The Accidental

by Ali Smith

  Or maybe it was just the watching something good in a dark room, with other people watching it in the same way as he was. Whatever it was, he felt expansive, bigger than himself, about it. And he hadn’t thought about feeling bad, not once, all the way through it.

  It said it was filmed in Islington, Astrid said. Did you see? Did you see? It said at the end, when it said The End, that it was filmed here.

  By the canal, Michael said. There was a film studio there.

  No way, Astrid said.

  No, there was, Michael said. Really. They did costume dramas, things like that. That’s definitely where they made that film.

  No way, Astrid said again.

  She switched on the big light. Michael blinked in the too-bright room. The boys looked pale, awkward, young; the furniture they sat on looked piecemeal. They looked too young to be having to be so kind. Astrid was dancing around. She was all long arms and legs. She was wearing her t-shirt that said on it I’m the girl your parents warned you about.

  Astrid, Michael said. Aren’t you a bit cold wearing just that t-shirt?

  The film studio that made that film, she was saying. Amazing. Right here, right here where we live, in Islington!

  She swung on to the arm of Michael’s chair like the child she nearly wasn’t any more. The words on her t-shirt were inches from Michael’s eyes and mouth. I’m girl warned. Then Astrid’s open mouth, her tongue and her little teeth, were an inch from his face, his own mouth, as she swung over and down.

  Michael closed his eyes. Cliché.

  Really really really really truly truly truly? she said.

  Michael pretended to rub his eyes. He leaned back in the chair, kept his eyes very shut. He shook his head, firm.

  Would I lie to you? he said

  the end of the road, at a junction where the mailboxes stuck out of the ground, the kind of mailboxes she had seen enough of by now to no longer find picturesque, there was another smaller road and a few miles along it there was a hidden little slip road that she’d missed the first couple of times. It took her through to another loop of road which coasted along next to woods all coming into leaf and opened out at field after field of impossibly beautiful horses. The horses were sleek and perfected. The fields were rich and rolling and green behind electric fencing hung with signs about the illegality of trespassing. But where the woods stopped, and between the stud-farms, there were houses. The houses had no fences. Some were smooth and new and expensively designed, the homes of the rich stud-farm owners. Others were more wood-board weather-worn, some with their slats peeling and splitting and their roofs warpy, made curved and precarious by the winters or the wind. Most of them were probably holiday homes or weekend homes. It only took two hours to get here from the city. All of them, even the more falling-down of them, looked like houses in a child’s dream of houses. All of them were big. All of them had porches and screen doors. All of them, even the ones that looked like they had had nobody living in them for quite a while, had stars and stripes hanging inert from little poles stuck by their doors.

  Eve had parked the car on the grassy verge across the road from it. It sat, like all these houses, in its own open grassy space. The grass round this house was uncut. About three hundred yards away behind the trees there was another house and behind that there was another even huger house and behind them all, still visible in the moonlit night sky, the distant black ridge of mountains whose name she knew from her school atlas. Cat skill. Cats kill. Eve (15) had written the words on the inside cover of her rough-copy book in the middle of a geography lesson about rock layers and substructure. Eve (43) was on the right road, then. She had known the address of this road off by heart for more than thirty years.

  But none of these houses had visible numbers. Two of them looked empty. This one right in front of her looked like it may have been empty for some time. Of the other two, the nearer was dark but the further-away one had cars outside. There had been lights in its windows earlier. Eve had heard people calling each other and a dog barking, or dogs.

  By her calculation this house was the house her father had owned before he died, the house her other family had lived in. But it looked desolate. It might not be his house. The right house could, in fact, be any one of these houses. Those people with the cars and the lights and the dogs, for all she knew, could be family, though this was very unlikely; their house was on a different road. But they would probably have known, if she had had the sense to knock on the door and ask them at a time of the evening when someone might still be awake, which of these houses had belonged to him.

  This was a country in which the light of the moon was so bright that you could even read a newspaper by it, if you wanted to read a newspaper. In a minute Eve was going to take her newspaper and go and sit on the porch of this empty house.

  She got out of the car. She sat on the bonnet of it.

  All round her was New York State. Those were the Catskills. It was the month of May. She was holding the newspaper she’d bought earlier that day in New York. There was a picture on the front of it of a man in a bodybag. The man was clearly dead. He had the empty clayey look of the not-long-gone. The bodybag was zipped quite far up, but you could see his bruises, his nose, his broken teeth, his upturned dead eye. Above the bodybag was a girl in military clothes. She was pretty, she was smiling and she was giving the photographer the thumbs-up sign above the dead man’s face. There was a report about a woman in her seventies. One day they took her out of her cell. They snarled a dog at her and they made her go down on all fours like a dog. A soldier sat on her back and rode her round the prison courtyard like a horse. There were pictures of a lot of prisoners-of-war who were made, by dog and at gunpoint, to strip. Then the soldiers put bags over their heads. Then they were piled up, naked, one on top of the other into a hive of live bodies and the soldiers had had their photographs taken smiling as if at a family party over the top of the pile of people.

  Eve knew that something quite mysterious happened the more she looked at the pictures. She knew it was supposed to happen like that, that although these photographs were a signal to the eyes about something really happening, the more she looked at them the less she felt or thought. The more pictures she saw, the less they meant something that had happened to real people and the more it became possible to pile real people up like that again anywhere you wanted and have your picture taken standing smiling behind them.

  She could still clearly see it, the photograph of the dead man in the bodybag and the grinning girl soldier, even though it was the middle of the night. She didn’t know what to do about the looking, whether to keep on looking or to stop looking. There was no answer to it. It was itself the answer. She was living in a time when historically it was permissible to smile like that above the face of someone who had died a violent death.

  Eve had taken a gap year from her own history. She had been walking down the road in London and had seen a poster-sized advert in a student travel office window. Q: Is there life after death? She had been on her way to a press conference about the Families Against the Thievery of Relatives’ Authenticity group. She could already see the news headlines. FATRA Lot of Good. As FATRA Would Have It. The families had got together to try to get money out of Jupiter Press and Eve. Eve’s head was full of sentences which she’d been practising overnight. Who is to say what authenticity is? Who is to say who owns imagination? Who is to say that my versions, my stories of these individuals’ afterlives, are less true than anyone else’s? She was going to answer every question with a question. This would let her answers seem open, let her seem willing to be discursive, at the same time as be rhetorically cunningly closed. She had passed the travel office then stopped and gone back to its window and read the words on the poster again. A: Why wait to find out? Take a gap year. Live now. This had made her go in and press the button on the machine that gave out numbers to people waiting their turn to be seen. The ticket said number 6. It was noon. So few people were travelling because of the worl
d at the moment, the woman in the office told her, that they were thinking of getting rid of their ticket machine. Does it matter that I’m not a student? Eve had asked. It’ll cost you more, the woman said, but no, in terms of who you are, of course not. Anyone can take a year out. Where would you like to go in the world?

  Instead of going to the press conference, Eve had gone to her doctor’s surgery and booked herself in for injections. By now Eve had withdrawn money from HSBCs in many major cities of the world. She had been offered sex, mostly but not exclusively by men, almost as many times and in almost as many cities as she’d drawn out money. She’d drunk Coke in a hotel room in Rome. She’d drunk Coke in a bar overlooking a palace in Granada. She’d drunk Coke in a chalet bar up a mountain in Switzerland. She’d drunk Coke on several aeroplanes. She’d drunk Coke in a hotel bar in Nice on the Promenade des Anglais, across the road from a group of drug addicts on the stony beach. She’d drunk Coke in the air conditioning of a restaurant in a rich suburb of Colombo, through the front windows of which she had seen children living in a derelict tower with rags hanging from the holes where its windows should be. She’d drunk Coke in a filthily expensive bar in Cape Town. She’d been down a dirt track in Ethiopia in the middle of nowhere where there was nothing but scorch, nothing but flies, nothing to eat, nothing to farm, nothing but an old tyreless truck and some standing shacks, and the thin and always smiling people who lived there had welcomed her in, given her everything they had, which was almost nothing, then they’d swept her into their ramshackle bar like she was a whole festival and they’d presented her to the Coke machine, in front of which several of them had argued and nodded and clubbed together and shouted for more people until they eventually found enough money and let coin after coin drop into the slot until the can thudded into the dust-covered mouth of the machine. I am posting this from the airport, she wrote on the postcard home. Just to let you know I just drank my last ever Coke.

  She’d put coins in slots herself two weeks ago, in Las Vegas. Two weeks ago she’d flicked what she’d won there over the side of the Grand Canyon: meaningless small change thumbed into the biggest slot in the world. What would the payout be? what would thud down at her out of the world’s most massive machine? For luck, she’d flung her phone over the edge after the coins. It was worth something. It was international-ranging. On its screen the angry red icon shaped like a telephone receiver had been flashing at her for days. You Have New Messages. Before she threw it away Eve left a message on the home answerphone.

  Hello Astrid, hello Magnus, hello Michael, it’s me. Just to let you know I’m at the Grand Canyon. I’m trying to think how to describe it. Actually it makes me think that every level pavement or road I’ve ever stood on was a kind of nonsense. I think I may feel vertiginous for the rest of my life. I’m sitting right at the edge. I’m on the south rim. The north rim is still closed, apparently. It’s ten miles away, apparently. A man at the observation point told me they used to be able to see the curve of the earth from one of these observation places, you know, with special telescopes, but now it’s not visible any more. There’s a small fence here where I am, but you can climb over it and look right down, I just have, and from here I can see this tiny strip of green at the bottom. Apparently it’s the Colorado River. There’s a Japanese man in front of me now. He’s having his picture taken. He’s standing out on a rock. It looks a bit dangerous. He’s on the edge in a way that’s giving me an urge to run at him and knock him over it. Lots of birds. Lots of, ravens I think they are. I can see goats as well, Astrid, down on the rocks. It’s as though I’m looking at a different planet, except for the tourists. It’s as though it’s earth before anyone was on it, except for the tourists. Of course, I’m a tourist too. It’s a bit bewildering, to be honest. It’s a bit overwhelming. It’s very beautiful. Its colours keep changing with the light changing. It’s so huge. Well, anyway, I’m about to throw my phone in. I have to throw something into it, and if it’s not going to be me, or that perfectly nice Japanese tourist, well. And I just wanted to leave you a message before I did. Lots of love.

  Not all of this had been recorded by the home answerphone, which had made the beeping noise signalling the end of the allocated speaking space at about the time Eve was saying the words from here I can see.

  On the other side of the canyon, invisible to the naked eye, was her dead mother out on a ledge of rock, high on morphine in a hospital bed, singing hymns and songs all jumbled together. Then sings my soul my saviour God to thee. A nurse had come and closed the door. Oh isle of my childhood I’m longing to see. Her mother was forty-four, that was all. She couldn’t hold her head up any more; her head rested on her chest as if her neck was broken. Her neck didn’t work any more. She took Eve’s hand and held it so tight that it hurt and when she let go Eve had marks in her hand from her mother’s rings. She spoke to Eve, she said something that sounded like words but it wasn’t words. Eve had had no idea what her mother’s last message to her was.

  I think you were old enough for it to be okay, Michael had told her when they first knew each other. You weren’t really a child any more. You were past the stage psychologists talk about where children, because they’re so young when they’re bereaved, feel bereaved forever.

  It was meaningless, what she said to me at the end, Eve told him.

  Not meaningless, he said. It had meaning because she said it. Even though you don’t know what she said, it had meaning because it went between you, from her to you.

  Yes, Eve said.

  It was just that the literal meaning itself wasn’t immediately comprehensible, Michael said. That doesn’t mean it didn’t mean.

  This conversation was one of the reasons that Eve had married Michael. He had seemed a man with whom the right kind of dialogue would be possible.

  Poor Michael. A girl called Emma Sackville had finally sacked his ville. The truth had been waiting for them on the answerphone when they got back from Norfolk. But one of the last times she’d talked to Michael things had sounded better. He had had a series of poems accepted by a small publisher. The TLS or someone wanted to publish two of them. He sounded ludicrously happy about it. But Astrid was still refusing to come to the phone, and Magnus had been at the library with a friend, revising for his exams.

  Eve: Priesthood? What kind of priesthood?

  Michael: I know. I told him he’d have to convert first, that you couldn’t just join and be a priest just like that, and he looked at me like I was some kind of idiot. But then, he always looks at me like I’m some kind of idiot. No, but he’s fine, he’ll be sorry he missed you, we’re fine, really.

  Eve: And how’s Astrid?

  Michael: Fine, we’re all fine.

  Eve: Is she still wearing red all the time? Michael: Oh, you know. She’s fine. Don’t worry. She’s perfectly safe. She’s made friends. She’s working on an alternative school newspaper or something. She’s writing a manifesto for it, up in her room. Like mother, like daughter.

  Eve: A manifesto? Not like me, I never wrote a manifesto. What kind of manifesto?

  Michael: How would I know? It’s not as if she’d show me. She did let me choose a badge though. She’s made badges for herself and for her friends. She very grandly said I could have one.

  Eve: Did she? God, you’re lucky. You’re doing something right.

  Michael: There was a choice. A badge with the word imagine written on it or a badge with the word afraid.

  Eve: Imagine or afraid?

  Michael: Imagine or afraid.

  Eve: Which did you choose?

  Michael: Ah. That’d be telling.

  Eve: Very telling.

  Michael: Ha ha.

  Eve: Give Astrid, give them both, all my love. Tell them I think of them every morning when I wake up and every night before I go to sleep. I picture them in front of me as if they’re here with me.

  Michael: Well, they’re not. They’re very definitely here with me.

  Eve: I know that.

&nb
sp; Michael: I can tell because of the supermarket bills. And me too, though? You think about me too, don’t you?

  Eve: Oh, I suppose so. I suppose I think of you occasionally. What will you call it?

  Michael: What will I call what?

  Eve: Your poem sequence. What’s it called?

  Michael: Ah. Ha ha. I’d forgotten about that for a minute. I should speak to you more often. It’s called The Lady Vanishes.

  Eve: The Lady Vanishes. That’s good.

  Michael: It is good, isn’t it?

  Eve: Are they paying you a lot of money?

  Michael: Ha ha. Joke.

  Eve: No, seriously, how are you for money?

  Michael: Well, we’re still holding the fort, but the apaches are definitely on the attack and I don’t know that a sonnet sequence is going to hold them at bay for long.

  Eve: So…?

  Michael: So, no, I don’t know what we’ll do. I’m trying not to think about it.

  Eve: Because I’m nearly out, myself.

  Michael: Ah. Does that mean you’ll be coming home?

  On the far side of the Grand Canyon was Eve’s mother. She wasn’t in a hospital bed at all. She was young and nonchalant, as if leaning against the sideboard in the kitchen having a quiet think. She waved to Eve and Eve saw that her mother was leaning on a thin layer of formica-covered wood above nothing but air, and that just below her feet, which were dangling in mid air, ravens circled and cawed. On the far side of the Grand Canyon was the man who had been her father. He was standing, operatic, on air, above an open grave 250 miles long, ten miles wide and one mile deep. He was older, bigger, balder; he was wearing a fine suit; he had his arms open to her. He waved too. He waved to her mother. She waved back at him. Then both Eve’s parents, together at last, smiled and waved goodbye like they were on holiday somewhere nice, like they were having the time of their lives and like their special relayed televised message to her had reached its end.