The Thing on the Shore

by Tom Fletcher

  “Sh-she always says that she’s happy,” Harry said. “She always sounds happy.”

  “Maybe we’re talking about different places,” Arthur said. “We could be talking about different places.”

  “I suppose so,” Harry said, looking thoughtful.

  “There’s something else,” Arthur said.

  “What?” Harry laughed and reached over, put his hand on Arthur’s knee. “Some… something even more weird?”

  “Ha,” Arthur said. He actually said the word “ha” while attempting a smile, and he realized that that was something his mum used to do. “Something as weird maybe, yeah. I was on the pier before.”

  “You still go out on the pier?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do. And I saw these things come out of the water, out of the sea. Like big crabs, but they weren’t crabs. I kicked them back in, but … it wasn’t the first time, and I don’t think it will be the last.”

  Harry just remained silent and nodded.

  “I think they want me for something,” Arthur said.

  Harry continued nodding. His face looked weird, like he was trying to keep it impassive or something, but he only succeeded in making it look strained.

  “Arthur,” Harry said, “have … have you thought about seeing a doctor, maybe?”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “It s-sounds like you’re under a lot of pressure. Maybe with your promotion and everything, you—”

  “I haven’t been promoted!” Arthur shouted, standing up. “I haven’t had a fucking promotion! I don’t even know what I’m doing at work! I just have more to do! I have to listen to more calls from more idiots, I have to tell more people how badly they’ve failed. I now have to tell people—people doing the same job as me— that they’re doing it wrong. I … I just hate it all!”

  “Son,” Harry said, “y-you should be grateful to have a job at the moment. There are people who would kill for a steady job, with overtime. And I can tell you, when I was unemployed things were so difficult. Your mum was so worried all of the time. I don’t know if you remember, but—”

  “Of course I fucking remember,” Arthur spat.

  “P-please don’t swear, Arthur,” Harry said.

  “Then please don’t try and tell me how fucking lucky I am!” Arthur shouted—screamed, really. His face was red and taut, his whole body shaking. “I should be grateful? Grateful for that shitty job working for that brainless fucking monster? Grateful for this house with its rotten bathroom and walls full of fucking worms? And a stinking, useless fucking alcoholic dad who I have to think about all of the fucking time, because he can’t fucking look after himself, let alone me?”

  “I’ve … I’m sorry,” Harry said. “I’m just—”

  “You’re just a fucking mess!” Arthur waved his hands around as he yelled, trying to expel all the pent-up physical energy without actually hitting his father.

  In the silence that followed his last utterance, he jumped over to the wall and punched that instead. His fist made a hole, from which he then pulled it, ragged and bleeding. He noticed that his hand was damp, even aside from the blood. That meant there was moisture inside the wall. He turned his hand over and saw a little worm curled around the tip of his finger. He pressed it against the wall—an undamaged part of the wall—leaving a small brown smear. He turned around.

  “How did Mum die, Dad?”

  “I don’t r-really w-want to talk any more,” Harry said.

  “Tell me.”

  “You know how,” Harry said. “Sh-she fell off the cliff and drowned in the sea.”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  Harry shifted in his seat. “What do you mean?” he said.

  “She jumped, didn’t she? She killed herself.”

  “N-no!” Harry shouted, standing up too. “She fell! She fell!”

  “Why are you lying?” Arthur said.

  “I-I-I-I’m not lying!”

  Arthur stood there and stared at his father for a long time, without saying anything. Harry was rigid, vibrating, tears in his eyes, spittle on his lower lip.

  Arthur nodded. “Well, then, you’re just wrong,” he said, quietly. “Mum threw herself off that cliff, Dad. I could see from the window. I understand that maybe you’ve convinced yourself that it was some kind of accident, but it wasn’t. It was her intention to die, and that was what she did.”

  “Then w-why does she ring me up, then?” Harry asked, jerking his head up and trying to look defiant. “Hm? Tell me that.”

  “I don’t know where to start,” Arthur said. “Literally, I do not know where to start.”

  He looked at his father for a moment longer, feeling baleful and ashamed, and then left the room, left the house, disappeared back out into the rain and the wash of seagull sounds, and into the new streets and the old streets.

  Harry collapsed, folding in on himself, a poor shell-like substitute for a man, falling back down into the sofa on which he now spent far too much of his life, a sad husk confused in a dark room, because he’d thought it was quite a good question. Confusion was not all he felt, but it was certainly one of the things that he felt.

  Why did she ring him up?

  She must still love him. She must still love him. That was the only thing that made sense.

  AT THE MUSEUM

  Harry used to work in the Haig Pit museum, before it closed down. That was the museum on the cliff just to the south of Whitehaven, next to the big rusted wheel. Old Man Easy had worked there too. Harry himself had managed the place while Old Man Easy—known as Roger back then—had been a museum attendant. They had been good friends.

  The museum consisted of only two rooms: one was full of displays of photographs, the other full of lumps of coal. Those things were still there behind the locked doors, beneath the rusting wheel, the turning sky. Roger always used to be a big reader; he used to read a newspaper while the fascinated tourists learned about different types of coal or the coal trade, or looked at photographs of the harbor when it was covered in rail tracks and black dust. He would read the paper and then later, over a cup of tea, he would talk seriously with Harry about the pleasures of hard physical work and jobs in manufacturing—in making things. He would speculate about the death of industry, and how Great Britain would become a “service nation.”

  “I don’t know what the kids are going to do for work,” he’d say.

  PART FIVE

  YASMIN MAKES A MOVE

  Yasmin stood at the French doors, looking up at the sky. It was early in the morning but still dark. The rain had stopped hours ago and the clouds had scurried off, leaving the sky open to the stars. The difference in light pollution between here, Drigg, and even a little town like Whitehaven was astonishing. Yasmin stood there looking up at the sky for about fifteen minutes. Maybe she was still drunk or stoned. Maybe not. She didn’t know.

  Bony was asleep on the sofa. Before going to sleep on the sofa, he had changed the sheets on his bed and made it ready for Yasmin and, as far as he knew, that’s where Yasmin was—sleeping in his bed. That’s where she’d been when he lay down on the sofa, anyway.

  What time was it? About four o’ clock. The early hours of Tuesday morning. There was no way Yasmin would get to work today. Well, there were ways, obviously, but she would not attempt any of them. It wasn’t like she ever usually rang in sick, so she didn’t feel too bad.

  Who was she kidding? She didn’t feel bad at all. She felt more honest and true and virtuous than she did on those mornings when she hauled her reluctant body to the call center, every cell in her body rebelling and getting heavier with misery the closer she got. Was that overstating it? Actually, no, she didn’t think it was. And here, now, on this morning, predawn, she felt very hopeful, almost as if success were nothing at all to do with going to work. That was a naïve and futile feeling to hold on to, she realized, but she held on to it anyway.

  She turned to look at Bony, lying there asleep. He was buried beneath a double duvet, piled up
like a mountain on the narrow sofa. The duvet was white and it seemed to glow. Bony’s head stuck out from underneath it, like the duvet had fallen out of space and squashed his body. His breathing was slow but shallow, and he seemed very peaceful.

  Yasmin sat down carefully on the edge of the sofa, at the very end, so as not to wake Bony up. He shifted in his sleep, obviously quite a light sleeper. She reached under the cover and put her hand on his shin. He woke up then and sat straight up, in a way that seemed totally unnatural to Yasmin, before landing all tensed and wary on the floor. His eyes were wide and the whites of his eyes showed clearly all the way around. The duvet was gone, whipped across the room. He was wearing just his boxer shorts.

  “Yasmin?” Bony whispered. “Is that you?”

  “Yeah,” Yasmin said. “Jesus, Bony, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Well …” Yasmin began, her hands clasped together in her lap. She was wearing dark green satin pajamas, with a sleeveless top. Her pale arms shone. “Oh, well, I suppose I did mean to wake you. I wanted … I just wanted to touch you. I thought maybe we could sleep together. Just sleep … or, I don’t know. Why don’t you come back to your bed with me?”

  “No!” Bony said, yelped almost. “Yasmin, what are you saying?”

  Yasmin didn’t know what to say.

  Bony seemed to relax a little bit, then stood up fully. He was still uneasy, though—Yasmin could tell that by his posture and expression. Bony usually looked totally serene, but not right now.

  “I understand if you don’t want to,” Yasmin said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to explain what I want.”

  “You don’t have to,” Bony said.

  “No!” Yasmin said. “I mean, I don’t just want to have sex with you. I think you’re a great person, Bony. You’re not like anybody I’ve ever met before. I love how you don’t care whether or not anybody knows you. And you know so much without having to keep showing people what you know.”

  “I think maybe you’re still drunk,” Bony said.

  “I might be,” Yasmin said. “But I feel these things when I’m sober too.”

  “Oh, Yasmin,” Bony said. He sat back down on the sofa, not quite next to her. “I don’t think I’m good boyfriend material. I’m a very strange person.”

  “In what way?”

  “I cannot invest in any kind of relationship,” Bony said. “Not really. I feel a lot, but I’ve never felt a lot more for one person than any other person, or felt more than I do for things, like—just the world in general. I mean, I feel intensely positive about most people, but I feel the same for most things too.”

  “Arthur told me you don’t find people sexually attractive,” Yasmin said.

  “Did he?” Bony laughed. “That’s not really true. I do. I find most people very sexually attractive. But I don’t have sexual relationships with people, because I can’t pretend to commit. Or they realize that I like trees or machines just as much. I just—I see sex as just objects responding to other objects. And I think that’s OK. There’s nothing wrong with objects. I see our minds as objects, parts of the body, that’s all. The relationships between these objects are complicated—more so than with magnets or thermometers, for example—but, still, that is how sex appears to me.”

  “So you don’t … you don’t do it?”

  “I avoid sex at all times.”

  “So that you don’t upset people?”

  “More or less.”

  Yasmin nodded. “I think I understand.”

  “But you don’t feel the same?” Bony said.

  “No,” Yasmin said. “No, I don’t.”

  The two of them sat there in silence for a while.

  “I feel emotions for you,” Yasmin said.

  “I think sex would be an especially bad idea, then,” Bony said.

  “You were thinking about it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think it would be a bad idea at all,” Yasmin said. “Not now that you’ve explained yourself.”

  Bony looked directly at Yasmin. “So it would not upset you that all the time I would be thinking of you as just a load of interlocking systems that I am manipulating?”

  “That’s how you think of me anyway, though, right?”

  “Yes,” Bony nodded. “I think of all people that way all of the time. And there’s something else I should tell you,” he said. “I use objects … I mean, non-human objects. I like to … oh God I can’t explain it.”

  “Like sex toys?”

  “No. Like … well, kind of, but more than that. Everything is connected, Yasmin. Everything is one big network. Things I come across: unusual textures, unusual vibrations. Like the railway line. Or like … like the thing on the beach. Everything is part of the same system, interlocking. I try to plug in.”

  Yasmin narrowed her eyes and breathed in. “You fucked the thing on the beach?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you use a condom?”

  “Yes. There was no contact between my skin and that thing.”

  “That’s OK, then,” Yasmin said, breathing out again.

  “What? Really?”

  “Yes,” Yasmin said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “It’s the kind of thing that might disgust normal people with normal emotions,” Bony said.

  “It is disgusting,” Yasmin said. “It is weird and disgusting, but it’s not wrong in any way I can really put my finger on. It doesn’t point to any kind of moral deficiency.”

  “Some people would claim that’s exactly what it points to.”

  “I suppose some people would,” Yasmin said. “But I’d say that they’re wrong.”

  “It’s good to be able to tell somebody about these things,” Bony said.

  “Bony,” Yasmin said, “you are one of the best people I know.”

  “OK.” Bony nodded. “So basically,” he said, “I don’t really differentiate between people and things in a lot of ways.”

  Yasmin nodded. “Work makes me feel like a thing,” she said. “Work makes me feel like a baked potato or something, just waiting to be eaten.”

  Bony laughed at that.

  They stood up and left the room. On the horizon, the stars started to fade away as the sun rose, although of course the sun wasn’t rising. It was just becoming visible there, in that part of the world.

  THE STREETS OF WHITEHAVEN

  Arthur wandered around the town in a state of almost total blankness, his hands in his pockets, his head down. He was cold. It was a cold night.

  He found a bar called Sydney’s. He remembered going there when he was younger, about sixteen, although it had been a different place then; it had been called Shadows, and was a rock club. It had always seemed empty when it was Shadows. Arthur remembered sitting there on a chair at a low table in a corner, probably with Bony, and watching Pedophile Ted slowly headbanging, alone, in the middle of the too-bright dance-floor, a cartwheel interwoven with fairy-lights suspended above him, and his long blond hair moving around like seaweed. Maybe he wasn’t slowly headbanging at all, maybe Arthur was just remembering it all in slow motion. Pedophile Ted was called Pedophile Ted because he was aged twenty-four but was going out with a fourteen-year-old girl. Although that would have been ten years ago, so maybe he wasn’t a pedophile any more. Maybe he was with the same girl, and she was now twenty-four and he was thirty-four. Or maybe he had kept going after the young ones, and he was in prison now. Who knew? Whatever had happened to Pedophile Ted and his denim jacket and his long blond hair and his lumpy, scarred, acne-ravaged face?

  Arthur hadn’t been back to Shadows—or Sydney’s, as it was now called—since that night. In ten years, he hadn’t been there. He stood outside for a moment, wondering how he’d ended up here in this dark little back alley off New Street in the first place, because he hadn’t consciously decided to walk here. It had happened by accident. And then entered the bar.

  There was no dance-f
loor any more. There was just a long bar, and a load of booths. It was all leather and cocktails now. Quite nice, really, in its way, Arthur thought, but not what it used to be. Did that matter? Maybe it didn’t matter. It was dead there, but then it was a Monday night, and what time was it, anyway? How long had he been out walking?

  It was nine o’ clock and they were still serving. Arthur sat at the bar and looked up at the lights. They had chandeliers now, but the chandeliers were enclosed in plastic cylinders. Why was that? It looked a bit stupid. He ordered a cocktail, after checking that you could pay by card. He couldn’t afford it—all of his money in the bank was already spoken for, earmarked for bills—but that had never stopped anybody before, had it? It had never stopped Dad in the Vine. Besides, Arthur wasn’t sure if he’d ever tasted a proper cocktail before, and that seemed just abnormal for somebody of his age. The cocktail he’d chosen was a Long Island Iced Tea because that, he thought, sounded quite sophisticated. It would be nice to be sophisticated.

  What else could he remember from all those years ago? He remembered Bony staying over one night and being so drunk that Arthur had propped his friend’s head over a biscuit tin in case he was sick. He remembered how once, at Bony’s house, he and Yasmin and Bony had been sunbathing—it was a fantastically hot summer’s day—when the three of them were disturbed, to their incredulous joy, by an ice-cream van turning up from nowhere. It had been playing “Stairway to Heaven.”

  By the time they threw him out of Sydney’s, Arthur could barely walk. “Maybe all people are wrapped in an impenetrable membrane,” he was mumbling, “that prevents genuine emotional interaction.” In his mind he was picturing a second skin that mapped itself to the contours of the human body, including the interior surfaces of all of the orifices, and through which another human being could never, ever pass.

  Yasmin! That was who he wanted to see. Yasmin was kind and he felt like he loved her, which was maybe the same thing as loving her. Who knew? He slowly made his way down to Lowther Street and turned right, occasionally having to push himself away from the wall. It was a bright night; the moon and the stars were out. Arthur was a stooping, stumbling silhouette. Oh, he was a right fucking mess.