The Accidental

by Ali Smith

  Uh huh, Magnus says.

  Except we weren’t, she says, we hadn’t, we were just at home, in our own house.

  Magnus nods.

  Catherine Masson, he says.

  What? Astrid says.

  It’s her name, Magnus says.

  Whose name? Astrid says.

  Magnus says it again.

  Catherine Masson.

  Then he tells it all to Astrid through the opened door, or as much of it as he knows and as much of it as he can, beginning at the beginning

  the end-of-pier jokes about him, and if he couldn’t stop coining them himself then presumably everyone else would be doing it too, putting the oral into tutorial, the semen into seminar, the stud into student, he’d be the stock repertoire of the stud-ents, and not just them but the schadenfreude lecherer peergroup in the common room too, Michael was sure, if it wasn’t too egotistical of him to be imagining puns like these, puns about him, as the whispered underscore of the department, in the air outside the locked-tight door of his office (if it was still his office and not already someone else’s, all his books and papers boxed up in the building’s basement without anybody telling him), as much in the air as the institutional slightly fogey smell that hung in the corridor, the smell that you stopped overtly noticing but that was there all the same, let your subconscious know exactly what department you were in. The story had only just broken and some wag had pinned a notice on to his door on headed departmental paper next to his seminar sign-up lists and the photocopy of the Blake poem, the lineaments of gratified desire for God’s sake. He had gone back to his office to get his coat, that was the last time he was in the faculty, back in October, and there it was, next to Blake, next to the official Departmental Memo telling them to see Professor Dint to be assigned a new tutor in the temporary absence of. Departmental Health Warning. Girls: feeling a bit low-grade? In need of a good two-one-ing? Sign up here for injections from Dr Love (Boys: negotiable).

  Depart. Mental. At least someone had thought he was trendy; boys negotiable. Dint had had the notice removed by now presumably (like she’d had her own sense of humour removed years ago). Or maybe the notice was still on the door, Michael didn’t know, hadn’t been in. Astonishing how that was what being in a bookshop again brought back, the faculty, smells and all. Maybe Dr Love was now the only thing left on the door along with his name-plate, if his name-plate was still on it. Dr Michael Smart, official campus cliché.

  Unbelievable that in that other life, a whole life ago, only half a year ago, he had planned out a new series of lectures on the subject and imagined himself giving them this very term, the term that was happening right now with its people scurrying all day to and from their tutorals, their semenars, as if nothing else in the world mattered. Cliché, as well as its clichéd meaning of hackneyed phrase or stereotypical response, also meant the fixed impression made by a die in any soft metal. Michael Smart, stamped. Bitten by the teeth of cliché. A soft metal. A marked man.

  No, it was good. No, it was. It was liberating. It meant, for instance, that he could saunter into an early evening bookshop like this and do exactly as he’d just done, walk straight past the literature fiction literary criticism critical theory bays without even turning his head and go straight to the singular good monosyllabic sports section. Michael Smart, a real man at last. He had never in his life–in his old, unreal life–not stopped at lit and fict to see what was selling, what was stocked, what was new, what was on the tables, which volumes of his own private canon were available on the shelves, proof of whether or not the bookshop was a decent bookshop.

  But for months he had been unable to go near the door of a bookshop without feeling nauseous. He hadn’t even been able to pick up a book without feeling nauseous. So it was good, this. Here he was. He was back. There was more than one type of book in a bookshop.

  Michael had decided, earlier that day, that he would take up rock climbing and mountaineering. He had decided it that morning when he was driving around on the M25 with the traffic and the dreary but undeniably springlike sky ahead of him, listening to Radio 4, on which a man whose name he hadn’t caught was describing the sheer unpeopled wonder of being on top of the world, scaling something insurmountable, going further up than everyone else’s litter. The man had seen dead bodies on the sides of the mountains he’d climbed. The unburied bodies of people who’d fallen on the way, got sick in the too-high air, lost consciousness or for whatever reason just not survived, were apparently quite plentiful on real mountains, the mountains which provided the real challenges. The man on the radio had described the act of rising above a corpse on the route as a kind of rebirth.

  It was February. February couldn’t help but be promisory. February was spring! All sorts of things were possible in spring. The coffee smell in the bookshop was good. He would find the right book then go for a coffee and have a look at it to see if he should buy it. Habit warned him not to drink coffee this late. Habit could fuck off and die. Habit was old, outworn, belonged to before. Michael liked being awake late. Did he have to go to sleep at any particular time? No. He was a free spirit. Sports. Football Hockey Horseracing Motorracing Mountaineering. He took a book off the shelf of shiny books. It had a compass on the cover. He flipped it open. Navigation is fun! It is a skill which you ignore at your peril. It had chapter headings in its content list which sounded right. Mountain Weather. Technique on Snow and Ice. Security on Steep Ground. Dealing with Altitude. Leaving Nothing but Footprints. The Contents of Your Rucksack.

  Yes. This was what Michael Smart was going to deal in from now on, nothing but the definite, the concrete, the scree and boulder fields described here, the different kinds of rock, loose rock and wet rock.

  Loose.

  Wet.

  Why were all words so loaded? Why did they immediately poison themselves, turn into words which could be used against him, even by himself? Was everything a joke? Against him? A good two-one-ing. That was quite good. That was quite well put. There you go. There you have it. His problem was his openness, his own generosity, his willingness to congratulate even every little undergraduate shit who made a joke about him. Dead by the snowy side of a difficult route, a splay of waggish undergraduates and fulfilled ungrateful girls, and Marjory, and Tom, and that hag-faced dried-up lesbian from Personnel whose name he couldn’t remember, like someone from a women’s prison, no, worse, a tv drama series about a women’s prison, sitting there long-faced at him behind the long table in the faculty office. Fuckulty office. See? He could make fun of his own demise, his own below-the-belt activity. It was hardly the end of the world. Further on, up from this, there was the breathtaking natural beauty of nature at its heights. Dead by the side of a mountain pass, Emma-Louise Sackville, not in person of course, just in file form. Letter and email correspondence form. Anyway she’d been pretty rubbish, she’d just lain there like she was dead by the side of a mountain pass already.

  Michael took three books upstairs to the café. Rock Climbing Techniques, Mountaincraft and Leadership and The Mountain Handbook. He ordered a double espresso from the girl. He didn’t even look at her. Was she pretty? He didn’t find her attractive. It was ironic. He hadn’t found a girl attractive for months. He held his books under his arm, cover-out, so anyone who happened to look at him would see the photo on the front of one of them of a man halfway up a rock cleft, far above the tops of several trees. That was the kind of chap he was. The kind of chap he would soon be being. He took his coffee and sat in one of the armchairs. But as soon as he sat down, he felt cheated. In America, for example, on trips he’d made to America, sitting in an armchair in a huge chain bookshop had felt likeably edgy, triumphant actually, like you belonged because you’d managed to gain the territory of one of the chairs before someone more local had. But here, now, the three other easy chairs had men in them who looked lonely, unemployable, on drugs, and the chair Michael was in smelt sickly, of off milk.

  He opened the first book. It was full of wonderful new w
ords. Transpaseal, for example. Now there was a word that did what it said on the tin. There was more; there were the words and names for variations in snow and snowflake: plates and stellars, columns and needles, spatial dendrites, capped columns and graupels. Graupels! Wonderful. Here was what Michael was looking for, a whole new language. A language of tents–dome tent, hoop tent, ridge tent. You needed an anorak, the book said. A balaclava or ski hat. The body loses a third of its heat through its head. An astonishing fact! Michael had known it, but never really thought about it, the head giving off energy like a lit hot lightbulb. You needed to buy overtrousers with zips so you didn’t have to take your shoes off to put them on. So simple it was genius, really. Blisters were serious. A rope could be dead or alive. Here was a language alive with its own sheer usefulness–more, alive with a real, tenable hope. There are very few mountains in the British Isles which can not be walked up. It was promising. It was practical. It told you how to avoid invisible cliffs. Michael sipped the coffee. The coffee was foul. The cup rattled in its saucer as he put it back on the too-low table. He would go first to the Peak District, or Snowdonia, maybe to the Brecon Beacons or the Yorkshire Dales. He would drive. He would leave his car in the car park at the base of the mountain, or outside a nice guest house whose breakfasts were on the hearty side. He flicked further into the book. Lightning, apparently, was responsible for taking the lives of a small number of climbers every year. The book said climbers saw this as an Act of God and instructed its readers not to discard an ice axe that had been struck by lightning, even if it was fizzing or sparking, because you’d probably need it later. Michael wondered if the mention of Act of God was in the human ballpark or in insurance terms. He turned the page. There was a list of the names of knots. Mountaineer’s coil, butterfly coil, double fisherman’s. He thought of Philippa Knott. He wondered who was teaching Roth to Philippa Knott now. Who was double fishermanning her. Mountaineer’s coil.

  He closed the book.

  God only knew.

  There was no way on earth Michael Smart, at his age, could go up the side of a mountain.

  You’ve been pushing your luck, Mike, Marjory Dint said to him informally (Mike meant informal). Having your cake, eating it then not wanting to suffer the consequences. (Cliché!) One girl, we could have written off. One, we could have done something about. Don’t think we didn’t try. And don’t say you weren’t warned, I told you five years ago, four years ago, three years ago, two years ago and last year. Sackville is just the snowball before the avalanche. (Terrible, Marjory.) She’s more than willing to let the cat out of the bag. (Terrible.) Altogether now, we’ve seven complaints to investigate, none of them, I will say in your favour, as well corroborated as Sackville’s but mark my words, Michael (so, not informal at all, then, Marjory), this isn’t going to go away overnight.

  Marjory Dint, speaking lines like she’d learned them from a BBC script for a banal detective series.

  So Michael liked sleeping with girls. Was it a crime? They liked him back. Was it a crime? They were all consenting adults. He was good-looking. They were good-looking, most of them. Was it a crime? Formally, in front of Tom and the lesbian from Personnel, Marjory Dint cautioned him. Formally, it was a stoppage of tenure and a half-pay, believe-me-we’ve-pulled-out-all-the-stops-for-you-to-get-any-moneyat-all, spell of official leave.

  The core of the body. The shell of the body. The book had fallen open at the symptoms of hypothermia. He couldn’t believe how many of the symptoms he had. He definitely felt cold and tired, he felt this all the time. He had definitely had, off and on this winter, times of numbness in his hands and feet. Yes, there had definitely been times when he’d shivered. Yes, he had physical and mental lethargy and had been unable to answer questions or directions. That was true. That was what he felt like, inside, all the time. Yes, he had had violent outbursts and a lot of unexpected energy. Yes, he was very shaky, even right now. Look at that cup, look at putting that coffee cup down a moment ago, and he was always knocking coffee cups etc. over at home, dropping things in the kitchen and suchlike. He was very, very accident-prone. Was it a symptom? Yes. Yes, he had difficulty in focusing. He found it particularly hard to watch the tv with the lights off, which Astrid insisted on doing. Yes, he had light-headedness, often. Yes, muscle cramps. Definitely, he was pale. He couldn’t believe how pale he was when he got up in the mornings. He had extreme ashen pallor. Not just him; it was as if everything round him in the world had extreme ashen pallor too. Did his whole world have hypothermia? The causes: exhaustion, windchill, dehydration, low morale, apprehension, fear, spirit of hopelessness, often the final episode in a chapter of errors, stretched beyond endurance, vile weather, at end of long hard day struggling to reach objective about which not confident anyway. He checked them through, one after another. He had almost all of those causes.

  Michael stood up. He was shaking. It was exposure. He put the books down. He crossed the bookshop, away from the other non-survivors. He stood behind one of the New Age shelves and got out his mobile. He scrolled up Eve and pressed Call.

  She probably wouldn’t answer.

  Her answerphone came on.

  He hung up and scrolled down to Charis Brownlee. Her office answerphone came on, her voice, her Welsh accent. Michael hung up and keyed in her home number. Her answerphone came on, welshly.

  It’s Michael, Michael said. Michael Smart. Long time. Hope you’re well. I’m in a bookshop and I just found myself wanting to, uh, ask your advice about something. I’m on my mobile. If you get this message in the next hour or so, can you call me back?

  She was away, probably. She was always out of town, in Rome or New York. Her husband was a psychotherapist too. They were a team. Between them they made the kind of fortune that meant they were always out of town, which made them exclusively expensive. Michael had stopped seeing her last spring, almost exactly a year ago, because they had spent the whole of one exclusively priced hour listing their top ten favourite pop songs. He had stopped being a client shortly after he’d told Eve about it and she’d nearly died laughing.

  Michael, shivering in the bookshop, couldn’t think who else to call.

  He called home. Astrid answered.

  It’s me, Michael said.

  Yep, Astrid said.

  I’ll be home in about an hour, he said. I just have to deliver some things to some, uh, students.

  Yep, Astrid said.

  Have you eaten, Michael said, or do you need me to bring anything?

  Have you eaten? Astrid said. You’re the one who’s got thin.

  Is Magnus home? Michael asked.

  Yep, Astrid said.

  Okay, Michael said. Home soon. Did your mother call?

  Nope, Astrid said.

  She hung up before he did.

  He felt wretched.

  He went downstairs to find Eve’s books. They weren’t in history. They weren’t in biography. They were in fiction, how ridiculous, and they only had the most recent one, but they had about ten copies. Genuine Article, Ilse Silber. He took one off the shelf and turned it over to look at its back cover with Eve’s picture on it. Eve, younger, smiling. He took deep breaths. He breathed in through his mouth and out through his nose.

  So what was your song list, and what was hers, and how therapeutic was it, exactly? Eve had asked when she’d managed to stop laughing. She was sitting on the bed. Michael felt foolish, but it was quite a nice foolish. He sat on the edge of the bed too, a little ashamed, a little giggly himself. Ray Stevens, Misty. Four Seasons, December 1963 (Oh What a Night!). Chris Montez, The More I See You. Elvis Costello, Oliver’s Army. Dire Straits, Romeo and Juliet. Charis Brownlee’s number one had been Starland Vocal Band, Afternoon Delight. This made Eve laugh even more.

  Thinking of you’s working up my appetite, Eve sang. Rubbing sticks and stones together makes the sparks ignite. Sky rockets in flight.

  Michael laughed, felt sheepish.

  Was Bohemian Rhapsody on her top ten, by any chance?
Eve asked.

  Michael grimaced and nodded.

  Eve gave another burst of laughter.

  Was Imagine? she said.

  He raised his eyebrows in a shrug. Eve laughed so much she literally cried. He had never seen her laugh so much or find anything so funny. He sat smiling next to her on the bed. She was beautiful laughing, and a little hateful.

  (Your choice of songs reinforces what I consider your near-psychotic need, when it comes to self-belief, to refute all guilt, was something like what Charis Brownlee said. You know how Oscar Wilde put it, Michael, she said. We are all innocent until we are found out.)

  Michael and Eve, back from holiday, standing in the robbed house, not looking at each other. On the floor between them the answerphone, the only thing in an otherwise empty room. The voices had spoken. The answerphone was rewinding itself and switching itself off. There had been a message concerning Magnus, a message for Eve and a message, at last, for Michael.

  Marjory Dint. The game’s up, Michael. It’s Marjory. Phone me. Careful who you talk to. The legal department’s involved.

  Whatever this is, I swear, I don’t know anything about it, Michael said.

  It’s all right, Eve said. I know.

  She nodded. She took his hand.

  Michael, looking at Eve’s photograph in the bookshop, understood again, like he’d understood now every day since, and every day the understanding came to him as incomprehensibly newly as it would if he suffered from a brain disease that meant he couldn’t remember anything for longer than twenty-four hours.

  Astonishing.

  He realized Eve knew. He realized she had always known, known all along, and it had made no difference to her. He realized, too, that they had both been waiting for exactly this message.

  He sat down on the floor in the corner made by the shelves in the S to T fiction bay and Eve’s kindness opened above him as big as a sky.

  The sky closed in, white. It became the white-tiled ceiling of a bookshop. He was on its floor. It was potentially embarrassing. As if browsing, Dr Michael Smart, on official leave, picked a book off the shelf next to him as if he’d been looking for exactly that book. Journey by Moonlight. Antal Szerb. Never heard of him. Translated from the Hungarian. 1930s. Michael liked things in translation. This looked like a book he could read. He opened it. No joy I ever experienced afterwards ran as deep as the pain, the exulting humiliation, of knowing that I was lost for love of her and that she didn’t care for me.