The Thing on the Shore by Tom Fletcher Page A

people Yasmin and her colleagues ever really spoke to—the customers—couldn’t see them, so as far as the customers were concerned they were just voices coming through the wires. They weren’t living, breathing bodies in a town by the sea; they weren’t anywhere. They became almost nothing but words on the end of the line, for eight hours a day.
Every fucking phone call is a kind of reduction
, she thought.
A reduction of me. The proportion of time I spend as just a voice is far too high. Every phone call tips that balance just a little bit—for me and for everybody else who works in these places.
    If you weren’t lucky enough to face the windows and be able to fix your eyes on something solid—the lighthouse was Yasmin’s favorite—then you could find yourself drifting in a susceptible state, and thus suffer a kind of vertiginous horror at the absence at the center of it all. You were somewhere
in between.
Between two companies. Between two phones.
You could forget that you were here at all
, she thought. And every phone call was a kind of puncture into your head. The beep that signified a new customer was a terrible sound, and it seemed to Yasmin to be the sound of something actually penetrating space;in its blunt, aural violence, it seemed to be indicating that a phone call was an invasion, was one place invading another. It was some kind of dart piercing the fabric.
That’s why call centers are thin places
, she thought.
That’s why it feels thin. Because there are thousands of little needles arriving every day from other places, thousands of little needle voices, thrusting into our heads and into our lives and into our world.
And they left holes just like pinpricks in a piece of paper. Letting the light through. Making it weak. This was something that she’d talked about with Arthur and Bony, on many hazy nights spent at the Vagabond. Arthur would always understand completely, nodding and grinning, and saying “Yes!” at various junctures, but Bony would just look blank. But then, that was Bony.
    â€œI’ve got two degrees,” said one customer who couldn’t understand her bill. “I doubt you’ve got any qualifications. Don’t tell
me
I’m wrong.”
    â€œYou stupid fucking bint,” said another caller, who didn’t seem to remember why he’d rung, or even whom he’d rung. “Fuck you.”
    The next call consisted of some kind of telephonic malfunction: it was another call adviser, assuming Yasmin was a customer, so both Yasmin and the other girl started following their scripts at the same time. A seagull flew into the window. The next call was another strange one. It was just static, really, but with a certain texture and depth that somehow made it a
landscape
of static. A difficult terrain of peaks and troughs and shadows. Somewhere in the distance there was a quiet voice—probably that ofthe customer—that sounded high and panicky, due to the bad line. It was slowly eclipsed by a high-pitched whistle of white noise that sounded like a train grinding to a halt. Yasmin winced and disconnected.
    She looked out of the window at the lighthouse.
I’m not here
, she thought.
I’m somewhere else. I’m sitting in a tree in Lothlorien. I am discovering intelligent life on another planet. I am impressing everybody with my elegantly pointed ears. One of these days,
she thought,
I am going to develop some kind of real-world ambition. One of these days.

D EAD W EIGHT
    Artemis stood in the meeting room, his hands behind his back, and stared at the cream-colored wall. His nose was wrinkled. The wall was covered with small blue and gray spots where Blu-Tack had either left a stain or pulled some paint off with it when removed. The wall looked dirty. It looked diseased. It looked
disgusting
. What kind of place was this? There were tatty, torn posters as well, depicting stacks of pound coins. Something to