The Thing on the Shore (6 page)

“You finally understand,” said Arthur. “I couldn't have put it better myself.” He unpaused the game and gestured at the screen. “Currently, my character—I mean, Tiffany's character—and her delightful companion, Miss Lynch, are exploring the backstreets of Whitechapel, looking for a drunk who may have some information regarding Jack the Ripper.”

“I prefer proper games,” said Bony, “like
Fallout 3
or
Command and Conquer.
Games with nuclear weapons.”

“You would,” replied Arthur. “Anyway, I think that will have to do for now.” He opened a dialogue box on screen and typed a short message addressed to Miss Lynch.

I have to go now, Yasmin
, he wrote.
Be in the Vagabond tonight. You out?

Will be if you lot are
, replied Yasmin.
See you later!

He logged out and closed down the game, and the misty world of
Victorian Gothic Online
dissolved from the screen. He realized that Bony was eyeing him and frowning.

“What?” said Arthur.

“She knows who you are,” said Bony.

“Yeah,” said Arthur, “but that's OK, because I know who she is, too. Yasmin won't go to the game police.”

There was a moment's silence.

“Can I blow these stupid candles out now?” asked Bony.

“You can stick them up your ass. What time's the train?”

“It's in ten minutes. We'd better get ready.” Bony started opening all the curtains.

He lived in a tiny bungalow in Drigg, a couple of minutes' walk from the level crossing at which he worked. If you didn't know him properly you would be surprised at how pretty his house and garden were, given his cadaverous appearance and his devotion to all things technological.

Arthur opened the front door and squinted up at the gray clouds. It was Saturday afternoon, not late at all, but the sky was dark with the approaching storm. “I hope we don't miss the best of it,” he said.

“We won't,” said Bony. “It's going to be another big one, I think.”

Yasmin wanted elf ears. She spent hours looking at photo galleries on the internet, studying photos of people with elf ears, people who'd had cosmetic surgery to make their ears look like the ears of elves. Or those of Vulcans, sometimes, but mostly elves. The surgery was expensive but she reckoned she could afford it if she started doing some overtime at the call center. She tucked her long blond hair behind her current ears and inhaled deeply on her gentle spliff. As she exhaled, the smoke curled beautifully in the draft from the open window. The windows on either side of her desk looked directly out over the harbor and the marina and the sea.

Yasmin lived in a first-floor flat in a harborside building that had once been a warehouse for storing sugar and limes and rum, and possibly—probably—slaves. Tonight, black clouds were gathering on the horizon and turning the sea slate-colored. She preferred the view as the sun was melting into the sea, when it looked like
the whole world was swaddled in the yolk of a bloody, broken egg.

Ultimately she would like to live on a riverboat somewhere. With friends, though. On an impossibly huge river-boat big enough for her and all of her friends and all of her books and CDs and video games. She finished the spliff and turned her PC off, then lit an incense stick and put Fleetwood Mac on and started getting ready to go out. Spectral fingers, reaching down out of the sky, approached from across the sea. They were composed of rain.

Artemis stood on the raised platform in the middle of the call center floor and looked out over the rows of deserted desks. Six o' clock on a Saturday evening and the place had closed at five. No fucker around. The windows looked out over the darkening sea, and a rising wind was starting to make the roof creak. The telephones were still and silent, though they were never turned off, only ever sleeping. Artemis stroked the black receiver of the unit on his own desk. If he deliberately listened for it he could hear the insistent hum of electricity. He smiled to himself. This building felt like a ship, and he was the captain. It felt like an empty ship. A beached ship. A ghost ship.

He sat down and turned on his computer. Then he stood up again and paced his way from one end of the huge, empty room to the other, keeping to the west-facing side and looking out of the window. Next he walked down the southern wall, until he found himself inside the glass labyrinth of the pods. He opened all of the shutters and
raised them till he was surrounded just by sheets of glass that reflected each other and reflected his bulk between them, although his reflections seemed ethereal and lost amongst the shining panes. He left the shutters up, and weaved his way through semi-circular huddles of desks back to the raised platform, the command center. He was a giant stalking through streets at night and the desks were houses. He was the Beast of Bodmin and the desks were just little lambs. When he got back to his desk the computer was fully awake and waiting for him. He logged on using his employee number and password—L1SA—and pursed his lips when the Outsourcing Unlimited logo appeared as his desktop wallpaper. That would have to be changed. In fact, the whole site would require complete re-branding, starting with the logo displayed on the outside wall. He'd get on to the Comms team about it on Monday—and Facilities Management too. Still, at least he'd been able to bring in his own night-watchmen. They'd worked with him in the past, at previous sites, and they had developed certain understandings.

Artemis bent down and retrieved an unmarked CD from his briefcase. It was contained in a thin, transparent, plastic jewel case. The CD itself was a couple of years old, and he had not listened to it before. He had never had the courage to, but now it seemed right. Now it seemed fitting. This was the key, really, to whether his most ambitious project for the call center would happen or not. He held it between the forefingers of both hands, each one supporting diametrically opposite corners of the case. Like
that, he spun it around and around. He meanwhile felt sick. After about five minutes of just spinning it and trying to keep his mind blank, he leaned forward and opened the CD drive of the computer. He placed the CD on the tray and closed the drive again. The media-player program opened automatically and started playing the first audio file. A warm female voice whispered out to him from the shitty PC speakers.

Do you have a water meter?
it said.

Is your property domestic or commercial?
it said.

How many people live at your property?
it said.

Artemis's lips curved into a kind of smile, and his eyes narrowed as if he was remembering something. He
was
remembering something. His eyes filled with tears. The voice continued, asking more and more questions. The rain suddenly hit the call center, and the harbor and all of the town of Whitehaven, and it was so heavy it sounded like falling stones. The wind started to howl. Artemis's chest heaved as he sobbed, and the choking sound of his grief was loud in that empty space, but still not as loud as the wind and the rain outside. He picked up an empty folder and threw it as far away as he could. That done, he squeezed at his erection through the thin black fabric of his trousers. He clicked the pause button on the PC screen and shouted out: just a sound, but no words. He dried his eyes and then started playing the recording again. He unzipped his trousers and pulled them down, together with his purple boxer shorts. He was the captain and the ship was sinking.

He kneeled and started to masturbate into the waste-paper bin, and imagined waves towering like skyscrapers around him, growing ever larger, their dark green flanks terrifyingly translucent beneath the lightning-cracked sky. He was kneeling on the deck and high above his head, strong gray sharks swam past inside those walls of water. He saw one of the waves grow white at the top and it started to break, and it looked like a mountain in winter and, as it started to rush toward him, he grabbed hold of the tiller with both hands and the wave crashed over him and he came and he beat his forehead against the edge of the desk as he did so. After he was done he collapsed and lay on the floor, conscious but completely silent. Salt water ran from his body. The sound of the waves echoed around inside his skull. Above him the recorded voice continued.

Do you have an outstanding balance?

Would you like to pay in full?

Would you like any plumbing and drainage insurance?

The voice of his wife.

What he really missed, though, was her body.

Isobel opened up the hand-held games console and turned it on. She never tired of this beautiful object, was constantly delighted by the perfect tactility of its buttons and its plastic gleam and its pale, chalky-blue color. It was small and rectangular and she opened it like a book. Two screens welcomed her in.

She was sitting on the sofa in the living room while Bracket was doing the washing up in the kitchen. Yorkie humphed around in between. Outside it was raining again, another reason not to go out. Sometimes she felt guilty for staying in on a Saturday night. Like she was wasting her life. But really, after being out all week at work, all she wanted to do was curl up somewhere warm, like a cat, and rest. God, another week of it. Sometimes she felt sick at the length of time she spent at work. But best not to dwell on it. After all, everybody else did the same, didn't they? Everybody hated their job, it went without saying. Bracket probably didn't want to hear about it, so best just
for her to get on with it and shut up. And when the weekend came, she would use it however the fuck she wanted to. Which, more and more frequently, meant disappearing off to visit her friends in the video game
Animal Crossing.

In
Animal Crossing
you play a character who moves into a small town populated by animals. Except all of the animals behave like humans: living in houses, going to shops, talking, that kind of thing. The town is idyllic: all grass and fruit trees and irregularly shaped buildings and crystal-clear streams and butterflies. You take out a mortgage and have to pay it off, except, instead of getting some kind of boring, realistic job, you do things like dig up fossils and sell them to the museum. You could spend any spare money you had on decorating your house, buying new clothes for your character, or maybe buying presents for other characters. You could design and make things: clothes or ornaments or images. As the game progressed, more and more shops would open up in the town, selling a vast array of different virtual objects. You could go round to the other animals' houses and talk to them, or meet up in the local pub for a drink. You could write them little letters, too, or send greeting cards.

If you connected to the internet, then you could visit other towns and meet up with other people playing the same game—real people, that was, not the computer-controlled characters who lived in your own town. Isobel had tried that once, after seeing a hot-air balloon float
through the distance in the rich blue digital sky of her screen. The most exciting thing she'd found was an incredible range of things for her character to buy; the number and variety of objects that had been created for buying and selling seemed limited only by the collective imagination of all of those worldwide players and, of course, the filters that blocked out any content that might make the world unsafe for children.

But the downside of this wider exploration was that the real people she'd met in various communal online areas were not as interesting as the fictional animals populating her small town. Their lives were not as interesting. They communicated in typing errors and bad spelling and the ugly, lazy elisions of “txt spk.” Their comments and opinions were not as surprising or insightful as those of the AI animals with which she had made friends. Or maybe they were, and she had simply mistaken any articulate players for in-game creations; either way she had been uncomfortable. That was the primary reason for her discomfort, actually—the fact that she frequently felt unsure whether she was simply communicating with the console or with real people elsewhere within the human world. She could have asked, she supposed, but that would have felt wrong. She didn't want to break the sense of immersion either for herself or for others.

Isobel had started playing
Animal Crossing
after asking a young girl at work what its attraction was. The girl had told her a story, then, about a woman with cancer. This woman had had a son, her only child, who lived with her.
The boy's father had gone—he'd left, or died, it didn't really matter. As a distraction for his terminally ill mother, the boy had bought one of these little consoles and a copy of
Animal Crossing
, reckoning it a game she could play while he was away at work. And she'd fallen in love with it. As the illness wore her down and she became less and less able-bodied, she would play the game more and more. She spent hours and hours of each and every day picking fruit and planting flowers, or fishing on the virtual beach. The friends she made in
Animal Crossing
—the foxes, owls, hedgehogs, badgers, turtles, parrots, dogs, pandas—they were with her almost until the end. She played right up until a day or two before she died, leaving the little console and the game to her only son.

After the funeral, he switched the console on to see what her in-game house might be like. He found that she had created a character representing himself, so he logged in and started playing to find out more. His character woke up in a small, plain bedroom, which is how the game always starts. He walked his character downstairs and found himself in a room so large that he could not even see the walls of it. The floor was covered in gift-wrapped presents and there were so many that it must have taken all of the hours she spent playing to earn enough in-game currency to buy them all. Directly in front of his character lay a small note carefully placed on the floor. It was from his mother's character, addressed to him: