Death and the Seaside Read online

  With an abandoned degree behind her and a thirtieth birthday approaching, amateur writer Bonnie Falls moves out of her parents’ home into a nearby flat. Her landlady, Sylvia Slythe, takes an interest in Bonnie, encouraging her to finish one of her stories, in which a young woman moves to the seaside, where she comes under strange influences. As summer approaches, Sylvia suggests to Bonnie that, as neither of them has anyone else to go on holiday with, they should go away together – to the seaside, perhaps.

  The new novel from the author of the Man Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse is a tense and moreish confection of semiotics, suggestibility and creative writing with real psychological depth and, in Bonnie Falls and Sylvia Slythe, two unforgettable characters.

  Praise for The Lighthouse

  ‘A haunting and accomplished novel’

  — Katy Guest, The Independent on Sunday

  ‘No surprise that this quietly startling novel won column inches when it landed a spot on the Man Booker Prize longlist . . . Though sparely told, the novel’s simple-seeming narrative has the density of a far longer work . . . It all stokes a sense of ominousness that makes the denouement not a bit less shocking.’

  — Hephzibah Anderson, The Daily Mail

  ‘It is this accumulation of the quotidian, in prose as tight as Magnus Mills’s, which lends Moore’s book its standout nature, and brings the novel to its ambiguous, thrilling end.’

  — Philip Womack, The Telegraph

  ‘Ultimately, what drew me into this bleak tale of sorrow and abandonment was the quality of the writing – so taut and economical it even looked different on the page somehow – and so effective in creating a mounting sense of menace and unease. It never flinches . . . For such a small volume, The Lighthouse actually has a deceptively clever structure which I didn’t fully appreciate until the ending, and what an ending it is. I had to think about it, and I like that.’

  — Isabel Costello, On the Literary Sofa

  ‘This is powerful writing likely to shine in your memory for a long time.’

  — Emily Cleaver, Litro Magazine

  ‘Alison Moore has created an unsettling, seemingly becalmed but oddly sensual, and entirely excellent novel . . . a discomforting and moving portrait of intense loss.’

  — Alan Bowden, Words of Mercury

  ‘Every word feels earned and precise and right. It all builds wonderfully . . . It is the quiet exactitude of this novel that makes it such a powerful work’

  — Ben Dutton, A Literary Life

  ‘a kind of heartbreaking farce . . . Moore’s touch has the sharp penetration of a hypodermic needle.’

  — Adam Roberts

  ‘As soon as I had finished it I wanted to re-read it’

  — stillnotfussed

  ‘Just superbly written’

  — Literary Hoarders

  ‘deliciously unsettling . . . our sense of inevitable disaster becomes almost unbearable’

  — Jenn Ashworth, The Guardian

  ‘Moore’s writing has a superb sense of the weight of memory.’

  — Kate Saunders, The Times

  ‘Small wonder that it stood up to the crash-testing of a prize jury’s reading and rereading. One of the year’s 12 best novels? I can believe it.’

  — Anthony Cummins, The Observer

  ‘It really is an excellent debut’

  — Heavenali

  ‘precise, evocative prose. The Lighthouse is a fine first novel’

  — David Hebblethwaite

  ‘brilliant craftmanship. A haunting, lingering read.’

  — Victoria Cooper, Red

  ‘queasy brilliance . . . It deserves to be read, and reread.’

  — Isabel Berwick, The Financial Times

  ‘Alison Moore’s writing is sublime . . . The Lighthouse is sad, atmospheric and wonderfully creepy.’

  — Page Plucker

  ‘Disquieting, deceptive, crafted with a sly and measured expertise, Alison Moore’s story could certainly deliver a masterclass in slow-burn storytelling’

  — Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

  Praise for The Pre-War House and Other Stories

  ‘Showcases the evolution of a writer who refuses to dilute her stories with artificial light or sentimentality to make them more palatable. There’s really no need, when she knows how to make bleakness so thrillingly readable.’

  — ISABEL COSTELLO, On the Literary Sofa

  ‘There is an insistent, rhythmic quality to Moore’s writing, and a dark imagination at work.’

  — GENEVIEVE FOX, The Daily Mail

  ‘Just as uncompromising and unsettling as The ­Lighthouse.’

  — DINAH BIRCH, The Guardian

  ‘Beautifully crafted, rendered in a lean, pared-down style that accentuates the stark content.’

  — Metro

  ‘The tales collected in The Pre-War House . . . pick at psychological scabs in a register both wistful and brutal.’

  — ANTHONY CUMMINS, The Times Literary Supplement

  ‘she creates an atmosphere of discomfort pervaded by that niggling feeling that all is not quite as it should be. Clever stuff.’

  —Lit Nerd

  Praise for He Wants

  ‘The best novels are the ones that leave you with a sense of yearning, and in He Wants, Alison Moore proves her mastery of the medium . . . As Lewis’s desires are revealed, the reader is drawn into a compelling series of regrets, coincidences and reminders that life doesn’t often bestow second chances . . . Moore’s tightly wreathed prose and assured plotting ensure a bittersweet longing for more once the final page is turned.’

  — Lynsey May, The List

  ‘Moore is a serious talent. There’s art here. There’s care.’

  —Sam Leith, The Financial Times

  ‘a witty and very moving novel’

  —Jonathan Edwards, New Welsh Review

  ‘brave and rigorous’

  — Rachel Cusk, The Guardian

  ‘Moore movingly mines the aching gap between aspiration and actuality.’

  — Anita Sethi, The Observer

  ‘He Wants is a funny, touching, life-affirming novel about desire’

  — Anne Goodwin, Annecdotal

  Death and the Seaside

  ALISON MOORE’s first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards (New Writer of the Year), winning the McKitterick Prize. Both The Lighthouse and her second novel, He Wants, were Observer Books of the Year. Her shorter fiction has been included in Best British Short Stories and Best British Horror anthologies, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra and collected in The Pre-War House and Other Stories. Born in Manchester in 1971, she lives near Nottingham with her husband Dan and son Arthur.

  ALSO BY ALISON MOORE

  The Lighthouse (2012)

  The Pre-War House and Other Stories (2013)

  He Wants (2014)

  Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

  12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Alison Moore, 2016

  The right of Alison Moore to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

  Salt Publishing 2016

  Crea
ted by Salt Publishing Ltd

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 978-1-78463-070-6 electronic

  To Nick Royle

  undertow • n. = undercurrent • n. 1 a current of water below the surface and moving in a different direction from any surface current. 2 an underlying feeling or influence.

  – Oxford English Dictionary

  © PAPERBACK OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY 6E edited by Catherine Soanes et al (2006), reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

  I

  1

  Sometimes, Susan woke to find that her limbs were dead. Her arm would be flung back, bent beneath her head, the blood stopped, and she would have to move it with her other hand, the dead weight unsettling her, as if she had woken to find a ten-pound leg of lamb lying on her pillow; or one leg would be lying lifeless beneath the other, and she would have to lift the numb leg with both hands, holding it under the thigh and hanging it over the side of her bed like a Christmas stocking that wanted filling. This had been happening to her for as long as she could remember.

  This morning, it was her right leg. Sitting on the edge of her mattress, she stretched her blood-starved toes, the nasty comfort of pins and needles bringing her leg fizzing back to life.

  She had no curtains at her window, nothing to buffer the daylight in those first few minutes of being awake. She had been promised curtains but, in the meantime, it did not bother her too much. Her room was in the attic, so it was not like anyone walking by could see in. Each morning, she woke to see the window framing the bare sky. The lack of curtains only troubled her if 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.

  Her cigarettes were on the windowsill. She stood, testing her foot, feeling only a residual tingling, like froth left popping on the sand when a wave pulls away. She crossed the room and opened the window, letting in the brisk sea air. Leaning on the windowsill, she lit a cigarette. She looked out at the quiet street and the churning waters beyond it.

  In the coming week, there would be a bonfire on the beach; there was a poster advertising it on the wall in the pub. They would burn the old fishing boats too, like a sacrificial offering on a funeral pyre.

  She smoked her cigarette down to the butt and blew the smoke outside, blowing it downwards, though it drifted up. The slabbed pavement reminded her of a dream she’d had when she was small, in which she jumped from her bedroom window to the patio slabs below and sank, very comfortably, into the ground, as if she were Mr Soft, as if nothing could hurt her. ‘It wouldn’t be like that though,’ her mum had said, in the kitchen in the morning. ‘You’d be lucky just to break your legs.’

  Susan let go of her cigarette end and watched it fall to the pavement. She thought of that thing about a feather and a brick descending at exactly the same speed, or a ton of feathers and a ton of bricks. That was in a vacuum though, or on the moon or something. The butt hit the ground and Susan closed the window.

  She got dressed, pulling on skinny jeans patched at the knees, and a thin, blue jumper with suede patches on the elbows. She was lanky, all legs, like the harvestmen that so unnerved her. If a predator got hold of a harvestman’s leg, the harvestman could just detach it, as if it were a joke leg. It made Susan think of the fake limbs that she had seen used in art and magic, to create an illusion or just to give someone a fright. She thought of the rubber hand deception, where the imitation hand began to feel like a person’s real hand. The harvestman’s leg was not a fake though; the escaping harvestman left the abandoned limb twitching in the predator’s jaw. Since childhood, animals with spindly legs and backwards knees had set Susan’s teeth on edge. She remembered seeing an emu at the zoo. Something about the way it ran, the way its legs bent the wrong way, had made her cry.

  She left the room and made her way downstairs. Usually, she would have gone straight through to the bar and started work, but it was a Monday so the pub was closed and this was Susan’s day off. There were boxes of bar snacks at the foot of the stairs. She took a packet of crisps and left through the back door.

  She had come into the Hook on her first day here in Seatown. It was summer, and she had been thinking that until she found her feet she might sleep on the beach, but when she stood on the esplanade, looking out to sea, it occurred to her that the water was likely to come all the way to the sea wall, and some way up it; she might be spending the night on the seabed. Just behind her was the Hook, and from it had come a smell of warm food that made her feel hungry. She went inside, and saw on the bar a jolly polystone pig wearing a chef’s hat and coat and holding in its cloven hooves a carving knife and a chalkboard advertising the special: ham and chips; and she saw on the wall, handwritten on a piece of paper, an advert for a room above the pub. As it happened, the landlady also wanted bar staff, and as no one but Susan had applied for the job or asked about the room, she acquired both and moved in the same day. Each morning, when she started work, she asked about the lack of curtains. ‘They’re coming,’ she was told. ‘Your curtains are coming.’

  Susan ate her crisps as she wandered along the esplanade, past the signs that said ‘NO CYCLING’, ‘NO DOGS ON THE ESPLANADE OR THE BEACH’, and, at the top of the slope that went down to the beach, ‘NO DISABLED ACCESS’. The fresh air in her lungs made her want another cigarette, so she smoked while she walked. The tide was coming in. She made her way to the amusements, where they were still advertising for someone to work in the change booth. Every time the manager saw her, he shouted to her, from the confines of the booth, ‘This could be you!’ The booth was perhaps three feet wide by three feet deep, and more than six feet tall with perspex windows on three sides. Sitting in there would make her feel like she was in one of those animatronic fortune-telling machines, like Zoltar, but at least not like Economy Zoltar whose booth was only two feet square and who had no head or arm movement. She would feel like a spider caught under a glass.

  At lunchtime, Susan left the amusements with empty pockets. Sometimes, here on the coast, the force of the wind when she met it head-on, when it whistled past her ears and whipped back her short, brown hair, made her think of how it would feel to ride her motorbike without a helmet on, or to freefall. But just now, there was a lull, and she stopped to smoke a cigarette on the esplanade, leaning on the railings, facing the sea.

  She had been desperate to get away from home. Even when she was little, she had run away from home, just for the fun of it. That had got her a stinging slap on her bare legs, and her mum had said, ‘You’ve got worse than that coming your way if you ever do it again.’ But then her mum had rolled her eyes and said, ‘You’re just like me.’ Her mum had gone down to Gretna Green in her teens, to marry her boyfriend without her parents’ blessing. ‘You’re making a mistake,’ they had said, but that just made her want him more. They had been right though, about Susan’s dad; Susan’s mum had made a mistake, a bad choice. Maybe it ran in the family.

  Susan had come south on her motorbike, racing down with the open road ahead of her, thinking about her mum on her way to Gretna Green, her future a great unknown, and about her granddad who had lied about his age so that he could go off and fight in the war. ‘He just couldn’t wait,’ said her mum. He went to Ypres, and spent the rest of his long life confined to a wheelchair.

  Susan’s grandmother always believed that travelling south was easier than travelling north because south was ‘downhill’ on the map, as if anyone trying to go north without concentrating risked rolling all the way back down; as if, in fact, gravity could make anyone tumble down at any moment.

  Susan rememb
ered her first sight of Seatown. It had been getting late as she approached; the sun was going down. It looked like someone had set fire to something; it was like a house on fire on the horizon, except bigger than that: it was as if someone was burning everything they owned. She had headed towards it.

  She came from a small village surrounded by countryside. She had seen the newborn lambs in the field in the spring before she left; she had got away before that moment in the summer when the lambs were taken away in the lorry. She hated the thought of them going into the lorry with no idea what was coming and no way to avoid their fate anyway. She hated seeing the lorry that pulled up outside the chicken shed with ‘EAT BRITISH CHICKEN’ printed on the back. Susan wondered if she would make it home for Christmas. On Boxing Day, the hunt rode out, despite the fox-hunting ban. Her dad used to go with them, before he fell from his galloping horse and lost the use of his legs.

  Susan took out her mobile phone and looked at the screen. The signal here came and went. There was no signal right now. Sometimes she spent ages thumbing long texts to her parents, which she then could not send. Perhaps she should change her provider. She wrote another text now, even though it would only sit in her outbox with the others until a signal could be found. She kept having to stop and undo what the predictive text function inserted. Some of the sentences that predictive text wanted to construct looked like the strange non sequiturs of someone who was losing their mind. She wondered how predictive text worked. Did her phone make predictions on the basis of texts that she had previously written? Was she herself responsible for these peculiarities? Or did the odd suggestions come from a programmer? Her granddad thought that someone managed his answerphone messages, someone in a call centre, like a switchboard operator; he got cross when they tampered with his saved messages, when they deleted something without asking.