On quitting university, she had moved home again, and her father had said to her mother, ‘What did you expect?’ Bonnie had been living with her parents ever since, and doing casual work. In her spare time, she sat in her old bedroom, at the same desk she had once used for her schoolwork, and wrote stories, or tried to. She had come to a halt in her current one, in which her protagonist had moved to the seaside and taken a room above a pub. Bonnie had got as far as her protagonist finding a message that had been pushed under the door of her room, but when she looked at it, it was blank, any message or sense of meaning evaporating before her eyes, the way even the most vivid dream could slip away as you woke, so that in moments it went from something that felt real to something that could not even be recalled. Now Bonnie did not know what to do, what might happen next. But anyway, she had put the story away. She would have to clear her desk and empty her drawers, having been told by her parents, as the big three-zero approached, that it was time for her to move out.
Although she had been asked to leave home, Bonnie had no reason to leave town. She had her jobs, and no promise of anything better elsewhere. She searched through the Homeseeker section of the local newspaper and found a ground-floor flat available to rent, in a terraced house at one end of Slash Lane.
‘I’m not sure I like the sound of Slash Lane,’ said her mother. ‘It doesn’t sound safe.’
‘It’s just a name, Mum,’ said Bonnie, although she did remember how driving up Carsick Hill Road in Sheffield always made her feel queasy, and she wondered if she would ever feel comfortable walking along Slash Lane on her own in the dark.
She arranged to view the Slash Lane property, and was met outside the Victorian house by the letting agent. Wearing a navy-blue suit and holding a clipboard, the letting agent reminded Bonnie of the driving instructor who had failed her when she was seventeen, and the woman from the human resources department at Bonnie’s first place of work, which Bonnie had left at the end of a trial period, and the bank employee who had turned down her loan request, and someone else Bonnie was unable to recall. The letting agent shook Bonnie’s hand and looked at her clipboard, and Bonnie braced herself for some sort of test.
‘Mrs Falls?’ said the letting agent.
‘Miss,’ said Bonnie. ‘Ms,’ she added, and the sound she made was like air escaping through a puncture, the sound of something slowly deflating.
‘I’m sorry,’ said the letting agent, making a note on her clipboard. ‘Are we waiting for anyone else or it just you?’
‘It’s just me,’ said Bonnie.
‘That’s fine,’ said the letting agent. Scribbling again, she said something that Bonnie did not catch, and then, ‘Single?’
‘I’m sorry?’ said Bonnie. She could imagine her mother having hired this woman — the navy-blue suit a disguise, the clipboard just a prop — to conduct an investigation into Bonnie’s love life and come up with an answer, a solution. Bonnie thought of her school’s careers adviser biting the end of her pen and frowning. She thought of her mother saying, ‘You’re not a bad-looking girl, Bonnie. You just need to brighten yourself up. You just need to smile.’ Bonnie had occasional dates with men she met online, but they rarely progressed to a second date, and never to a third. She was never, it seemed, quite anyone’s type.
‘Single tenancy?’ said the letting agent.
‘Yes,’ said Bonnie.
The letting agent ticked a box on the paperwork on her clipboard, and Bonnie looked at the house. Its front — a flat, orange-bricked rectangle standing on its short side, with a pointy, orange-tiled roof on top — made her think of a gingerbread house, the clean frames like white icing around the square windows and the front door.
‘There are two flats available in this property,’ said the letting agent. ‘An attic flat and a ground-floor flat. Did you want to see them both today?’
‘No,’ said Bonnie. ‘Just the ground-floor flat.’
‘All right,’ said the letting agent. ‘You can always change your mind. Let’s go and see the downstairs flat first.’
Bonnie was led through a passageway between the house and its immediate neighbour, down a red-brick path like the one in the film of The Wizard of Oz, in which, at first, a red-brick road and a yellow-brick road spiralled together, like the pattern on a spinning top that Bonnie had lost in childhood. Dorothy took the yellow-brick road, while the red-brick road went off in another direction, and you never found out where it led. In the book, though, there was no option, no red-brick road. Also in the book, the yellow-brick road was interrupted in places by deep drops with sharp and jagged rocks at the bottom, which Bonnie did not remember seeing in the film. And what was only a dream in the film was, in the book, quite real.
The passageway led to the house’s back door, and they entered the ground-floor flat through the kitchen, which had a three-foot-wide aisle down the middle and work surfaces on either side. The letting agent pointed out the fixtures and fittings, and any damage that she was aware of. ‘It’s all on the inventory,’ she said, referring to her clipboard, which held a list of what was provided and what was damaged, with no division between the two: the kitchen contained a fridge and a missing drawer handle, a cooker and a missing vinyl floor tile.
A narrow bathroom extended from one end of the kitchen, and at the other end you walked into a long lounge barely touched by natural light, and beyond that was the bedroom. Living in this flat, thought Bonnie, would be like living in a series of corridors. The bedroom, at the front of the flat, looked directly onto the street and the bus stop outside.
In the bedroom’s side wall, there was a door. ‘What’s behind this door?’ asked Bonnie, reaching for the door handle, but the letting agent said that it led only to the other part of the house, the hallway that the front door opened into, and the stairs to the upper floors. Now that the house had been divided into flats, this door remained locked, she said, although Bonnie tried the handle anyway.
At the end of February, Bonnie moved into the flat on a six-month tenancy agreement. She had recently been turned down by a temp agency but she had two cleaning jobs. She was hoping to find something she liked better. She kept putting in applications but rarely got interviews; and when she did get an interview, she never got the job. For now, her parents were supplementing her rent. She could not afford to buy anything for the flat but it came partially furnished anyway; there was even an old television. And she brought some home comforts with her from her parents’ house: she had a kettle that her mother had been about to throw out, and a small supply of tea bags to tide her over, and she had her books. She had more books than shelf space: on either side of the bookcase in the lounge, the books spread in piles across the floor, reaching towards the doors, towards the bedroom and the kitchen, as if they were trying to get out, to go out into the world. She did her best to make the flat feel like hers, putting her own bedding on the mattress, and placing her knickknacks around the lounge, though they looked a bit lost in that long, dim room. She moved them around a bit.
In the kitchen, in a drawer, she found a memo, or a partial shopping list. It said, ‘BUY WOTSITS’. Bonnie had not bought Wotsits for years. In a cupboard, she found dozens of hoarded newspapers, with items clipped out. She found a picture postcard, with a design from the 1930s, advertising Butlin’s holiday camps in Skegness and Clacton-on-Sea; it said ‘JOIN OUR HAPPY FAMILY’. She turned it over but the side the sender was supposed to write on was blank. At the back of a drawer in the bedroom, Bonnie found a newish pair of socks, which she kept, even though they were a bit small, a bit tight. They would be useful, she thought, in an emergency. In the under-stairs cupboard — which was in her part of the house even though the stairs themselves were not — she found a huge amount of stuff presumably left behind by a previous tenant: a cardboard box full of dusty baby blankets; a cool box; a camping stove; a table with folding legs, like a picnic table, or a wallpaper pasting table; a pair of Anglepoise lamps and a torch; a case of LPs but nothing to play them on; old coats and shoes. People lived with so much crap, she thought, peering into this cupboard whose back wall she could not even see. She shut the door. It was astonishing what people came across when they moved into old houses. She had read about people finding — in their attics and cellars — antiques, old masters, old letters and diaries, or they found guns and grenades, mummified squirrels and mice, birds and bats, cat bones and dog bones and human bones. Sometimes, they lived in these places for years with no idea that these things were there, just below their feet, just above their heads. But Bonnie had found nothing like that.