The Accidental (12 page)

Since then, Amber MacDonald said, I gave up my job, my salary. I sold the car and I left most of the money I got for it, thousands, in a big pile of cash, like a hillside cairn, by the side of that road where it happened. I bought a second-hand Citroën Estate. And I decided that from then on I would never live in a place that could be called home again. How could I? How could I live the same way after?

They sat in the dark. It would soon be light. A single tear welled up and out of one of the girl’s eyes, ran down the line of her nose and stopped, as if asked to, just below the curve of her cheekbone exactly halfway down her face. Gently she stubbed her cigarette out in the grass. She looked up, looked Eve right in the eye.

Well?
she said.
Do you believe me?

I was born in a trunk. It was during the matinée on Friday. I stopped the show.

I was born in the year of the supersonic, the era of the multistorey multivitamin multitonic, the highrise time of men with the technology and women who could be bionic, when jump-jets were Harrier, when QE2 was Cunard, when thirty-eight feet tall the Princess Margaret stood stately in her hoverpad, the année érotique was only thirty aircushioned minutes away and everything went at twice the speed of sound. I opened my eyes. It was all in colour. It didn’t look like Kansas any more. The students were on the barricades, the mode was maxi, the Beatles were transcendental, they opened a shop. It was Britain. It was great. My mother was a nun who could no longer stand the convent. She married my father, the captain; he was very strict. She taught us all to sing and made us new clothes out of curtains. We ran across the bridges and jumped up and down the steps. We climbed the trees and fell out of the boat into the lake. We came first in the singing contest and narrowly escaped the Nazis.

I was formed and made in the Saigon days, the Rhodesian days, the days of the rivers of blood.
DISEMBOWEL ENOCH POWELL
. Apollo 7 splashdowned. Tunbridge Wells was flooded. A crowd flowed over London Bridge, and thirty-six Americans made bids to buy it. They shot the king in Memphis, which delayed the Academy Awards telecast for two whole days. He had a dream, he held these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created equal and would one day sit down together at the table of brotherhood. They shot the other brother at the Ambassador Hotel.
RIGHTEOUS BROS
it said in lights, above the hotel car park. Meanwhile my father was the matchmaker and my mother could fly using only her umbrella. When I was a child I ran the Grand National on my horse. They didn’t know I was a girl until I fainted and they unbuttoned my jockey shirt. But anything was possible. We had a flying floating car. We stopped the rail disaster by waving our petticoats at the train; my father was innocent in prison, my mother made ends meet. I sold flowers in Covent Garden. A posh geezer taught me how to speak proper and took me to the races, designed by Cecil Beaton, though they dubbed my voice in the end because the singing wasn’t good enough.

But my father was Alfie, my mother was Isadora. I was unnaturally psychic in my teens, I made a boy fall off his bike and I burned down a whole school. My mother was crazy; she was in love with God. There I was at the altar about to marry someone else when my boyfriend hammered on the church glass at the back and we eloped together on a bus. My mother was furious. She’d slept with him too. The devil got me pregnant and a satanic sect made me go through with it. Then I fell in with a couple of outlaws and did me some talking to the sun. I said I didn’t like the way he got things done. I had sex in the back of the old closing cinema. I used butter in Paris. I had a farm in Africa. I took off my clothes in the window of an apartment building and distracted the two police inspectors from watching for the madman on the roof who was trying to shoot the priest. I fell for an Italian. It was his moves on the dancefloor that did it. I knew what love meant. It meant never having to say you’re sorry. It meant the man who drove the taxi would kill the presidential candidate, or the pimp. It was soft as an easy chair. It happened so fast. I had my legs bitten off by the shark. I stabbed the kidnapper, but so did everybody else, it wasn’t just me, on the Orient Express.

My father was Terence and my mother was Julie. (Stamp. Christie.) I was born and bred by the hills (alive) and the animals (talked to). I considered myself well in, part of the furniture. There wasn’t a lot to spare. Who cared? I put on a show, right here in the barn; I was born singing the song at the top of my just-formed lungs. Inchworm. Inchworm. Measuring the marigolds. Seems to me you’d stop and see how beautiful they are. I rose inch by inch with the international rise of the nose of Streisand, the zee of Liza. What good was sitting alone in my room? When things went decimal I was ready for it.

I was born in a time of light, speed, celluloid. Downstairs was smoking. The balcony was non. It cost more money to sit in the balcony.

The kinematograph. The eidoloscope. The galloping tintypes. The silver screen. The flicks. The pictures. Up rose the smoke. Misty watercolour memories.

But it’s all in the game and the way you play it, and you’ve got to play the game, you know.

I was born free, I’ve had the time of my life and for all we know I’m going to live forever.

The middle

of the dual carriageway right in front of the cars! She sticks her arm up i.e. Stop. The cars coming towards her screech to a halt with their horns going like mad. Amber stands in the middle of the two lanes with her hand up to keep the cars stopped.

Now! she shouts over the noise, waving her other arm at Astrid. Astrid runs across, careful not to drop the camera.

Then when they’re both on the central reservation Amber steps out exactly like she did before in front of the traffic coming in the other direction and the screeching to a halt and the horns all start again.

It is insane. It is really dangerous. It is a bit like the story from the bible when the sea parts in two, except it is traffic. It is like Amber is blessed with a magnetic forcefield from outer space or another galaxy. If she were a cartoon character she would be the kind of superheroine that can draw things to her and repel them away from her at the same time.

Personally Astrid thinks Amber should stop when she gets to the edge of a pavement or whatever. It is insane just to walk out. But that’s what Amber’s like. It is what her personality is like. It isn’t so much that she’s a retard about cars, it’s that she really believes that she has as much right to the road as they do, maybe even more.

They stand together on the verge with all the cars roaring back up to speed behind them and people still shouting at them out of car windows. Amber ignores it. Now that Astrid can breathe properly again and her heart has stopped doing the scared thing and she can hear herself think, she wishes she’d filmed it, them crossing the road. It would have been an amazing thing to have on film.

She films Amber now. She has the field behind her. It is all golden.

Astrid also wishes someone else was filming them both from the outside. They would look like an older person and a younger person who are having a day out and are really good friends or maybe sisters, sometimes even walking about with their arms linked, because age, Amber says, is nothing to do with anything, it is just irrelevant.

There is a great view of the countryside and the edge of the town. Amber points at the wild flowers in the grass as they walk; long thin red ones, really pretty little blue ones. Astrid films them. When she is finished filming Amber is already quite far ahead, going towards the buildings in the distance. She films Amber from behind for a while, walking in the field, swinging her arms.

One of the buildings is a supermarket. It has the little pointed roof with a cockerel weathervane on the top. When Astrid catches her up and points it out, Amber says the weathervane is nothing to do with the way the wind blows. It is to make the supermarket look more old-fashioned, from the past, so that when people go shopping there they feel better about it like they’re going somewhere that’s something to do with a tradition, somewhere they think they recognize from their pasts even though their pasts almost definitely never had anything like that in them. It is fiendishly clever how it works. It works subliminally.

Astrid still doesn’t know where they’re going. It would be uncool to ask. Bring the camera, Amber called up the stairs to Astrid this morning. This is their third day out filming important things on Astrid’s camera. Amber is striding out now across the field, walking straight through all the stuff growing in it. Insects buzz everywhere and there are birds. There are fieldmice or rabbits or grass snakes probably, ricocheting away from them as they take every step. It would be amazing if they could actually see them shooting off away from the noise of Amber’s and Astrid’s feet i.e. she and Amber are giants in a different world and the ground is shaking under them and all the animals etc. radiating away from them. But the stuff growing in the field is jabby on Astrid’s legs, and the soil where there’s space through the stalks of stuff is dry and very uneven, and the field is huge, much bigger than it seemed from the edge of the motorway where it looked like it would be really easy to walk across, and it is very very hot because it is around noon.

Halfway over, Amber stops and waits for her. She unties her sweater from her middle and winds it round Astrid’s head to keep the sun off, tying a knot in it with its arms to keep it on.

How’s that? she says.

Astrid feels better.

At the other side of the field they go round by the road past a garage selling cars (cameras outside) and a massive Boots the Chemist (cameras outside), then across an industrial kind of place (camera) and into the supermarket car park (several cameras). The car park is quite busy with cars. There is shade again when they get to the door so Astrid takes the sweater off her head and gives it back to Amber and Amber ties it round her middle again. Amber is really quite slim. She is probably a size ten. She has long hands, long fingers, they are quite elegant-looking really. Amber, Astrid’s mother said last night at dinner, you have piano player’s hands. Yes, Amber said back, but what kind of a piano player, a good one or a rubbish one? Magnus laughed. Michael laughed for ages like a mad person. A good one, of course, Astrid’s mother said. You’ve never heard me play the piano, Amber said.

Astrid looks at her own small hands now, at the camera in them.

Do you want me to film? she says pointing the camera at the first security camera inside the door.

Amber is standing at the door with her eyes narrowing, scanning the inside of the supermarket. She shakes her head. She does it slowly i.e. she is concentrating.

Go and find something for lunch, she says. Are you hungry?

Astrid nods.

Anything you like, Amber says. Definitely get some fruit. Get me a sandwich.

Astrid’s mission is to get lunch. At the fruit place she chooses a couple of apples called Discovery. The sign above them says they are local and organic. It is better than them not being local and organic. Tasting is believing! a sign above the apples says. Another one says how good the supermarket is at selling really fresh fruit. Imagine if it wasn’t fresh. Imagine if they were all old and manked, all these rows and rows of apples and oranges and nectarines and peaches. Would the sign still say fresh or would it say old and manked? Old manked fruit here for sale. Tasting is believing. Ha ha. She makes a mental note to tell it to Amber, and to Magnus when she gets home. She picks out a tuna and mayonnaise sandwich from the great wall of sandwiches on the refrigerated shelves at the front of the shop. The great wall of sandwiches–like the great wall of China! Imagine if the great wall of China was made of sandwiches. The tuna in the sandwich has been caught without harm to dolphins. It says so on the packaging, which has a picture on it of an island with a palm tree.

There aren’t very many people shopping in the supermarket even though there were all those cars parked outside. Astrid looks above the shelves at the signs hanging from the ceiling for the hot food sign. The hot food is next to the deli counter. Another sign hung behind the hot food counter also says Tasting is Believing! She chooses a small rack of barbecued ribs for herself and a woman wraps them in packaging that will keep them warm, the woman says, for about half an hour.

Thank you, Astrid says to the woman.

You’re welcome, the woman says.

A camera above their heads films it all: Astrid asking for the ribs, the woman wrapping them and telling Astrid (it will come out silent on the tape) how long they’ll keep warm for. Astrid takes the package. She wonders if the woman serving her knows about the cameras i.e. of course she knows, it’s obvious and she works here. But what about when she stops work and goes for a walk along the road and the other cameras that she passes just because of the way she’s walking home video her going past them? Like they videoed that boy who died when Astrid was younger because he was stabbed; just before he did he went skipping past the Peckham library with its new architecture; and that girl who played the saxophone and did the ironing on the home video that her parents let the authorities show of her on the news, the girl who went missing on her way home from school.

Except that the video of this supermarket woman doing her job and walking along a street or getting her car out of the car park or going to a library, whatever, is just useless recording, it doesn’t mean anything, it’ll never get watched unless something awful happens to her and then it will mean everything, which would be terrible, but important.

And then, if nothing terrible happens, when the woman gets home at night and sits at dinner or with a cup of coffee or whatever, does she realize she is not being recorded any more? Or does she think inside her head that she still
is
being recorded, by something that watches everything we do, because she is so used to it being everywhere else? Or does she just not ever think about it, is she just a woman who works in a supermarket and doesn’t bother thinking about that kind of stuff?

The thought of it all makes Astrid feel weird. She looks at the package in her hand. She knows the ribs are warm inside though the package feels completely cool from the outside.

Astrid goes from aisle to aisle of supermarket stuff. She eventually finds Amber in the aisle with all the bathroom things and deodorants etc. Amber is taking packets off the little hook they’re hung on and letting them drop to the floor as if the front packet isn’t the one she wants, and neither is the next one, and neither is the next one. Packet after packet hits the floor. When Amber has completely cleared one hook she starts on the packets on the hook next to it and does the same thing again. She has unloaded the contents of a couple of hooks already.

Astrid goes over. Sealed packets of razor blades, the kind with the plastic handles, are scattered round Amber’s feet. Amber pulls another one off the hook and lets it drop.

Astrid looks at her.

Why are you doing it? Astrid’s look says.

Amber looks back.

But Astrid has no idea what the look means.

Is mayonnaise all right? Astrid asks.

Depends on whether it’s been left out in the sun for any length of time, Amber says.

Astrid laughs.

I.e. in your sandwich, she says.

Amber lets the packet fall, unhooks another, holds it out and lets it fall.

Yes, Amber says. Id est, I like mayonnaise. As long as it’s not just a mayonnaise sandwich, id est with nothing in it but mayonnaise.

Tuna, Astrid says holding it up.

My favourite, Amber says.

Astrid is very pleased. Pleasedness, or whatever the word for it is, goes all through her body.

Amber gazes for a moment at the empty hooks in front of her and the packets all over the floor and then she says: Right.

She steps out over the circle of packets.

Checkout time, she says.

Three uniformed security men and two men in suits are standing on the other side of the checkout almost as if they’re waiting for Amber and Astrid. Then Astrid realizes they are. Amber pays a girl for the apples and the sandwich and the barbecued ribs. The girl won’t look up or at Amber or Astrid. She only looks at the things they’re buying and the till she’s barcoding and pushing the keys on. She asks all the cashback and petrol questions without looking at them too. She knows she is being watched and that something is up. The security men wait there for the paying to finish, like angry silent cowboys in a tv western. One of the men in the suits looks angry. The other one looks ironic. He looks directly at Amber and shakes his head at her as she and Astrid pass. But they don’t do anything or say anything.

Amber and Astrid leave the supermarket.

Ribs, Amber says, peeking into Astrid’s package. Her face looks like she doesn’t like ribs much.

Don’t you like ribs? Astrid asks.

Take them or leave them, Amber says.

Me too, Astrid says. I can take them or leave them too. I quite like the burnt way they taste.

Carcinogenic, Amber says.

Yeah, Astrid says.

She knows carcinogenic means something but she can’t remember what.

Eating burnt things. Cancer, Amber says.

It is as if she can actually read Astrid’s mind.

I know, Astrid says.

Then she worries, because if Amber can actually read her mind she will know she didn’t know what it meant. She steals a glance at Amber, but Amber is pointing.

Lovely picnic spot, she says.

It is a horrible recycling-bin place. They sit on the grass at the edge of the car park in the smell of old wine and beer from the bottle bins. Our recycling project, a sign says by the bins. Success. Environment.

One of the security men is standing at the front door of the supermarket. He has been watching them since they left and he watches them the whole time they sit there eating their lunch. He is talking into a phone.

Astrid and Amber watch him back.

I suppose they saw you doing that thing with the razor blades, Astrid says.

They definitely saw me, Amber says. You might say they saw quite a lot of me.

She tells Astrid that this supermarket is testing a new way of stopping shoplifters. When someone takes a packet of razor blades off the hook a computer chip inside it instructs a camera to take a picture of that person so that the people at checkout can match the photo to the person buying it, so they can know who has and who hasn’t paid for their razor blades and whether they’re being stolen or not.

Astrid doesn’t really get what the problem is. She thinks it’s fair enough really, for the supermarket to do this. After all, it is to stop people stealing.

Amber gets a bit annoyed.

Astrid thinks about asking Amber about the supermarket woman and the being taped. But she knows that if she says the thing about the supermarket woman may be not caring because she is just a supermarket woman, Amber will get even more annoyed. So she doesn’t say anything at all about anything. She holds a rib up and picks round it with her teeth, trying not to get sauce on her face or any further up her hand.

Amber has finished her sandwich. She gets up. Astrid hurries to her feet too, holding her hands away from herself. Amber is dusting herself down and stretching. She waves goodbye to the security man who raises a hand to wave back, as if not sure, as if by mistake. Then Amber takes the camera because Astrid’s hands are all barbecue sauce and they go back the same way they came, across the hot field (Astrid eats an apple then throws the applecore away, biodegradable) then cross the dual carriageway by a pedestrian walkway bridge which leads directly to the station and is clearly the way they were meant to go the first time instead of walking out into the middle of the road that insane way.