Death and the Seaside

by Alison Moore

  ‘All right,’ said Sylvia, ‘well, give me what you’ve written and then I can read it before we go. I can’t wait to read it.’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ said Bonnie. ‘Not just yet.’

  Her mother called from the kitchen, ‘Bonnie! I think you’ve got mice!’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Please,’ said Sylvia, gesturing towards the kitchen door.

  Bonnie left the room, saying to her mother, ‘I wondered if I had. I thought I’d heard something scratching.’

  When Bonnie returned to the lounge, Sylvia said, ‘I’d better go, dear.’

  ‘It looks as if some mice got in,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘All right,’ said Sylvia, as she picked her way past the road signs’ metal legs. ‘Let me know if you see them.’ As she passed through the kitchen, Sylvia peered into the pot that was bubbling away on the stove. ‘That smells delicious,’ she said.

  ‘The recipe’s just there,’ said Bonnie’s mother, nodding towards it while she stirred. ‘If you give me a minute, I’ll copy it out for you.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ said Sylvia, who had her phone in her hand and was angling the screen over the page of text. She took a photo. ‘Got it,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure I do know you,’ said Bonnie’s mother. ‘I just can’t think how. Who’s your dentist?’

  ‘I really do have to go,’ said Sylvia, moving towards the back door. ‘I must finish my packing. Ah!’ she exclaimed, looking at the table with folding legs, which had come out from under the stairs and was now getting in the way in the kitchen. ‘I’ll take this off your hands,’ she said, picking it up. It was lightweight but long, and Bonnie took one end of it and helped Sylvia to steer the table through the doorway and into the passageway. Bonnie felt like someone in a gag trying to get a ladder through a series of doorways, someone like Stan Laurel, who was always in some kind of trouble, some kind of foolish danger.

  ‘All right,’ said Sylvia, when they were standing on the pavement at the front of the house. ‘This will do, you can put it down here.’

  ‘I can bring it inside,’ said Bonnie. ‘I can help you get it up the stairs.’ She had never seen inside Sylvia’s part of the house.

  ‘No,’ said Sylvia, ‘this is just fine. You can leave it with me now. You’d better be getting back – your dinner will be waiting for you.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’m looking forward to our trip,’ she added. ‘I’ll be here with the hire car at nine o’clock on Monday.’

  When Bonnie got back to the kitchen, she found the light off, the stove off. Her mother called through from the lounge, ‘We started without you.’ Bonnie went through and her mother indicated the dish on the floor. ‘Help yourself,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know how you can live like this,’ said her father, balancing his full plate on his knees. ‘Have you not got a table?’

  ‘Funnily enough,’ said Bonnie, ‘I’ve just helped Sylvia take a table out of here.’

  ‘Of course you have,’ said her father.

  They ate, and when they had all finished, Bonnie reached for her parents’ empty plates. ‘Let me take those,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said her mother. ‘These are my good plates, I don’t want you to break them.’

  Bonnie’s mother took the plates through to the kitchen and Bonnie said, ‘Do we want afters?’

  ‘What have you got?’ asked her father.

  Bonnie went and had a look in the fridge, and in the freezer compartment, and in her biscuit tin. ‘I’ve got biscuits,’ she said.

  ‘What sort of biscuits?’ asked her father.

  ‘Broken,’ said Bonnie. ‘I got a kilogram.’

  ‘I think we’ll just go,’ said her mother, who had washed up the plates and was packing them away, along with everything else that she had brought with her.

  Bonnie walked her parents to their car. Bonnie’s mother, after getting in and closing her door, wound down her window to say, ‘Have a good trip!’ and Bonnie’s father, behind the wheel, shouted up at Sylvia’s flat, ‘Don’t let her drive!’ There was no sign of Sylvia though; there were no lights on.

  Bonnie returned to the flat, to the lounge, where she switched on the television and sat and watched the tennis. She always meant to follow Wimbledon, but somehow she never did, not all the way through to the end.

  Her eyes followed the ball across the net, to and fro, like someone following a hypnotist’s swinging pocket watch, to a background murmur of commentary. The game had a familiar lulling, rhythmic quality, but at the same time, underlying the tennis whites and the strawberries and cream, there was muscle and ferocity and steely-eyed tenacity.

  The tennis finished while Bonnie was in the kitchen, boiling the kettle. She took her cup of tea back into the lounge and settled down again in front of the television to watch Blade Runner. She had seen the film before, but this, it turned out, was a different version: the Director’s Cut. With one brief shot spliced into the middle of another scene and lasting only seconds, the Director’s Cut introduced into the narrative a subtle but vital difference: Deckard’s mental image of a unicorn running through the mist suggested that Deckard himself was a Replicant. It was unsettling, as if this must also have been true in the other version, as if this had been part of the narrative all along but without Bonnie ever having seen it, despite sitting through the whole film. Those few seconds made all the difference in the world, changing the meaning of Deckard finding the silver paper origami unicorn at the end of the film. How disturbing it would be, she thought, to discover, just like that, that you were not what you thought you were, that you were not real. And what had happened to her happy ending? In the Director’s Cut, you no longer saw Deckard and Rachael driving off into the future. All that was just gone. ‘That’s not how it ends!’ said Bonnie to the screen. She watched the closing credits, after which there was sometimes something more, something extra.

  The screen faded to black.

  Apparently there were other versions as well, but Bonnie was wary of seeing them.

  She did not feel like going to bed just yet. She changed channels and watched an old silent film, the start of which she had already missed. Intertitles flashed up, like subliminal messaging for slower readers: ‘What’s the matter – afraid of Temptation?’ Or like a fortune cookie message: ‘The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.’ The flickering text also reminded her of an installation that she had seen with her mother at Tate Liverpool: in a dark box of a room, she had sat on a bench facing a screen on which a short black and white film had looped, and in amongst the indistinct, ghostly images she had seen a phrase, ‘THE DEATH OF TOI’. She had sat there watching the film of flickering light and shadows repeating, the words flashing up over and over again. She had been comfortable in there. It was not often she went to a gallery, and less often still that she understood a piece of modern art, but this, she felt, she did. She was talking about it as they left the gallery, and her mother said, ‘I don’t think that’s what it said. Didn’t you see the description?’ Bonnie had not. The film, her mother explained, was a corrupted recreation of the final scene of the silent film of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the caption was ‘THE DEATH OF TOM’. Bonnie had seen something that was not really there, or rather, she had seen something that she was not meant to see. Now that she had seen it, though, she could not unsee it; she still saw it flashing up on the screen in her mind’s eye as she walked with her mother up Water Street: ‘THE DEATH OF TOI’.

  The film that Bonnie was watching now came to an end: ‘The End’ appeared on the screen and Bonnie switched the television off. She made another cup of tea and took it to bed with her.

  On Sunday afternoon, Bonnie went to the launderette. There was no one in there except for her, and the woman behind the counter who was in charge. There were machines going, but most people put their washing in and then left, a
nd came back when their washing was done. Bonnie, though, had once put her washing into the machine and gone home and failed to return until after the launderette was closed. Now she stayed, to be on the safe side.

  She put her washing into a machine and set it going. The woman behind the counter said, ‘Hello, love,’ and Bonnie turned around. The woman was not looking at her now; she was searching through a bag of laundry. Bonnie said hello but she might have said it too quietly to be heard; the woman did not look up. Bonnie sat down to wait. She had forgotten to bring a magazine. Her phone was in her pocket but she had neglected to charge it and the screen was dead.

  The launderette had been given a fresh coat of paint; Bonnie could smell the fumes. The smell reminded her of ghosts. She had once – three times in fact – seen the ghost of Elvis Presley. She had been asleep in her bedroom, which was being painted at the time, the walls changing from a floral pattern to plain white, the blue flowers still showing through after the second coat, like the bell on Noddy’s hat showing through the black paint on Adrian Mole’s bedroom wall, the bell iterated dozens of times around the walls and still showing through coat after coat. Bonnie had woken up in the night and seen Elvis’s ghost, which came forward out of a poster of him, which was still up on a wall that had not yet been painted, or else – she could not remember – the wall had already been painted and the poster had been put back up. The following night, the same thing happened, except that this time Elvis grew bigger, came closer. On the third night, he was bigger and closer still, a beautiful spectre looming over her. She did not tell her mother, who would have said that it was only the paint fumes. Bonnie knew that it was not just the paint fumes: she had seen it with her own eyes.

  Bonnie watched her washing tumbling around inside the spinning machine. It was mesmeric. It made her feel sleepy.

  The woman behind the counter said, ‘You have to watch this programme they’re showing at nine o’clock tonight on the BBC.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bonnie. ‘All right.’

  The woman glanced up, and Bonnie realised that the woman was using a hands-free device; she was talking to somebody else.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Bonnie. ‘You were talking to somebody else, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the woman, but she had already looked away again and her reply might have been meant for the person on the other end of the phone.

  When the washing machine came to a stop, Bonnie discovered that she had not brought enough money for the drier, and besides, the afternoon had disappeared and the launderette would be closing soon. She pulled her wet washing out of the machine into her Bag for Life and lugged it home. She draped her damp laundry over the washing line in the yard, and it hung there in the early evening shadows and in the dusk, barely drying at all, while Bonnie flicked between BBC channels, wondering which of the nine o’clock programmes was the right one.

  17

  My subjects knew me as Dr Slythe. I had put an advertisement in the local paper, and a reasonable number of people had responded. I hired an upstairs room in a community centre on Waterside Close. The room was not one of those windowless boxes: it had a large window, which I opened, and I pinned a welcoming notice onto the door. I set up a television and a video player and put out a row of chairs for the participants. It was going to be, I thought, a little bit like one of those theatre shows where you think you’re just in the audience but then, unexpectedly, you have become part of the performance, sometimes without even leaving your seat. The houselights go up and that’s the signal, like the light which comes on before the meat powder is delivered into the dog’s dish in Pavlov’s experiment, or like the tone which the dog hears prior to receiving a shock in Rescorla’s investigations, or in Maier and Seligman’s experiments, which showed that dogs which have been taught through conditioning that they have no control over receiving shocks will, in the second stage of the experiment, when they do have a choice, make no attempt to avoid the shock.

  I dressed the part, in a suit, navy blue, and I also had a white laboratory coat to wear, which I had borrowed from the university prior to being asked to leave.

  My subjects were split up into three groups, each of which was to be shown a video which I had put together in the editing suite. Nowadays, there is dedicated software: I could do it on my laptop at home.

  I was planning on testing the power of subliminal messaging, not by flashing up the name of a branded drink or even an exhortation to drink this particular branded drink. It seemed to me that the success of such an experiment would be hard to quantify: a participant who, after seeing the video, chose that particular branded drink, might have chosen it anyway, regardless of the subliminal message. It seemed much more reasonable to assume that nobody coming into the room that day was planning on jumping out of the window.

  More specifically, I was aiming to establish which was the more effective: negative suggestion or positive command. I had, in the editing suite, put together three videos. Superficially, they were all the same, a montage of various everyday images.

  My morning cohort, Group A, included Mrs Falls. She’d had to bring along her daughter, who was seven years old at the time. The little girl sat on the floor at the back of the room with a drawing pad and some felt-tip pens and a packet of sweets to keep her quiet. “Don’t draw on the floor, Bonnie,” said Mrs Falls to the little girl, who had not yet uncapped a pen. The little girl looked at the floor, whose vinyl tiles were about the same size and shape as the sheets of paper in her drawing pad, and she took the lid off a pen. I seated my participants so that they were facing both the television screen and, beyond it, the window, which was open, I said, so that the room would not be stifling. I explained to them that I was studying attention span and memory, and that they were required to watch very closely the video which I was about to show to them, and that afterwards there would be a task and questions. And so, they watched very closely a video in which I had planted messages which appeared on the screen for a matter of milliseconds. For Group A, in amongst landscape and cityscape and seashore shots, there were positive commands: “FAIL”, in capitals in white on black and in black on white, and “JUMP”, superimposed on edges, ledges, open windows. (“Fail” is both a positive command and a negative word. In a 2009 article, “Subliminal advertising really does work, claim scientists”, the Telegraph reported that subjects who were shown negative, neutral and positive subliminal words were more likely to pick up, subconsciously, on the negative ones, such as “despair”, and “murder”.) When the video came to an end, I realised that I had forgotten to put on my white laboratory coat. I put it on and then asked the participants to take a buzz-wire test. There was a reasonable success rate on the buzz-wire test, which was a disappointment. Mrs Falls managed it: she had a very steady hand. I then asked a series of questions about the video which the group had been shown, keeping them there for longer than I had planned to, but not a single person showed the slightest interest in the open window. I was not, of course, planning on letting anyone actually jump out of the window, but the urge to do so would nonetheless have been evident. I had argued with the university many times about such subtleties.

  In between my first two groups, I ate a sandwich. It was during this break that I realised that I had inadvertently watched the first video alongside Group A: I too had been exposed to the “FAIL” and “JUMP” commands. It felt like having stood in the path of an X-ray, an invisible beam of electromagnetic radiation, without having first put on the lead apron. Or perhaps, I thought, the video would not work on me, if I knew that the subliminal messages were there.

  I tidied the room up and noticed that the drawing pad had been left behind. On the front, in untidy handwriting, it said “Bonnie Susan Falls”, and inside she had drawn a series of rectangles.

  After lunch, I welcomed Group B, to whom I showed the same film, except that their subliminal messages were negative suggestions: “DON’T FAIL”, in black and white,
and “DON’T JUMP”, printed like public notices in front of those open windows and at those cliff edges. I watched it with them, hoping that it might neutralise any effect from the first video, that a positive command and a negative command might cancel each other out. Afterwards, they did the buzz-wire test and answered the questions and again showed not the slightest interest in the window, which I had opened a little wider before they came in.

  I had hired the community centre for the whole day, but by the afternoon I was running late. I ought to have hired it for two days, or three, but that would have been more expensive. Also, by the middle of the afternoon, I was out of temper because my experiment was not going as I had hoped. I rushed the control group, who were to watch a version of the video which had no subliminal messages in it. I asked them only a few questions before paying them and sending them home. When I was packing up, I discovered that undoctored version of the video still in my bag, which meant that my “control” group must in fact have seen one of the other videos. Probably, I had accidentally reinserted the version that I had shown to Group A, or perhaps I had neglected to swap the tape at all after the Group B showing. Either way, this meant that I had no control group. But never mind, I thought: the experiment had failed anyway. Slight differences between the groups’ buzz-wire tests were statistically insignificant, and not one of my subjects had even approached the open window. One woman, who at one point I thought was about to, was only fetching her purse from her bag, so as to show another woman a photograph of her new granddaughter. “Oh,” said the other woman, looking at the baby’s picture. “She’s going to be a heartbreaker.”

  I typed up my notes, but I was, to be honest, rather put out.

  Then, after the passage of some 20 years, I read in the local newspaper about a man who had jumped or fallen from the roof of a car park, and I recognised his name: Eliot Pierce. I dug out my records of my subjects’ names, groupings, test scores, and I found that this man had been in Group C: he had been the youngest member of my control group. I remembered that he had worn glasses, and that the lenses were dirty, smudged: he walked around with a big thumbprint – presumably his own, but possibly somebody else’s – between him and the world. I had wondered whether his glasses would have prevented him from seeing the video properly, whether everything would have looked blurry, but I suppose not.