The Accidental

by Ali Smith

  Amber has finished her sandwich. She gets up. Astrid hurries to her feet too, holding her hands away from herself. Amber is dusting herself down and stretching. She waves goodbye to the security man who raises a hand to wave back, as if not sure, as if by mistake. Then Amber takes the camera because Astrid’s hands are all barbecue sauce and they go back the same way they came, across the hot field (Astrid eats an apple then throws the applecore away, biodegradable) then cross the dual carriageway by a pedestrian walkway bridge which leads directly to the station and is clearly the way they were meant to go the first time instead of walking out into the middle of the road that insane way.

  Halfway across the pedestrian bridge, above the roaring traffic, Amber stops. They lean over and look at the view and the countryside again. It is beautiful. It is really English and quintessential. They watch the cars beneath them going in and coming out, moving like a two-way river. The sunlight off the windscreens and the paint of the cars is flashy in Astrid’s eyes. It is easier to look at the further-away cars fading into a see-through wall of more shimmering heat. Their colours melt through it as if cars aren’t made of anything solid.

  It is a beautiful summer afternoon, like perpetual summers used to be in the old days, before Astrid was born.

  Then Amber drops the camera over the side of the bridge.

  Astrid watches it fall through the air. She hears her own voice, remote and faraway, then she hears the plastic-sounding noise of her camera as it hits the tarmac. It sounds so small. She sees the truck wheel hit it and send it spinning under the wheels of the car behind it on the inside lane, breaking it into all the pieces which scatter all over the road. Other cars come behind and carry on hitting the pieces, running them over, bouncing them across the road surface.

  Come on, Amber says.

  She is striding off ahead and is already halfway down the steps towards the station. Astrid can see her back disappearing, then her shoulders, then her head.

  It is unbelievable.

  It is insane.

  All the way home on the train, Astrid is thinking: it is insane. All the way walking home from the train station to the house, which is quite far, Astrid isn’t speaking to Amber. All the way home she won’t look at her either. When she does sneak one look, from under her fringe, Amber looks completely unbothered, like nothing terrible has happened, like she hasn’t done anything even remotely upsetting.

  It was a present from her mother and Michael on her last birthday.

  She will be in terrible trouble.

  It cost a fortune.

  They are always talking about how much it cost. They are proud of how much.

  It was a Sony digital.

  It had footage from today, of those flowers.

  It had Amber crossing the field with all the yellow and gold behind her head.

  There was filming on it from the other day in Norwich and it might also have been the tape with the footage they took outside the Curry Palace etc. on it.

  What use will Astrid be to Amber now, now that she can’t record anything important?

  The dawn footage is on the bedside table. But it stops on the day that Amber came. What if Astrid woke up and wanted to start that again tomorrow?

  Amber will have to be made to pay for the camera.

  Typical and ironic, no security cameras on the pedestrian bridge.

  Nobody saw it happen.

  Astrid can’t prove anything.

  All the way home she won’t look or speak. Amber doesn’t even notice. She whistles ahead, hands in her pockets. Astrid trudges after her on the opposite side of the road, her eyes fixed on the ground moving beneath her sandals. But Amber doesn’t notice, or if she does she doesn’t think it matters.

  When Astrid gets home and goes upstairs and locks the door behind her in the room, she catches sight of herself in the mirror and her face is so white that she has to look twice. It nearly makes her laugh out loud, how small and white and angry the face in the mirror looks. It nearly makes her laugh out loud that it is actually her.

  She stares at herself.

  The part of herself that wants to laugh feels separate, seeing herself like that. It feels i.e. completely unbothered, or like a whole other different her.

  She sits on the bed looking away from the mirror and concentrates hard on staying furious.

  A couple of days later Amber asks Astrid if she can borrow her pad and her felt pen for a minute.

  Astrid nods. She makes a noise that means yes. She still isn’t really speaking to Amber.

  Amber lies on the grass in the shade, drawing with Astrid’s pen on Astrid’s pad of paper.

  After a bit, Astrid comes over and sits nearby. Then she moves a little closer still.

  Amber is pretty good and very quick at drawing. She has drawn a picture of a small child. You can tell the child is in school because there is a desk and an old-fashioned blackboard is in the background with an old-fashioned teacher at it. The child in the picture is drawing too, on a piece of paper on an easel. Her picture has the word Mummy in child-writing above it, and then is the kind of picture children draw of their mothers, like a stick figure with its arms stuck stupidly out, funny jaggy hair and one eye much bigger than the other and a scrawl for a mouth.

  Amber shows Astrid.

  Then she tears the page out, turns it over, puts her arm over the pad like people do when they don’t want people to copy their answers, and draws something else.

  When it’s finished she gives it to Astrid.

  The second picture is of the gate outside the school (there is a sign saying School) with three mothers there waiting to take their children home. Two of the mothers look like real people. But the third mother is the spitting image of the mother in the child’s painting in the first picture. Standing beside the real mothers she is all crazy sizes and jaggy hair and has one eye too big and the insane mouth-scrawl and the arms at their stupid angle i.e. the mother really looks like that in real life, is the joke.

  It is the funniest thing that Astrid has seen in her whole life. She can’t stop laughing. She can’t believe how funny it is that the mother in the real life might actually really look like the mother in the picture the child drew. It is so funny and so really stupid that Astrid laughs till she is crying with laughter. Tears run down the side of her head, cold behind her ears, down into the grass. Amber is laughing too, lying on her back laughing like anything. They are both rolling about on the lawn laughing and laughing at the two pictures.

  Example of very similitude, Michael says when he looks over her shoulder later at the piece of paper (she is showing Magnus).

  Very funny, Magnus says. He is lying on the sofa staring at the ceiling. (He is nearly normal again, he is talking to people again, he is even taking baths etc. There is still some black round his eyes as if someone took a felt pen and smudged it in there.)

  Did Amber do it? her mother asks. She’s so talented. She’s such a talented girl.

  She is. Amber is really talented. For days and days the joke still makes Astrid laugh in the middle of something else, anything else, it doesn’t matter what.

  Nights later it still comes into her head and she can’t help it, she starts to laugh all over again, it is the kind of funny that’s so deep in your middle where your breathing starts that it feels like your insides are melting or you have been taken over by an alien which does nothing but laugh inside you and long after the actual pictures have got lost or tidied up or maybe thrown away by Katrina the Cleaner Astrid is still laughing helplessly when she thinks of it, how funny it is, how clever the idea of it is, the mother standing waiting at the school gates looking like she exists in the real world exactly the stupid childish way she has been drawn i.e. as if the way the child drew her was actually true and real after all.

  Astrid, her mother says one hot hot evening when Michael has made something that’s supposed to be special and there are inedible flowerheads scattered in the salad. You should film us all at supper tonight. I
t’s such a lovely night, it’s been such a lovely day, and it’s such a lovely supper, we should commemorate it. Go and get your camera.

  Astrid doesn’t say anything.

  Astrid, her mother says. Go on.

  Astrid looks at her plate.

  Go on, her mother says. Go and get it.

  No, Astrid says.

  No? her mother says.

  I can’t, Astrid says.

  What do you mean, you can’t? her mother says.

  I lost it, Astrid says.

  You what? her mother says.

  Astrid says it again.

  I lost it.

  Where did you, Astrid, lose the camera? Michael says.

  Well if I knew that, Astrid says, it wouldn’t be lost would it?

  Amber laughs.

  Astrid, that’s enough, her mother says.

  Astrid scowls at the pile of little flowers on the ridge of her plate.

  But how, exactly, you could do this thing? Michael says.

  Astrid, it cost two thousand pounds, you know it did, her mother says but she says it wheedlingly rather than angrily because Amber is here at the table and they are trying hard to be perfect in front of her, even Astrid’s mother.

  When? Michael says. Did you report it to the police?

  Astrid, for God’s sake, her mother says. Your camera.

  Actually, Amber says as she helps herself to another slice of bread, it’s my fault. I didn’t like her carrying it around all the time. So I threw it off a motorway pedestrian bridge.

  Everybody turns and looks at Amber. There is a silence that goes on and on, keeps going on until Astrid says:

  No she didn’t. It just fell off.

  Oh, her mother says.

  Ah, Michael says.

  It was on the edge of the bridge. And it just–fell, Astrid says.

  Oh, her mother says again. There is another silence, except for the noise of Amber’s fork and knife on the plate.

  Pedestrian bridge, Amber says. Over the A14.

  It could have killed somebody, anything, Michael says. If it had hit a windscreen, anything.

  Yep, Amber says.

  But it didn’t, did it? Astrid’s mother says quick.

  No, Astrid says.

  Nobody died, Amber says tearing the bread in half. Anyway, it was my fault so don’t give her a hard time about it. If you’re going to give anyone a hard time, give it to me.

  Astrid’s mother dabs her mouth with her napkin and looks at Michael, then looks at her watch, then looks out of the window.

  Insurance. I’ll look into it, Michael says glancing at her mother then at Astrid then at Amber then at nobody, into thin air behind Amber’s head. He reaches for the bottle to put more wine in the glasses. Be fine, he says nodding.

  Her mother carries on eating like nothing has happened. It is so weird. Michael carries on eating. Magnus is looking down at his plate and chewing. All up the side of his neck and face is all red like a rash. But nobody says anything else about the broken camera. Nobody says anything else about it all night or the next day and by the third day Astrid is pretty sure they’ve all forgotten about it.

  Id est is long for i.e. or rather i.e. is short for id est. It is another way of saying i.e. and comes originally from Latin, which is what id est is.

  Astrid tells Amber about the mobile in the school litter bin with its rental still being paid and nobody knowing. She tells her about Lorna Rose and Zelda Howe and Rebecca Callow. She tells her about how she and Rebecca Callow used to be friends. She tells her about her father Adam Berenski’s letters to her mother and how she found them under the birth certificates, car insurance, papers about who owns the house etc., in the bureau in her mother’s study and how she took them and how nobody has even noticed that she’s taken them and how she keeps them now inside a sock inside another sock inside the zip-up pocket inside the holdall under her bed at home. She tells Amber the beautiful things they say i.e. id est off by heart you are for me the Beginning of Beginnings. You have taught me the meaning of faithful. If I had a film camera behind my eyes what I would do is film all the dawns of all the mornings of my life then give the finished film to you all spliced together (spliced means married). Then you would know what it’s like to know you, to wake up with you. You are a perpetual beautiful summer, a summer that goes on for months, from May to October, day after day after day of uninterrupted gentle sun and summer air. I am the high-flying birds which skim your sky. You make me fly. When I look at you I feel that I am the only man alive ever to be able to fly so close to the sun. Don’t melt my wings! (id est Icarus who is the son of Daedalus in the Greek myth).

  She describes the photograph of him in the blue car with the door of it open. He has one leg out of the car on the ground. He is wearing jeans. He has dark hair. He is thin. He is wearing a blue checked shirt, you can see it through the car windscreen. There are bushes behind the car and modern-looking houses behind the bushes. There is the leaf on the ground that fell off a tree before the photograph was taken.

  His arms are folded. You can’t see his hands. His eyes are either smiling or shut.

  He took sugar in his tea.

  The words come out of Astrid’s mouth like the kind of heated-up stones they use at the place her mother goes for massage, the kind that leave red places on people’s skin after they’ve been put on and taken off.

  Amber breaks a tall stem of grass from the edge, puts the stem in her mouth and lies back on the lawn. She looks up at Astrid for a long time through eyes half-closed against the sun. She doesn’t say anything.

  The tops of the trees shift all round them a moment before they feel the actual breeze that shifted the leaves above them that moment ago.

  Amber is away for the day.

  Astrid walks round and round the house. She walks round the garden. Then she walks to the village. On the way she thinks about when she and Amber went filming in Norwich.

  Stand there, Amber said directly below the first camera she pointed out, the one filming them at Norwich station as soon as they got off the train. And just keep filming it for a minute. I mean film it for a whole complete minute.

  Astrid sits on the bench across from the village church. She watches the road. She looks at her watch for a whole minute, each tick of the second hand. In that minute, which feels like a very long time, not a single thing happens.

  A whole minute? she’d said to Amber. Who’s ever going to want to watch a film for more than like five seconds of a stupid closed-circuit camera just there on the wall doing nothing?

  Amber rolled her eyes and looked at Astrid id est Astrid was being stupid and annoying so Astrid switched the camera on and autofocused it and started filming the other camera. It swivelled to look at her. The cameras were id est filming each other.

  It is too hot sitting here in the sun. The sun is a huge red eye. Astrid gets up. She looks at the war memorial, with its faded old fake flowers on the two wreaths. She touches its stone ledge, so hot from the sun that she can’t touch it for long. Since this war memorial was new the sun has heated it up every summer.

  She tries the door of the church. It is locked. There is a notice on it saying who to ask for the key, Mr something who lives in the street at the second junction (there is a map).

  Churches are usually locked. It stops vandalism.

  But what if you were a vandal? You could just go and ask for the key.

  But then they would know it was you who was the vandal.

  But what if you said you’d had the key and dropped it somewhere, say, and that a vandal must have found it and gone in and done the vandalism?

  Or–what if the person who owns the key is a vandal, and decides to do some vandalism and then just make up afterwards that someone else came and borrowed the key and wrote with spraypaint on the walls or broke the seats or whatever’s in there etc.?

  It is actually not true that not a single thing happened in that minute she counted just now. There were the birds and things like ins
ects flying. Crows or something probably cawed in the heat above her. They are doing it now. There is the tall white plant over behind the wall, cow something it is called. In sixty seconds it probably moved a bit in the air and it must even have grown but in a way that can’t be seen by the human eye. There are bees etc. everywhere in the shade, working in and out of the flowers, on their way home to their hive where the drones still have their legs because it’s still summer, all happening in its own world which exists on its own terms in this one even if someone like Astrid doesn’t know about it or hasn’t found out about it yet. A heart-shaped stone next to the door says on it Died 1681. There really is someone under it who died in 1681 id est once he or she was alive like this and now he or she whoever it was (there is no name on it, just the date of it, and no month, just the year), what is left of him or her, has been under there for more than three hundred years, and once he or she lived and was actually alive in this village. The sun has been hitting that stone every summer all that time, right the way through the perpetual summers up to the ecologically worrying ones of now. Astrid has never really noticed how green things are before. Even the stone is green. The wood of the locked church door is brown-green, has a kind of sheen of green on it from it just being there in weather etc. It is a really bright colour. If she had her camera she would have just filmed the colour for a whole full minute and then later she would be able to see what it really looks like, that colour.

  She sits down in the shade by the door and looks hard at the greenness of the green. If she looks hard enough she will maybe know or learn something about greenness or whatever.

  But those people who died in those wars last century and the person under the stone shaped like a heart, is it the same thinking about them as it is about that boy who ran past the Peckham library or that girl they found in the woodland dead last year? Or people right now in places in the world who haven’t enough to eat so are dying right now as Astrid sits here thinking about a colour? Or animals in countries where there’s not enough food or rain so they die. Or the people who are in that war that’s supposed to be happening, though not very many people seem to have died in it, not as many as in a real war.