The Accidental (22 page)

Burt Lancaster kisses Gina Lollobrigida on the trapeze high above the crowd.

A roomful of society people breathes a sleeping gas pumped through the ventilation system of a grand old house. They all fall down.

A man loading a Great War plane with bombs holds them up for us to see. The bombs curve at their heavy ends like the naked breasts of women.

The dead on all the battlefields get up and walk. They walk and walk, they become a great crowd. Limping, bandaged, pale, carrying each other, not like zombies, like real shattered people, they walk to the houses of the living and they stare in through the windows.

A woman conducts a tiny orchestra whose players are no bigger than her hand.

A country girl stands under a shower of golden coins. A minute ago she was too poor for food. A door opens in front of her. It leads to a magic land.

The agents appear out of nowhere in the middle of the room. They’re told what the house-owners want–to move everything to another house across the city. They nod–and disappear into thin air, there one second, gone the next. The house-owners are bemused. They shake and scratch their heads. But then the books climb down by themselves from the shelves. They jump on to the windowsill. They throw themselves out of the window. They jaunt off up the street below, waving their pages. The plates climb down off the dresser. They strut in a line to the window and jump. The cups follow. They throw themselves out. None of them smashes. The cutlery ups and walks. The chairs jump out of the window. The clothes float out of the wardrobes. The shoes, largest first, down to the children’s tiny boots, walk themselves out of the house. The carpets roll themselves up and out. The house empties itself.

Palais de luxe, Alhambra, place of my conception, for which I was named.

The workers go home through the factory gates. It’s the end of the long, long day.

The end

of the world. Even if it is just 1 km wide, which sounds quite small, and travelling at just 20 km a second, which sounds quite slow, it will still be the end, the absolute end. Say it hits somewhere like America and people elsewhere don’t mind because they’re nowhere near America. Say it hits America and then the burning crusts of the big hole it makes in America are flung up into the sky and they shower down on to, among other places, England. The whole of England, not just London, not just Islington, will be burning. Norfolk will be burning. Stratford will be burning. Richmond and Kew, and that place near Bedford where they sometimes have to go because Michael’s parents live there, will be burning, and Hebden and all the other places Astrid hasn’t been to will be burning. Astrid is two vowels short of an asteroid. Asterid the asteroid. The Asteroid Belt is between Jupiter and Mars. An asteroid is a pile of space rocks welded together into one huge rock by its own gravity and can be a km or more wide. An asteroid is a star on steroids. It is what happened to the dinosaurs. Probably only one, only about 10 km wide, is all it took to make them exactly that, dinosaurs. But a lot more recently than that, only ninety-five years ago to be exact, which is not very long in relation to history and is only a relatively short percentage of time ago, a very small, almost negligible-sized asteroid hit Siberia though miraculously there were only six people killed by it even though it had the same power of detonation as 1,000 complete WMDs. It was just insanely lucky for human beings that it was only Siberia that it landed on.

She is not afraid to imagine the end. There will be burning chipmunks and skunks hurtling through the air, glowing red in the dark like chipmunk-sized live coals, there will be skunk-firebombs and burning bits of that bridge from San Francisco or bits of film studios and that castle and the fake rides in Disneyland and the Empire State Building, glowing like huge embers, hurtling thousands of miles up into the air and down again for miles, gaining speed and then smashing into the clockface of Big Ben, smashing into the Houses of Parliament, and Waterloo Bridge, and the Eye toppling on its side and all the people in it being thrown about inside the falling capsules like they’re on the inside of snowglobes, and the buildings all on fire, Tate Modern on fire, the art burning, the restaurant burning, the shop burning.

Astrid yawns.

She is up quite early.

It is morning but it is still dark out there. She is looking out of the window at the sky above the houses. It is the colour of streetlights, then dark above. The heating hasn’t come on yet. It is cold. She is wearing one of the three new red pyjama tops. She has two of the new red jerseys and the new red cardigan all layered on top of each other on top of the pyjama top and the cardigan buttoned up.

You can’t have everything red, her mother said. You can’t have everything the same colour.

They’re different shades of red, Astrid said.

Anyway I’m not totally convinced that red suits you, Astrid, her mother said.

Astrid sniffed and held out the red cardigan. Her mother sighed and took it to the paying desk.

Michael, however, doesn’t notice or care what colour Astrid chooses and he’s in charge of paying for things till her mother comes back, by which time almost her whole wardrobe will be red.

She has tucked her feet inside the ends of the pyjama trousers, which are luckily a bit big for her. She will grow into them.

A lot of people are up and have lights on in their houses though it is still so early and dark, people getting ready for work or whatever. 6.35 a.m. on the new digital radio alarm, which sends a signal to Greenwich and receives the exact correct time back. Her room smells of the new bed and all the other new stuff. The smell of new stuff is exciting at first, then a bit annoying. Everything has the smell. It is practically all new now, literally almost everything in here and almost everything everywhere in the house.

It was amazing to see the floorboards. It was amazing to see the walls. It is still amazing to think about. Getting home and walking in through the front door and it all being bare was like hearing yourself breathe for the first time. It was like as if someone had turned your breathing volume level inside you up to full.

Astrid doesn’t really miss the old stuff, just some of it. She liked it best when the house was still totally empty of stuff and they came back from the three nights in the hotel and slept in the borrowed sleeping bags on the floor till the beds arrived. It was amazing that it was the doorknobs going and not something a bit bigger or more obvious, like the Aga or the computer or the first editions or the manuscripts, that finally made her mother cry. Her mother has been gone now for three weeks and three days. It is not fixed, the date of her coming back. It is a round the world kind of thing. It is apparently very necessary. Astrid thinks it is deeply irresponsible.

They’d got home from holiday and gone into the empty house and her mother stood and stared, like they all did, in the hall first and then going through to each room. Both her mother and Michael were laughing at first, kind of standing or going past each other, their eyes open like they couldn’t believe it, like it was a giant practical joke. Then her mother tried to open the door to get downstairs and see what had happened there but she couldn’t open the door because there was no doorknob.

Then she started crying.

They were arts and crafts, she was saying. She kept saying it, like an insane person. The doorknobs were arts and crafts.

It was doorknobs that were the end for her. The end is presumably different for everybody. Astrid thinks now that this is rather a disgusting end, doorknobs. It’s the end, her mother kept saying after that. The absolute end.

The beds, the chairs, the cupboards, the doors off the wall-units, the wardrobes, all the things in all the cupboards and units and wardrobes. Even the magazine pictures of Busted etc. off Astrid’s wall. Even the blu-tack that they were stuck on with. The chests of drawers, things like the scissors and the elastic bands etc. and bits of string that were in the drawers. There was nothing left. Not even a lost button. It was like all the floors had been swept clean. Not even a lost paperclip down a crack in the wood. The only thing the thieves didn’t take was the answerphone. It was bleeping on the floor by the wall in the dining room with its little red light flashing on and off. They could hear it when they opened the front door, you usually can, you always could when you got home and opened the front door, so it wasn’t like it was a big surprise to hear it, except that this time it was almost preternaturally loud. It sounded a lot louder because of everything else being gone. They’d taken the phone though, so Michael called the police on his mobile. The whole house, Michael said. Literally stripped. Then he phoned a hotel. His voice was weird because they’d taken the carpets, even the stair carpets, so the sound in the house was completely different. Just someone saying something, anything, out loud, sounded weird.

So, first they’d got back from Norfolk and parked the car. Then her mother had opened the door. As soon as they went in Astrid registered the bleeping noise. Then she registered that something was different. Then she registered that the place where the coatstand usually was was strange. This was because the coatstand was gone. And then she could see that something else was gone too and then she remembered what it was, it was a bookcase, because she remembered the shape of the bookcase in the hall. And then she saw that the places on the walls that looked weird were the places where pictures had been. It is funny, Astrid thinks, that it actually took a moment to remember, and sometimes was actually quite difficult to re-imagine what it was that was in the space that something left after it got taken away.

Then they went into the front room, the lounge, the playroom, the kitchen, and looked at all the things that had gone from there.

And so on.

So the only things left, apart from obviously the answerphone, are what she and Magnus and her mother and Michael all came back with, had in the four-wheel drive or had with them in the holiday house in Norfolk. The thieves took the taps off the sinks. They took the tops off the regulators on the radiators, which has proved a bit problematic because of it now being nearly November and still not sorted out with replacements and it’s sometimes quite definitely cold but sometimes too warm for the radiator to be on high all the time and none of the radiators in the house can be made to change their heat level without a pair of pliers.

It had its good side, because Astrid couldn’t be in trouble about her mobile any more because she said it had been in her bedside cabinet, which obviously got taken like everything else.

Her mother went round all the neighbours, but no one had seen or heard anything unusual. The Moors had seen a removal van coming and going two weeks ago. We didn’t think anything of it, they told her mother and Michael. We thought you were moving. We were waiting for the estate agent sign to go up because we’re thinking of having our own house valued.

Her father’s letters and the photograph got taken. They were in the holdall under the bed, with the shoes and the plastic bags and posters also under the bed, which all got taken.

Astrid looks down the road. Then she looks up the road. There are a few people walking around, getting into cars etc., but nobody she recognizes. It is not as if she is expecting to see anybody she recognizes. But it is what your eyes do. They look at people who are strangers to see if they aren’t strangers.

A streetlit leaf falls off a tree. She sees it hit the ground. She looks at the strip of sky above the houses again. There are more than 1,000,000 asteroids, and those are only the ones that scientists and astronomers actually know about. There could easily be loads more. Id est.

She has pretty much stopped saying things like id est out loud. It is a bit lame to. She will be thirteen in three months’ time. She would, in three months’ time, have been sorting through her old toys and dolls and doll’s house etc. in the two toy cupboards and giving them away to younger children like the Powells and the Packenhams and the children of families not like Astrid’s who end up in hospital, like Magnus was made to do with his, but they have, as it were, already been sorted and distributed for her. Though she does wonder where for instance Harry the Rabbit and the velvet-covered collection of ponies and all those bears etc. in all their various states of wornness and newness are now.

In heaven, Magnus said when she wondered it out loud.

Listen, Astrid said to Magnus a couple of weeks ago when they were out in the garden because the house was full of carpet people putting new carpets on to the stairs and back into the rooms that had originally had carpets. There’s this thing, I was wondering, why would I want to do this thing?

What thing? Magnus said.

Magnus has been sitting around a lot at home doing nothing. He has two months more of suspension pending inquiry. It was one of the things on the answerphone when they got home. He and Michael sit in different rooms all day. Astrid thinks that if she was suspended or lost her job or whatever she would at least go to a library or a bookshop or the swimming pool rather than waste her day just sitting around doing nothing, which is a bit disgusting.

Say I saw an animal that looks dead, Astrid said. Why would I want to poke it with a stick?

To see if it’s alive, Magnus said.

But why, Astrid said, would I want to do something that might be cruel if the animal isn’t dead and is still alive and only looks like it’s dead?

To see if it’s alive, Magnus said again.

Astrid had unpacked her bags from holiday and found the two tapes. She had caught the bus to Dixons, where they have her model of camera wired to a display unit. It was plugged in. She had clicked it open, inserted the first tape, which happened to be the tape with the dead thing on it on the road, and stood in the shop and watched the dead thing from back then. It lay there, dead. Astrid turned the volume up. There was the sound of the country, buzzing and air and birds. Then she saw a hand that must be her own hand lifting a latch thing on a door. Then the top of the head of the woman who was the cleaner at that house and the noise of the vacuum, then Astrid’s voice asking her something and the cleaner answering. Then the walk down the stairs, it wasn’t very good camerawork, it was the kind you can’t look at without feeling queasy, then some floor, then into blinding sunlight reflecting into the lens. Then nothing else on the tape after that, just white noise. This was majorly annoying, because Astrid had been hoping for some footage of Amber from that day, which is one of the earliest days.

She is not allowed to talk about Amber. She is not allowed or supposed to even mention her.

It’s finished now, her mother said. That time’s over. Let it go, Astrid. I’m warning you. That’s enough.

This had made Astrid recite, every time the car came to a traffic light junction all through the rest of their time left in Norfolk and all the way home: red, amber, green, or: green, amber, red (depending on which way the lights were changing, obviously). When her mother worked out why she was doing it she went insane at Astrid and there was all sorts of shouting and demanding. So Astrid went undercover. She started saying: amb I supposed to be back by ten? or whatever. She asked Magnus questions in front of their mother about the kind of music called ambient. She talked out loud in the car about the way a cow was ambling along a field, or an old person was ambling down a road. She talked in front of her mother to the woman behind the counter in Heals about the difference between a lamp taking a three-amb or thirteen-amb fuse. According to the woman it was for more light.

Astrid, her mother said.

What? Astrid said.

Don’t push your luck, her mother said.

You are disgusting, Astrid said under her breath. She changed the word amber in her head to the word red when a red car went past them. She said, out loud, what a nice red car. When she saw another she said, I like the red colour of that car.