The Thing on the Shore (2 page)

Arthur looked out over the sea—now black under the night sky—and thought of a planet he had read about in the science bit of the newspaper. This was a planet that had been discovered outside our solar system, using a network of telescopes trained on a not-too-distant star. A water planet. One three times as large as the Earth and made almost entirely of water; a colossal spherical ocean wrapped around a ball of rock. That ocean was over fifteen thousand kilometers deep, which was a detail Arthur had not been able to forget. Fifteen thousand kilometers of water heading straight down. Fifteen meters seemed deep enough, to be honest. If you knew that the water beneath you was fifteen meters deep, that was enough to make you feel small; that was enough to make you feel like there was some serious depth below you. But fifteen thousand kilometers? That didn't really bear thinking about. Arthur thought about it quite a lot, though.

The same planet was believed to have a thick atmosphere that rendered it permanently dark. There was no visible light from the sun reaching that ocean. It was hot, being seventy-five times closer to its sun than the Earth was to our sun, and yet the ocean remained liquid because of the weight of the atmosphere. So the water could reach nearly three hundred degrees Celsius and still not evaporate.

Theoretically there could be islands floating on this planet. Not made of rock or soil, but a kind of ice formed after it was subjected to phenomenal atmospheric
pressures. Crystalline structures forced into existence through the compaction of water.

When they got a chance, they would turn the Hubble Space Telescope on to this planet in order to analyze its atmosphere. They would look for oxygen: something that only exists on Earth because of the presence of life there. Oxygen in the atmosphere of the water world would indicate the presence of life there, too, which would not be as impossible as it might sound, given the way weird creatures thrived around volcanic vents at the bottom of the sea on Earth. And what kind of life might exist in an ocean fifteen thousand kilometers deep?

Imagining this planet with its heaving, bottomless ocean, an impossibly hot ocean, an ocean totally enveloped in darkness, orbiting a red dwarf star—a dying star—felt very sad and eerie. It was an eerie sadness that Arthur could enjoy, though. He liked to imagine himself swimming through those black waters, somehow immune to—but not unaware of—the hideous temperatures. In these fantasies, the sky would flash red or white as unearthly storms tore open the heavy clouds, and barbed threads of lightning skittered across the peaks of the mountainous waves.

He imagined the whales, or their equivalent, that might live in those depths. These creatures would be blind and they would also be gargantuan. They would be pale and they would have strange skin able to deal with the heat and the pressure. They might have some kind of rigid exoskeleton. Maybe those creatures would be more insect
than mammal, or God knows what else. It probably wasn't even possible, though. The planet probably didn't even exist. How could anybody really know? Still, he often imagined himself swimming—flailing—across the surface of that orb, and waiting for something alive to brush against his feet.

He now imagined something alive, one of those monsters from that planet, rising directly up out of the sea in front of him, somehow here with him, somehow in the water just by virtue of being from other water, as if all water were somehow connected; as if the oceanic depths of one planet were connected to the oceanic depths of another.

The sea off the shore of Whitehaven would boil and the creature would thrash its way up above the surface and halfway on to the land and, without even knowing it, it would knock the lighthouse down.

The next day, Arthur sat at the desk with his head in his hands, because it was somehow the most comfortable position. The chair he occupied was old and broken. His posture would be ruined forever. He should do something about it. He grimaced as one of the recorded voices rattling out of his earpiece grew louder and angrier. He felt like he wasn't physically big enough to deal with the anger he was listening to. He wanted to expand and break and flow across his desk, until he was pressed into all the corners. He wanted to fill the small, perfectly square “pod” with himself, with just his body. Completely. He wanted to be bigger, and he wanted to be made out of water.

The pod was not a real room, but a space partitioned off by walls that were actually more like windows. Each wall was made out of two large sheets of very strong glass with a blind fitted between them. These blinds could be lowered so that whatever happened inside the pod remained hidden. The walls only went halfway up to the
ceiling, though, so the pod was never entirely private. Conversations could be overheard. The pod was one of many lining one wall of the call center in which Arthur worked. He could hear the general murmur of hundreds of people talking on telephones on the other side of the glass, the insect buzz of typing, the hum of all those computers. He could smell dust and hot plastic.

Arthur had lowered the blinds of the pod he occupied, so he could now feel alone. His back was hunched. His longish black hair flopped down in front of his face. He wore black trousers secured high about the waist by a belt in which he'd punched new holes with a corkscrew, and a white shirt with a red tie. The trousers were too big for him. His mum always used to say he was too thin.

The angry voice that he was listening to had momentarily stopped shouting, and a second voice was now audible as it apologized. The second voice was weak, and its owner stammered.

“I'm … I'm sorry, Mr. McCormick. I'm very, very sorry. Um … before I look into that, I just need to … um. Can … can I just ask, do you have a mobile number that, um, or any other … any other contact number that I could, um, take? Please?”

Arthur squeezed his eyes shut. He heard a sharp intake of breath from Mr. McCormick.

“No!” shouted Mr. McCormick. “No, you cannot! You … you bloody people, you'll know more about me than I do myself!” His voice grew louder and Arthur could picture the spittle flying from his lips and sticking to the telephone
receiver gripped in his fleshy hand. “I've got a heart condition! I'm not a well man! And you … you won't even try to help me! It's bloody disgusting! I'm ill, I am! And you just keep asking questions!”

“I … I'm sorry, Mr. McCormick.”

“Yeah, well, I'm sorry too. Sorry I'm not talking to somebody who knows what they're doing!”

“If—”

“Just forget about it! Don't even bother! All this nonsense'll kill me! Bloody idiots!”

Arthur heard Mr. McCormick slam the phone down forcefully, missing the cradle, then swearing, before righting his error with the understated
click
of a call being disconnected. He bit his lip. The second voice continued.

“Mr. … Mr. McCormick? Are you there? Hello? Oh.”

That second voice—that weak, stammering sound that worried and fussed into one end of the dead telephone line—was the voice of Arthur's father, Harry, one of the many customer advisers working at the call center.

Arthur stopped the recording and was about to close down the Random Call Recorder computer program when the door into the pod swung open. It banged into one of the glass walls with enough force to send a sharp cracking sound bouncing around the small, square space. Arthur spun around on his chair, his eyes and mouth wide open.

“Arthur,” said the pale, stocky man standing in the doorway. “What are you still doing here?” He looked at his watch. “You finished half an hour ago!”

“Yeah,” said Arthur. “Yeah … Hi, Bracket. I was just catching up. Marking a few more calls. I don't want to claim overtime. Don't worry about it.”

“I wasn't,” said Bracket. He had a cracked kind of voice that always sounded tired.

“OK,” said Arthur.

“You all right?”

“Yeah,” said Arthur, shutting down the computer. “I'm fine.”

“Good.”

Bracket stood awkwardly in the doorway for a moment. He had short, bristly gray hair and dark blue rings under his eyes. His shirt was creased and the sleeves were rolled up to the elbows. He wore a chunky watch that looked expensive but, Arthur reckoned, probably wasn't. Bracket held a small stack of paper in one hand as he chewed on his lower lip. He was Arthur's team manager, Arthur being on the Quality Assurance Team.

“Arthur,” Bracket continued at last. “There's been some news. We're delivering team briefings, so I'm trying to round up all of the QPs who're still here. I wasn't expecting to find you but, well, seeing as you
are
still here, you'd better come too.”

“OK,” said Arthur.

“You're not in a rush to get home, are you?” asked Bracket.

“No,” said Arthur.

The QPs were the Quality Police, which was how Bracket referred to the Quality Assurance Team. It was his little joke.

“Then you'd best get yourself to the scrum sofas,” said Bracket. “That's where the others are. Have you seen Tiffany anywhere?”

“No,” said Arthur. “I haven't seen anybody since I finished. I've just been in here all the time.”

“I'll meet you over there,” said Bracket, “once I've found Tiffany. That woman, I don't know.”

He turned and left the pod, shaking his head and muttering under his breath.

Arthur waited a few seconds longer, so that he would not have to walk alongside Bracket, then picked up his coat and made his way out on to the main floor of the call center. This place always felt somehow green to him, but not in a healthy, fresh way—it was the sickly green of swallowed frustration, of exhausted arguments, of boredom, of well-thumbed £5 notes. This was probably partly because the carpet was green, reflected Arthur, but there was more to it than that.

The scrum sofas were beneath a long window on the opposite side of the room to the pods. Most of the QPs were already seated there. With his coat draped over his shoulder, Arthur threaded his way between semi-circular huddles of desks, each one assigned to a different team. When he finally reached the bright blue sofas, he put his coat down next to a boy called Dean, and then stood by the window and looked out over the sea toward Whitehaven lighthouse. The sea was a bitter gray color and looked violently rough. Waves threw themselves high against the wall of the far harbor, which rose about six
meters above the water at that point, and then crashed over the top of it. The spume rose even as high as the top of the lighthouse, which itself stood on the harbor wall, and a never-ending wind whipped it up into the sky, in bright white specks that stood out starkly against the glowering black clouds.

“Right then!” came Bracket's voice from behind him. “Looks like we're all here now. Arthur, come and sit down. Is everybody actually here? Yes? Good.”

Arthur turned from the window and sat down next to Dean, in the spot where he'd left his coat. He saw that Bracket had found Tiffany. She was now squeezing on to one of the sofas, pushing everybody else along.

“Ooh, sorry I'm late,” said Tiffany. “I didn't know! I didn't know there was a meeting!”

“Short notice,” said Bracket.

“I was just on the bog,” said Tiffany. “Caught unawares, I was. But a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do!”

“Tiffany,” continued Bracket, and he looked at her hard.

“Sorry,” said Tiffany. “Sorry, you know what I'm like with my mouth.”

Tiffany usually wore the strangest combinations of clothes. She made them all herself, and they were always covered with geometric patterns in strange, dysentery-hued colors. They were like the clothes that Arthur imagined older women used to wear in the seventies. She had long hair that might never have been washed or combed for as long as it had grown on her head. Her teeth were mostly black with rot, but her gums were a bright electric
pink. All the younger girls said she was a witch, partly because of the way she looked and partly because she herself claimed to be a medium.

“I have to read this verbatim,” announced Bracket, holding up the thick document he was carrying, “and I also have to give you each a copy of the brief. This is so that everybody working here receives exactly the same message as everybody else. Do you understand?”

“Yeah,” said somebody, quietly. Everybody else nodded half-heartedly. Arthur noticed that Diane, an empty-eyed girl on the team, was texting somebody while using her notebook to hide the fact from Bracket.

“That means that you will all take away these handouts,” said Bracket. “You will recognize the importance of the message they deliver and keep hold of it, partly to refer to in your own spare time and partly to demonstrate your interest in the workings of this corporation, this workplace, and your employer.”

“Is this part of the brief?” asked Dean.

“No,” replied Bracket. “Here, Dean, you distribute these.” He handed the stack of paper to Dean, who stood to receive it and then shuffled around the sofas, with his back slightly hunched. Dean had a significant overbite and bad skin, and he smiled genuinely at the rest of the team as he passed them their individual copies of the brief. His short brown hair had been shaped into greasy spikes with the help of some sort of gel. Once he'd finished, he turned to Bracket.

“Thank you,” he said.

“That's OK,” said Bracket, his forehead creasing slightly. “OK then, at last. The brief is starting. I am beginning now. I am reading from the briefing note, so please listen.

“‘It is with great sadness that I have gathered you here to inform you of some recent events. As you may be aware, certain contractual renegotiations have been ongoing between Outsourcing Unlimited and the parent company, Interext, with regard to the Northern Water contract. For three years now, Outsourcing Unlimited have provided Northern Water with an excellent customer-management service from the Whitehaven contact center, and both Interext and Northern Water would like to express their unreserved gratitude to both the center and all of the hardworking staff employed there.'”