crying.”

“Look,” said Bracket. “It's been a heavy night. I just—I just need to pick up this crap and then go home. Please. I don't really want to have to pick it up in front of my new boss.”

“What?”

“I saw you on the organogram,” said Bracket. “I work at the call center. I'm a team manager there.”

“What's your name?”

“Bracket.”

“What the fuck kind of name is that?”

“Oh … Oh, sorry. I mean that's just a nickname. Hackett is my real name. Not really any better than Bracket, is it?”

“No, not at all.” Artemis sighed deeply and looked past Bracket, over his head, in the direction of the call center. “So why were you crying, then? You can tell me all about it, you know. I think you'll find me quite approachable. And if it's something major, then I should probably know anyway. If it might affect your work.”

“My wife is pregnant,” said Bracket. “I just found out tonight.”

Artemis's eyes suddenly focused back on Bracket's. “Then
you're crying because you're happy?” he asked. His expression was severe.

“Oh,” said Bracket. “Yeah. Yeah, of course.”

“Good,” said Artemis. He clapped a heavy hand on Bracket's shoulder. “I guess you'll be wanting some overtime, then, eh?”

Bracket bit his lip and looked down at Yorkie. Yorkie gazed back at him with an expression that said nothing at all.

“Yeah,” he said, eventually. “I guess I will.”

“Ha!” barked Artemis. “Excellent! I have a couple of projects that I want to kick off, so you can be my right-hand man.”

“Sounds good,” said Bracket.

“I'll talk to you some more on Monday.”

“Great,” said Bracket. He was still looking at Yorkie.

“I'm going to go and find my hotel now,” said Artemis. “You go home.”

“Yeah,” said Bracket. “I was just about to, anyway, actually. Which hotel is it?”

“The Waverley.”

“Down there,” said Bracket, pointing along a pedestrianized street that ran from the harbor straight into the town. “Down there and to the left.”

“See you on Monday, then,” said Artemis, and strode away again, back toward his suitcase.

Bracket just looked at Yorkie for a while, who sat there looking back up. Then he bent down and picked up the still-warm feces. He could feel the heat and the wetness
of it through the thin plastic of the carrier bag. Once he'd gathered most of it he reversed the bag the right way round again and tied it closed.

“Come on, then,” he said to the dog. “Come on, old man.”

Artemis walked on past his suitcase toward what looked like a ramp for getting boats into or out of the water, just beyond the piece-of-crap “sculpture” that was The Wave. Behind him, he could hear Bracket scraping up the dog shit and he shook his head. How could anybody lower themselves to that? He then sat down on the ramp, just above the water level, and took off the shoe that was smeared with muck. He dipped the sole of it into the water. The liquid was an inky black, except where the ripples caught the moonlight or the neon, shining their reflections silver and bright blue respectively. He paused momentarily as he thought he saw a ghost emerging, head first, from the water, but then realized that it was just a sleeping swan tinged with a blue luminescence from The Wave. It was one of many bobbing gently on the surface, their heads tucked beneath their wings so that they appeared almost spherical.

Once his shoe was clean, Artemis put it back on and just sat there with his head in his hands.

He'd loved his wife. They'd first met in the zoo; he'd gone to look at the big cats and she'd been on her way to the aquarium. Artemis had loved her dearly.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, Arthur dreamed that he stood looking at the toilet. Small black worms were overflowing from beneath the lid of the cistern, which shifted slightly due to the tumultuous mass heaving beneath it. He knew the cistern was full of them. He knew they were hidden inside all of the walls, all of the pipes. Even as he watched, more and more of them tumbled down the bright white sides of the cistern. He could hear the wind outside, just the wind and nothing else, and he imagined that there was nothing else, just a flat, empty landscape, as flat as a still sea.

Bony had a very impressive 32-inch flatscreen monitor, together with a brand-new, cutting-edge graphics card, and Arthur kept getting so absorbed in watching the mist drift across the screen that he neglected to play the game itself. Bony was sitting next to him, slurping from a fresh cup of tea, but that didn't really detract from the atmosphere created by the surround-sound set-up and the dim lighting in the room.

“I am blown away by the mist all over again,” said Arthur.

“It's good, isn't it?” said Bony. “It makes the game seem almost worthwhile.”

“Don't mock that which you don't understand.”

“You'll start playing it for yourself next.”

“I do play it for myself, really,” said Arthur. “I mean, I don't know how playing it for myself would be any different.”

“I don't understand it. I mean, I understand why
you
do it but I don't understand Tiffany's motivation.”

Arthur paused the game and sipped from his own mug meditatively. The curtains were closed and the only light came from numerous candles spaced around the small room. The squawking of seagulls came from outside, but apart from that the only thing to be heard was the game's soundtrack—vaguely spooky piano music evocative of its nineteenth-century setting.

“I can't say I really understand it either,” said Arthur, tipping back on the two rear legs of his chair, “but people earn a living doing this full time, you know. You have, like,
offices
full of people doing it in Japan.”

“What? Playing multi-player online games for other people?”

“Yeah. So, like, you have some rich businessman who wants a super-high-powered character, but he can't be bothered playing as a low-powered character in order to gain the experience points he needs. Like, he can't be bothered trotting around the sewers killing giant rats, or whatever. So he pays somebody else to play all the early stages of the game for him. Then, once the character is powerful enough—say the businessman has specified that he wants a level-thirty character or whatever—the person who's been playing it so far just tells the businessman that the character's ready whenever he wants to log in, and that's it.”

“And people do that for a living?”

“Yeah, but it's illegal. So if you're doing it for that businessman, you have to pretend to
be
that businessman. Like, you have to pretend you're that same businessman playing the game as his allotted character.”

“And that's what you're doing for Tiffany?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

“Playing the game as her because she wants to play it but can't be bothered playing it?”