The Accidental

by Ali Smith

  But Astrid, tonight? had cleared the plates and shared jokes with Eve like a normal daughter. Magnus? had almost looked his old self again. He had even gone through voluntarily, like in the old days, to help Michael with the washing up (since there were apparently no dishwashers in the swindle that was Norfolk). Then Astrid had forgotten her adolescent squeamishness about the house’s furniture and had lain on the sofa (though she did fold a Guardian on the arm of it where her head would go) and was nearly asleep. Eve and the girl, Amber, stood in the warm at the open french windows.

  What did Eve do then? Let’s take a walk around the garden, Eve said. Calm, measured.

  All right then, the girl said. That’d be a nice thing to do. Thanks.

  They crossed the gravel. Eve talked generally, about flowers, about how to get things to grow in shade. They sat under one of the old trees.

  What did Eve say to the girl in the garden?

  You’re Scottish, aren’t you? I can hear it in your voice. I love Scotland. I haven’t been for years. My mother was Scottish.

  Ah. Where are you actually from, originally?

  Can you speak that–I can’t remember the name of it–that other language people used to speak up there?

  What did you say? It sounds beautiful.

  Translate it for me. What you just said.

  Tell me a bit about yourself.

  Well, anything, just general. What are you studying?

  At university, I mean.

  What did the girl in the garden say back?

  I’m a MacDonald.

  I am directly descended from the MacDonalds of Glencoe.

  (Something that sounded like gibberish.)

  (laughing) I was telling you some ancient Gaelic proverbs that everybody knows off by heart in the place I come from.

  Okay. Roughly translated. One: there’s many a hen that lays an egg. Two: the yellow will always return to the broom. Three: be careful not to let folk over your threshold till you’re absolutely sure who they are.

  What do you want to know?

  What d’you mean?

  (laughing) I’m not at a university.

  What was practically the last thing Eve said to the girl in the garden?

  We are a family, Amber, as you will have seen this evening. Astrid is only twelve and at a very difficult stage, and things with Magnus are a little adolescent. It’s complicated, with family. You understand, I’m sure. Did Michael tell you you could come here?

  And the last thing the girl in the garden said to Eve, smiling at her in the dark?

  Michael who?

  (She was good, the girl.)

  Did he tell you that it was all right for you to come here? Eve asked. Because you and I know that it isn’t simple, that it’s very complicated, especially where family and children are involved.

  Was Eve being patronizing? Only within her right.

  What did the girl do? The girl made a little Scottish snort of a noise through her nose. She got up, shook her head at Eve, stretched her arms above her head and went off back towards the house. Eve stayed sitting under the tree. She checked her watch.

  Was ten minutes enough time for them to sort it out? She would go in herself after the tenth minute and courteously offer the girl the spare room for the night, to show there was no ill feeling, because there wasn’t, was there? and in the morning, with no ill will, the girl would leave. She let the seconds tick round, measured, even, calm.

  But what happened when Eve came back into the house? Nothing. Not a thing. Michael and Magnus were still in the kitchen clinking dishes, drying things. Astrid was asleep on the sofa, with her feet up across Amber MacDonald’s lap. Shh, Amber MacDonald said to Eve as Eve came in. She was holding Eve’s daughter’s feet.

  Was even her shh a bit Scottish-sounding? Eve stood by the open window. She could see the roof of the car, but not into it, not whether she was awake or asleep or even in there at all.

  Why had that girl wanted to shake her? She really didn’t know.

  What was the story, again, of the place Amber MacDonald said she was descended from? Eve couldn’t recall. It was historical, or a song, or something about a battle and a Scottish family.

  What was Scotland to Eve? Eve’s mother knelt on the rug in front of the electric fire in the front room in the house in Welwyn Garden City playing records on the big box-shaped record player. The voices of men came out of the box. They sounded like they were dead already but that they’d died valiantly for love or for loss, that the breaking of them had been worth it.

  What were these terrifying gentle songs? They filled her mother’s eyes with tears.

  How old was Eve? It was before school age. One of the songs was called The Dark Island. Though the fire gave off a glow there was darkness coiled snakily in the corners of the room. Eve (4) saw it. On Sunday evenings Eve’s mother always made toast rather than a main meal and she and Eve ate it in companionable silence, listening to the chart countdown of the top twenty on the radio. When Eve thought of happiness this is what she thought of: the taste of toast and marmalade, early spring light, a radio on a table. If You Leave Me Now by Chicago was playing. It was number one. It was quite late in the chronology of things. It was in Eve’s teens. Soon Eve would be coming home every weekday from school to her mother ill in bed in the afternoons.

  Summer afternoons? Winter afternoons? All the light and the dark afternoons.

  What happened at twenty past four every afternoon when she got home? Eve left her schoolbag by the phone-table, went to the kitchen, put a teabag in a cup, made a cup of tea and took it upstairs, still in her school blazer. Her mother’s head was tiny at the top of the white expanse of the bedcovers. Is it you, love?

  Was that a sort of Scottish way of saying things? Is it you? Yes it was. Eve’s mother had gone into hospital and died. She had died of heart disease. Eve was fifteen. Eve’s father worked in business in the States; he had his ‘other’ family there. When she died he came home briefly. He and Eve collected all her mother’s things together and gave them away to neighbours and second-hand shops. Be calm, fifteen-year-old Eve told herself, packing the Scottish LPs into a cardboard box full of cardigans. Look, just look. An LP in its sleeve was very thin, wasn’t much thicker than a slice of processed cheese. There was snow on the top of the mountains on the front of one of the LPs. It’s just snow on a mountain, she told herself as she slid the record down between the side of the box and the empty folded clothes. It’s just a two-dimensional picture of a place I’ve never seen. Measured and calm. Eve by a window so many summers later was moved nearly to tears by her fifteen-year-old self. Her fifteen-year-old self, still in her school blazer, stared back at Eve, steely, disdainful, not-crying. Feeble, she was saying. As if anyone’s childhood was an excuse for anything. Don’t blame me for you. I’m not taking the blame. She took the transistor radio off the table, held it up by the handle and smashed it hard on the floor. The back came off it and its insides spilled out. Grow up, for fuck sake, Eve (15) snorted at Eve (42).

  When in her life had Eve snorted like that? At the funeral, at the notion that there was a God who, even if prayed to, would do anything about anything. At her father, after the funeral, when he took her for an upmarket dinner in a London restaurant, as if a treat, before he flew back to New York State. At her father again, when he suggested over prawn cocktail that she might like to spend summers there with the ‘other’ family. She was sixteen in a month’s time. She snorted. In one month’s time she could do what she chose. (It was one of the times in her life when she was free to do exactly that.)

  When else? At Adam when he announced that he was going to divorce her and marry ‘Sonja’ from ‘Personnel’ at the ‘Alliance’, whom he’d met when he went in to set up a ‘joint interest paying current account’ for him and Eve.

  Are you joking? Was his name really Adam? Eve chose not to answer that question.

  And what had Eve done in Michael’s university office the first time she understood, as s
he sat waiting for him to come back from a meeting, that the wallspace of the office and even the spaces between the bookshelves on the walls were covered with a mosaic of postcards, literally hundreds of them, reproductions of works of art, of posters from films, of famous photographs, of international landmarks, of beaches, cats curled in Greek sun, French monasteries, penguins etc. doing funny things, writers, singers, film stars, historical figures, and that probably every one of these postcards was from some girl he’d been fucking, I mean f***ing? One card had slipped down and fallen off the wall in front of her. She had leaned forward, picked it up, turned it over. A coloured line-drawing of two old-fashioned trains. On the back in handwriting was a tawdry message from a girl who spelled Freudian freuedian, who called herself his ‘jaguar’ and who used too many exclamation marks. Calm and measured. Hxxxx p.s. you get an Alpha calm !!!! measured. Eve was waiting for her husband Michael in his office at the university, where he held a prestigious position in the literature faculty.

  Because what was Eve? Eve was a house and a garden and a four-square family and a fascinating writer in her own right and doing rather well albeit on a small scale and money coming in and the given shape of things.

  And what was Hxxxx? Thin as a postcard, and an old postcard too, going by the date. PLEASE DO NOT PUT ANYTHING BUT WASTE PAPER IN THIS WASTE PAPER BIN. She stuck the postcard back on the wall, back in its given little space. She looked up the wall. Cards on cards on cards. She looked round at all the other walls. Cards. Eve tried it again, now, across the room from the sleeping Michael (she tried it quite quietly) and yes, she could still snort, and exactly like that girl in the garden had earlier tonight.

  What else did Eve unexpectedly like about the girl? The comment the girl had made about Magnus in the bathroom. ‘I found him trying to hang himself.’ She was no fool, the girl, to see so clearly, to be able to sum up so well, the special mourning period that being teenage was.

  Couldn’t it sometimes take an outsider to reveal to a family that it was a family? Magnus had said goodnight like he used to. Astrid had kissed Eve goodnight. Michael had kissed Eve’s back, between her shoulders. They had had quite attentive sex before he put his head under the pillow. As Eve thought this, another thought struck her. It struck her forcibly.

  What if the girl had been telling the truth?

  What if the girl was in reality nothing to do with Michael? What if, all night, Eve had been maligning the girl–and also Michael, sleeping so sweetly there beneath his goosefeather pillow? Oh dear God. Oh dear God. Eve was standing by the window. Oh dear God.

  Was this possible? For instance. Think back. Eve had come out of the shed earlier this evening at the usual allotted time. At the door she had heard a curious noise. It was Astrid, sounding happy. Astrid seemed to be talking to someone, a young woman, a girl, who was lying on the lawn with her eyes shut.

  And what now? Astrid was saying.

  I can still see the outlines, but reversed, the girl was saying. The light and the dark are reversed.

  Like a photo negative? Astrid said. Like the whole thing inside is like a photo negative?

  Eve had known as she watched, she had known in the photoflash of the moment in which she stood watching and unperceived, that one day Astrid would betray her. She had known in the flash of the moment that Astrid doing the natural thing, simply growing older, was a helpless betrayal in itself.

  Then Astrid saw Eve standing there.

  Oh, hi, she said. She said it brightly, obliviously. She looked pleased to see Eve.

  The girl with the closed eyes had opened them and seen Eve above her. She’d sat up. She’d shaded her eyes.

  Hello, she’d said.

  She had said it with nothing but friendliness.

  Because what if, all night, ever since that hello, and possibly because she had been feeling momentarily betrayed about something totally else, something completely unrelated–what if, because of all this, Eve had concocted a scenario of which the girl was totally innocent? Eve stood by the window in the dark. She rubbed her eyes.

  But then, if she wasn’t Michael’s, what would that make the girl?

  A tramp. She looked a bit like she could be a tramp.

  A gypsy kind of a person.

  A skilful freeloader who lived by charming her way into people’s houses to eat. She was charming, it was true.

  An anecdote for future dinner parties–the night a total stranger fooled us into serving her dinner when we were on holiday in Norfolk one summer. I thought she was one of his students and he thought she was something to do with me–

  No, answer the question–what did it make the girl? What it made the girl was truthful.

  For instance, had that girl actually asked them for anything? No. Not a thing. She had been invited to supper. She had been invited to stay the night.

  So was it any wonder, then, that she had shaken Eve so hard? No wonder. Eve stood by the window. She looked down at the car. She looked out at the night. She looked down at the car again.

  So what would Eve do about it? Right. If it rained tonight, Eve was definitely going to go downstairs and tell the girl that under no circumstances could she sleep in a car in the rain, that she was to come inside. Eve would run downstairs and out the front door with a coat over her head and knock on the wet car window and insist.

  But (she glanced at the maddeningly clear sky) would it rain tonight? No. It wouldn’t. It was the perfect summer night. It was, though, far too hot tonight for anyone to be sleeping in a car. Dogs, for instance, were known to suffocate in cars with the windows not down on hot days. They died of dehydration.

  What if that girl had gone to sleep and left no car windows open? Presumably if you slept in a car you had to keep yourself safe by keeping the windows tight closed so no one could break in and do whatever horrible unsafe things people would do to someone vulnerable sleeping in a car. But keeping the windows closed on a too-hot night like this would be at least dehydrating, at most seriously dangerous.

  Eve leaned out of the window and looked at the car. From here she couldn’t tell, because of the angle it had been parked at, whether its windows were open or closed.

  Hadn’t it been, after all, a friendly kind of shaking?

  Hadn’t the girl been sternly smiling, almost as if Eve was an old comrade?

  What did Eve do now? Very quietly, she crossed the room and pulled her dressing gown round her shoulders. Very quietly, she opened the door.

  Where was the girl? Not in the car at all. Eve looked in all the windows, but the car was empty.

  She was in the garden. She was sitting under the trees they’d both been sitting under earlier. She was smoking. Eve could smell the smoke, then see it. Cigarette smoke curled up into the still air above the girl’s head and disappeared.

  Hello, she said.

  She patted the ground beside her.

  Eve tucked her dressing gown round herself.

  Want one? the girl said. She shook one out of the packet and held it out. They were French cigarettes, Gauloises. The girl struck a match; as she lit Eve’s cigarette her face was caught in the flare of it, concentrated and serious, and then the dark again.

  I haven’t been entirely straight with you tonight, the girl was saying.

  You haven’t, Eve said.

  No, and I’m really sorry. I didn’t tell you the, well, entirely the truth.

  Ah. Right, Eve said.

  Because when you asked me would I like to sleep in the house, the girl said, well, of course the answer is yes, like who’d choose a car over a bed? But. The thing is. This thing, it happened, and I can’t, I made the promise, I made it years ago, and I won’t, well, I can’t.

  What did she tell Eve? In the half-sentences of someone who finds something hard to say, this:

  When she was in her twenties Amber MacDonald worked in the city in a high-flying position in investment assurance and insurance interests. She had a Porsche. It was the 1980s. One sleeting winter night, the week b
efore Christmas, she was driving along a narrow car-lined street in a small town with the radio on playing a song called Smooth Operator and the windscreen wipers doing their rubbery swipe over the windscreen, and a child, a girl of seven wearing a little winter coat, its hood edged in fur, stepped between two cars on to the road in front of her and Amber MacDonald’s car hit the child and the child died.

  Since then, Amber MacDonald said, I gave up my job, my salary. I sold the car and I left most of the money I got for it, thousands, in a big pile of cash, like a hillside cairn, by the side of that road where it happened. I bought a second-hand Citroën Estate. And I decided that from then on I would never live in a place that could be called home again. How could I? How could I live the same way after?

  They sat in the dark. It would soon be light. A single tear welled up and out of one of the girl’s eyes, ran down the line of her nose and stopped, as if asked to, just below the curve of her cheekbone exactly halfway down her face. Gently she stubbed her cigarette out in the grass. She looked up, looked Eve right in the eye.

  Well? she said. Do you believe me?

  I was born in a trunk. It was during the matinée on Friday. I stopped the show.