Death and the Seaside

by Alison Moore

  ‘Where exactly is this restaurant?’ asked Sylvia.

  ‘I think I know,’ said Bonnie. It was a Chinese restaurant, to which she had been once before, some years ago, perhaps for her eighteenth birthday, or her twenty-first: a landmark birthday, which at the time had felt like passing through a portal, as if everything would be different on the other side. New Year’s Eves were like that: at the end of the countdown, she always felt as if she ought to hold her breath, ready to jump, braced for the cold or a hard landing.

  The restaurant had gone. Bonnie walked past where it ought to have been, twice, but it seemed to have metamorphosed into a chip shop. They were terribly late now. She walked to the end of the road, where cars were whipping past on the dual carriageway. She turned back. ‘It’s just not here!’ she protested, as if this were some kind of trick.

  She found the restaurant eventually, in the middle of an adjacent street. The bright facade, red for luck, was the same as the original, as if it had just been lifted off, moved to a unit in the next street along, and stuck back on again, like a structure in a Potemkin village.

  Inside the restaurant, the layout and decor looked much the same as it always had, in the other location, as if in fact the building had just been wheeled wholesale down the street.

  They were led by a white-jacketed waiter to a booth at the back of the restaurant, where they found their party eating, nearing the end of a course. Bonnie’s father looked up and said, ‘You’re late.’ He put his last piece of chicken in his mouth and pushed away his empty plate.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Bonnie. ‘I couldn’t find the restaurant. It’s moved.’

  ‘Oh,’ said her mother, ‘yes, it has,’ as if that was not very important, as if buildings moved about all the time and you just had to keep up.

  ‘This is my friend Sylvia,’ said Bonnie, presenting her landlady with a flourish, as if she were the grand reveal at the end of a magic show. Bonnie’s mother was busy passing some sauce across the table, but turned and offered her hand to Sylvia when Bonnie said, ‘This is my mum . . . and my dad . . . and this is Fiona, my friend from work.’ Fiona said hello but she looked annoyed, as if she wished she were elsewhere. ‘Sorry we’re late,’ said Bonnie.

  Bonnie sat down next to Fiona, and Sylvia sat next to Bonnie, boxing her into the booth.

  ‘We’ve had our starters,’ said Bonnie’s father. ‘And we ordered our mains as well.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s not too late to add yours on though,’ said Bonnie’s mother, ‘but they might come out a bit later.’

  ‘All right,’ said Bonnie, and she glanced through the menu and then looked around, trying to catch a waiter’s eye.

  ‘Mrs Falls,’ said Sylvia, smoothing out a crease in the tablecloth, ‘Bonnie tells me that you ski.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Bonnie’s mother. ‘I like to compete.’

  ‘I ski as well,’ said Bonnie’s father.

  ‘And when you go skiing,’ said Sylvia to Bonnie’s mother, ‘you don’t have a problem with the heights? You’ve never . . . had an accident?’

  ‘We did have a twisted ankle,’ said Bonnie’s mother.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘But that wasn’t on the slopes. It was on a slippery poolside that you twisted your ankle, wasn’t it?’ she said to Bonnie’s father.

  ‘I’d just done my mile of swimming,’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ said Sylvia. ‘And when you compete,’ she said to Bonnie’s mother, ‘you have some success?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Bonnie’s father. ‘We had to buy a whole new cabinet for all Pearl’s trophies. It’s in pride of place in the spare room. That’s your old room, Bonnie.’

  Bonnie had not yet managed to attract the attention of a waiter, and in the end, her mother turned her head as a waiter came by and she stopped him. ‘My daughter is ready to order now,’ she said, and as Bonnie and Sylvia ordered their food, the rest of the meals came out and the three of them tucked in.

  Bonnie’s father, eyeing Fiona’s progress, said, ‘You eat a lot for a little girl.’

  ‘I’m not a little girl,’ said Fiona.

  ‘You are,’ he said. He turned to Bonnie’s mother and said, ‘Isn’t she? Whereas our Bonnie’s always been a big girl.’

  ‘She’s hardly a girl,’ said Fiona. ‘She’s thirty years old.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, turning to Bonnie. ‘Tick tock.’

  He picked up the bottle of table wine and filled Bonnie’s mother’s glass, and then Sylvia’s, and then Fiona’s. Bonnie poured herself a glass of water.

  ‘Aren’t you having wine?’ asked Sylvia.

  ‘I don’t drink,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Not even on your birthday?’ said Sylvia.

  ‘I prefer not to,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘My mother doesn’t drink,’ said Fiona. ‘She’s one of these high-powered people who doesn’t like to lose control.’ They all looked at Bonnie, whose hair, though dry, was still tangled, and whose dress looked like cats had been sitting on it, even though she did not have a cat.

  ‘Not even one little glass?’ asked Sylvia. ‘Just a sip?’

  Bonnie shook her head and reached for her water.

  ‘Well,’ said Sylvia, ‘many happy returns anyway,’ and the four of them touched their wine glasses desultorily against Bonnie’s water glass.

  Sylvia’s dinner arrived, though not Bonnie’s, and when the waiter came back to take away the empty plates, Bonnie’s mother asked him where Bonnie’s dinner had got to. The waiter went to check and after a while he returned to say that there had been some mistake and that no other order had gone through to the kitchen. The order was placed again. ‘And the bill, please,’ said Bonnie’s father.

  When the waiter had dealt with the bill and had gone away again, Sylvia said to Bonnie’s parents, ‘I’ve been reading some of Bonnie’s writing.’

  ‘It’s about time she gave that up,’ said her father. ‘I’ve told her, writing is a young man’s game. A writer will always do his best work before he’s thirty, and after that it’s just so much hogwash.’

  ‘One of Bonnie’s stories,’ said Sylvia, ‘touches on a phase she went through of jumping off the ends of piers, in Blackpool and Bognor Regis and Belgium.’

  Bonnie’s father looked at Bonnie and shook his head in astonishment, as if, once again, she stood dripping and bedraggled before him. ‘She took a long walk off a short pier,’ he said. He tapped his temple with his index finger and said to Sylvia, ‘She hasn’t got a bit of sense.’

  ‘It’s just as well the tide was in,’ said Bonnie’s mother, ‘otherwise she’d have broken her legs, if she was lucky.’

  ‘And she used to sleepwalk,’ mentioned Sylvia, ‘and nearly went out of a window?’

  ‘She’s like a bloody lemming,’ said Bonnie’s father.

  ‘Don’t you ever feel,’ said Bonnie, ‘when you’re up high—’

  ‘Don’t mumble,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘She does mumble, doesn’t she?’ said Bonnie’s mother.

  ‘When you’re up high,’ said Bonnie, ‘don’t you ever feel an urge to jump? Don’t you ever feel that you might not be able to stop yourself?’

  Sylvia smiled, and Bonnie’s father touched his fingertip to his temple again.

  ‘Freud wrote about the death drive,’ said Sylvia, ‘a death instinct, leading organic life back into the inanimate state.’

  ‘What do you do for a living, Sylvia?’ asked Bonnie’s mother.

  ‘I’m just a landlady,’ said Sylvia, ‘now.’

  Bonnie’s mother ate a mint and said, ‘Well, we could go if it wasn’t for Bonnie’s dinner.’

  They talked a little longer, and finally Bonnie’s dinner arrived. ‘Eat up,’ said her father, and her mother started putting on her coat. Bonnie ate her chips and drank her water while eve
ryone waited, and then her father said, ‘All right, let’s go.’

  Bonnie’s mother handed Bonnie a mint and said, ‘Have one of these. It will help with your breath.’

  Outside the restaurant, Bonnie’s parents said their goodbyes and drove home, and Sylvia said to Fiona, ‘Whereabouts do you live?’ but Fiona was evasive. She went one way – ‘Maybe see you on Monday,’ she said – while Bonnie and Sylvia went the other.

  It had grown unexpectedly dark while they had been inside. They walked home in comfortable silence until, as they passed the end of Waterside Close, Sylvia cleared her throat and said, ‘Do you have any plans for the summer? Are you going away anywhere?’

  ‘I’d like to go somewhere,’ said Bonnie. ‘A few years ago, I stayed in an Ibis hotel and that was really nice. Apparently they have them abroad too. I’d like to try one of those sometime.’

  ‘They’re all the same, you know,’ said Sylvia. ‘You could be anywhere.’

  ‘They’re not exactly the same,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘There’s a hotel in Japan,’ said Sylvia, ‘whose reception desk is staffed by a team of identical robots that look completely real.’

  ‘Really?’ said Bonnie. ‘You wouldn’t know they were robots?’

  ‘Well,’ said Sylvia, ‘maybe you’d know, but they are uncannily lifelike, like the Stepford Wives.’

  ‘Presumably they can only do what they’ve been programmed to do?’ said Bonnie.

  ‘I imagine so,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘You couldn’t order them to kill all humans.’

  ‘You could try, but I doubt they’d do it,’ said Sylvia. ‘You could probably order a sandwich.’

  ‘You can do that at an Ibis as well,’ said Bonnie. ‘There’s a twenty-four-hour snack service.’

  ‘Have you seen the Ancient Egyptian images,’ asked Sylvia, ‘of a man with the head of an ibis, writing? It was the Egyptians,’ she added, ‘who reared ibises specifically for sacrificial purposes.’

  ‘And Comfort Inns,’ said Bonnie. ‘I would try them too.’

  ‘Who do you go on holiday with?’ asked Sylvia.

  ‘I used to go with my mum and dad,’ said Bonnie, ‘but eventually they decided it was time I started going away with my friends. I haven’t been on holiday for a while. I can’t really afford it anyway.’

  ‘I haven’t been away for years,’ said Sylvia. ‘We should go somewhere together. We could go to Devon.’

  ‘That would be really nice,’ said Bonnie, turning and looking at Sylvia as they walked along. ‘I’d really like that. There’s an Ibis in Devon.’

  ‘Leave it with me,’ said Sylvia. ‘I’ll look into it.’

  ‘I’d need a ground-floor room,’ said Bonnie.

  They were almost home when Bonnie suddenly said, ‘Oh, I completely forgot that you’d met Mum before. You told me you used to know her. I would have mentioned it to her if I’d thought. You didn’t say anything about it in the restaurant. And I don’t think she recognised you.’

  ‘No,’ said Sylvia. ‘I don’t think she did.’

  They turned onto their street, and Bonnie thought that her mother might not like the idea of her walking the length of Slash Lane in the dark, but at least, she thought, as she passed beneath the broken street lamps, she was with a friend.

  11

  My grandmother was born in the same year as the behaviourist B. F. Skinner. My grandmother used to threaten to put me in a box and keep me there until I learned to behave. This, she said, was how Skinner had trained his daughter. Apparently, this is a myth – Skinner’s “baby box” was more like “an upgraded playpen” with a “thermostatically controlled environment” and padded corners (Slater, Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century) – but I didn’t know this at the time. My grandmother told me that she would get my grandfather to build the box. He had a workshed and had built a bird table and I knew that he could easily build a box. Whenever I misbehaved, my grandmother would tell my grandfather to go to the workshed and get on with constructing the box, and he would go, and I would try very hard to behave. “If you even think of getting up to anything, Sylvia,” my grandmother would say, “I will be the first to know about it.” Even if I left the room, she would call after me, “I’ve got my eye on you!”

  I tried to do helpful things, like dusting the mantelpiece or washing up the teacups, but my grandmother did not like me to do it. “You’ll do it all wrong,” she would say, or, “You’ll break something. I know what you’re like.” If my mother let me carry my own glass to the table, my grandmother would say to me, “You’re going to drop it,” and when I did, and while I stared down at the smashed glass at my feet, my grandmother would say, “I knew you would.”

  My mother read child development manuals, turning back the corners of the pages here and there: “Failures of every sort are usually traceable not to a lack of ability, not to bad luck . . . but to a tendency in the subject to maintain the condition in which he has learned to feel at home . . . One of the deepest impulses in the very social human animal is to do what he perceives is expected of him” (Liedloff, The Continuum Concept). My mother asked my grandmother not to talk to me that way. “If you say she’s going to drop it, she will,” said my mother, walking in with the dustpan and brush.

  “So she dropped it because I warned her not to?” said my grandmother, raising one thin, scathing eyebrow. “Get away from that glass,” she said to me. “You’re going to cut yourself.”

  “You didn’t warn her not to drop the glass,” said my mother. “You told her she would drop it. But Jean Liedloff says it’s the same either way. Whether you tell her, ‘You’ll drop it,’ or whether you tell her, ‘Don’t drop it,’ what she hears is your expectation that she will drop it, and so she does, she complies.”

  “I didn’t tell her to drop it,” replied my grandmother. “I didn’t make her drop it.”

  “On some level,” said my mother, “you did.” She bent down and picked up the big pieces of glass, holding them in her cupped hand.

  “You’ll cut yourself,” said my grandmother. My mother pursed her lips and carried the big pieces into the kitchen, where I heard the sound of the glass being wrapped up in newspaper, the package going into the bin, a cupboard being opened. When she came back into the room, my mother made no reference to the fresh plaster I saw on her finger. She picked up the dustpan and brush and began to clear up the smaller pieces of broken glass.

  “I hear you say such things,” countered my grandmother. “When she isn’t careful on the road, you tell her, ‘One of these days, a car is going to knock you down.’ When she walks on the wall, you tell her, ‘You’re going to fall.’ Will you make these things happen just by saying them?”

  My mother, sweeping, said, “Jean Liedloff says I shouldn’t say things like that. She says that if we say to a child, ‘Watch out, you’ll hurt yourself,’ the child, quite unconsciously, endeavours to do so, as if following an order. If we say, ‘One of these days, a car is going to knock you down,’ the child understands that one day that is going to happen, as if they have been promised something. She mentions a child who got over a fence and into a swimming pool and drowned because he was warned so often about that happening. He drowned because he was expected to.”

  My grandmother made a noise with her mouth and went outside, into the garden, where my grandfather was working in the shed at the end of the path. My mother went back into the kitchen with the dustpan and brush and I heard her tipping all those little broken bits into the bin. I stayed where I was. Was I more likely, I wondered, to drop a glass that I was carrying, or knock over the ornaments on the mantelpiece, or break the teacups in the sink, if I was told I would, or if I was told not to? I stood still, in socks on the living room’s swept-clean floorboards, looking for the glint of a stray shard.

  At school, in the sixth form, I began
reading Freud who, in explaining a dream of his, revealed that when he was born, an old peasant-woman prophesied to his mother that she had brought a great man into the world. I was studying psychology at the time, and came across Rosenthal and Jacobson and the elementary schoolchildren who were given a fake assessment, after which a randomly chosen group of these children was reported to the teachers to be showing signs of imminent intellectual blooming. This so influenced expectations regarding the children’s abilities that those assigned to the “spurting” group actually did spurt, finishing up with higher IQs. And what about the other ones, I wondered, the ones who did not “spurt”: how were they doing now? Thus, I discovered “the Golem effect”, in which low expectations cause poor performance in subjects, the observation of which confirms and reinforces low expectations, and so on. I read some of Merton’s work: his demonstration of how a “prophecy of collapse led to its own fulfillment”. In a footnote, Merton had added: “Counterpart of the self-fulfilling prophecy is the ‘suicidal prophecy’ which so alters human behavior from what would have been its course had the prophecy not been made, that it fails to be borne out” (Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure). I wondered about the influence of personality type on the outcome of a prophecy, on whether the prophecy proves to be self-fulfilling or suicidal. One pupil is told that she is “going nowhere” and becomes stuck on this path that has been described for her, and she does indeed go nowhere. On the other hand, there have been children whose school reports have called them “hopeless” and said that they were “on the road to failure”, whose junior school teachers wrote that, “This boy will never get anywhere in life” and, “He cannot be trusted to behave himself anywhere”, and these children – John Lennon MBE, Eric Morecambe OBE and Sir Winston Churchill – have gone on to be exceptionally successful in life (Hurley, Could Do Better: School Reports of the Great and the Good). Some people’s internal drives are no doubt stronger than the external factors acting upon them, and some people’s drives must be weaker, or at least their drives are different. Perhaps, for some people, the prophecy itself is irrelevant, while for others it is clearly influential. There is also the question of the point at which we might say that a narrative is complete, that it has reached its conclusion. We do not leave the story of Oedipus when he sets out for Thebes, resisting the prophecy that has been explained to him by the oracle. We see what happens next, and in the end he cannot help himself. A prophecy that has not come true today might still come true tomorrow, or in twenty years’ time, or within the hour. The bubble might yet burst.