Alison Moore - Death and the Seaside

‘I’ve got your bag,’ said Sylvia, coming through from the lounge into the kitchen.

‘Oh yes,’ said Bonnie, ‘thank you.’ She took her bag from Sylvia, glanced cursorily through its contents, and stepped outside, with Sylvia right behind her. As Bonnie turned to lock the door behind them, the house phone started ringing and Bonnie paused with her key in the lock.

‘Leave it,’ said Sylvia. ‘We’re on holiday now.’

‘Yes,’ said Bonnie, locking the door. ‘You’re right.’ They walked through the passageway to the car. They could still hear the phone ringing, but barely, and, when they got into the car and closed the doors, not at all.

Sylvia drove. She did not hold her hands at ten to two on the steering wheel; she held them both at the top, at noon, or midnight, which looked like a dicey way to steer, and Bonnie wondered if she was safe. She also noticed that Sylvia’s hands, which had always looked manicured, now looked somewhat scaly. Sylvia picked at the skin on the backs of her hands as she drove, scratching off loose, transparent flakes, and Bonnie saw that it was only glue, dried glue, as if Sylvia had been doing some craftwork, something like papier mâché.

They drove towards the motorway, and when they were nearly at the junction, Sylvia noted that they were passing the site of what had once been a nightclub called The Sea Around Us. The nightclub was now long gone. ‘It always seemed like a strange name for a place in the landlocked Midlands,’ she said, ‘but of course the sea is all around us, wherever we are, especially on a small island.’ And here and there it was inching closer. Bonnie had seen the information on the Internet about coastal erosion, the predictions for the next twenty and fifty and one hundred years, the places where the cliffs and dunes and beaches were disappearing at the rate of a metre or two or three or more every year.

At the junction, they crossed over the roundabout, going straight past the sign for the M1, ‘The SOUTH’, where Bonnie had expected to turn off. ‘Is that not our exit?’ asked Bonnie, turning her head to look back at the signpost for the south, for London.

‘No,’ said Sylvia. ‘That’s not the way we’re going.’

They left the roundabout again. ‘I always wanted to go down to Margate,’ said Bonnie. ‘I wanted to go to Dreamland, but it closed down years ago.’

‘The amusement park?’ said Sylvia. ‘Wasn’t it reopened recently?’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so,’ said Bonnie. ‘It’s been closed for ten years.’

‘I believe it’s been refurbished though, and reopened as a “Re-imagined Dreamland”.’

‘I’d like to go there one day,’ said Bonnie. And she thought of going to Butlin’s too, although she could hardly believe it still existed beyond the pre-war world of that picture postcard, as if trying to go there would be like trying to get to the Land of Oz.

They got onto a different stretch of road, an A road that turned into a motorway, and Bonnie decided to look these destinations up on her phone, to see if they really did exist and if she could go there. She opened her bag and searched through it. Eventually, she looked up again and said, ‘I can’t find my phone,’ and at the same moment she saw a sign at the side of the road showing the silhouette of an old-fashioned telephone receiver, like the one by her bed, and like the one on a toy phone that she used to have, a phone on wheels, a phone with a face. The silhouette had no cord though, as if the line had been cut through by an intruder. Underneath the disembodied receiver, it said ‘SOS’. Half a mile on, she saw another one: ‘SOS’. And then another one.

Bonnie felt terribly excited, as if she were Scott of the Antarctic setting out on an expedition, as they drove south-west on the M5 — south, with the force of gravity pulling them down, and underneath , thought Bonnie, is everything we don’t know and are afraid of knowing ; and west, go west, young man , which meant to explore, to seek out new opportunities, but wasn’t it also a euphemism for death? ‘The South West’, said the blue signs, ‘The SOUTH WEST’, and Bonnie felt like a character in an Alan Sillitoe story she had read, who ‘felt like one of those sailors in the olden days who, about to set off west, wasn’t sure he would ever get back again’.

The motorway carved through the countryside, and Bonnie saw a lorry full of lambs, and another lorry with ‘EAT BRITISH CHICKEN’ printed on the back, and another with ‘EAT MORE CHIPS’ printed on the side, as she and Sylvia sped past. She saw the turn-off for Weston-super-Mare and a brown sign for the Grand Pier. They drove on.

They stopped for a late lunch at Sedgemoor services. Out of the air-conditioned car, they could feel the mid-July heat. ‘You wouldn’t know we were in England,’ said Bonnie. ‘We could be abroad.’

They bought sandwiches and giant cups of tea and sat down. Bonnie rummaged around in her shoulder bag. ‘I still can’t find my phone,’ she said.

‘Maybe you left it at home,’ said Sylvia.

‘I remember putting it in my bag,’ said Bonnie. ‘I’m sure I did…’

‘The mind can play tricks,’ said Sylvia.

They ate their sandwiches, though Bonnie left her crusts.

‘You should eat your crusts,’ said Sylvia. ‘They’re good for you.’

‘I’m going to give them to the birds,’ said Bonnie.

Outside, while she smoked a cigarette, she scattered the crusts for the car-park pigeons, and then Bonnie and Sylvia returned to the car and the M5. Bonnie, in the passenger seat, was rooting around again in the bag on her lap. ‘What on earth have I done with my phone?’ she muttered.

‘Forget about your phone,’ said Sylvia. ‘We’re on holiday.’

‘I’ll need to phone my mum when we arrive,’ said Bonnie, ‘to let her know I’m safe.’

‘I would lend you my phone,’ said Sylvia, ‘if I had one. They’re bound to have a phone in the pub though. I’m sure you’ll be able to use that.’

Sylvia put on one of her CDs, her film music, and Bonnie watched the landscape scrolling by, within the frame of the passenger-seat window.

They were less than an hour from Seaton when they turned off the motorway and onto A roads that wound through the villages. At one junction, they took a wrong turning — someone had tampered with the signpost, turning the arm to point the wrong way, like a comic-book jape. They got onto a B road, which would take them all the way down to the sea. Poppies growing in the verge made Bonnie think of Dorothy en route to the Emerald City, watched by the Wicked Witch of the West through her crystal ball, Dorothy fast asleep in a field of poppies, in which she might sleep forever. The poppies looked as if they were made of red tissue paper or crepe paper.

It was all downhill as they neared the sea, and the car picked up speed. They crossed the River Axe and entered Seaton on the Harbour Road.

‘I’m really looking forward to this,’ said Sylvia, reaching over to the passenger seat and gripping Bonnie’s forearm, and her skinny, sharp-nailed fingers made Bonnie think of those stories of seagulls trying to fly off with cats and small dogs. Then Sylvia returned her hand to its worrying position on the steering wheel, braking gently as they approached the corner. ‘Here we are,’ she said, although their view was obscured by a derelict block of flats, and then they turned the final bend, and Bonnie saw the sea.

Sylvia slowed, and stopped, and backed into a tight space between two parked cars, with the pounding sea on one side and the Hook and Parrot on the other.

‘So here it is,’ said Sylvia. ‘This is where your story takes place.’

‘It’s a long time since I’ve been here,’ said Bonnie, peering through the passenger window.