Alison Moore: Death and the Seaside

‘Oh,’ said Bonnie, taking a sideways glance at the washing-up that she had not yet done, the dirty pots and pans and tins spread over the worktops. She had not been expecting visitors. The landlady, still smiling, moved her shiny shoe towards the threshold, and Bonnie took a step backwards, barefoot on the sticky lino. The landlady came into the kitchen.

‘Would you like a cup of tea, Mrs Slythe?’ asked Bonnie.

‘Call me Sylvia,’ she said.

‘Sylvia,’ said Bonnie.

‘Thank you, dear, that would be lovely.’

‘How do you take it?’ asked Bonnie, opening the fridge.

‘White with two sugars, please,’ said Sylvia.

‘Oh,’ said Bonnie, peering into the fridge. ‘I’m out of milk.’

‘Never mind,’ said Sylvia. ‘We can have it black.’

‘I haven’t got any sugar, either,’ said Bonnie, looking inside the empty pot that had ‘SUGAR’ written optimistically on the side.

Sylvia smiled. ‘Whatever you can manage is fine,’ she said.

Bonnie carried their mugs of black, unsweetened tea through to the lounge, where she offered Sylvia a seat on the sofa, although it did occur to Bonnie that all the seats in the house were really her landlady’s anyway. Sylvia removed her sheepskin coat, underneath which she was wearing a suit jacket, which she left on. It was a cold spring day and just as cold inside the house as out. Sylvia’s jacket matched her blue skirt, attached to the belt loop of which was a bunch of keys, which made her look a bit like a jailer, but more ladylike. Sylvia smoothed her skirt beneath her as she sat down.

Bonnie handed Sylvia the bigger mug, which had ‘I’M A MUG!’ printed on the side. It was one of Bonnie’s favourites but it looked wrong, she thought, in Sylvia’s elegant hands.

Sylvia accepted her tea with a smile and said, ‘I just came to see how you were getting on.’

‘Fine,’ said Bonnie. ‘Absolutely fine.’

‘Are you still unpacking?’ asked Sylvia, nodding towards one corner of the room, in which were piled some of the cases and boxes that Bonnie had found in the flat and which she had never got around to mentioning to the letting agent. ‘Or were you thinking of moving out already?’

‘Oh,’ said Bonnie. ‘None of that’s mine. I just found it here.’

In another corner were the three artificial Christmas trees. It looked as if a dinky little fairy tale forest were sprouting through the floorboards, like something dreamt up by the Brothers Grimm.

Along the wall in between the two corners were all the traffic cones and red-triangle road signs. Some of the signs were folded, leaning, with their backs to the wall, and some of them were erect. They looked as if they had been put there to warn of some danger in the flat: a lump in the carpet that someone might trip over, or a hole in the ground into which someone might stumble.

The whole thing looked like an art installation, something that a person might stand in front of at an end-of-year show, trying to see some meaning or message in it.

‘I don’t know where it all came from,’ said Bonnie. ‘I didn’t know what to do with it.’

‘There was a student living here before you,’ said Sylvia. ‘But he wasn’t here for long. I had no idea he’d hoarded all those signs.’ With an expansive sweep of her hand, like someone on a game show indicating what could be won, or what had not been won, she said, ‘Consider it gone.’

Bonnie bent her head to her mug of black tea, burning her lips and the inside of her mouth.

‘Do sit down,’ said Sylvia. Bonnie adjusted her dressing gown and sat down next to her landlady. ‘You have a familiar name,’ said Sylvia. ‘Bonnie Falls,’ she added, as if Bonnie might not know it. Bonnie had always been disconcerted by the thought of strangers holding her details in their files, and Sylvia was one of them.

‘Do I?’ she asked.

‘May I ask your mother’s name?’ enquired Sylvia, and Bonnie told Sylvia her mother’s maiden name, which appeared only briefly on the family tree that Bonnie had seen, on which all the women’s branches were short, their names disappearing, while what her father called ‘the main, true line’ went back for generations. He was not interested in ‘the peripheral lines’, the female lines, on which the names changed every generation, as if the women themselves were fickle and flighty. Although, in fact, the ‘Falls’ line was not entirely stable either: from the top to the bottom of the tree, the name changed from Faill to Fall to Falls.

‘No,’ said Sylvia, ‘not her maiden name. What’s your mother’s first name?’

‘Oh,’ said Bonnie. ‘Pearl. Why?’ Her landlady was not filling in forms.

‘Pearl,’ echoed Sylvia. ‘Good.’ She grinned, displaying large teeth in a wide mouth. ‘I think I knew her,’ she said. ‘And you, as well, when you were little.’ She tested her tea and then asked how Bonnie’s mother was.

‘She’s fine,’ said Bonnie.

‘Is she?’ said Sylvia, and Bonnie thought she seemed surprised, and slightly disappointed. ‘Tell me about her,’ said Sylvia, so Bonnie talked about her mother’s career and her various committees and achievements, and Sylvia seemed increasingly disheartened. Bonnie mentioned her mother’s success in amateur skiing competitions; she had just flown out to compete in another one. Her mother was generally adventurous. She had taken an infant-school-aged Bonnie to Japan, where they had climbed Mount Tenjo. There was a photograph of the two of them on their way up the mountain path. The label in the album said: On Mount Tenjo, with Mount Fuji in the background. Mount Fuji was not visible in the photograph, but Bonnie recalled how, while they stood there on the mountain path, the dense, white cloud beyond the trees had shifted, revealing, in the vast skyscape, a sliver of something huge, the dark edge of Mount Fuji emerging like a soft pencil line drawn on the blank sky. Then the cloud had moved again, obscuring the mountain, and the camera’s shutter had clicked. She remembered, as well, being told about the giant catfish that slept beneath Tokyo Bay. Its wriggling caused Tokyo’s daily tremors, and one day, after decades of sleeping, it would wake and cause a major earthquake. ‘But it’s only a story,’ her mother had added. Bonnie, though, had felt the tremors, which shuddered through her in the night.

‘I’m not like my mother at all,’ said Bonnie to Sylvia.

‘Are you not?’

‘No. I can’t ski, and I don’t fly. I avoid heights.’ She had flown to Japan; she’d had no problem with it then. When, more recently, Bonnie’s problems had become apparent, her mother had suggested medication, so that she would be able to get on with her life, to fly and so on. Bonnie, though, whilst afraid of being up high, was even more wary of being up high and feeling no fear.

‘And I didn’t get on very well at school,’ added Bonnie.

‘Don’t mumble,’ said Sylvia.

‘At school, my reports tended to say things like I was going nowhere, which I suppose is proving to be true,’ said Bonnie. ‘At secondary school I failed a lot of my exams. So I don’t have the sort of career my mum would like me to have.’

‘You failed your exams?’ said Sylvia, leaning forward in a way that seemed sympathetic.

‘A lot of them,’ said Bonnie. She mentioned that she had recently been having another go at learning French, her attempts at school having been so dismal, and that her mother had bought her audio lessons and had suggested listening to the course at night — ‘You’ll learn it in your sleep,’ her mother had said — but Bonnie was wary of having it dripped into her unconscious self like that. She would be like the child in Brave New World who suddenly knew that The-Nile-is-the-longest-river-in-Africa but not what that meant.