The Thing on the Shore

by Tom Fletcher

  Taking one call immediately after another was stressful at the best of times. You didn’t have any time to think, and it was easy to accidentally leave one screen open from the previous customer’s account and thus get mixed up, or confuse this caller’s surname with the last caller’s. Without the opportunity to speak to real people around you, you became a creature of scripted speech and mathematics and nothing else. Coupled with the threat of an angry Artemis, it was deeply discomfiting.

  Arthur started to feel weird. He started to panic that he was disappearing. Not physically—just the part of him that was feeling weird, the part that was thinking. He was aware of his mouth moving and parts of his brain working out corrections to customers’ bills, and his fingers amending addresses and adding notes to accounts, but all of those things were happening outside of his consciousness. He felt that he was trapped behind the eyes of a robot, yet with no means of communicating with it or controlling it. As far as the world was concerned, he was only a customer adviser—he was a voice on the telephone, nothing else. Yasmin and his co-workers wouldn’t be aware of him, because they were all trapped inside their own automata, their minds being squeezed out of existence. Like his. The customer voices coming in through the earpiece sounded slow and soft, words stretching out like bread dough, becoming incomprehensible, monotonous, sickening. He tried to focus on what the current customer was saying. This one was talking about somebody from the call center whom he’d spoken to previously.

  “If I only knew what she was doing,” the customer said. “She knew what she was doing, but I didn’t. She didn’t do anything really to impress me, but then she didn’t do anything bad either.”

  Arthur unpicked this utterance in his mind, throwing away the bits of shell to reveal the point of it, the truth of it, the grain of relevance or inquiry that had prompted the customer to say it. He struggled, though, and he couldn’t find anything. This was often the way with whatever the customers said. They said some words that added up to nothing, and then expected you to respond with something concrete, some kind of answer or solution to what had never properly been a question. Arthur was aware of his mouth opening as if to speak, but he didn’t know what was going to come out of it. He found that he was looking at work-queues on the screen. Yes, that’s right, he thought, this customer’s account is somehow tied up in a work-queue. That girl he’s spoken to has put the account into a work-queue. We are waiting for the outcome. That’s right.

  Work-queues were just that. Queues of particular tasks that needed doing. Often, the call center staff didn’t have the time or systems access to perform some necessary work on a customer account, so they sent off the task to back-office colleagues, who would then work through the jobs in the order that they had been created. The back-office colleagues were based somewhere else—Chorley maybe, or Liverpool, or Delhi, or Kuala Lumpur, or in their own homes scattered across the world. Arthur didn’t really know, and he didn’t really give a fuck because it didn’t really matter.

  The work-queues appeared vertically on screen as lists of reference numbers and explanatory comments, but they now appeared horizontally in Arthur’s imagination, with all the physicality of a Heath Robinson invention, each task a little parcel, all those little parcels backing up in a tube—a horizontal tube—except they were more like clumps of staples, not parcels: clumps of staples, or millipedes, each bit of work forming a different segment. They got incredibly long all too quickly, growing at unmanageable speeds, coiling off into a virtual, electronic distance across the internal plains of some data bank that stretched from Whitehaven to Chorley, maybe, or to Liverpool or Delhi or Kuala Lumpur, or wherever the fuck, bits of them breaking off and getting lost or getting mixed up with other queues, all the while spinning out and bleeding confusion. These spaces are the problem with call centers, Arthur thought as he looked around. Not the people who answer the phones. These eerie, empty interstices, empty of life and reason but full of lost data.

  The customer’s soft words meanwhile had melted into one long, low sound—a kind of thunder that echoed around the milky, buzzing sky. The ground was made up of lurid green and purple things, like tentacles, almost. When he looked at them more closely they either looked like worms or the long, skinny arms of spindly starfish.

  Arthur realized that the thunder wavering in volume was in fact made up of lots of voices broken down into component units and sounds, currently nothing more than signals on their way from one place to another. In the distance he could see a purple light that colored the sky above it.

  Arthur was still aware of his body going through the motions, sitting at his desk, talking to the customer. He was not entirely sure of his situation. He couldn’t work it out. He was in two places at once, though, he knew that much.

  He giggled a little bit. “Hello?” he said. “Where is this?”

  “Don’t be alarmed,” said a very faint voice, a gentle voice that seemed to come from all directions at once. “You are completely safe.”

  “I wasn’t alarmed,” Arthur said.

  The voice sounded feminine, but when he thought about the sound of the voice in any detail, it started to come apart as if he hadn’t heard it at all but just received the words directly into his brain.

  “Head for the City,” the voice said. “You will meet me on the way.”

  Arthur was about to ask where the City was, but then looked at the purple light and saw that it was not one purple light, but many. The City.

  Arthur could not recall ever having felt so excited in his entire life.

  The only semi-decent explanation for these events that Arthur could come up with was that he had died. He was shocked at the warmth that flooded his consciousness when he thought of that possibility; he was dead, but the world was not over. There was an afterlife—a stranger existence, a more exciting existence. He was almost ecstatic at the potential. He realized that he could no longer sense his corporeal body, or the chair it sat in, or the keyboard at its fingertips.

  Arthur started walking. Sometimes the ground seemed to shift beneath his feet and, as it did, it sounded like the wet susurrations of static that would occasionally whisper from the call center telephones in place of the voice of a customer. It remained solid though—the ground, that is—in a way that Arthur didn’t fully understand.

  After some time spent walking—it was hard to say how long—Arthur could see a figure approaching him from the direction of the City. The City was still a long way off, but this figure was at about the halfway point. The world felt darker, but the sky was the same dirty, creamy color that it had been when Arthur arrived. From this distance, the figure seemed very tall—a thin black line scratched into the landscape.

  “I can see you now,” said the voice from the air, sounding louder than it had done previously. “Can you see me?”

  “Yes,” Arthur said. “Yes, I can.” He felt light. The voice was definitely feminine. Not only that, it sounded almost familiar. It sounded, in as much as it sounded like anything at all, like his mother. That would make sense, right, if he was dead? You saw it all the time in films. People you loved are waiting for you when you die. That wasn’t something Arthur had ever believed, but then he’d never believed in an afterlife either.

  “I won’t be long,” he said.

  “Good,” said the voice. “That’s good.”

  Arthur felt some kind of electric slap across his cheek, and screwed his eyes shut. He felt himself falling. He opened his eyes to find he was lying on the rough office carpet tiles of the call center floor.

  Yasmin was shaking his shoulder. “Arthur?” she was saying. “Arthur, are you OK?”

  He stood up and just looked at her, mouth slack. Artemis loomed behind her, hand pressed on chin.

  “Sorry for the slap,” she said. “Seemed to do the job, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were unconscious,” Yasmin said.

  “Was I?” Arthur said.

  “You were talking,
” Artemis said suddenly, and loudly. Yasmin jumped, as if she hadn’t known he was there. “Who were you talking to, Arthur?”

  “I don’t know,” Arthur said, not wanting to embarrass himself.

  “You said, ‘Where is this?’ Why did you say that?”

  “I was in a strange place.”

  “Were you alone?”

  “No.”

  “Who was there with you?”

  “I don’t know who they were.”

  Artemis nodded, looking serious. “You should go to the doctor’s,” he said. “Just to make sure you’re not a complete nut.” Then he walked off, grinning.

  “Fucking acid,” Arthur murmured to Yasmin. “I thought I was dead.”

  “Oh, Arthur,” said Yasmin, and put her arms round him. “It sounds awful.”

  Arthur didn’t say anything.

  “Let’s go to the break room,” Yasmin said. “I think Artemis was, in his own way, offering you a breather—if not suggesting you take the rest of the day off.”

  *

  Arthur and Yasmin stood on the break room balcony that jutted over the car park and faced out to sea. The wind was strong here, and they were cold, but it was preferable to the crowded, noisy break room itself. Arthur was feeling scatterbrained and hollowed-out.

  “I thought I was dead, but it didn’t bother me too much,” he said. He pursed his lips and looked up at Yasmin. She looked back with narrowed eyes.

  “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.

  OBJECTIFICATION

  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.

  THE FISHING LINE

  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 holida
y 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.