The Accidental

by Ali Smith

  People were clearly fucking in that church.

  It was the sound of Michael in the lurch.

  It was the sound, to Dr Michael Smart,

  of tragedy, a bloody song of goats.

  That’s what it was, a goat-song. Was it Sartre

  said tragedy was those who got their oats

  when others didn’t, or something like thart?

  Michael was tired of being a rubbish poet.

  Tired of a language that barely suffices,

  words that could call this All a mid life crisis.

  Michael had fallen for a bit of rough

  who’d happened past their Norfolk holiday home.

  There was no doubt about it. It was luff.

  He swelled with false hope, like the Millennium Dome.

  He fucked his wife instead. Not good enough.

  Like the Millennium Dome, nobody’d come,

  they couldn’t find it, it was off the map,

  and when they did get there the show was crap.

  It was New Labour love, then, him and Eve,

  a dinner-party designer suit-and-tie,

  a rhetoric that was its own motif,

  they believed in each other, and a lie

  was at the very centre of belief.

  The waste it was made Michael want to cry.

  He was a ruined nation, and obscene,

  and nothing meant what it was meant to mean.

  He put his hands over his ears, appalled.

  Strangers having sex made him want to drown.

  He walked back to the house, nonchalant, called

  his therapist but she was out of town.

  He walked twice round the garden feeling old,

  did what he always did when he felt down,

  he drove his car to the nearest supermarket

  and looked for a good place to double-park it.

  He filled the basket with selected fruit

  then checked along the line of working girls

  judging them for the likeliest recruit.

  He chose the one with honey-coloured curls.

  She looked about fifteen. He queued. He put

  the grapes in front of her like they were pearls,

  the oranges like she was very fine,

  smiled at her dashingly, fed her the line.

  The girl smiled back. He charmed her by explaining

  her beauty, his amazement at her, talked her

  into meeting him on her tea-break, feigning

  wonder, left without paying, snapped ‘I’m a Doctor,’

  to stop the man he’d double-parked complaining,

  flashed his ID, waited for her and fucked her

  for fifteen mins (tea-break) in the passenger seat

  in the nearby wood and she was very sweet

  and everything but he felt nothing at all.

  He felt–awful. Her name-badge said ‘Miranda’.

  Brave new world. He felt bad, utterly small.

  He magicked all his cash into her hand, a

  small fortune. She straightened her overall.

  It was nylon. He dropped her, as if planned, a

  little away from where she worked. She waved.

  Brave new world. Dr Michael Smart, depraved,

  wept for five hours, head on his steering wheel,

  in a nondescript backlot God knew where,

  miles from anywhere. Then he began to feel

  hungry, so he drove back, windows down, air

  flow making his eyes less red. At the meal

  Astrid had lost her camera. Amber’s hair

  was glorious. It really was. It was.

  She had hair that was truly glorious.

  Afterwards Amber played this game. ‘Say you

  gave me something of yours, maybe a key,

  a house or car key or something, something you do

  quite a lot with in an everyday way, see,

  a house key’s maybe best, I’d be able to

  tell you all sorts about yourself. Trust me.’

  (He sent Astrid upstairs, told her to get

  his keys out of the bedside cabinet.)

  Amber closed her eyes and held Magnus’s ring.

  She said something about truth and disguise.

  Astrid refused to give her anything.

  Amber told Astrid she should use her eyes.

  Eve gave her–he had no idea–something

  and she told Eve something Eve thought was wise.

  His turn. She held them to her perfect nose

  and he could feel her breath, she leant so close.

  ‘You’re never going to get the thing you want.

  Not till you work out what it is you want.

  You don’t actually want the thing you want.

  You only want what you can’t have. You want

  it blindly. What it is you think you want

  is nothing like what you actually want.

  You’ve still got to work it out, what you want

  and what it is, the real meaning of want.’

  She dropped his keys on to the table. Never.

  She’d told him he’d never get what he wanted.

  It made him want her more. It was so clever.

  It left him hopeless hope, a ghost more haunted

  by the living unhaveable than ever.

  He’d have it. He’d have her. He wasn’t daunted.

  He walked around the garden and he ranted.

  He wasn’t daunted. He’d get what he wanted.

  Months later he remembered that she knew

  where the house keys were kept, after this game–

  in the bedside cabinet. Months later, too,

  he thought about the wanting her with shame

  and not a little wryness, like a clue

  right under his own nose, a clue that came

  and went and told him exactly what he needed,

  plain as abc, and he’d refused to read it.

  the middle ages she’d have been in real trouble having all that charisma; history held that to be quite so animally magnetic wasn’t always so safe and in a different age she’d have been publicly flayed for it or dragged humiliatingly through the village and stuck in the stocks, or chained to a post outside the local church with all her hair shaved off like that girl in the Bergman film, the film where death was following the medieval knight and the plague was making everyone go mad. (God, those Bergman films were such hard work. They were beautiful. But impenetrable, and so dark. The times films like those were dealing with were dark, she supposed. And it took dark times themselves to produce films like that one. That particular film was meant to be an allegory about post-nuclear paranoia if Eve remembered rightly. Did dark times naturally result in dark art? And did art always really reflect its own time, rather than any other time? Eve was a member of a very nice book group in Islington, six or seven women and one rather beleaguered man, who met in each other’s houses–one of the pleasures of it was seeing the insides of a whole range of other people’s houses. Over the last six months the book group had enjoyed two doorstop historical novels–both Victorian, mostly about sex–by contemporary novelists, last year’s Booker winner about the man in the boat with the animals, a Forster novel, the big multicultural bestseller which most people in the group got only halfway through, and a very nice novel about Southwold. Michael disapproved of the book group. He thought it bourgeois beyond belief. But Eve was a minor celebrity at the book group, being an author herself. It gave her a definite authoritative edge, which half of the group nodded to and most of them secretly resented, she sensed.)

  She watched as Amber, sitting next to Michael, filled her plate from the salad bowl, and thought about what Amber would look like with her head shaved. She’d probably still be beautiful. That was real beauty, Eve thought, beauty that could withstand humiliation, or baldness, and not David Beckham baldness but spite baldness, victim baldness, violence baldness, crowd-anger baldness. She pictured Amber, head bowed and
bald as an egg, hands bound behind her back round the wooden post, thirsty and silenced and beautifully insane outside a medieval church with all the villagers jeering at her.

  Astrid, she said instead, quick. You should film us all at supper tonight. It’s such a lovely night, it’s been such a lovely day, and it’s such a lovely supper, we should commemorate it.

  But Astrid being quintessentially Astrid, as well as maddening Eve by arranging and eating things on her plate in some kind of psychotic adolescent order–the meat by itself first, the bits of salad separated into leaves from the same types of lettuce next, the cucumber separately from the tomato–announced she had ‘lost’ her nearly-a-thousand-pounds-worth of camera ‘somewhere’. Amber tried to cover for her and pretend it was her fault; more the act of an adolescent schoolfriend than a grown woman; with the same sweet brusqueness Amber distracted them after supper by playing one of those psychological personality games where she claimed to be able to ‘know’ information about someone by simply holding in her hand some object that had belonged to him or her for a considerable length of time.

  Trust me, Amber said. This talent is what enabled me to travel three continents on almost no money and always eat a reasonable supper.

  Everybody laughed, except Astrid, who wouldn’t join in. Amber asked Magnus to give her the ring he was wearing (the one Eve had bought him for his birthday the year before last). Magnus slid the ring off his finger. Amber held it in her hand and held her hand up, professionally, in front of her face.

  This ring, she said after a moment’s silence, is very very precious to you. This is because your mother gave you this ring.

  Astonishing! Michael said. Totally glorious!

  Eve held up her hand to quieten Michael.

  It was a Christmas gift, Amber said with her eyes closed, as if listening. No, a birthday. A birthday. Fifteen years to the day after your birth, your mother gave you this ring.

  Well, obviously, Magnus must have told her this. But Magnus swore he hadn’t.

  Shh, please, Amber said. Your birth was complex. You had the cord around your neck before you were born.

  Magnus’s mouth fell open. He turned to his mother and stared.

  Amber raised her fist with the ring in it up to her forehead again. Someone must have told her. Michael must have told her, if Magnus hadn’t. Not that Eve could have imagined Michael remembering a fact like that. But Michael was odd at the moment. He was strange, changeable. Several times now, Eve had found him sitting staring into space. The other day she’d found, in his trouser pockets (turning them inside out for washing) along with the usual condoms, a piece of paper which had the alphabet scrawled on it and under this a mysterious meaningless list of words: bluff cuff duff enough fluff rough stuff tough.

  Amber was good at this performance of herself. She was really very good. She was almost totally convincing. She was now saying a lot of quite brilliantly pitched and conveniently vague-sounding things to Magnus about being true to yourself and being false to yourself.

  Eve slipped out to the garden. There were a few small stones under a rose bush. She picked one up. She brushed the dusty soil off it and then gave it a rub on her leg. It would do. It was yellow-white, like a sea stone, glittery in places.

  Back in the house, when it was her turn, she gave the stone to Amber. Amber held it for a moment. Then she laughed.

  Really? she said.

  Eve nodded.

  Are you sure? Amber said.

  Yes, Eve said. I’ve had it for years. It’s very dear to me.

  Okay, Amber said still laughing.

  What did you give her? What is it she’s got? Michael said.

  It’s private, Eve said.

  We can do this privately, yes, if you like, Amber said. She took Eve’s hand and led Eve across the lounge to the sofa on the other side of the room, and this is what she told Eve, holding as proof the random stone from the garden, leaning forward confidentially like a gypsy:

  You were born in a good place at a good time, at the turn of the dark decades into the lighter ones. (This was true, and easy to guess.)

  You had a good early love and a good early loss. (This was true, too.)

  You’ve led a life unthinkable to most of the generations of women and men who birthed you to freedoms and riches unimaginable to them. (Well, this was true of almost everyone.)

  You’ve been lucky.

  You’ve been blessed.

  You’ve been educated, more than you understand.

  Really? Eve laughed.

  Amber ignored her and continued:

  You’ve always had a safe place to sleep and good things to eat, all your life.

  So what is it you could possibly want to know about yourself?

  And what is it they’d ask you, what do you think they’d want to know, if they were here tonight, all those women and men and women and men and women and men that it took simply to culminate in the making of you, the birth of you, that day, squealing and furious and covered all over with your mother’s blood?

  Well, Eve said because her head was full of the images of herself as a small new child matted with blood and Amber had stood up, was about to leave her like that, about to go back across the room and tell Michael something about himself; he was already holding up something, a keyring or something. But you can’t go without telling me the answers, Eve said to Amber, low, catching her by the wrist.

  To what? Amber frowned.

  To those questions, Eve said.

  I don’t know the answers, Amber said.

  All the same, Eve said not letting go.

  Amber took Eve’s hand and opened it. She dropped the little white stone, warm from her own hand, back on to Eve’s palm and closed Eve’s fingers over it. As she did she caught Eve’s hand in both of hers and shook it as if heartily congratulating Eve.

  You’re an excellent fake, Amber said. Very well done. Top of the class. A-plus.

  Here was a summer 2003 holiday snapshot of Eve Smart in her taupe linen suit on a summer night in the moonlit garden of the holiday home. Calm and measured. Measured and calm.

  Here was a summer 2003 holiday snapshot of Eve Smart (42) working hard on her latest book all summer in the idyllic summerhouse of the holiday home of Eve and her husband, Dr Michael Smart, and look how the light caught the wet fountain-pen ink on the page as she wrote line after steady line, and how she paused for a moment to think, and how the photograph caught the moment of it, and caught that unidentifiable wraith of smoke or dusty air in a shaft of sunlight, and the way this marked the accidental fall of the light through the summerhouse window that day.

  Here was a summer 2003 holiday snapshot of the Smart family standing outside the front door of their 2003 Norfolk holiday home, Eve Smart and Astrid Smart at the front with their arms round each other and Magnus Smart and Michael Smart horsing around at the back, Michael with his hand on Magnus’s shoulder.

  A family, all of them, smiling. Who were they smiling for? Was it for themselves, somewhere in the future? Was it for the photographer? Who took the photograph? What did it show? Did it show that Michael had come home smelling, yet again, of someone else? Did it show that Magnus was a boy so like his father that Eve almost couldn’t bear to sit in the same room with him? Did it show that Astrid was infuriating to Eve, that she deserved to have no father, just as Eve had done most of her life, and was lucky to still have a mother at all?

  Eve roamed the moonlit garden shocked at herself and at how very fine it felt to be this angry, smoking only half a cigarette, to keep the fen mosquitoes off, well, that was her excuse. And what kind of life was it, where she needed an excuse to smoke even half a cigarette? And were there fens in Norfolk, or were the fens somewhere else? Eve didn’t know. Did that make her a fake, not to know? The girl had taken her by the hand, then called her a fake. Was Eve a fake? Was she a fake everywhere in the world, or only a Norfolk fake? A Norfake! Eve felt drunk. Her heart was beating like mad. Eve Smart had a mad heart. That sounded
good. It sounded extraordinary. It sounded like a heart that belonged to a different person altogether.

  The very notion that Eve Smart (42) could be something other than what she seemed was making her heart beat more than anything had, including Quantum, for years.

  A couple of days before this, Eve had been looking for Amber to tell her about a dream she’d just had and ask her what she thought it meant. Eve had dreamed that Michael was being sent love letters from the students he slept with and that the love letters were printed minutely on each of his fingernails, like the tiny pages of those record-breaking Smallest Bibles In The World, the words even smaller than Your Name On A Grain Of Rice. The nails could be read, but only with a special reading apparatus which was very expensive to hire and Eve had woken up before she had managed to sign all the forms in the hire shop.

  Eve had prepared, over breakfast, a version of the dream that didn’t implicate Michael or herself. Astrid had told her, over breakfast, that Amber was very good at dream interpretation. But Eve couldn’t find Amber. Amber had disappeared. She wasn’t in the garden. She wasn’t in her car. Her car was still there, though, at the front, so she couldn’t have gone very far.

  She wasn’t with Magnus, who had his nose in a book in the front room. She wasn’t with Astrid; Eve could see her kicking about outside by herself, bored-looking under a tree. Michael had gone to the city. Eve had seen him leave. She definitely wasn’t with Michael.

  Eve ran up the stairs. She called Amber’s name. She caught sight of someone moving below her. But no, it was just the cleaner shuffling the vacuum through into the front room, trailing its plug and flex, its unwieldy plastic tube tucked up under one arm and its bits and pieces of brush held tight under her other arm.

  Excuse me, Katrina, Eve called down.

  The cleaner stopped. She stood still, waiting, with her back to Eve.

  You haven’t on your travels seen my friend who’s staying with us, have you? Eve asked. Amber, you know?

  With her back to Eve, the cleaner shook her head and started her shuffle through the hall again. But as she went she said something. Eve couldn’t quite make it out.