Death and the Seaside

by Alison Moore

  Having become interested in behaviourism, conditioning, and stimulus-response psychology, I begged my parents for a kitten, and when we got one I began to conduct behavioural experiments. In the acquisition stage of its conditioning, the kitten learnt to respond to my whistling at feeding time. I then tested to see how long it would take for the kitten to unlearn that association, to stop running to its empty bowl when I whistled. These were the extinction trials. It never did unlearn the response, although I suppose at some point I just abandoned the experiment. Ideally, I wanted to recreate the experiments which I had read about in my textbook, but I did not know how to go about making Pavlov’s one-way glass panel, or “an enclosed compartment [in which a subject could be] periodically subjected to electric shock (by electrifying the floor)” (Atkinson et al, Introduction to Psychology). I conducted experiments on my little brother. I would tell him, “Come here, I’ve got a present for you,” and sometimes, when he came to me, I would give him some little gift, and sometimes I would pinch him. I recorded the data as a graph.

  I read about LeShan, who experimented with sleep learning in relation to nail biting. Hundreds of times a night, for weeks, he played to a number of sleeping boys the phrase, “My fingernails are terribly bitter.” He claimed some success (although his phonograph eventually broke, requiring him personally to stand in the room at night repeating the phrase while the boys slept). And I read about Cameron, who was similarly interested in mind control techniques and who tried to reprogramme his bedbound subjects’ brains, playing taped messages to them through headphones for hours each day, day after day, for months. He is reported to have had some success with the message, “When you see a piece of paper, you want to pick it up.” I also read up on Skinner, who believed that human free will is an illusion. Around 30 years ago psychologist Benjamin Libet discovered that if you ask people to make voluntary movements, their brains initiate the movement before they become consciously aware of any intention to move. Other experiments have since been performed along similar lines, leading many neuroscientists to conclude that free will is an illusion.

  Fascinated by the potential of sleep learning and mind control, I also developed a curiosity about hypnosis, and specifically posthypnotic suggestion in which a suggestion made to a hypnotised subject is “activated” in the posthypnotic “waking” state, perhaps when a cue is given. I attempted to hypnotise my brother. However, he was uncooperative, despite me trying a very wide range of both traditional and innovative methods. I saw hypnosis done on stage, subjects convinced that they were Madonna, or that they were playing a trumpet when no trumpet was there, or that their chair was burning hot. I was most intrigued by the idea of negative hallucination, where the subject will fail to see what is right there in front of them. In the subject’s imagination, the hypnotist’s clothes disappear, or their own clothes disappear. The trick gets a big laugh and everyone claps and the subjects go back to their seats.

  My other interest was drama. Our school had a good drama department and I got involved in set design. I was fascinated by the ability of a neutral performance space to become a desert or a hotel room via the dressing of the space with papier mâché cacti or a bed and maybe a picture on the wall. It was not really the set design that was important: it was that we – the performers and the audience – all agreed to believe that the performance space was, at this moment, a desert or a hotel room.

  I attached myself to the drama department at university as well, taking classes in video production, which introduced me to the editing suite. Meanwhile, I was majoring in psychology, and saw a recording of the 1962 film of Stanley Milgram’s Obedience experiment, in which everyone was playing a role, was part of the act, except for the naive subject. I discovered the work of James Vicary, and began to take an interest in the possibility of subliminal messaging.

  It was around that time that I had my first run-in with the university, receiving my first warning. In my defence, I cited Milgram, and Watson, and others who had not been hampered by impossible-to-know long-term effects on their subjects. All sorts of things which used to be allowed in experimental psychology are unfortunately no longer permitted, formally.

  12

  ‘I thought we were going to stay in an Ibis,’ said Bonnie, switching on the kettle. ‘Or a Comfort Inn if there is one.’

  ‘No,’ said Sylvia. ‘This is better. We’re going to Seaton, because that’s where your story is set.’

  ‘It’s set in Seatown,’ said Bonnie, ‘a fictional Seatown.’

  ‘It’s obviously Seaton,’ said Sylvia. ‘I can see that, even if you can’t.’

  ‘And either way,’ said Bonnie, ‘why are we going there?’

  ‘If you go there, you might find out how your story ends,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘Fiona thinks it’s strange that I’m going on holiday with you,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Does she?’ said Sylvia. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘You’re my landlady,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘I don’t see what’s so strange about it,’ said Sylvia. ‘We’ll be one another’s travelling companions, like in Rebecca: I’ll be Mrs Van Hopper and you’ll be my young lady companion on the Côte d’Azur.’

  ‘I don’t think I have a name, do I?’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Oh, you have one,’ said Sylvia. ‘We just don’t know what it is. We know it’s something unusual and hard to spell.’

  ‘And I remember that she doesn’t much like Monte Carlo,’ said Bonnie. ‘She finds it artificial.’

  ‘Well,’ said Sylvia. ‘It is what it is.’

  ‘And it doesn’t end well, does it?’ said Bonnie. ‘It ends with everything ablaze.’ It ended with the smell of ash mixed with the salt wind from the sea.

  ‘Well, that’s not Mrs Van Hopper’s fault,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘My character seems to think it might be. If it wasn’t for Mrs Van Hopper, I’d never have become Mrs de Winter,’ said Bonnie. ‘You know,’ she added, ‘I know very little about you. You know a lot more about me.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can get us rooms above the Hook and Parrot,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘I don’t think they do rooms,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘But it’s in your story,’ said Sylvia. ‘That’s where Susan stays.’

  ‘I think there are rooms upstairs,’ said Bonnie, ‘but not for people to stay in. I think it’s just a pub.’

  ‘So that’s not where you stayed when you went there as a child?’

  ‘No,’ said Bonnie. ‘We stayed in a caravan park.’

  ‘Well,’ said Sylvia. ‘Maybe they do rooms now.’

  ‘I need to be on the ground floor,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Sylvia. ‘Leave it to me. Are you waiting for this cup of tea to make itself?’

  While Bonnie made the teas, Sylvia went ahead to the lounge. When Bonnie came through, Sylvia was standing near the desk, browsing through a small pile of new library books.

  ‘Is this your holiday reading?’ she asked. ‘Heart of Darkness. The Sheltering Sky. I can imagine you reading these in your room at the Ibis, journeying up the Congo and trekking into the North African desert while you’re lying on your bed.’

  ‘I thought we weren’t staying in an Ibis?’ said Bonnie.

  ‘No,’ said Sylvia. ‘No, we’re not.’ She took her cup of tea and drank it while she browsed through a Rough Guide volume that Bonnie had read, in which women braved Taliban-occupied Afghanistan; and Antarctica, where blinking for too long caused your eyes to freeze shut; and countries where leeches found their way onto your body, onto any and every part of you, even your privates, tiny ones worming unseen through your clothes; and where earthquakes parted the ground beneath you, the road you’d been travelling on, leaving you stranded.

  ‘I was wondering about getting into travel writing,’ said Bonnie, and Sylvia laughed. ‘I was going to try some travel writing
when I stayed in that Ibis. I was going to write about a museum I’d planned to go to, but I went on the wrong day and it was closed, so I just got a taxi back to the hotel.’

  Sylvia smiled and said, ‘Have you written any more of your story?’

  ‘No,’ said Bonnie. ‘I was thinking of seeing if I could get anything done this weekend.’

  ‘Put more detail into it,’ said Sylvia. ‘I want to be able to picture what everything looks like. What’s the wallpaper like in the bedroom? What’s the picture on the wall? Whereabouts in the room is the bed? You had a blanket in the first part, but now it’s a duvet. And what colour is it?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bonnie. ‘Yellow?’

  Sylvia finished her tea. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ll leave you to it, and when you’ve written it I’d like to read it.’

  ‘Maybe you can read it while we’re in Seaton,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘No,’ said Sylvia, ‘before that. I’ll pop round again in a week.’ She looked at the boxes from under the stairs. ‘I’ll take some of this away with me as well.’ She handed Bonnie her empty cup and picked up the cool box and another box that contained assorted bits and bobs. ‘See if you can find a teapot,’ she said, nodding to the other boxes. ‘It makes a better cup of tea.’

  III

  13

  Susan dreamt that she was in a hotel, walking back to her room, but she could not get her eyes to open properly; she could not hold them open long enough to read the numbers on the bedroom doors. And so she wandered up and down the corridor, unable to find her room.

  Waking, she found that she was not in fact walking endlessly in a corridor but lying in her bed, which was in the corner furthest from the door. She liked that her bed was in the corner; she liked to go to sleep against a wall, although she always found that she rolled to the opposite side, the side that was not against a wall, during the night. She still remembered the childhood bump of tumbling out of bed.

  The sun was shining on the floral wallpaper, and Susan turned towards the window and saw the unbroken blue sky.

  Her foot had gone to sleep, and she did not wait long enough before standing. The foot, as if boneless, dragged lamely on the patterned carpet as she went towards the window. She inspected the glass for marks where the paper must have been stuck to it in the night, but there was nothing, no residue. She opened the window wide and looked down at the pavement below, but saw no square of paper that might have been on the outside of the window before coming unstuck and dropping down. Perhaps what she had seen against the window in the night had just been something blown against the glass and then blown away again, or perhaps it had, in fact, somehow, been a reflection of something, perhaps a reflection of the picture after all, which was a still life, apples in a bowl, by Cézanne, whose walls slid, whose chairs bent, whose cloths curled like burning paper, whose perspective was distorted and who took liberties with reality.

  Or perhaps she had not really seen it at all; perhaps she had only dreamt it.

  She lit a cigarette. When she inhaled, the tip of her cigarette glowed orange like a dashboard warning light. She leaned over the sill to blow out smoke rings, which floated up, dispersing. They looked like cartoon wailing or surprise: o O O. She took a final puff, dropped the butt and watched it spark on the slabs. A cyclist on the pavement steered around it.

  Susan put on yesterday’s clothes. She needed to go to the launderette, but she would not go today because she was working behind the bar.

  The pub was always quiet during the week. Joe would probably come in; he usually spent his lunch hour in the Hook. Susan had been on one date with Joe. It had gone well, she thought, although he had been too busy for a second date; and then at some point, without anything having been said, it became clear to her that it was not going to happen, which was fine. They were friends now; she pulled his pints.

  Towards noon, Susan took out her powder compact and retouched her make-up. At two o’clock, Joe walked through the door. He came to the bar and Susan served him. ‘I had the strangest night,’ she said, putting the pint down on the bar in front of him. ‘Well, it started yesterday really. I’d just woken up, and I saw a piece of paper near the door, like a message that had been pushed underneath, but when I went to look at it, it was blank, or I thought it was, but there might have been something on it that I couldn’t quite make out. And then last night I woke up and you know how I’ve got no curtains?’

  Joe did not respond. His attention was on a woman at the far end of the bar. She looked like a mannequin, made out of pale pink plastic or fibreglass. The man she was with leaned forward to kiss her, and she let him but she kept her eyes open while he did it. Her false eyelashes looked like a spider’s legs on her brow bone and the top of her cheek, which gave Susan the shivers, thinking about spiders crawling across your face in the night, and swallowing them in your sleep – she had read that somewhere, that we swallow eight spiders a year in our sleep. Perhaps it was not even true but now she was scared of the thought anyway and imagined spiders creeping out of their hidey-holes and onto her face the moment she fell asleep. She had even mentioned this to Joe, and he had told her that he would like to get hold of a plastic spider and put it on her face while she was sleeping, to scare the crap out of her when she woke up.

  Susan, who had been going on with her story of the night before, stopped dead in the middle of her sentence. Was it Joe, playing tricks on her? He could have got hold of her keys, got them copied. With a set of keys, he could let himself in and out of the pub, in and out of her room while she slept.

  Joe reached out and touched Susan’s frown line with the tip of his forefinger. This was something he did: if she had been talking for too long, he pretended to switch her off. Now, as if she were a machine whose screen had frozen mid-task, with his fingertip pressed into her flesh, against the bone of her forehead, he rebooted her: ‘Beep,’ he said.

  ‘Have you been in my room?’ said Susan.

  ‘You know I have,’ said Joe, grinning.

  ‘No, I mean, have you been in my room when I’ve been asleep?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Joe.

  ‘Yes, but I mean, without me knowing you were there?’

  Joe raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I’ve been finding all these notes,’ said Susan, ‘slipped under my door and stuck to my window.’

  Joe shrugged. ‘They’re not from me. Did you think they were from me? Why would I be sticking notes onto your f***ing window? What do they say, these notes?’

  ‘I’m not sure they say anything. But I think they might say, “JUMP”.’

  Joe gave her a look, the same look he’d given her when she’d asked him if he wanted to come to her parents’ at Christmas. ‘You think someone’s slipping you notes that tell you to jump, but you’re not sure?’

  ‘The notes appear when I’m asleep, and I can never quite make out what’s written on them.’

  ‘Look, if you’ve been dreaming that messages are telling you to jump, well, don’t. Don’t jump out of the window. OK?’ He finished his pint and got up to leave. ‘Back to the grindstone,’ he said. ‘No jumping out of the window, all right?’ He walked to the door, and when he got there he turned and said again, as he disappeared through the doorway, ‘Don’t jump.’

  The mannequin woman and her partner left too, leaving Susan alone in the bar. She helped herself to a drink and looked through the local paper for the quick crossword puzzle. She wrote her answers lightly in pencil, and doodled while she thought.

  The radio was on, as it always was. It was tuned to a local station that played love songs and adverts. Susan turned the dial and found a poet talking about how stealing something changes it. ‘You want it,’ he said, ‘you decide to take it, but now that it’s in your hands suddenly it’s different, it automatically begins to reshape into something else.’ It made Susan think of some sweets that she had once tried to steal. She had se
lected a packet and tucked it up her sleeve. She had got as far as the doorway and was stepping outside when a hand grabbed her shoulder, and she had felt the sweets against the inside of her wrist; they were round and hard like pebbles inside the little scratchy packet that said ‘WIN’.

  ‘When William Burroughs and Brion Gysin were hanging out in the hotel on Rue Gît-le-Cœur and they were cutting up and rearranging newspapers,’ continued the poet, ‘they told people that they were trying to uncover the subliminal message hidden inside the original newspapers. They weren’t thinking of themselves as like artists, they were more like cryptographers, right, ’cause after all, they’re only showing you what’s already there.’

  Susan gave up on the crossword, turned the pencil over and rubbed out her answers and her doodles of eyes with lashes like spiders’ legs. The landlady liked to do the crossword herself, and Susan was forbidden to touch it.

  By the end of her shift, after hours of standing, Susan’s legs were aching, as they always were. She went outside for some fresh air. It was nearly the end of October. Before the bonfire, there would be Halloween. She wondered if they did Halloween here. At home, in the village, there would be carved, lit pumpkins in the windows, and there would be witches and devils and monsters and ghouls in the streets, and fake police tape stretched across doorways, crime scene tape saying ‘DO NOT ENTER’, ‘HAUNTED HOUSE – DO NOT ENTER’, and on doorsteps and in entrances and hallways there would be bowls of sweets.