The Thing on the Shore

by Tom Fletcher

  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.

  WITH THE ANIMALS

  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:

  Thank you so much for all of your love, and for all of my friends. I loved you so very much. I hope you like all of your presents. They are all for you. All of my love forever—Mum xxx

  The boy spent hours unwrapping all of these virtual presents and with each and every one an animation showed his character holding the new gift up toward the screen, smiling delightedly. He loved them all.

  Isobel had been so touched by this that she borrowed the girl’s console so that she could understand the story fully. She thus found a game that enabled her to live in a world almost identical to that which she had fantasized about as a child. And that was it: she was hooked.

  “How did you know about that woman and her son?” she’d asked the girl at the time.

  “I was at the funeral,” the girl had replied. “Not the real one, obviously. But they had one online.”

  She’d waved her little pink console in the air.

  So now Isobel was curled up on the sofa, playing Animal Crossing, wishing furiously that she could make a living by selling seashells in real life. She found herself holding her stomach and smiled at the thought of the child inside her, and all of the worlds that the child would have to discover. She was excited at the thought of them exploring together.

  Somewhere in the background, Bracket turned on the radio. He didn’t seem to understand the appeal of Animal Crossing at all. Never mind, though. Everybody had their own hobbies. Isobel slowly became completely oblivious to the growing storm.

  AT THE LIGHTHOUSE

  Arthur wore an old waterproof coat that wasn’t really waterproof any longer; it had rips under the arms from being a bit too small, and the rain burrowed its way in through those holes. The raindrops came down like ball bearings. Like bullets. Arthur stood there on the harbor, near The Wave (currently deactivated), and imagined the height from which the water was falling. He imagined the force of the wind behind it. If Yasmin had glanced down from her living room window, she would have been able to see him. He kept his head down and his hair hung around his face like black pondweed. If she were still alive, his father’s mother would have said the rain was coming down like stair-rods. And she would have been right. These weren’t raindrops—they were solid bars connecting the earth to the tops of the cumulonimbus clouds, piercing his body and pinning him to the spot in the process. Arthur could feel them running right through him. His hands were pushed deep into the pockets of his thin black trousers. His ears were so cold that they felt skinless, but he didn’t mind. The thin layer of water dancing across the pale stones and small metal fish adorning the harbor promenade looked like boiling oil.

  Bony spotted Arthur standing there from a short distance away, but he couldn’t attract his attention through the noise of the downpour and the voice of the wind. He wore his hi-vis jacket and some blue waterproof trousers that he occasionally used for fishing. He jogged toward Arthur and slapped him on the back.

  “You ready?” shouted Bony.

  “Yeah!” shouted Arthur. “Been here for bloody ages!”

  “Why didn’t you give Yasmin a buzz? Could’ve waited up there!”

  “No answer!”

  “Come on, then!” shouted Bony.

  They turned and ran past the end of the Sugar Tongue, then past the end of the Lime Tongue, occasionally skidding and waving their arms about in an effort not to fall over. They ran past the Zest Harborside restaurant, and at the end of the promenade turned right on to the long stone harbor wall. They ran along it, past the green hull of an upturned rowing boat. They ran on past the Sea Cadets’ building. The sky was something between black and green, and seemed alive and pulsating. Arthur and Bony ran until they reached the warning sign.

  WARNING

  The surface beyond this point is uneven.

  They stopped running here and started to walk instead. The sign marked the point at which the harbor wall really struck out into the sea, because it was here that the land fell away to the left-hand side as well as to the right. The sign indicated the point at which it became the West Pier.

  It was a two-tiered structure: one a wide, uneven surface with huge rusty lumps of metal sticking out of it, to which tall ships had once been moored, and the other a high, narrow wall, running alongside the left-hand edge, which had protected sailors from the sea while they were working in bad weather. You could walk along either, but Bony and Arthur now chose the lower path. The smell of salt water filled their heads like a corrosive vapor. The sea down to their right was in a constant state of violent motion as the rain hit it with enough force to smack the water straight back up into the air again, turning it white and soft. When the pair looked up and ahead of them to where the West Pier began curving round to the north, they saw the crests of waves breaking against the barrier wall and showering foam down on to the path that the two of them intended to follow. The pier was so big, so strong and wide and deep and old-looking, that they were both—unknown to each other—reminded of the architecture in that video game, Shadow of the Colossus. They hurried onwards.

  As they came to the very end, they slowed down. The structure widened out here, like the clenched fist at the end of an arm, and rising from the center of the bulge was Whitehaven lighthouse. The lighthouse entrance was at the level of the lower tier, but some steps led up around it to enable access to the upper tier. Here, at the end, was an additional low wall protecting the edge of the higher level also. The lighthouse was white with a red door and a red balcony around the top of it, and it looked bright and vibrant against the angry sky. Water pooled in the dips and hollows of the stone surface on which Bony and Arthur stood. The broken remnants of mammoth waves surged around beneath the structure, indicative of the peaks and troughs of the ocean still hidden by the higher levels of the West Pier.

  “Ready?” shouted Arthur.

  Bony nodded in response, despite Arthur’s words being snatched away by the wind as soon as they’d left his mouth. They lowered their heads and slowly approached the base of the steps. There was a rusted yet sturdy metal railing which they held on to as they ascended, and they kept their heads bowed beneath the weight of the weather. To their left, the lighthouse seemed like some kind of magical monument, glowing white and streaming with liquid. They eventually reached the upper level on all fours, with waves constantly collapsing over the low wall that separated them from the sea. They crawled toward the wall, the lighthouse behind them now, their hands and knees submerged in the restless water hissing across the stonework. When they got to the wall, they turned and sat with their backs resting against it. This was the same spot where, on friendlier days, fishermen would stand with their rods and eat their sandwiches and gut fish and leave the entrails lying around to stink in the sun.

  Bony and Arthur glanced at each other, then turned so that both were on their knees facing the wall. Slowly they gripped the top of the wall with their hands and raised their heads above it to look out to sea.

  They saw a landscape, not a seascape. They saw mountains and valleys, as if they were looking at an aerial photograph of the central Lake District. Except everything was moving. The mountains were rolling along and then subsiding and then leaping up again, and in between them were cavernous hollows that deepened and deepened, like there was no limit to the depth they might achieve. The peaks would roll in and smash against the fortress-like structure of the West Pier, spraying the exhilarated pair’s faces with their shattered remnants. And already there would be replacement peaks spawning a long way out, growing impossibly huge, racing with fantastic speed toward the shore, toward the town, toward the land, toward Arthur and Bony with their little wet faces like two smiling, stupid peaches just waiting to be swallowed up. The heights and depths of the water were astounding and terrifying, and this turbulence stretched for as far as their eyes could see, before being obscured by veils of sheeting rain. Somewhere above the clouds, thunder roared as some forgotten
god stamped its feet. And the sky would flash as lightning lit up the clouds from the inside. Arthur and Bony looked at each other, nodded, and raised themselves a little higher. They wormed themselves forward so that they were looking directly down into the water, each bent over at the waist to ninety degrees.

  Arthur studied the green hell beneath him. He blew a kiss downward. He felt as if his mother were closer to him when the weather was like this. He had this idea that she would be nearer the surface, though he knew this was ridiculous. He knew that wasn’t how it worked. The ocean broke bodies down into nothing and spread them out across the Earth. He knew that. But he still couldn’t help looking for her.

  He let himself slip backward, back toward the relative shelter of the wall, and raised his head so that he could see further. If this was Shadow of the Colossus, then he was the Wanderer. He was exploring an abandoned world, discovering architecture built for giants, and every now and again one of those giants would rise up from the surrounding environment and look down at him with glowing eyes. He wanted it to happen now. He wanted some huge creature to emerge.

  Bony slipped back alongside him and gave a jerk of his head backward toward the town. Arthur nodded.

  THE VAGABOND

  Yasmin was drinking white wine and Dean was drinking some kind of blue alcopop. They were sitting in a corner of the Vagabond, which was a pub occupying a part of the same building—the old converted warehouse—as Yasmin’s flat. They were near the door but in an alcove. The floor was old black stone but the wooden tables and benches were new. Pictures of Jack Kerouac and Mohammed Ali and Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan covered the walls. The place seemed quite full, but only because it was relatively small. Small and warm and dry. Dry, that is, until Arthur and Bony blew in.