by Tom Fletcher
Harry stopped as Arthur opened the door into the front room.
“Who are you talking to, Dad?” asked Arthur.
“Your mother,” said Harry.
“Mum’s not here,” said Arthur. “I can see that she’s not here.”
“I was talking on the telephone,” said Harry. “That’s the magic of the telephone. They don’t have to be here at all.”
“Dad,” began Arthur.
“I know you don’t believe me,” said Harry. “I know you don’t believe me, son. I’m not asking you to. Just—let me talk to her.”
“OK,” said Arthur, after a moment.
Harry was a small man, painfully thin, and he lived in a navy-blue fleece. His pointed face was red and flaky, his hair was gray and greasy, flecked with dandruff, and he always smelled faintly of old raw meat.
“Do … do you want some tea?” he asked, then he gave a little smile. “I had beans on toast. I can make you some beans on toast if you like. I saved half the tin.”
“Go on, then,” said Arthur. “I’ll just go up and get changed.”
Later on, as Harry sat on the edge of the old gray sofa and shouted out the answers to University Challenge, Arthur went upstairs to use the toilet. The light on the landing was dim. The carpet was green and cheap and badly fitted. The walls were a dirty cream color. Arthur stood there for a moment and listened to his father’s voice carrying upstairs from the front room. Harry got most of the answers right when it came to University Challenge. It seemed that watching it was one of the highlights of his father’s week. Second only to karaoke night in the Vine, maybe.
It was a shame, Arthur thought, that his father was not as good at his job as he was at University Challenge.
Arthur eventually went into the bathroom. There was no window there, so he couldn’t see anything much at first, but he couldn’t really bear that so he tugged the light-switch cord. He urinated into the toilet bowl, fixing his eyes on the cistern. As he washed his hands, he noticed something move, out of the corner of his eye. He turned to look at it but couldn’t see straight away what it was.
The walls above and around the bath were covered with small white tiles. The bath itself, despite Arthur’s best efforts, was a little stained. He leaned over it to look more closely at the wall. Something had definitely moved. A lot of the grout was rotten or missing, and it was into one of the black holes left by some missing grout that Arthur now peered. There was something in there.
He wasn’t sure that it was what he had originally seen, but he could certainly see it now. It looked as if a small part of the remaining grout was somehow alive and wriggling. He shuddered involuntarily as he watched the soft, tiny piece of darkness squirm its way out from between the tiles and drop, silently, into the heavy glass soap dish that had once been his mother’s. He saw then that it was a short black worm, maybe no more than a centimeter long. There was one already in the soap dish. That must have been what he’d spotted from the corner of his eye—the first worm falling. Together they made up an “=” symbol in the soap sludge.
Arthur’s face twisted as he examined them. Then he tore off some toilet paper and rolled it into a ball, before using it to squash the two worms. Gathering them up with it, he flushed the toilet paper away. Arthur shuddered again as he washed his hands, and then he left the bathroom, turning off the light as he went.
The soap dish that had been his mother’s was heavy because it was so thick. It was made out of blue glass, with a shallow cavity at the top to hold the soap in place. Inside the glass itself were lots of tiny mirrored squares that caught the light and reflected each other, or whatever else was there.
THE OMINOUS PASSENGER
Bony turned off his Walkman—he had been listening to whalesong—and put on his hi-vis jacket before jogging down the steps to close the level-crossing gates. He could smell cow muck and hear the cows themselves in the distance. Maybe, if he stood completely still, he could also hear the sea. And he could just about hear the train if he put his mind to it.
He closed one of the gates—the one on the far side of the line from his signalman’s hut—and then stood between the rails and looked southwards, which was the direction from which the train approached. The level crossing was at about the halfway point of a particularly long stretch of straight track, and Bony stared all the way to the vanishing point of the rails. Beyond that rose the humped blue shadow of middle-distance mountains. If he were to turn around, he would be able to see the rails passing beneath a bridge and then disappearing toward the horizon that way too. The sky was growing dark, turning purple. The sky was big here in Drigg. There was nothing getting in the way of it.
The sound of the train was now definitely audible—a low, rhythmic rumble that sounded warm to Bony, warm and reassuring—although the train itself was not yet in sight. There were no cars or people around. There never were at this time of day.
Bony lay on his side across the tracks, facing south, with his ear to one of the rails. It was vibrating and he held his head up slightly, so that the vibrations didn’t rattle his skull. He longed to lie face down along one of the tracks, and let the humming metal bring him to orgasm. The only reason he didn’t was that somebody might catch him there and guess at his motivation. He didn’t want anybody thinking that he was some sort of pervert. So he contented himself with lying there on his side just for a short while, while trying to enjoy the sensation. Normally he did. Normally it inspired a sense of belonging that he found difficult to explain: a sense of companionship emanating from the ground itself. This time, though, there was a spiky violence to the oscillations that was entirely unpleasant. It was almost like being run over by a ghost train, he thought. It is almost like there is a ghost train here with me.
Slightly unnerved, he got up after a moment and returned to the western side of the tracks, closed the second gate of the level crossing and ascended the steps to his hut. The train would still be passing through Ravenglass, so he had some time yet. He opened the door and did twenty pull-ups on the top edge of the doorframe. As he lowered himself the last time, he saw the light of the train had now appeared at the end of the straight. “Well done, Bony,” he said.
It was getting dark now. Up above, the sky was a purplish black with a couple of big bright stars, but over the sea, to the west, it was still a pale blue. In that direction there lay nothing but fields and sand dunes and then the beach and the sea, with a few sheep scattered over both grassland and dunes.
Bony watched the train get steadily nearer. The Cumbrian coastal line was not a busy route, and the trains running up and down it were old and slow, so, as ever, the thing seemed to be taking an age to arrive. Being so small, Drigg was a request-only stop, so Bony didn’t know if this train would even stop. For some reason he hoped it wouldn’t. He chewed the fingernails of his left hand absentmindedly, running the right hand over his shorn skull. Something about this particular train was making him feel sick; he had known there was something wrong with it from the vibrations. It was moving with an agonizing sluggishness, and he wanted it to be gone. He just wanted the train to have passed through, so he could open up the level crossing and then get back to his pull-ups, his press-ups, his National Geographic magazine.
He tapped his foot frantically, noticing that it had got dark very quickly. His hut looked on to the track at such an angle that he could now see all the train’s lit-up windows, appearing as orange squares with rounde corners. He turned away then, because he didn’t want to see inside. Instead, he picked up the telephone and rang the conductor of the approaching locomotive.
“Hello?” said the conductor in response.
“All right,” said Bony. “It’s Bony.”
“All right, marra,” said the conductor.
“You stopping?”
“No, not tonight,” said the conductor. “Gotta go slow, though. Some bugger’s reported a cow on t’line just past Seascale.”
“Oh, right.”
“You OK?”
>
“Yeah, good. Thanks.”
Bony hung up. A cow on the line? He should have received a call about that. They’d probably tried to call him while he’d been speaking to his mother. He kept telling her: “Don’t call me at work. It’s very important that the phone line is always kept free. It’s very important. Don’t call me at work.” But she didn’t seem to understand. He looked back out of the window: the train had slowed to a crawl. It was only fair, of course; you didn’t have to be going that fast to burst a cow. It was typical, though. The one and only time a train feels somehow sinister, and a fucking cow appears, as if by magic, to slow it down.
Bony continued gazing out of the window and noticed the last of the light had drained away during that brief phone call. And there, right opposite him, but a little bit lower, was a train window, through which a passenger stared up at him. All sound slowly stopped.
Looking slightly too big to be human, the passenger was squeezed tightly into his seat, his knees pressing against the one in front. He was wearing a black suit with an open-necked white shirt. His huge, long head was perfectly bald and unusually pointed. His eyes were dark and deep, overshadowed by a pair of thick, heavy eyebrows that swept upward like the feathers above an owl’s eyes. His actual eyes, in fact, were just about invisible—all Bony could see of them were twin points of light. His nose was sharp and pointed. He had a neatly trimmed black goatee, and his lips were thin. His skin looked naturally tanned and, even though he sat folded up into a train seat too small for him, he gave an impression of physical fitness and coiled-up strength. Each of his hands could have encased Bony’s entire head, and on his fingers he wore thick gold rings.
Bony quickly scanned all the other windows of the train, but there didn’t appear to be any other passengers. He then stared back down at the massive man below him, whose mouth was now twisted in derision.
Stop looking at me, thought Bony. Stop looking at me, you terrifying bastard. But the deep glints that passed for the man’s eyes didn’t leave Bony’s face until the train had edged further along the track, and the windows finally shifted out of alignment.
Once the big man had passed from view, everything started moving more quickly. Bony opened the cabin door and watched the train recede to the north. It appeared black against the inky blue of the landscape and the luminous purple-blue of the sky. The orange windows still stood out clearly, as if they were the only lit-up things in the world. Bony became aware of the sound again. The sound of the train as it grew quieter. He stood in the doorway and watched.
Soon he felt totally alone once more, standing in the doorway watching nothing, and listening to the Drigg cows bellow and moan in the darkness of night.
ARTEMIS APPROACHES
The train’s conductor was young and fat and sweaty, and his badly shaved head was covered in small cuts and spots. Every now and again, he would dash up and down the train as if he had something important to do. Artemis couldn’t bear the sight of him, and wished he had a gun, even a knife, just to scare him. And why didn’t this stupid fucking train have a first-class carriage, anyway? And where was the shop? Where was the wi-fi? He would have waited for the fucking monkeys at the garage to fix his car if only he’d known he would end up stuck here in one of these crappy tin cans. Pitiful things. Small and slow and old.
He stood up to stretch his legs. The dome of his head bounced against the carriage roof as the train swayed, so he hunched his back a little. It wasn’t even as if there was anything of interest outside the window. Just the sea at night. He couldn’t believe they were sending him to this no-place: this empty coastline with its small, grim excuses for towns and villages, its miserable little houses, gray stony beaches, the cold gray ocean, and the weird, unintelligible people. If the ice caps actually melted and angry water swamped this bleak shithole of a place then it would be no real loss. There wasn’t even anybody else on the train, but then nobody in their right mind would come up here if they didn’t have to. Artemis shook his head at his reflection in the window. Out there on the sea shone an orange light. Some sort of boat? It shone at him through the reflection of his shadowed eyes.
AT HOME
“I don’t want to talk,” Bracket said. “I don’t want to talk about anything. I’m sorry. Just—I’m just going to go and sit down.”
He regretted saying that almost before he finished uttering the words. Isobel had been looking at him as if she were about to tell him something fantastic; a smile playing around the corners of her mouth, her eyes wide and bright with excitement. He hadn’t read her face until it was too late. He felt a coldness settle in his stomach as he turned to hang his coat up on the back of the kitchen door. When he turned back, she was still looking at him. She wore a long black cardigan over a shirt and some jeans, and around her the cluttered yet tidy kitchen was glowing orange. Her rust-colored hair was tied back, but a halo of loose strands floated about her head.
Yorkie raised his old, tired dachshund face above the edge of the dog basket in a kind of lazy greeting, and then let it fall back on to the cushion with a humph.
“I’ll make you a drink,” said Isobel.
“Thank you,” said Bracket. “I’m sorry.” He bit his lip and smiled to prevent himself from crying. “I, um … It’s just … I don’t know.”
Isobel stepped around the kitchen table, piled high with newspapers and unopened envelopes, and ran both her hands down his arms. “Go and sit down,” she murmured, and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll be through in a minute.”
Before finishing work, Bracket had checked his emails and read one that had been sent out to all of the managers on site. There had been an attachment—the new organogram. The word “organogram” itself made him feel a kind of nausea. He had pinched the bridge of his nose, then opened the attachment and scanned the slick PowerPoint slides which presented the new management structure. He had grimaced at the headshots which illustrated it. His photo in particular was a poor one—he looked like a condom stuffed full of bread dough. As he had expected, virtually nothing in the structure had changed—not yet, anyway—except the face and the name appearing at the top of it. Jessica Stoats, with her pursed lips and huge false eyelashes, had been replaced by Artemis Black, with his gleaming bald skull and sneering mouth. His eyes oozed contempt even through the photograph, through the desktop monitor, and it had taken an effort of will for Bracket not to smash his clenched fist into the screen. He had kept a lid on it, though, as he was surrounded by customer advisers taking calls from customers. It was on his personal development plan to always remain positive in the workplace. In his last performance review, Jessica had spoken to him at length about what she called “the shadow of the leader.”
Now, though, sitting curled up on the sofa in his darkened living room, there was nobody to pretend for. At home he acknowledged the truth: he was a seam of coal being steadily mined. He was an ocean being emptied of fish. He was a field being slowly stripped of nutrients. He was giving everything away to people and things he felt nothing for. He had told Isobel that he didn’t want to talk, but actually words were queuing up inside him. She would understand, if he explained. I am thirty-six, he imagined himself saying. I am thirty-six and I spend the majority of my waking hours pretending to be interested in what’s going on around me. I pretend to like people. I pretend to care about what I’m doing. But everything I see and everything I hear and everything I have to do makes me angry. My anger is very deep and very distant. I keep it very deep and very distant. I am thirty-six years old and I hide myself. I hide myself so that I can keep my job. A job that I hate. I cannot explain how pathetic that makes me feel. If I keep myself hidden for much longer, I will disappear. I am thirty-six. I should not feel so pathetic. Nobody should feel pathetic. Nobody should feel as pathetic as I do. And now everything will change. The routines that have allowed me to survive will be broken. The surfaces that I skate over will collapse. The new site manager is coming, and he will expect things of me. He will expect more of
me than I can bear to give. And I want to use myself for something good. I want to give you more of myself, Isobel, so I am going to leave. I know you’ll understand. I am going to write my letter of resignation tonight and hand it in tomorrow. It will be OK. It will be OK. Is it normal to be so angry and to be so far away?
Isobel nudged open the living room door with her foot, a mug in each hand, and turned on the light with her forehead. Yorkie dragged himself in after her.
“Look at you,” she said, “sitting in the dark.”
“How was work?” asked Bracket.
“Oh, you know,” said Isobel, rolling her eyes. “The usual.”
“Yeah.” Bracket smiled.
Isobel worked in an office at Sellafield nuclear power station. She would meet any jokes made about her glowing in the dark with a long, cold, hard stare, and would maintain a healthy lack of respect for the perpetrator’s sense of humor for months afterward, if not years. She sat down on the far end of the sofa and looked at him keenly. That excited smile was back on her lips.
“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.