The Thing on the Shore

by Tom Fletcher

  “That was a good one,” said Bony.

  “It was,” said Arthur.

  “Neither of you are sitting next to me,” said Yasmin. She shook her head. “No way.”

  “Have … have you been in the sea?” asked Dean, mystified.

  “Not quite,” said Bony.

  “They go out to the lighthouse during storms,” explained Yasmin. “Mental.”

  “Why do you do that?” said Dean. “I … I thought it was dangerous?”

  “I suppose it is, really,” said Arthur.

  “It’s like you’re plugging in,” said Bony. “It’s like you’re engaging with everything. You should come with us next time, Dean. Honest to fucking God. It’s like the world is talking to you alone.”

  “Are you OK for drinks?” said Arthur, standing up again. He left a puddle behind on the stool. There was some early Jimi Hendrix playing in the background, and the smell of grilled Cumberland sausage wafted through from the kitchen.

  Later, despite the warmth, Bony was still wearing his pair of soggy gloves. They were now covered in yellow crumbs.

  “Bony,” said Yasmin, “please take your gloves off to eat your crisps. It’s making me feel sick.”

  “Don’t look, then,” mumbled Bony through a mouthful. “I just don’t like the feel of crisps on my fingers.”

  Yasmin rolled her eyes and Arthur laughed.

  “What … what do you reckon about this new stuff at work, then?” said Dean. “Reckon it’ll change much?”

  “Not much,” replied Arthur. “Except maybe they’ll be even more bastardly. More desperate.”

  “Bracket was … was saying that there might be some opportunities coming up.” Dean’s head bobbed up and down like that of an excited chicken. “Said they might have a proper restructure, like. I was thinking I … I could maybe apply for something. Not often you get such a good chance to … to develop.”

  “You should,” said Arthur. “You’d make a good team coach.”

  “Th … thank you,” said Dean. “Are you going to apply for something, Yasmin? If it comes up?”

  “Maybe,” said Yasmin. “If it gets me off the fucking phones, then yeah, too right.” She drank deeply from her wine glass. “The only way I get through the day is by forgetting I’m even there. The way people talk to me I feel like a prostitute. It’s like, how far do people go? Do they think it’s OK to be so rude because they’re not physically beating the seven greenest shades of shit out of you?”

  “They would kick your head in if they could do it via the telephone,” said Arthur. “As long as they can’t see you and don’t know you, then you’re fair game.”

  “You’d think people would be intelligent enough these days to realize that you don’t have to be actually physical to be violent or damaging,” said Yasmin.

  “They know,” said Arthur. “They know all right.”

  “W … will you go for any new jobs, Arthur?” asked Dean.

  “Maybe,” said Arthur, after a moment. “I don’t know. I don’t really know what I want. I want to work at Sellafield is what I want, but nothing ever comes up there. Nothing that I can do, anyway.”

  “You see all those Sellafieldies going past on the train in the morning,” said Bony. “They’re all weird.”

  “As if you can talk,” said Yasmin. Her eyes lingered on him.

  “I’m not weird,” said Bony, though not making eye contact. He looked as if he was about to say something else, when he noticed somebody entering the pub and got distracted. The person in question was a young man, quite short and fat, with a blond thatch and big teeth and a sweaty red face. He wore a white shirt and heavily dyed blue jeans. He grinned at Bony and Bony nodded at him before standing up.

  “’Scuse me,” he said to the three seated around the table. “I just need to see Ollie for a moment.” He squeezed himself out of the alcove and disappeared into the crush.

  “Isn’t that Tiffany’s son?” asked Yasmin, frowning.

  “Yeah, it is,” said Dean. “How … how does Bony know him?”

  Arthur peered around over both his shoulders and then leaned forward before replying in a low voice.

  “Acid,” he said.

  KARAOKE

  It was karaoke night in the Vine and the pub was full. Harry was up at the bar, perched on a tall stool, his head swaying loosely to “Do You Think I’m Sexy?” by Rod Stewart. The lights were low and the air felt brown. Lots of big bald men in striped shirts danced without moving their feet, while tall women with long blond hair and bottomless cleavages shook their heads around, their arms up in the air. People were shouting and laughing. The woman behind the bar looked like a retired pirate with a blond perm.

  The man singing along to Rod Stewart was short, about Harry’s height, with straight chestnut-colored hair hanging down to his shoulders. The top of his head was bald, like a monk’s, and as orange with fake tan as the rest of his face. The words coming out of his mouth were low and throaty and unintelligible, like the sound of coal being shoveled. He seemed to have some teeth missing, and kept tripping over his own feet. After many failed attempts, he managed to thread the cable of the microphone between his legs, and pull it to and fro. He grinned as he did so, jerking his hips forward and backward. He tried unbuttoning his bright pink shirt, but didn’t seem to know how to do so. He still held the microphone but had momentarily stopped singing.

  A young blond girl with six-inch heels came forward as if to help him, before turning to laugh at her friends. They all joined her and danced around the karaoke singer, whose lips were pulled back in a weird kind of smile. One of the girls helped him shrug the shirt off, revealing a very round stomach, like he was going to give birth to a beach ball. His whole body was orange, and his chest and stomach were completely hairless and shiny. He dropped the microphone and started bending over, kind of dancing, but kind of just bending over. The girls dispersed, a couple of them exchanging glances as if to say, It’s getting too weird now. The man carried on in the middle of an empty space.

  Harry watched him, not smiling any more, just watching. Harry loved karaoke night in the Vine. Sometimes he got up and sang himself. Sometimes he would sing “Dignity” by Deacon Blue. That was his favorite song to sing at karaoke night in the Vine. Not in an ironic way, either. He just liked it because nobody really noticed him and nobody really cared. His eyes were closing now; he was drooping, nearly falling off the stool.

  He was suddenly aware of somebody else standing near him at the bar. A young man in a white shirt with blond hair and a red face, who was talking to him.

  “All right, marra,” he was saying.

  “Evening,” said Harry.

  “I’m selling Viagra,” said the boy. Ollie. “You want any?”

  “What?” said Harry.

  “Viagra, marra. You want any?”

  “Oh!” said Harry. “No, my wife and I have a very satisfactory relationship, thank you. We’ve got everything we need. Our … bodies are OK. We don’t need … don’t need anything extra, thank you very much. No, thank you very much.”

  “Not to worry,” said Ollie. “I can always shift a few in Gallagher’s.”

  “But I thought that was where young people go?” said Harry.

  “Yeah,” said Ollie, “but it still helps them out. You know how it is.”

  When Harry turned back again, he was disappointed to see that the strange little topless singing man had disappeared. He wondered if he’d temporarily drifted off. There was still music playing and people dancing. He gestured to the bartender. She looked at him uninterestedly from the other end of the bar, then slouched over toward him. He smiled at her. He was going to sing.

  BEFORE THE LIGHTHOUSE NIGHT

  Arthur remembered things being OK. He remembered everything being fine, back when his dad had been working at the museum. It had been a good time for them. Harry had come back in the evenings with his head still supported by his neck, not just lolling forward like it did now. His hair had bee
n gray but clean and swept backward, not gray and greasy and flat. He had ironed his clothes, and they had always been fresh and fragrant. Every evening he had walked along the cliff from the museum with some kind of bounce to his gait. Sometimes, when the sun set in a hallucinatory blaze of pinks and greens, streaking the ocean with colored ink, Harry would stand there on his way home and look out over the water like some kind of personable scientist in a far-future utopia, his shirt loose and his glasses low on his nose, his hands in his pockets. Once upon a time Harry had been a perfectly capable man. A respectable man. Standing there on the cliff experiencing some kind of joy in the view.

  Rebecca used to get home later than Harry and, as a rule, Arthur and Harry would have the tea ready for her arrival. Rebecca was a manager at the Tesco supermarket. It was a good job. She was a sharp, smart woman usually dressed in a fitted navy-blue suit when out and about, with glossy shoulder-length hair and subtle, but effective make-up. She was the first person Arthur knew to acquire a mobile phone. After tea she would sit in the armchair with her knees pulled up—she always wore jeans and soft jumpers when at home—and do the crossword while half-watching the news.

  Thinking about it, the house used to be pretty nice, with its clean, plain rooms and lots of warm lamps. Where were all the lamps now?

  Arthur stood in the doorway to the living room and looked around. Actually the lamps were all still there. It was just that the bulbs had gone years ago, and the stands and shades had faded away into the dust and accumulated clutter of the background. Drying clothes now hung over them or they rested, broken, down alongside the skirting boards.

  What had his dad done? Arthur stepped into the room but then just stood there indecisively. It felt disloyal and vindictive to ask the question, but what had Harry done?

  Had he actually done anything? Did it have to be his fault? Well, no, but Arthur felt pretty sure that it had been. Yet his mother had never seemed like the kind of person who would react to something, to anything, by killing herself. Getting angry or walking out, yes. Throwing a frying pan across the kitchen, absolutely. Suicide, however, seemed too much. Maybe she did simply fall. Maybe she did fall after all.

  What could his dad have done to her? The worst thing Arthur could imagine was some kind of violence, but even then, his mum would not just have left the house and jumped to her death. She would have fought back, screamed, shouted, or called the police. She had not suffered fools, or bastards, ever.

  Arthur had been quite an intelligent, observant child and also quite an intelligent, observant adolescent, even if it had not been very apparent. Surely he would have spotted any signs of domestic violence. Surely he would have seen the signs if Harry had been having an affair. The thought of Harry having an affair was laughable these days, but not so much back then. He had once possessed the wiry handsomeness of Samuel Beckett or somebody, albeit with thicker glasses. But he was not the kind of man who would have had an affair. Assuming there was a typical kind of man who would have had an affair. He had not been much of a drinker then either. That had come afterward. After the lighthouse night.

  MONDAY MORNING AT ARTHUR’S

  On waking, Arthur lay in his bed and listened to the wind. It was getting light; his thin blue curtains glowed. He got up and looked out of the window. The house was at the southern end of High Road, and his room lay at the back, with a view to the west. He could see out over some scrubby grass toward a muddy footpath, beyond which the ground dropped away into sheer sandstone cliffs. It was a clear day, and the sea shone bright in the sunlight. He could see the Isle of Man outlined faintly on the horizon. Seagulls were getting blown this way and that by the wind.

  Silhouetted against the shining sea, to the right of his view, he could see the defunct minehead balancing on the edge of the cliff. It was a tangle of rusted metal, an assortment of tin boxes and a big yellow wheel that had once lowered people down into the earth. After the mine closed, the minehead had been turned into a museum. His father had been the curator, until the museum had closed too.

  Arthur made his way to the bathroom. A few of those bastard worms were visible around the bath; they must have surfaced during the night. He checked the cistern but, thankfully, found none. He looked at the bath and the worms and the tiles all around the bath, and chewed his lip and realized that he was shivering. He could imagine them all packed in together behind the tiles. Writhing and dividing like bacteria under a microscope. If that was the case, then they’d soon burst through the walls. But, of course, that wasn’t the case. It was bacteria that did that. These were fully fledged worms, therefore different. Different things altogether.

  Arthur’s eyes hurt after spending all Sunday morning at Bony’s along with Yasmin, the three of them playing Mario Kart and getting stoned, and then all Sunday afternoon on Drigg beach, the three of them squinting up at the sun and drinking tea from a flask and taking photos of the rusty remains of twentieth-century shipwrecks. It had been a warm day for September, and a marked contrast to the weather of the night before. Thinking about it, though, thinking about that Saturday and Sunday caused Arthur almost physical pain, given that it was now Monday morning.

  He felt, as he felt every Monday morning, a kind of corporeal reluctance to get ready for work. It was as if the anger and disappointment and dread that would once have occupied his thoughts had seeped out to infect the rest of his body, leaving a kind of numbness in his head and an acidic unpleasantness everywhere else. He took it out on the worms, smacking some tissue paper down on top of them. He did the last couple slowly, and was faintly nauseated to find that the crushing of the creatures made a small sound, as if they were actually chitinous. The noise was like a split second of static or a little click. To Arthur it sounded like somebody a long way away putting the phone down. He wrinkled his nose. Everything came back to work. Work.

  What he was most afraid of was arriving at the call center to find the place crazily busy, with calls queuing up. That is, with irritated customers waiting to have their calls answered. Because that would result in him having to answer such calls rather than getting on with his own job of monitoring call quality. But customers could not be allowed to wait. Little did it matter that the main reason for them calling was that their previous calls had been dealt with incorrectly. Little did it matter that if he and his QP colleagues were allowed to get on with their job, and thus monitor enough calls and deliver enough feedback, then customer queries would get dealt with properly and then the customers wouldn’t need to ring back, which would prevent the calls queuing up, which would solve the problem pre-emptively. None of that mattered. Why bother thinking long-term to fix a problem, when you can exacerbate it superbly by just reacting in the most knee-jerk and haphazard way imaginable?

  Arthur started brushing his teeth. The mirror in front of him already wore a thin veneer of splattered toothpaste. Either he or his father was going to have to clean it one of these days. Well, it wouldn’t be his father.

  Of course, Arthur understood the panicking mentality that drove the all-hands-to-the-wrong-deck approach. Nobody wanted to piss off the customers. And besides, he was probably wrong about it all anyway. What did he know? In the grand scheme of the business, he was nothing. He was sure somebody up there in the upper reaches of the company—whichever company it was—must know what they were doing. They would have it all worked out.

  Still, though, he didn’t want to go to work. Monday mornings were always busy. There were always calls queuing on a Monday morning. Customers across the country pressing telephone receivers into their faces. All of them part of the same phantom line, and all holding each other up. All of them frustrated. All of them waiting. Waiting. If Arthur was taking calls, he tended to imagine a long queue of ghosts just beyond his desk, waiting for him to log into his telephone. He dreaded that moment. He dreaded the customers. Most of them were OK, but it only took one to ruin everything.

  WHERE ARE YOU?

  Yasmin felt like she still had Drigg beach sand
in her eyes. Monday fucking morning, and the weekend had never even happened. She was busy trying to revert to her I’m-not-here bubble as she made her way across the buzzing floor to her desk. I’m not here. It was only twenty past eight and the calls were queuing already. Still, it was only a job, and she wasn’t there. I’m not here. She had ten minutes yet before she needed to be logged in, so she turned her computer on, giving it time to boot up, and then went to the canteen to get a small plastic cup of water. Water was the only thing from the canteen you could take back to your desk.

  Yasmin unlocked her desk drawers and took out an A4 pad of paper. All paper and notebooks had to be locked away between shifts, in case you’d written down any customer details that could be stolen. There had been a short-lived rule that nobody was allowed to write anything down at all, but the impracticality of that had been quickly proven. Some customers seemed to speak purely in numbers, and many of them didn’t take kindly to having to repeat themselves. The original idea had been to make notes on the computer as the customer spoke, but that meant not being able to look at those notes at the same time as you worked in another computer program. And, besides, which idiot really thought that information saved on a networked computer was actually safer than information written down by hand and locked away in a drawer?

  Anyway, Yasmin’s pad of paper didn’t have any information on it at all. It was for doodling only. It wasn’t that Yasmin didn’t pay attention to customers speaking on the phone, or didn’t make sure to remember what they were telling her. Her doodling was completely automatic, and required none of her pretty formidable brainpower, so she was able to focus all of that on the customer at hand. About sixty percent of the customer advisers working there doodled like this, too. Most of Yasmin’s doodles ended up full of ears and mouths and wires. Pointed ears, that is, and impossibly plump lips, and thick black biro wires that snaked out all over the page. About halfway through each shift, she’d find the outer edges of her hands leaving big smudges across her desk, and see that they were covered in ink from leaning on the densely populated paper. A lot of the other customer advisers would, without thinking about it, draw ships and sea monsters.