The Thing on the Shore

by Tom Fletcher

  He stood up and picked up his mother’s heavy glass soap dish and, holding it tightly, smashed it into the white tiles. They splintered and fell easily. They crashed into the bath, along with black grout and black worms and soft, dark lumps of tile adhesive and plaster that had gone rotten. He kept on going until he became aware of his father shouting to him through all the clattering. As Arthur felt his father’s hands on his shoulders, the violent world of rancid mess and angular noise that he was in the process of creating suddenly receded into nothing. The tide inside went out in a matter of seconds; where there had been waves and motion there was now just a flat expanse of nothing. He dropped the soap dish on to the bathroom floor and it broke. He didn’t hear it.

  “Arthur,” Harry said. “What are you doing?”

  “These worms,” Arthur said. “They’re getting to me.”

  “That soap dish was your mother’s.”

  “It was only a soap dish.”

  “Yes,” Harry said. “Yes, it was.”

  “Don’t talk about it like it’s something important.”

  “OK.”

  “I wish I could talk to her like you do.”

  Harry put his arms all the way around Arthur, and held him pretty close. Arthur could feel his father shaking.

  “Dad,” Arthur said, “sometimes I feel like some kind of freak. Sometimes I feel very different to everybody else, like there might be something wrong with me.”

  By this point, the two of them were kneeling on the bathroom floor, their knees wet with water from the morning’s showers. Harry was still hugging Arthur. He struggled for what felt like a long time to think of a response, but in the end he couldn’t.

  Later that evening, Harry called up to Arthur that he was going out. Arthur shouted a goodbye from his bedroom. Off to the Vine, probably, thought Arthur, who was lying face-down on the bed. His room was square, with just the bed and a desk and a wardrobe. The desk was a homework desk from when he was still at school; now it was a bit too small for him. On it sat a telephone handset. The ceiling light was off and the curtains were closed, but they were thin and there was still a little brightness left in the sky outside, so the room was illuminated very slightly. Arthur felt a bit like he was in an aquarium, and the window was a tank set into a wall that he could walk up to and press his face against to see something weird floating inside. He could picture that groaning green crab hanging there in mid-air, its legs dangling like the tentacles of a jellyfish, staring back at him.

  Arthur rolled over and reached across to grab the telephone handset. If his dad could talk to his mother, then he could too. But now, looking at the phone, he felt the ridiculousness of it all. He didn’t even know how to begin. Or what number to dial. He put the receiver to his ear and listened—there was a scratchy wind in the distance, some kind of static, and a ticking, clicking sound that sometimes seemed close and sometimes far away. What was that? Was that due to birds sitting on telephone wires and moving around? Was that how it worked? How did it work? How did anything work? He moved the phone away from his head and went to dial a number again, but his finger just hovered over the keypad.

  There was no telephone number he could possibly ring to reach his mother. His mother was dead. They had found her meaty skeleton, crawling with crabs and sandflies and strange worms, down on the beach. She had drowned, he knew. She had toppled from the cliff, breaking her skull on the way down, and then drowned in the sea. The fucking sea. So where was she whenever his father spoke to her? In heaven? Maybe the phone was just some earthly prop for a much more mystical form of communication. Or maybe his father was just a fucking nut-job.

  Maybe they were both nut-jobs. It could be hereditary, couldn’t it? And his father’s delusions were hardly more drastic than his own recent experience with the landscape and the purple-lit city and that tall figure in the distance. Or—Arthur sat upright—maybe neither of them was delusional at all. He stood up and pulled back the curtains.

  Outside, seagulls squawked and squealed as they were buffeted by the wind. They looked luminous in the darkening sky, lit up as they were by the lights of the town. The rusty, decrepit-looking wheel of Haig Pit was visible if he looked south. A dinosaur skeleton. Something massive and obsolete.

  He had felt kindness in that landscape, and the voice had been warm. Maybe there was something else happening. He watched a seagull, which had been suspended up in front of a silvery rift, suddenly plummet down toward the sea, disappearing behind the black edge of the cliffs where the land dropped away. Maybe his father was right. Maybe his mother was in there somewhere, on the phone. In the phone lines. In that same place, elongated and silhouetted, wading through the writhing wastes, that dark figure that never reached him. In that submarine limbo. The underwater. The sea. That’s where she went, after all: the sea. That’s where she was. Down there with the starfish and the thick, ground-hugging cables and the silt and the fat green crabs. And with the huge, unidentifiable, fleshy masses.

  Of course! Arthur smiled slightly and became aware of his reflection in the glass of his bedroom window smiling back at him out of the darkness beyond. The Thing on the shore. There was something happening in that place, wherever it was—that landscape—that was sending winding tendrils of consequence out into the same gray-green ocean that lapped against the stone and sand of Whitehaven harbor.

  Arthur turned away from the window and decided—one way or another, he would get back there. He would get back there somehow.

  THE WHALES

  Arthur was listening in to a call from an elderly man.

  “Are you telling me my house isn’t here?” he was saying in a low, husky, difficult-to-interpret voice.

  “No,” the CA—a girl called Linda—was saying nervously. “I’m just saying that it’s not here. I mean I can’t find it on the system.”

  “What?” the old man said. “What?”

  “I can’t find it on the system here,” Linda said.

  “What do you mean, you can’t find it on the system?” the old man said. “Are you telling me my house doesn’t exist? What do you think I’m living in, then, eh? You people! The Post Office people, as well, were trying to tell me that my house doesn’t exist! Well, I said, why don’t you come and have a look, eh?”

  Arthur had his head in his hands, as he imagined Linda had had her head in her hands during the call. The customer was not being rude or unpleasant; the call was just typical of so many calls, so many misunderstandings, so many crossed wires, so much confusion. Sometimes there were so few points of reference shared between the customer and the CA. Especially, to be honest, with the elderly. Sometimes, if the customer were elderly, all you had to do was mention a computer or a “system,” and they would immediately lose all respect for you and adopt a weary, irritable tone that, although it was not especially offensive or upsetting, was exhausting in its own unique way.

  Arthur remembered a particularly strange call from a man who was querying a very high bill. When Arthur had investigated, he found the company had the property registered as empty due to a meter reader reporting that the building looked unlived in and semi-derelict. Arthur hadn’t mentioned that to the customer, of course; he had just changed the company records accordingly. But he then started to imagine an alternative town, or rather a series of alternative towns. Where had that meter reader visited? He had been to the very same address, but maybe an alternative version of it somewhere else. An empty version. If parallel universes existed, basically, then maybe the computer system they were using was aligned to the wrong one.

  What a stupid thing to think.

  Arthur lifted his head from his hands and opened his eyes, and physically recoiled at the shock of seeing the strange wastes rolling out before him. He was back in the Scape. His ears were filled with that subtle, chittery rustle created by all of those tiny, ugly things that squirmed across the ground, or that actually constituted the ground. They didn’t look like they were moving when he watched them; they looked like
lots of still, thin, pink or white or yellow or red wires. But he got the sense that they were writhing around just out of sight, or immediately behind him. He got the sense that other things appeared sometimes: little claws or shells or wet beaks or hair-thin tentacles. But never clearly within his field of vision.

  Arthur made no attempt to move this time. He sat still in his chair with his arms flat on the desk, but the chair and the desk were made of something more of the Scape than of the world he knew—some kind of thick, twisted, shell-like material, rough like the surface of a conch.

  Another sound, something else. Not the whisper of the ground or the buzz and hum of the sky, but a faint, haunting cry, an eerie whistle of some kind. A long, drawn-out sound but, unlike the constant murmurings of the environment, one with a beginning and an end. It was accompanied by the appearance of something on the horizon. Arthur felt his hair move in the wind, but actually it felt more like it was moving in water; the movement was slower and heavier. The dark shape on the horizon grew larger until it became apparent that something was moving through the sky toward him. It made that sound again: an emotional, evocative, high-pitched song.

  Whatever the creature was, it was huge and it was black against the sky. It was long, with a heavy, rounded front end that tapered to nothing at the rear. It moved with a gentle undulation, like … like it was swimming.

  Arthur recognized it only when it was nearly directly above him. It was a whale. It was about half a kilometer up, maybe. It was hard to tell. His sense of perspective was all shot, so he couldn’t really tell how big it was. He realized that his mouth was hanging open, so he closed it again. The whale suddenly moaned, and the sound of it sent waves of pleasure surging all over Arthur’s skin, sent bright tingles running up and down his spine. Where was he? Why was the whale in the sky? He didn’t much care. The whale looked like it was moving slowly, like it was not in any kind of rush. Like it didn’t care about anything.

  The whale turned out to be the first of a pod. They all spoke to each other in their incredible voices. Arthur did not understand them but he felt like he understood. Their presence made his presence there OK. He sat at the desk and looked up until he became aware of a pain in his neck. Then he reached up to rub the back of his neck and found that his knuckles were banging against some kind of rough surface. He realized that he was lying on his back, on the floor. He looked up and, instead of the whales, he saw Bracket’s face hovering over him, slack-eyed and frowning.

  REBECCA’S LAST DAY

  “What was she running away from then?” Pauline asked.

  Harry—dirty, bleary Harry—raised a hand to his face and dragged it down across his wet mouth. He shrugged slightly, as best he could without lifting his elbows from the bar.

  There was some kind of game on. Football. The TV screen wasn’t very big for a pub and the sound was quite low, so it wasn’t too intrusive, but Harry found it intrusive enough—something bright and fast-moving hovering in his peripheral vision. It was pissing him right off. He shrugged again.

  “She must have been running from something,” Pauline suggested.

  Her words did, of course, imply that Rebecca had been running away from Harry himself, but Pauline was saying it so brazenly that Harry couldn’t tell whether or not she was aware of that implication.

  “So was she running away from you, then?” Pauline said.

  Harry couldn’t help laughing. He should have known better. Pauline did not “imply.” But, of course, his was not genuine happy laughter. It was something sharper and more muscular, a kind of hacking sound.

  “Shall I tell you what happened?” Harry said.

  Pauline rolled her eyes. “Might be a fucking idea,” she replied. “’Sonly what I’ve been driving at.”

  “It is … it is a strange thing,” Harry said. “It was a strange thing. She was off work … She was off work and we woke up quite late in the morning. Rebecca seemed quite quiet, and she was often quiet but this was different, like something had happened or something was wrong. I … I can’t explain how scared I was, Pauline, just sitting there, sitting in bed with the sun pouring in through the window, looking at her. Looking at Rebecca and not knowing what to say or do. I felt like I had to say or do something, because it just wasn’t like her.”

  Harry stopped speaking and sipped from his pint. There were other people in the Vine, but they were sitting at the tables or in the wide, shabby booths. Nobody else was sitting at the bar.

  “Arthur was at school, so he wasn’t around when we had breakfast. It was just Rebecca and me. I made scrambled eggs and really crispy bacon with croissants. I was standing in the kitchen feeling like my chest was going to burst or something because I knew that Rebecca was just sitting there at the table not doing anything and not saying anything and not even moving. That wasn’t like her, Pauline. It was a lovely day, too, really bright outside. The seagulls sounded clean and it felt like we were on holiday. We were on holiday. I mean, we were both off work. That was such a rare thing, too, so I couldn’t understand what was wrong. She smiled at me when I sat down with the food but it was like she was forcing the smile, you know? Like she knew she should be smiling but didn’t really want to. I asked her what was wrong but she just said there was nothing wrong. Then, after a few minutes of pushing her food around, she said that this was only her second day off work in a row and she felt bored. Said she didn’t know what to do. I said, what do you mean? I didn’t really understand.

  “She said that she couldn’t work out what to do. She had all day ahead of her and nothing to do. What did people do when they weren’t at work? Well, I said, they relaxed or they carried on with hobbies or they spent time with each other. She nodded at that, but looked confused. She said that she couldn’t do the crossword all day. No, I said, that would get boring. That’s exactly it, she said.”

  Harry shook his head slightly and shrugged again. Pauline gazed at him but gave nothing away. She was inscrutable. Without taking her eyes off Harry, she moved some clean glasses from the dishwasher tray into their separate compartments beneath the bar.

  “She told me her heart was racing. She was just sitting there at the table and she was a very healthy woman, was Rebecca, she was always running around that supermarket and she would often go running along the cliffs. But she looked at me and said in a very quiet voice that her heart was going ten to the dozen with panic. I said, what are you panicking about? She said she didn’t know but she thought it was something to do with being so bored. This thing she was saying about being bored was getting to me, Pauline, so I said, what do you mean you’re bored? Is it not enough to be off work for a day and just spend it with me? Am I so boring?”

  Pauline grimaced and sucked in air through her yellowing teeth.

  “She just looked at me,” Harry continued, “and then she opened her mouth but didn’t say anything like she didn’t know what to say. I … I knew what she meant, though. She meant, yes, you are boring, Harry. Yes, you are a boring man. She said, no of course you are not boring. I’m sorry, Harry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I then said, I know what’s wrong with you, Rebecca. You’ve got some time on your hands and you don’t know what to do with it. It’s as simple as that. It was as simple as that, Pauline. Oh my God.”

  Pauline had finished arranging the glasses now, and was just watching Harry and listening to his sputtered reminiscences. Elsewhere in the Vine people were carrying on with their own conversations, but Pauline felt reasonably sure that these were conversations that were recycled, that happened every night, that were well worn by their participants. So many conversations came round again and again, like songs on a commercial radio station. But what Harry was saying felt quite new, like he was saying something that he had never said before. It was something that Pauline had never heard before, at any rate.

  “It went on for hours. Rebecca just sat around with her hand on her chest and this look in her eyes. Honestly, it was a very scary thing. She said, I have never felt li
ke this before. I have never thought these things before. She said, what do I go to work for if I don’t know what to do when I am not at work? I said, there are lots of things you could be doing. She said, like what? Is there anything really that I could be doing? I was getting sick of it, Pauline. I didn’t know what she was going on about. What are you going on about, I asked, not for the first time. She looked at me and she was not just sad now, but angry as well. She said, you could at least make an effort to understand, Harry. I said, I am making an effort but, despite my best efforts, I do not understand at all. Am I supposed to just understand through some psychic power? She said, isn’t that what being in a relationship is all about? We should rely less on verbal communication and more on some kind of unvocalised knowing. She was a very clever girl, was Rebecca. Oh God, I miss her, Pauline. I miss her so much. She said, the better we get to know each other the less we should have to talk. Communication, she said, communication is for people who do not understand each other. Communication is only an attempt at understanding. It demonstrates a total lack of understanding.

  “I knew what she was getting at, but I didn’t know what to say. It felt like a terrible moment. A truly terrible moment, like everything was changing, and changing for the worse. The house was so light on that day with all of the sun coming in. Looking back, I don’t know how it was so light because it’s never that light any more, even when it is sunny outside. Anyway. She said, people who understand each other do not need to talk at all. That is true understanding. I said, how do you know that? She said, it is just common sense. It is a common-sense conclusion that I have arrived at. I said, I think we have drifted off-topic. We were talking about how boring you find me. She said, for fuck’s sake, Harry. For fuck’s sake.”

  Harry was now propping himself up by resting his forehead in his hand, his elbow resting in a puddle of old beer on the bar top. He didn’t mind that. He was barely aware of it.