The Accidental

by Ali Smith

  Now Magnus, in the cinema, imagines Jake on the pavement and the door opening behind him and the kindly lady coming out, picking him up off the ground. She would take him into the front room and sit him on the sofa and she would make him a cup of hot chocolate, or tea, something hot and comforting anyway, and bring it through and put it in his hands, and he would be crying so much that his tears would fall in it, and she’d take the cup and put it on the table and take his hands and say, now now, come on, it can’t be helped, it’s okay, it’s over. And then she’d get up and go through and phone Milton and say, Mr Milton, one of the boys is here who.

  Or maybe she wasn’t kindly at all. Maybe she was crazy and hurt and angry, her face still all lined from crying and not sleeping; maybe she got Jake by the hands and she dragged him in and threw him on to her front room floor and shouted and swore at him, and threw the cup she had in her hand at him, and threw everything within reach at him, plates, pictures, a vase, a table, everything–until they were both exhausted with the shouting and the sadness and everything broken all round them and both just sat in their own exhaustion staring at nothing until she got up and went through and phoned Mr Milton. And said–what? Hello, Mr Milton, this is Mrs ******, the mother of ********* ******, who can’t be mentioned, the girl who died, remember, and one of the boys is here who.

  It was the mother or the brother who found her, in the bathroom. Magnus knows what her little brother looks like. He is at Deans. Everybody at Deans knows what he looks like, and he will know who Magnus is now; everybody knows which boys were suspended.

  They will walk past each other in the school corridors.

  That noise Magnus can hear beyond the film’s music and actors can’t be the escalators. It is an impossibility. There is no way he would be able to hear them in this auditorium with its cinema-sound-level soundproofing. It must be the noise of the projector he can hear. The film is almost over now because everything is adding up in it. The actors from all the different segments of story have all met each other at the school nativity play or at the airport and smiled and waved at each other like they all live in the same world and they’ve known each other all along. The actress pretending to be the Portuguese cleaner has said yes to getting married to the actor most famous for being in the Jane Austen adaptation. Everybody has laughed at the fat actress pretending to be the fat sister of the Portuguese cleaner. The film is supposed to be about love. But its only message, as far as Magnus can make it out, is not to be too fat if you’re a girl or everyone will think you are laughable and no one will want to marry you.

  Along from him one of the two girls is crying. He wonders if she is crying because the film has moved her or because she thinks she’s too fat. The girl is crying and crying. She isn’t in the least bit fat. Her friend puts her arm round her. Magnus finds himself hoping that Astrid has a friend like this, who will put her arm round her if she is one day sitting crying in a cinema. But at the notion of Astrid crying in a cinema, especially at a film like this, the Astrid in his imagination sticks her middle finger up at him, and at it.

  But what if Astrid came to a film like this one and was reduced by it, like this girl along from him? What if Astrid is nothing like the Astrid in his head is, when she’s out in real life? She might have to be different. Girls have to be a certain way with each other, the same as boys do.

  In a minute Magnus will have to leave the cinema. The credits are almost over. He will have to go back out of this place, like this place is a safe cave with its shadows flickering on its wall, where it’s easy to pretend that there’s nothing but the shadows. Out there, there’s the escalators going round and round in their fixed directions. The things you’re supposed to buy all the time. The end of the year. The people looking at people and not looking at people. What will he do when he sees her little brother in the corridor in the new term, in the new year? Will he pretend not to see him? Will he look straight through him? Will the little brother pretend not to see Magnus? Worse. Will he look straight at him?

  A group of men were chained inside a cave, and all they saw, all they could see and all they’d ever seen of the world was the shadows their own fire made on the walls. They watched the shadows all the time. They spent their days watching them. They believed that’s what life was. But then one of them was forced out of the cave and into the real world. When he came back into the cave and told the others about sunlight, they didn’t believe him. They thought he was mad. Magnus can’t remember the end of that story. Does the man who’s seen the outside world go mad? Does he leave the cave, the only place he knew, and go somewhere else, exiled from his old friends and from the only life he’d known before that, inside the cave? Do the men chained to the cave floor kill him, because they’re so disturbed by what he keeps saying?

  The crying girl and her friend are waiting to get past him. He stands up to let them pass, then he follows them out of the cinema and into the glare of the shopping precinct. He feels protective. He walks behind them, protecting them without them knowing, all the way to the escalators and down, concentrating on the back of the one who was crying and has stopped now, is glancing red-eyed round her. Her friend is talking. She nods and answers. They both laugh. That’s better. Also, it has got him to the bottom of the escalator without him having to think about the escalator.

  He follows them for a bit.

  He stands at the door of Accessorize, which is about to shut, and waits for them. When they come out again, arm in arm, he gives them a head start then walks behind them past the other shutting shops. They leave the precinct, cross the street with the crowd and disappear among the people going round the corner towards the tube and Magnus is abandoned standing in a winter street whose buildings seem to rise from the ground as two-dimensionally as the buildings of a fake street on a film backlot. A strong enough wind would blow them away.

  She had a brother, just like Magnus is Astrid’s brother.

  She gave her brother the finger and swore at him and treated him like shit and watched tv slouched on a sofa, and he did the same back to her, exactly the same as him and Astrid.

  She closed the bathroom door. She stood up on the bath, maybe. She had had enough. She stood herself up on the edge of the bath and she looked down, and instead of seeing someone there, she saw no one.

  The end result.

  =.

  The equals sign, Magnus remembers telling Amber one afternoon so incredibly hot that it was even warm inside that old stone church, was invented by Leibniz.

  It was? Amber said. Are you sure?

  She had her hand, her very gentle hand, round his prick, which was out of his shorts, not doing anything, just her, holding him. He had his hand, gentle, half inside her, inside her shorts, the same. It was just after sex, and it was just before sex.

  How do you mean, sure? Magnus said.

  I mean, how do you know? Amber said.

  I just know, Magnus said. It’s just something I know.

  He was half-hard. She was often a bit annoying like this between sex, to wind him up. Eventually, other times in the church, he’d know to just not enter into this kind of conversation. But at this point he was still a bit easy to wind up.

  But how do you know it’s true? Amber said.

  Well, Magnus said. Assuming I read it in a book, because I can’t remember exactly when or how I learned it as a fact, but assuming I read it in a book, well, then it will have been in a book, which makes it presumably true.

  Why would being in a book make it true? Amber said.

  Because if it was in a book it was presumably in a schoolbook, a textbook, Magnus said, and textbooks tend to have been written by people who have studied a subject for a long enough time, and well enough, to be able to teach it to people who know a lot less about it. And also. Books are edited by editors who check the facts before they publish them. And even assuming I didn’t learn it from a textbook but from a teacher, then the same applies.

  What, Amber said, teachers are edited by edit
ors who check the facts before they teach them?

  Magnus clicked his teeth.

  You know what I mean, he said. Come on. A break, please. Give me.

  All I’m saying is what if it wasn’t Leibniz? Amber said. All I’m saying is what if it was someone else?

  It was Leibniz, Magnus said.

  But what if it wasn’t? Amber said.

  But it was, Magnus said.

  He was hard now.

  What if you’re wrong? Amber said as she ran the circle of her hand up towards the tip, back towards the balls and up towards the tip again.

  I’m, uh, I’m simply, uh, not, Magnus said.

  What? Amber said.

  Wrong in this instance, Magnus said.

  Ah, Amber said.

  She moved so his hand came out of her. She shook off her shorts, stepped out of them, left them on the old wooden floor.

  Sure? she said as she climbed on to him.

  100 per cent, Magnus said deep in the sweet heat of the moment. 100 per cent sure in the heat of the summer, unimaginable now that it’s now and it’s winter, 100 per cent sure in the sweet headfuck of the endless, ended time in that house, in that church, in Amber. I’m not in love, Amber had said to him. So don’t forget it. It’s just that men your age are naturally very suited to women my age, since I’m just coming up to my prime number but you’re already in yours.

  Did she really say prime number, as a kind of Amber joke, or did she just say prime and he added number on afterwards? Moping around on the internet on one of the new computers at home on one of the many suspended days, asking Jeeves on Ask.com whatever came to mind, like who killed Kennedy, and where was Osama Bin Laden, and how did Plato die, and did Shakespeare really exist, and who was Zeno of Elea, and when did Leibniz invent the equals sign, Magnus had discovered that not Leibniz after all but a Welshman called Robert Recorde had maybe possibly invented it, in the 1550s. The only other fact about Robert Recorde on the site was that he died in a debtors’ prison.

  After this, Magnus had typed in the sentence: Where has Amber gone? and then clicked on search.

  Nuke CopsTM–Team Amber Has Gone Nuke CLear Link to Us. Team Amber has Gone Nuke CLear…msnx writes ‘Our site has undergone major rework since earlier days as McCop. Gone-Amber

  POETVILLE. Gone by Amber Lynn Faust copyright September 23, 2003.

  Everything is gone, No one to lean on. Let alone, hard like stone. Fenton-“Gone with the wind’’ lamp in Collectibles: Glass, This lovely Amber Gone with the wind lamp stands 22–1/2 tall and was issued in 1971. The top globed can be lighted alone or the base…

  Victoria Amber Light Fixture

  Beyone Expression Antiques. This is an exquisite amber hobnail Gone-with-the-wind light fixture with jewels in the frame, and alternating…

  Gone to Dogstar–Amber

  Amber…My dog’s name was Amber, and she was a red chowchow female. She died of stomach cancer when she was eight year old.

  Security at Sellafield goes on amber alert

  Sellafield has gone on amber alert as a precautionary measure in line with a Government order for extra vigilance and protection at sensitive…

  Amarillo Globe-News: Business: Amber Waves: Where have all the Web posted…Sunday, June 15, 2003…5:34 a.m. CT. Amber Waves: Where have all the cowboys gone? By Kay Ledbetter…Amber Review and Walkthrough

  When the outline of the PeeK unit in your inventory flashes, click on it to confirm that the AMBER device has gone online.

  Ask Jeeves. Greetings, please enter your search below.

  Magnus typed in ********* ******.

  Your search for ********* ****** did not match with any Web results. Please try your search again.

  Magnus typed in C******** M*****. He counted the stars to make sure he’d got the correct number. Then he clicked the search button. Jeeves found him a guitar chord dictionary listing jazz chords, a link to an art museum in Los Angeles and a link for comic fonts and lettering.

  After this Magnus had accessed the free galleries, for the first time since before. His heart was actually audible to him as he clicked on the first and it opened in front of him.

  It was okay. It was just a porn site. It was pretty tame. It didn’t matter.

  Lezzie ass licking in the jacuzzi. Petra shows off her pretty pussy. Preimum Hardcore Site. Horny grandma wants an orgasm. Redhead sassy teen with inredible tits and a ’tude. Bitch swallows it. Teenie and her teddy bear loose in the yard. Golden girl baths in pee. Vixen shows off her pink love canal. Shaved muff redhead Rose. Big tittied bitch teases the camera. Dick leaves friction burns on babes tongue. Little titties Latina fucked.

  Preimum. Inredible.

  He’d emptied the history into the trash and switched the computer off. It wasn’t that it was so bad, or made him a bad person, looking at the bodies. They were just bodies. It wasn’t like in a psychological thriller movie where all the bodies suddenly had her face, or anything like that. They all had their own faces. None of them had her face. It was that he’d thought of her face and then had been ashamed, and what he’d been most ashamed at was the badness of the language, how stupid it was.

  Magnus, leaning against the wall of Superdrug on the dark last day of the year, considers the Millet Seed Paradox of Zeno of Elea. If one millet seed falls and makes no sound, does the definite sound that a thousand millet seeds make when they fall together mean that a thousand nothings make a something? The girls on the porn sites stretch into thousands of thousands, and thousands more links to thousands of other links. To look at even a fraction of them would take persistence of vision. The girls on the sites stretch out their cracks to the crack of doom. Shakespeare.

  Did Shakespeare really exist?

  What was love actually?

  Where did Amber go?

  Amber going was a case of good riddance and bad rubbish, according to Eve. Amber had been less than they’d imagined, according to Michael. She had sold them down the river (Eve). She had pulled the wool over all their eyes (Michael). She had shown her true colours (Eve). She had taken and taken from them in a very insidious way (Michael). Magnus thinks of Amber, taking and taking from him in the attic, in the garden, in the church. St Magnus. He thinks of her taking his clothes from him that first night, after she bathed him. He thinks of himself, lost after Amber had gone, wandering the village, and the man from the restaurant coming out and offering him something to eat and telling him the building’s history. He thinks of himself being sick outside the same restaurant, just before Amber, and the same man coming out angry at him. That restaurant, before it was a restaurant, was an old cinema first, then when going to the cinema got unfashionable it became a snooker hall and then a derelict building and now an Indian, and the man said at this rate it would soon be something else, though he didn’t know what. Amber had clearly befriended the man, like she had befriended most of the Village People.

  Sit here, the man had said patting the wall outside his empty restaurant. You hungry? No? Eh? Pity. Lots of food in there. Lots of good food. Nobody to eat it. You know what someone wrote on the wall of the Gents? Muslim Jew bastard. I’m not a Muslim. I’m not a Jew. I’m not a bastard. Well, that’s life. That’s the way. Your friend. The lady. Where’s she gone? Eh? You don’t know? Eh? You don’t? Pity. Pity.

  The man shook his head.

  She’s a fine one, that one, he said. A real lady. The real thing.

  31 December 2003, quite late in the afternoon. He should go home. He looks at his watch. His watch has stopped. Its hands say ten to midnight, or noon. It isn’t. It’s only about four o’clock. All the shops are shutting. All the escalators in all the precincts all over the country are surely stopping. It’s holiday time for escalators. All the people round him are drunk already or on their way to getting drunk, on their way into central London as if compelled magnetically. He should go home.

  It will mean walking against the crowd.

  In the gone summer light, the man nudged Magnus outside the empty resta
urant.

  Sure you’re not hungry?

  Magnus shook his head. The man smiled at him.

  The real thing. Eh?

  Magnus comes up the stairs one at a time, one foot, then the other, then the other. He stands on the landing outside Astrid’s bedroom door. He takes a deep breath. He knocks.

  Go away, Astrid shouts from inside.

  It’s me, Magnus says.

  Like, who else? Astrid says.

  She opens the door enough to peek out. Magnus can see just one of her eyes.

  And? she says.

  He sits down just outside the door on the landing carpet. The carpet is still so new that there are shreds of it in the corners.

  I saw a really rubbish film today, he says.

  So? Astrid says.

  She is about to close the door again.

  Don’t, Magnus says.

  She doesn’t. She stands, suspicious, watching him through the few open inches. In a moment, any moment, she’ll slam the door.

  It was good, wasn’t it? he says.

  You just said it was rubbish, she says.

  No, I mean, it was good when we were on holiday this year, he says.

  Astrid stares at him. She opens the door properly.

  It was really good, too, he says, when we got back here and there was like nearly nothing left.

  Astrid sits down in the doorway. She picks at the new carpet too.

  It was brilliant, she says. It was so good.

  I think I liked it best when there was totally nothing, Magnus says. When you could just walk through a room and there was nothing at all in it.

  And we could hear ourselves all different when we walked or talked, even just breathing was different, Astrid says.

  Yep, Magnus says.

  And when we spoke it sounded like an echo, all round us, like we lived in a stately historic house, Astrid says, or like we were on a stage or something because of the carpets gone, no carpets where you expected there to be carpets. So it was like we were walking out on to a wooden stage every time we went across a room.