‘I don’t know how you can live like this,’ said her father, balancing his full plate on his knees. ‘Have you not got a table?’
‘Funnily enough,’ said Bonnie, ‘I’ve just helped Sylvia take a table out of here.’
‘Of course you have,’ said her father.
They ate, and when they had all finished, Bonnie reached for her parents’ empty plates. ‘Let me take those,’ she said.
‘No,’ said her mother. ‘These are my good plates, I don’t want you to break them.’
Bonnie’s mother took the plates through to the kitchen and Bonnie said, ‘Do we want afters?’
‘What have you got?’ asked her father.
Bonnie went and had a look in the fridge, and in the freezer compartment, and in her biscuit tin. ‘I’ve got biscuits,’ she said.
‘What sort of biscuits?’ asked her father.
‘Broken,’ said Bonnie. ‘I got a kilogram.’
‘I think we’ll just go,’ said her mother, who had washed up the plates and was packing them away, along with everything else that she had brought with her.
Bonnie walked her parents to their car. Bonnie’s mother, after getting in and closing her door, wound down her window to say, ‘Have a good trip!’ and Bonnie’s father, behind the wheel, shouted up at Sylvia’s flat, ‘Don’t let her drive!’ There was no sign of Sylvia though; there were no lights on.
Bonnie returned to the flat, to the lounge, where she switched on the television and sat and watched the tennis. She always meant to follow Wimbledon, but somehow she never did, not all the way through to the end.
Her eyes followed the ball across the net, to and fro, like someone following a hypnotist’s swinging pocket watch, to a background murmur of commentary. The game had a familiar lulling, rhythmic quality, but at the same time, underlying the tennis whites and the strawberries and cream, there was muscle and ferocity and steely-eyed tenacity.
The tennis finished while Bonnie was in the kitchen, boiling the kettle. She took her cup of tea back into the lounge and settled down again in front of the television to watch Blade Runner. She had seen the film before, but this, it turned out, was a different version: the Director’s Cut. With one brief shot spliced into the middle of another scene and lasting only seconds, the Director’s Cut introduced into the narrative a subtle but vital difference: Deckard’s mental image of a unicorn running through the mist suggested that Deckard himself was a Replicant. It was unsettling, as if this must also have been true in the other version, as if this had been part of the narrative all along but without Bonnie ever having seen it, despite sitting through the whole film. Those few seconds made all the difference in the world, changing the meaning of Deckard finding the silver paper origami unicorn at the end of the film. How disturbing it would be, she thought, to discover, just like that, that you were not what you thought you were, that you were not real. And what had happened to her happy ending? In the Director’s Cut, you no longer saw Deckard and Rachael driving off into the future. All that was just gone. ‘That’s not how it ends!’ said Bonnie to the screen. She watched the closing credits, after which there was sometimes something more, something extra.
The screen faded to black.
Apparently there were other versions as well, but Bonnie was wary of seeing them.
She did not feel like going to bed just yet. She changed channels and watched an old silent film, the start of which she had already missed. Intertitles flashed up, like subliminal messaging for slower readers: ‘What’s the matter — afraid of Temptation?’ Or like a fortune cookie message: ‘The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.’ The flickering text also reminded her of an installation that she had seen with her mother at Tate Liverpooclass="underline" in a dark box of a room, she had sat on a bench facing a screen on which a short black and white film had looped, and in amongst the indistinct, ghostly images she had seen a phrase, ‘THE DEATH OF TOI’. She had sat there watching the film of flickering light and shadows repeating, the words flashing up over and over again. She had been comfortable in there. It was not often she went to a gallery, and less often still that she understood a piece of modern art, but this, she felt, she did. She was talking about it as they left the gallery, and her mother said, ‘I don’t think that’s what it said. Didn’t you see the description?’ Bonnie had not. The film, her mother explained, was a corrupted recreation of the final scene of the silent film of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the caption was ‘THE DEATH OF TOM’. Bonnie had seen something that was not really there, or rather, she had seen something that she was not meant to see. Now that she had seen it, though, she could not unsee it; she still saw it flashing up on the screen in her mind’s eye as she walked with her mother up Water Street: ‘THE DEATH OF TOI’.
The film that Bonnie was watching now came to an end: ‘The End’ appeared on the screen and Bonnie switched the television off. She made another cup of tea and took it to bed with her.
On Sunday afternoon, Bonnie went to the launderette. There was no one in there except for her, and the woman behind the counter who was in charge. There were machines going, but most people put their washing in and then left, and came back when their washing was done. Bonnie, though, had once put her washing into the machine and gone home and failed to return until after the launderette was closed. Now she stayed, to be on the safe side.
She put her washing into a machine and set it going. The woman behind the counter said, ‘Hello, love,’ and Bonnie turned around. The woman was not looking at her now; she was searching through a bag of laundry. Bonnie said hello but she might have said it too quietly to be heard; the woman did not look up. Bonnie sat down to wait. She had forgotten to bring a magazine. Her phone was in her pocket but she had neglected to charge it and the screen was dead.
The launderette had been given a fresh coat of paint; Bonnie could smell the fumes. The smell reminded her of ghosts. She had once — three times in fact — seen the ghost of Elvis Presley. She had been asleep in her bedroom, which was being painted at the time, the walls changing from a floral pattern to plain white, the blue flowers still showing through after the second coat, like the bell on Noddy’s hat showing through the black paint on Adrian Mole’s bedroom wall, the bell iterated dozens of times around the walls and still showing through coat after coat. Bonnie had woken up in the night and seen Elvis’s ghost, which came forward out of a poster of him, which was still up on a wall that had not yet been painted, or else — she could not remember — the wall had already been painted and the poster had been put back up. The following night, the same thing happened, except that this time Elvis grew bigger, came closer. On the third night, he was bigger and closer still, a beautiful spectre looming over her. She did not tell her mother, who would have said that it was only the paint fumes. Bonnie knew that it was not just the paint fumes: she had seen it with her own eyes.
Bonnie watched her washing tumbling around inside the spinning machine. It was mesmeric. It made her feel sleepy.
The woman behind the counter said, ‘You have to watch this programme they’re showing at nine o’clock tonight on the BBC.’
‘Oh,’ said Bonnie. ‘All right.’
The woman glanced up, and Bonnie realised that the woman was using a hands-free device; she was talking to somebody else.
‘Sorry,’ said Bonnie. ‘You were talking to somebody else, weren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said the woman, but she had already looked away again and her reply might have been meant for the person on the other end of the phone.