She shared her shift at the Lab with a woman called Chi. The supervisor, Mr Carr, called her Chichi, which Chi found infuriating. This only encouraged him.
On days when Bonnie did not arrive late, she and Chi would sit together in the staff room before starting their shift, and Bonnie would get something out of the vending machine — a packet of crisps or sweets or a chocolate bar. Sometimes, there was a competition running, and Bonnie would have a chance of winning something: ‘WIN £50 °CASH’ said the shiny packets. At least one company had apparently hidden tracking devices in certain products, in the wrappers of half a dozen bars of chocolate, so that they could track you down and leap out and give you a briefcase full of cash, ten thousand pounds. Or she could win a holiday, or a car: ‘WIN INSTANTLY’ said the products, from behind the toughened glass of the vending machine, and she did try.
‘Win, win, win,’ she whispered to a brand-new packet of sweets.
‘What was that?’ asked Chi. ‘What did you say?’
‘You can win a prize,’ said Bonnie, ‘if you’ve got the lucky packet.’
‘But saying “win, win, win” won’t make a difference,’ said Chi. ‘You’ve either got the winning packet or you haven’t.’
‘I always say it,’ replied Bonnie.
‘And have you ever won?’ asked Chi.
‘It worked the very first time I tried it.’
‘Does it work every time?’
‘I don’t think it’s worked since then,’ said Bonnie, ‘but what if one time I would have won if I’d said it, but then I didn’t say it and so I lost?’
Chi leaned towards the packet of sweets and said, ‘Lose, lose, lose.’
Bonnie winced. ‘What did you do that for?’ she complained, looking anxiously at the little packet.
‘It makes no difference,’ said Chi. ‘You have no control over whether you win or lose. You know that, don’t you?’
Bonnie did not reply. She was busy looking inside the packet to see if she had won, but she had not.
From five to seven o’clock, Bonnie mopped the long corridors in the main building. The corridors led past sets of double doors: big, white doors with no windows in them. She wondered what was behind these blank doors, what grim experiments might be taking place. She thought about monkey experiments, like Dr Harlow’s monkeys: newborns taken from their mothers and made to choose between a bare-wire, milk-giving ‘mother’ and a cloth-covered, milkless ‘mother’. This was not that sort of laboratory, of course, but still, when she saw the secretive double doors, she thought of those unhappy monkeys clinging to their make-believe mothers. Or else she thought of dogs being made to smoke cigarettes, and rabbits having chemicals dripped into their unblinking eyes. There were some things that the scientists were not allowed to do these days, but she was not sure exactly what, quite where the line had been drawn.
Or perhaps it was just a store room, a stationery cupboard, full of headed paper and window envelopes, spare pens and pencils, toner cartridges and boxes of paperclips so that they need never run out, so that the paperwork could always be completed.
Chi, who cleaned a different section of the complex, disliked the job even more than Bonnie did. She had once said to Bonnie, ‘I don’t like what they do here,’ and Bonnie had nodded. ‘I think we should leave,’ Chi had added, but then Mr Carr had appeared on the scene, and Bonnie had opened her mouth and started to say that she was not sure that she could leave, that she needed the work, the money, that it could be worse, but Chi picked up her bucket and walked away, and Bonnie had to go to her first long corridor and start work.
At the end of the shift, Bonnie and Chi would go back to the staff room to collect their belongings, and Mr Carr would be there too, to make sure that they were not sneaking off early or stealing anything. He would check their pockets and their bags, whose contents he sometimes emptied out onto the tabletop, and when they left, he would say, ‘I’m watching you.’
Sometimes, at night, after walking back to the flat on Slash Lane — where the street lamps flickered and sometimes went off — Bonnie had trouble sleeping.
In the night, she found herself at her bedroom window, whose curtains did not meet in the middle. Seeing a star, one very bright star in the otherwise empty sky, she thought to herself, There’s the North Star. She did not know much about what was out there but she thought she knew that: she was looking at the North Star, and the North Star was a constant, a guiding light. She whispered to it:
Star light, star bright,
The first star I see tonight…
Or, she thought, was she wrong about that? Did the role of North Star switch from one star to another as everything moved around in the sky? And then she saw that this bright star she was looking at was moving even as she watched it, the dot of light sliding from one side of the window frame to the other, and she thought of those old films where people are pretending to be driving along while the background scrolls past, to give the impression that the people themselves are moving.
The light in the sky was just an aeroplane. Perhaps someone was going on holiday, in the middle of the night.
Pressed against the windowpane,
Wishing on an aeroplane.
Awake in the early hours, she put on her dressing gown and pottered. She had continued to find all sorts of unexpected things secreted about the place. In the cupboard under the stairs, she discovered three artificial Christmas trees, and a collection of road signs — red-bordered triangles — and traffic cones that ought to have been around holes in the road. On top of the wardrobe in the bedroom, she found a suitcase full of dressing-up clothes: Halloween costumes — a witch, a devil, a Frankenstein mask, or rather Dr Frankenstein’s monster — and a clown costume, or perhaps the clown was also a Halloween outfit. And in the drawer of the old Mission desk in the lounge, she found a little origami figure that made her think of a fat, flightless bird like a chicken, or a dodo. She did not know whether these things ought to be returned to someone or whether they were hers now, but she did not want all these things: the fake trees, the costumes, the warning signs. She would mention it to the letting agent, but it did not bother her too much for the time being. In university accommodation, she had put up for the best part of a year with a mattress whose springs poked through, stabbing into her flesh as she slept.
Or sometimes, when she could not sleep, she would go to the all-night garage and buy something. On her birthday, she bought a packet of Love Hearts that said ‘CRAZY’ and ‘DREAM ON’.
Or else she would open up her laptop and try to write, although mostly she ended up on the Internet. It just happened: one moment, she would be looking at an opening paragraph, trying to bring something to mind, her fingers hovering over the keyboard, and the next moment she would have clicked and she would find herself online, window-shopping; she would try not to let the cursor — which turned into a little hand with its index finger extended, as if, like a child, it wanted to touch everything — stray towards the targeted advertising, the flashing buttons that said ‘SHOP NOW’, ‘BUY NOW’, and when she did, she worried about the people who were out there waiting to phish her. She pictured them as if they were just beyond the screen, waiting for her to make a move. One day, she would click on some link without realising what it was and then her cursor would start moving around on the screen, with a life of its own, and that would be it, they would be in.