‘Where do you think the anxiety in your writing stems from?’ asked Sylvia. ‘This obsession with the fragility of limbs?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Bonnie, who had never seen her writing that way. ‘I don’t feel particularly anxious.’
‘Well, here and now, you are in a safe and predictable environment. But were you to be removed from such a safe and predictable environment, you might expect anxiety levels to rise.’
Bonnie looked anxiously at Sylvia. ‘Removed?’ she said.
‘In your writing, you keep returning to the seaside.’
‘I like the seaside,’ said Bonnie.
‘Some people feel rather trapped by the sea,’ suggested Sylvia. ‘The seashore is something one cannot go beyond; it hems one in.’
‘But you can go beyond it,’ said Bonnie. ‘You can go to sea; you can go into the sea.’ It was, for Bonnie, more like the sea was the open side, where structure ceased. The barrier, depending on how you looked at it, both was and was not there, like a theatre’s fourth wall, in which case the seaside was the set.
Sylvia clicked her fingers in Bonnie’s face. ‘Wakey wakey,’ she said. She had said something that Bonnie had not caught. When Sylvia had Bonnie’s attention again, she continued: ‘The excessive anxiety in your writing—’
‘Excessive anxiety?’
‘Yes,’ said Sylvia. ‘—is perhaps linked to your inability to establish satisfactory conclusions.’
‘My inability?’
‘Yes,’ said Sylvia.
‘You know,’ said Bonnie, ‘for a long time, I had trouble accepting that a storybook’s ending was fixed, that it wouldn’t change each time I read it, but that it would end how it was always going to end.’
‘I think perhaps that follows us even into adulthood,’ said Sylvia. ‘If I watched Gone with the Wind again now, a little part of me would still be hoping that Rhett might stay, that he might change his mind at the very last minute.’
‘When I was little,’ said Bonnie, ‘I had a favourite book, The Fox and the Hound, which I asked my mum to read to me over and over again. Then one day, when Mum was away for a few days, my dad read it to me instead, and the story was different. First one dog was killed by a train when it ought to have got away, then the Master gassed a den of kits, then he caught their mother in a trap, then he killed another litter of kits after drawing them out of their den, and then he used the sound of a wounded kit to draw out the vixen and killed her; then Copper, the bloodhound, chased Tod until the fox died from exhaustion, and then the Master shot the dog. I told my dad, “That’s not how it ends. Tod always escapes, every time. And so do his babies.” But Dad said, “No, it goes like this; it ends like this.” I told him, “I don’t want it to end that way,” but Dad just shrugged. “That’s what happens,” he said, showing me the print on the pages, showing me the black-and-white truth. “You can’t change it.” Although, of course, Mum had changed it, to make it bearable. Even now, when I think of that story, it seems mutable.’
‘I used to like Choose Your Own Adventure books,’ said Sylvia. ‘The story could go all sorts of different ways. If you didn’t like your ending, you could choose a different one. I even thought of writing one; I thought about becoming a novelist, but I decided that it was all rather pointless. It’s hardly saving lives.’
‘They changed the story in the film, too,’ said Bonnie. ‘They made the fox and the hound be friends and no one dies. I prefer the film.’
‘You won’t remember this,’ said Sylvia, like a hypnotist: When I snap my fingers, you will wake up, and you will remember none of this. ‘You weren’t even born, although I suppose you might have seen it anyway. When the Challenger failed, when the space shuttle broke apart, my mother videoed it and then rewound the tape to the beginning, ready to show to my father when he came home. All the pieces got pulled back together and the Challenger descended safely, intact. It sat on the launch pad, ready and waiting. But as it happened, my father had already seen the footage of the disaster, so neither he nor my mother pressed PLAY.’
‘So the shuttle stayed where it was,’ said Bonnie, ‘on the launch pad.’
‘Probably not,’ said Sylvia. ‘I wouldn’t have been able to resist pressing PLAY.’
‘I don’t think I saw it,’ said Bonnie, although even as she said it, she wondered if maybe she had seen the footage after all. She had a flash — somehow simultaneously vague and vivid — of what might have been a memory of some televised disaster, some mid-air disintegration.
Bonnie reached for her pack of cigarettes, which was on top of a magazine on top of a pile of library books on the arm of the sofa. She took from the packet a cigarette and her lighter, put the cigarette between her lips and thumbed the spark wheel of the lighter.
‘I’d rather you didn’t smoke that in here,’ said Sylvia. ‘You can smoke in the yard.’ She glanced at the magazine on the arm of the sofa; it was turned to the horoscopes at the back. ‘You don’t read those, do you?’ she asked.
‘It’s often pretty accurate,’ said Bonnie. Pulling the magazine onto her lap, she said to Sylvia, ‘What star sign are you?’
Sylvia rolled her eyes, leaned closer and read from the page: ‘“Travel is on the agenda. Embrace your adventurous side. Once you’ve started there’s no going back. You’re on the brink of a breakthrough.” You know how these things work: it tells you that you’ll meet a tall, dark stranger, and then you’re on the lookout for a tall, dark stranger. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy — expectation influences behaviour. You know that really, I’m sure.’
‘I know,’ said Bonnie. ‘But even so, it’s amazing how often it turns out to be right.’
‘It’s like anything like that — fortune telling, tarot cards… ’
‘I’ve got a pack of tarot cards,’ said Bonnie. ‘But I don’t know how to use them.’
‘Give them to me,’ said Sylvia. Bonnie fetched her tarot cards, broke open the protective cellophane wrapper and handed the pack over to Sylvia, who shuffled the cards and then cut the deck three times; she seemed to know what she was doing. Holding the pack out to Bonnie, she said, ‘Take a card from the top and place it face up between us.’ Bonnie did so, and they both looked at it and saw that it was the Tower, tall and grey with small, high windows, and behind it was the pitch-black night sky, and beneath it were jagged rocks towards which were falling two surprised-looking figures. ‘So,’ said Sylvia. ‘You go to a tarot reader and you turn over the Tower. You are told that this card means danger; sudden and destructive change. You turned it over, you attracted that card, so now you are certain that that’s what’s coming your way: danger, sudden and destructive change. And because you are literal minded, you are thinking about yourself falling from a great height, a high window, something like that. The card, the Tower, has as good as told you that this is what is going to happen. You know it is going to happen. It is there in your future — you’ve seen it illustrated in full colour.’ Sylvia tapped the Tower card with her index finger. ‘And even if the tarot reader tells you that this future is not set in stone, and that you can avoid such an eventuality, still you will find yourself circling it, this idea of the Tower, a building with high windows, from which you will fall.’ Bonnie had barely blinked while Sylvia had been speaking; she was gazing intently at Sylvia, whose eyes were the colour of deep water. ‘You will be drawn towards this destiny like water to a plughole, swirling down.’ Sylvia sat back and smiled. ‘That’s how diets work as well, of course,’ she said. ‘A magazine tells you — and you say to yourself — Do not eat the cake. That cake now has a label attached to it, which says, ‘DON’T EAT ME’. This label, I think, is far more powerful than the label on Alice in Wonderland’s cake, which says, ‘EAT ME’, and on her drink which says, ‘DRINK ME’. ‘DON’T EAT ME’ says this cake, which you can’t see because you’ve put it somewhere safe but you know it is there and it is still making your mouth water. ‘DON’T EAT ME,’ says the cake, and you will indeed not eat the cake for as long as you possibly can, all the time with one eye — your mind’s eye — on where you have put your cake, or trying so hard not to look at it, not even to think about it, right up until the moment when, of course, you will not only look at it but you will finally give in and eat it.’