The Thing on the Shore (19 page)

“Any family?”

“What?” he asked.

Diane sat back a little when he said that, as if she thought that she'd seen something awful, and her smile wavered. But then Artemis caught a hold of himself and Diane realized that she must have been mistaken. She laughed nervously.

“I don't have any family,” Artemis said.

Diane was very drunk before too long. She was not half as mature or experienced as she seemed to have been making out, Artemis thought, as he walked her up the stairs. No matter. Maybe he'd been misreading her.

No matter.

Once they entered his hotel room he locked the door and then, positioning himself between her and the door, he let Diane go. She looked around her. She looked confusedly at the cream-colored walls, or coffee-colored, or whatever the fuck they were, and at the cream-and-coffee-colored bedclothes, and the cheap white bedside units.

“I think I want to go now,” she said.

“I think you're a bit too drunk,” he said. “I don't think it would be safe for you to go outside now.”

“I think I'm going to be sick,” she said, then unzipped her jacket and shrugged it off.

“Into the bathroom,” Artemis said, and pointed. He pushed her toward the bathroom door and, as soon as
she'd entered the smaller en-suite room, he took off his coat, jacket and shirt. He followed her into the bathroom and watched her throw up in the toilet. When she stood up again, she stared at him blankly, her mouth slack, then looked at the wall and put her hand out. Artemis took it and led her through to the bedroom.

“I'm fucked,” Diane said. “S-steaming, like.”

“I know,” Artemis said. “Let me take your jacket off. You're probably too warm.”

Diane nodded, despite the fact that she had already taken her jacket off. Artemis gently pushed her down on to the bed and then lifted her arms up. Artemis rolled her jumper up over her head, which flopped around like her neck had no strength in it, like she was already falling asleep. She didn't try to stop him; she was more or less unconscious. She was wearing a white push-up bra underneath, nothing else, and the bra was too small, Artemis thought. He stood back and smiled. Diane just slowly sank down on to her side and lifted her legs up on to the bed.

Once Artemis was sure that Diane was asleep, he unfastened her bra and slowly maneuvered the straps over her shoulders and down along her arms. Her breasts were large and her nipples small and dark. He undressed completely and sat down in the small, ugly, hotel-room chair. He looked at Diane. He stared at Diane. He liked her body. He felt his arousal gathering, strengthening, swirling into him like water into a plughole, filling him up. He liked these girls: young, doe-eyed, precocious, naïve.
If Diane had opened those eyes, she would have seen him sitting there naked, somehow weirdly gaunt without his suit on, his head bald and bulbous and disproportionately large, the beakish hook of his nose a kind of counterpoint to the questing cock that reared up from his lap. Hands like talons.

Artemis liked hotel rooms, and he liked offices too. He was really
somebody
here in these bland, generic places. He was powerful.
Give me a hotel room
, he thought,
or give me an office, and I can do anything. Anything.

Harry and Arthur both sat with their plates of beans on toast on their knees, watching
Come Dine with Me
on the TV. Harry was acting like there was something wrong with him, though; he was even more nervous and fidgety than normal. Arthur watched him across the living room. Harry kept putting his knife and fork down, then picking them up again and cutting off a little corner of toast and eating it, and then putting them back down.

“What is it, Dad?” Arthur asked.

“Nothing, son. Nothing.”

“OK,” Arthur said.

“Oh, son, OK! I can't hide it any more.” Harry moved his plate aside and stood up, and then waved his hands around. “I'm so proud. I've got you something. I was going to give it to you after tea, but I can't wait.”

Arthur moved his head slightly to one side. “Proud of me?” he said. “What for?”

“For getting your promotion!”

“I haven't had a promotion,” Arthur said.

“Let me just … let me just get this for you,” Harry said. “Wait a second.” He left the room for a moment, and came back with the scrappy old backpack that he always took to work. He sat back down on the sofa and opened the backpack, removing from it a Tesco's Finest chocolate cake of some sort.

“Oh, Dad,” Arthur said. “You shouldn't have. It's not a real promotion, you know.”

“Of course it is! They … they must think you're very good! You
are
very good, son. Anyway, I just … I just wanted to get you something to show … to show you.”

“You took it from the fridge at work, didn't you, Dad?”

“Well, yes, but it wasn't easy. And, besides, that Artemis can always afford to buy himself another one, can't he?”

“'Course he can.” Arthur smiled again and accepted the cake. “Thanks, Dad, but it really isn't a big deal. They're just using me because they know I'll say yes. They just push all the work downward. It's not like they're changing my role or anything. They're just asking me to do something they don't want to do themselves.”

“You can't dismiss it like that, son. It's good to be valued at work.”

“Valued, yeah. Not exploited, though.”

“Just … just to have a job at all, Arthur, is something these days. I mean, look at me. I'm not long for that place.”

“Dad, they just take advantage. I mean, they know that there aren't any other jobs going around here, so they just pile on the pressure until—”

“Arthur!” Harry almost shouted, standing up. “You're doing well working for a respected company and at such a young age too and I am so proud and your mother is so proud as well!”

Arthur saw that his father's eyes were wet.

“Thanks, Dad,” he said. “I really love the cake. Here, let's finish our tea and I'll cut it up.”

“No, son,” Harry said. “It's all for you.”

Harry stood there for a moment longer, and then turned and left the room. Arthur set the cake down on the floor, next to his chair, and put his face in his hands for a little while. Then he took the cake and went upstairs and lay down on his bed. He could hear his father through the wall, talking to himself. Or talking to Arthur's dead mother, whichever. It's not like there was any difference.

Arthur went to the bathroom. He tried not to look in the bath, but he did, and there they were: the worms. He gritted his teeth and, before actually going to the toilet as he'd intended, he took some toilet roll and screwed it up and set about killing all the little bastards. He counted about fifteen. He then flushed the tissue paper away and went back to his bedroom. He'd just put a CD on when he realized that he hadn't used the toilet at all, so he went back to the bathroom. He tried, again, not to look in the bath, but he did, and again there they were: the worms. There were worms in the bath again. Arthur sat down on the toilet seat and felt his face start to tremble and the tears start to come. He chewed his lip and realized
that he was shivering. He could imagine them all packed in together inside the walls. The worms, that is.

He stood up and picked up his mother's heavy glass soap dish and, holding it tightly, smashed it into the white tiles. They splintered and fell easily. They crashed into the bath, along with black grout and black worms and soft, dark lumps of tile adhesive and plaster that had gone rotten. He kept on going until he became aware of his father shouting to him through all the clattering. As Arthur felt his father's hands on his shoulders, the violent world of rancid mess and angular noise that he was in the process of creating suddenly receded into nothing. The tide inside went out in a matter of seconds; where there had been waves and motion there was now just a flat expanse of nothing. He dropped the soap dish on to the bathroom floor and it broke. He didn't hear it.

“Arthur,” Harry said. “What are you doing?”

“These worms,” Arthur said. “They're getting to me.”

“That soap dish was your mother's.”

“It was only a soap dish.”

“Yes,” Harry said. “Yes, it was.”

“Don't talk about it like it's something important.”

“OK.”

“I wish I could talk to her like you do.”

Harry put his arms all the way around Arthur, and held him pretty close. Arthur could feel his father shaking.

“Dad,” Arthur said, “sometimes I feel like some kind of freak. Sometimes I feel very different to everybody else, like there might be something wrong with me.”

By this point, the two of them were kneeling on the bathroom floor, their knees wet with water from the morning's showers. Harry was still hugging Arthur. He struggled for what felt like a long time to think of a response, but in the end he couldn't.

Later that evening, Harry called up to Arthur that he was going out. Arthur shouted a goodbye from his bedroom. Off to the Vine, probably, thought Arthur, who was lying face-down on the bed. His room was square, with just the bed and a desk and a wardrobe. The desk was a homework desk from when he was still at school; now it was a bit too small for him. On it sat a telephone handset. The ceiling light was off and the curtains were closed, but they were thin and there was still a little brightness left in the sky outside, so the room was illuminated very slightly. Arthur felt a bit like he was in an aquarium, and the window was a tank set into a wall that he could walk up to and press his face against to see something weird floating inside. He could picture that groaning green crab hanging there in mid-air, its legs dangling like the tentacles of a jellyfish, staring back at him.

Arthur rolled over and reached across to grab the telephone handset. If his dad could talk to his mother, then he could too. But now, looking at the phone, he felt the ridiculousness of it all. He didn't even know how to begin. Or what number to dial. He put the receiver to his ear and listened—there was a scratchy wind in the distance, some kind of static, and a ticking, clicking sound that
sometimes seemed close and sometimes far away. What was that? Was that due to birds sitting on telephone wires and moving around? Was that how it worked? How did it work? How did anything work? He moved the phone away from his head and went to dial a number again, but his finger just hovered over the keypad.

There was no telephone number he could possibly ring to reach his mother. His mother was dead. They had found her meaty skeleton, crawling with crabs and sandflies and strange worms, down on the beach. She had drowned, he knew. She had toppled from the cliff, breaking her skull on the way down, and then drowned in the sea. The fucking sea. So where was she whenever his father spoke to her? In heaven? Maybe the phone was just some earthly prop for a much more mystical form of communication. Or maybe his father was just a fucking nut-job.

Maybe they were both nut-jobs. It could be hereditary, couldn't it? And his father's delusions were hardly more drastic than his own recent experience with the landscape and the purple-lit city and that tall figure in the distance. Or—Arthur sat upright—maybe neither of them was delusional at all. He stood up and pulled back the curtains.

Outside, seagulls squawked and squealed as they were buffeted by the wind. They looked luminous in the darkening sky, lit up as they were by the lights of the town. The rusty, decrepit-looking wheel of Haig Pit was visible if he looked south. A dinosaur skeleton. Something massive and obsolete.

He had felt kindness in that landscape, and the voice
had been warm. Maybe there was something else happening. He watched a seagull, which had been suspended up in front of a silvery rift, suddenly plummet down toward the sea, disappearing behind the black edge of the cliffs where the land dropped away. Maybe his father was right. Maybe his mother was in there somewhere, on the phone. In the phone lines. In that same place, elongated and silhouetted, wading through the writhing wastes, that dark figure that never reached him. In that submarine limbo. The underwater. The sea. That's where she went, after all: the sea. That's where she was. Down there with the starfish and the thick, ground-hugging cables and the silt and the fat green crabs. And with the huge, unidentifiable, fleshy masses.

Of course! Arthur smiled slightly and became aware of his reflection in the glass of his bedroom window smiling back at him out of the darkness beyond. The Thing on the shore. There was something happening in that place, wherever it was—that landscape—that was sending winding tendrils of consequence out into the same gray-green ocean that lapped against the stone and sand of Whitehaven harbor.

Arthur turned away from the window and decided—one way or another, he would get back there. He would get back there somehow.

Arthur was listening in to a call from an elderly man.

“Are you telling me my house isn't here?” he was saying in a low, husky, difficult-to-interpret voice.

“No,” the CA—a girl called Linda—was saying nervously. “I'm just saying that it's not here. I mean I can't find it on the system.”

“What?” the old man said. “What?”

“I can't find it on the system here,” Linda said.

“What do you mean, you can't find it on the system?” the old man said. “Are you telling me my house doesn't exist? What do you think I'm living in, then, eh? You people! The Post Office people, as well, were trying to tell me that my house doesn't exist! Well, I said, why don't you come and have a look, eh?”

Arthur had his head in his hands, as he imagined Linda had had her head in her hands during the call. The customer was not being rude or unpleasant; the call was just typical of so many calls, so many misunderstandings,
so many crossed wires, so much confusion. Sometimes there were so few points of reference shared between the customer and the CA. Especially, to be honest, with the elderly. Sometimes, if the customer were elderly, all you had to do was mention a computer or a “system,” and they would immediately lose all respect for you and adopt a weary, irritable tone that, although it was not especially offensive or upsetting, was exhausting in its own unique way.