Death and the Seaside

by Alison Moore

  It was still dark. And there, again, in the middle of the window, was a familiar white square. She stared at it, knowing that if she crossed the room and tried to touch the piece of paper that was stuck to the glass, she would find that she could not: her fingers would slip right over it as if it were frozen beneath ice. She crept to the end of her bed, towards the closed window, through which she could hear the sea and the crying of gulls, which sounded like laughter, and she said to them, through the glass, ‘Don’t you sleep?’

  There did seem to be something written on the piece of paper. It was not quite legible, but Bonnie believed that she could almost see the hint of the word that was written there: ‘JUMP’.

  Her pack of cigarettes was still on the windowsill. It was face up, and the label said ‘Smoking kills’. Bonnie extracted a cigarette, reached for the window handle and eased the window open. It was astonishingly dark out there: there were no lit street lamps, or stars visible in the sky; there was no moon. She could barely see the pavement below. In the darkness, she could hear very clearly the pull of the tide. But where was her lighter? It was not in the packet with the cigarettes, nor loose on the windowsill. Perhaps it was in her shoulder bag, which she did not have. She pulled the window to again and put the unsmoked cigarette back inside the packet. She went back to her bed and her pillow.

  She dreamt about nothing.

  ‘My door was locked,’ said Bonnie to Sylvia, who was coming into the room with a bowl of ice cream, like Bonnie’s mother when Bonnie had her tonsils removed.

  ‘Sorry, Bonnie,’ said Sylvia, shutting the door behind her and coming over to the bed. ‘I decided to lock your door because you’ve not been well, sometimes hardly able to get out of bed, and if you couldn’t get to the door to lock it from the inside, I had to lock it from the outside, to keep you safe. That makes sense, doesn’t it?’

  ‘And I still don’t know where my bag is,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Have you not got it?’ asked Sylvia. ‘I’m sure it will turn up before we leave.’

  ‘I saw another note,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Another note?’ said Sylvia.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bonnie. ‘Like the one I found under the door yesterday, except that this one was on the window.’

  Sylvia frowned. She put her hand to Bonnie’s forehead. ‘You ought to rest,’ she said. ‘You’ve not been well.’

  ‘I would like to get some fresh air though,’ said Bonnie. ‘I’d really like to go down to the seafront.’

  ‘Soon,’ said Sylvia, ‘perhaps.’

  Bonnie was feeling rather weak in the legs anyway. She ate her vanilla ice cream, and Sylvia said, ‘Where is this note?’

  ‘I’m sure I left the first note on the desk,’ said Bonnie. ‘But it’s gone now. I threw the second note in the wastepaper basket.’

  Sylvia went over to the wastepaper basket. ‘The basket is empty,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bonnie. ‘And there was a third one as well, stuck to the outside of the window,’ but they could both see, even as she was saying it, that there was nothing there now.

  ‘I think you’ve been dreaming,’ said Sylvia. ‘Or hallucinating.’

  Sylvia herself did not look entirely well, thought Bonnie. She looked rather wide-eyed. Her complexion was shiny and her hair was quite wild. She still had on what might have been the same blue suit, and it looked a little dishevelled. Perhaps this sea air was not doing either of them any good.

  ‘You’re getting mixed up with what happens in your Seatown story,’ said Sylvia. ‘It’s not surprising, of course. Here you are, in Susan’s room, in Susan’s bed, almost in Susan’s skin. Now you can find your ending. You just have to think: what is she going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Well, as long as you’re in the right frame of mind, in your character’s mindset, it will come. You’re Susan – what happens next?’

  Bonnie finished her ice cream and Sylvia took the bowl away, and Bonnie heard her lock the door.

  Bonnie woke suddenly, from a dream in which she had dived into water, into the sea, and was looking around on the seabed for something that she had lost. She had been underwater for a very long time, and throughout she had been holding her breath.

  She seemed to remember from reading Freud that a dream of diving into water was a ‘crossing a threshold’ symbol relating to the process of waking. It seemed topsy-turvy, because the sea was supposed to be the realm of dreams. In dreams, though, there was all this reversal.

  And she had, just before waking, found what she had been looking for, which was a key, a car key. She had lifted it from where it was lying half-buried in the sand, like a gift from the sea.

  She could feel something tickling her cheek, and she scratched and rubbed at her face.

  She was on the edge of the mattress. She rolled back into the middle of the bed and looked at the window, the night sky. There was no moon – no circle, and no square either. She got out of bed and turned on the desk lamp. Squinting away from the light, she looked down at the headache-inducing carpet, which she could see now had not been properly laid, only cut to size; she could see the loose threads from the rough edges against the skirting boards.

  Facing the window, she found that her reflection was missing, as if somehow she did not exist, but then she saw that the window was wide open; it must have been left ajar and caught by the wind. She shivered in the night air and thought that it was lucky that the glass in the flung-open window had not smashed. The draught coming in, blowing the split ends of her hair against her face, must have been what woke her up.

  She could smell something damp in the room, something mouldering, a swampy smell.

  And then she saw the word.

  20

  There was a word on the window. It looked etched into the glass itself, scratched with something sharp, like the point of a compass, and she remembered a boy at school using the point of a compass to scratch a message into his own arm. She did not remember what it was that he scored into his flesh, but it was something short, and perhaps left unfinished.

  She went to the window and ran the tip of her forefinger along the length of the word: ‘JUMP’. The surface of the glass was smooth, though; she could see but not feel the engraving. It seemed to be inside the glass, like the warning that appeared like an advertisement within the window of an electric tram in an M. R. James story. What were the words that appeared there? It was, she thought, some lines from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, about someone who, having glanced over his shoulder, walks on,

  And turns no more his head;

  Because he knows a frightful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread.

  Or perhaps that appeared somewhere else in the story. She had a feeling that what was seen within the window of the tram was a message with a more specific hint of what was coming, but she could not quite remember what it was.

  She wanted to touch the outside of the window to see if the writing had somehow been scratched on backwards from the outside. She thought that this message was not quite so far beyond her reach as the previous one had been.

  She took her pack of cigarettes from the windowsill. The lighter was inside the packet, where it belonged. She lit up a cigarette and leaned out of the window to puff out the smoke. She could hear the harsh utterances of the gulls, and the sound of the sea toying with the pebbles at its edge, and she flicked her ash to the ground. In a vacuum, or on the moon, she would fall at the same speed as that ash, at the same speed as a feather. She was not in a vacuum though; she was not on the moon.

  Light was leaking into the sky. The tide would be coming in.

  It seemed to her that it mattered greatly whether the word had somehow appeared within the glass or whether it had been scratched into the glass from the far side. She reached around, trying to touch the outside of the window, but
her arm was too short. She got herself up onto the windowsill and tried again, straining towards that hard-to-reach spot behind the word. Her fingertips, with their bitten nails, edged closer. ‘Come on,’ she murmured, ‘come on,’ and she leaned out just a little further.

  Her cigarette landed last, and softly.

  Keep passing the open windows.

  – John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

  21

  She knew that was how it had to end. As soon as she had seen that word, which really did seem to be scratched into the pane of glass in the unfastened window, Bonnie had known suddenly and clearly what she had to do. Still in that place between sleeping and fully waking, she had turned away from the wide-open window and written the last part of her story out in longhand in the lamplight, without even sitting down at the desk, only leaning over the desktop to scribble onto the paper, giving herself a backache. She felt strongly, unequivocally, that it was the only possible conclusion, although she would want to check that reference to ‘Casting the Runes’, that Coleridge quotation.

  So, she thought, as she put down her pen, her story was finished, although she still did not know why the messages had appeared in Susan’s room, or who had put them there. It was the landlady, she supposed; she had wanted to see what would happen. People did some very odd things. Or at least the landlady was responsible for the first message. Beyond that, perhaps it had just been Susan’s imagination. Or perhaps it was all in her imagination; perhaps she had dreamt the whole thing. Perhaps, at the end, she was sleepwalking.

  Straightening up, Bonnie became aware that the door to her room was standing slightly open, creaking in the breeze. She stepped away from the desk and went towards the door. She looked outside, peering up and down the dark landing. ‘Sylvia?’ she said, but there was no reply. She stepped onto the landing.

  The door adjacent to hers was ajar, and Bonnie hesitated only briefly before entering this neighbouring room. Even in the dim light of dawn, Bonnie could see that Sylvia was not in there, although she switched the light on anyway. Not only was Sylvia not in her bed but there was no bed; there was no furniture at all except for a table standing against the wall. Everything was bare: the walls and the gappy floorboards and the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Only Bonnie’s room had been given a fresh coat of paint, and decorated with a few rolls of end-of-line floral wallpaper and cut-to-size patterned carpet and a Cézanne that might have been printed off the Internet, the bed dressed with Susan’s yellow blanket.

  The table, which was standing against the partition wall, was the one with folding legs from the under-stairs cupboard, and on it stood an open laptop. On the screen, Bonnie could see what she realised was her own room, as if the screen were a one-way window; she could see the bed in which she had just been sleeping, and the wide-open window from which Susan had fallen. A wire snaked out of the side of the laptop and up the wall, up to a finger-sized hole that had been drilled through the brickwork. It reminded her of artworks that she had seen that invited people to look through peepholes. The wire disappeared into the hole, and would come out, she guessed, on the far side, just where the clock that did not tell the time had been hung on the wall. If she were to stand in her own room in front of the clock, her face would appear on the screen of the laptop in Sylvia’s room.

  Next to the laptop was a notepad whose handwritten entries said things such as ‘9.46pm awake’. Beside the notepad were a few old typewritten pages, stapled together in one corner. The pages included, saw Bonnie, browsing through, a list of names, split into three groups, in the first of which Bonnie saw her mother’s name, and, inserted in pencil, a reference to herself: ‘Bonnie Falls, 7 years old’. Her skin prickled as if chilled by a draught. There was also a more recent, word-processed document – something like a report, with citations. Flicking through the loose pages, she saw ‘Bonnie has failed’, ‘free will is an illusion’, ‘FAIL’ and ‘JUMP’, and something about chickens. Towards the back, she found what seemed to be a summary or critique of the dissertation that she had never written, and a newspaper clipping about Eliot Pierce and his plunge from the top of the three-storey car park in town. He had landed badly and had been in a coma, but he was all right, he was going to be all right, as far as Bonnie knew. On the last page, like a final thought, was a single handwritten paragraph: ‘Eliot Pierce was 18, only just on the brink of adulthood, and Bonnie Falls was still an infant. Might young people be more susceptible to subliminal messages than older people are? They are certainly more suggestible. A number of reports document the suggestibility of children, especially very young children, whose memories are malleable, their narratives changeable, conforming to the adults’ suggestions. It should be quite easy to test whether these very young children are also more susceptible to subliminal messages.’

  There was a used coffee cup on the table, and an Anglepoise lamp, and an empty CD case with a handwritten label on the front saying ‘BONNIE SEASIDE’.

  Underneath the table, Bonnie found her shoulder bag, inside which she located her lighter; and in Sylvia’s bag, Bonnie discovered her missing phone, along with the car keys, and a paper bag with something hard and round inside it, like a cartoon bomb, wrapped in layers of tissue paper and bubble wrap. Beneath these layers, she found a teapot, with ‘Seatown’ written on the side.

  She could not see her suitcase. And where was Sylvia? She was not in the little bathroom that adjoined this would-be bedroom. Bonnie opened the other door next to the bathroom, which was not a cupboard but a kitchenette, with a lukewarm kettle on the side, and those plastic water containers that Sylvia had brought along, and a toaster, and a half-empty jar of instant coffee and a spoon, and a little stack of clean crockery and Tupperware tubs on a tray, and a window that had a view of the sea and was within sight of the Hook and Parrot, which was a few hundred metres down the road.

  Bonnie returned to her own room. There was light in the sky now. She looked in the wardrobe and under the bed, where she found her suitcase, and when she opened it up she found it full of her damp and mouldering clothes. The clothes that she had travelled down in were in there too and had become equally damp, but she put them on. She felt like something that had just crawled out of the sea.

  There was still some life in her phone, and there was a signal. She had lots of missed calls, from home, from her mother, who Bonnie called now. She hoped that she would not hear the answerphone – ‘Please, please, please,’ she said to the phone – and then she heard her mother’s voice, saying, ‘Bonnie? Bonnie? Is that you? Where are you?’

  ‘I’m still at the seaside,’ said Bonnie, ‘but I’m coming home.’

  ‘Oh thank God,’ said her mother. ‘Are you with Sylvia?’

  ‘I don’t know where she is,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Your Sylvia is Dr Slythe, did you know that?’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘I told you all about her, years ago, about that experiment she conducted at the community centre, and what Eliot Pierce’s mother told me Dr Slythe was really doing.’

  Bonnie did not remember her mother mentioning it. Or perhaps it did ring a bell, being told about this bogus doctor and her dubious and potentially dangerous experiment; she had all but forgotten about it.

  ‘Do you think I’d have come on holiday with her,’ said Bonnie, ‘if I’d realised it was her?’

  ‘I suddenly realised who she was, just when you were leaving. I phoned your flat, but Sylvia answered. I told her I knew who she was, and told her to put you on the phone, not to take you away, but she hung up. I tried your mobile, but I couldn’t get you.’

  ‘Sylvia had my mobile,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Is she there?’ asked her mother.

  ‘She’s here somewhere,’ said Bonnie. ‘She’s been up to her tricks again. I’m not sure where she’s gone though.’

  ‘But you’re going to come home?’

  ‘Ye
s.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked her mother. ‘You don’t sound all right.’

  ‘I’m a bit cold,’ said Bonnie. ‘My clothes are damp.’

  ‘Oh Bonnie,’ said her mother. ‘You’ll catch your death. By the way, did you hear the news about that laboratory you work at? An animal liberation group hatched a plan to let the animals out. That girl you know was involved.’

  ‘Fiona?’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said her mother, ‘although that’s not her real name. She took the supervisor’s keys and locked him in the store room. They blew up some outbuildings too.’

  ‘The store room’s in the outbuildings,’ said Bonnie. ‘They didn’t blow up the outbuildings with Mr Carr inside, did they?’

  ‘Oh,’ said her mother. ‘I don’t think so. I wouldn’t have thought so.’

  ‘Is Fiona OK?’

  ‘As far as I know,’ said her mother. ‘She hasn’t been caught.’

  ‘And did they manage it?’ asked Bonnie. ‘Did they release the animals?’

  ‘I’m not sure about that,’ said her mother. ‘I don’t remember reading that bit. So you’re going to come home?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bonnie. ‘I’m coming now.’

  ‘You’re not going to drive, are you?’ said her mother.

  Bonnie half-heard her father saying something in the background.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ said Bonnie.

  After hanging up, she took her suitcase to the door, put the ending to her story in her bag and picked her cigarettes up off the windowsill. She inspected that word that had appeared in or on the glass. Putting her finger to it, she could feel that nothing had been scratched in from this side of the window. She was reaching out of the open window for the handle when she noticed that what was written there was not ‘JUMP’ but ‘JUMI’, and she wondered what that might mean, and then it occurred to her that it was more likely to be that someone had not quite finished scratching the intended word into the glass, from the far side.