15
Over the next few weeks, Bonnie saw very little of Sylvia, so little that she started to think that something might be up, that perhaps she had completely misread Sylvia. ‘I’m getting paranoid!’ Bonnie said to Fiona. ‘She hardly ever comes round now, and when I do see her she’s dashing off somewhere. If she’s gone off the idea of us going away together, maybe you and I could do something instead.’
‘’Fraid not,’ said Fiona. ‘I’ve already made plans.’
‘Where are you going?’ asked Bonnie.
‘I’m not sure yet,’ said Fiona. ‘But I am going.’
The Lab was not a place where anyone stayed for long. Bonnie was well aware that Fiona hated the place, and Mr Carr. She asked Fiona how long she was going to stay there for, but Fiona would not say just when she would leave or what plans she had made.
‘How about you?’ asked Fiona.
‘I’ll probably stay,’ said Bonnie, although she disliked it too.
On a Friday in July, a few days before Bonnie was due to go on holiday with Sylvia, Bonnie watched a matinee showing of a science fiction film before heading for her evening job. As she passed the ‘CUNT’ bench, on which two women were sitting, talking, one of them said, ‘Just quit.’
Bonnie bought a chocolate bar and ate it while she walked to the Lab. Halfway down a quiet side street, she became aware of two or more men, wearing dark clothes, baseball caps and shades, following some distance behind her. They were like something escaped from the film she had just seen, and she walked a little faster. When she looked back over her shoulder, the men had gone.
Fiona was already in the staff room. She was sitting down while Mr Carr stood over her, with his shirt open, showing off the tattoo on his chest. When Bonnie came into the room, Mr Carr rebuttoned his shirt, although Bonnie caught sight of the legend, or part of it, tattooed across his broad chest: I am the master. It reminded Bonnie of her student housemate’s recitation: ‘I am the master of my fate.’ It was from an old poem. That was probably what Mr Carr’s tattoo said as welclass="underline" I am the master of my fate. Perhaps they were, she thought; or perhaps they were like Number Six in The Prisoner, trapped in the Village and insisting, ‘I am a free man!’
‘Go on, then,’ he said to the two of them. ‘Get to work.’
Bonnie cleaned her corridors, and was on her way back to the staff room when she saw Fiona coming from the store room. She could see that Fiona had already collected her belongings, and as they neared one another, Fiona, with a spring in her step, said, ‘I won’t see you on Monday.’
‘No,’ said Bonnie. As far as she knew, she was still going on holiday. ‘But I’ll be back at the end of the week. I’ll see you then.’
‘No,’ said Fiona, ‘I won’t see you again.’
‘Are you quitting?’ asked Bonnie.
‘Not exactly,’ said Fiona, passing her by with a grin, without stopping, turning her head to say, ‘I have to go. My friends are waiting for me.’
Bonnie had to go to the staff room to pick up her jacket and her bag. She was not looking forward to seeing Mr Carr. She had dragged her feet over asking for time off for her holiday. Mr Carr did not like it when people asked for time off, and Bonnie had continually failed to start the conversation, until eventually it had got too late to ask. If he saw her, he would say to her, ‘See you on Monday, don’t be late,’ and Bonnie would have to mumble something in reply. Under her breath, she said, ‘Please, please, please.’
Mr Carr was not in the staff room. Bonnie collected her things and headed towards the gate. She would still have to face him when she got back. Although, in fact, she had started to think about quitting. She would make that decision later though. Right now, she needed to do her packing, and nothing was clean. She had been meaning to go to the launderette but she had not got around to it.
As she left the complex, she half-expected the men in black, the men in dark glasses, to be there, waiting, but she did not see them.
She put in her earphones. She had abandoned the language course. Instead, she half-listened to music as she wandered home.
She passed a gym with posters in the windows that said ‘JOIN NOW’. She had been a member of this gym, despite the fact that she had never really been able to afford the fee. She had only ever been inside once, to use the swimming pool, and although she had always meant to go back, somehow it had never happened. She had already signed their forms though — they had her bank details — and so her membership money had been direct-debited from her bank account at the start of each month for the rest of the year. She ought to swim more though, she thought; she ought to get fit. She ought to join again.
For supper, Bonnie worked her way through a family pack of crisps. She opened up her laptop and discovered that the connection to her printer was working again. The elves, her grandmother would have said, had been working their magic. As a child, Bonnie had been troubled by the thought of these elves who let themselves into people’s private rooms and worked their strange magic, fixed their shoes in the middle of the night, and then left again without being seen, although you knew that they had been there.
She printed out the latest part of her story and put it away in the desk drawer with the rest. She finished the crisps and left her laptop to go to sleep. ‘But what happens next?’ she said to herself. Where could she go from where she was? And where was she? Susan suspected Joe of coming into her room while she was sleeping, but that was not likely to be the case, reckoned Bonnie as she brushed her teeth. And Susan had been thinking about Halloween coming, thought Bonnie as she put on her nightie, or about whether or not it would be coming to the seaside. And then she climbed into her bed, and went to sleep.
16
Waking late on the Saturday morning, it occurred to Bonnie that she had not told her parents that she was going away. They would want to know, she thought. She would not mention, though, that she was thinking of quitting her job. She would have to not say that. Do not say that, she told herself.
The landline was in her bedroom; her telephone was on the bedside table. She would be able to make or take an emergency call in the middle of the night without leaving her bed. She had an old-fashioned style of telephone, the type with a dial on the front and the receiver in a cradle. Her mother had worried that it would take too long for her to dial 999, but Bonnie had explained that the dial was just for show, that it was really a push-button model. It had been sold as a novelty telephone, which made it sound as if it would not actually work, as if it were just a prop. It was black, and whenever she used it, she felt as if she were a femme fatale in a Hitchcock film, although she mainly used it to call her mother, or to call for pizza.
She phoned home and spoke to her father, who said, ‘I’ll put your mother on.’
When her mother came on the line, Bonnie said to her, ‘I forgot to tell you that I’m going away on Monday. I’m going to the seaside with Sylvia for a few days.’
‘Who’s Sylvia?’ asked her mother.
‘My landlady,’ said Bonnie. ‘You met her at my birthday meal.’
‘Why are you going away with your landlady?’ asked her mother.
‘She suggested it,’ said Bonnie, ‘and I said yes. We’re going to Devon.’
‘What about your job?’ asked her mother. ‘Have they given you time off?’
‘Not really,’ said Bonnie. ‘But I was thinking of quitting anyway.’