The Accidental

by Ali Smith

  Astrid waits for the noise of typing to start. It takes a moment for it to. Then it does.

  She looks at the way the sun comes through the leaves above her head i.e. the story of Icarus who had the wings his father made which the sun melted when he flew too close. She wonders what the difference would have been if the father had made the wings for a girl instead, who maybe would have known how to use them properly. But probably this would depend on how old the girl was, because if she was Astrid’s age it would be okay. But if she was any younger it would be dangerous, she would be too young, and if she was any older she would be worrying about people seeing up her skirt and the sun melting her eye make-up.

  Astrid also knows from somewhere, Magnus probably, that it is supposed to take twenty-eight seconds of looking straight at the sun to make a person go blind. What would it be like to be blind? You couldn’t go to a play, or a film; there would be no point. A tv might as well be a radio. She shuts her eyes. How do blind people decide where the beginning of the day is if they can’t see if it’s light yet or not? if they can’t see the difference between the light and the dark that happens every day?

  She wonders what would happen if she were to stand here and make herself look at the sun for twenty-eight seconds.

  Her eyes would melt.

  There would be doctors and ambulances etc.

  She steps into the blaze of sunlight between the two old trees. She opens her eyes wide and looks directly up. One, she counts. One second is too much. Her eyes clam shut. Inside them is all flashing light. When she opens them she can’t see anything except the circle of the sun she looked at, bright orange. She closes them again. The outside world shifts on her eyes, like an inside photograph. Then the inside photograph is laid over the outside world when she opens them. If she could take photographs with her eyes it would be amazing. If she could do this and she had wings i.e. in the myth with the wings, she could take aerial photographs. She would soar over everything like in a helicopter. The substandard nothing of the village would be obvious. The smallness of these massive trees she is standing under would be like obvious. She could fly over home. She would be able to hold the whole house in the palm of her hand. She would fly over the whole school in a fraction of a second. All the people in the classrooms doing French right now, and the sports field, the playground, the streets around the school, would be like nothing, smaller than the palm of her hand and getting smaller and smaller depending on how high in the sky she chose to go.

  It is too hot in the garden. She walks towards the house. That’s her bedroom, there. She would fly up and go in through the window. She would never have to touch the carpet with her feet again. She would be inches off the ground all the time. She would fly up to Magnus’s window now and peek below the blind. (Magnus Smart. Magnus Berenski. Magnus is not even bothered. Why should I care about him when he clearly doesn’t give a fuck about me, he said once. But Magnus can remember him. He put me on his shoulders and we walked along the beach, he told Astrid one night in the treehouse. He let me spoon sugar into his tea.) The blind on Magnus’s room is always down. He doesn’t ever have a bath or a shower. He doesn’t get up until two in the afternoon most days and only comes downstairs to bring down dirty dishes, collect his dinner in the evening and take it back upstairs with him and lock the door again. Their mother and Michael are losing their patience. But even though they are annoyed with him he still gets to do it. Because typical and ironic, when Astrid tried taking her dinner up the stairs as well all hell broke loose.

  The four-wheel drive is gone from the front. There is an old white car in the driveway. The kitchen is empty. The tv is on by itself in the lounge. A man has gone missing on the news, and the police have found a body. Astrid puts today’s newspaper on the armchair and sits on it, keeping her arms and hands tucked into herself away from the arms of the chair. The newscasters and the people they are interviewing keep saying that a man went missing and that they have found a body, but nobody will say that the body is anything to do with the man who went missing or vice versa though it is obviously what they mean. It is something to do with the war. The prime minister comes on surrounded by cheering Americans and having his hand shaken by men in suits. After the news a woman in a tv studio talks for ages about what happened to her bowel movements since she started putting her food into special combinations. Not just a pretty faeces, the woman presenter says. Everybody in the studio laughs. It is juvenile. A man phones up the programme and says he has been drinking his urine. The people in the studio discuss whether it would make you feel better to drink your own urine. Astrid is glad that Michael isn’t here since he would probably think the urine thing was a good idea and make them all do it.

  This tv only has thirty or so channels on it and most of them are rubbish. It is typically substandard. There is a 1980s music video show on another channel. It is okay to watch it because neither of them is around to act like a loser going on and on about when pop music was political or do the stupid jerky dance. The video comes on about the girl who is in a café having a cup of coffee and reading a comic then the comic comes alive and she becomes part of the story. The boy from the strip cartoon winks at her, then he holds out his hand, right out of the picture into her world and she takes it in her real hand and goes inside the cartoon world and becomes an illustration like him, but out in the real world the woman who owns the café can’t work out where the girl has gone and is angry she left without paying for her coffee so she screws the comic up and throws it in the bin which in comic world is i.e. a total disaster and makes men with crowbars break in and start being violent. So the boy actually rips his world open for the girl (his world is made of paper) so she can escape through the ripped paper of the comic back into her own world. The woman in the café in the real world finds the girl, who’s real again, collapsed on top of the café rubbish bin behind the counter. So the girl grabs the comic all crumpled out of the bin, goes running out of the café, runs all the way home and sits in her bedroom and tries to smooth it out. The end of the video is the boy from the comic (who is the lead singer from the pop group too) trying to smash his way through into the girl’s real world to become real, not just an illustration.

  Astrid goes through to the kitchen and breaks the loaf in two without touching anywhere any knife will have been. She fists out the bread from the inside. She eats it. On her way back through she pulls her t-shirt up over her mouth and breathes into the cotton, then smells the cotton where she breathed. It smells quite nice. She wonders if this is what she would taste like, this sweet breath-smell taste, if she could taste what it was she tasted of, or if someone else was maybe to. But what if she tastes disgusting? She worries about tasting disgusting through two more videos. Then she switches the tv off.

  She fits the battery into the camera and checks it’s working. She tucks the charger, still charging the other battery, in behind the old horrible crime and mystery paperbacks on the lowest shelf of the bookcase. She listens in the hall but there is no sound of Magnus. She leaves the house by the front door. Her mother and Michael keep saying how amazing it is to be in the country where you can trust people and leave your car unlocked and the doors of the house unlocked or even wide open. Astrid checks that the front door is locked behind her. If people want to rob the house they can go through the open French windows in the garden and her mother can be to blame. They won’t find the charger unless they’ve come specifically to steal old Agatha Christie novels, which would be an excellent ironic crime.

  She walks down the lane that leads to the road that leads to the village. It is very hot. She thinks of the house behind her, sitting there full of all its horrible things, and all their holiday things there too, arranged and different, like things floating on a too-hot surface. It is the moment before burglars walk in through the garden and just help themselves. But, since it’s the moment before this happens, the rooms downstairs are all empty, nothing in them but things, like the rooms are holding their breath in this hot
summer air. Magnus told her that idea about how something on a film is different from something in real life. In a film there is always a reason. If there is an empty room in a film it would be for a reason they were showing you the empty room. Magnus held up a pen, then dropped it. He said if you drop a pen out of your hand in real life, that’s all it is, a pen you dropped out of your hand there on the ground. But if someone in a film drops a pen and the camera shows you the pen, then that pen that gets dropped is more important than if it’s just a dropped pen in real life. Astrid knows this is true but she is not completely sure how. When Magnus is speaking to people again she will ask him. She will also ask him, if she can remember to, about why she poked the dead animal with the stick without even thinking. Magnus will know the reason she wanted to and will explain it. That would be amazing, if she had had film of that animal, not dead yet but just before it was run over, the minute before it was run over. There it would be, sitting at the side of the road, whatever it was, a rabbit, or a cat, just sitting there with its eyes and paws etc.

  But it would only be really amazing if you watched it knowing what happened after it. You would know, but the animal wouldn’t. If you knew this and had film of that it would be exactly like if you were looking at a room before it was burgled. You would know, but the room wouldn’t. Not that a room can know things, as if a room could be alive, like a person. Imagine a room alive, its furniture moving round by itself, its walls calling across the room to one another. A living room, ha ha. Imagine if you were in the room, the living room ha ha ha, and you didn’t expect it to be alive and you went to sit down on a chair and the chair said get off! don’t sit on me! or it moved so you couldn’t sit on it. Or if walls had eyes and could speak i.e. you could come into a room and ask it what had happened in it while you were in another room and it could tell you exactly what

  Hello, someone says.

  Hello, Astrid says back.

  It is the person from this morning who was lying on the sofa in the front room.

  She is walking alongside Astrid. She has two apples in one hand. She weighs them both, looks them over, chooses which one to keep for herself.

  Here, she says.

  The apple comes at Astrid through the air and hits her quite hard in the chest. She catches it in the crook of her arm between herself and her camera.

  Astrid, the person is saying. Astrum, astralis. How does it feel to have such a starry name?

  Then she starts talking about stars. She says that because of light pollution from cities and streetlights, the night sky can’t be seen properly any more and that all over the western world the sky now never gets properly dark. In more than half of Europe, in America, all over the world, people can’t see the stars any more in the same way as they were able to in the past.

  She has a way of talking i.e. Irish-sounding, or maybe a kind of American. Though Astrid hasn’t said anything about how she’s going to the Curry Palace, she starts talking about it. She says has Astrid seen it and that it is a blatant act of local crime. Why else would anyone throw black paint at the door and windows of the only ethnic restaurant in the village? The only ethnic restaurant for miles around?

  Astrid holds her camera higher, then up near her eye, though it’s off and its lenscap is on. She hopes the person will see it and ask her about it. But the person has stopped talking now and is walking faster, a little ahead of Astrid. Astrid lowers the camera. She starts eating the apple. She hadn’t realized how hungry she is.

  How did you know? she calls. I mean about the restaurant?

  She hurries to keep up.

  How did I know? the person says. How could you miss it? How could you not know?

  Are you something to do with the house? Astrid asks.

  The person has stopped in the road. She is looking hard at the ground. She suddenly crouches down. Astrid sees a bee there, crawling on the rough tarmac, the large kind of bee, the furry kind. The person gets something out of the back pocket of her cut-offs. It is a little packet. She rips it at its corner and empties something out of it into the palm of her hand. She folds the corner of the packet and slips it into her back pocket again. She spits into her hand. It is gross. She is rubbing spit into her palm with her thumb. She scrapes her spit on to the road just along from the bee, which has stopped still now because something is close to it that’s bigger than it.

  The person gets up and walks on, licking her palm and rubbing it on the denim of her cut-offs.

  Astrid thinks about asking her how old she is. She looks at the person’s legs with the hair on them. It is obscene. She has never seen anything like it. She looks at the bare feet, walking on the road surface.

  Is it sore walking on your feet like that? she asks.

  Nope, the person says.

  Did your car break down? Astrid says.

  They are on a road Astrid doesn’t recognize now.

  Cars are a very bad idea in such a polluted world, the person says.

  Did you rent us the house? Astrid says.

  What house? the person says.

  The house we’re renting, Astrid says.

  The person finishes her apple and tosses the applecore into the air and over a hedge.

  Biodegradable, she says.

  Why did you do that back there, near the bee? Astrid asks.

  Resuscitation, the person says.

  She takes the sachet with the folded corner out of her pocket, makes sure it’s tightly folded down, then tosses it to Astrid. It is the square kind they have in café sugar bowls, the kind that has random information on it like the dates of birth of classical music composers or famous writers or the names of famous cars and horses that won races. On one side it says WHITE SUGAR. On its other there is the ripped-through picture of a fighter plane and the words ‘LD WAR 2 1939–1945 An Estimated 55 Million Lives Were Lost’.

  Keep it, she says.

  Astrid balances the apple and the camera and tucks the sugar into her own back pocket. All along the new strange road the person is talking about how, after the summer, the worker bees throw the drone bees out of the hive because there’s not enough food for all the bees for the whole winter otherwise and the drones’ usefulness in the hive is finished now that the queen has been fertilized, and the running of the hive is changing because of the summer being over, so what the worker bees do is chew off the wings of the drones then let them drop out of the hive on to the ground.

  What happens to them then? Astrid says.

  Birds eat them, probably, the person says.

  The drones do their best, she says, to hold on to the bees that are ejecting them; they hook on with their feet as their wings get chewed off. But for now, she says, the drones are safe. It’s only the beginning of summer.

  She is some kind of a bee expert. She is whistling now. She puts her hands in her pockets and walks along the road ahead of Astrid, whistling a tune like a boy would. Astrid is going down a road that she doesn’t know with someone she doesn’t know, and her mobile phone is buried in rubbish and she is now officially untraceable.

  How do you know my name is Astrid? she calls at the back of the person’s head.

  Well, that’s easy. The man told me, she says.

  What man? Astrid asks.

  The man. The man at your house, the person says. The man who’s not your father. I don’t have a father either. I never even met mine.

  Astrid drops the half-eaten apple. It rolls off the road on to the verge. She almost drops her camera, but catches it against her as it slips. She stops. She stands in the middle of the road.

  Car, the person says as a car rounds the corner ahead of them. Astrid jumps to the side. She tries to remember what she’s said so far out loud. It wasn’t anything about anything. She never said anything. She never mentioned a father or not a father. The car swerves round her and she feels the air as it passes. It is as if a car engine is roaring in Astrid’s ears and eyes, though there’s no wind at all and the noise of the car is gone and it’s a completel
y calm, completely sunny, ordinary July day.

  The person has carried on walking. Come on then, if you’re coming, she calls without turning.

  She is now going quite fast. Astrid starts to run. But it’s as she catches up that it dawns on her. The whole point of being awake first in the morning is that there is nobody else about, just Astrid, yawning, near-asleep, leaning out of the open window, steadying herself with her elbows on the sill to film the light coming. All there is is the waking-up birds, all there is is the trees moving in the wind, the crops moving, no cars on the near or the faraway roads, no dogs barking, no nothing. But on one of the mornings Astrid, through her camera lens, which has a very good long range, has seen her.

  It was her.

  It was definitely her.

  It was far away, there was someone sitting on the roof of a car, a white car, Astrid is sure it was a white car, parked at the very far edge of the woods. She seemed to have binoculars or maybe some sort of camera, like a birdwatcher or an expert in some kind of nature. Funny that she was watching the only other person awake, who almost seemed, typical and ironic, to be watching her back, and now when Astrid catches her up on the road she talks as if they’re midway through a conversation and as if she takes it for granted that Astrid understands exactly what she’s talking about.

  Because listen. If you tell anybody at all, the person says, I’ll kill you. I mean it. I will.

  The person turns and looks at her. She starts to laugh, as if something has delighted her, something so funny that she can’t not laugh. She makes a wide-eyed face at Astrid and Astrid realizes that the reason the person is making this face at her is that her own face is so wide-eyed. Her eyes have gone so wide open that she can actually physically feel how wide open they are.

  The person, still laughing, reaches out her hand, puts it firmly on the top of Astrid’s head then raps twice, hard.