Death and the Seaside

by Alison Moore

  Susan signed off her text with an ‘x’ and then waited for the message to fail to send. She smoked her cigarette down to the filter and dropped it, flattening it with the toe of her sandal. She walked on, back towards the Hook, outside which she kept her motorbike. She knew she ought to get some proper motorbike leathers, and boots with toe protection and ankle, heel and shin armour. Her mum had warned her that she went too fast, that she would end up hitting the tarmac at so many miles per hour and then she’d have pins in her legs, ‘if you’re lucky’, she said.

  She ought at least to get some warmer footwear for the coming winter.

  Susan went back inside the pub and up to her room, where she flopped down onto her unmade bed, pulled the blanket over her and nodded off.

  She dreamt that she was having difficulty walking. When she woke up, blinking in the afternoon light, she remembered the dream; she knew it was just a dream but she made a cautious effort to move her legs anyway, just in case. She did not understand what the dream meant – everything in dreams seemed to mean something else.

  Sitting up, she noticed a square of paper on the carpet over by the door – a letter, she thought, or a message, that had been posted through the gap underneath the door. She walked over and picked up the scrap of paper, but when she looked at it she found that it was blank; although perhaps there was the faintest suggestion of something there, as if it had been photocopied almost to oblivion. She opened the door and peered outside but there was no one there, and no one on the stairs. She turned again to the piece of paper, and she almost thought that she might be able to make out a message after all, or just a word, but even as she looked, her sense of that dim outline disappeared, like a shadow when the sun slips behind a cloud.

  2

  Early in the new year, when it was still bitter outside and Bonnie was approaching thirty, she began looking for a cheap flat. She had been living in her parents’ house for years, and even though she had lived away from home before, she had never lived alone.

  In her early twenties, after a gap year that had turned into three, all spent under her parents’ roof, her mother had insisted that she go away to university, if she could still find one that would take her. And so she had gone to university, although it was not, as her father had pointed out, a proper university; it was not a good university. She majored in English, because it had always been her best subject and because she had managed to get a B at A level. It was also her native language.

  She had got a room in halls of residence, sharing with another girl. Bonnie’s roommate kept a diary. She wrote in it every night and stowed it under her mattress when she went to sleep. The first time Bonnie’s roommate left the diary out on the bed while she went to the bathroom, Bonnie had been unable to resist reading it; she had opened it up and seen her own name written there, and ‘weird’, or something like that – she could never remember exactly what it said, exactly what she was. She had shut the diary quickly, got into bed and pretended to be asleep when the girl came back. The diary was left out another time or two after that, but Bonnie never looked in it again.

  After halls, she had lived in a shared house, where one of the other students, behind the closed door of his bedroom, used to chant every day before breakfast, ‘I am the master of my fate.’ He repeated it three times every morning without fail, before swaggering out to start his day. Another of the students used to leave photocopied leaflets lying around where they might be seen, picked up and read. The leaflets said things like: ‘God Will Save You’. Bonnie never heard him say a word, this student. If he was in the house, he stayed in his room; Bonnie only knew that he had been in the kitchen or the lounge or the bathroom because of the trail of leaflets he left behind him, like a trail of breadcrumbs laid so that no one would be lost.

  In her first term, in An Introduction to English Literature, she heard about the death of the Author, and at first she wondered who they meant, and then she realised that it was all of them, all the authors, and Bonnie thought fleetingly of the dodo. And what was more, asserted Barthes, the Author enters into his own death, or her own death, thought Bonnie, who had just started writing herself. She had a vivid memory of the lecturer standing in the lecture theatre saying all this, although over time it had merged with another memory, of her mother coming into a room and saying that Bonnie’s grandmother had died. ‘She wanted to go,’ said her mother. ‘She was ready.’ There had been a funeral, of course, a week later, and at this funeral Bonnie’s mother had asked after somebody’s husband, forgetting that he had died; and then somebody else, who Bonnie’s mother was certain had died, came round with plate of sandwiches.

  After a few years of literary criticism, Bonnie had found that she could no longer read a story without seeing it through a lens of critical analysis, as if there were always some underlying meaning that you might miss if you were not paying attention. And at the same time, she began to see the real world in terms of narrative; she saw stories and symbolism everywhere. She found it all exhausting, and left her course – which her father had called a Mickey Mouse degree anyway – before taking her final exams or completing her dissertation.

  On quitting university, she had moved home again, and her father had said to her mother, ‘What did you expect?’ Bonnie had been living with her parents ever since, and doing casual work. In her spare time, she sat in her old bedroom, at the same desk she had once used for her schoolwork, and wrote stories, or tried to. She had come to a halt in her current one, in which her protagonist had moved to the seaside and taken a room above a pub. Bonnie had got as far as her protagonist finding a message that had been pushed under the door of her room, but when she looked at it, it was blank, any message or sense of meaning evaporating before her eyes, the way even the most vivid dream could slip away as you woke, so that in moments it went from something that felt real to something that could not even be recalled. Now Bonnie did not know what to do, what might happen next. But anyway, she had put the story away. She would have to clear her desk and empty her drawers, having been told by her parents, as the big three-zero approached, that it was time for her to move out.

  Although she had been asked to leave home, Bonnie had no reason to leave town. She had her jobs, and no promise of anything better elsewhere. She searched through the Homeseeker section of the local newspaper and found a ground-floor flat available to rent, in a terraced house at one end of Slash Lane.

  ‘I’m not sure I like the sound of Slash Lane,’ said her mother. ‘It doesn’t sound safe.’

  ‘It’s just a name, Mum,’ said Bonnie, although she did remember how driving up Carsick Hill Road in Sheffield always made her feel queasy, and she wondered if she would ever feel comfortable walking along Slash Lane on her own in the dark.

  She arranged to view the Slash Lane property, and was met outside the Victorian house by the letting agent. Wearing a navy-blue suit and holding a clipboard, the letting agent reminded Bonnie of the driving instructor who had failed her when she was seventeen, and the woman from the human resources department at Bonnie’s first place of work, which Bonnie had left at the end of a trial period, and the bank employee who had turned down her loan request, and someone else Bonnie was unable to recall. The letting agent shook Bonnie’s hand and looked at her clipboard, and Bonnie braced herself for some sort of test.

  ‘Mrs Falls?’ said the letting agent.

  ‘Miss,’ said Bonnie. ‘Ms,’ she added, and the sound she made was like air escaping through a puncture, the sound of something slowly deflating.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the letting agent, making a note on her clipboard. ‘Are we waiting for anyone else or it just you?’

  ‘It’s just me,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘That’s fine,’ said the letting agent. Scribbling again, she said something that Bonnie did not catch, and then, ‘Single?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Bonnie. She could imagine her mother having hired this woman – th
e navy-blue suit a disguise, the clipboard just a prop – to conduct an investigation into Bonnie’s love life and come up with an answer, a solution. Bonnie thought of her school’s careers adviser biting the end of her pen and frowning. She thought of her mother saying, ‘You’re not a bad-looking girl, Bonnie. You just need to brighten yourself up. You just need to smile.’ Bonnie had occasional dates with men she met online, but they rarely progressed to a second date, and never to a third. She was never, it seemed, quite anyone’s type.

  ‘Single tenancy?’ said the letting agent.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bonnie.

  The letting agent ticked a box on the paperwork on her clipboard, and Bonnie looked at the house. Its front – a flat, orange-bricked rectangle standing on its short side, with a pointy, orange-tiled roof on top – made her think of a gingerbread house, the clean frames like white icing around the square windows and the front door.

  ‘There are two flats available in this property,’ said the letting agent. ‘An attic flat and a ground-floor flat. Did you want to see them both today?’

  ‘No,’ said Bonnie. ‘Just the ground-floor flat.’

  ‘All right,’ said the letting agent. ‘You can always change your mind. Let’s go and see the downstairs flat first.’

  Bonnie was led through a passageway between the house and its immediate neighbour, down a red-brick path like the one in the film of The Wizard of Oz, in which, at first, a red-brick road and a yellow-brick road spiralled together, like the pattern on a spinning top that Bonnie had lost in childhood. Dorothy took the yellow-brick road, while the red-brick road went off in another direction, and you never found out where it led. In the book, though, there was no option, no red-brick road. Also in the book, the yellow-brick road was interrupted in places by deep drops with sharp and jagged rocks at the bottom, which Bonnie did not remember seeing in the film. And what was only a dream in the film was, in the book, quite real.

  The passageway led to the house’s back door, and they entered the ground-floor flat through the kitchen, which had a three-foot-wide aisle down the middle and work surfaces on either side. The letting agent pointed out the fixtures and fittings, and any damage that she was aware of. ‘It’s all on the inventory,’ she said, referring to her clipboard, which held a list of what was provided and what was damaged, with no division between the two: the kitchen contained a fridge and a missing drawer handle, a cooker and a missing vinyl floor tile.

  A narrow bathroom extended from one end of the kitchen, and at the other end you walked into a long lounge barely touched by natural light, and beyond that was the bedroom. Living in this flat, thought Bonnie, would be like living in a series of corridors. The bedroom, at the front of the flat, looked directly onto the street and the bus stop outside.

  In the bedroom’s side wall, there was a door. ‘What’s behind this door?’ asked Bonnie, reaching for the door handle, but the letting agent said that it led only to the other part of the house, the hallway that the front door opened into, and the stairs to the upper floors. Now that the house had been divided into flats, this door remained locked, she said, although Bonnie tried the handle anyway.

  At the end of February, Bonnie moved into the flat on a six-month tenancy agreement. She had recently been turned down by a temp agency but she had two cleaning jobs. She was hoping to find something she liked better. She kept putting in applications but rarely got interviews; and when she did get an interview, she never got the job. For now, her parents were supplementing her rent. She could not afford to buy anything for the flat but it came partially furnished anyway; there was even an old television. And she brought some home comforts with her from her parents’ house: she had a kettle that her mother had been about to throw out, and a small supply of tea bags to tide her over, and she had her books. She had more books than shelf space: on either side of the bookcase in the lounge, the books spread in piles across the floor, reaching towards the doors, towards the bedroom and the kitchen, as if they were trying to get out, to go out into the world. She did her best to make the flat feel like hers, putting her own bedding on the mattress, and placing her knickknacks around the lounge, though they looked a bit lost in that long, dim room. She moved them around a bit.

  In the kitchen, in a drawer, she found a memo, or a partial shopping list. It said, ‘BUY WOTSITS’. Bonnie had not bought Wotsits for years. In a cupboard, she found dozens of hoarded newspapers, with items clipped out. She found a picture postcard, with a design from the 1930s, advertising Butlin’s holiday camps in Skegness and Clacton-on-Sea; it said ‘JOIN OUR HAPPY FAMILY’. She turned it over but the side the sender was supposed to write on was blank. At the back of a drawer in the bedroom, Bonnie found a newish pair of socks, which she kept, even though they were a bit small, a bit tight. They would be useful, she thought, in an emergency. In the under-stairs cupboard – which was in her part of the house even though the stairs themselves were not – she found a huge amount of stuff presumably left behind by a previous tenant: a cardboard box full of dusty baby blankets; a cool box; a camping stove; a table with folding legs, like a picnic table, or a wallpaper pasting table; a pair of Anglepoise lamps and a torch; a case of LPs but nothing to play them on; old coats and shoes. People lived with so much crap, she thought, peering into this cupboard whose back wall she could not even see. She shut the door. It was astonishing what people came across when they moved into old houses. She had read about people finding – in their attics and cellars – antiques, old masters, old letters and diaries, or they found guns and grenades, mummified squirrels and mice, birds and bats, cat bones and dog bones and human bones. Sometimes, they lived in these places for years with no idea that these things were there, just below their feet, just above their heads. But Bonnie had found nothing like that.

  She had been in the flat for some weeks before she got around to investigating a lumpy bit of carpet in the middle of the lounge. Peeling back the thin, beige carpet – which had been cut to only approximately the right size and shape and laid like a rug, without gripper at the edges – Bonnie found, underneath it, an old paint-tin lid lying on the floorboards. Its crust of paint was the same colour as the lounge walls. The work that had been done to make this place seem habitable – the slapping on of magnolia and the snipping out of a rough bit of carpet – was somewhat superficial, giving the room a temporary feel, like a stage set.

  So, thought Bonnie: no old masters, no grenades, no bones; just newspapers, socks, a paint-tin lid, and the contents of the deep and jam-packed cupboard under the stairs. And sometimes, through the walls or through the ceiling, from the other part of the house, came the sound of someone else’s music or the smell of someone else’s cooking; a familiar film score would make her tap her foot, or her mouth would start watering at the smell of home cooking coming from the upstairs flat; and when her bedroom was dark, she saw a sliver of light coming through underneath the locked door.

  3

  Bonnie’s morning cleaning job was at an amusement arcade on the high street. She walked there past an old house that had the ghost of an advert painted on its side wall, clinging faintly to the brickwork: EAT . . . She passed a chip shop and high-rise buildings and a car park from which a man had jumped, the son of someone her mother knew. She passed a church, with posters stapled to a board outside, saying ‘GOD WILL SAVE YOU’. She passed the community centre on Waterside Close, with scalloped stone edging around the doorway, and happy cartoon characters stuck to the windows, or starting to come away. She might once have gone to the playgroup there; she had the vaguest sense of having been abandoned in that building. There was graffiti on the exterior walls that said things like ‘HOPE’ and ‘BOOM!’

  On the high street itself, she passed a pet shop in which she used to work. The pet shop had a resident parrot that sat on a perch and seemed to watch her, and every now and again it said, ‘You stink!’ The parrot surely did not mean her personally, and Bonnie was not even sure that pa
rrots had a sense of smell, but still she would surreptitiously put her nose to her armpit and sniff, although she could not tell if what she could smell was just the hamsters in their cages, on their wheels. Either way, it had not been good for her self-esteem.

  After keeping the pet shop job for longer than any other, she had got her current morning job in the amusement arcade, where she vacuumed the carpet tiles and cleaned the machines. She wiped the backlit buttons that said things like ‘PRESS’, ‘PUSH’, ‘PUSH!’, ‘HOLD’ and ‘GO’, buffing away the build-up of fingerprints made by the punters’ fingertips pecking and pecking at the buttons, waiting for the payout. She polished the chrome-effect trim on the change machine as if it were a magic lamp.

  Bonnie had a few hours free in the afternoon, before her second job. Usually, she went to the chip shop. The chips were wrapped in butcher paper, the sort that she had done her paintings on when she was still in infant school: pictures of her house and her garden, and her family holding hands; it was the sort of paper that her mother sometimes brought lamb chops home in. The chips in those days were wrapped in newspaper; Bonnie remembered sitting on a wall with a hot packet of greasy, salty chips on her bare thighs, the newspaper print coming off on her skin. Lose weight, said the ink on her legs, but backwards.

  In the middle of town, there was a bench with a plaque on it: ‘In loving memory of’ someone or other. On the wooden slats, someone had written, in thick, black marker pen in two separate places, ‘CUNT’. If the bench was free, Bonnie would sit there with her chips. The two pieces of graffiti were placed such that whichever side she sat on, the word ‘CUNT’ would remain visible beside her, like a label.