Accidents in the Home (20 page)

He woke up hungry, to the smell of cooking.

For the first few days in the house at Besteaston the ordinary sensations of physical comfort—the sheets, the hot shower, the clean clothes, the central heating, the home-cooked food—were almost too much, as if his capacity for them had shrunk while he was on his travels: they made him drunk and muddled.

Tamsin wandered into the room wearing the ginger cat round her neck like a boa and eating a toasted sandwich; she sat cross-legged on her bed, which was neatly made even though she was still in her pajamas. (The whole room was neat, apart from him on his mattress: Tamsin, whose teenage floor had been uncrossably deep in dirty clothes and overflowing ashtrays and coffee cups growing mold, had had a Damascus Road conversion to cleanliness a few years ago, when she came back to Marian from living in her squat.)

—So what happened? she said.

—How do you mean, what happened?

—In India, stupid. On second thought, don't tell me. It'll be all the predictable spirituality-materialism, roadside-pickles, music and flowers, poverty-dysentery stuff.

—I didn't get dysentery.

—That's one thing then.

—I've taken loads of photos.

—Predictably. Luckily you won't be able to afford to develop them. “This is an American girl I met, standing in front of a Hindu temple. This was Sanjay, our guide round the ruins of the ranee's tomb.”

—Actually, something did happen.

Tamsin had just taken a big bite of sandwich; she narrowed her eyes suspiciously at him while she finished her mouthful. Oh, no. You found a guru. You saw through to the meaning of life.

—Not that kind of thing. I don't know if I should tell you. I don't want Mum to know. I don't want anyone else to know, really. Just because there's no point in anyone worrying about it.

—You've got AIDS.

He shook his head. An accident.

—What kind of accident?

—In a car.

—What were you doing in a car?

—We hired one. We were going to do some trekking in the Annapurnas.

—Who's we?

—Me and some girls I met at the hostel in Kathmandu. Three girls, Dutch girls. I'd only met them the day before: they had the whole trip planned out; they had food and maps and toilet paper and everything. (Actually, toilet paper's not much use, it's better just to use snow.) They said I could come along, there was a space in the car.

—Did you sleep with any of them?

Toby blushed deeply scarlet. It's not that.

—Too ugly?

—No. I mean, not particularly, that wasn't the reason why. They weren't those kind of girls.

—You bet, said Tamsin. They're always those kind of girls, only you don't notice. So, go on.

—We hired a car, Toby said. It looked all right. You couldn't hire a car without a Nepalese driver. I think hiring a car was a mistake: most people get the buses, but one of the girls had sort of fixed on this, this girl called Bregje. She was mad enough that they wouldn't let her drive. We'd hardly gone any way, we were about twenty miles outside the city, on the Pokhara road where it's quite flat and runs beside a river. The car hit something in the road, a stone or something, which was ironic considering it was the only road in Nepal I ever went on that was surfaced and didn't have too many potholes. But the car just—well, the axle snapped, I think. That's what the man said, the one who was driving. Except his English wasn't very good. The girls said it was his fault, they were going to try to prosecute him, they said the vehicle was unfit and all this stuff, they got kind of obsessed with getting justice, they kept arguing with the police and everything, and the Dutch consulate, and they got involved with this dodgy lawyer. But you know, the car looked all right but it didn't look that good, they just don't have the kind of checks we have over here, or the regulations, everything's just different, you know?

—So was anyone hurt?

—There was this big crunch when we hit the stone, then the car skidded along and hit a post at the side of the road—maybe it had been a road sign once but now it was just a gray painted metal post, doing nothing—and it spun round and stopped. And you could see one of the wheels rolling off in another direction. It wasn't really all that terrible, we weren't going very fast, there wasn't much other traffic. The girls were screaming, but I thought we'd be OK. One of the ones in the back next to me hurt her shoulder, the other one cut her lip where she hit the seat in front. I was all right. The girl in the front passenger seat looked as if she had passed out. I wanted to get her out of the way because the car had sort of twisted across and the front of it was sticking out into the road, and the driver had jumped out and was trying to look at the engine, for some reason. I managed to get her out of the car and carry her to the side of the road, she opened her eyes, I sort of laid her down and kept holding her hand and told her she was going to be all right. The other girls were trying to call somebody on their mobile phone, one of them was crying because her shoulder hurt, the driver was climbing under the front of the car, where it was propped up on one wheel. While the others were still calling—they couldn't get a signal—she died.

—Just like that.

—Just like that. She was gripping my hand and then she just let go. It was so strange; it really hadn't been such a terrible accident. It all seemed quite ordinary and calm, the others didn't even realize what was going on, they were still trying to get through on their phone. It turned out she had broken her neck, but I still don't know how. You try and remember what happened, but it all seemed quite sedate, the other girls were screaming but until the last minute she was still trying to grab the steering wheel from the driver and pull it round, I remember her shouting something angrily in Dutch, probably swearing, and the driver was probably swearing in Nepali too. It was quite funny really.

—Next minute she was dead.

—The trouble was I didn't particularly like her. Out of the three of them, she was the one I didn't like. She was bossy, kind of unfriendly in the way she said things, I don't think she'd really wanted me to come along. She was a big girl, there was something about her that sort of spilled over as if she was unhappy with herself. She had a really pale face and her writing was huge. You know those people who do circles to dot their
i
's and take up two lines for a single line of writing? She was the one who'd made all the lists for the trekking.

—Ugly people die too.

—She'd made some big scene the night before, sulking and stomping off to bed early, because the others thought she was planning for them to walk too far every day. That's what she was like; you could tell she put everything into planning some great future project all the time, and always overdid it, and then she'd be the first to be groaning and complaining when things went wrong.

—Only not this time. Sounds like good riddance to me. One less fat monster abroad, making everyone's lives miserable.

—So it was strange that it was my hand she was holding, when it happened.

—Her personality was already over. That was just physiology. Biochemistry.

*   *   *

IN THE MORNINGS
Clare went out early to go home and help her husband get their children ready for school, and Marian went to work (she was a teacher). Naomi had a new job at the box office in the theater. She didn't have to start until ten o'clock, and she wasn't drinking every night, especially now Toby was home. Even after a bad night she could still just about manage to pull herself back together in the morning. She showered and washed her hair and appeared downstairs looking fragile and pretty and with only—as Tamsin put it—a faintly piquant aura of abuse, the purple crescents under the eyes, the etched lines beside the nostrils, a patch of angry skin between her eyebrows, hands that shook as she reached out for her mug of coffee.

—You can be sure, Tamsin also said, that the next sadist has already sniffed her out and is halfway to convincing her he's the one to save her from herself. Let's just hope he's a
man
, for God's sake, and heterosexual. At least then we'll know where we are. I loathe lesbians. I'm praying she doesn't try to start anything with Mum.

—Don't be ridiculous, said Toby. You are ridiculous.

—You know how she works. “I'm such a failure! Everything I touch comes to no good! I'm just too trustful, the people I get involved with always seem so sweet at first; I'm so hopeless at seeing through them.” I mean, she's so right: but Mum's a complete sucker for that stuff. And now we've got Clare too: “I've made such a mess! I'm such a failure! I'm so selfish: I wrecked my relationship, I've damaged my children.”

Toby didn't take offense when Tamsin insulted Naomi. All his earliest memories had Tamsin in them. He seemed to have always known that Naomi was his mother and that the girls had a separate mother somewhere else, but in his family memories from childhood it was Tamsin whom Naomi was mostly preoccupied with: Tamsin screaming and kicking and (her specialty) banging her head against the floor, Tamsin refusing to go to the play park, Tamsin refusing to eat anything except cream crackers and peanut butter, Tamsin waking up with nightmares, Tamsin cutting vengeful slits in the sitting room curtains with scissors after she was told off for something, Tamsin wetting the bed. He remembered that during these scenes Clare would frown and put her fingers in her ears and read her book; he wondered what he'd done. Perhaps he watched. He had somehow known from his mother that they must put up with this; they must hold off from one another because they owed something to the girls, something they couldn't do enough to make up for.

—Because, you see, I have Daddy, she had explained to him once; so that he understood what a weighty counterbalance Daddy was to all the difficulties she struggled with. (He visualized this very literally: Graham's six foot three to Naomi's five foot two.) And then, when Toby was twelve, Graham left Naomi and went to live with the woman who became his third wife, Linda, so there was no counterbalance any more.

Tamsin had given up her job at a ticket agency, so in the mornings once Naomi had gone out Tamsin and Toby had the run of the house together. They got up late and cooked themselves extravagant breakfasts: curried scrambled eggs on toast and fruit salad with crème fraîche; fresh rolls filled with bacon and mushrooms cooked with garlic and parsley. When they finished eating, Tamsin took laxative powders; she explained to Toby that she needed to stay slim.

—Everybody does it, she said. And I might get a job modeling, like Helly.

—I thought Marian said you were thinking of doing A levels and going to college?

—Oh, that's just to keep stalling her so she doesn't hassle me about the rent and bills. No way am I going back to studying at twenty-six. What I want is a job that will earn me lots and lots of money and be really piss-easy. Like lying around having photographs taken of me.

It was easy to imagine that someone might want to take photographs of Tamsin. Toby could see there was something formidable in her looks that made people stare. She didn't have boyfriends, though; or, rather, there had been one boyfriend, years ago, when Tamsin was at her teenage wildest. He had died of a drug overdose, and she had had a baby that was stillborn; that was when she had come home from the squatter's place they had lived in to be with Marian.

—And what are
you
going to do, Toby?

—Oh, I'm going to go up to London and look around. Make some contacts, find a place to live, find some work to pay the bills, volunteer as a runner for some film project or other on my days off.…

But for a few weeks he made no move to go. This list of achievements he had set for himself sounded improbably difficult; he was not quite sure what sequence they would need to be attacked in, and in the meantime it was so comfortable in Marian's house, where he and Tamsin watched television in the afternoons and then Marian or Naomi or Clare came in and cooked them supper.

*   *   *

IN THE EVENINGS
the house filled up with some or all of its women. They took turns cooking, and Toby ate. Tamsin often refused to eat with them, Clare—if she was there—had no appetite, Naomi never ate much, Marian was afraid to put on weight: so Toby, who had come back from India even skinnier than he had gone away, demolished plateful after plateful to their immense gratification.

—He sings a little song while he's eating if he's really enjoying it, said Naomi. He doesn't know he's doing it. I always listen out for that.

After supper when the dishwasher was gurgling, Marian and Clare, if Clare wasn't spending the evening with her children, would sometimes sit together at the kitchen table by the big pink-shaded lamp. Marian marked schoolbooks, Clare was working on her thesis on George Sand, reading and making notes and looking things up in the dictionary. Sometimes Naomi sat with them too, doing her needlepoint. Tamsin watched television; if she came through the kitchen to fetch herself a Diet Coke, the cat draped contentedly across her shoulders, she cast a look of withering disapproval at the congregation around the table. Sometimes she went out to choir practice. Sometimes someone—a male someone—telephoned for her, but she told Marian to say she was not in, and Marian sighed and lied, obediently and unconvincingly.

One night Toby brought his video camera downstairs and filmed the three women sitting at the table. They all protested—Marian, who was normally so calm, was flustered with dismay at the thought of having her picture taken—and then for a while held their faces self-consciously before they forgot about him. They weren't talking much. Naomi, with her head bent to count the holes, pulled her thread with a soothing rasp through her canvas, stretched taut across a frame. Marian went patiently over and over a routine of ticking and correcting, and the pile of books on her right hand grew taller while the pile on her left diminished. Clare read with a willed absorption, frowning and moving restlessly in her chair as if she wanted to get inside the book.