The Thing on the Shore Read Online Free PDF Page B

her face until it was too late. He felt a coldness settle in his stomach as he turned to hang his coat up on the back of the kitchen door. When he turned back, she was still looking at him. She wore a long black cardigan over a shirt and some jeans, and around her the cluttered yet tidy kitchen was glowing orange. Her rust-colored hair was tied back, but a halo of loose strands floated about her head.
    Yorkie raised his old, tired dachshund face above the edge of the dog basket in a kind of lazy greeting, and then let it fall back on to the cushion with a
humph.
    â€œI’ll make you a drink,” said Isobel.
    â€œThank you,” said Bracket. “I’m sorry.” He bit his lip and smiled to prevent himself from crying. “I, um … It’s just … I don’t know.”
    Isobel stepped around the kitchen table, piled high with newspapers and unopened envelopes, and ran both her hands down his arms. “Go and sit down,” she murmured, and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll be through in a minute.”
    Before finishing work, Bracket had checked his emails and read one that had been sent out to all of the managers on site. There had been an attachment—the new organogram. The word “organogram” itself made him feel a kind of nausea. He had pinched the bridge of his nose, then opened the attachment and scanned the slick PowerPoint slides which presented the new management structure. He had grimaced at the headshots which illustrated it. His photo in particular was a poor one—he looked like a condom stuffed full of bread dough. As he had expected, virtually nothing in the structure had changed—not yet, anyway—except the face and the name appearing at the top of it. Jessica Stoats, with her pursed lips and huge false eyelashes, had been replaced by Artemis Black, with his gleaming bald skull and sneering mouth. His eyes oozed contempt even through the photograph, through the desktop monitor, and it had taken an effort of will for Bracket not to smash his clenched fist into the screen. He had kept a lid on it, though, as he was surrounded by customer advisers taking calls fromcustomers. It was on his personal development plan to always remain positive in the workplace. In his last performance review, Jessica had spoken to him at length about what she called “the shadow of the leader.”
    Now, though, sitting curled up on the sofa in his darkened living room, there was nobody to pretend for. At home he acknowledged the truth: he was a seam of coal being steadily mined. He was an ocean being emptied of fish. He was a field being slowly stripped of nutrients. He was giving everything away to people and things he felt nothing for. He had told Isobel that he didn’t want to talk, but actually words were queuing up inside him. She would understand, if he explained. I am thirty-six, he imagined himself saying. I am thirty-six and I spend the majority of my waking hours pretending to be interested in what’s going on around me. I pretend to like people. I pretend to care about what I’m doing. But everything I see and everything I hear and everything I have to do makes me angry. My anger is very deep and very distant. I keep it very deep and very distant. I am thirty-six years old and I hide myself. I hide myself so that I can keep my job. A job that I hate. I cannot explain how pathetic that makes me feel. If I keep myself hidden for much longer, I will disappear. I am thirty-six. I should not feel so pathetic. Nobody should feel pathetic. Nobody should feel as pathetic as I do. And now everything will change. The routines that have allowed me to survive will be broken. The surfaces that I skate over will collapse. The new site manager is coming, and he will expectthings of me. He will expect more of me than I can bear to give. And I want to use myself for something good. I want to give you more of myself, Isobel, so I am going to leave. I know