The Thing on the Shore (14 page)

Arthur didn't normally do overtime. He was often asked, as he was a particularly capable customer adviser, but he refused it so regularly that saying no felt almost like a principle. It wasn't a principle, really. He just couldn't bear to spend any more time here than was necessary. Overtime was necessary now, though, because Arthur had decided that he and his father were going to get a new bathroom. He had decided, lying awake in bed one night recently, that this would make a significant difference to their quality of life.

At about eleven o' clock on this Saturday morning, Arthur's headset beeped and he launched into his
scripted call opening. There was no response, though. All he could hear was music. Not hold music or anything like that, but music being played at the other end of the telephone line. He couldn't identify it. It seemed to change from relaxing, summery classical music to some upbeat, fifties American rock with blurry, unclear vocals. And then it changed back again. The change was somehow seamless—Arthur couldn't quite pinpoint it. He didn't let it worry him, though. He just sat back and let the music keep his phone line engaged. It lasted for about five minutes before the line went abruptly dead. The silence rushed in like water, and like water it was threatening. The whole thing seemed momentarily awful, but then Arthur looked about him at his mundane environment and felt slightly less afraid, if a little sad at the end of the distraction.

Arthur was seated at Harry's usual desk. He tended to sit there when he was on the rota to work a weekend shift to prevent anybody else sitting there and noticing the flakes of skin in the keyboard, the stray hairs littering the mouse mat.

Yasmin was talking to somebody, and laughing gently. It didn't matter who Yasmin spoke to, she maintained her calmness and patience, her kindness of tone. She would sometimes have a rant about a call later on, or even a sob, but the customers would never know. Arthur wasn't sure it was good for her, really. He watched her over the top of the screen. Maybe he should ring up and ask to speak to her, then pretend to be a customer and talk to
her for a long time. That might be nice. Although she'd probably recognize his voice.

Arthur took another call. As he spoke to the customer he looked through their account history and saw that Yasmin had spoken to the same customer in the past. There was a note from her on the system, date-stamped two years ago.

PTC Customer rang to set up direct debit. Explained charges scheme and possible allowances. Yasmin, Team Kansas.

This note had no bearing on the customer's current query, but Arthur kept returning to it, moving the mouse cursor back and forth over her name. He suddenly realized that one day she might leave. He imagined coming across notes like this after she'd left, and considered the impact they might have on him. Whether or not he found them would be totally random; it would depend on which customers rang up, and which of them dropped through to his telephone line. But they would be there, buried in the depths of the system like little bright stones, waiting to be found. Like clues, almost, or notes that she'd left just for him, containing some kind of message. He would have to keep a record of the reference numbers for any accounts that she'd worked on. Starting straight away. After the customer had gone, he wrote down that same account number in the back of his notebook.

The day started to get a little busier. Call volumes were
forecast according to bill dispatch dates, public holidays, time of day, previous volumes, that kind of thing, and the number of agents scheduled to work was varied accordingly. Sometimes, though, for reasons that nobody really understood, the forecasts were wrong. People up and down the country would all start ringing at the same time, as if in response to some kind of general signal. It didn't make much sense, but it happened. The only explanation Arthur could think of was some kind of deeply buried, collective consciousness. Whatever the reason, the number of calls now coming in seemed higher than expected, and customers were obliged to queue to speak to the advisers. The leisurely tone of the place gradually changed, becoming harder.

Artemis started prowling around, shouting things. “If two percent or more of customers hang up before getting to speak to an adviser then the company gets fined
billions
of pounds!” he shouted. “Get the customer on, answer their questions, get them off again, then get the next one on!”

Taking one call immediately after another was stressful at the best of times. You didn't have any time to think, and it was easy to accidentally leave one screen open from the previous customer's account and thus get mixed up, or confuse this caller's surname with the last caller's. Without the opportunity to speak to real people around you, you became a creature of scripted speech and mathematics and nothing else. Coupled with the threat of an angry Artemis, it was deeply discomfiting.

Arthur started to feel weird. He started to panic that
he was disappearing. Not physically—just the part of him that was feeling weird, the part that was thinking. He was aware of his mouth moving and parts of his brain working out corrections to customers' bills, and his fingers amending addresses and adding notes to accounts, but all of those things were happening outside of his consciousness. He felt that he was trapped behind the eyes of a robot, yet with no means of communicating with it or controlling it. As far as the world was concerned, he was only a customer adviser—he was a voice on the telephone, nothing else. Yasmin and his co-workers wouldn't be aware of him, because they were all trapped inside their own automata, their minds being squeezed out of existence. Like his. The customer voices coming in through the earpiece sounded slow and soft, words stretching out like bread dough, becoming incomprehensible, monotonous, sickening. He tried to focus on what the current customer was saying. This one was talking about somebody from the call center whom he'd spoken to previously.

“If I only knew what she was doing,” the customer said. “
She
knew what she was doing, but I didn't. She didn't do anything really to impress me, but then she didn't do anything bad either.”

Arthur unpicked this utterance in his mind, throwing away the bits of shell to reveal the point of it, the truth of it, the grain of relevance or inquiry that had prompted the customer to say it. He struggled, though, and he couldn't find anything. This was often the way with whatever the customers said. They said some words that added
up to nothing, and then expected you to respond with something concrete, some kind of answer or solution to what had never properly been a question. Arthur was aware of his mouth opening as if to speak, but he didn't know what was going to come out of it. He found that he was looking at work-queues on the screen.
Yes, that's right
, he thought,
this customer's account is somehow tied up in a work-queue. That girl he's spoken to has put the account into a work-queue. We are waiting for the outcome. That's right
.

Work-queues were just that. Queues of particular tasks that needed doing. Often, the call center staff didn't have the time or systems access to perform some necessary work on a customer account, so they sent off the task to back-office colleagues, who would then work through the jobs in the order that they had been created. The back-office colleagues were based somewhere else—Chorley maybe, or Liverpool, or Delhi, or Kuala Lumpur, or in their own homes scattered across the world. Arthur didn't really know, and he didn't really give a fuck because it didn't really matter.

The work-queues appeared vertically on screen as lists of reference numbers and explanatory comments, but they now appeared horizontally in Arthur's imagination, with all the physicality of a Heath Robinson invention, each task a little parcel, all those little parcels backing up in a tube—a horizontal tube—except they were more like clumps of staples, not parcels: clumps of staples, or millipedes, each bit of work forming a different segment. They got incredibly long all too quickly, growing at unmanageable
speeds, coiling off into a virtual, electronic distance across the internal plains of some data bank that stretched from Whitehaven to Chorley, maybe, or to Liverpool or Delhi or Kuala Lumpur, or wherever the fuck, bits of them breaking off and getting lost or getting mixed up with other queues, all the while spinning out and bleeding confusion.
These spaces are the problem with call centers
, Arthur thought as he looked around.
Not the people who answer the phones. These eerie, empty interstices, empty of life and reason but full of lost data.

The customer's soft words meanwhile had melted into one long, low sound—a kind of thunder that echoed around the milky, buzzing sky. The ground was made up of lurid green and purple things, like tentacles, almost. When he looked at them more closely they either looked like worms or the long, skinny arms of spindly starfish.

Arthur realized that the thunder wavering in volume was in fact made up of lots of voices broken down into component units and sounds, currently nothing more than signals on their way from one place to another. In the distance he could see a purple light that colored the sky above it.

Arthur was still aware of his body going through the motions, sitting at his desk, talking to the customer. He was not entirely sure of his situation. He couldn't work it out. He was in two places at once, though, he knew that much.

He giggled a little bit. “Hello?” he said. “Where is this?”

“Don't be alarmed,” said a very faint voice, a gentle voice
that seemed to come from all directions at once. “You are completely safe.”

“I wasn't alarmed,” Arthur said.

The voice sounded feminine, but when he thought about the sound of the voice in any detail, it started to come apart as if he hadn't heard it at all but just received the words directly into his brain.

“Head for the City,” the voice said. “You will meet me on the way.”

Arthur was about to ask where the City was, but then looked at the purple light and saw that it was not one purple light, but many. The City.

Arthur could not recall ever having felt so excited in his entire life.

The only semi-decent explanation for these events that Arthur could come up with was that he had died. He was shocked at the warmth that flooded his consciousness when he thought of that possibility; he was dead, but the world was not over. There
was
an afterlife—a stranger existence, a more exciting existence. He was almost ecstatic at the potential. He realized that he could no longer sense his corporeal body, or the chair it sat in, or the keyboard at its fingertips.

Arthur started walking. Sometimes the ground seemed to shift beneath his feet and, as it did, it sounded like the wet susurrations of static that would occasionally whisper from the call center telephones in place of the voice of a
customer. It remained solid though—the ground, that is—in a way that Arthur didn't fully understand.

After some time spent walking—it was hard to say how long—Arthur could see a figure approaching him from the direction of the City. The City was still a long way off, but this figure was at about the halfway point. The world felt darker, but the sky was the same dirty, creamy color that it had been when Arthur arrived. From this distance, the figure seemed very tall—a thin black line scratched into the landscape.

“I can see you now,” said the voice from the air, sounding louder than it had done previously. “Can you see me?”

“Yes,” Arthur said. “Yes, I can.” He felt light. The voice was definitely feminine. Not only that, it sounded almost familiar. It sounded, in as much as it sounded like anything at all, like his mother. That would make sense, right, if he was dead? You saw it all the time in films. People you loved are waiting for you when you die. That wasn't something Arthur had ever believed, but then he'd never believed in an afterlife either.

“I won't be long,” he said.

“Good,” said the voice. “That's good.”

Arthur felt some kind of electric slap across his cheek, and screwed his eyes shut. He felt himself falling. He opened his eyes to find he was lying on the rough office carpet tiles of the call center floor.

Yasmin was shaking his shoulder. “Arthur?” she was saying. “Arthur, are you OK?”

He stood up and just looked at her, mouth slack. Artemis
loomed behind her, hand pressed on chin.

“Sorry for the slap,” she said. “Seemed to do the job, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were unconscious,” Yasmin said.

“Was I?” Arthur said.

“You were talking,” Artemis said suddenly, and loudly. Yasmin jumped, as if she hadn't known he was there. “Who were you talking to, Arthur?”

“I don't know,” Arthur said, not wanting to embarrass himself.

“You said, ‘Where is this?' Why did you say that?”

“I was in a strange place.”

“Were you alone?”

“No.”

“Who was there with you?”

“I don't know who they were.”

Artemis nodded, looking serious. “You should go to the doctor's,” he said. “Just to make sure you're not a complete nut.” Then he walked off, grinning.

“Fucking acid,” Arthur murmured to Yasmin. “I thought I was dead.”

“Oh, Arthur,” said Yasmin, and put her arms round him. “It sounds awful.”

Arthur didn't say anything.

“Let's go to the break room,” Yasmin said. “I think Artemis was, in his own way, offering you a breather—if not suggesting you take the rest of the day off.”

*

Arthur and Yasmin stood on the break room balcony that jutted over the car park and faced out to sea. The wind was strong here, and they were cold, but it was preferable to the crowded, noisy break room itself. Arthur was feeling scatterbrained and hollowed-out.

“I thought I was dead, but it didn't bother me too much,” he said. He pursed his lips and looked up at Yasmin. She looked back with narrowed eyes.