The Accidental (16 page)

Time is nothing at a time like that.

Afterwards they sit on the village green, on the village bench. People go past. Amber says hellos to them all. They all say hello back like they know her. They all smile. They are the Village People. Magnus doesn’t tell Amber that they call them this. Eve is never rude about the village for some reason, neither is Michael, in front of Amber.

Look how long their shadows are, Amber says as two cyclists pass them. She waves at the cyclists. They wave back. Magnus watches the shadows waving their strange-angled arms on the road surface.

People are nothing but shadows, he says.

You’re not fucking a shadow, you know, Amber says. Or if you are, then this shadow likes it fine, even if that’s all I am, just a shadow.

He is embarrassed that he might have offended her. But she doesn’t look offended in the slightest. Instead, as usual with Amber, it is an astonishing way of looking differently at things. It makes him momentarily brave.

It keeps getting dark when it’s light, he says. I mean, when it’s not meant to be dark.

Does it? Amber says.

She thinks about it.

Persistence of vision, she says. You must have seen something so dark that it’s carried on affecting your vision even though you’re not looking directly at it any more.

But how? Magnus says.

Exactly the same as if you saw something too bright, she says. God you’re stupid for someone who’s supposed to be so clever.

Magnus sits up. (Situation = possible light as well as possible dark.) An old lady goes past.

How are you today? Amber says. Hot, isn’t it?

Oh it’s a hot one all right, the old lady says. The rhubarb’s dead. The leeks are dead. The geraniums are dead. The lawn’s all dead. It was the heat that did it. You’re a good girl, you, aren’t you, always at the church, day after day, him too, always there with you. It’s grand to see.

Ah, it’s not me, it’s him making me go, Amber says. He’s a saint, you know.

You’re a good boy, you are, the old lady says to Magnus. There’s not many boys as’d go to the church like that all them days on their holidays in the time that’s theirs. You’ll make someone a good husband one day.

Where’s your own husband today then? Amber asks.

Oh yes, my husband, he’s dead my love, the old lady says. I had one, I had him for fifty-six years, he was a good enough lad while he was here, but he’s dead now.

Amber waits until the old lady is well up the road before she turns to Magnus.

It was the heat that did it, she says in his ear.

Amber = angel, though maybe not quite in the way Magnus first thought when he saw her all lit up that first time in the bathroom when he was up on the side of the bath.

She’d caught him as he came down. She’d steadied him. She’d sat him on the rim of the bath. She’d looked up at the shirt arm swinging above them from the shirt tied round the beam. Then she’d unbuttoned her shorts, sat on the toilet. She was urinating. Do angels urinate? He looked away, shut his eyes. It was quite noisy. When he opened his eyes again she was buttoning up her shorts.

You’re very polite, she said.

She pressed the flush handle.

You could really do with a bath, you know, she said.

She turned on the taps. Water came out of the showerhead.

Stand up, she said.

She undid the button on his jeans.

Where’ve you been? she said. In the river?

She knew everything. He turned his back to her. He slid his wet jeans down his legs. He stepped out of them on the floor. When he sat in the bath it was with his back to her. She reached the showerhead down. She showered him. Then she soaped his back, then his chest, his neck, then she put her hand down underneath, soaped round his balls, all round his prick. He was ashamed of himself, when she did that.

She adjusted the taps, showered the soap off him with warmer water. Then she soaped his hair, rinsed it off. She turned the taps off. He stood up. He was shivering. She held out the towel. While he dried himself with his back to her she stood on the side of the bath, reached up, untied the shirt from the beam. She jumped down. She was so light on her feet. She put the shirt to her nose then screwed it up in her hands, folded it inside the jeans all in a damp bundle which she put into his arms.

Maybe some cleaner clothes, she said.

She was sitting on the top step waiting for him when he opened the door of his room again, clean now, cleanly dressed, to check if she was still there or if, as he suspected, he’d totally made her up.

The television is full of the news about Saddam’s dead sons. The Americans killed them in a shoot-out a couple of days ago. The tv shows the photos of them again, the ones taken directly after the killing. Then it shows the photos the Americans took after they shaved them to make them look more like they’re supposed to look, like they looked when they were recognizable. The photos taken after that prove they’re clearly the sons.

This is a turning point, the tv says. It has broken the back of the war, which will be over now in a matter of weeks.

Magnus looks at the photos of the dead faces on the screen. They were tyrants = all sorts of torturing, raping, systematic or random killings. A typical human being contains about one hundred billion neurones. A human being = a cell which divides into two then four then etc. It is all a case of multiplication or division.

The people on the tv talk endlessly. After the talk about the deaths there is talk about the government’s popularity via the tv channel’s own phone-in poll, then a report on the current political stratification of middle England, the shift of support after the killings. They say the word middle a lot. Support among the middle class. No middle ground. Now to other news: more unrest in the Middle East. Magnus thinks about Amber’s middle, her waist, her abdomen, how doing it with her smells like wax melting into heated-up fruit, how the kisses taste of aquarium.

So as anyone who was a hep cat back in the swinging sixties will happily assure you, the woman on tv is saying, you can still be trendy in your own swinging sixties because what we used to think of as middle age is nowadays almost unrecognizably youthful!

A picture of Mick Jagger comes up on the tv screen. Swinging 60, the caption says.

Magnus shifts, restless on the sofa. He stands up, presses the remote. The tv is obedient, switches off. The room, however, goes on ticking round him by itself.

He walks to the village. When he gets there he walks the whole circle of it to see how long it takes him.

It takes fourteen minutes.

He circles the locked church.

The little shop with the post office is shut. Its shutters are down.

On his way back to the house he stops outside a long building. He has the feeling he’s been here before. Then he recalls distinctly: he is leaning on the wall; he is trying to be sick; a man is coming out; the man is angry; he is shouting at him, helping him roughly to his feet; there are people watching him through a window.

Magnus steps over the tiny wall round the building into its empty car park. From the front he sees that the building is an old-style bingo hall. It is one of the biggest buildings in the village that’s not a house. It must have been important in the life of the village at some point, though now it is pretty dilapidated-looking.

Two painters are redecorating its outside. They are painting it whiter. There is a strong smell of paint, beyond it the smell of food. The building seems to be a restaurant of some sort. No wonder the man came out shouting at him, if he was being sick outside his restaurant right in front of diners eating dinner.

Magnus remembers himself that night, a broken boy on the ground.

His mother, broken. Michael, broken. Magnus’s father, his real father, so broken a piece of the shape of things that, say he were walking past Magnus, his son, sitting in the corroded bus shelter of this village right now, Magnus wouldn’t recognize him. He wouldn’t recognize Magnus. Everyone is broken. The man who has the restaurant, he’s a broken man. Magnus remembers his shouting. Those two painters, they’re broken, though you can’t always tell by just looking. They must be, since Magnus knows everybody in the whole world is. The people talking on all the millions of tvs in the world are all broken, though they seem whole enough. The tyrants are as broken as the people they broke. The people being shot or bombed or burned are broken. The people doing the shooting or the bombing or the burning are equally broken. All those girls on the world wide web being endlessly broken in mundane-looking rooms on the internet. All those people dialling them up to have a look at them are broken too. Doesn’t matter. All the people who know in the world, all the people who don’t know in the world. It’s all a kind of broken, the knowing, the not-knowing.

Amber is broken, a beautiful piece of something glinting broken off the seabed, miraculously washed up on to the same shore Magnus happens to be on.

A woman goes past Magnus in a car. She looks at him. It is amazing how many older women turn their heads at him. He feels momentary pride that he knows what to do, that Amber has taught him how.

But then he realizes it was just the cleaner who works for them in their holiday house. She was looking at him because she recognized him.

He has seen her standing spraying chemicals on to wood, rubbing at a side board with a lemon-scented disposable duster.

I broke somebody, Magnus says to Amber that evening when they go to the church.

So? she says. And?

She says it kindly. She unbuckles him.

So.

It is another evening. The shadows outside have lengthened. Everyone is in the lounge. Amber is doing something to his mother’s knee. His mother is telling Amber information about the French Impressionist Edgar Degas. Magnus wonders why his mother has this need to tell Amber things, as if she doesn’t know them, as if Amber is stupid or an uneducated person. Michael is the same, always quoting stuff as if it’s instructive to her. Amber knows all kinds of things about most things. There’s not much she doesn’t know about. He and Amber have had discussions about how light is part particle, part wave-structure, how time is bending, speeding up so that actual minutes are shorter though we don’t notice it because we don’t know how to yet. Amber knows about Egyptian, Minoan, Etruscan, Aztec everything. She knows about car electronics, solar radiation, the carbon dioxide cycle, things in philosophy. She is an expert on those wasps which inject other insects with paralysis so that their own grubs can feed off something still alive. She knows about art, books, foreign films. She spoke for ages one afternoon in the attic about an Irish playwright who listened at the cracks in the floor of the room he was renting, to hear the people in the kitchen of the house he was staying in, so he could put the kind of speech that people actually used into his plays.

Right now Amber is kneeling on the floor in front of his mother while his mother holds forth to Amber, but really to the whole room, as if the room has never heard of French Impressionism, about how beautiful the Degas sculptures of horses are, how like life the Degas dancers are. She is explaining that when Degas died he left instructions that his sculptures–which were mostly made of clay but also in some cases of the stems of his paintbrushes, even grease from Degas’s kitchen–were not, under any circumstance, to be cast in bronze. He wanted them to rot away. He wanted them, his mother says, to have a life cycle. But after Degas was dead his agent ignored his instructions. His agent had them cast in bronze after all. His mother is trying to get a discussion going about whether this was morally right or wrong. Amber, meanwhile, is rubbing his mother’s knee gently, in clockwise circles.

360 degrees is the total number of degrees in a revolution because shepherds, who were the first astronomers, used to believe that the year had 360 days total.

Otherwise, the bottom line is, we wouldn’t have them, his mother is saying. The world would have lost great art if his agent hadn’t been greedy enough to.

Magnus watches Amber’s hand. 360. 360. 360.

His prick twitches.

She stops the circling. She starts pressing places below his mother’s kneecap.

Is that any better? she says.

His mother nods uncertainly.

From nowhere Magnus is overcome with love for his mother, for his sister watching sleepily from the sofa, for Michael at the table rustling the paper. He even loves Michael. Michael’s all right. At the very same moment Magnus understands that if he ever let it be known that he feels anything at all, things will fly apart, the whole room will disintegrate, as if detonated.

There are things that can’t be said because it is hard to have to know them. There are things you can’t get away from after you know them. It is very complicated to know anything. It is like his mother being obsessed by the foul things that have happened to people; all those books about the Holocaust she’s got piled up in her study at home. Because can you ever be all right again? Can you ever not know again?

For example. Is his mother innocent because she doesn’t know about what he is doing with Amber every afternoon in the church? Is Astrid innocent because of it? Is Michael? What kind of innocence is that? Is it good? Is that what innocence is, just not knowing about something? To take an extreme example. Is it innocent, as in a state of goodness or whatever, if you simply don’t know about all those people in the Holocaust? Or is it just naïve, stupid? What use is that kind of innocence anyway?

It seems to Magnus that it is no use at all, unless someone wants to feel more powerful than somebody else because one person knows something the other person doesn’t.

Can you ever be made innocent again? Because up in the attic with Amber, or over under the old wooden roof of the church, fast-breathing the dusty air–held, made, straightened out then curved by her–Magnus cannot believe how all right, how clean again it is possible to feel even after everything awful he knows about himself, even though supposedly nothing about what Amber is doing, or he is doing, or they are doing together, is innocent in any way. In fact, the opposite is true.