Alison Moore - Death and the Seaside

The sun was shining on the floral wallpaper, and Susan turned towards the window and saw the unbroken blue sky.

Her foot had gone to sleep, and she did not wait long enough before standing. The foot, as if boneless, dragged lamely on the patterned carpet as she went towards the window. She inspected the glass for marks where the paper must have been stuck to it in the night, but there was nothing, no residue. She opened the window wide and looked down at the pavement below, but saw no square of paper that might have been on the outside of the window before coming unstuck and dropping down. Perhaps what she had seen against the window in the night had just been something blown against the glass and then blown away again, or perhaps it had, in fact, somehow, been a reflection of something, perhaps a reflection of the picture after all, which was a still life, apples in a bowl, by Cézanne, whose walls slid, whose chairs bent, whose cloths curled like burning paper, whose perspective was distorted and who took liberties with reality.

Or perhaps she had not really seen it at all; perhaps she had only dreamt it.

She lit a cigarette. When she inhaled, the tip of her cigarette glowed orange like a dashboard warning light. She leaned over the sill to blow out smoke rings, which floated up, dispersing. They looked like cartoon wailing or surprise: o O O. She took a final puff, dropped the butt and watched it spark on the slabs. A cyclist on the pavement steered around it.

Susan put on yesterday’s clothes. She needed to go to the launderette, but she would not go today because she was working behind the bar.

The pub was always quiet during the week. Joe would probably come in; he usually spent his lunch hour in the Hook. Susan had been on one date with Joe. It had gone well, she thought, although he had been too busy for a second date; and then at some point, without anything having been said, it became clear to her that it was not going to happen, which was fine. They were friends now; she pulled his pints.

Towards noon, Susan took out her powder compact and retouched her make-up. At two o’clock, Joe walked through the door. He came to the bar and Susan served him. ‘I had the strangest night,’ she said, putting the pint down on the bar in front of him. ‘Well, it started yesterday really. I’d just woken up, and I saw a piece of paper near the door, like a message that had been pushed underneath, but when I went to look at it, it was blank, or I thought it was, but there might have been something on it that I couldn’t quite make out. And then last night I woke up and you know how I’ve got no curtains?’

Joe did not respond. His attention was on a woman at the far end of the bar. She looked like a mannequin, made out of pale pink plastic or fibreglass. The man she was with leaned forward to kiss her, and she let him but she kept her eyes open while he did it. Her false eyelashes looked like a spider’s legs on her brow bone and the top of her cheek, which gave Susan the shivers, thinking about spiders crawling across your face in the night, and swallowing them in your sleep — she had read that somewhere, that we swallow eight spiders a year in our sleep. Perhaps it was not even true but now she was scared of the thought anyway and imagined spiders creeping out of their hidey-holes and onto her face the moment she fell asleep. She had even mentioned this to Joe, and he had told her that he would like to get hold of a plastic spider and put it on her face while she was sleeping, to scare the crap out of her when she woke up.

Susan, who had been going on with her story of the night before, stopped dead in the middle of her sentence. Was it Joe, playing tricks on her? He could have got hold of her keys, got them copied. With a set of keys, he could let himself in and out of the pub, in and out of her room while she slept.

Joe reached out and touched Susan’s frown line with the tip of his forefinger. This was something he did: if she had been talking for too long, he pretended to switch her off. Now, as if she were a machine whose screen had frozen mid-task, with his fingertip pressed into her flesh, against the bone of her forehead, he rebooted her: ‘Beep,’ he said.

‘Have you been in my room?’ said Susan.

‘You know I have,’ said Joe, grinning.

‘No, I mean, have you been in my room when I’ve been asleep?’

‘Well, yes,’ said Joe.

‘Yes, but I mean, without me knowing you were there?’

Joe raised an eyebrow.

‘I’ve been finding all these notes,’ said Susan, ‘slipped under my door and stuck to my window.’

Joe shrugged. ‘They’re not from me. Did you think they were from me? Why would I be sticking notes onto your f***ing window? What do they say, these notes?’

‘I’m not sure they say anything. But I think they might say, “JUMP”.’

Joe gave her a look, the same look he’d given her when she’d asked him if he wanted to come to her parents’ at Christmas. ‘You think someone’s slipping you notes that tell you to jump, but you’re not sure?’

‘The notes appear when I’m asleep, and I can never quite make out what’s written on them.’

‘Look, if you’ve been dreaming that messages are telling you to jump, well, don’t. Don’t jump out of the window. OK?’ He finished his pint and got up to leave. ‘Back to the grindstone,’ he said. ‘No jumping out of the window, all right?’ He walked to the door, and when he got there he turned and said again, as he disappeared through the doorway, ‘Don’t jump.’

The mannequin woman and her partner left too, leaving Susan alone in the bar. She helped herself to a drink and looked through the local paper for the quick crossword puzzle. She wrote her answers lightly in pencil, and doodled while she thought.

The radio was on, as it always was. It was tuned to a local station that played love songs and adverts. Susan turned the dial and found a poet talking about how stealing something changes it. ‘You want it,’ he said, ‘you decide to take it, but now that it’s in your hands suddenly it’s different, it automatically begins to reshape into something else.’ It made Susan think of some sweets that she had once tried to steal. She had selected a packet and tucked it up her sleeve. She had got as far as the doorway and was stepping outside when a hand grabbed her shoulder, and she had felt the sweets against the inside of her wrist; they were round and hard like pebbles inside the little scratchy packet that said ‘WIN’.

‘When William Burroughs and Brion Gysin were hanging out in the hotel on Rue Gît-le-Cœur and they were cutting up and rearranging newspapers,’ continued the poet, ‘they told people that they were trying to uncover the subliminal message hidden inside the original newspapers. They weren’t thinking of themselves as like artists, they were more like cryptographers, right, ’cause after all, they’re only showing you what’s already there.’

Susan gave up on the crossword, turned the pencil over and rubbed out her answers and her doodles of eyes with lashes like spiders’ legs. The landlady liked to do the crossword herself, and Susan was forbidden to touch it.

By the end of her shift, after hours of standing, Susan’s legs were aching, as they always were. She went outside for some fresh air. It was nearly the end of October. Before the bonfire, there would be Halloween. She wondered if they did Halloween here. At home, in the village, there would be carved, lit pumpkins in the windows, and there would be witches and devils and monsters and ghouls in the streets, and fake police tape stretched across doorways, crime scene tape saying ‘DO NOT ENTER’, ‘HAUNTED HOUSE — DO NOT ENTER’, and on doorsteps and in entrances and hallways there would be bowls of sweets.