‘I was wondering about getting into travel writing,’ said Bonnie, and Sylvia laughed. ‘I was going to try some travel writing when I stayed in that Ibis. I was going to write about a museum I’d planned to go to, but I went on the wrong day and it was closed, so I just got a taxi back to the hotel.’
Sylvia smiled and said, ‘Have you written any more of your story?’
‘No,’ said Bonnie. ‘I was thinking of seeing if I could get anything done this weekend.’
‘Put more detail into it,’ said Sylvia. ‘I want to be able to picture what everything looks like. What’s the wallpaper like in the bedroom? What’s the picture on the wall? Whereabouts in the room is the bed? You had a blanket in the first part, but now it’s a duvet. And what colour is it?’
‘Oh,’ said Bonnie. ‘Yellow?’
Sylvia finished her tea. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ll leave you to it, and when you’ve written it I’d like to read it.’
‘Maybe you can read it while we’re in Seaton,’ said Bonnie.
‘No,’ said Sylvia, ‘before that. I’ll pop round again in a week.’ She looked at the boxes from under the stairs. ‘I’ll take some of this away with me as well.’ She handed Bonnie her empty cup and picked up the cool box and another box that contained assorted bits and bobs. ‘See if you can find a teapot,’ she said, nodding to the other boxes. ‘It makes a better cup of tea.’
III
13
Susan dreamt that she was in a hotel, walking back to her room, but she could not get her eyes to open properly; she could not hold them open long enough to read the numbers on the bedroom doors. And so she wandered up and down the corridor, unable to find her room.
Waking, she found that she was not in fact walking endlessly in a corridor but lying in her bed, which was in the corner furthest from the door. She liked that her bed was in the corner; she liked to go to sleep against a wall, although she always found that she rolled to the opposite side, the side that was not against a wall, during the night. She still remembered the childhood bump of tumbling out of bed.
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.’