‘And I didn’t get on very well at school,’ added Bonnie.
‘Don’t mumble,’ said Sylvia.
‘At school, my reports tended to say things like I was going nowhere, which I suppose is proving to be true,’ said Bonnie. ‘At secondary school I failed a lot of my exams. So I don’t have the sort of career my mum would like me to have.’
‘You failed your exams?’ said Sylvia, leaning forward in a way that seemed sympathetic.
‘A lot of them,’ said Bonnie. She mentioned that she had recently been having another go at learning French, her attempts at school having been so dismal, and that her mother had bought her audio lessons and had suggested listening to the course at night — ‘You’ll learn it in your sleep,’ her mother had said — but Bonnie was wary of having it dripped into her unconscious self like that. She would be like the child in Brave New World who suddenly knew that The-Nile-is-the-longest-river-in-Africa but not what that meant.
‘I would be interested to know,’ said Sylvia, ‘if you have any success with that method.’
‘I find it very difficult to get the language to stick in my brain,’ said Bonnie, hammering at her skull with her fingertips.
‘The younger you are, the easier it is,’ said Sylvia. ‘You learn your first language effortlessly, just picking it up from the people around you and assimilating it.’ She mentioned the language deprivation experiments that had been conducted on children by pharaohs and emperors and kings throughout the ages, experiments designed to see what language the children would grow up to speak without any intervention. ‘I do find it interesting,’ said Sylvia, ‘this question of the extent to which language is an internal impulse or an external knowledge to be acquired. It’s unfortunate,’ she added, ‘that these language experiments also tended to necessitate social deprivation, sometimes almost complete isolation. I believe the experiments led to some deaths.’
‘That’s terrible,’ said Bonnie. ‘No one would dream of doing that these days. No one would allow it to happen.’
‘It seems unlikely, doesn’t it?’ said Sylvia.
Bonnie told Sylvia about going to university but finding it hard and failing to complete her degree.
‘At what point did you leave your course?’ asked Sylvia.
‘In the final year,’ said Bonnie. ‘I’ve still got all the notes I made for my dissertation, but I never actually wrote it.’
Bonnie told Sylvia about the job she had taken after dropping out of university, her trial period, and how it had not really worked out. She told her about some things she had tried since, which had failed, including the temp agency that had not wanted her. ‘I have a couple of cleaning jobs,’ she said. ‘My parents help me with the rent.’
‘And what would you like to be doing?’ asked Sylvia.
‘Oh, I don’t really know,’ said Bonnie, glancing at the desk across the room, on top of which sat a laptop, which was closed, and a printer.
‘Don’t mumble,’ said Sylvia, but she followed Bonnie’s gaze. Bonnie reminded herself of a character in a book she had read, in which a woman, when asked about some wanted rogue she might be harbouring, denied that she had seen him but at the same time glanced at the scullery door that hid him. Bonnie looked away.
Sylvia regarded her for a moment, as if considering something. ‘When you took this flat,’ she said, ‘were you aware that the top flat — the loft conversion — was also vacant?’ She pointed to the ceiling. ‘It has a good view.’
‘Yes,’ said Bonnie, ‘but I prefer to live on the ground floor.’
Sylvia looked at her with interest. ‘And why is that?’ she asked.
‘When I was a kid,’ said Bonnie, ‘I started sleepwalking. I’d wake up and find myself standing at a window, like I was looking out, although I wasn’t really seeing, I suppose. But one time, the window was open, and Mum found me halfway out of it. She had to keep the windows locked and hide the keys.’
Bonnie reached for a pack of cigarettes that was lying on the arm of the sofa. She opened it and offered a cigarette to Sylvia, who declined. ‘But I would accept another cup of tea,’ she said, ‘if you don’t mind.’
‘Of course,’ said Bonnie, standing up, fixing the belt of her dressing gown, and taking the mugs back into the kitchen. While she waited for the kettle to boil again, she smoked her cigarette; there was no smoke alarm in the kitchen ceiling. Looking out into the backyard, she saw that it had started raining. She could not see the rain itself falling or landing; no drops were being blown against the window; but, in a waterlogged pothole outside the back door, in the puddle left behind by the previous day’s rainfall, she could see the little ripples that the rain made on the surface of the water, the tiny disturbances radiating outwards.
When Bonnie returned to the lounge with the two mugs of black tea, she found Sylvia standing over by the desk, reading. ‘Oh,’ said Bonnie, putting down the mugs. There was no coffee table, so she placed the mugs on the carpet and went over to the desk, where Sylvia was looking at the printout of the Seatown story. ‘Did I leave that out?’
‘You’re a writer?’ said Sylvia.
‘Not really,’ said Bonnie.
‘But this is a story you’ve written?’
Bonnie took the story out of Sylvia’s hands. ‘It is a story I tried to write,’ she said. ‘It’s only the beginning, but I print everything out in case the laptop fails, which happened once.’ One moment, she had been staring at a Word document, with her fingers poised over the keys, and the next moment the screen had gone blue and an emoticon was looking at her sadly, and then the screen went black. ‘It’s bound to happen again. I keep the printouts in case I ever want to go back to them, although I never do.’
Bonnie saw all sorts of advice for would-be writers: ‘Write the moment you wake up, when you’re in a hypnagogic state and can access your subconscious.’ What Bonnie wrote sitting up in bed in the morning, what she netted from her subconscious, always seemed like so much hogwash. Or else she made notes as she was falling asleep, and then, when she looked at them again days or weeks or months later, could not understand what on earth it all meant. ‘Walk around in your fictional world as if it were the set of a soap opera; enter its buildings and approach its inhabitants.’ Bonnie did not see how this could be done. She read that fictional characters have free will, but she did not see how this was possible. ‘There is inspiration everywhere — you just need to train yourself to notice it.’ Perhaps she needed something like the pair of special glasses that John Nada discovered in They Live, which enabled a person to see something more, a hidden world beneath the manifest one; although when John Nada looked beneath the surface, what he saw was ‘SLEEP’, ‘STAY ASLEEP’, ‘OBEY’.
‘You’re not a writer,’ said Sylvia, ‘unless you’re writing.’
Bonnie put the Seatown story back inside the desk’s wide drawer, on a little pile of other abandoned openings. At the same time, Sylvia was reaching in, touching some of the pristine stationery that Bonnie had in there.
‘You’ve got some beautiful notebooks in here,’ said Sylvia. ‘This one’s covered in genuine calfskin,’ she noted, admiring the finish.
‘My mum gave me that one,’ said Bonnie.
Her mother had said, ‘Now you’ll look like a writer,’ as if that were the point, as if a pair of wing-tipped spectacles and a purple scarf were all Bonnie needed, as well as all the cats. Some people did wear special outfits in order to write, or else they used a lucky pen, but Bonnie did not have one of those.