The Thing on the Shore

by Tom Fletcher

  “I don’t know. I think we should have a think. I’m sure the answer will come to us.”

  “It feels important,” Arthur said.

  “I know,” Bony said. “Let’s go and sit on the stones. I’ve got a small bottle of Jack in my pocket.”

  The afternoon wore on, and Drigg beach took on the aspect of a surrealist painting. As the sun lowered, everything turned bright pink and bright orange, the colors shining up from the wet sand as well as down from the sky. The Thing, the big dead flesh thing, looked—from this distance, this angle—like candle wax that somebody had melted and then poured slowly, allowing it to solidify. Further along the beach, beyond the path and out toward the sea, the Barn Scar mast stood thinly and yet vividly against the sky, like a streak of black ink. Those rusted frames of old ships or submarines or planes, or whatever they were, grasped upward from the sands.

  The whisky—or bourbon, as Bony insisted on calling it—felt warm in Arthur’s blood.

  “Bony,” he said, “I had a hallucination when I was at work on Saturday. I put it down to the acid.”

  “No,” Bony said, “I think it was only rice-paper that somebody had drawn on with a highlighter pen.” He swigged from the bottle. “I feel ashamed.”

  “It was quite extreme,” Arthur insisted. “Are you sure about … about the acid?”

  “I am completely sure,” Bony said.

  “That person over there—see them? They look like the person from my hallucination.”

  Bony squinted.

  “To be fair,” Bony said, “that looks like just about anybody. That doesn’t look like any one person in particular. I don’t think you are actually recognizing them. I think you’re just seeing another person from a distance.” He gazed at Arthur with a vaguely concerned expression. “That’s what people at a distance look like,” he said.

  “I know, I know,” Arthur replied, scowling. He waved his hands around. “I was on the phone at work, and I started to feel like I was being reduced. Like I wasn’t really there. Like I was just a voice; just signals passing down the wire. The system on screen, the one we use for billing … I was imagining it as being made up of physical things. And then I was there, I was walking through this landscape made of static and the dead sounds you hear when telephones are broken. I was just there. And in the distance was a city—the City—and … and there was this person walking toward me from a long way away.” Arthur pointed at the figure still standing just where the small waves were breaking. “And that person over there looks just like the one I saw in that landscape.”

  “I wouldn’t read too much into the similarity,” Bony said, sitting forward. “Even so, though, your vision sounds incredible.”

  “But if we didn’t take any acid, then what caused it?”

  Bony pulled his woolen gloves from a pocket and put them on. “I guess that’s the question,” he said. “And the other question: what is that dead thing I found?” He nodded in the direction of the pile of meat.

  “Do you think one thing is connected to the other?”

  Bony was silent while he thought about it.

  “I doubt that very much,” he said, finally.

  Once the bottle was empty, Arthur and Bony stood up and made their way back to the path. They walked unsteadily.

  “Fucking rice-paper,” Bony said suddenly, looking back across the beach one last time before they headed back through the dunes. “A disgrace.”

  A REQUEST FROM HEAD OFFICE

  Bracket and Sally sat in the break room. They hunched over coffee in cardboard cups, and let their gaze rest on the large TV that had been muted. The lunchtime news was on.

  “Well, I just think he’s very rude,” Sally said. “We don’t have bad habits. We’ve been doing all right. Our customer satisfaction scores were getting better. We would have got better at cash collection too, after we’d sorted out the”—she stifled a laugh—“the C-sat.”

  “Fucking C-sat.” Bracket shook his head. “People from big companies don’t half talk shit.”

  “They think they’re too busy to use full-length words,” Sally said.

  “I think Artemis just likes to be in control,” Bracket said. “He likes to get you on the back foot.”

  “Well, I think he’s a prick,” Sally said. “If he can’t manage manners, he can fuck off.” She sighed deeply and looked out of the window. “He stresses them out, you know, the kids.”

  Sally referred to her team as “the kids,” and she wasn’t being derogatory. It was just because they were young: all of them sixteen or seventeen.

  “Yeah,” Bracket said, “he stresses me out too.”

  “They all forget their scripting whenever he walks past. It’s like … it’s like in a film where somebody walks down a corridor and all the lights go out as they pass them. You know the kind of film I mean? It’s like that. One after the other, bang-bang-bang. You can see it in their eyes: panic. It’s like they think he’s going to hit them if they get something wrong. Well, fuck, sometimes I think he’s going to hit them.”

  “I know what you mean,” Bracket said. “He’s threatening.”

  “He’s damaging.”

  Bracket nodded slowly.

  “Did you have a good weekend?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Sally said. “It was OK. Didn’t do much, though. Went out on Friday and went out on Saturday. Went to Mom’s for dinner yesterday. It just goes by so quick. Too quick. How was yours?”

  “It was OK,” Bracket said. “Didn’t do much.” He thought about it. He really hadn’t done much. He had taken Yorkie on a couple of long walks. That was about it. Isobel had spent most of the weekend playing Animal Crossing. “No,” he said, “didn’t do much at all.”

  Sally sighed again and looked at her watch. “I’d better get back,” she said. “My ten minutes are nearly up.”

  “OK. Yeah, I should get back, too.”

  “See you later, Bracket!” Sally said as she stood up. She smiled brightly. “Don’t let them get you down!”

  Bracket smiled back as Sally left. “But you’re new,” he said quietly, once she was too far away to hear.

  On his way back to his desk, Bracket passed the command center. It was unoccupied, and the phone on Artemis’s desk was ringing. The background hum of the call center—people speaking quietly in numbers, the occasional raised voices as advisers announced that they would terminate the call if the customer carried on speaking to them like that, the occasional outburst of manic laughter—receded.

  Bracket looked at the phone. Normally he would answer a ringing phone on anybody’s desk, without hesitating, but Artemis … He thought about it a moment longer, and then picked up the receiver.

  “Artemis,” said a voice like stones shifting about in mud, “contact with the Interstice has, we believe, been made. On Saturday past. Employee ID number T387561. We now have a request to make.”

  “Sorry,” Bracket said, scribbling the number down on a nearby Post-it note. “This isn’t Artemi—”

  A sound like a sudden hailstorm howled down the line, and somewhere within it were traces of the voice that had been speaking. It was high-pitched with rage and it sounded as if it were splitting up, disassembling, breaking down into multiple other voices. Then the line went dead. Bracket stood there with the receiver in his hand and stared at it. He scratched his stomach and put the receiver down. What a fucked-up voice! And what a wanker! Jesus, you could always leave a message, or at least say goodbye. Manners cost nothing. It was almost as if people thought that their success in a corporate environment meant that normal, everyday rules—like being polite—no longer applied. If being successful at work meant having to deal with people like—

  A heavy hand landed on his shoulder.

  “You do not answer my phone,” Artemis whispered into his ear from behind. “You do not answer my phone. Got it?”

  “Yeah,” Bracket said, “but I was only trying to help.”

  “Got it?”

  “Yeah!
”

  Artemis removed his hand, stepped past Bracket, and up on to the command center. “Who was it?” he asked.

  “Somebody saying that they’ve had contact from the Interstice or something,” Bracket replied. He nearly went on to say that whoever the Interstice were, they’d better not be some kind of consultancy firm or something, because they’d been down that road before. But the look on Artemis’s reddening face discouraged him from saying anything at all. It suddenly felt to Bracket as if the wrong word or facial expression could be the end of him.

  “Was that all?” Artemis whispered, bending over toward Bracket from his higher ground.

  “No.” Bracket was leaning backward. “No, he … they said that it happened on Saturday, and gave an employee number. T387561.” He frowned, looking at the number he’d written down. “Actually, I know that employee number. That’s Arthur.”

  “Arthur,” Artemis said, and it wasn’t a question. He nodded. “Yes, Arthur was here on Saturday. Interesting.”

  “They said that they had a request to make.”

  Something flickered briefly across Artemis’s face. Not quite alarm or panic, but something more fundamental. A kind of fear.

  “Did they give you any more details?”

  “No, as soon as I said that I wasn’t you, they … they kind of howled and hung up.”

  “OK,” Artemis said. “OK. Fuck. Fuck. OK, you come with me. Now.”

  Artemis grabbed Bracket’s arm and started dragging him along between the desks, before remembering where he was and releasing his grip. Customer advisers looked up worriedly. For Christ’s sake, Bracket thought, I’ve got work to be doing. Reports on the quality of calls across the site. Charts showing which teams are better, which business processes result in the poorest customer service, all that bollocks. And instead …

  Artemis led Bracket into one of the pods lining the far wall of the center. There were two chairs in there, one behind the desk and one in front of it. It had probably recently been used for a performance review or something. Just another poor fucker, Bracket thought, having to pretend that they really gave a shit. Just another two poor fuckers, actually, if you included the manager doing the assessment.

  “Sit,” Artemis said, gesturing to the chair in front of the desk. He himself sat down in the other chair, then moved the desk telephone so that it was directly in front of him. He looked like he was thinking hard.

  Bracket didn’t know what to do or what to say.

  “If in future you are ever again presented with the opportunity to answer my phone, you do not do so,” Artemis said, one finger raised but without looking at Bracket. “That is best for all concerned.”

  “I understand,” Bracket said.

  “It is a big if,” Artemis continued, looking up. He lifted the receiver.

  Bracket nodded. “We are expecting our first child,” he said.

  “I know,” Artemis said. “I wouldn’t expect them to give a fuck about that, though. Besides, redundancy is not exactly what I’d be worried about, if I were you.”

  Bracket tilted his head as if asking Artemis to elaborate, but Artemis did not. Instead he started dialing.

  The phone was answered quickly.

  “Artemis Black here,” Artemis said.

  Bracket patiently watched the larger man nod and grimace and mutter acquiescence for the next five minutes, and then Artemis put the phone down. He hung his head and steepled his long fingers.

  “Bracket,” Artemis said, “you are involved now. There is nothing that can be done about that. So, you have a task to complete.”

  “I have quite a lot to do,” Bracket said.

  “I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t do everything that you already have to do,” Artemis said. “Your new task will, I think, have to be completed outside of office hours.”

  Bracket looked at Artemis without saying anything. He thought about refusing. He even thought about walking out. “What is it?” he asked.

  “I was thinking of enlisting your services, anyway,” Artemis said, “once I found that you were expecting.” He laughed in a strange, forced way. “Money, right? You can’t get enough overtime with a kid on the way!”

  Bracket smiled uncertainly.

  “Anyway,” Artemis continued, and Bracket was relieved to see the awkward smile drop from his face, “Head Office demand your involvement, now that you know a little too much.”

  “How can I know too much?” Bracket said. “This is just work. This is just a call center. What are you talking about?”

  “There are things you don’t know about Interext,” Artemis said. “My advice to you is to just to do as you’re told. There’s more going on here than you might expect. You don’t want to—trust me on this—you don’t want to piss Head Office off.”

  “Sounds like a warning.”

  “Let’s make it more of a threat,” Artemis said. “Let’s just say that you don’t want to piss me off either, OK?”

  “Or what?” Bracket was all tensed up. He knew that either way his actions now would shape the rest of his life, and he didn’t like that feeling. “The worst you can do is sack me.”

  “You say that like it means nothing,” Artemis said, “but we both know that you don’t really have anywhere else to go. You’ve seen this town. You’ve seen the shops closing down. You’ve heard people talking about redundancies. Besides”—Artemis leaned forward—“I can actually do much worse than sack you.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “You don’t want to know.” He sat back up.

  Bracket didn’t say anything. What was this? What the fuck was this?

  “Can you send me Diane, please, once you get back to your team?” Artemis requested, as if the previous dialogue hadn’t just happened. “I overheard her talking to a customer in a somewhat less than appropriate manner.”

  Bracket stood up.

  “Just await further instructions, Bracket,” Artemis said. “We’ll let you know what we require.”

  “OK,” Bracket said.

  As Bracket left the pod, he pictured Isobel and their asyet-unborn child sitting on the sofa, playing Animal Crossing on matching hand-held consoles. He wanted to join them, but there was something in the way.

  He found Diane at her desk, resting her chin on her hand and looking out of the window. Bracket told her to go and see Artemis in the pod and then immediately felt bad, like he’d done something awful.

  Later, Bracket collared Arthur at his desk.

  “Arthur,” he began. “I’m going to be busy with some extra work from Artemis. I’m going to need your help.”

  “What?” Arthur looked up at Bracket and took his headset off. “That’s fine, but … I didn’t think I was doing very well here at the moment. That stuff with Diane?”

  “Well, yeah, your general demeanor could do with an overhaul but, to be honest, you’re one of the strongest team members I’ve got. I want you to run the calibration sessions and report on the call-quality scores, OK?”

  “Will I get some time to do it?”

  “Well, hopefully. I don’t want to make any promises, though.”

  Arthur looked out of the window. “OK,” he said, “I guess. OK.”

  “I’ll email you the process maps,” Bracket said, “so that you know what you’re doing.”

  Arthur didn’t respond. Bracket hesitated, and then walked away. He thought he knew exactly how Arthur felt.

  WITNESS

  Yasmin watched as Diane slouched across the workspace floor toward the glassy walls of the pods. Diane looked like she wanted to appear nonchalant and uninterested, but she couldn’t help casting several nervy glances back at her colleagues and friends.

  It wasn’t usual for the site manager to carry out coaching sessions or disciplinaries; these had always been the responsibility of the team managers. Maybe this was one of Artemis’s new schemes. Or maybe, Yasmin thought, and more probably, Artemis was just a pervert. After all, Diane was quite attractive in a slovenly, fake-tanned kind
of way, and tended to wear low-cut tops or leave her shirt open a little further down than necessary.

  Diane glanced behind her one last time before disappearing around the side of the last pod, and presumably, entering it. Yasmin shivered, imagining Artemis as some futuristic monster hulking in his shiny lair, while Diane was … what? Irritating—yes. Small-minded—yes. Casually cruel—yes. But ultimately young and naïve, and hopefully fundamentally OK deep down. She was only seventeen, in all fairness, even if she did look slightly older.

  Yasmin checked the time on her phone, took her headset off, and lifted her leather jacket from the back of her chair. She put the jacket on, then checked the pockets for cigarettes and a lighter. It was cold outside—well, it was September—so she put her fingerless gloves on too. Then she made her way to the back door, which was the fire exit, and descended the stairs. She went alone. Most people went for a cigarette with other people, but Yasmin was alone.

  The smoking shelter occupied a corner of the car park between the call center and the narrow, muddy shore path that followed the beach up from Whitehaven toward Parton. It was like a bus stop with no side walls. Yasmin stood beneath it and shivered, the wind gently tugging at her hair. The car park was square, and enclosed by a tall metal fence. After a moment, the door by which Yasmin had exited the building opened and Harry emerged, blinking. He approached her.

  “Good day to you, Yasmin,” he said with a lopsided smile.

  “Afternoon, Harry.” Yasmin grinned.

  “How are you finding the new regime?”

  “It appears to be much the same as the old regime,” Yasmin said, “apart from that it feels like people are waiting. It feels like they’re waiting for something to change.”

  “I’m waiting,” Harry said, glancing down. “I’m waiting for the boot.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he replied. He looked up at Yasmin as he said it, and she was struck, not for the first time, by the clarity of his eyes. His eyes were at odds with the rest of his face, which was mottled and soft-looking, like a ripened fruit. She now just looked at his eyes. “I find myself saying things to customers just to calm them down. I make … I make it all up, Yasmin. Not all of it, but … but you know what I mean. Or … or I think I know what I’m doing and then it’s as if I wake up, and I’m looking at a screen full of numbers that I don’t understand, and so I panic. So I tell the customer I’ll look into it for them and ring them back, and I make a note in my work-queue or in my notebook and then the next time I get five minutes I’ll have a look but I never get that five minutes. I never get it. Or I get the five minutes and then I can’t find the notes I made. Or I ring some customer up and Sally comes over and tells me to get off the phone because we can’t make outbound calls because there are so many incoming calls queuing up. I mean, Sally’s a lovely girl but, but there’s somebody higher up leaning on her, isn’t there? There is. There’s always that.”