The Thing on the Shore Read Free

watch. “You finished half an hour ago!”
    â€œYeah,” said Arthur. “Yeah … Hi, Bracket. I was just catching up. Marking a few more calls. I don’t want to claim overtime. Don’t worry about it.”
    â€œI wasn’t,” said Bracket. He had a cracked kind of voice that always sounded tired.
    â€œOK,” said Arthur.
    â€œYou all right?”
    â€œYeah,” said Arthur, shutting down the computer. “I’m fine.”
    â€œGood.”
    Bracket stood awkwardly in the doorway for a moment. He had short, bristly gray hair and dark blue rings under his eyes. His shirt was creased and the sleeves were rolled up to the elbows. He wore a chunky watch that looked expensive but, Arthur reckoned, probably wasn’t. Bracket held a small stack of paper in one hand as he chewed on his lower lip. He was Arthur’s team manager, Arthur being on the Quality Assurance Team.
    â€œArthur,” Bracket continued at last. “There’s been some news. We’re delivering team briefings, so I’m trying to round up all of the QPs who’re still here. I wasn’t expecting to find you but, well, seeing as you
are
still here, you’d better come too.”
    â€œOK,” said Arthur.
    â€œYou’re not in a rush to get home, are you?” asked Bracket.
    â€œNo,” said Arthur.
    The QPs were the Quality Police, which was how Bracket referred to the Quality Assurance Team. It was his little joke.
    â€œThen you’d best get yourself to the scrum sofas,” said Bracket. “That’s where the others are. Have you seen Tiffany anywhere?”
    â€œNo,” said Arthur. “I haven’t seen anybody since I finished. I’ve just been in here all the time.”
    â€œI’ll meet you over there,” said Bracket, “once I’ve found Tiffany. That woman, I don’t know.”
    He turned and left the pod, shaking his head and muttering under his breath.
    Arthur waited a few seconds longer, so that he would not have to walk alongside Bracket, then picked up his coat and made his way out on to the main floor of the call center. This place always felt somehow green to him, but not in a healthy, fresh way—it was the sickly green of swallowed frustration, of exhausted arguments, of boredom, of well-thumbed £5 notes. This was probably partly because the carpet was green, reflected Arthur, but there was more to it than that.
    The scrum sofas were beneath a long window on the opposite side of the room to the pods. Most of the QPs were already seated there. With his coat draped over his shoulder, Arthur threaded his way between semi-circular huddles of desks, each one assigned to a different team. When he finally reached the bright blue sofas, he put his coat down next to a boy called Dean, and then stood by the window and looked out over the sea toward Whitehaven lighthouse. The sea was a bitter gray color and looked violently rough. Waves threw themselves high against the wall of the far harbor, which rose about sixmeters above the water at that point, and then crashed over the top of it. The spume rose even as high as the top of the lighthouse, which itself stood on the harbor wall, and a never-ending wind whipped it up into the sky, in bright white specks that stood out starkly against the glowering black clouds.
    â€œRight then!” came Bracket’s voice from behind him. “Looks like we’re all here now. Arthur, come and sit down. Is everybody actually here? Yes? Good.”
    Arthur turned from the window and sat down next to Dean, in the spot where he’d left his coat. He saw that Bracket had found Tiffany. She was now squeezing on to one of the sofas, pushing everybody else along.
    â€œOoh, sorry I’m late,” said Tiffany. “I didn’t know! I didn’t know there was a meeting!”
    â€œShort notice,” said Bracket.
    â€œI was just on the bog,” said Tiffany.