Death and the Seaside

by Alison Moore

  ‘Shall I go and order?’ asked Bonnie, unzipping her purse, which was stuffed with old receipts and all sorts of things that she pulled out, searching for paper money.

  Sylvia picked something out of all the litter. ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

  Bonnie looked at the little origami figure that Sylvia was holding. ‘I found it in my flat,’ she said, ‘in the desk drawer. I think it’s some sort of bird, a flightless bird, like a chicken or a dodo.’

  ‘It’s a chicken,’ said Sylvia. ‘My grandmother used to make these. She showed me how to do it when I was little. I could probably do it now. You don’t forget these things once they’re in your head.’ Bonnie gave her the silver paper from inside her cigarette packet, and watched as Sylvia folded it corner to corner, folded again, turned it and lifted a flap and refolded, and already Bonnie was quite lost and would never have been able to retrace the steps. She had never even known how to make a paper hat or a boat. All of a sudden, there it was, standing on the table in front of her: a silver-paper chicken, and Bonnie thought of Blade Runner, and the cop saying, It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does?, like the chaplain in The Outsider who said that everyone was condemned to death: if you don’t die soon, you’ll die one day.

  ‘Chickens aren’t really flightless, you know,’ said Sylvia, ‘unless they’ve had their wings clipped. They can fly, they just tend not to; they don’t really need to, unless they feel they’re in danger.’

  Bonnie put the litter back into her purse, leaving the paper chickens standing on the table like two sentry guards. She started to get to her feet. ‘If I go and order,’ she said, ‘I can ask about the room, and the phone.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Sylvia, standing up. ‘I’m nearer than you, and I have the booking reference.’

  While Sylvia went to the bar, Bonnie sat and looked out of the window, thinking about Lyme Regis, which was mentioned in the shipping forecast, which Bonnie heard in the dead of night: Selsey Bill to Lyme Regis, and Lyme Regis to Land’s End; fair, moderate, occasionally very poor, and then ‘God Save the Queen’.

  She sat with the big oblong windows in between her and the climbing sea, and waited.

  19

  Bonnie woke feeling heavy, as if she had fallen asleep on the beach in the sun, except that she was in a bedroom, tucked up in bed, underneath a yellow blanket. Her arm was flung back, bent beneath her head, and she had to move it with her other hand so as to get the blood back into it. The dead weight was unsettling – like a ten-pound leg of lamb lying on the pillow, she thought.

  It was dusk, or dawn. She could see the sky through a curtainless window. She was in her room above the Hook, of course. She was in Susan’s room. How funny, she thought, that the window really did have no curtains.

  The journey must have been more tiring than she had realised. She remembered being downstairs in the bar with Sylvia. Sylvia had been talking about chickens and how they could be hypnotised. ‘I put a finger just in front of the chicken’s beak,’ she had said, ‘not quite touching,’ and she had put her finger close to the end of Bonnie’s nose as if to demonstrate, ‘and then I draw my finger away a little,’ she said, as she did so, ‘and then I bring it back . . . And I do this until my chicken is hypnotised.’

  Bonnie had no recollection of coming to bed. She did not even remember getting undressed, but she must have done so because she was wearing the nightie from her suitcase, which Sylvia must have brought in. Bonnie knew for certain that she had only been drinking diet lemonade. Or perhaps her drinks had got mixed up with Sylvia’s after all. Wasn’t it vodka, she thought, that you could not taste?

  How strange, she considered, looking around, that she had got the room so right, or nearly right. Or perhaps it was not so strange, for it was only a room with a bed in it, and a wardrobe, and a desk with writing paper and a pen on it; you would find these things in any hotel room. As in her story, the wallpaper was floral, but only one of these walls was papered, while the other three were painted white, or off-white: it was a trick, she thought, to make the room look bigger than it really was. The wallpaper’s almost psychedelic design was not exactly what she had pictured, and the patterned carpet was busier than she had imagined. There were other differences too: there was a picture hanging on the partition wall opposite the window, just as there was in her Seatown story, and it was even a Cézanne, and one of the apple paintings as well, but it was not the right one, and it was a rather poor quality print in an ill-fitting frame. And there were three doors in the walls, like one of those riddles in which you have to make the right choice because one of the doors had something really terrible behind it.

  One of the doors was in the corner diagonally across from the bed, and the other two were facing that one. She did not know which of them led to the outside world, and which just led into a cupboard.

  Apart from these differences, though, it was astonishing the extent to which this room was like Susan’s, which had only ever existed in Bonnie’s mind, or so she had thought. It made her wonder if she had in fact been in this room before and had just forgotten, or half-forgotten.

  The lack of curtains was rather strange, but it did not bother her too much. If the room was in the attic, it was not like anyone walking by could see in.

  She wanted to sit up – she could see her cigarettes on the windowsill – but her limbs were sluggish. As she struggled up from the mattress, there was a knock at the door in the furthest corner of the room, and no pause before it opened and there was Sylvia, coming in with a breakfast tray.

  ‘Are you feeling any better?’ asked Sylvia.

  ‘Have I been ill?’ asked Bonnie. ‘Am I ill?’

  ‘You weren’t too good last night,’ said Sylvia, propping her up with pillows and setting the tray down on Bonnie’s lap: a glass of orange juice, a small plate of scrambled eggs, and a cup of tea. ‘You’ll want to stay in bed today. You’ll find your legs are weak, too weak to walk on just yet.’

  Sylvia sat down next to Bonnie, and Bonnie ate. Her appetite was fine. ‘I don’t remember coming upstairs last night,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said Sylvia. ‘But you seem much better now.’

  ‘It’s so strange being in this room,’ said Bonnie. ‘It’s a lot like the room in my story, weirdly so in some ways, although in other ways it’s different.’

  ‘In what ways is it different?’ asked Sylvia, frowning around at the room.

  ‘Well, there’s a clock on that wall,’ said Bonnie, ‘which isn’t there in my story.’ The clock, which had a big, round, white face, was on the same wall as the Cézanne.

  ‘You didn’t mention it in your story,’ said Sylvia. ‘That is true.’

  ‘And the Cézanne isn’t the right one,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ said Sylvia.

  ‘And the room’s the wrong shape,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Well I don’t see what anyone could do about that,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘It’s very strange though,’ said Bonnie, ‘that the room should be so similar, because as far as I know I’ve never been up here before.’

  ‘Well you obviously have,’ said Sylvia. ‘You’ve just forgotten. The subconscious is a powerful thing.’

  When Bonnie finished her scrambled eggs, she picked up her teacup. The saucer and her empty plate, side by side like a pair of staring eyes, shared a design of black and white concentric circles. She turned to look again at the pack of cigarettes on the windowsill. ‘Would you mind passing me my cigarettes?’ she asked.

  ‘You must not smoke,’ said Sylvia. ‘Let’s leave them there for now. Your room, by the way, is at the back of the building; I couldn’t get you a sea view, I’m afraid. But you’ll be able to hear the seagulls.’ And Bonnie could.

  ‘Do you think I could have some curtains?’ asked Bonnie.

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Sylvia, taking the tray from Bonnie’s
lap and standing up.

  ‘Could you ask the landlady?’

  Sylvia smiled. ‘You get some rest now,’ she said, moving the pillows that were propping Bonnie up. ‘You’ll be feeling sleepy.’ She helped Bonnie to lie down again, and pulled the yellow blanket over her, up to her neck. ‘You close your eyes and have a little nap.’

  Sylvia stroked Bonnie’s hair, slowly, the rhythm of it closing Bonnie’s eyes.

  When Bonnie woke again, she saw, in the weak daylight, on the carpet by the door, the edge of a piece of paper, like a note that had been pushed through the gap at the bottom of the door.

  She made an effort to sit up, but one leg was lying lifeless beneath the other and she had to lift it with both hands, holding it under the thigh. She hung the numb limb over the side of her bed and sat waiting for it to fizz back to life.

  After a while, she tried putting her weight on her feet, looking down at the carpet, whose geometric design was reminiscent of an optical illusion. When she stood up, she felt fine, not especially ill nor very dizzy, although as she stepped forward, moving towards the door, she felt like one of those newborn foals standing, trying to walk, for the very first time. She bent down carefully and picked the piece of paper up, looked at one side and then the other, but it was blank – although there was, when she turned the paper towards the light and inspected it closely, the faintest suggestion of words there, the shadow of something that had been photocopied almost to oblivion. She put her hand on the door handle. She half-felt that if she opened it and looked outside she would find nothing but desert, and that if she walked through the doorway she would never get back inside again. She opened the door, and it felt unexpectedly light in her hand. It was not solid wood; it was a cheap hardboard door, but newly painted. Outside, there was an empty landing, and the top of a flight of stairs, the sight of which made her head swim. She felt blurry. She had in mind to go and look for Sylvia, but her legs felt both weak and heavy and she wanted to go back to bed. ‘Sylvia?’ she called. ‘Sylvia?’ She heard a noise and a door further along the landing opened.

  ‘Bonnie!’ said Sylvia. ‘You’re out of bed!’

  Sylvia came to the door of Bonnie’s room and took her by the elbow, and Bonnie said, ‘Did you put this under my door?’

  ‘Put what under your door?’ asked Sylvia.

  ‘It’s some kind of note, I think,’ said Bonnie. She looked again at the piece of paper in her hand, and almost thought that she might be able to make out a message after all, but even as she looked, that hint of words dissolved, as a mirage dissolves.

  Bonnie left the piece of paper on the desk near the door, and Sylvia walked her back over to her bed.

  ‘I need to go to the toilet,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘There’s a toilet just there,’ said Sylvia, indicating one of the doors that Bonnie had taken for a cupboard.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting an en suite,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘You have everything you need right here,’ said Sylvia. ‘You don’t have to leave your room for anything. I’ll look after you.’ Sylvia held out her arm, and Bonnie, in her nightie, took it. She crossed the room, walking the length of that complicated carpet, with her arm linked through Sylvia’s, as if this were her wedding day, as if Sylvia were giving her away.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Sylvia, when they reached the door.

  Bonnie went in to use the toilet. There was no window in there so she switched on the light, and shut the door for privacy. ‘There’s even a shower in here,’ she said to Sylvia, through the closed door. ‘I could do with a shower, a bit later maybe. What happened last night?’ she asked. ‘It’s like one minute we were sitting downstairs and the next minute I was waking up here.’ She pressed the flush but nothing happened. She tried again. ‘The flush isn’t working,’ she said, but Sylvia did not answer. Bonnie turned on the tap but no water came out. ‘I think there’s a problem with the water,’ she said. ‘We ought to let the landlady know.’

  Bonnie opened the door and looked out, but Sylvia was not there. Bonnie made her way back across the room to her bed. She sat down. A tapping sound at the window made her turn her head: a seagull had perched on the sill outside and was rapping on the glass with its beak. The gull appeared to be looking at her, but Bonnie could not tell whether it could really see her or only its own reflection. It flew away.

  Bonnie tried to remember whether she had phoned her mother after arriving in Seaton. Sylvia had gone to the bar to order food, and had come back to say that she had asked about using the phone, and that it would be fine to do so but that the line was out of order and was at that moment being fixed, and that she would be welcome to use it as soon as it was mended. Bonnie had not, as far as she could remember, made her call.

  Sylvia came into the room with a tray, on which was a plate of toast and a cup of tea.

  ‘I want to phone my mum,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sylvia, setting the tray down on Bonnie’s lap. ‘But we haven’t got a phone, have we? And we’re out of range here anyway.’

  ‘But the pub’s got a phone. I can use that.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sylvia. ‘I’ll ask if it’s been fixed yet, and then if you’re strong enough I’ll take you downstairs so that you can phone your mother and tell her that you’re safe.’

  Bonnie ate her buttered toast, and Sylvia said, ‘It’s not true, you know, that we swallow eight spiders a year in our sleep. It’s a complete fabrication, but the statistic is decades old and continues to circulate on the Internet. It goes to show how keen we are to believe what we see.’

  ‘I didn’t really think it was true,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘It’s probably more like one or two,’ said Sylvia. ‘By the way, when Joe asked Susan why he would be slipping notes under her door and sticking them onto her window, why did you star-out the word “fucking”?’

  ‘I couldn’t write that,’ said Bonnie. ‘My mum might read it.’

  ‘I don’t really see why you need the swearing at all,’ said Sylvia. ‘And you shouldn’t start a sentence with “and” or “but”. It’s bad form.’

  Bonnie nodded and drank her tea. As she put her cup down again, she shivered.

  ‘Are you cold?’ asked Sylvia. ‘You didn’t bring a jumper with you, but I’ve got one you can wear.’ And she produced from somewhere, like a magic trick, or perhaps just out of a bedside drawer, a thin, blue jumper. She helped Bonnie to pull it on. ‘There,’ she said. She took the tray away, glancing back at Bonnie when she reached the door. Smiling, she left the room.

  Bonnie looked at the clock on the wall and realised that the hands were not moving. It occurred to her that she had no idea what time of day it was. The meal – the toast and tea – could have been breakfast or supper. She wondered where her watch was: it was not on her wrist. She could not see her shoulder bag anywhere, but she knew that her mobile phone was not in it anyway. Not knowing what time it was, she could not even be sure what day it was. She would have to ask Sylvia.

  She lay in bed, waiting to see whether it was going to get lighter or darker.

  Eventually, with the window still framing a wide, blue sky, she fell asleep. The lack of curtains only troubled her when she woke in the night and saw the cold window with all that darkness outside, that big black rectangle in the middle of the long wall.

  In her dream, Bonnie had jumped into a swimming pool. She was going down and down, feet first; the pool was impossibly deep, but it had no water in it. She felt her feet touch the white-tiled bottom, and remembered nothing after that.

  Bonnie opened her eyes and lay looking at the uncurtained window, in the middle of which she could see a small, white square. She sat up, peering at it, trying to see what it was. It was clear that it was not a reflection of the Cézanne, the wrong apples, next to which a reflection of the broken clock would have hung like a moon.

  There was no lamp on the be
dside table, so she climbed out of bed and crossed the room in the dark. She reached out and touched the white square, a sheet of paper, which was stuck to the inside of the glass. On the page, she thought she could see, despite the darkness, the word ‘JUMP’. She unstuck the paper from the window, took it over to the desk and switched on the Anglepoise lamp, which spilt a pool of yellow light across the desktop. With the light on, she felt exposed to the outside world, which she could not see; if she looked at the window, she saw only her own reflection, as if she were standing in front of a one-way mirror in an investigation room.

  Looking at the paper in the light, she found that there was nothing written on it after all, and even when she switched the lamp off again and looked at the page in darkness as before, she could see nothing there.

  She went to the door of her room, but when she tried to open it she found it resistant, as if she were pulling when she ought to be pushing. Eventually, she realised that it was locked. Bonnie knocked on her door, from the inside. ‘Sylvia?’ she called. ‘Sylvia?’ But no one answered.

  She turned away from the door and stood in the middle of the room, listening for sounds of breathing, hearing nothing. She scrunched up the piece of paper, dropped it into the wastepaper basket and went back to bed. She thought she might lie awake until it got light, but she must have fallen straight back to sleep because suddenly she was waking again. On the edge of sleep, she heard music, a song she knew – Last night as I lay on my pillow – the lines looping through her head – Last night as I lay on my bed – like the language she was supposed to be learning – Last night as I lay on my pillow – or like the lessons learnt by the children in Brave New World – I dreamt that my Bonnie was dead. What an odd song, she thought as she came awake, to hear in a pub in the depths of the night. Or perhaps it was only the remnant of a dream, because at that moment, the music stopped.