The Accidental

by Ali Smith

  Eve was looking up at him now. He straightened his mouth in case. The perfect pitch of her, in his ears and his head and jangling all through his blood, so that he leaned forward at the table then sat back again then couldn’t think how to sit. What Apollinaire called ‘that most modern source of energy–surprise!’, words he wrote on the whiteboard at the start of every academic year, modernist literature being full of the energy of surprise, as Dr Michael Smart told the new third-years every first term. But Dr Michael Smart God bless him and all who sail in him had never before hit a note quite like this one for this startling a quality, this piercing a newness, this jolt of an oh.

  He sat forward, leaned on his hands on the table. He sat back again. His arms and legs were acting new to their sockets, his hands had never before been at this loss as to what to do with or where to put themselves. But he felt so exceptionally good. He felt remarkable. He drummed at his legs; they felt good. He stretched out in his chair. Every muscle felt strange, new, good. Eve was still speaking, oblivious, good. She was clearing plates, telling Astrid something. They were saying something about spoons. Spoons! There was a world, with spoons in it, plates, cups, glasses. He held his wine glass out in front of him, swirled the end of the wine in it, watched it settle. It was good. It was Gavi, from Waitrose.

  If he were this wine glass there would be hairline cracks holding him together, running their live little electrical connections all over him. Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness. Michael smiled. Eve thought he was smiling at her. She smiled back. He smiled at Astrid too. She gave him a murderous look and scraped a plate. Good for her! Obnoxious little creep. He laughed out loud. Astrid glared at him and left the room. Both Eve’s children needed therapy. Magnus was a case in point. To refuse to eat with them was one thing. To refuse, though, to acknowledge a guest in the room, to act as though she weren’t there, to refuse to say a simple hello, as he’d just done, was quite another kind of rudeness, deeply reprehensible no matter how profound the adolescent hell angst etc. and Michael, who generally kept well out of that side of the parenting thing, was actually going to make a point of talking to Eve about it later in bed. But now a large moth had come in through the open window and was hanging around the lit candle. Moths couldn’t help it, like a moth to a, they were genetically programmed to be attracted by light, of course they saw all light as love-light. When they swam through air drunk towards it it was because they believed, genetically, that they’d found their Übermoth, the one moth in the whole world especially for them. They would even try in a clear night sky to fly as far as the moon if the moon was full.

  No preamble–this one went straight into the flame and dropped on to the table with an audible thud. It was a brownish moth. Over it went on itself, and again, and again. He could make out the furred blur of its facial features as it flopped itself round on its damaged wing (he had always had excellent eyesight, good eyes; well into his forties and no need at all at any point in it for glasses or contacts or whatever). Moths and candlelight! Like a moth to a flame! Dr Michael Smart had been reduced to cliché!

  Deeply exciting, though, cliché was, as a concept. It was truth misted by overexpression, wasn’t it, like a structure seen in a fog, something waiting to be re-felt, re-seen. Something dainty fumbled at through thick gloves. Cliché was true, obviously, which was why it had become cliché in the first place; so true that cliché actually protected you from its own truth by being what it was, nothing but cliché. Advertising, for example, loved cliché because it was a kind of pure mob truth. There was a lecture in this, maybe for the Ways To Read course. Source? clearly French, he would look it up. Larkin, for instance, the Sid James of English lyric poetry (now that was quite a good observation, Dr Michael Smart firing on all cylinders) knew the power of cliché. What will survive of us is love. His old racehorses in that horse poem didn’t ‘gallop for joy’ but for what must be joy. Larkin, an excellent example. Comic old sexist living all those years in the nether librarian circles of Hull, no wonder he was such a curmudgeon, but he could crack a cliché wide open with a couple of properly pitched words. Or when Hemingway, for example, wrote it before anyone else had even known how to think to express it, didst thou feel the earth move (or however it was he faux-peasantly put it in the not-very-good For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1941 Michael believed), could he have had any idea how his phrase would enter the language? Enter! The language! Cliché was earth-moving, when you understood it, when you felt it, for the first time. Earth and movement, an earthquake, a high-pitched shattering shift in the platelets far down in the heat, below the belt, beneath the feet. Moth plus flame. Right here, right now, Michael had seen and felt and heard the precise drama of the moment when that moth wing singed and went brittle in the candle. He had felt the whole substantial impact of individual moth hitting individual table. He had felt these things, yes, more acutely, more truly, more surprisedly, than he had maybe felt anything since he was, oh, he didn’t know, a fresh-faced (cliché!) twelve-year-old, and not a twelve-year-old like that one over there either, he thought to himself, casting a glance over the top of the bland combed hair of the head of Eve’s curmudgeonly girl, not a twelve-year-old now, when nothing was new and everything was so already known and been and done and postmodern-t-shirt-regurgitated, no, he meant a back-then tank-topped twelve-year-old at the side of deep water, lying deep in the long grass and the noise of summer, the sweet core-line of a piece of the grass in his mouth, when for the first time he saw two insects, two flies of some kind, long-legged water-flies, a metonym you might say for the whole of summer, and the one was on the other’s back in a sheer frenzy of what Michael knew for sure, for the first time, the most innocent time, was entry.

  Entry! It was a wonderful word. The fly in the fly. The boy in the grass. The grass in the boy. The boy deep in the day and the day deep in the boy. He particularly liked the word sheer too; as a word it was calmed and smoothed yet still so bloody boyishly enthusiastic, it still went as far as it could. The sheer surface of the water, imagine, then someone diving right into it, unabashed.

  She had entered him like he was water. Like he was a dictionary and she was a word he hadn’t known was in him. Or she had entered him more simply, like he was a door and she opened him, leaving him standing ajar as she walked straight in. (Ajar! When is a door not a door? Terrible joke from boyhood television which he was never supposed to watch, it was never funny, that joke. Not till now. He had never been open enough to it till now, ha ha!)

  Who is she? what’s her name again? Eve, taking him aside before supper in the kitchen, quietly asking him. It was unlike Eve to forget such things or be cavalier with the details of made appointments; he was suddenly pleased, it made him feel good about his own organizational clarity. He had been dotting the insides of a trout with knobs of butter. Too much and it’s spoilt. Too little and it’s spoilt. Well judged. Amber something, isn’t it? he’d said, poking butter in under the slit.

  She had rung the doorbell this morning. He had opened the door and she’d walked in. Sorry I’m late, she’d said. I’m Amber. Car broke down.

  Dessert, is there any? Eve was saying now, passing through the room. She was smiling her persuasive smile. She was in a good mood. The fish, by the way, was perfect, she said as she leaned across him.

  Yes, he said. It was good, wasn’t it? (She had liked it; she had liked everything he put on the table, she had wolfed it all down so, well, wolfily, fishskin and all, that Astrid had stared at her and Michael had found himself wanting to stare too; he had forgotten what it was like to have what you made be quite so physically appreciated. Nobody ate like that any more, like they were hungry, like what they were eating was good.) I thought Pears Belle Hélène, he told Eve. I just need to heat it. I’ll do it in a minute.

  Eve took the last of the plates, took the plate from between his hands. She kissed him as she did; he kissed back, light but pressing; she put her han
d to the back of his neck then went through again. The sun was gone but the evening was warm. She would come back into the room any moment now. Any moment now she would come down the stairs, turn towards the door and enter and sit there opposite him again and he’d glow inside his clothes like a reddening electric element. Would he start to smoke and smoulder? Would his clothes melt into his skin? Would his khakis start to singe where they stretched tight against his thigh?

  He drummed his thigh again with his fists. Ha-ha! he said. Astrid gave him a withering look. He ignored her. He sang. It’s a Barnum and Bailey world, Just as phoney as it can be. His voice sounded good. His reflection in the window made him look boyish. But it wouldn’t be make-believe. The moth had stopped moving. He went to pick it up off the tablecloth and it moved again; it had only been resting. He got it; he held it close to his nose; he was tempted to put it in his mouth.

  He was smelling a moth for the first time.

  Moths didn’t smell of anything.

  It was fluttering inside his hand. Thank you, moth, for your excellent simile, he said as he closed his hand, leaned over, closed his eyes, put his hand through the open window and dropped the moth out, not looking to see where it landed.

  Good luck, moth. If you believed in me.

  Michael liked the old songs. They were lyric poems in themselves. He breathed in, deep. The air was new and clean to him. He had finally mastered an oven he didn’t know, in a house that wasn’t his, and an electric oven at that, always the worst. There was moth dust left on his hand; he wiped it on his jeans. The doorbell had rung. He had opened the door and in she’d walked. She had walked right past him. He had answered the door while he was still on the phone. Hang on, he’d said to Philippa Knott. Something’s come up, can I call you straight back, Philippa? His own voice saying Philippa’s name, he could hear it, gravelly, soft-rough, skin needing a shave, hotel afternoon skin, the promise of it going into Philippa Knott’s ear. As he’d answered the door he’d been wondering what he’d call her, Pippa, Pip maybe. A pity she used her full name already, the full name was always more meaningful, more full; these other names were child names; pity; they tended to like to be asked to be adult. He’d ask her later what she’d like, which name she’d prefer him to use. She’d have been waiting for someone to ask her; they generally always were; generally loved to be asked.

  Philippa Knott had known to return and hold his eye over the heads of the others in the second-year Victorian seminars; she was slim and dark, long dark hair with a very slight wave in it. Good dress sense, almost totally straight-A in her accumulative writtens for continual assessment, a couple of notably good second-year essays especially one on pre-Freudian suggestion in Robert Browning’s monologues; she’d written very well about the surfaces of stone in Browning’s poems, the way Browning made such sensuality of stone, he’d told her so in his office at the end of the summer term when she’d come to ask him to supervise her American dissertation. She’d looked him directly in the eyes then too; she was game, that was good. Excellent, he’d said, are you here in town for the summer? because I’ll be popping up and down, marking, office work, holiday home in Norfolk, have you got a mobile number, or? He’d put his hand on the small of her back as she’d left his office and she’d let herself shift, just slightly, back into it. He’d phoned Justine to check her summer exam results, mostly beta-alphas; good, that settled it.

  Then this happened.

  Sorry I’m late. I’m Amber. Car broke down.

  He hung up on Philippa Knott, something’s come up, can I call you back? She walked straight in and sat down on the sofa. She looked at him, uninterested; she wasn’t here for him. A bit raddled, maybe thirty, maybe older, tanned like a hitchhiker, dressed like a road protester, one of those older women still determinedly being a girl; all those eighties feministy still-political women were terribly interested in what Eve did. Hippie name. Amber. Ridiculous name.

  I’m Michael Smart, Eve’s partner, he’d said and held out his hand. She looked at his hand, looked back at him, blank. He held it out, up in the air for a moment more then dropped it to his side, cleared his throat.

  Eve’s in the garden, he said. She’s working in the summerhouse. I’m sure she’ll be here in a moment. She’s expecting you, yes?

  She was looking out of the window. She didn’t say anything.

  Perhaps I can get you something while you wait? Some fruit, or maybe a drink of something? (Inside he felt blustery, overdone.)

  Hunky-dory, she’d said. Is there coffee?

  Hunky-dory. He hadn’t heard the words hunky-dory for years. She had an accent that sounded foreign. Scandinavian. It came into his head in the kitchen, how he used to cycle to the campsite and lean on his bike-seat over the fence watching the holiday people and it was the year of the two Swedish girls, their hair so light it was almost white, and the patchouli oil smell, and the friendship bracelets, the leather thongs they had round their necks, they had ankle bracelets too, and their toenails painted purple and black, and the way they strode laughingly between the tents and the taps where they filled their water-bottles, and they called to him over the fence and tempted him in through the unzipped front of their tent, so small from the outside like there’d hardly be room in its upside-down V for them both to fit in it, never mind him as well. Anna-Katherine, and the other one was Marta. He was ten. How old had they been? They can’t have been more than nineteen, maybe twenty; they’d seemed unthinkably adult to him, he’d known for sure he’d never be the kind of age they were. Where were those girls now? What had happened to them in their lives? Thirty years ago. More. 1971. Like yesterday. The noise of the rain on the outside of the tent, the backs of his bare legs in his shorts on the warm damp of the groundsheet.

  He hadn’t thought of it for years.

  Those girls had stayed at the site for a week. His mother had wanted to know where it was he was going on his bike every evening and not coming home till it was nearly dark. He wasn’t supposed to hang around there; the kind of people who did things like going camping weren’t ever going to be the right kind of people. He had said he was at Jonathan Hadley’s house. (Jonathan Hadley was some kind of chief pathologist high-earner now with a big family and a three-and-a-half-million riverbank house in Walton-on-Thames.) So every night he took a book off the classics shelf, had it in full view casually under his arm, told her he and Jonathan Hadley were spending the evenings reading in Jonathan’s bedroom. That was admirable. That was allowed. Great Expectations. My infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit. The Mill on the Floss. Volume One, Book First, Boy and Girl. Vanity Fair. A novel without a hero. The Manager of the Performance. The smell of wet grass. The light filtering through the walls and door-seams of the tent. When those girls left, the patch of flattened grass where their tent had been was unbelievably small. The new people to take the space were from somewhere unpleasant, Bournemouth, Bognor Regis, a big family. The father’s face was tough-looking as he erected the complicated framework of their tent, which took up three spaces. They were loud. They shouted across the grass to each other. He was nothing but a local boy leaning on a fence.

  He had brought through a pear for her, elegantly sliced. She ate it immediately, one slice after the other. Did she notice it was elegant? She didn’t say thank you.

  So what happened to it, your car? he’d said.

  She didn’t say anything. Maybe she hadn’t heard him because of the noise of the vacuum cleaner above.

  Your car? he said again, louder. Broken? he said. Won’t start, or?

  She shrugged.

  The battery? he said. He said it too loud into a pause in the vacuum noise.

  She looked blank. Maybe she didn’t know the word battery.

  I put the key in, turn it, nothing, she said, looking away from him.

  She had probably left the lights on overnight, he thought. Maybe the small ceiling light. There was probably no petrol in it.

  He sat on the arm of th
e sofa. So, where are you from, originally? he’d begun to say, when she broke in with a shockingly long sentence:

  But do you think it will be okay and do you think it’s completely safe there just left abandoned in the middle of the road like that?

  The sentence ended. The noise started again over their heads.

  Well, I’ve absolutely no idea, he shouted. To be honest it doesn’t sound safe at all, if it’s as you describe. Where is it?

  She gestured vaguely in the air, towards the window.

  I mean, it’s very quiet round here, he shouted against the vacuum roar. The incongruity made him laugh. She looked at him. He stopped laughing.

  But what I’m trying to say is, he said, I wouldn’t consider anything left in the middle of the road very safe. It depends how middle of the road you mean.

  Yes, she said. Right in the middle. Just on a corner I had to leave it where it stopped. All night I was driving to get here.

  She rubbed her eyes. She did look exhausted.

  Everything’s still in it, she said.

  You haven’t left anything valuable? he said. Like a laptop, anything like that?

  She nodded, gestured at his mobile on the table.

  Everything, she said.

  You really shouldn’t have, he said. Nowhere’s safe these days. Not even out here in the middle of nowhere. Thieves everywhere.

  She sank back into the sofa and closed her eyes, shook her head. She rubbed her head with her hand. She seemed to be waiting for something.

  Well, I–, he began. I don’t know much about cars. I don’t have much time. I’ve got to nip in to London in about an hour.

  She looked utterly bored.

  Where is it exactly? he said. If you like, I could take a–

  She had already stood up, taken a car key out of the pocket of her shorts and was holding it out. She sat down again when he took it.

  But will the coffee be very long? she said.