Bonnie tried to remember whether she had phoned her mother after arriving in Seaton. Sylvia had gone to the bar to order food, and had come back to say that she had asked about using the phone, and that it would be fine to do so but that the line was out of order and was at that moment being fixed, and that she would be welcome to use it as soon as it was mended. Bonnie had not, as far as she could remember, made her call.
Sylvia came into the room with a tray, on which was a plate of toast and a cup of tea.
‘I want to phone my mum,’ said Bonnie.
‘Yes,’ said Sylvia, setting the tray down on Bonnie’s lap. ‘But we haven’t got a phone, have we? And we’re out of range here anyway.’
‘But the pub’s got a phone. I can use that.’
‘Yes,’ said Sylvia. ‘I’ll ask if it’s been fixed yet, and then if you’re strong enough I’ll take you downstairs so that you can phone your mother and tell her that you’re safe.’
Bonnie ate her buttered toast, and Sylvia said, ‘It’s not true, you know, that we swallow eight spiders a year in our sleep. It’s a complete fabrication, but the statistic is decades old and continues to circulate on the Internet. It goes to show how keen we are to believe what we see.’
‘I didn’t really think it was true,’ said Bonnie.
‘It’s probably more like one or two,’ said Sylvia. ‘By the way, when Joe asked Susan why he would be slipping notes under her door and sticking them onto her window, why did you star-out the word “fucking”?’
‘I couldn’t write that,’ said Bonnie. ‘My mum might read it.’
‘I don’t really see why you need the swearing at all,’ said Sylvia. ‘And you shouldn’t start a sentence with “and” or “but”. It’s bad form.’
Bonnie nodded and drank her tea. As she put her cup down again, she shivered.
‘Are you cold?’ asked Sylvia. ‘You didn’t bring a jumper with you, but I’ve got one you can wear.’ And she produced from somewhere, like a magic trick, or perhaps just out of a bedside drawer, a thin, blue jumper. She helped Bonnie to pull it on. ‘There,’ she said. She took the tray away, glancing back at Bonnie when she reached the door. Smiling, she left the room.
Bonnie looked at the clock on the wall and realised that the hands were not moving. It occurred to her that she had no idea what time of day it was. The meal — the toast and tea — could have been breakfast or supper. She wondered where her watch was: it was not on her wrist. She could not see her shoulder bag anywhere, but she knew that her mobile phone was not in it anyway. Not knowing what time it was, she could not even be sure what day it was. She would have to ask Sylvia.
She lay in bed, waiting to see whether it was going to get lighter or darker.
Eventually, with the window still framing a wide, blue sky, she fell asleep. The lack of curtains only troubled her when she woke in the night and saw the cold window with all that darkness outside, that big black rectangle in the middle of the long wall.
In her dream, Bonnie had jumped into a swimming pool. She was going down and down, feet first; the pool was impossibly deep, but it had no water in it. She felt her feet touch the white-tiled bottom, and remembered nothing after that.
Bonnie opened her eyes and lay looking at the uncurtained window, in the middle of which she could see a small, white square. She sat up, peering at it, trying to see what it was. It was clear that it was not a reflection of the Cézanne, the wrong apples, next to which a reflection of the broken clock would have hung like a moon.
There was no lamp on the bedside table, so she climbed out of bed and crossed the room in the dark. She reached out and touched the white square, a sheet of paper, which was stuck to the inside of the glass. On the page, she thought she could see, despite the darkness, the word ‘JUMP’. She unstuck the paper from the window, took it over to the desk and switched on the Anglepoise lamp, which spilt a pool of yellow light across the desktop. With the light on, she felt exposed to the outside world, which she could not see; if she looked at the window, she saw only her own reflection, as if she were standing in front of a one-way mirror in an investigation room.
Looking at the paper in the light, she found that there was nothing written on it after all, and even when she switched the lamp off again and looked at the page in darkness as before, she could see nothing there.
She went to the door of her room, but when she tried to open it she found it resistant, as if she were pulling when she ought to be pushing. Eventually, she realised that it was locked. Bonnie knocked on her door, from the inside. ‘Sylvia?’ she called. ‘Sylvia?’ But no one answered.
She turned away from the door and stood in the middle of the room, listening for sounds of breathing, hearing nothing. She scrunched up the piece of paper, dropped it into the wastepaper basket and went back to bed. She thought she might lie awake until it got light, but she must have fallen straight back to sleep because suddenly she was waking again. On the edge of sleep, she heard music, a song she knew — Last night as I lay on my pillow — the lines looping through her head — Last night as I lay on my bed — like the language she was supposed to be learning — Last night as I lay on my pillow — or like the lessons learnt by the children in Brave New World — I dreamt that my Bonnie was dead. What an odd song, she thought as she came awake, to hear in a pub in the depths of the night. Or perhaps it was only the remnant of a dream, because at that moment, the music stopped.
It was still dark. And there, again, in the middle of the window, was a familiar white square. She stared at it, knowing that if she crossed the room and tried to touch the piece of paper that was stuck to the glass, she would find that she could not: her fingers would slip right over it as if it were frozen beneath ice. She crept to the end of her bed, towards the closed window, through which she could hear the sea and the crying of gulls, which sounded like laughter, and she said to them, through the glass, ‘Don’t you sleep?’
There did seem to be something written on the piece of paper. It was not quite legible, but Bonnie believed that she could almost see the hint of the word that was written there: ‘JUMP’.
Her pack of cigarettes was still on the windowsill. It was face up, and the label said ‘Smoking kills’. Bonnie extracted a cigarette, reached for the window handle and eased the window open. It was astonishingly dark out there: there were no lit street lamps, or stars visible in the sky; there was no moon. She could barely see the pavement below. In the darkness, she could hear very clearly the pull of the tide. But where was her lighter? It was not in the packet with the cigarettes, nor loose on the windowsill. Perhaps it was in her shoulder bag, which she did not have. She pulled the window to again and put the unsmoked cigarette back inside the packet. She went back to her bed and her pillow.
She dreamt about nothing.
‘My door was locked,’ said Bonnie to Sylvia, who was coming into the room with a bowl of ice cream, like Bonnie’s mother when Bonnie had her tonsils removed.
‘Sorry, Bonnie,’ said Sylvia, shutting the door behind her and coming over to the bed. ‘I decided to lock your door because you’ve not been well, sometimes hardly able to get out of bed, and if you couldn’t get to the door to lock it from the inside, I had to lock it from the outside, to keep you safe. That makes sense, doesn’t it?’
‘And I still don’t know where my bag is,’ said Bonnie.
‘Have you not got it?’ asked Sylvia. ‘I’m sure it will turn up before we leave.’
‘I saw another note,’ said Bonnie.