Death and the Seaside

by Alison Moore

  A little bit of blue down below drew her eye, and when she looked she saw Sylvia, lying on the slabs.

  •

  Out on the landing again, Bonnie gripped the banister, which was not made of wood but cold metal. She felt light-headed, weak-limbed. She had brought the yellow blanket with her, as if it were her comforter.

  She descended the stairs. Below the carpeted landing, the concrete staircase was bare, and it did not spiral down but turned corner after corner, going down to a ground floor that was not white-and-red tiled, and there were no boxes of bar snacks at the bottom, and there was no bar. The building looked as if it had not been inhabited for months, or longer. It looked as if it had been gutted for redevelopment, or else it had been earmarked for demolition.

  There was an emergency exit sign above a door that had a metal bar across it, the sort that you had to push down, the sort that might make an alarm go off, but none did; she exited in silence, emerging at the back of the building, an abandoned block of flats. Everything outside seemed bright and strange, like when she came out of the cinema in the middle of the afternoon.

  She had half-expected that when she looked again, Sylvia’s body would be gone, like in a film where people who you thought were dead have somehow escaped. She was not in a film though: the body was still there, on the slabs, in its blue suit. Bonnie tried not to look at Sylvia’s leg, at the knee that was bent the wrong way.

  ‘Sylvia,’ said Bonnie, but she did not really expect a reply.

  She looked at the sharp and shiny implement – something surgical-looking, such as a doctor might use – lying near Sylvia’s manicured, motionless hand.

  Bonnie, crouching, put a hand to Sylvia’s throat, and then to her wrist, looking for a pulse. She did not know what to do with the yellow blanket. She wanted to put it like a pillow underneath Sylvia’s head, but she felt that she should not move her. She thought that she ought to cover the body, but did not want to put the blanket over Sylvia’s face. In the end, Bonnie tucked the blanket around Sylvia’s shoulders, leaving the face uncovered, as if Sylvia were only sleeping, with her head on the cold pavement.

  Bonnie lit a cigarette, although the shaking of her hands made it difficult, and then she called the emergency services, and they told her to keep the line free in case they needed to call her. She wondered if there would be sirens, or if the ambulance would appear suddenly, quietly.

  She found the car and lifted her suitcase into the boot. She was cold in her damp clothes, and had managed to come away without a warm coat, only waterproofs, and they seemed redundant now. She got into the car, sitting at first in the passenger seat, and then shifting across into the driver’s seat. She thought of home, of her mother’s voice on the phone, and her father’s voice in the background; she thought of getting back to work, the amusement arcade and the flashing buttons that said ‘GO’, ‘GO!’ An ambulance came around the corner and passed the parked car, and Bonnie saw it slowing down near the block of flats. They would find her.

  She checked that she had her cigarettes and her lighter to hand, because she would want them, and then she put the key into the ignition and turned it, waking the engine. She had not driven for years and years, but it was still early, the roads were clear. She held down the clutch with one foot and touched the accelerator with the other and there was a roar. Bonnie released the handbrake and pulled unsteadily away from the kerb, away from the beach, away from the encroaching sea.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Nick Royle for prompting me to write the short story ‘The Harvestman’, a reworking of which became a key part of Death and the Seaside. Thanks to Nick too for the loan of his busker, and, with his Salt hat on, for his finely honed editing skills. Thanks to Salt’s Jen and Chris Hamilton-Emery for their patience and for being, as ever, a real pleasure to work with. Thanks to John Oakey for magicking-up another striking and fabulous cover design. Thanks to Dan for being my other half, for not showing any signs of boredom during the many read-throughs and discussions, for sterling editing and for helping me to find the right ending. Thanks to my son Arthur, for loving stories and for not minding that I sometimes have my head in the clouds. I am also grateful to Andrew Harrison at the University of Nottingham for all his support and encouragement.

  I am grateful for the following permissions, and informal blessings, to quote or reprint material:

  Some parts of Bonnie’s Seatown story appeared in the short story ‘The Harvestman’, published by Nightjar Press in 2015.

  ‘The death of the author’, Roland Barthes, in Modern Criticism and Theory, 3rd edition, edited by David Lodge and Nigel Wood, page 313, published by Pearson Education Ltd, 2008, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis.

  ‘There is inspiration everywhere – you just need to train yourself to notice it.’ © Tania Hershman, 2015, Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ & Artists’ Companion, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

  In chapter 5, I have used extracts from:

  The World According to Garp © 1976 John Irving, by permission of the author and The Cooke Agency.

  The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch © 1978, published by Chatto & Windus.

  Beside the Sea by Véronique Olmi, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter, published by Peirene Press.

  The Sea by John Banville, published by Picador.

  Learning to Swim by Graham Swift, published by Picador. Both the quotation acknowledged within the text in chapter 5, and the line ‘dissolved, as a mirage dissolves’ in chapter 19, are borrowed from the story ‘Learning to Swim’.

  Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton (Copyright © Patrick Hamilton, 1941) Reprinted by permission of A.M. Heath & Co Ltd.

  The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

  The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark, published by Penguin Books.

  The Outsider by Albert Camus, translated by Stuart Gilbert. This translation first published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 1946, published in Penguin Books 1961. Page 63: ‘But the whole beach, pulsing with heat, was pressing on my back’, and page 115: ‘if you don’t die soon, you’ll die one day’. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

  ‘And if death had come her way it was no more than she had asked for. She had gone to meet him halfway.’ Reproduced from The Witch of Exmoor by Margaret Drabble (Copyright © Margaret Drabble 1996) by permission of United Agents LLP (www.unitedagents.co.uk) on behalf of Dame Margaret Drabble.

  In chapter 11, I have used extracts from:

  Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century © Lauren Slater, 2004, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

  The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, published by Penguin. www.continuum-concept.org.

  Social Theory and Social Structure by Robert K. Merton, published by Free Press.

  Could Do Better: School Reports of the Great and the Good, edited by Catherine Hurley, published by Simon & Schuster.

  Atkinson/Atkinson/Smith/Hilgard. Introduction to Psychology, 9E. © 1987 South-Western, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc. Reproduced by permission. www.cengage.com/permissions

  The passage about Benjamin Libet is taken from a New Scientist article, ‘The Grand Delusion’ by Graham Lawton. © 2011 Reed Business Information Ltd, England. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

  In chapter 12, ‘with the salt wind from the sea’ is from Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, published by Virago and reproduced with the permission of Curtis Brown.

  In chapter 13, the poet heard talking on the radio is Ross Sutherland, www.rosssutherland.co.uk, who was talking on BBC Radio 4’s Short Cuts.

  In chapter 17, I have quoted from Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown. Published by Transworld. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

  The Alan Sillitoe stor
y mentioned in chapter 18 is ‘A Time to Keep’, and the extract is reproduced with the permission of Ruth Fainlight.

  The epigraph preceding chapter 21 is from The Hotel New Hampshire © 1981 Garp Enterprises, Ltd, by permission of the author and The Cooke Agency.

  I have also quoted from The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840 by Alain Corbin, translated by Jocelyn Phelps, published by Penguin; The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H. P. Lovecraft; and The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey. The line ‘I am the master of my fate’ is from ‘Invictus’ by William Ernest Henley. The line ‘and underneath is everything we don’t know and are afraid of knowing’ is from D. H. Lawrence’s essay ‘New Mexico’. The short film The Death of Tom is by the artist Glenn Ligon. The ‘old silent film’ whose intertitles are quoted is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Famous Players-Lasky, 1920). Bonnie’s reference to the still life by Cézanne is a combination of D. H. Lawrence’s description in ‘Introduction to These Paintings’, Late Essays and Articles: ‘Walls twitch and slide, chairs bend or rear up a little, cloths curl like burning paper’, and the description in Janson’s History of Art: ‘Cézanne took these liberties with reality’. The reference to ‘Stan Laurel, who was always in some kind of trouble, some kind of foolish danger’ is a nod to Kurt Vonnegut’s observation of the ‘terrible tragedy’ of Laurel and Hardy, who ‘are in terrible danger all the time. They could so easily be killed’. The Rough Guide volume mentioned is Women Travel. The parkour expert referred to is Daniel Ilabaca, co-founder of the World Parkour and ­Freerunning Federation. The lines ‘My Bonnie lies over the ocean, my Bonnie lies over the sea’, ‘Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my Bonnie to me’ and ‘Last night as I lay on my pillow . . . Last night as I lay on my bed . . . Last night as I lay on my pillow . . . I dreamt that my Bonnie was dead’ are from the folk song ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’.