Death and the Seaside

by Alison Moore

  Sylvia looked at her watch. ‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘Besides, it’s a Saturday evening. You’ll be off out somewhere, I expect.’

  ‘I’ll see you out,’ said Bonnie, and she made her way through to the kitchen. ‘There are other Bonnies,’ she said, ‘as well as Bonnie Parker and My Bonnie lies over the ocean. There’s Bonnie Tyler, and Bonnie Langford, and Bonnie Greer.’ She was at the back door before she realised that Sylvia was not behind her, and it was if Bonnie were the one leaving somebody else’s house. Sylvia came into the kitchen a moment later, carrying the dirty mugs that Bonnie had left behind on the carpet. ‘There are other Bonnies,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘Of course,’ said Sylvia. ‘There aren’t very many of you though, are there? The name’s not popular these days. It’s gone out of fashion. You’re an endangered species.’ She put the mugs down on the side, finding a space near the sink. ‘You could do with some proper teacups,’ she said. ‘Thin china cups. It makes the tea taste better.’

  At the door, Sylvia paused and said to Bonnie, ‘You’re afraid of your own story. But you don’t need to worry about what happens at the end. All you need to know is: What happens next?’

  After Sylvia had gone, Bonnie smoked her cigarette in the doorway and then locked up. She got herself some supper to take to bed: some warm milk, which would help her to sleep, and some cheese, which would give her weird dreams. On her way through to the bedroom, she stopped off in the lounge to take her Seatown story out of the drawer. She wondered about her anxiety, her obsession with the fragility of limbs. She did remember being frightened of a busker whose legs could bend the wrong way, and having a nightmare after seeing a dog that had wheels instead of back legs. She thought about her story and how it might end. She thought, What happens next? She remembered something that Sylvia had said to her: ‘In your writing, you keep returning to the seaside.’ Had Sylvia seen her other unfinished stories? Bonnie looked in the drawer but all her printouts were there, including, in fact, her dissertation notes.

  Bonnie went through to her bedroom, which was dark, and into which a blade of light was coming beneath the locked door. She thought of the bunch of keys attached to the belt loop of Sylvia’s skirt. She thought about moving the furniture, pushing the wardrobe or the bed in front of the door. But whatever she did was likely to make no difference at all, she realised, because Sylvia probably still had her own key to the back door.

  II

  7

  Leaving behind the blank – though perhaps not entirely blank – piece of paper, Susan went downstairs, to the landlady’s rooms on the next landing. After knocking on the solid wooden door, she waited. After a minute, the landlady came to the door wearing an apron that said, ‘I’M THE BOSS!’ She was a strikingly tall woman, and under her apron she was smartly dressed, in an outfit that matched her eyeshadow and complemented the colour of her eyes, which were the shifting blue-grey-green of the sea and reminded Susan of childhood beach holidays and almost drowning.

  ‘Did you come up to my room just now?’ asked Susan. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t hear anyone knocking. I was sleeping.’

  ‘No,’ said the landlady. ‘I’ve not been up to your room today. I’ve been baking.’

  ‘Someone’s been up to my room,’ said Susan.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said the landlady. ‘You know the pub’s closed. It’s only you and me here today.’

  ‘Somebody put something under my door,’ said Susan.

  ‘Put what under your door?’ asked the landlady.

  ‘A piece of paper,’ said Susan. ‘I assumed it was a note for me.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Susan. ‘I’m not sure it says anything.’

  The landlady gave her a strange look. ‘Where is this note?’ she asked.

  ‘I left it in my room,’ said Susan.

  ‘I’ll come and have a look,’ said the landlady.

  A beeping sound came from the kitchen and the landlady held up a finger to Susan: Wait. She went back into her kitchen and opened the oven door. Susan caught the edge of a baking smell that made her mouth water. A moment later, the beeping sound was turned off and the landlady came out again still wearing her ‘I’M THE BOSS!’ apron. ‘Right,’ she said, touching Susan’s elbow to steer her towards the stairs. ‘Show me this piece of paper.’

  She followed Susan up the stairs and into her room, where Susan looked for the piece of paper on the desk by the door. There was some writing paper on the desk, but not that same scrap. She looked on the floor, and on the bedside table, and on and in the bed. ‘It was here,’ she said. ‘But now I can’t see it.’

  ‘I’m sure it will turn up,’ said the landlady.

  The beeping sound came again, up the stairs or through the floorboards, and Susan’s mouth watered. ‘That will be my scones,’ said the landlady. ‘Come with me.’ Susan locked the door to her room and followed the landlady back down the stairs. ‘Wait there,’ said the landlady. Susan waited on the landing. From there, and indeed from outside her own room, she could see over the banister to the ground floor, the hardwood staircase spiralling down, framing the cramped entrance hall, the floor tiles off-white with occasional squares of red. When Susan looked at it from the top floor, she thought of the life nets or jumping sheets that firefighters used, or once used, and she felt the pull of the drop.

  The landlady came back with a few hot scones around which she was wrapping a clean tea towel. ‘Go and get some fresh air,’ she said.

  Susan headed down the stairs and went outside. Her bundle of scones wrapped in a checked tea towel made her feel like a runaway setting out for London, like Oliver Twist running away from the undertaker’s with a crust of bread and a coarse shirt and a penny tied up in a handkerchief. She sat down on a bench in front of the pub. There were very few people around – she could see a couple at the seashore with a toddler on reins, and a bald man coming along the esplanade. The bald man seemed to say something to the family, and the couple turned around and looked at him but did not reply. It was late in the day, as well as late in the year, and there was not much light left. Susan opened up the tea towel and began to eat one of the scones, which was surprisingly dense. She was not looking at the bald man when he stopped just in front of her and leaned against the railings in between Susan and the sea. With her mouth full of scone, she became aware of him standing there, staring at her. His arms, holding on to the railings behind him, were bent at an odd, double-jointed angle. ‘Jump!’ he said, and Susan looked right at him. She saw the smooth, flat space between his unblinking eyes and his unsmiling mouth, and saw that he was not looking at her after all; those eyes were only tattoos on the back of his head, and the thin, wide mouth was a crease in the skin at the base of his skull. He was facing the sea; and as commanded, a dog that had been hidden from Susan’s view by the sea wall jumped up from the beach onto the esplanade, and the man let go of the railings and turned away from the beach. He did not look at her, but the dog did; the dog saw her. The man strolled on down the esplanade, with the dog trotting along at his heels. From her place on the bench, Susan watched him go, and the tattooed eyes in the back of his head stared unblinkingly back at her.

  In the middle of the night, Susan woke suddenly from a dream in which she was driving. An instructor was in the passenger seat. He had dual controls, pedals that Susan could not see, but the pressing of which she could feel influencing her control of the car. The driving instructor’s eyes were those same tattooed eyes, and the place where his nose belonged was smooth and flat, and his mouth was thin-lipped and wide and unsmiling. He was turned towards her, looking steadily at her, but he did not speak to her at all. Somehow, though, he was instructing her nonetheless, and had told her which way to go. Susan had circled a roundabout, and as she left it, she realised that this exit was going to send her hurtling south when she had expected to go north. Either the driving instruct
or had misdirected her or Susan had acted contrary to his instructions. It was going to be difficult for her to get back onto the northbound side of the motorway.

  She lay, open-eyed now, facing the black rectangle of the uncurtained window in the far wall. The window was closed, so that the roaring and crashing of the sea would not disturb her while she was sleeping.

  She could see, in the middle of the dark windowpane, a smaller, white square. She sat up, peering at it, trying to see what it was: not the moon, a square moon; if she moved her head she could see the moon, a white circle beside the white square, like a geometry test. There was a framed, glazed picture on the opposite wall, but it did not seem to be a reflection of that. Pushing back the duvet, she climbed out of bed and crossed the room without switching on the light. At the window, she reached out and touched the white square. It was a sheet of paper, stuck to the inside of the glass. On it, she thought she saw, despite the darkness, a word: ‘JUMP’. She unstuck the paper from the window, took it over to the desk and switched on the lamp, but when she looked at the paper in the light, she found that there was nothing written on it after all, or else the message had simply vanished, as happened, for example, when she wrote with her finger in condensation on a window, and then the condensation evaporated, leaving behind only a trace of what had been there, the unseen shape of her writing on the glass, and then sometimes it reappeared.

  She switched the lamp off again and looked at the page in darkness as before – as if it might be some kind of glow-in-the-dark trick – but still she could see nothing there. She wondered if it was the same piece of paper as the one that had been slipped under her door and then lost; but whether it was the same piece of paper or not, who would or could have stuck it to her window?

  Keeping the light off, so that she would not feel exposed to the outside world, she went to her door and opened it, looking out and towards the stairs, but there was no one there. ‘Hello?’ she called, but very quietly. She closed the door again. She went to the wardrobe and flung open the double doors, so that the empty hangers rattled. She got down on her knees and peered under her bed, looking right into the corners. She felt like her own mother trying to prove to her that there were no monsters hiding anywhere in her bedroom. It was really too dark to see clearly though, and she did not turn her lamp on again, and she did not stretch out an arm to feel around in the darkness under the bed.

  She screwed up the piece of paper and threw it into the wastepaper basket. She half-expected that in the morning she would not find it in there, that this was only some kind of bad dream or depths-of-the-night confusion. She went back to bed. She thought she might lie awake until it got light, but she must have fallen straight back to sleep because later she woke and it was still dark and there, again, in the middle of the black rectangle of the window, was a small, white square. She wondered if this was one of those dreams that she sometimes got stuck in, which she might ‘wake’ from, and then find that she had only made it into the next part of the dream. Then, when she really did wake up, she could not quite trust it; she could not quite believe in the realness of her life.

  She stared at the white square. She closed her eyes for a moment, but when she opened them again she was still in the same dream, or else wide awake. She got up and crossed the room, reaching out for the piece of paper that was stuck to the glass, to unstick it, and found that she could not: her fingers slipped right over it as if it were frozen in ice. The piece of paper was now stuck to the outside of the glass. It was like a blank picture, mounted on the black of endless sky and endless sea; it was like Tom Friedman’s 1000 Hours of Staring, bare paper impregnated with the artist’s purposeful staring, the artwork’s medium listed as ‘stare on paper’; or it was like Gianni Motti’s Magic Ink series of drawings which were done, according to the artist, in invisible ink that had disappeared on completion of the work.

  Susan opened the window and peered out, as if she might find some joker halfway down a ladder, or see someone running off down the street, but there was no ladder and nobody running away.

  It would not be possible, she thought, for her to reach around to the middle of the outside of the window, so instead she inspected the piece of paper from her side of the glass. There did seem to be something written on it, but it was not quite legible; it was as if the message had been left out in the rain and had all but washed away. But she thought that perhaps she could almost make out one word, or a half-perceived whisper of the word: ‘JUMP’.

  Through the open window, she could hear the sea washing in and out, rattling the stones at the shore and dragging the smaller ones out. She could see the dark line that the deep sea made against the night sky, like a streak of black ink on black paper.

  She closed the window again. If she’d had curtains she would have drawn them. She went back to bed and lay awake listening, without knowing quite what she was listening for – a creak that might just be this old building settling, some rustling or scratching in a corner that might be mice, a breath that might just be a gust coming in through a gap in the window frame.

  8

  The weather had turned warmer, and Bonnie had taken to sitting out in the backyard, a concreted sun-trap, through whose cracks the weeds grew and to whose low end wall the landlady had attached a trellis for clematis and wisteria to climb up.

  Bonnie read horror and fantasy novels from the library, and women’s magazines, or she just sat and watched the birds fly overhead, or she watched the clouds change shape as they drifted across the blue sky.

  On this particular Saturday, she was sitting out there with Sylvia, both of them in deckchairs. They had slipped off their shoes – Bonnie could see Sylvia’s neatly painted toenails – and they had bared their legs below the knee. Bonnie felt like they ought to be eating ice creams, or fish and chips.

  ‘I feel like we ought to be able to hear seagulls,’ said Bonnie.

  ‘It’s possible to buy recordings of seagulls’ cries,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘Is it?’ said Bonnie.

  Having become aware that Bonnie had written a further two thousand words of her Seatown story, Sylvia had been nagging Bonnie to let her read this next instalment, and it had not taken very long for Bonnie to give in. Now Bonnie was waiting for Sylvia to finish reading the new pages, and it felt a bit like lying down while a doctor inspected her soft insides and she waited for it to hurt. In fact, Bonnie had a vague idea that Sylvia had mentioned doing a PhD, in which case perhaps she was a doctor, but either way, she was not a real doctor.

  Bonnie could see exactly which line Sylvia was reading – she could hear the sea washing in and out, rattling the stones at the shore and dragging the smaller ones out – because she moved her left thumb down the side of the page as she went, as if she were checking it, looking for errors. Sylvia came to the end of the page and said, ‘Yes, you can get CDs with all sorts of sound effects on.’

  Bonnie reached out for her story but Sylvia kept hold of it.

  ‘Have you ever held a conch shell to your ear to hear the sound of the sea?’ asked Sylvia.

  ‘I have tried it,’ said Bonnie, ‘but I could never find one that worked.’

  ‘You know it’s not the shell,’ said Sylvia, looking at her, ‘don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bonnie. She did know that really; she knew that it was all to do with the shutting out of external sounds, and resonance, and that what you heard, that sound of the sea, was partly just the sound of your own blood flowing. But still, she remembered being on beaches, picking up shells and trying them out, wanting to hear the rushing in and crashing and drawing out of the sea, and she never could; she never could hear what everyone else seemed to hear in those shells.