She had been in the flat for some weeks before she got around to investigating a lumpy bit of carpet in the middle of the lounge. Peeling back the thin, beige carpet — which had been cut to only approximately the right size and shape and laid like a rug, without gripper at the edges — Bonnie found, underneath it, an old paint-tin lid lying on the floorboards. Its crust of paint was the same colour as the lounge walls. The work that had been done to make this place seem habitable — the slapping on of magnolia and the snipping out of a rough bit of carpet — was somewhat superficial, giving the room a temporary feel, like a stage set.
So, thought Bonnie: no old masters, no grenades, no bones; just newspapers, socks, a paint-tin lid, and the contents of the deep and jam-packed cupboard under the stairs. And sometimes, through the walls or through the ceiling, from the other part of the house, came the sound of someone else’s music or the smell of someone else’s cooking; a familiar film score would make her tap her foot, or her mouth would start watering at the smell of home cooking coming from the upstairs flat; and when her bedroom was dark, she saw a sliver of light coming through underneath the locked door.
3
Bonnie’s morning cleaning job was at an amusement arcade on the high street. She walked there past an old house that had the ghost of an advert painted on its side wall, clinging faintly to the brickwork: EAT… She passed a chip shop and high-rise buildings and a car park from which a man had jumped, the son of someone her mother knew. She passed a church, with posters stapled to a board outside, saying ‘GOD WILL SAVE YOU’. She passed the community centre on Waterside Close, with scalloped stone edging around the doorway, and happy cartoon characters stuck to the windows, or starting to come away. She might once have gone to the playgroup there; she had the vaguest sense of having been abandoned in that building. There was graffiti on the exterior walls that said things like ‘HOPE’ and ‘BOOM!’
On the high street itself, she passed a pet shop in which she used to work. The pet shop had a resident parrot that sat on a perch and seemed to watch her, and every now and again it said, ‘You stink!’ The parrot surely did not mean her personally, and Bonnie was not even sure that parrots had a sense of smell, but still she would surreptitiously put her nose to her armpit and sniff, although she could not tell if what she could smell was just the hamsters in their cages, on their wheels. Either way, it had not been good for her self-esteem.
After keeping the pet shop job for longer than any other, she had got her current morning job in the amusement arcade, where she vacuumed the carpet tiles and cleaned the machines. She wiped the backlit buttons that said things like ‘PRESS’, ‘PUSH’, ‘PUSH!’, ‘HOLD’ and ‘GO’, buffing away the build-up of fingerprints made by the punters’ fingertips pecking and pecking at the buttons, waiting for the payout. She polished the chrome-effect trim on the change machine as if it were a magic lamp.
Bonnie had a few hours free in the afternoon, before her second job. Usually, she went to the chip shop. The chips were wrapped in butcher paper, the sort that she had done her paintings on when she was still in infant schooclass="underline" pictures of her house and her garden, and her family holding hands; it was the sort of paper that her mother sometimes brought lamb chops home in. The chips in those days were wrapped in newspaper; Bonnie remembered sitting on a wall with a hot packet of greasy, salty chips on her bare thighs, the newspaper print coming off on her skin. Lose weight, said the ink on her legs, but backwards.
In the middle of town, there was a bench with a plaque on it: ‘In loving memory of’ someone or other. On the wooden slats, someone had written, in thick, black marker pen in two separate places, ‘CUNT’. If the bench was free, Bonnie would sit there with her chips. The two pieces of graffiti were placed such that whichever side she sat on, the word ‘CUNT’ would remain visible beside her, like a label.
She watched the kids skateboarding and training to do parkour. Someone had said — some parkour expert — that thinking you are going to fail at something gives you a higher risk of doing just that. She wondered if that was true, and supposed she could test it, though not right now, in front of everyone; she would fall flat on her face.
Sometimes, after her chips, she went to the cinema. She might watch a film more than once during its run, as if she expected it to be different the second or third time. During these matinee showings, she was often the only person in the auditorium. In the dark, she ate her popcorn and lost herself in the film, something historical or futuristic, something set in another country or on another planet. It only took an hour or so, ninety minutes, for the world outside to become unreal. When she emerged, the familiar town would look strange, like a set, the oblivious shoppers like walk-ons. After horror films, she felt uneasy in broad daylight, and made an effort to avoid alleyways and underpasses and anywhere deserted; she felt compelled to glance behind her as she walked, although she tried hard not to look, to just keep walking, looking straight ahead. The film score remained in her ears and would come back to her at odd times throughout the day, for years.
The walk to her second job took her past an animal rescue centre, a cat sanctuary. When she got close, she could hear what might have been dozens of unwanted cats, a hundred cats, miaowing, or else she imagined that she could. What happened, she wondered, to the cats that could not find an owner, the ones that were just too old to be chosen? Some places had a ‘no kill’ policy; she did not know about this particular sanctuary. And presumably a lack of space meant that there were some cats that did not make it into the shelter in the first place. One day, instead of walking past, she would go in. If she went in, she would want to take a cat home; if she chose one, she would want to choose three or four; she would want to take them all, every last one. She would be the kind of woman who was always mocked, a woman with a houseful of rescue cats, except that she did not have a house, and was not allowed pets in the flat.
At the end of the afternoon, Monday to Friday, Bonnie cleaned at a pharmaceutical research and development laboratory, which was in the middle of a normal street of old, red-brick terraced houses, whose tiles were slipping and whose chimneys and garden walls were crumbling and toppling — you could imagine the whole street falling to pieces in a storm — but the pharmaceutical complex was new; it was squat and sturdy.