Death and the Seaside

by Alison Moore

  Bonnie’s notes refer to the ancient seashore being “haunted by the possibility of a monster bursting forth”, a monster that might represent an invader, or the Black Death, or there might be actual monsters, “nightmarish creatures born out of black waters” (Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840). The monsters might even have names, like Leviathan or the Kraken, or they might be unnamed, like the inhuman sea creatures of Innsmouth – “They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed” (Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth) – or like the shark in Jaws (for the modern-day seashore remains equally haunted, it seems, by the possibility of a monster bursting forth). The sea, writes Bonnie, is the domain of the Under Toad, a misunderstanding of the word “undertow”, an unseen danger: “lurking offshore, waiting to suck him under and drag him out to sea. The terrible Under Toad . . . Would it ever surface?” The reek of toad, the Under Toad’s “swampy smell”, is the reek of death (Irving, The World According to Garp). The monster might even be seen, might indeed burst forth: “I saw a monster rising from the waves . . . However: it is possible, perhaps plausible, to conjecture that the sea monster which I ‘saw’ was a hallucination” (Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea). In Bonnie’s books, the sea itself has waves “like huge mouths snapping at the empty air, waiting for us” (Olmi, Beside the Sea). The sea is something that devours. The children are “made uneasy by this waveless, unstoppable tide, the sinister, calm way it kept coming on”, and so they should be: “whatever cliffs there may once have been the sea had long ago eroded” (Banville, The Sea).

  The sea represents the dimmer regions of the subconscious, inhabited by dreams and nightmares – “She thought: people slip off the shores of the real world, back into dreams” (Swift, “Learning to Swim”) – and by madness: the ocean, “that unruly dark side of the world which was an abode of monsters stirred up by diabolical powers, emerges as one of the persistent figures of madness” (Corbin, The Lure of the Sea). To be in “the world under the sea”, “at the bottom of the ocean”, is to be in a “dead” mood, a trance-like state (Hamilton, Hangover Square). The philosophers Kant and Schopenhauer draw a parallel between dreaming and madness: Kant writes that, “The madman is a waking dreamer”, and Schopenhauer calls dreams a brief madness and madness a long dream (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams).

  The sea, writes Bonnie, was believed to produce unhealthy emanations at the shore, “bad air”, which might be attributed to the seaweed, the debris, “the excreta from the abyss”, which accumulated on the sand (Corbin, The Lure of the Sea). And/or it might be explained by the sea being “a freezing great floating graveyard”, so that taking a lilo into the shallows is akin to playing at the edge of an ancient Indian burial ground. The sea looks “like a torrent of mud”, and being on the beach is like “being in a cardboard box”, which suggests a makeshift coffin, ready for burial (Olmi, Beside the Sea).

  The narratives themselves, notes Bonnie, have an untethered quality: “Later that day, the day the Graces came, or the following one, or the one following that, I saw the black car again” (Banville, The Sea). The narratives shift suddenly and easily from one time frame to another, or from one point of view to another. Or there are commas where one might expect full stops, and a lack of speech marks, giving a sense of fluidity, a lack of boundaries, one “sentence” washing into the next: “Kevin and Stanley were clean, they were getting ready for the night, as they said, yes, they often said I’m getting ready for the night, it’s nice, getting yourself all sorted for the night, they never say I’m getting ready for the day, because daytime doesn’t really warrant it, you’ve got to do it so you do, that’s all, but at night there’s a sort of preparation, like before a journey” (Olmi, Beside the Sea).

  The “irresistible awakening of a collective desire for the shore” that arose around 1750 sounds to me like mass hypnosis. “Cure-takers began rushing toward the sea-shore . . . Along the desolate shore, the pleasant song of birds gives way to the sea-gull’s harsh cry.” The cure-takers’ sea-bathing “was part of the aesthetics of the sublime: it involved facing the violent water, but without risk, enjoying the pretence that one could be swept under, and being struck by the full force of the waves, but without losing one’s footing”. My first thought, when I read these notes of Bonnie’s, was that there is a risk, one could lose one’s footing and be swept under, and that this activity must involve flirtation with a death wish. But it turns out that the female cure-taker had a supervisor: “The ‘bathers’ would plunge female patients into the water just as the wave broke, taking care to hold their heads down so as to increase the impression of suffocation.” It sounds brutal, but the end result is that the fey young women become invigorated. The sea is bracing, if also dispassionately vicious. There is a note about exorcism, and when I first read it I thought that what was being referred to was the submersion of people so that they would be purified by the sea. In fact, it means sailors immersing relics into the water in order to purify the demonic sea. But it made me think of the bathers, the supervisors pushing the women’s heads under the water, trying to force some change in them. “At the seaside, sheltered by the therapeutic alibi, a new world of sensations was growing out of the mixed pain and pleasure of sudden immersion . . . The sea-shore offered a stage on which, more than anywhere else, the actual spectacle of the confrontation between air, water, and land contributed to fostering daydreams about merging with the elemental forces and fantasies of being swallowed up” (Corbin, The Lure of the Sea).

  In each of these novels and novellas, Bonnie recognises the compelling power of the sea’s “siren’s song” (Banville, The Sea). The sea, she suggests, is where the characters belong, where they want to be. A mother tells her child that the sea is “just saying how glad it is to see you, it’s really missed you!” (Olmi, Beside the Sea). Far out at sea in his skiff, a fisherman thinks to himself, “I wish I was the fish . . . I would rather be that beast down there in the darkness of the sea” (Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea). A student, and his cousin who is in the “madhouse”, “shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses” (Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth). The seashore represents a powerful “invitation to undertake a journey from which no one returns” (Corbin, The Lure of the Sea). Bonnie has written in the margin of her notes: “It is like the Land of Oz, which is surrounded by desert, and once you are there, it is almost impossible to leave.”

  Bonnie sees inevitability in the deaths in these seaside narratives. Even the train, she says, that George Harvey Bone is travelling on seems to sense this: “Approaching Brighton in the darkness, the train slowed down, hesitated, seemed to be feeling its way before risking itself in a dangerous area” (Hamilton, Hangover Square). The characters that come to the coast, feels Bonnie, are just as surely coming to their end, one way or another. After coming on holiday to a coastal city, Lise “will be found tomorrow morning dead”. While Lise is devising her own murder, the maid at the hotel “inquires amiably if Madam is going to the beach” (Spark, The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark). Meursault thinks that he might not, after all, commit murder, “But the whole beach, pulsing with heat, was pressing on my back” (Camus, The Outsider). He is condemned to death. Characters walk steadily into the water: “Then calmly they stood up and waded into the sea, the water smooth as oil hardly breaking around them, and leaned forward in unison and swam out slowly . . . out, and out” (Banville, The Sea), or they plunge from the eroding cliffs into the sea that is waiting below: “And if death had come her way it was no more than she had asked for. She had gone to meet him halfway” (Drabble, The Witch of Exmoor).

  The above, then, is what Bonnie has picked out of her source material. Out of all that text, all that imagery, this is what she has homed in on, this is how she sees. It i
s like how a dog sees: a monochrome wash and then a vivid patch of blue, someone’s blue jumper picked out, like the little girl’s red coat in Schindler’s List. This is Bonnie’s sea: Here be monsters. While Bonnie herself lives in the Midlands, about as far away from the coast as she could be, it is to the shore of this sea that Bonnie keeps sending the characters in the stories that she writes.

  6

  No one came to take away all the stuff that had been left behind in Bonnie’s flat. She had grown used, though, to living with the cases and boxes that made it look as if she had not quite made up her mind about staying, and she hardly noticed the traffic cones and the signs, except for when she tripped over them in the dark. She began to think that if this stuff was not there, in the corners of the lounge, the room might feel oddly empty. She thought of those spaces in which homeowners sometimes discovered strangers living, homeless people who had crept into a basement or a closet and had lived there undetected for months. Were they missed, she wondered, these trespassers, after they had gone?

  She did lose things, and wondered if somehow it was because of all this junk. She kept misplacing the remote control for the television; and she had looked, one night, for her dissertation notes, wondering whether it was too late to try again, but she could not find her notes anywhere; they were not where she thought she had put them. She decided she would have to remind Sylvia about taking the junk away, but then she found the remote control again and forgot all about it.

  On a Saturday afternoon in the middle of spring, Sylvia turned up again. After spotting Bonnie through the kitchen window, she came in through the back door without knocking. She was smartly dressed, in the same suit as before, as if it were a uniform, as if she were going to work. The suit matched the colour of her eyes in certain lights, at certain angles. ‘Milk and sugar,’ she said, handing a shopping bag to Bonnie, who was still in her dressing gown. Bonnie put on the kettle and made two milky, sugary teas, putting Sylvia’s in the nicest mug she had, her birthday mug, while Bonnie had the ‘I’M A MUG!’ mug, which did not look so out of place in her own hands.

  Sylvia led the way through to the lounge, where she sat down on the sofa and patted the space beside her. ‘Sit down, dear,’ she said, and Bonnie sat. Sylvia smiled. ‘I’ve been thinking about your story,’ she said. ‘The Seatown in your story is fictional. There is a place on the Dorset coast called Seatown, but there is no pub there called the Hook, and there is no esplanade as there is in your story. The pub there is called the Anchor, and the shore is a pebble beach enclosed by grey clay cliffs. There is a town called Seaton, just along the coast, in Devon, where there is a pub called the Hook and Parrot, and it does have attic rooms, and there is an esplanade with signs disallowing cycles and dogs and so on. It is not closed on Mondays, though, as your Seatown pub is. There is a pub in Hampshire called the Hook and Glove, which is closed on Mondays, and which even has a pig with a chalkboard, although it is not quite like the one in your story. The Hook and Glove, however, is not by the sea.’

  ‘I have been to Seaton,’ said Bonnie, ‘but the story’s just made up.’

  ‘Have you written any more of the story?’ asked Sylvia. ‘I’d very much like to read it.’

  ‘I haven’t,’ said Bonnie. ‘I haven’t written a thing for weeks.’

  ‘Where do you think the anxiety in your writing stems from?’ asked Sylvia. ‘This obsession with the fragility of limbs?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bonnie, who had never seen her writing that way. ‘I don’t feel particularly anxious.’

  ‘Well, here and now, you are in a safe and predictable environment. But were you to be removed from such a safe and predictable environment, you might expect anxiety levels to rise.’

  Bonnie looked anxiously at Sylvia. ‘Removed?’ she said.

  ‘In your writing, you keep returning to the seaside.’

  ‘I like the seaside,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Some people feel rather trapped by the sea,’ suggested Sylvia. ‘The seashore is something one cannot go beyond; it hems one in.’

  ‘But you can go beyond it,’ said Bonnie. ‘You can go to sea; you can go into the sea.’ It was, for Bonnie, more like the sea was the open side, where structure ceased. The barrier, depending on how you looked at it, both was and was not there, like a theatre’s fourth wall, in which case the seaside was the set.

  Sylvia clicked her fingers in Bonnie’s face. ‘Wakey wakey,’ she said. She had said something that Bonnie had not caught. When Sylvia had Bonnie’s attention again, she continued: ‘The excessive anxiety in your writing—’

  ‘Excessive anxiety?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sylvia. ‘—is perhaps linked to your inability to establish satisfactory conclusions.’

  ‘My inability?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘You know,’ said Bonnie, ‘for a long time, I had trouble accepting that a storybook’s ending was fixed, that it wouldn’t change each time I read it, but that it would end how it was always going to end.’

  ‘I think perhaps that follows us even into adulthood,’ said Sylvia. ‘If I watched Gone with the Wind again now, a little part of me would still be hoping that Rhett might stay, that he might change his mind at the very last minute.’

  ‘When I was little,’ said Bonnie, ‘I had a favourite book, The Fox and the Hound, which I asked my mum to read to me over and over again. Then one day, when Mum was away for a few days, my dad read it to me instead, and the story was different. First one dog was killed by a train when it ought to have got away, then the Master gassed a den of kits, then he caught their mother in a trap, then he killed another litter of kits after drawing them out of their den, and then he used the sound of a wounded kit to draw out the vixen and killed her; then Copper, the bloodhound, chased Tod until the fox died from exhaustion, and then the Master shot the dog. I told my dad, “That’s not how it ends. Tod always escapes, every time. And so do his babies.” But Dad said, “No, it goes like this; it ends like this.” I told him, “I don’t want it to end that way,” but Dad just shrugged. “That’s what happens,” he said, showing me the print on the pages, showing me the black-and-white truth. “You can’t change it.” Although, of course, Mum had changed it, to make it bearable. Even now, when I think of that story, it seems mutable.’

  ‘I used to like Choose Your Own Adventure books,’ said Sylvia. ‘The story could go all sorts of different ways. If you didn’t like your ending, you could choose a different one. I even thought of writing one; I thought about becoming a novelist, but I decided that it was all rather pointless. It’s hardly saving lives.’

  ‘They changed the story in the film, too,’ said Bonnie. ‘They made the fox and the hound be friends and no one dies. I prefer the film.’

  ‘You won’t remember this,’ said Sylvia, like a hypnotist: When I snap my fingers, you will wake up, and you will remember none of this. ‘You weren’t even born, although I suppose you might have seen it anyway. When the Challenger failed, when the space shuttle broke apart, my mother videoed it and then rewound the tape to the beginning, ready to show to my father when he came home. All the pieces got pulled back together and the Challenger descended safely, intact. It sat on the launch pad, ready and waiting. But as it happened, my father had already seen the footage of the disaster, so neither he nor my mother pressed PLAY.’

  ‘So the shuttle stayed where it was,’ said Bonnie, ‘on the launch pad.’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Sylvia. ‘I wouldn’t have been able to resist pressing PLAY.’

  ‘I don’t think I saw it,’ said Bonnie, although even as she said it, she wondered if maybe she had seen the footage after all. She had a flash – somehow simultaneously vague and vivid – of what might have been a memory of some televised disaster, some mid-air disintegration.

  Bonnie reached for her pack of cigarettes, which was on top of a magazine on top of a pile of library
books on the arm of the sofa. She took from the packet a cigarette and her lighter, put the cigarette between her lips and thumbed the spark wheel of the lighter.

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t smoke that in here,’ said Sylvia. ‘You can smoke in the yard.’ She glanced at the magazine on the arm of the sofa; it was turned to the horoscopes at the back. ‘You don’t read those, do you?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s often pretty accurate,’ said Bonnie. Pulling the magazine onto her lap, she said to Sylvia, ‘What star sign are you?’

  Sylvia rolled her eyes, leaned closer and read from the page: ‘“Travel is on the agenda. Embrace your adventurous side. Once you’ve started there’s no going back. You’re on the brink of a breakthrough.” You know how these things work: it tells you that you’ll meet a tall, dark stranger, and then you’re on the lookout for a tall, dark stranger. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy – expectation influences behaviour. You know that really, I’m sure.’

  ‘I know,’ said Bonnie. ‘But even so, it’s amazing how often it turns out to be right.’

  ‘It’s like anything like that – fortune telling, tarot cards . . . ’

  ‘I’ve got a pack of tarot cards,’ said Bonnie. ‘But I don’t know how to use them.’

  ‘Give them to me,’ said Sylvia. Bonnie fetched her tarot cards, broke open the protective cellophane wrapper and handed the pack over to Sylvia, who shuffled the cards and then cut the deck three times; she seemed to know what she was doing. Holding the pack out to Bonnie, she said, ‘Take a card from the top and place it face up between us.’ Bonnie did so, and they both looked at it and saw that it was the Tower, tall and grey with small, high windows, and behind it was the pitch-black night sky, and beneath it were jagged rocks towards which were falling two surprised-looking figures. ‘So,’ said Sylvia. ‘You go to a tarot reader and you turn over the Tower. You are told that this card means danger; sudden and destructive change. You turned it over, you attracted that card, so now you are certain that that’s what’s coming your way: danger, sudden and destructive change. And because you are literal minded, you are thinking about yourself falling from a great height, a high window, something like that. The card, the Tower, has as good as told you that this is what is going to happen. You know it is going to happen. It is there in your future – you’ve seen it illustrated in full colour.’ Sylvia tapped the Tower card with her index finger. ‘And even if the tarot reader tells you that this future is not set in stone, and that you can avoid such an eventuality, still you will find yourself circling it, this idea of the Tower, a building with high windows, from which you will fall.’ Bonnie had barely blinked while Sylvia had been speaking; she was gazing intently at Sylvia, whose eyes were the colour of deep water. ‘You will be drawn towards this destiny like water to a plughole, swirling down.’ Sylvia sat back and smiled. ‘That’s how diets work as well, of course,’ she said. ‘A magazine tells you – and you say to yourself – Do not eat the cake. That cake now has a label attached to it, which says, ‘DON’T EAT ME’. This label, I think, is far more powerful than the label on Alice in Wonderland’s cake, which says, ‘EAT ME’, and on her drink which says, ‘DRINK ME’. ‘DON’T EAT ME’ says this cake, which you can’t see because you’ve put it somewhere safe but you know it is there and it is still making your mouth water. ‘DON’T EAT ME,’ says the cake, and you will indeed not eat the cake for as long as you possibly can, all the time with one eye – your mind’s eye – on where you have put your cake, or trying so hard not to look at it, not even to think about it, right up until the moment when, of course, you will not only look at it but you will finally give in and eat it.’