The Accidental

by Ali Smith

  Take me to your leader, hurtling.

  The sky is red, a storm is coming and all the cute chipmunks in the world are potential firebombs. But for now Big Ben is still standing, like a tower that tells what time it is, and so are the Houses of Parliament, and so is Tate Modern, and the Eye, and the river is just the same old grey water with the sky dawning red above it, red all over the city of London, red through the window of Astrid’s room

  the end result = Magnus has been invited to return to school when the new term starts on the 5th. The letters saying so came yesterday. They call what happened ‘the matter’. None of the letters mentions her name or specifies what ‘the matter’ is. One letter came addressed to Eve and Michael and one came addressed to Magnus himself. The one Michael opened said almost exactly the same thing as Magnus’s. We ask your respectfulness and confidentiality in the matter. We are glad to inform you. The matter officially closed.

  The end result = they’ve got away with it.

  The end result = nobody really wants to know.

  It is a Wednesday today. It is the last day of the year. It is getting dark out there already and it’s only lunchtime. Magnus had been wandering about in the eye-hurting light of the shopping precinct. Now he is in the auditorium and the lights have gone down and the adverts are over and the film is playing. Up on the screen the actor pretending to be the Prime Minister has pretended to fall in love with the actress pretending to be the tea-girl. This film had been just about to start, so he had bought a ticket. It is about Christmas. It is full of shiny-looking people and houses, like watching a very long building society advert, or an advert for something, Magnus can’t work out exactly what. Watching it is like being hungry and having nothing to eat except, in fact, the kind of food sold in cinemas. The air in this cinema smells of cinema food, hot dogs and popcorn. Of course it does. Everyone with any brain knows they pump it in on purpose to make you buy food at the kiosk. It works. Most of the people round Magnus are putting food into their mouths without taking their eyes off the screen.

  The escalators will still be going round and round in their grooves outside. Magnus had noticed it and then he had been unable not to notice it. He had stopped to watch the people coming down the down escalator and to watch how each step disappeared so neatly into the groove at the base of it as if folding into nothing as the people stepped off it and away into their futures, and the next step after it doing the same, and the next. One step had a piece of sticker or paper of some sort stuck into the metal at the front of it. It made the step more noticeable than the other unmarked steps. He watched for this step to come round a few times and for it to disappear. He went up on the up escalator and watched the steps ahead of him vanishing into the crack in the top of the machine and how the step he was on did the same. He was watching this so hard that the escalator threw him off it into the people ahead of him and then he was off balance so the people coming behind him stumbled into him too.

  Sorry, Magnus said.

  He was. He was really sorry.

  He waited at the top of the down escalator until he saw the step with the sticker on it come round again. It was the label off a bottle of water, tattered with going round and round the treadmill system under people’s feet. But then he had to wait for it to come round again because an old man stood on it first. When it came round again he stood on it and rode it down to the floor below. He rode the up escalator again, to do this again. But at the top of the down escalator he began to think what he was doing was a bit mad, so when he turned and saw that the floor he was on was the one with the cinema, and a film was literally about to start, he bought a ticket.

  Maybe it is a really good film and because he is being Lobotomic Escalator Boy he can’t actually tell whether it is good or not.

  The end result = he is supposed to be relieved. Michael waved his and Eve’s letter in the air at Magnus. It’s okay, he said. It’s over. Simple as abc. I’ll phone your mother, tell her the happy ending.

  The escalators carry on going round and round in their fixed direction circuit, folding mechanically into and out of themselves and carrying people on them up or down until the day is over and the precinct shuts for the night and they switch the power off until next morning when they switch the electrics back on and it all starts again. When the precinct is shut this cinema will be dark and empty, all its seats empty in their rows and the place dark as a cave, dark as the inside of a stone on the moon, dark as the inside of a human brain inside a head.

  You can start to forget it now, Michael said holding the letter. You can let it go.

  Simple as abc, 123. He can let it go, now that the old year is ending and the new year is beginning, because it will belong to that old year and new things will happen in this new year. He can let it go, as if it is a toy balloon filled with helium and he has been holding on to it by a piece of string, with the kind of stubbornness a small child has, and now he can open his hand and it’ll float off upwards into the sky and he can watch it getting smaller and smaller, further and further away, until he can hardly make it out any more. He can forget it. A simple act of subtraction. Him minus it. He can have his memory erased by a special laser pen-torch, like in Men in Black. Magnus likes Men in Black. He likes all kinds and genres of cinema, usually. At least, he did, before, when he knew what it was he was, and what it was he liked. He argued in the class debate about art, about how cinema was a greatly misunderstood art form and Citizen Kane was probably the greatest film ever made because of the genius way it was shot and framed from the different angles (though not his personal all-time-favourite, which was Bladerunner the Director’s Cut). This film he is watching now is something to do with the British film industry. Another actor on the screen has just pretended to fall in love with an actress pretending to be his Portuguese cleaning lady because he has seen her take her clothes off to dive into a lake and seen her afterwards all tousled up and with wet hair, much prettier than she was the first time he saw her. Magnus looks at the edges of the screen, where the edge of light of the film meets the blackness. He wonders why the thing films are shown on is called a screen. What is it in front of?

  Behind this one is probably just a blank brick wall.

  He thinks about the way that human eyes take the outside world and flash it back, like an upside-down film, on to the retinal screen at the backs of the eyes, then the brain instantaneously turns it the right way up.

  There are two girls a few seats along from him and they seem to be quite engrossed in it, quite enjoying it. It is a girls’ film, after all, so Magnus shouldn’t have high expectations of it or even expect it to interest him. It is the genre of film that you are meant to take a girl to.

  He imagines Astrid here next to him watching this film. Astrid wouldn’t just think it was shit, she would say it was. She would exclaim with boredom at it and people would turn their heads and tell her to be quiet. She isn’t old enough yet to have to pretend to like stuff like this. He smiles in the dark. Just before Christmas she set fire to the pile of leaves against the side of the shed and the whole shed went up in flames. It made Michael react; he came, almost running, down the garden with a fire extinguisher. Then he stood in the garden with them, laughing at the blackened shed. Michael’s all right. Then they all sat in the kitchen together for a while round the table and had coffee, something they’d never done before, round this particular table anyway. The table is a different shape from the old table, circular, not rectangular. It made a difference that night, that the table was a circle. Magnus wonders if Eve will like the new table when she gets home. Astrid is still refusing to speak to Eve when she calls. She even refused to speak to Eve when she phoned on Christmas day. Magnus has, however, more than once, come into the kitchen and caught Astrid flicking through the (now quite thick) wedge of postcards.

  I thought you weren’t reading those on principle, Magnus said the second time.

  I’m not reading them, Astrid said. I had to take them off the top of the fridge to ope
n its door to get the milk out and they happened to be in my hand and I happened to look down at them, that’s all. It’s not the same thing as reading them.

  The end result letters came yesterday morning. Yesterday afternoon Astrid was watching a programme called Killer Hornets from Hell. Magnus sat down beside her on the sofa and she told him how the killer hornets, which are ten times the length of the bees somewhere in South America, send their scouts out ahead to track down beehives then report back. Then hornets mob the hive, kill the bees and eat the honey. But then some bees got clever and worked out that these hornets die at a certain temperature, 116 degrees. But bees also die at a certain temperature. 118 degrees. So the next time a hornet scout was spotted by the bees, the bees somehow knew to surround the scout and vibrate together as a unified bee being until they reached–get this–exactly 117 degrees. Fucking brilliant, Astrid said.

  Astrid, would you just call me a wankstain? Magnus said.

  What? Astrid said.

  Would you mind just calling me it? Magnus said.

  You’re a wankstain, Astrid said.

  Would you just call me it again, a few times? Magnus said.

  You’re a wankstain, you’re a wankstain, you’re a wankstain, Astrid said not taking her eyes off the television.

  Is there a calculus for sadness? Calculus enables you to reach the correct answer without necessarily knowing why. Is there a calculus that lets you understand why and how you reached a wrong answer? The letters had come. It was the end result. Something was wrong with it.

  That’s great, darling, Eve had said when she called back, her voice coming and going and breaking up. It’s (something) news. Wonderful news. Thank God. We (blank) faith in you. (blank) the school is being very sensible. Now you can put this all (something) and get on with your life. With your real life. With working (something) exams. It’s (blank) this coming year (blank) repercussions (something) rest of your life.

  Isn’t there anything worse you can call me? Magnus said to Astrid as they watched the bees pick over the corpse of the hornet scout.

  Nope, Astrid said. Wankstain is the worst thing I know.

  (Astrid is not to be told anything about the school etc. Nobody is. As part of the non-expulsion agreement Magnus has agreed not to mention the name or case in public, and has been warned against mentioning it in private. Your respectfulness and confidentiality in the matter.)

  You’re a killer hornet from hell, Astrid said.

  That’s good, Magnus said nodding to himself because it implied relief. It implied that for doing the wrong thing he could be heated to death by the righteous exact calculation of innocent bees.

  You’re a killer hairnet from hell, Astrid said.

  Magnus, in the cinema, laughs out loud. The two girls along from him turn and look at him in the dark because it is the wrong time to laugh, nothing funny is happening on the screen, no one else is laughing in the cinema. The actor pretending to be the Prime Minister is pretending to make a speech about how he disagrees with American policy. He is doing this because a moment ago in the film he caught the actor pretending to be the American President kissing the ear of the actress pretending to be the tea-girl.

  He watches as people on the screen make jokes about how fat the actress playing the tea-girl is supposed to be, though Magnus himself doesn’t think she’s particularly large, not really, not that noticeably.

  Pascal made a bet with himself that there was probably a God and therefore a heaven and a hell. He reckoned that if he bet his life on it, if he lived his life as if there were, then he’d attain heaven. But if he died and there was nothing, then it wouldn’t really matter that there was nothing. There was no point, according to Pascal, in betting your destiny on nothingness rather than somethingness. That was a real waste of a bet.

  I bet you there’s something that you would never in a million years be able to guess about me, Magnus said to Astrid.

  You think you’re gay, Astrid said.

  No, I mean it, he said. Something, I bet, that if you knew it about me you would never want to speak to me again or have me as your brother. You wouldn’t be able not to hate me.

  He said it as if he were joking, as if it were a joke.

  You think I’m gay, Astrid said.

  The programme about the bees ended.

  I hate you anyway, Astrid said. There’s nothing you could tell me that would make me hate you more than I already do.

  She smiled sweetly at him. He smiled back. He was near tears. A programme about the events of 2003, now that 2003 was nearly over, had begun. The England Rugby team was standing, fists raised, in front of a huge roaring crowd. Then US soldiers sat around on regal-looking chairs in the dusty remains of a blown-open palace suite. Then there was an aerial shot of a police cordon round the edge of a small green wood. It was summer. Then in grainy magnified type, across the screen, the word sexed and the word up.

  Is it something about your suspension and all that stuff being over? Astrid said.

  Over. Easy as abc.

  a). Magnus, pressing the button on the answerphone, sitting there as if waiting for him like a loyal dog, a dog who’s found his long way home after unbelievable travels, right in the middle of the floor in the otherwise empty dining room.

  Three messages. One for Michael (from the university, about the girl who was threatening the law suit). One for Eve (from the legal office at her publisher’s, about the families). The other, echoing out round Magnus into the empty room. Milton requesting that Eve and Michael urgently notify the school.

  Magnus, tossing and turning in bed.

  He must have been spotted leaving the computer room on the right date etc. by the school cctvs. He must have been traced from something which left a trace on the hard disk. The cleaners cleaning the upstairs corridor must have identified him as being there in the school after hours that night.

  Beyond the windows of Milton’s office the playing field, deserted for summer. Michael looking distant–it was the same week Michael heard about his job–and Eve clearly concerned about the way Milton kept warily glancing, like he couldn’t not, at what bruising remained from the black eye she got from Amber when she told her to leave and Amber coiled back her arm, her fist back as far as her own head, then punched Eve hard in the eye. Milton telling Eve and Michael: school investigation, recent tragic suicide, local press, their son Magnus, implicated, necessary suspension while all proper investigations.

  Eve and Michael nodding, dazed. Eve’s arm round Magnus. Milton telling them. Jake Strothers, sitting crying on the pavement outside her house. Her mother opening the front door and taking him in and then phoning Milton.

  (So it wasn’t closed circuit or hard disk or cleaners at all. It was Jake Strothers that did it. It was love.)

  Milton emphasizing relief. The case had had such relatively low profile in the media. (No mention of Anton. Anton, completely getting away with it.) Milton believed the family wouldn’t press charges in any case. The case in any case the case the case in any case.

  Everyone suddenly silent, looking at Magnus.

  But it’s true, Magnus said.

  I did it.

  b). Magnus on the way home in the back of the car, his arms round himself, inside him his own bones, inside them nothing, concavity; child made of nothing. Eve and Michael in the front, nodding a lot. The words publicity, avoidance, necessity. Eve and Michael hugging him when they all got out of the car. Magnus in bed at 6 p.m., asleep. A huge hand lifting the stone slab off his back. A huge hand finally coming down out of the air and picking him up out of the crowd, weighing him, turning him over in its palm, about, any minute now, to raise him to a giant eye in the sky and have a good look at him.

  c). Magnus going for questioning and investigation at the end of November. The secretary sitting him down in Milton’s office and Milton giving the speech at him. How surprised Milton had been to see, of all names, Magnus’s name. How Milton literally couldn’t believe. How in this case ‘true’ w
as ‘relative’. How Milton understood that Magnus clearly didn’t really mean. How hard the school had worked to exonerate Magnus. The importance of working hard this very important exam year. Bad influences and how to keep away from them. Contact with Jake Strothers, penalty of expulsion. Fortunate for Magnus, the unwillingness of the police to be involved in a clear case of suicide. Fortunate for Magnus, the very wise reluctance of the girl’s family to press the matter further. Imperative to Magnus, a temperament founded on the properness and decency of knowing when to leave stones unturned so that 1. the terrible bereavement the school had already suffered because of this unfortunate accident could be allowed naturally to diminish. And 2. the bereaved family could be allowed to continue their everyday existence without even more grief from troubling speculation and interruption. Did Magnus understand? this being the solitary question put to Magnus at the interview.

  Magnus understanding, nodding and complying. 1. 2.

  (a+b)

  +c

  = the end result

  = the matter officially closed.

  Simple, abc. Mathematics. To find the simple in the complex, the finite in the infinite.

  Yes, Magnus said, it’s about the suspension and stuff being over.

  What about it? Astrid said. What happened?

  On the screen Bob Hope was telling a joke to some Second World War troops. They were showing this on tv because Bob Hope was dead. He had died in 2003.

  Doesn’t matter, Magnus said shaking his head.

  Astrid rolled her eyes.

  Like I want to know anyway, she said.

  The Second World War troops roared with laughter.

  Actually there is something worse than wankstain, Astrid said.

  What? Magnus said.

  You, Astrid said.

  Thanks, Magnus said.

  You’re welcome, Astrid said flicking channels. 2003, gone in the flick of a button. It made him feel minimally better. He slouched down further into the sofa.