Death and the Seaside

by Alison Moore

  She watched the kids skateboarding and training to do parkour. Someone had said – some parkour expert – that thinking you are going to fail at something gives you a higher risk of doing just that. She wondered if that was true, and supposed she could test it, though not right now, in front of everyone; she would fall flat on her face.

  Sometimes, after her chips, she went to the cinema. She might watch a film more than once during its run, as if she expected it to be different the second or third time. During these matinee showings, she was often the only person in the auditorium. In the dark, she ate her popcorn and lost herself in the film, something historical or futuristic, something set in another country or on another planet. It only took an hour or so, ninety minutes, for the world outside to become unreal. When she emerged, the familiar town would look strange, like a set, the oblivious shoppers like walk-ons. After horror films, she felt uneasy in broad daylight, and made an effort to avoid alleyways and underpasses and anywhere deserted; she felt compelled to glance behind her as she walked, although she tried hard not to look, to just keep walking, looking straight ahead. The film score remained in her ears and would come back to her at odd times throughout the day, for years.

  The walk to her second job took her past an animal rescue centre, a cat sanctuary. When she got close, she could hear what might have been dozens of unwanted cats, a hundred cats, miaowing, or else she imagined that she could. What happened, she wondered, to the cats that could not find an owner, the ones that were just too old to be chosen? Some places had a ‘no kill’ policy; she did not know about this particular sanctuary. And presumably a lack of space meant that there were some cats that did not make it into the shelter in the first place. One day, instead of walking past, she would go in. If she went in, she would want to take a cat home; if she chose one, she would want to choose three or four; she would want to take them all, every last one. She would be the kind of woman who was always mocked, a woman with a houseful of rescue cats, except that she did not have a house, and was not allowed pets in the flat.

  At the end of the afternoon, Monday to Friday, Bonnie cleaned at a pharmaceutical research and development laboratory, which was in the middle of a normal street of old, red-brick terraced houses, whose tiles were slipping and whose chimneys and garden walls were crumbling and toppling – you could imagine the whole street falling to pieces in a storm – but the pharmaceutical complex was new; it was squat and sturdy.

  She shared her shift at the Lab with a woman called Chi. The supervisor, Mr Carr, called her Chichi, which Chi found infuriating. This only encouraged him.

  On days when Bonnie did not arrive late, she and Chi would sit together in the staff room before starting their shift, and Bonnie would get something out of the vending machine – a packet of crisps or sweets or a chocolate bar. Sometimes, there was a competition running, and Bonnie would have a chance of winning something: ‘WIN £500 CASH’ said the shiny packets. At least one company had apparently hidden tracking devices in certain products, in the wrappers of half a dozen bars of chocolate, so that they could track you down and leap out and give you a briefcase full of cash, ten thousand pounds. Or she could win a holiday, or a car: ‘WIN INSTANTLY’ said the products, from behind the toughened glass of the vending machine, and she did try.

  ‘Win, win, win,’ she whispered to a brand-new packet of sweets.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Chi. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You can win a prize,’ said Bonnie, ‘if you’ve got the lucky packet.’

  ‘But saying “win, win, win” won’t make a difference,’ said Chi. ‘You’ve either got the winning packet or you haven’t.’

  ‘I always say it,’ replied Bonnie.

  ‘And have you ever won?’ asked Chi.

  ‘It worked the very first time I tried it.’

  ‘Does it work every time?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s worked since then,’ said Bonnie, ‘but what if one time I would have won if I’d said it, but then I didn’t say it and so I lost?’

  Chi leaned towards the packet of sweets and said, ‘Lose, lose, lose.’

  Bonnie winced. ‘What did you do that for?’ she complained, looking anxiously at the little packet.

  ‘It makes no difference,’ said Chi. ‘You have no control over whether you win or lose. You know that, don’t you?’

  Bonnie did not reply. She was busy looking inside the packet to see if she had won, but she had not.

  From five to seven o’clock, Bonnie mopped the long corridors in the main building. The corridors led past sets of double doors: big, white doors with no windows in them. She wondered what was behind these blank doors, what grim experiments might be taking place. She thought about monkey experiments, like Dr Harlow’s monkeys: newborns taken from their mothers and made to choose between a bare-wire, milk-giving ‘mother’ and a cloth-covered, milkless ‘mother’. This was not that sort of laboratory, of course, but still, when she saw the secretive double doors, she thought of those unhappy monkeys clinging to their make-believe mothers. Or else she thought of dogs being made to smoke cigarettes, and rabbits having chemicals dripped into their unblinking eyes. There were some things that the scientists were not allowed to do these days, but she was not sure exactly what, quite where the line had been drawn.

  Or perhaps it was just a store room, a stationery cupboard, full of headed paper and window envelopes, spare pens and pencils, toner cartridges and boxes of paperclips so that they need never run out, so that the paperwork could always be completed.

  Chi, who cleaned a different section of the complex, disliked the job even more than Bonnie did. She had once said to Bonnie, ‘I don’t like what they do here,’ and Bonnie had nodded. ‘I think we should leave,’ Chi had added, but then Mr Carr had appeared on the scene, and Bonnie had opened her mouth and started to say that she was not sure that she could leave, that she needed the work, the money, that it could be worse, but Chi picked up her bucket and walked away, and Bonnie had to go to her first long corridor and start work.

  At the end of the shift, Bonnie and Chi would go back to the staff room to collect their belongings, and Mr Carr would be there too, to make sure that they were not sneaking off early or stealing anything. He would check their pockets and their bags, whose contents he sometimes emptied out onto the tabletop, and when they left, he would say, ‘I’m watching you.’

  Sometimes, at night, after walking back to the flat on Slash Lane – where the street lamps flickered and sometimes went off – Bonnie had trouble sleeping.

  In the night, she found herself at her bedroom window, whose curtains did not meet in the middle. Seeing a star, one very bright star in the otherwise empty sky, she thought to herself, There’s the North Star. She did not know much about what was out there but she thought she knew that: she was looking at the North Star, and the North Star was a constant, a guiding light. She whispered to it:

  Star light, star bright,

  The first star I see tonight . . .

  Or, she thought, was she wrong about that? Did the role of North Star switch from one star to another as everything moved around in the sky? And then she saw that this bright star she was looking at was moving even as she watched it, the dot of light sliding from one side of the window frame to the other, and she thought of those old films where people are pretending to be driving along while the background scrolls past, to give the impression that the people themselves are moving.

  The light in the sky was just an aeroplane. Perhaps someone was going on holiday, in the middle of the night.

  Pressed against the windowpane,

  Wishing on an aeroplane.

  Awake in the early hours, she put on her dressing gown and pottered. She had continued to find all sorts of unexpected things secreted about the place. In the cupboard under the stairs, she discovered three artificial Christmas trees, and a collection of road signs – red-borde
red triangles – and traffic cones that ought to have been around holes in the road. On top of the wardrobe in the bedroom, she found a suitcase full of dressing-up clothes: Halloween costumes – a witch, a devil, a Frankenstein mask, or rather Dr Frankenstein’s monster – and a clown costume, or perhaps the clown was also a Halloween outfit. And in the drawer of the old Mission desk in the lounge, she found a little origami figure that made her think of a fat, flightless bird like a chicken, or a dodo. She did not know whether these things ought to be returned to someone or whether they were hers now, but she did not want all these things: the fake trees, the costumes, the warning signs. She would mention it to the letting agent, but it did not bother her too much for the time being. In university accommodation, she had put up for the best part of a year with a mattress whose springs poked through, stabbing into her flesh as she slept.

  Or sometimes, when she could not sleep, she would go to the all-night garage and buy something. On her birthday, she bought a packet of Love Hearts that said ‘CRAZY’ and ‘DREAM ON’.

  Or else she would open up her laptop and try to write, although mostly she ended up on the Internet. It just happened: one moment, she would be looking at an opening paragraph, trying to bring something to mind, her fingers hovering over the keyboard, and the next moment she would have clicked and she would find herself online, window-shopping; she would try not to let the cursor – which turned into a little hand with its index finger extended, as if, like a child, it wanted to touch everything – stray towards the targeted advertising, the flashing buttons that said ‘SHOP NOW’, ‘BUY NOW’, and when she did, she worried about the people who were out there waiting to phish her. She pictured them as if they were just beyond the screen, waiting for her to make a move. One day, she would click on some link without realising what it was and then her cursor would start moving around on the screen, with a life of its own, and that would be it, they would be in.

  4

  One Saturday morning, Bonnie was woken by the sound of someone knocking at the back door. She lay in bed for a moment, wondering whether she could ignore it, but the knocking persisted and in the end Bonnie put on her dressing gown and went to see who it was.

  The doors at the front and back of her parents’ house were solid, but this door had a small pane of glass, like an A4 sheet of graph paper, and through it Bonnie could see a woman, waiting. Something about this made Bonnie feel nervous. It was the graph-paper glass, she thought, which made her think of tests that she was unlikely to pass.

  Bonnie opened the door. The woman standing on her doormat – a tall woman wearing a sheepskin coat – looked at Bonnie with a degree of interest that made Bonnie feel uneasy, and she touched the front of her dressing gown to check that it was securely fastened. The woman’s big, bright eyes made Bonnie feel like Little Red Riding Hood being looked at by the wolf. The woman smiled.

  ‘Can I help you?’ asked Bonnie.

  ‘I’m Sylvia Slythe,’ said the woman, holding out a long-fingered, long-nailed hand. ‘I’m your landlady, dear. I live upstairs.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bonnie, taking a sideways glance at the washing-up that she had not yet done, the dirty pots and pans and tins spread over the worktops. She had not been expecting visitors. The landlady, still smiling, moved her shiny shoe towards the threshold, and Bonnie took a step backwards, barefoot on the sticky lino. The landlady came into the kitchen.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Mrs Slythe?’ asked Bonnie.

  ‘Call me Sylvia,’ she said.

  ‘Sylvia,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Thank you, dear, that would be lovely.’

  ‘How do you take it?’ asked Bonnie, opening the fridge.

  ‘White with two sugars, please,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘Oh,’ said Bonnie, peering into the fridge. ‘I’m out of milk.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Sylvia. ‘We can have it black.’

  ‘I haven’t got any sugar, either,’ said Bonnie, looking inside the empty pot that had ‘SUGAR’ written optimistically on the side.

  Sylvia smiled. ‘Whatever you can manage is fine,’ she said.

  Bonnie carried their mugs of black, unsweetened tea through to the lounge, where she offered Sylvia a seat on the sofa, although it did occur to Bonnie that all the seats in the house were really her landlady’s anyway. Sylvia removed her sheepskin coat, underneath which she was wearing a suit jacket, which she left on. It was a cold spring day and just as cold inside the house as out. Sylvia’s jacket matched her blue skirt, attached to the belt loop of which was a bunch of keys, which made her look a bit like a jailer, but more ladylike. Sylvia smoothed her skirt beneath her as she sat down.

  Bonnie handed Sylvia the bigger mug, which had ‘I’M A MUG!’ printed on the side. It was one of Bonnie’s favourites but it looked wrong, she thought, in Sylvia’s elegant hands.

  Sylvia accepted her tea with a smile and said, ‘I just came to see how you were getting on.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Bonnie. ‘Absolutely fine.’

  ‘Are you still unpacking?’ asked Sylvia, nodding towards one corner of the room, in which were piled some of the cases and boxes that Bonnie had found in the flat and which she had never got around to mentioning to the letting agent. ‘Or were you thinking of moving out already?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bonnie. ‘None of that’s mine. I just found it here.’

  In another corner were the three artificial Christmas trees. It looked as if a dinky little fairy tale forest were sprouting through the floorboards, like something dreamt up by the Brothers Grimm.

  Along the wall in between the two corners were all the traffic cones and red-triangle road signs. Some of the signs were folded, leaning, with their backs to the wall, and some of them were erect. They looked as if they had been put there to warn of some danger in the flat: a lump in the carpet that someone might trip over, or a hole in the ground into which someone might stumble.

  The whole thing looked like an art installation, something that a person might stand in front of at an end-of-year show, trying to see some meaning or message in it.

  ‘I don’t know where it all came from,’ said Bonnie. ‘I didn’t know what to do with it.’

  ‘There was a student living here before you,’ said Sylvia. ‘But he wasn’t here for long. I had no idea he’d hoarded all those signs.’ With an expansive sweep of her hand, like someone on a game show indicating what could be won, or what had not been won, she said, ‘Consider it gone.’

  Bonnie bent her head to her mug of black tea, burning her lips and the inside of her mouth.

  ‘Do sit down,’ said Sylvia. Bonnie adjusted her dressing gown and sat down next to her landlady. ‘You have a familiar name,’ said Sylvia. ‘Bonnie Falls,’ she added, as if Bonnie might not know it. Bonnie had always been disconcerted by the thought of strangers holding her details in their files, and Sylvia was one of them.

  ‘Do I?’ she asked.

  ‘May I ask your mother’s name?’ enquired Sylvia, and Bonnie told Sylvia her mother’s maiden name, which appeared only briefly on the family tree that Bonnie had seen, on which all the women’s branches were short, their names disappearing, while what her father called ‘the main, true line’ went back for generations. He was not interested in ‘the peripheral lines’, the female lines, on which the names changed every generation, as if the women themselves were fickle and flighty. Although, in fact, the ‘Falls’ line was not entirely stable either: from the top to the bottom of the tree, the name changed from Faill to Fall to Falls.

  ‘No,’ said Sylvia, ‘not her maiden name. What’s your mother’s first name?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bonnie. ‘Pearl. Why?’ Her landlady was not filling in forms.

  ‘Pearl,’ echoed Sylvia. ‘Good.’ She grinned, displaying large teeth in a wide mouth. ‘I think I knew her,’ she said. ‘And you, as well, when you were little.’ She tested her tea and then
asked how Bonnie’s mother was.

  ‘She’s fine,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Is she?’ said Sylvia, and Bonnie thought she seemed surprised, and slightly disappointed. ‘Tell me about her,’ said Sylvia, so Bonnie talked about her mother’s career and her various committees and achievements, and Sylvia seemed increasingly disheartened. Bonnie mentioned her mother’s success in amateur skiing competitions; she had just flown out to compete in another one. Her mother was generally adventurous. She had taken an infant-school-aged Bonnie to Japan, where they had climbed Mount Tenjo. There was a photograph of the two of them on their way up the mountain path. The label in the album said: On Mount Tenjo, with Mount Fuji in the background. Mount Fuji was not visible in the photograph, but Bonnie recalled how, while they stood there on the mountain path, the dense, white cloud beyond the trees had shifted, revealing, in the vast skyscape, a sliver of something huge, the dark edge of Mount Fuji emerging like a soft pencil line drawn on the blank sky. Then the cloud had moved again, obscuring the mountain, and the camera’s shutter had clicked. She remembered, as well, being told about the giant catfish that slept beneath Tokyo Bay. Its wriggling caused Tokyo’s daily tremors, and one day, after decades of sleeping, it would wake and cause a major earthquake. ‘But it’s only a story,’ her mother had added. Bonnie, though, had felt the tremors, which shuddered through her in the night.

  ‘I’m not like my mother at all,’ said Bonnie to Sylvia.

  ‘Are you not?’

  ‘No. I can’t ski, and I don’t fly. I avoid heights.’ She had flown to Japan; she’d had no problem with it then. When, more recently, Bonnie’s problems had become apparent, her mother had suggested medication, so that she would be able to get on with her life, to fly and so on. Bonnie, though, whilst afraid of being up high, was even more wary of being up high and feeling no fear.