Death and the Seaside

by Alison Moore

  ‘And I didn’t get on very well at school,’ added Bonnie.

  ‘Don’t mumble,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘At school, my reports tended to say things like I was going nowhere, which I suppose is proving to be true,’ said Bonnie. ‘At secondary school I failed a lot of my exams. So I don’t have the sort of career my mum would like me to have.’

  ‘You failed your exams?’ said Sylvia, leaning forward in a way that seemed sympathetic.

  ‘A lot of them,’ said Bonnie. She mentioned that she had recently been having another go at learning French, her attempts at school having been so dismal, and that her mother had bought her audio lessons and had suggested listening to the course at night – ‘You’ll learn it in your sleep,’ her mother had said – but Bonnie was wary of having it dripped into her unconscious self like that. She would be like the child in Brave New World who suddenly knew that The-Nile-is-the-longest-river-in-Africa but not what that meant.

  ‘I would be interested to know,’ said Sylvia, ‘if you have any success with that method.’

  ‘I find it very difficult to get the language to stick in my brain,’ said Bonnie, hammering at her skull with her fingertips.

  ‘The younger you are, the easier it is,’ said Sylvia. ‘You learn your first language effortlessly, just picking it up from the people around you and assimilating it.’ She mentioned the language deprivation experiments that had been conducted on children by pharaohs and emperors and kings throughout the ages, experiments designed to see what language the children would grow up to speak without any intervention. ‘I do find it interesting,’ said Sylvia, ‘this question of the extent to which language is an internal impulse or an external knowledge to be acquired. It’s unfortunate,’ she added, ‘that these language experiments also tended to necessitate social deprivation, sometimes almost complete isolation. I believe the experiments led to some deaths.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ said Bonnie. ‘No one would dream of doing that these days. No one would allow it to happen.’

  ‘It seems unlikely, doesn’t it?’ said Sylvia.

  Bonnie told Sylvia about going to university but finding it hard and failing to complete her degree.

  ‘At what point did you leave your course?’ asked Sylvia.

  ‘In the final year,’ said Bonnie. ‘I’ve still got all the notes I made for my dissertation, but I never actually wrote it.’

  Bonnie told Sylvia about the job she had taken after dropping out of university, her trial period, and how it had not really worked out. She told her about some things she had tried since, which had failed, including the temp agency that had not wanted her. ‘I have a couple of cleaning jobs,’ she said. ‘My parents help me with the rent.’

  ‘And what would you like to be doing?’ asked Sylvia.

  ‘Oh, I don’t really know,’ said Bonnie, glancing at the desk across the room, on top of which sat a laptop, which was closed, and a printer.

  ‘Don’t mumble,’ said Sylvia, but she followed Bonnie’s gaze. Bonnie reminded herself of a character in a book she had read, in which a woman, when asked about some wanted rogue she might be harbouring, denied that she had seen him but at the same time glanced at the scullery door that hid him. Bonnie looked away.

  Sylvia regarded her for a moment, as if considering something. ‘When you took this flat,’ she said, ‘were you aware that the top flat – the loft conversion – was also vacant?’ She pointed to the ceiling. ‘It has a good view.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bonnie, ‘but I prefer to live on the ground floor.’

  Sylvia looked at her with interest. ‘And why is that?’ she asked.

  ‘When I was a kid,’ said Bonnie, ‘I started sleepwalking. I’d wake up and find myself standing at a window, like I was looking out, although I wasn’t really seeing, I suppose. But one time, the window was open, and Mum found me halfway out of it. She had to keep the windows locked and hide the keys.’

  Bonnie reached for a pack of cigarettes that was lying on the arm of the sofa. She opened it and offered a cigarette to Sylvia, who declined. ‘But I would accept another cup of tea,’ she said, ‘if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Bonnie, standing up, fixing the belt of her dressing gown, and taking the mugs back into the kitchen. While she waited for the kettle to boil again, she smoked her cigarette; there was no smoke alarm in the kitchen ceiling. Looking out into the backyard, she saw that it had started raining. She could not see the rain itself falling or landing; no drops were being blown against the window; but, in a waterlogged pothole outside the back door, in the puddle left behind by the previous day’s rainfall, she could see the little ripples that the rain made on the surface of the water, the tiny disturbances radiating outwards.

  When Bonnie returned to the lounge with the two mugs of black tea, she found Sylvia standing over by the desk, reading. ‘Oh,’ said Bonnie, putting down the mugs. There was no coffee table, so she placed the mugs on the carpet and went over to the desk, where Sylvia was looking at the printout of the Seatown story. ‘Did I leave that out?’

  ‘You’re a writer?’ said Sylvia.

  ‘Not really,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘But this is a story you’ve written?’

  Bonnie took the story out of Sylvia’s hands. ‘It is a story I tried to write,’ she said. ‘It’s only the beginning, but I print everything out in case the laptop fails, which happened once.’ One moment, she had been staring at a Word document, with her fingers poised over the keys, and the next moment the screen had gone blue and an emoticon was looking at her sadly, and then the screen went black. ‘It’s bound to happen again. I keep the printouts in case I ever want to go back to them, although I never do.’

  Bonnie saw all sorts of advice for would-be writers: ‘Write the moment you wake up, when you’re in a hypnagogic state and can access your subconscious.’ What Bonnie wrote sitting up in bed in the morning, what she netted from her subconscious, always seemed like so much hogwash. Or else she made notes as she was falling asleep, and then, when she looked at them again days or weeks or months later, could not understand what on earth it all meant. ‘Walk around in your fictional world as if it were the set of a soap opera; enter its buildings and approach its inhabitants.’ Bonnie did not see how this could be done. She read that fictional characters have free will, but she did not see how this was possible. ‘There is inspiration everywhere – you just need to train yourself to notice it.’ Perhaps she needed something like the pair of special glasses that John Nada discovered in They Live, which enabled a person to see something more, a hidden world beneath the manifest one; although when John Nada looked beneath the surface, what he saw was ‘SLEEP’, ‘STAY ASLEEP’, ‘OBEY’.

  ‘You’re not a writer,’ said Sylvia, ‘unless you’re writing.’

  Bonnie put the Seatown story back inside the desk’s wide drawer, on a little pile of other abandoned openings. At the same time, Sylvia was reaching in, touching some of the pristine stationery that Bonnie had in there.

  ‘You’ve got some beautiful notebooks in here,’ said Sylvia. ‘This one’s covered in genuine calfskin,’ she noted, admiring the finish.

  ‘My mum gave me that one,’ said Bonnie.

  Her mother had said, ‘Now you’ll look like a writer,’ as if that were the point, as if a pair of wing-tipped spectacles and a purple scarf were all Bonnie needed, as well as all the cats. Some people did wear special outfits in order to write, or else they used a lucky pen, but Bonnie did not have one of those.

  ‘I thought the notebooks might help,’ said Bonnie, ‘but I can’t write in them, they’re too nice. I’m bound to spoil them.’ She shut the drawer and returned to the sofa, where she gulped down her tea like a victim recovering from shock, except that her tea was not sweet.

  Sylvia stayed by the desk. ‘This story you were trying to write,’ she said, ‘is about a girl who is liv
ing in an attic room, and who dreams about jumping out of the window.’

  ‘Dreamt,’ said Bonnie, ‘once, when she was little.’

  ‘All right,’ said Sylvia, ‘dreamt of jumping out of a window, and then moved into an attic room. And how will your story end?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘You’ve no idea how your story ends?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But if you write it,’ said Sylvia, ‘you’ll find out.’

  ‘If I wrote it I would,’ said Bonnie, ‘yes.’

  ‘What does it say on the piece of paper that’s appeared under the door?’ asked Sylvia.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘But it does say something,’ said Sylvia, ‘doesn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Bonnie. ‘I think so.’

  ‘But Bonnie can’t quite see it.’

  ‘Susan,’ said Bonnie. ‘Susan can’t see it.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Sylvia. ‘Susan.’

  ‘It makes me think of the messages that appeared each morning on Cézanne’s doormat,’ said Bonnie, ‘when he was in Aix, nearing death.’

  ‘What did those messages say?’ asked Sylvia.

  ‘They told him to leave town,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Who put those messages through his door?’

  ‘His neighbours, I think,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘And who posted this message under Susan’s door?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘The landlady, presumably,’ Sylvia suggested.

  ‘I’m not sure who else it could be,’ agreed Bonnie.

  ‘Well, it’s up to you, is it not?’ said Sylvia. ‘You are the writer. You decide whether and why your character does something. You must know.’

  ‘I’m sure I should know,’ said Bonnie, ‘but I don’t.’

  ‘So you are not really in control of your own story?’

  ‘I’m not sure I am,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘When did you write this?’ asked Sylvia.

  Bonnie sighed. ‘I started writing it in the winter, before moving in here, but, you know, I feel like I’ve been writing it for years, like every time I write anything it’s really the same thing I’m writing about.’

  ‘But you still don’t know how it should end?’

  ‘No. I’ve given up with it anyway. I don’t really know what the story’s about.’

  ‘It’s about failure,’ said Sylvia, ‘and fear.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bonnie. ‘Is it?’

  Sylvia turned to the bookcase beside the desk. ‘You have a lot of self-help books,’ she said.

  ‘My mum gave them to me,’ said Bonnie. She watched as Sylvia ran her index finger along the spines: Making the Most of Yourself, How to Start a Conversation and Make Friends, How to Be Your Own Best Friend, Embracing Your Inner Critic. Here and there Sylvia paused, like a doctor preparing to press down on bared skin so as to find out where the pain was: Does it hurt here? What about here? ‘Fail,’ said Sylvia, ‘Fail Again, Fail Better.’ She took out the book she was looking at. ‘So,’ she said, nodding to the words on the cover. ‘Can you lean into the unknown?’

  Bonnie shrugged.

  Sylvia took down another book, showing Bonnie the cover as if she might not have seen her own books before. ‘TRY AGAIN,’ she read. ‘FAIL AGAIN. FAIL BETTER.’ She slid the book back into place. ‘Have you read them all?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bonnie. ‘But not necessarily all the way through.’

  ‘Susan,’ said Sylvia. ‘Susan is your middle name, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bonnie, ‘it is.’ She did not recall putting this detail down on any paperwork when she had taken the flat, but then she remembered that Sylvia had known her mother, and herself, apparently.

  ‘You look like her,’ said Sylvia, eyeing Bonnie.

  ‘Like my mum?’ asked Bonnie.

  ‘No,’ said Sylvia. ‘She was blond, I think. Slim and very well turned out. No. I mean Susan. You have her short, brown hair, though not her legs.’

  Bonnie tugged the hem of her dressing gown over her bared, broad knees.

  ‘You could have given your character any name you wanted to,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘What’s wrong with Susan?’ asked Bonnie. ‘It’s just a name.’

  ‘Names are important,’ said Sylvia. ‘Judy Garland was not Frances Ethel Gumm. Cary Grant was not Archibald Leach. Marilyn Monroe could not remain a Norma.’

  ‘They were still the same people, though,’ said Bonnie, ‘whatever they were called.’ Nonetheless, she wondered whether her parents ever felt that they had chosen the wrong name for her, whether it had been optimistic, like when she had given the name Lucky to a fairground goldfish that turned out to be diseased.

  ‘You work in an amusement arcade, don’t you?’ said Sylvia. ‘Like the one in your story, in which Susan is offered a job?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bonnie, ‘but I don’t work in a change booth, which is the job Susan’s offered, and anyway, Susan never actually works there.’

  ‘Did you have the dream Susan has about jumping out of your bedroom window?’ asked Sylvia.

  ‘I’m not Susan,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘No,’ said Sylvia, ‘of course not.’ She smiled. ‘Our dreams, according to Freud, are wish-fulfilments. What do you dream about, Bonnie?’

  ‘I rarely remember my dreams,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘You’re more likely to remember what the dream was about if you wake up in the middle of it,’ said Sylvia. ‘Perhaps you sleep very soundly.’

  ‘But if you woke up in the middle of it,’ said Bonnie, ‘you would never know how it ended.’

  ‘Dreams rarely have proper endings,’ said Sylvia. ‘They just move on or suddenly stop, like life.’ She sat down next to Bonnie again and sipped her tea. ‘So you’ve written other things?’ she asked.

  ‘I haven’t really finished anything,’ said Bonnie. ‘Sometimes things seem like they’re going fine but then they just start going wrong.’

  ‘I would very much like to see your other stories,’ said Sylvia, ‘even if they aren’t finished, and even if they are no good.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Bonnie. ‘I’d rather not. I don’t—’ But Sylvia had begun to cough, her shoulders hunching, her hand brought up to her chest.

  When the cough subsided, Sylvia said, ‘Do excuse me. It’s just a tickle. Do you think I could have a glass of water?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Bonnie, getting to her feet. She went to the kitchen and stayed there for a minute, hoping that the unseen germs would disperse in her absence. Or perhaps they were instead filling the room, multiplying.

  When she returned to the lounge, Sylvia was on her feet, collecting up her things.

  ‘I’m going to get going,’ said Sylvia, pausing to accept the mug of water that Bonnie was passing to her, handing it back when she had taken a sip. ‘Thank you so much,’ she said. Indicating the things that were piled up in the corners of the room, she added, ‘I’ll send someone round to pick all this up.’

  Bonnie walked Sylvia to the back door, and when they got there she thought to ask, ‘How did you know my mother?’

  ‘Oh, I knew her years ago,’ said Sylvia. ‘You were only little.’ She stepped outside and then turned back. ‘Bonnie,’ she said, musing. ‘It sounds like such a happy name, but the only Bonnies I can think of are Bonnie Parker of Bonnie and Clyde, who was killed of course, and so young, and that song: My Bonnie lies over the ocean, my Bonnie lies over the sea.’ She smiled then, said goodbye and walked away, disappearing into the passageway, her footsteps loud and echoing at first, and then fading. Bonnie closed the door.

  She washed up the mugs and left them draining. What a nice lady, she thought; they had got on like a house on fire. She thought over what Sylvia had sai
d, about her story, and her books, and her dreams, and her name, and about knowing her mother. And there was something else, she thought, that she felt she was trying to remember, but it escaped her, and in the end she boiled the kettle again and turned on the telly. In between programmes, during the advert breaks when she went to the kitchen for Wotsits, and when she got into bed that night, the words of that song were in her head: Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my Bonnie to me.

  5

  Bonnie Falls has tried to write, but has failed to finish, at least half a dozen short stories, including her most recent “Seatown” story. Her habit of leaving her work incomplete reminds me of the Egyptians leaving a gap in their hieroglyphs of serpents, which they did, apparently, because completing the hieroglyph risked bringing the serpent to life.

  All of Bonnie’s unfinished stories have been printed out and kept together in the same place: in the drawer of my grandmother’s old Mission desk. This desk used to stand in the hallway of the house in which I grew up, and in its single, wide drawer my grandmother kept all her personal paperwork. I was told, when I was little: “Sylvia, you must not touch this desk. It is out of bounds.” Despite this caution, or perhaps because of it, I did, quite compulsively, touch the Mission desk. Even when I was really only walking past it, my arm would levitate and, before I knew it, my fingers were touching the legs or the front of the drawer. I could not help it. I was especially forbidden to open the drawer, but it had no lock. The desk is now in my possession anyway. It is in my house, in the ground-floor flat.

  All these unfinished stories of Bonnie’s are set by the sea, and one must ask: why this obsession with the sea? She does not live there, although she could. When considering this question, one ought to take into account the fact that in each of Bonnie’s stories – as well as in many of the novels on her bookshelves – the sea is a metaphor for death. Correspondingly, to be at the seaside is to be at the edge of death. The seashore is a threshold. This, in fact, seems to have been the focus of Bonnie’s unfinished dissertation, which she had been sketching out before abandoning her university course. I have had the opportunity of seeing the pages of notes made in preparation for this major piece of work, which was never completed, and I have endeavoured to put them into some sort of order here.