Barbara from channel four is halfway through her report on the boats when it happens. The sudden silence. The red of her blazer is replaced by a blue screen.
NO SIGNAL.
Check your internet connection and try again.
Clive’s first thought is about the blazer. He wasn’t done looking at it yet. Or rather, at what it contained. It reminded him of Cynthia, how she used to fill things out before the children came along and things got all pillowy. So long ago.
After a full minute of the blue screen his agitation is at the surface. What had Barbara been saying? The boats. Ceaseless. Bodies inside boats.
Clive snatches the remote from its place on the arm of his chair, jams at the off button. And on again. Blue screen, and the urge to throw something. He shoves himself out of his chair and moves over to the tv. When these things first came out there were wires, things to check on, to fix at the back. Now, just a panel. One wire.
Cynthia has come through from the kitchen to ask “What’s going on with the telly?”
“How should I know” says Clive. “Seems to be an internet problem.”
There is a moment of her blinking at him from the doorway. Gazing up at him with her puddle eyes. Doe things, helpless. Everything left to him to fix, always.
What had Barbara been saying about the boats?
He turns his focus back to the tv and smacks his palm into the side of it. The plastic of the frame creaks a little. “Don’t,” Cynthia says. “Donny paid a lot of money for it.”
“Well it seems he shouldn’t have bothered, should he?”
Clive is using his leave me alone voice. He’s perfected it over the years, and sure enough, Cynthia retreats from the doorway.
The tv. Blue. The rest of the living room is not sitting quite right in orbit now. Now that the sun is broken. He reaches behind and kills the power at the wall socket. Flicks it back to life again.
Blue screen.
*
“Why don’t you find another way to keep yourself occupied,” says Cynthia. “You could fix your dad’s watch, been meaning to, haven’t you?”
Clive has been putting this task off for months. His Dad’s old trench watch has stopped ticking. He needs to open it up and see whether there is something loose inside that he can sort out himself. Or some dirt that needs cleaning away. He pokes his head into the living room to make sure that the Blue Screen is still present before he fetches the watch from his bedside drawer and takes himself to the garden shed. Clive is sure that the tv will have righted itself, once he’s done. Shouldn’t have put this off for so long, really. Good to get around to something useful.
The shed is a lung of stale breath. He shunts his toolbox onto the workbench and picks a flat head screwdriver from the tangle inside. The lamp is flicked on and the watch placed underneath his table top magnifying glass. A Christmas gift from the grandchildren, something useful, for once.
He looks down his nose at the inscription on the back of the watch. His father’s name, date of birth. Date of death. Bulging up at him through the magnifier. Clive has looked at this watch hundreds of times, examined every inch of it long before it left his father’s wrist. The solid silver of the casing, the numbers edged in black. He knows the whispering ticking of the hands, and a desperation to hear the sound again rises up from deep in his chest. A piece of history, this is. How could he have let it lie broken for so long?
He slots the end of the screwdriver into the crevice between the watch face and the metal caseback. Increases the pressure, wiggles the flat head a little.
With a pop, the watch is open.
A snap, the face breaks away.
It falls to the worktop, bounces once, and lands on the floor. Clive utters a word that would earn a dirty look from Cynthia, and then the pain swims up from the hand that is holding the broken watch. The flesh of his index finger blooms red from where the screwdriver has carved petals into him.
*
Blue Screen.
*
He had watched Cynthia waddle around the garden with her pruning shears for half a day before he decided he would need to venture out for a newspaper. The flow of information might have been plugged in their living room, but Clive knows that things will still be happening, out there. The bodies will be coming, even now. Even as Cynthia’s backside eclipses the entire view of the rosebush she is picking at with her clippers. The walk to the village has become a treacherous thing, his knees not being what they were. Nothing else for it though, with the Blue Screen.
Clive had been into the living room twice in the night. He had found it difficult to drift off, knowing. They had been cut-off. He tried to tell himself as he lay staring up at the flaking ceiling paint that there was a cutting-off every night anyway. It’s not as though he left the tv on indefinitely. No, but this is different. The usual severance was chosen. It was him who decided that the moment had come for the silence to be invited in each night. This had come unbidden, and was reluctant to leave.
The girl behind the counter takes his money without smiling. The other chap, the Sunday one, is always friendly. This girl slaps his change onto the counter without looking at him. He hasn’t been into the centre on a Saturday since… Well, he can’t remember when. He takes another look at her, the one refusing to meet his gaze. At the piece of metal in her lower lip. He decides he doesn’t care for the centre on a Saturday.
He clutches his newspaper and a box of doughnuts as he crosses the road to the bench. He is reading the headlines before his backside makes contact with the seat. The ink on the paper stains his fingers and he finds a new appreciation for the tangibility of it. Information at his fingertips, brushing right up against his skin. Soaking in. He scans for mention of the boats as he fumbles with the box of treats on the bench next to him.
He finds it, an update on the bodies coming over the water. He eats the words and raises a doughnut to his mouth. Jam bursts as he bites down, slides over his chin, and as he shunts it deeper into his mouth with his tongue the sugar is a dagger in his jaw. A flash of pain, from the back molar that has been troubling him recently. Another thing he has been meaning to fix. He closes the paper, the box. It starts to rain as he heads for home, with blackened, sticky fingers cradling his cheek.
*
Blue Screen.
*
Clive lies awake again. His tooth has been needles and broken glass, a shattering ache. As if he didn’t have enough to deal with. The Blue Screen. He had insisted on leaving the tv on tonight, a kind of invitation. The glow has followed him to their bedroom like a nagging child. It’s everywhere, now. It climbs around the doorframe and he turns his back on it, but Cynthia’s face waits on his other side with an electric tinge to her skin. Her mouth is open as she sleeps. The light is inside there, too.
His tooth is agony. He has been meaning to make an appointment for months, maybe even a year. What has taken him so long? Oh, and there are the waiting lists. Full as the bloody boats, so they say. He’ll never get a booking in, now. Now that he really needs one. Maybe he should try to see what’s going on in there himself.
*
Cynthia’s magnifying mirror is in his hand, the one she used to use when she took better care of her appearance. He has ripped it from the bathroom wall, but he can probably fix that before she wakes in the morning.
The lightbulb in the shed is alive at his touch. A warm glow.
He puts the mirror on the table under the magnifier, and his fingers into his mouth. He stretches and pulls at his cheeks, trying to catch a glimpse of the cavity. His teeth are alarming to say the least, at this proximity. The colour of tea left out overnight. Nicotine stains from his youth have blackened, every incisor framed with a rim of tar. How deep does the black go? Clive tongues at his gums as he pulls at his face, wider, wider. If one tooth is this rotten, how far off can the others be? He’s left it too long, should have sorted it out.
The screwdriver is in his hand.
If he could just get a proper look at this molar, he would know for sure. How deep inside him the blight goes. If he gets it out, he might be able to stop the decay.
He slots the end of the screwdriver into the crevice between the aching tooth and the adjacent one. Increases the pressure, wiggles the flat head a little. With a pop, the tooth is free. It bounces from the magnifier, to the workbench, to the floor. A tinkling in the dark, then silence. Clive forgets the state of his knees and drops too quickly to them, tiny pops, shards. He crawls, fingers fighting grit with every motion. Finally, the tooth, stopped by the wheel of the mower. Clive snatches it up and pulls himself back to his feet, wipes a hand over the magnifying glass to clear some of the red away.
One side of the tooth is grey. He sees the hole now. A tiny chasm. But it’s there, and it’s been sitting for a while. He turns the aggressor over in his fingers and his thumb finds a jagged edge. The tooth has cracked against the flat head. The roots are still in his jaw. Rotten roots, buried.
He opens wide and the flat head is inside again. This time, an excavation. His mind starts to swim away from him as his gum gives in to steel, but he forces it back to attention with another examination of the tooth. Surely the rot will have spread? How is he to know what might be lurking in the small places? The ache he has felt all day can’t have come from a hole this small, from a single tooth.
It must be in the others as well.
*
There are five teeth next to the watch on the floor before Clive stops to check the window. It wouldn’t do for Cynthia to find him like this, but he can hardly see a thing through the years of grime gathered against the glass. He raises a hand to clear it. Red runs into his sleeve and also eats the dust, his fingers leave a brown soup across the pane. But it’s enough, their bedroom is still dark. The only light is coming from the living room. Where the tv is on. But the light is rippling now. Or pulsing. Like a lighthouse. Not stagnant. Not Blue. A small moan is a gurgle in his throat, he spits it up. Stumbles back to the house.
In the living room Clive falls to his knees again. He doesn’t feel it this time. He crawls closer, so close to the light that the ache behind his eyes can almost register above the pain in his jaw. He raises his hand, stretches out, fingertips against the cold screen.
A smear of red against the surface as the man at the news desk speaks of the bodies in the boats.
Erin Braithwaite is a writer and illustrator from South Africa living in Bristol. When she’s not watching horror films or reading creepy novels, she’s hard at work writing things that she hopes will send a shiver down the reader’s spine. She was selected as a mentee with Writer’s Block North-East and finished drafting her first novel in 2023, which has recently been longlisted in David Fickling Books’ Search for a Storyteller competition. You can find her on Twitter (@EJBraithwaite28) and Instagram (ej_braithwaite).
