The Accidental (29 page)

Then he slapped shut his mobile, bought his ticket, walked into the lift and went down into the dark like a man who knew exactly where he was headed.

Magnus and Astrid were in the lounge watching tv. The lights were off. Michael switched the big light on.

Hello all, Michael said.

Magnus’s taciturn friend Jake was round again.

Hello Jake, Michael said. How are you tonight?

Jake murmured something that sounded like fine thanks. Michael switched the big light off again.

Thanks, Astrid said.

He slumped down into the only chair left.

Jake was round a lot these days; he stayed over a lot. Michael had begun to wonder if Magnus was seeing a bit more of Jake than was normal and whether he should tell Eve about it, or whether they might be experimenting with dope, but after half an hour of listening outside Magnus’s bedroom door one night and hearing them holding forth to each other about Pascal and Teilhard de Chardin and what to do about your parents’ imminent divorce, he’d stopped saying to Jake at midnight, won’t your mother be wondering where you are at this time of night, Jake?

The programme they were all watching in the dark was about Goebbels.

What are we watching, Astrid? he said.

UK History, Astrid said.

The guide was stuffed down the cushions of the chair he was in. Michael leafed through it until he found the right day and the right channel. He bent the page back so he could read it in the tv light.

UK HISTORY

7.0am The Nazis: A Warning From

History 8.0 The Nazis: A Warning From

History 9.0 The Nazis: A Warning From

History 10.0 The Nazis: A Warning

From History 11.0 The Nazis: A

Warning From History 12noon The

Nazis: A Warning From History 1.0

War Of The Century 2.0 War Of The

Century 3.0 War Of The Century 4.0

War Of The Century 5.0 Horror In The

East. 6.0 Horror In The East. 7.0 The

Nazis: A Warning From History 8.0 The

Nazis: A Warning From History 9.0 The

Nazis: A Warning From History 10.0

The Nazis: A Warning From History

11.0 The Nazis: A Warning From

History 12midnight The Nazis: A

Warning From History 1.0 Close

I guess we’re watching The Nazis: A Warning From History, Michael said.

You don’t have to watch it if you don’t want to. This house is full of other rooms, Astrid said.

You know, you get more like your mother every day, Michael said.

No way, Astrid said.

She flicked the channel immediately.

I meant it nicely, Michael said. I happen to like your mother.

People on tv were doing a makeover in an empty house. Statistics came up on the screen about how much more the house would be worth after they’d done it.

Michael groaned.

It’s just till the film comes on, for fuck sake, Astrid said.

No, I don’t mind the channel, Michael said. It’s just that I feel a bit rough. And Astrid, please don’t swear.

Rough how? Magnus said.

Hypothermia, Michael said. Classic case.

You need to be taken to shelter, Jake said.

Do I? Michael said. That’s nice. That’s nice to know. Shelter. That’s a nice word.

You need to be kept warm, and kept if possible totally like off the ground, Jake said. You should be given a hot drink and something to eat, and people round you need to give you moral support.

It was the most Jake had ever said in public. Michael wished Eve were here so he could say so to her, afterwards, tonight, in bed.

Someone should get into your sleeping bag with you to keep you warm, Jake said.

Let’s just not go there right now, Jake, Michael said.

And we have to watch you for heart failure, Jake said.

You don’t know how true that is, Michael said.

And it might help if you curl into the foetal position, but with your head like sloping towards the floor, Jake said.

Magnus had gone through and switched the kettle on. He came back with tea for Michael. Michael was touched.

Do you want something to eat? Magnus said.

No, thanks, Michael said. But thank you, Magnus.

Have an egg, Astrid said. There are eggs in the fridge that need to be eaten.

No thanks, Michael said.

You should, Astrid said.

Should I? Michael said.

Eggs are beautiful, Astrid said. When you eat an egg you are eating beautifulness itself.

Am I? Michael said. What a lovely thought.

Boiled or scrambled? Magnus said.

Or raw? Astrid said.

Fried, Michael said.

Worst for you, Jake said.

Thank you, Jake, Michael said.

Magnus went back through. Michael curled himself into the foetal position. He sloped his head off the armchair. He watched the adverts upside down. It was quite a good thing to do to adverts. It gave them back their surrealness. Magnus brought Michael a fried egg sandwich. The film came on. Black and white, old, 1930s. Margaret Lockwood. The Lady Vanishes.

It’s a Hitchcock, Michael said.

And you told
me
not to swear, Astrid said.

Ha ha, Michael said.

The film was very clever, really. It was crazy and meandering for half the plot as if things were just meaningless comedy, then all its clues fell brilliantly into place. A lot of English people were stuck in bad weather in a hotel in the mountains of eastern Europe, then they were all travelling home on the same train. But a sweet old lady went missing on the train and the young beauty who’d been travelling with her insisted she was real, she’d definitely existed, though everybody Germanic on the train, including a creepy brain surgeon, was conspiring to make the girl seem like a lunatic. Only the sporty young English cad believed her and even he wasn’t completely convinced. There were a lot of jokes about repressed sex and Freud and in the end it was a matter of national security.

The End.

Michael stretched his arms above his head and roar-yawned.

Fantastic, Magnus said.

Very good, Michael said.

Jake murmured something positive-sounding.

Michael stretched again. He actually felt quite good. Maybe it was the egg sandwich, doing him some good. Maybe it was the boys’ instinctual kindness, earlier. Maybe it was the fact that the film itself was such a very good one, one that, if someone had asked him, he’d have sworn he’d already seen, he was bound to have seen before, but in reality he’d never seen and would never have guessed the cleverness of or the plot of, even though it was such an old classic and must have been running continuously somewhere in the background of his tv-watching for years.

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 world 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?