The Thing on the Shore (24 page)

“It wasn't as awful as I'm making it sound,” Arthur said. “The thing is, I want to go back.”

“What do you mean?” Yasmin said.

“Yasmin,” Arthur said, “this is a real place I'm talking about! It's a place you can
go
to. I want to talk to you about it because you're clever, so I thought maybe we could think about what it is and stuff.”

“OK,” Yasmin said. She put her now-empty mug down and stood up. “I'm going to put the kettle back on. I'm sorry, I didn't realize … I haven't been sure all this time whether or not you've been talking literally or figuratively.”

“Literally,” said Arthur. He waved his hands around. “It's all literal.”

“Do you want tea or coffee?”

“Tea, please.”

“I'm going to have coffee,” Yasmin said. “I need to wake myself up a bit.”

Yasmin had a laptop with a broadband connection. This was not unusual in itself, but it was something Arthur and Harry did not have, and so far Arthur had not been able to look online for anything in the way of explanation. He'd tried to get on the internet at work, but the firewalls had blocked him. And anyway, he felt like he wanted some company for it. Somebody to help him sort the helpful from the nonsense.

“It's difficult to know what to search for,” Yasmin said, fingers hovering over the keyboard, the search-engine field sitting empty in the middle of the screen. She typed “world inside telephony system” and the search returned lots of telephony-system consultancy companies and technical websites. She searched for “telephone limbo,” and the results were equally useless. She tried “interstitial world” which brought back dictionary websites and medical pages about interstitial cystitis, whatever that was.

They spent ages trying to find something useful. Yasmin was well aware that real research involved more than trawling the internet, but the public library wouldn't be open. Arthur paced around behind her, suggesting things to try, swinging around a cricket bat that Yasmin usually kept by the bed in case of intruders. “Informational systems world,” he would suggest, or “data landscape” or “hidden reality.”

After a while, Yasmin was trying things like “new world hidden information structures alternative reality,” but still to no avail.

“I know we're not finding anything useful,” Arthur said, “but I feel like by doing this we've kind of worked out what it is I'm trying to describe.”

“I know what you mean,” Yasmin said. “Fucking hell, though, some of this stuff is a bit heavy for a school night.”

“Sometimes I wonder what I'd be capable of, if that place—work—didn't drain me,” Arthur said. “Sometimes, when I'm not there, I feel almost intelligent.”

“Work guts you,” Yasmin said. “We're all capable of great things, but work uses that capability up.”

“True,” Arthur said. By this point, he was looking out of the window at the sea.

“Speaking of work,” Yasmin said, “we should do a bit more digging there. See what we can find out.”

Harry never stopped to reflect on it, but it was strange, really, that Rebecca only rang when Arthur was out at work. If only Arthur were at home when she rang, then his son would be able to answer the phone and hear for himself that Harry was absolutely not imagining the voice. He'd passed the phone over, of course, in the past, on those occasions when Arthur came home and Harry was on the phone to Rebecca, but Arthur refused to listen. He had taken the receiver once, and spoken into it, but Rebecca had not replied; in fact, when Arthur had passed it back to Harry, the line was dead.

“It's no wonder he doesn't believe me,” Harry complained.

“Don't think I believe you,” Pauline said.

“Ooh,
I
believe you,” Tiffany said, “but then I'm a medium.”

The Vine was never that full on a Sunday night. Harry, Tiffany and—unusually—Bracket sat at the bar. Yorkie,
too, had a bar stool to himself, which—unbeknownst to anybody, he was urinating on. The worn green cushion just soaked up the liquid. Pauline stood behind the bar, leaning on it with her elbows, her mass of curly brown hair flopping forward over her red, worn face.

“You're a what?” Harry asked.

“A medium.”

“Look like a small to me,” Harry said.

“Ooh!” Tiffany said, and she started giggling. “You awful man!”

Harry gave a watery smile, as if his flirting had been accidental. Actually, it had been accidental. Sometimes when drunk, and especially in the company of women, he just said things. Really stupid things. What a stupid fucking cretin he was.

Pauline gave an over-dramatic roll of the eyes and shook her head.

“A medium?” Bracket said. “Really?”

“Call yourself a manager?” Tiffany said. “Don't know the first thing about me, eh?”

“I'm sorry,” Bracket said.

Bracket was drunk. Bracket was really very drunk. He had left the house after Isobel had fallen asleep on the sofa at about six o' clock. He wondered if maybe she was depressed. Or maybe she was just perfectly content to not communicate. Maybe she was very happy. Who knew? Anyway, he'd gone out to walk the dog, and somehow ended up here, at the Vine. The haunt of real drinkers. And what's more, he was enjoying it.

“Shame that I can't just talk to any old body up there in the afterlife,” Tiffany said, “otherwise I'd ask your Rebecca why she won't talk to young Arthur. He's a great lad, your Arthur, Harry.”

“I know,” Harry said. “He's the greatest.”

“Good at his job, too,” Bracket said.

“I'm very proud of him,” Harry said.

“Maybe she gets too upset to talk to him,” Tiffany said.

Bracket wasn't sure what was going on. It sounded like Harry was claiming that he talked to his dead wife on the phone, and Tiffany was saying that this was OK, this was possible. He wanted to tell them that this was not possible. Maybe ghosts did exist, but not like this. Surely not like this. Other people were sitting at tables elsewhere in the pub, and were probably having conversations that actually meant something.

“What do you talk about,” Bracket asked, “when Rebecca rings you up? What do you talk about?”

“All sorts.” Harry shrugged. “Can be anything. She starts by asking how I am, and what I've been up to—she always asks me those things. And I always tell her I'm fine. And then I tell her about my day. And it just kind of goes on from there.”

The weekly communication was issued every Monday. Arthur looked forward to it in a perverse kind of way, because it was always so badly written and so full of errors that it was almost funny. This week's was no disappointment, as he found himself reading and re-reading one sentence:

This is primarily as a result of failure against service levels and abandonment rates where performance on both overloaded and other causes is poor.

He couldn't work out if it made sense or not; it either didn't make sense at all, or he was being very, very stupid. Probably the former. Yasmin was convinced that half of the communications, directives, initiatives, training, briefings, etcetera—anything that came from higher management—were deliberately nonsensical to confuse the front-line staff so much that blame for every conceivable failure could then be loaded on to them.

Not that this was really necessary, for senior managers seemed to face no long-term consequences for their actions. Anyway their career progression seemed to work differently. They just floated from one role to another, one company to another, like massive self-aware Zeppelins built for the higher reaches of the atmosphere. The upper echelons. It appeared to be an entirely different world up there. Of course, maybe Arthur and Yasmin and all of the other customer advisers were wrong in their perception of the way these things worked, but as yet nobody had noticed anything to suggest so.

So the communication was usually almost funny. But only ever
almost
. It was, rather, on the boundary between “funny” and “pathetic.”

After reading this latest communication, Arthur searched for another call to listen to and assess. The assessments were done by quota: every customer adviser had to have a certain number of their calls assessed per month. Arthur chose one by Victor. Victor was the call center's only member of staff with a discernible foreign accent—Indian, in his case.

The call was good. Victor was good. Things only started to go a bit off-script when the customer was put on hold. Of course, what a lot of customers didn't realize was that sometimes when they thought they were on hold, the customer adviser had merely muted their mic and could hear everything the customer was saying. As could anybody listening to a recording of the call.

“Bloody call center's in India, innit?” the customer was
saying to somebody in the background. “I mean he's tryin' his best, but they don't understand over there, do they? I'm not being racist, but they don't understand our culture or owt.”

Arthur wasn't sure what culture the customer was talking about, or how exactly it was relevant. These things were often said, though, and race cropped up as a topic of conversation pretty frequently in telephone calls across the site. “Oh, it's nice to get somebody English for a change,” was the usual line—the usual starting point.

On the call Arthur was now listening to, the customer was wittering on about outsourcing and cheap labor and strong accents when Victor un-muted the mic and spoke.

“We're actually based in the UK, sir,” he said. “I am English.”

There was a silence.

“Oh right,” the customer said. Then, after a long pause, “They tell you to say that, do they? Think we can't tell?”

Victor hung up then. Justifiably too, Arthur thought, but of course you weren't supposed to terminate a call without warning the customer, and so Victor should be marked down for that.

And of course, for all the customer knew, the call center could indeed be based in India. Could be based in fucking Siberia, the bottom of the sea, or a network of caves in South America. Didn't make him right about any of the other stuff he spouted, but the truth was that there was no way of knowing the whereabouts of the people that you were speaking to. They could be anywhere and the
scary thing was that it didn't make the slightest difference. Their only location, in any meaningful sense of the word, was inside the networks—just rafts of signals, of ones and zeroes, drifting down the wires and emerging from the telephones of all of the customers.

Arthur raised his hands to remove his headset as soon as he heard it. That voice again. The voice he'd heard in the Scape.

“Arthur?” it said. It was now coming out of the headset, which meant that it was coming out of the phone. “Arthur? Are you there?”

And then it seemingly wasn't coming out of the headset at all. It was in the air; it was being spoken and heard directly, as if the originator were there alongside him. Arthur took the headset off and stood up quickly and looked around.

He was alone. The call center was empty. Not just of people, but of everything. In fact it was not a call center at all. It was just an empty room of the same size and shape, with blank, smooth, gray walls that looked cold to the touch. The floor and the ceiling were gray, too. Everything was the same, uniform color, apart from the light that came in through the windows, which was purple.

Arthur knew where he was. He was in the city that he'd seen: the City. He knew that for sure. He moved to a window and looked out.

The streets and the exterior walls of the other buildings were made out of the same gunship-gray substance. They were untextured and featureless, apart from the regularly
spaced windows, and even the windows were not windows so much as smoothly edged apertures opening into rooms that, Arthur assumed, were identical to the one in which he stood. All of the buildings were also identical, apart from their varying heights. They were the same width, the same shape, the same design. The colors and the lines were exactly the same as those of the computer system they used to manage customers' billing accounts.

Arthur felt a strange hand crawling through his stomach.

The City was the billing system, wasn't it? For a brief moment he was fully certain that each building corresponded to a record of a building in the database. Then the moment passed, and he was certain of nothing.

Arthur gripped the windowsill. The street in front was quite narrow and, when he looked down, he saw there the same pulsating organic matter that he'd witnessed on his first visit to the Scape. So he was definitely back there again. The street was illuminated by bright orbs emitting that same purple light. They seemed to be attached to the walls of the buildings, although Arthur couldn't be sure. He looked up into the ill sky, and could see some kind of small dark speck moving far, far above.

Turning back to face the room, Arthur saw a door in the middle of the wall opposite the window. Going outside wasn't an appealing prospect, though.

“Hello?” he said.

“Arthur,” said the voice.

“Whales!” Arthur blurted, without meaning to, and
without thinking. “Last time I was here, I saw whales!” He ran his hands over his face. He did not feel either hot or cold but his skin was coated with a layer of oily sweat.

“This is the Interstice,” the voice said. “It is in between. It is in between various places. It is linked to the planes of your telephony systems. It is where all of the voices are when they are in between telephones. It is linked to deep waters—the place through which the Ancient Egyptians believed all waters were connected. It is linked to other places, too, Arthur, but the deep waters are where the whales come from. The whales exist both here and in their own waters. There are other things that can move from one place to the other but I, alas, cannot.”