What He Woke

by Jess Whitecroft

The Woke thing was out of control, in Caroline’s humble opinion.

Everything was woke. Lawyers were woke. The media was woke. Even Strictly was woke now, with same sex couples dancing together and all. Blue hair, almond milk, lattes, tofu, lifeboats, LGBTQ or however many letters they had in it these days – all dreadfully woke. The condemnation of tofu as a malign left-wing influence should have been a tip-off really, especially coming from the lips of the Home Secretary herself, but it was still a shock when Caroline discovered that even her breakfast was woke now.

“Avocado toast?” said Tom. “Really, Mummy? You’ll be growing out your armpit hair and buying a pair of Birkenstocks next.”

“Very funny, dear,” she said, and poured herself some tea. Tom had always been a clever boy, quick with a remark. It was just that now he was forty-five and a Member of Parliament, and somehow still under her feet.

This was largely the fault of Tom’s wife, who had yet to learn the role of a politician’s wife. Caroline knew it well, Tom’s father having been the MP before him. When your husband was caught being indiscreet with another woman you took it on the chin and accepted that men were like that. Similarly, when there were financial irregularities, you accepted that politicians were corrupt, and it was ever the same the world over. What you didn’t do was cause a big stink and kick your husband out of the house, especially when kicking him out would interfere with your mother-in-law’s ability to enjoy an avocado in peace.

She moved onto the second half of her breakfast, a soft boiled egg. As soon as she smashed the shell she wondered if it was off, because there was a smell. Carefully she peeled off the broken cap of shell with the side of her knife and breathed in, but it was fine. A perfect egg. When Tom was tiny she had used to draw happy faces on the eggs with a felt tip pen, so they’d smile even while Tom smashed their skulls wide open with his spoon. She’d often thought the face on the egg should have been a little less smiley and a little more Edvard Munch. And sometimes – just sometimes – on the tantrumy toddler mornings when nothing had gone right, she’d watched Tom smash and wondered if he had also smiled a bit too widely.

“Mummy, could you just check something for me?” Tom asked, handing her a letter from on top of a large plastic folder.

It was touching, the way he still did this, asking her to check his letters like she was glancing over his homework. She scanned the letter before her – a standard constituency letter about sewage spills in the bay. Tom was concerned, naturally, and would be doing everything he could to raise this matter in parliament at the next session.

Curious, Caroline flipped open the folder and peered at it. It was full of graphs, marine maps, and columns of scientific looking statistics. “Darling,” she said. “It seems to me that these people know what they’re talking about.”

“Nah,” said Tom, swallowing half a cup of coffee in a single gulp. “They’re just typical woke tree-hugger types. Pig ignorant crusty twats who have never had a real job in their lives.”

Caroline glanced at the flyleaf. “Really? It says here that the lead on this study has a doctorate in marine biology.”

“Lots of people have degrees, Mummy. You have a degree, and what good has it done you, besides the ability to quote The Iliad at parties?”

“The Bacchae, actually,” said Caroline. “My dissertation was on Euripides, not Homer.”

“Well, it’s all Greek to me,” said Tom, peering at the name of the doctor. “Anyway, it’s that Joyce nutter – you know. The one with the blue hair, and the pottery shop. First thing I heard about her having a doctorate in marine biology. Always thought she was some kind of witch, actually.”

“Perhaps she’s a sea witch, dear,” said Caroline, but Tom was already out the door, leaving a bad smell behind him. Gas, she thought. She’d made cauliflower cheese for dinner last night.

She glanced at the folder again. It made sense that Joyce had a hand in this. Joyce had tattoos, and a Black Lives Matter sign on the window of her pottery shop down at the harbour. Joyce wore Doctor Marten boots, and despite being in her late forties – had no compunction about saying sixth-form things like ‘Fuck the pigs’ without the smallest flicker of shame. Joyce was Greenpeace, multilateral disarmament, tofu, and lentils, all about putting criminals in music programmes instead of giving them the hard boot up the bottom they clearly needed. Yes, Joyce was ‘woke’ – so much so that she was in need of a Rip Van Winkle length nap, but she was helpful. She always chipped in, like with the local walking festival, or when someone needed help around the house. Wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. And she made lovely ceramic eggcups.

Caroline got up from the table and started to tidy up. As was her custom she took the unsmiling, scooped-out shell of her egg and crushed it in the palm of her hand before dropping it into the food waste bin. She had always done so since childhood, when her superstitious grandmother had told her that if you didn’t do so then witches would write people’s names inside the shells and make boats out of them. And then they would row them across the river of the dead, apparently. Small witches, Caroline had said, but there had been times when Gerald was ill when she’d wondered if her grandmother – who had despised him so much she’d refused to come to the wedding – had written his name inside an eggshell at some point. Worse, there had been times she had cause to wonder if Grandma hadn’t been right to do so.

She decided to return the folder to Joyce. Besides, it was a good excuse to stretch her legs, and she had always loved the walk down to the beach. The English Riviera, they called it, a stony cove nestled amongst cliffs high enough to lend the place its own microclimate. Bougainvillea flourished here, as did palms, and large beds of drowsy, bee-buzzing lavender, the last lending their fragrance to the already delightful salt air. Nothing like a lungful of it when you were feeling out of sorts.

Only today it was all wrong. Instead of salt and lavender it was sour. And not just the regular smell of the beach, which – let’s be honest – had been a whole lot less pleasant lately. No, it wasn’t just that. Within her first couple of breaths a bitter film clung to the back of her palate, so acrid that her first thought was that she’d forgotten her antacid after breakfast. She turned the corner of the street and looked down into the bay.

In spite of what she’d said to Tom, Caroline knew her Homer almost as well as her Euripides. She knew his vindictive gods, and his wine dark sea. That sea had a million moods. She’d seen it grey and raging, hazy summer azure, Homeric black, or flat as a sheet of steel. But this? No. She’d never seen this before. The sea looked…sick. It was at once grey and yellow, like her husband’s complexion in the last throes of his liver disease.

“Sediment,” she said, out loud. It had been windy last night. No doubt the wind had stirred up the sand and stuff on the bottom. She told herself not to be so silly, and strode on down to the harbour.

Joyce’s shop had sprouted several new seasonal decorations, including striped flags of various LGTBQ allegiance and a sign that said DEFUND THE POLICE. Caroline raised an eyebrow at it and went inside, immediately grateful for the respite from the smell outside. Here it was masked with the smell of kiln heat and clay dust, and the ever-present hippie base notes of patchouli and cheap incense. The sound of the bell brought Joyce out from the back, drying her hands on crusty old towel. Her big white apron was spattered with flecks of clay, and her eyes immediately went to the folder in Caroline’s arms. She didn’t smile.

“I brought this back for you,” said Caroline, setting the folder on the counter. “You’ve obviously gone to a lot of trouble. I had no idea you had a doctorate in marine biology.”

“Yeah, I’m full of surprises, me,” said Joyce, frowning. “Did your son read it?”

“Yes.”

“All of it?” said Joyce, with understandable scepticism.

“Some of it,” said Caroline. “Look, I’m sorry, but he’s been very busy lately.”

Joyce arched a pierced eyebrow. “Yeah, I heard,” she said. “We took it down to his constituency surgery and he took one look at the folder and then had a ‘family emergency.’ Apparently.” She tilted her head on one side and Caroline squirmed. As far as she knew there had been no family emergency, and she had a nasty feeling she’d been co-opted into whatever lie Tom had told.

“I’m sure he meant to look at it later,” she said.

“Later,” said Joyce. “There is no later. There’s only now. Can’t you smell that?”

Caroline hesitated. “Yes,” she said. Hard to say it aloud, for some reason. “Is it…?”

“Shit? Yes,” said Joyce. “And death. Lots and lots of death. Starfish, mussels, fish. Oysters, too. Well, they’re not dead. Not yet, but they’re so full of E.coli that you can’t serve them without putting your customers in hospital. Did you see the restaurant down the end was closing? Bottom’s dropped out of the local seafood trade, what with the local seafood not being fit for human consumption. Used to be a time you’d get fined for taking your dog on the beach in the holiday season, and now…well, now you can’t take your dog for a paddle because it’s too bloody filthy even for dogs.”

Caroline put a hand on the folder. “Do you mind if I keep this for a little while, actually? I’d like to read it.”

“Why? You gonna read it to your son.”

“Well, I think he should give it his full attention,” said Caroline. “This is appalling.”

“He voted for it.”

“Oh no. He would never. Tom always loved the beach. That was why we moved here when he was little – he’d never stop badgering me to go down to the beach and make sandcastles.”

Joyce sucked her teeth. “Right,” she said, gimlet gaze not wavering for a second. Her eyes were a clear, witchy grey. “You do know his votes are a matter of public record, don’t you? I know you’re his mother but –trust me – he voted for it.”

“He wouldn’t do that.”

“Wouldn’t he?”

Caroline put on her best electioneering smile and picked up the folder once more. “I’ll see what I can do for you.”

“Don’t do it for me,” said Joyce. “Do it for yourself. Do it for your grandchildren. If the sea dies, we die.”

“Well, that’s your opinion.”

“More of a fact,” said Joyce. “But go off, girl.”

Girl? I’m old enough to be your mother. Caroline didn’t say it out loud. Too much else going on into her head to be picking fights. She wished Joyce a pleasant afternoon and stepped out into the stench once more. This time she gagged, and knew the smell too well not to admit it to herself. She walked up the hill slowly, and didn’t turn back. Better to concentrate on her ungirlish breaths as they came slower and harder with every passing year. Seventy-eight soon, old enough to see scythes when you looked over your shoulder, so best not to look back really. Keep on. Keep moving.

But then when she reached her front gate, she turned out of old habit, looked back over the bay she loved. The sea looked no better. If anything, it looked worse. It had tentacles. The tired looking surface of the water was now marbled over with sickly blue tracery, like the arms of a wrathful kraken stretching out beneath the water. Not sediment. Maybe an oil spill. Maybe a trick of the light, or maybe she was just losing her mind. And why did that seem like the least-worst option right now?

Caroline slammed the door behind her when she went inside. She made herself a very strong cup of tea and sat down to read.

She was no better when Tom came home. Perhaps worse. The folder did not make for comforting reading. “Joyce said you voted for this,” she said, deciding to just have it out with him.

“Voted for what?” Tom stood with his back to the sink, his hands on the edge. With that glitter in his eye he could have been seventeen again, fighting his corner even though he knew he was in the wrong.

“This,” said Caroline, tapping the folder. “What on earth are people paying their taxes for, to keep the beaches clean and the litter picked up, only for you to just let the water companies dump all kinds of nonsense into the bay?”

“Nonsense?”

“Shit.”

He snorted with laughter. “Mummy, I should wash your mouth out with soap and water.”

“Wouldn’t do much good if you used the water from the bay,” she said, refusing to rise to the bait. “It’s filthy, Tom. And it doesn’t matter what you call it – shit, poo, excrement, sewage – it all amounts to the same thing: dirty beaches, and me not being able to enjoy a nice prawn sandwich anymore. Did you know my favourite seafood restaurant was closing down?”

Tom rolled his eyes. “They’re all closing down. It was the pandemic.”

“Not this time. This time they said it was e-coli. I can only assume you voted against the water companies being allowed to do this? Being from a coastal constituency? I shouldn’t have to explain to you how a seaside economy works, even if you know nothing about ecosystems.”

“Ecosystems? Oh dear. Have you been talking to the wokerati again?”

“No,” said Caroline, regretting that they were both too old for her to give him a slap. “I’ve been reading. And I don’t like it one bit. Can’t you smell it?”

“Smell what?”

She took a deep breath to compose herself. It was still there, in the background, seeping into the house from outside. The smell caught in the back of her throat, and poked like a finger trying to make her vomit. “Stop it,” she said. “Did you vote for this? I can look it up, you know. But I shouldn’t have to. I don’t care how many other people you’ve lied to in your life, but you won’t lie to me, your mother. Tell me the truth, Tom.”

He took off his glasses. “I did not vote to cover the beaches in shit, Mummy. Okay? What kind of MP would I be if I did that?”

“Not a very good one. You’re here because people elected you, Tom. Because they expected you to look after their interests. To make sure that their taxes were being spent on infrastructure, not private jets and caviar for your friends in the Cabinet. And yes, I know you’re ambitious, but you can kiss goodbye to your dreams of the Foreign Office if they kick you out at the next election. You know what those wilderness years were like for your father.”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “That’s why I don’t drink, remember?”

Oh, she remembered all right. The smell of end-stage liver failure was not something you forgot in a hurry, and the memory tugged uncomfortably at threads of the present. Threads like the veins that had opened up in red clusters all over Gerald’s body. Threads first, then giving way to tangled snakes of distended veins under the too-thin skin of his hugely swollen abdomen. Caput medusae, the medical books called it, the head of the Medusa, a gorgon whose gaze petrified.

Caroline got up from the table, and pushed the folder back into her son’s hands. “This is a very real concern,” she said. “Do your job and address it. Properly.”

That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. Just as it hadn’t been the end when she’d stood in front of the tabloid cameras and said ‘no comment’ when they asked her if she was going to leave Gerald. That had been back in the nineties, when the stink of end stage government was rank in the country and the press. Gerald had taken up with a girl – too young – not much older than Tom had been at the time.

What did that woman look like now, Caroline wondered that night, as she stared into the unforgiving bathroom mirror. That young girl must have been pushing fifty, an age that now sounded blissfully young to Caroline. Fifty would have been a reprieve from the fat numbers staring at her now. Eighty – an infinity symbol and a circle, because you circled back around to so many things, like needing help with your buttons, or not being safe to be alone in the bathroom.

She had bars on the edge of her bath these days, and it had hurt to have them put there, but she wasn’t giving this up. As the only woman in a house of men it had always been her sanctuary. When you’d had enough you could take yourself off for a nice bubble bath, lock the door, and shut them out, at least temporarily.

Only her sanctuary had been violated now. Not only could she not stop remembering old betrayals, but the smell wouldn’t go away, undrowned by the lavender scent of her bath. If anything it was worse in the bathroom, a miasma that seeped out from the plumbing the moment she turned on the tap. It was fouler here, more vegetable than animal, and that – at least – was some kind of comfort. She could chalk it up to a blocked drain, or the disgusting but familiar smell of rotting seaweed piled high on the beach after a storm. She leaned forward, sniffing towards the overflow, trying to find the source of it. Yes. Get a plumber in. Nothing to worry about.

Something slithered.

She heard it, too hideously clear to be a hallucination. Something moved in the pipe.

Caroline recoiled, water splashing over the edge of the tub. Oh God. Something was in there. She could hear it moving, a wet, writhing, searching sound. She covered her mouth, and her nose, too, as if she could stop this happening if she could only stop smelling it.

But she couldn’t. She couldn’t stop staring, either, her eyes fixed on the end of the bath, like some idiot girl in a horror film watching the door handle turn around because the killer was on the other side. And she was wet. And naked, and to all effects trapped in this bathtub with whatever was making those terrible noises – a slapping and a slithering, a sickly gurgle like that of a dying bowel.

She was glad of the hand over her mouth when it peeked out of the overflow. Not much, but enough to tip the awful balance into believing this was really happening to her. A queasy bluish tentacle slid out like the tongue of a snake. It flickered, moved, as though scenting the air, now rendered even fouler by its presence. And it was searching, still searching. On some primordial level she knew what for, too. For her. For the smell of flesh and bone behind the mask of synthetic lavender.

She shot out of the bath at a speed she knew to be impossible even as she was doing it. In slow motion she felt herself slip, tip, and then a bone-shaking thud as she fell sideways. “I’m sorry,” she said, and despite the pain she somehow scooted across the cold floor on her bare bottom, desperate to get out of the door. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It wasn’t me. I swear to God, please.”

The tentacle twitched towards her, then – just as she was sure she was going to scream – it shot back up the tap with another hideous noise.

The pipes gurgled as it went.

Caroline got up slowly. It was the only way she could get up these days, but at least she could. Nothing broken, at least not her hip. Her mind, on the other hand…well.

“I had a fall,” she told Tom, when she could speak again without her voice trembling.

Tom, slouched in front of Newsnight with one eye on his phone, looked up. “Shit,” he said. “Are you alright?”

“Yes. Nothing broken. Probably just a few bruises.” He didn’t get up, so oblivious that she couldn’t help but twist the knife just a little. “I think the drain is blocked in the bathroom,” she said. “Can’t you smell that?”

He sniffed and shook his head. So like his father. Always one for telling people that everything was all right when everything was anything but. That night she crept out of bed when Tom’s light was off, and closed the bathroom door, before wedging a heavy chair under the handle. It didn’t make her sleep any better.

She dreamed about Gerald that night. It was towards the end, when his belly was swollen like a giant yellow egg, the bloated veins standing out blue. “He lies to me,” she was saying. “The same way you always lied to me. And you expected me to just put up with it forever, didn’t you?”

He was beyond talking at that point. His navel had turned fully inside out, the way Tom had inverted hers in her sixth month of pregnancy. The blue gorgon tentacles squirmed under his thin skin, and then the skin tore like a wet paper sack. All at once, a hydra knot of blue, reeking horror pouring out from his collapsing belly. The smell of it followed her into wakefulness, and lingered.

Caroline tried to reassure herself that it was just a dream, but still dread prickled between her shoulder blades and up the back of her neck. That smell. Oh, it was worse. It was so much worse, and she already knew what she would see when she walked to the end of the garden path and looked down into the bay. Death. More death than any human mind could cope with and remain sane.

And there. There was a crumb of comfort. She was mad. Or sane. Perhaps everybody else was mad, because they were all walking around forgetting to be terrified that everything was dying in front of them. Why weren’t they afraid, for God’s sake?

The comfort was short lived, because the bay looked worse than ever. Grey-yellow and sickly blue. “Stop it,” she told herself, and tried to walk down to the beach like nothing was wrong, like she was blowing the cobwebs away the same way she did every other day. Just a harmless madwoman, out for a morning constitutional.

There was a crowd on the beach. Some were waving placards, while others were taking pictures of the grotesquely discoloured sea, or staring anxiously into their phones.

Oh dear.

It wasn’t just her. And she was horribly, lamentably sane.

“Well, fancy seeing you here,” said Joyce, appearing at her elbow. Caroline didn’t take her eyes from the sea, and the Greek words that came out of her mouth came from a long, long way back. Back before Tom, before Gerald, even.

“‘We do not trifle with divinity’” she translated, in the face of Joyce’s confusion.

“What?”

“Euripides. I studied Ancient Greek – many years ago. The sea was a God to them.”

Joyce nodded. “Looks like we’ve angered the Gods, doesn’t it?” she said, her mouth a tight, thin line as she shook her head. “Here. Have a placard.”

A placard? What use was a placard when the kraken woke? There were tentacles sliding out of her bath taps, for God’s sake. She was about to say all these things and worse, but then she saw him.

Tom. He was nodding and frowning and looking very serious. In his hand was his father’s old bullhorn, dragged out of the back of the garage. It whined as he switched it on. “Did you look up his votes yet?” asked Joyce, and thrust a piece of paper into Caroline’s hand.

Caroline didn’t look at it. Not at first. She was too busy trying to remember how to close her mouth. Eco-wankers, Tom had called them. Jobless crusties. Wokerati dipshits. He’d called them these things with a level of contempt usually reserved for vermin, but now he was acting like he was their king. He raised the bullhorn to his lips.

“What do we want?” he yelled, in a rehearsed rhythm.

The crowd responded. “Clean beaches!”

“When do we want it?”

“Now!”

It was his job to do these things, of course, but the contempt still lingered in Caroline’s mind. Like father like son, Caroline thought, and looked down to see what she knew she would. Joyce had obviously printed it out for her, and there was no mistaking it. She’d been a politician’s wife for so long that the portcullis symbol may have been stamped on her DNA. This was official, Houses of Parliament voting records. And Tom had voted for this, this ordure, this horror, this nightmare that would kill them all.

She did the only thing a mother could have done in that moment. She marched across the beach and slapped his lying little face.

The slap caught him off guard. The bullhorn landed on the dirty sand and screeched in protest. Some of the crowd were gasping, others cheering and laughing. “You lied,” said Caroline.

Tom picked up his glasses. “Are you out of your mind?”

“You. Lied,” she said, again. The look on his face was pure Gerald, and she wanted to slap him again. No, worse. She’d made this monster, and the shame of it was enough to make her want to shoot them both there and then. “You voted for this. It’s right here.” She held up Joyce’s phone. “In fucking Hansard. You voted for it twice.”

He flustered for a second, then went into interview mode. “I did not vote for this,” he said. “I voted to relax regulation, not for—”

“—no,” she said, as firmly as if he were a toddler again, trying to run out in front of an oncoming car. “Don’t. Not to your own mother, Tom. Don’t you bloody dare.”

That should have been the end of it, but Caroline knew it was only the beginning. Like his father, Tom knew how to sulk, and how to place a woman in disgrace. And she was in disgrace. She knew that. Her job had always been to either smile or maintain a dignified stoicism. Slapping your adult sons in public and seeing tentacles crawling out of the bath taps was so far from the mandatory pale blue Tory behaviour that it was almost comical. It would have been funnier if she hadn’t had to listen to the plumbing gurgle all night, and to Tom’s icy silence in the mornings.

On the morning that she decided to embrace madness entirely, she made Tom a boiled egg for breakfast. He would be leaving for London after that, for an appearance on Newsnight that evening. He missed votes all the time, but never missed an opportunity to preen on television. He said nothing to her as he ate. Since the slap the atmosphere in the house had settled into a steady, cold seethe, but of course he wouldn’t move out. Not while he was still getting his laundry done.

He scraped clean what she had given him, working his spoon between the white of the egg and the inner mottled shell. She thought of marker pens, and names written on membrane, and Gerald’s old conviction that her grandmother had cursed him.

Finally, it was Tom who broke the silence between them. “Are you really going to watch me eat?”

Caroline smiled. “You used to love a boiled egg,” she said. “I used to draw little smiley faces on the shells for you. Do you remember? And you’d laugh while you bashed their heads in.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“I do,” she said, looking at the inside of the eggshell. So clean, so smooth. And such a pretty colour, like expensive notepaper. “Eat up.”

She didn’t crush the eggshell.

When he had gone the pipes gurgled less, but the smell still lingered. “Come on, then,” she said to the tap, when she was brushing her teeth. “Let’s get it over with. If you’re going to poke your tentacles out at me then get on with it. At my age you don’t have much time left to waste, you know.”

But there was nothing. It didn’t seem to be interested in her.

“This is who I am now,” she said to the empty house. “I talk to the plumbing, and I smack my son in public. Even though he’s forty-five.”

She had gin for dinner, and amaretto for dessert, raising her glasses to the ghost of Gerald’s liver. The alcohol sang in her veins, along with a new delinquency. Or maybe it was an old delinquency, older even than she was. How many generations of women had been told they were mad or mistaken, or seeing things that weren’t there? She thought of Tom’s wife, who had put her foot down in a way she had never dared to, and felt tears prick her eyes when she discovered that she was jealous. And proud.

“Enough,” she muttered, and went to the kitchen. The eggshell from this morning was still there, uncracked, resting on a pile of potato peelings in the recycle bin. The inner shell was dry now, so she took a laundry marker and wrote his name, the name she’d given him after she gave him birth, on the inside of the shell.

When she stepped outside the air seemed cleaner, although she might have just drowned out the smell with the backdrafts of gin and amaretto currently sloshing around her head. The sea was black now, black as the mood of an old, vindictive God. She wove a drunkard’s path down to the beach, then kicked off her shoes and walked in up to her shins. And there – the smell thickened and returned to her. Her heart skittered as she felt something slimy brush against her ankles beneath the dark water.

“It’s me again,” she said. “But you don’t want my dry old bones, do you? No. I know who you really want.” She set the eggshell down in the waves. It bobbed, like a tiny boat for witches, and once again her girlhood Greek, learned some sixty years ago, returned to her lips. Pity me, mother, she said, like an incantation. Don’t kill your child because I’ve made mistakes.

She had Bloody Marys for breakfast. Tom came back from London and caught her at it, taking in at a glance the empty bottle of Bombay Sapphire on the side, the sticky film of spilled amaretto on the kitchen table. “Oh good,” he said. “So you’re finally out of your mind, are you?”

Caroline smiled and prodded the celery stick deeper into her drink. “Perhaps. Or I’m more in my mind than I ever was. In vino veritas, and all that.”

Tom sniffed. “Don’t see much vino around here, Mummy,” he said, peering theatrically at the gin bottle. “Just the hard stuff. Mother’s ruin.”

“Yes dear,” she said, and carried on drinking while her travel-stained ruin took himself off for a bath. She heard the water running, but it only penetrated the edges of her senses today. She’d got him so many baths ready over the years. Rubber ducks, plastic toy boats, No More Tears, watching over him because even two inches of water could be deadly to a child. Especially one who didn’t do as he was told. She sipped, and floated away to the centre of her mind, where the eggshell with his name on it still bob bob bobbed in the shallow, shit-stained surf.

She heard a splash, and the rubbery rasp of skin on wet bathtub as he moved too fast. In her mind a tentacle reached up, claimed the eggshell and pulled it under. And then his voice, its tone too young for him. “Mummy!”

Caroline rose slowly from the kitchen table, and walked to the bathroom door. It was ajar, and the stink was worse than ever – an end-stage smell, poking at the back of the throat like a finger. She rolled it over her tongue like a lunatic sommelier, and tasted something else under the film of tomato juice and vodka. Vengeance. Her heart hammered in her chest, fighting against old instincts as she pushed at the door. But there were older instincts at work now, and she couldn’t help that. Tom screamed again.

The bathtub had cracked like the eggshell, and she hadn’t even heard it. There was a shattered hole where the taps used to be, and from it poured a tide of sickly-blue…

…tentacles. Tom thrashed naked in a couple of inches of dirty water, the tentacles already covering his belly the way they had once writhed under the skin of his father’s. “Help me!” he said, and it wasn’t even a plea, even now. Even when he was about to be eaten by a sea monster he was still making demands, and she shook her head. What kind of mother would she be if she failed to teach him that actions had consequences?

She closed the bathroom door.

Host Commentary

PseudoPod Episode 931
August 2nd, 2024
What he Woke by Jess Whitecroft
Narrated by Kat Day
Hosted by Alasdair Stuart with audio by Chelsea Davis

Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing okay. I’m Alasdair, your host and this week’s story comes to us from Jess Whitecroft. Veteran romance writer Jess Whitecroft moonlighted into writing horror when she moved to a haunted location and discovered that none of the alleged ghosts did any haunting, and that she would have to supply her own. A rank amateur at the art of self-description, she outsourced her author biography to her nearest and dearest, who said, “Great cook, but sometimes eats crisps in bed.” Which is the best place

Kat Day(taking over after a tech problem from Siobhan Gallichan, a voice artist and premier William Hartnell voice actor, is one of those people who actually loves Marmite. Listen to Siobhan’s podcast at The Flashing Blade or watch the show on YouTube.)

The author said this: This story was written before the 2024 British General Election. The MP whose voting record inspired these events has since been fired by his constituents. We didn’t feed him to a sea monster. Honest.
Kat said this: Response to the many, many accounts of terrible pollution on British beaches and waterways thanks to the malicious incompetence of the former (ha!) Tory government. Obviously written before the election was announced. Unleash hell, Al.

Oh it’s my pleasure. To quote my favorite freelance security consultant, daddy’s about to express some rage. Those of you who don’t like when we get political step away now. Give me about 350 seconds.
For the last 14 years this country has been ruled, not governed, ruled by men like the MP in this story. Men, and it’s predominantly men, who have decided that trans folks are actively dangerous and the entire LGBTQIA+ spectrum needs some pretty serious side eye. Men obsessed with stopping the small boats bringing refugees to the country’s shores but not that fussed about ensuring those refugees aren’t scooped back up by human traffickers once they’re here. Men who, when faced with a global pandemic that continues to rage five years later, initially write it off as ‘Nature’s way of dealing with old people’ and when they finally sober up enough to deal with it, write the phrase ‘WHO DON’T WE SAVE?’ on a whiteboard in the crisis planning office.
Sometimes it’s women, to be fair. I think my favourite, and that word is doing a LOT of work right now is the tory leadership candidate who once paid for a rival’s computer being hacked decrying the dirty tracks campaign being waged against her. Then there’s the empty headed grinning psychopath whose administration lasted less time than a lettuce, but whose economic idiocy took a country already bleeding from a decade of austerity and damaged it worse for years to come.
Let’s talk about food banks. Prior to 2010, the Trussell Trust, the largest food bank network in the UK had 35 locations. By 2020 they had 1300. There are, best guess, 1600 active sites in the UK.
There are roughly a dozen food banks in the City of Westminster, where the Houses of Parliament are and where at least £25 million was spent on the coronation of King Charles.
The sewage in the ocean and rivers depicted here is real. . The Environmental Audit Commission’s recent report stated that at most 14% of the country’s rivers could be said to have good ecological status.
The far right. You may have seen some tory politicians complain that a vote for Labour would be a vote for the Reform party, who aren’t actually a party, they’re a corporation run by a pair of, you guessed it, rich sociopathic racists. Who may have fielded AI generated candidates in the last election. Who were enabled and courted by the tories because an Eton education apparently doesn’t include the Leopards Eating Faces Party joke.
Brexit. Close to a decade after it happened, the UK is a smaller, crueller, meaner dirtier nation whose businesses can’t import or export without vast expense, whose residents have been denied freedom of movement through the EU and whose children are literally shrinking. Five-year-olds of this generation are an inch shorter, because poverty is endemic, as Tay Zonday once said poverty charges interest and poverty unlike economic growth actually DOES trickle down.
A couple of weeks back, after 14 years in power, the tories were ousted. Labour, their replacement, are far from perfect and their Health Minister Wes Streeting is as bad as his tory counterparts just somehow even more supercilious with views on trans rights which would make members of Slytherin politely ask if he could maybe chill out.
A Harry Potter joke. And in context too!
A lot of folks are pre-emptively up in arms about labour and honestly with very good reason. There’s no such thing as a good politician, especially in this country, and it’s very easy to assume the new boss is the same as the old boss and hates you just as much. In Streeting’s case, that’s true.
John Rogers, one of my favourite writers, said something this week that really spoke to me about this and resonates with this story. It’s in a thread I’ll link to if I can but it boiled down to an argument about the two US parties and the choice between refusing to accept either of the options on the table because they’re both various levels of threat or holding your nose and voting for the prosecutor but not the nazi. I won’t go into detail on the thread but Rogers’ made a point about not voting which is one of those turns of phrase that rings like a bell.
‘Go be pure but useless.’
I am tired. I was tired before last month, which was Hell. Living here has been exhausting for longer than 14 years but living here in the last 14 has been exhausting, enraging and terrifying all at once. And I’m a straight white man with two college degrees. I’m the living Konami code and I hate it here. So my first response to the end of this story is, honestly, ‘this isn’t enough.’
But there’s nuance to that. Justice wipes a slate but vengeance writes in ink and the line between the two is so thin. Likewise the thought of the work that need to be done, the work that Labour in a lot of every areas (But not child poverty or trans rights) have already begun, is exhausting. Not just because of the volume but because of the trust it requires us to place in people who aren’t trustworthy. The faith, with a small f, of standing next to people better than the last lot but still dirty. We’re all so tired. We’re all so angry. We’re all so sad. There’s so much to do and no one in a position to do it can be entirely trust.
So do we choose to be pure but useless or do we get dirty and get stuff done.

That’s the choice.
Good luck.

Amazing work, thanks to all.

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Next week we have The Man With a Serpent in his System by Jane Marciano read by the amazing Tiernan Douieb and with audio production by Chelsea and hosting by me. We’ll see you then. And finally, PseudoPod has just found this quote from John Ensign.

“I believe that voting is the first act of building a community as well as building a country.”