The Accidental

by Ali Smith

  Nothing, Magnus says.

  What exactly were you thinking about it? Amber says.

  About what? Magnus says.

  About nothing, Amber says.

  Everybody laughs.

  No, Magnus says. I was thinking, um, lighthouse. If you wanted, for instance. I was trying to work out, to measure the total inside area in cubic metres it would be really difficult because of the changing size of it as you went further, uh, further up inside.

  Magnus has gone a really really red colour, Astrid says.

  God, yes, darling, his mother says shaking her head. Is it sore? Run upstairs, Astrid, get the aftersun. It’s in my soapbag.

  No, Magnus says. I’m fine.

  I think you should definitely use it tonight, Eve says.

  It’s all right, Magnus says.

  It looks very raw, she says. Weren’t you using any protection?

  Amber looks straight at Magnus, raises one eyebrow. She laughs out loud. Magnus can’t not laugh. He laughs too. In front of everybody, still nobody getting it, nobody knowing, nobody even beginning to work it out. They all start laughing along anyway, even though. They laugh like a family all laughing together at something.

  Amber = what?

  The Jordan Curve Theorem. Every simple closed curve has an inside as well as an outside. Amber’s bare breasts hanging down above his head were two perfect bell curves. She is a torus. Inside her is curved space. It was late afternoon. He came out of his room. Amber was whistling, standing on the upstairs landing looking at the ceiling like she was some kind of house expert off a tv programme.

  Wait here, she said. Don’t go away.

  She fetched a stick from the garden to shift the loft hatch open. She gave him a leg-up into the loft. She climbed on to the banister to get in after him. He leaned out, helped pull her up. The floor is bare boards up there, unvarnished. There is a small skylight blackened with old dirt. There is a lot of stuff in boxes, a lot of dust. It is even hotter than the rest of the house. Amber wiped her hands on her shorts, crouched on the floor for a minute, looked right at him. What about here? she said. He didn’t know what she meant. He didn’t know what he was supposed to say. While he was trying to think of something she slipped away down through the hatch again.

  He noticed how his heart sank. Her going felt like he’d done something wrong. But she came straight back below the hatch with a blanket coverlet kind of thing out of one of the bedrooms.

  She was pretty fit for someone quite old. She balanced on the banister again, reached for his hand. She levered herself up barefooted off the wall. She slid the door-cover across the hatch with her foot. She straightened up. She looked round, still holding his hand.

  This’ll do, she said.

  Dark, he said.

  She let go of his hand. But then she took off her t-shirt. The tips of her breasts were white around the nipples. She took off her shorts. Parallel postulate. Incalculable x. She took his hand again. She put it on her thigh, then put it further up her thigh. Point of contact. She undid his belt. It leapt out, it formed a parabolic curve (roughly speaking y = x squared). She squeezed him. It shot out, like out of a spot.

  Then she said, lie down here.

  Manifold = aggregate.

  Aggregate = formed of parts that make up a whole.

  Infinity = never-stopping.

  A sequence which repeats itself at regular intervals, once, then again, then again, then again = periodic.

  Point of intersection. She made him lie on his back, she was perpendicular, right-angled. She added herself to him.

  The line going from Amber’s eyes to his at one precise moment had the most unbelievably beautiful gradient in the world.

  Inside her was like going inside a boxing glove, or a room made of pillows, or wings. Magnus exploded into a billion small white feathers.

  The smell of the hot summer attic, the smell of them both, stuck with amazing sweat. The lean of her up against him afterwards, laughing against his ear. The lean of her whole body as she walks, as she talks, as she sits saying nothing at all, smiles at him across the table over supper with nobody else knowing. Her hidden miraculous curves.

  Amber = angel.

  They have sex in the loft three more times. Twice when the house is too full of people they have quick (quite sore) sex in the garden behind the bushy hedge. Once Amber comes to Magnus’s bedroom after everyone has gone to bed. This is one of the best times.

  It is unbelievable.

  How wet it all is is a little shocking. Magnus had no idea. He is also always a little shocked, no matter how many times he sees it, by Amber having hair, like that, down there. It simply hadn’t occurred to him women would. It is of course obvious when you think about it. Of course they do. Presumably they remove it with hair-removing products before they go online or have their photos taken or are filmed. Or maybe, like boys, like men, some women just have it, some just don’t. Maybe older women have it. He looks at his mother as she walks across the garden. He wonders if she removes it, or if she hasn’t any, or if she has a lot. He wonders in what area of cm squared. Then he has to blink a lot, he can hardly think straight.

  I’m taking St Magnus for a walk into the village, Amber announces to Eve. We’ll be away about an hour, long enough for me to ravish him sexually then bring him back safely, is that okay?

  Magnus feels all the colour drain out of him. When he can hear again he can hear Eve, Astrid too, laughing like they think it’s a hilarious joke.

  We’ll be reasonably private, Amber is saying. We won’t alarm the good people of the village, not this time anyway. Will we?

  Mmphgm, Magnus says looking at the ground.

  Can I come? Astrid asks.

  No, Amber says. But if you’re good today I’ll take you shoplifting tomorrow.

  Have a nice walk, Eve says not looking up as they go. Don’t go too far.

  Amber = genius, Magnus thinks. Amber = genius squared for thinking to find a man who has a key to the church in the middle of the village. The next time she goes to London she gets a copy of the key made. This is genius to the power of three.

  They go there most days after that. They aren’t disturbed once.

  Why do you always wear that stopped watch? he asks Amber one afternoon in the church. Amber, kneeling on the floor between his legs, has just finished taking the tip of him in her mouth, coaxing him out of himself again. As she did he saw the flash of her arm with her watch on it that always says seven o’clock no matter what time it actually is. For example it is about five o’clock now.

  Amber leans back against the pew, pushes her hair back off her face with her hand.

  I need to keep an eye on the time, she says.

  Yes, but it’s always the wrong time, Magnus says.

  That’s what you think, Amber says.

  Then, with her watch hand, she reaches down. What she does next blanks his mind completely of time.

  Time is nothing at a time like that.

  Afterwards they sit on the village green, on the village bench. People go past. Amber says hellos to them all. They all say hello back like they know her. They all smile. They are the Village People. Magnus doesn’t tell Amber that they call them this. Eve is never rude about the village for some reason, neither is Michael, in front of Amber.

  Look how long their shadows are, Amber says as two cyclists pass them. She waves at the cyclists. They wave back. Magnus watches the shadows waving their strange-angled arms on the road surface.

  People are nothing but shadows, he says.

  You’re not fucking a shadow, you know, Amber says. Or if you are, then this shadow likes it fine, even if that’s all I am, just a shadow.

  He is embarrassed that he might have offended her. But she doesn’t look offended in the slightest. Instead, as usual with Amber, it is an astonishing way of looking differently at things. It makes him momentarily brave.

  It keeps getting dark when it’s light, he says. I mean, when it’s not meant to be dar
k.

  Does it? Amber says.

  She thinks about it.

  Persistence of vision, she says. You must have seen something so dark that it’s carried on affecting your vision even though you’re not looking directly at it any more.

  But how? Magnus says.

  Exactly the same as if you saw something too bright, she says. God you’re stupid for someone who’s supposed to be so clever.

  Magnus sits up. (Situation = possible light as well as possible dark.) An old lady goes past.

  How are you today? Amber says. Hot, isn’t it?

  Oh it’s a hot one all right, the old lady says. The rhubarb’s dead. The leeks are dead. The geraniums are dead. The lawn’s all dead. It was the heat that did it. You’re a good girl, you, aren’t you, always at the church, day after day, him too, always there with you. It’s grand to see.

  Ah, it’s not me, it’s him making me go, Amber says. He’s a saint, you know.

  You’re a good boy, you are, the old lady says to Magnus. There’s not many boys as’d go to the church like that all them days on their holidays in the time that’s theirs. You’ll make someone a good husband one day.

  Where’s your own husband today then? Amber asks.

  Oh yes, my husband, he’s dead my love, the old lady says. I had one, I had him for fifty-six years, he was a good enough lad while he was here, but he’s dead now.

  Amber waits until the old lady is well up the road before she turns to Magnus.

  It was the heat that did it, she says in his ear.

  Amber = angel, though maybe not quite in the way Magnus first thought when he saw her all lit up that first time in the bathroom when he was up on the side of the bath.

  She’d caught him as he came down. She’d steadied him. She’d sat him on the rim of the bath. She’d looked up at the shirt arm swinging above them from the shirt tied round the beam. Then she’d unbuttoned her shorts, sat on the toilet. She was urinating. Do angels urinate? He looked away, shut his eyes. It was quite noisy. When he opened his eyes again she was buttoning up her shorts.

  You’re very polite, she said.

  She pressed the flush handle.

  You could really do with a bath, you know, she said.

  She turned on the taps. Water came out of the showerhead.

  Stand up, she said.

  She undid the button on his jeans.

  Where’ve you been? she said. In the river?

  She knew everything. He turned his back to her. He slid his wet jeans down his legs. He stepped out of them on the floor. When he sat in the bath it was with his back to her. She reached the showerhead down. She showered him. Then she soaped his back, then his chest, his neck, then she put her hand down underneath, soaped round his balls, all round his prick. He was ashamed of himself, when she did that.

  She adjusted the taps, showered the soap off him with warmer water. Then she soaped his hair, rinsed it off. She turned the taps off. He stood up. He was shivering. She held out the towel. While he dried himself with his back to her she stood on the side of the bath, reached up, untied the shirt from the beam. She jumped down. She was so light on her feet. She put the shirt to her nose then screwed it up in her hands, folded it inside the jeans all in a damp bundle which she put into his arms.

  Maybe some cleaner clothes, she said.

  She was sitting on the top step waiting for him when he opened the door of his room again, clean now, cleanly dressed, to check if she was still there or if, as he suspected, he’d totally made her up.

  The television is full of the news about Saddam’s dead sons. The Americans killed them in a shoot-out a couple of days ago. The tv shows the photos of them again, the ones taken directly after the killing. Then it shows the photos the Americans took after they shaved them to make them look more like they’re supposed to look, like they looked when they were recognizable. The photos taken after that prove they’re clearly the sons.

  This is a turning point, the tv says. It has broken the back of the war, which will be over now in a matter of weeks.

  Magnus looks at the photos of the dead faces on the screen. They were tyrants = all sorts of torturing, raping, systematic or random killings. A typical human being contains about one hundred billion neurones. A human being = a cell which divides into two then four then etc. It is all a case of multiplication or division.

  The people on the tv talk endlessly. After the talk about the deaths there is talk about the government’s popularity via the tv channel’s own phone-in poll, then a report on the current political stratification of middle England, the shift of support after the killings. They say the word middle a lot. Support among the middle class. No middle ground. Now to other news: more unrest in the Middle East. Magnus thinks about Amber’s middle, her waist, her abdomen, how doing it with her smells like wax melting into heated-up fruit, how the kisses taste of aquarium.

  So as anyone who was a hep cat back in the swinging sixties will happily assure you, the woman on tv is saying, you can still be trendy in your own swinging sixties because what we used to think of as middle age is nowadays almost unrecognizably youthful!

  A picture of Mick Jagger comes up on the tv screen. Swinging 60, the caption says.

  Magnus shifts, restless on the sofa. He stands up, presses the remote. The tv is obedient, switches off. The room, however, goes on ticking round him by itself.

  He walks to the village. When he gets there he walks the whole circle of it to see how long it takes him.

  It takes fourteen minutes.

  He circles the locked church.

  The little shop with the post office is shut. Its shutters are down.

  On his way back to the house he stops outside a long building. He has the feeling he’s been here before. Then he recalls distinctly: he is leaning on the wall; he is trying to be sick; a man is coming out; the man is angry; he is shouting at him, helping him roughly to his feet; there are people watching him through a window.

  Magnus steps over the tiny wall round the building into its empty car park. From the front he sees that the building is an old-style bingo hall. It is one of the biggest buildings in the village that’s not a house. It must have been important in the life of the village at some point, though now it is pretty dilapidated-looking.

  Two painters are redecorating its outside. They are painting it whiter. There is a strong smell of paint, beyond it the smell of food. The building seems to be a restaurant of some sort. No wonder the man came out shouting at him, if he was being sick outside his restaurant right in front of diners eating dinner.

  Magnus remembers himself that night, a broken boy on the ground.

  His mother, broken. Michael, broken. Magnus’s father, his real father, so broken a piece of the shape of things that, say he were walking past Magnus, his son, sitting in the corroded bus shelter of this village right now, Magnus wouldn’t recognize him. He wouldn’t recognize Magnus. Everyone is broken. The man who has the restaurant, he’s a broken man. Magnus remembers his shouting. Those two painters, they’re broken, though you can’t always tell by just looking. They must be, since Magnus knows everybody in the whole world is. The people talking on all the millions of tvs in the world are all broken, though they seem whole enough. The tyrants are as broken as the people they broke. The people being shot or bombed or burned are broken. The people doing the shooting or the bombing or the burning are equally broken. All those girls on the world wide web being endlessly broken in mundane-looking rooms on the internet. All those people dialling them up to have a look at them are broken too. Doesn’t matter. All the people who know in the world, all the people who don’t know in the world. It’s all a kind of broken, the knowing, the not-knowing.

  Amber is broken, a beautiful piece of something glinting broken off the seabed, miraculously washed up on to the same shore Magnus happens to be on.

  A woman goes past Magnus in a car. She looks at him. It is amazing how many older women turn their heads at him. He feels momentary pride that he
knows what to do, that Amber has taught him how.

  But then he realizes it was just the cleaner who works for them in their holiday house. She was looking at him because she recognized him.

  He has seen her standing spraying chemicals on to wood, rubbing at a side board with a lemon-scented disposable duster.

  I broke somebody, Magnus says to Amber that evening when they go to the church.

  So? she says. And?

  She says it kindly. She unbuckles him.

  So.

  It is another evening. The shadows outside have lengthened. Everyone is in the lounge. Amber is doing something to his mother’s knee. His mother is telling Amber information about the French Impressionist Edgar Degas. Magnus wonders why his mother has this need to tell Amber things, as if she doesn’t know them, as if Amber is stupid or an uneducated person. Michael is the same, always quoting stuff as if it’s instructive to her. Amber knows all kinds of things about most things. There’s not much she doesn’t know about. He and Amber have had discussions about how light is part particle, part wave-structure, how time is bending, speeding up so that actual minutes are shorter though we don’t notice it because we don’t know how to yet. Amber knows about Egyptian, Minoan, Etruscan, Aztec everything. She knows about car electronics, solar radiation, the carbon dioxide cycle, things in philosophy. She is an expert on those wasps which inject other insects with paralysis so that their own grubs can feed off something still alive. She knows about art, books, foreign films. She spoke for ages one afternoon in the attic about an Irish playwright who listened at the cracks in the floor of the room he was renting, to hear the people in the kitchen of the house he was staying in, so he could put the kind of speech that people actually used into his plays.

  Right now Amber is kneeling on the floor in front of his mother while his mother holds forth to Amber, but really to the whole room, as if the room has never heard of French Impressionism, about how beautiful the Degas sculptures of horses are, how like life the Degas dancers are. She is explaining that when Degas died he left instructions that his sculptures–which were mostly made of clay but also in some cases of the stems of his paintbrushes, even grease from Degas’s kitchen–were not, under any circumstance, to be cast in bronze. He wanted them to rot away. He wanted them, his mother says, to have a life cycle. But after Degas was dead his agent ignored his instructions. His agent had them cast in bronze after all. His mother is trying to get a discussion going about whether this was morally right or wrong. Amber, meanwhile, is rubbing his mother’s knee gently, in clockwise circles.