The Accidental (21 page)

It’s okay, Eve said. I’m just, you know, teasing you.

You are? Amanda said.

It’s well under way, Eve said. April is fine.

Amanda looked visibly relieved.

Oh, she said. Good. Excellent. Perfect.

She shook her head, then ticked something in her diary.

It’s a Scottish one this time, Eve said. I think it’ll be quite popular. Without giving too much away, it’s a land girl. On a farm.

A land girl, perfect, Amanda said nodding, writing it in her diary.

On the train out of London Eve watched her own reflection shift and change and revert to herself in the flashing-past scrubland and small towns and trees in the window, and was finally appalled; though if someone, an interviewer sitting opposite, say, or God, maybe, with a tiny dat recorder and microphone, had asked her, she’d have been unable to articulate why.

She looked away from herself. She tried to imagine that Amber didn’t exist. When I get home, she told herself, it’ll be summer. I’ll be working on the land girl project for the next Genuine. I’ll be halfway through it.

But it was like trying to imagine that there was no such thing as a question mark, or trying to forget a tune once you knew it off by heart. Or rather, off by brain; new research suggested, Eve had read somewhere, that tunes actually etch themselves, as if with a little blade, into our brains.

Michael picked Eve up at the station.

He talked about Petrarch and Sidney, structures and deviations. He was clearly in love with Amber too, and this time it wasn’t the usual water off the back of the duck. Instead, the duck, wounded by a hunter and bewildered because half its head had been shot away, was still tottering about on its webby feet by the side of the pond. From the one side it looked like a duck usually looks. From the other, it was a different story.

When they got home, she walked straight in on Amber in the lounge with what looked like one hand on Magnus’s crotch. Magnus stood up.

It’s all right, Amber said. He’s legally of age.

Amber was just helping me with my zip, Magnus said.

Astrid came hurtling in from the garden and the first thing she did was throw herself on to Amber on the sofa and give her a bear hug.

Amber growled.

Hi, Astrid said to Eve, looking out from the hug. We had a great day. Amber and I went fishing.

Fishing, Eve said. Great.

Yep, Amber said.

We went to the river and we purposefully tried not to catch anything, Astrid said. We threw lines in with no hooks on the end.

Wasn’t that pointless? Eve said.

Yes, completely, Astrid said.

Literally, Amber said.

She and Amber broke into giggles and Amber, standing up, caught Eve’s daughter in her arms, turned on her heels and swung Astrid round in the air.

Meanwhile, days passed. They passed irrevocably, and as if a wave of heat had actually thundered down over everything and made it hazy and blurred and submerged, underwater day after night after day.

What’s it like for you now, when you think about what happened to the child? Eve said to Amber quite near the beginning of the end.

What child? Amber said.

The child, Eve said. The child. The child you. You know. The accident.

What child? Amber said. What accident?

What is it you could possibly want to know about yourself? Dream or reality? War es nun schon alles? Are you really Eve? How’s the new Genuine? What child? What accident?

Amber, standing so beautiful in the doorframe of the shed, was made dark by the sunlight behind her. She came towards Eve, at her laptop, on the chair by the desk, and stood in front of her with her hands on Eve’s shoulders as if to give her a good shaking.

Then she kissed Eve on the mouth.

Eve was moved beyond belief by the kiss. The place beyond belief was terrifying. There, everything was different, as if she had been gifted with a new kind of vision, as if disembodied hands had strapped some kind of headset on to her that revealed all the unnamed, invisible colours beyond the basic human spectrum, and as if the world beyond her eyes had slowed its pace especially to reveal the spaces between what she usually saw and the way that things were tacked temporarily together with thin thread across these spaces.

Amber was walking back across the garden now. She was whistling. She had her beautiful hands in her pockets making beautiful fists in the dark.

Eve shut down her laptop and closed its lid.

Michael was in the kitchen chopping food into equal-sized cubes with a knife. Astrid came running through from the lounge. Magnus had opened his bedroom door and was on his way down the stairs. Eve waited until they were all within earshot. She stopped Amber in the hall.

Goodbye, she said.

Eh? Amber said.

It’s time, Eve said. Goodbye.

Where are you going? Amber said.

I’m not going anywhere, Eve said.

Mum, Astrid said.

Astrid stood as if frozen. Magnus froze on the stair. The noise of chopping in the kitchen stopped; Michael was in there with his knife held frozen in mid chop, mid air.

That’s true, at least. You’re going nowhere, Amber said.

Meaning? Eve said.

You’re a dead person, Amber said.

Get out of my house, Eve said.

It’s not your house, Amber said. You’re only the tenant.

Get out of the house I’m renting, Eve said.

I am born just short of a century after the birth of the Frenchman whose name translates as Mr Light, who, in his thirties, late in the year 1894, has a bad night, can’t sleep, feels unwell, sits up in his bed, gets up, wanders about the house and–eureka! Of course! The ‘intermittent foot’ mechanism! Like a sewing machine uses to shift material along! He commissions his chief engineer at the factory. He sits down himself to punch little holes in his own photographic paper. He and his brother design it: a wooden box with an eye. It records what it sees in shades of black, white and grey for 52 seconds at a time.

The Paris Express arrives. Audiences in the front rows duck their heads! Workers come out of their factory. Audiences marvel! A boy tricks a gardener with a hosepipe. Audiences fall off their seats laughing! People play a game of cards. Audiences exclaim at the way the leaves on the trees behind the people playing cards move in the wind! Hundreds of trains arrive in hundreds of stations. Hundreds of workers leave hundreds of factories. Hundreds of gardeners are tricked by hundreds of boys with hosepipes. Hundreds of leaves move in hundreds of backgrounds.
Special Notice to Workmen and Workwomen. Why stand in the Cold and Rain when you could spend a Pleasant Hour for
1
d, between the hours of
12
and
2
p.m. on Saturdays Excepted. Come and See the Events Of The Day portrayed in Living Pictures.
Man attacked by lion. A couple, kissing. Victoria’s Funeral Procession, Football Finals, Grand National. Famous Airships of the World, Accompanied by the Famous Warwick’s Cinephone. The Music Hall becomes the Central Hall Picture House, run by the fairground MacKenzies. They hire a woman pianist to make the place respectable. Aladdin and his Marvellous Lamp. What Women Will Do. The Rajah’s Box. A woman rises out of a box in a cave and conjures up dancers all round her. A censor has painted over the bodies in each frame in red ink. Red shudders out of the too-bare necks and legs of the dancers.

Red means passion, or something on fire. Green means idyllic. Blue means night and dark. Amber means lamps lit in the dark.

Rescued From An Eagle’s Nest. The Suicidal Poet.
Bombastus Shakespeare tries twelve different new kinds to commit suicide. He does not succeed in any but dies anyhow. A screamer from start to finish.
A man stands on the stage and tells the audience the story as they watch it. A little girl is kidnapped by gypsies, who take her away in a barrel. The barrel falls into the river. It heads for the rapids. A wheat speculator makes a lucrative deal that means hundreds of his workers stay poor. He falls accidentally into his own wheat shaft and the screen tints into gold as the falling wheat smothers him. The Central Hall changes its name to The Alhambra Picture House.
This House has been specially designed, in full compliance with the
1910
Kinematograph Act, for comfort and safety, and will compare favourably with any first-class, up-to-date London or Glasgow Picture House.
It adds a tearoom. It has a full orchestra: pianist, cellist, violinist, drummer. It has seating for 1,000. It has a thirty-four-foot stage the sides of which are decorated with oriental figures. Its resident manager, Mr Burnette C. MacDonald, rattles chains in a barrel behind the screen for the chariot race in Ben Hur. Every Thursday night two brothers from the Black Isle come over on the ferry with their dogs to see the pictures and every week they sit in the same seats. One week the men don’t come but one of the dogs, a grey whippet called Hector, is found sitting in his usual seat and stays for the whole show.

Fights, fires, riots, storms: Beethoven, William Tell, Wagner. Intrigue, burglars etc.: Grieg, Liszt, Beethoven. Love or sentiment: Dear Old Pal of Mine, Sunshine of Your Smile, O Dry Those Tears. Kissing: everyone in the cheap seats whistling at the screen. You know a film is a good one when its surface is covered with scratches like heavy rain. Chaplin is king of a rainy country. His cane has little notches down it like the bony nodes of a spine. He tips his hat to whatever he’s just tripped over on the road. He stops to examine a hole in his shoe. A car drives past and sends him reeling into the dust. Another car going the other way sends him head over heels again. He gets up. He brushes himself down with a little clothes-brush. He sits down under a tree. He buffs his nails before he eats a piece of old black bread.
Several cinema managements have reported that after two weeks of Chaplin comedies it has been necessary to tighten the bolts in the Theatre seats since the audience had laughed so hard the vibrations loosened them.
Goodnight, Charlie, the boys in the audience shout at the end of the Chaplin short. Then the heroine tied to the conveyor belt heads steadily towards the buzz-saw.
Men are but boys grown tall.
The past appears right there in the room, the woodland glade, the dead person right there in the room.
You coward. You ran away when you knew the truth! Your son will never know you if I can help it.
Jesus saves the blind child.
Oh–oh yes–I think I can see the light.
The Love-Light. Mary Pickford tells the nun she wants the child back. The nun shakes her head.
I know, Sister Lucia, you think I’m crazy. But I’m not.
The police shoot the striking miners dead.
The pagan Chink gets a taste of the result of two thousand years of civilization.
Lillian Gish is about to have her head cut off in the French Revolution.
When a woman loves, she forgives.
Constance Talmadge lives in the mountains and refuses to marry. Blue Blood and Red. The Ten Commandments. The Campbells Are Coming. The Pride of the Clan. A woman takes a bath in a Cecil B. De Mille feature. Bathroom fashions all over the world change overnight. Puritan Passions. Enticement. Playing With Souls. Don Juan. The Adventures of Dorothy Dare, a Daughter of Daring. Ruth of the Rockies. Pearl of the Army. The Archduke gets down from his state car. The Archduke’s chauffeur steps round to the front of it to check the damage from the bomb.
A Nation Gone, Borders Wiped Out, A Fertile Land Made a Desert, A King in Exile–and Pathé News Cameramen Are There.
Seven or eight men climb out of a trench. One slips down, slumps dead. The Alhambra Picture House, Luncheon Room, Tearoom and Car Park.
If I Had A Talking Picture–Of You.
At the end of it the audience sits in stunned silence. The orchestra is out of work. European films stop. American films triple. There are six cinemas. It’s only a small town. The queues at each cinema are two hours long. The Empire the Palace the Playhouse the Queens the Plaza the Alhambra. There are wood-backed cushioned seats. There are art-deco walls. There are pillars. There is A P H in swirling letters round the tops of the pillars in gold. There are gold curtains whose voluptuous curved ruches go up and up in unthinkably sensual repetitions. There are lights so high in the double-domed ceiling that no one but God can change a bulb. A retired Great War sergeant-major sprays a pneumatic chrome-plated Scentinel Germspray canister up and down the aisles to
keep the air antiseptically clean and fragrant, session after session, day after day. Give your place a modern air. Have Scentinel freshness everywhere. Scentinel Sales New Hygiene Ltd.,
266
–
268
Holloway Rd, London N
7
.

Upstairs costs more money. Downstairs shouts at the screen in American accents. Upstairs and downstairs shout together at the British films with people in evening dress saying strangled-sounding things to each other. Cartoon, short, newsreel, forthcoming attractions, B movie, big picture, God Save the King. People bring their sandwiches.
Around the World in Sound and Vision on the Magic Carpet of Movietone.
4d to get in to see The Good Earth, same price as a loaf. The World Changes. I Am A Thief. Lady from Nowhere. Woman Against Woman. Let’s Get Married, showing with A Dangerous Adventure. March of Time. International Settlement. All six cinemas close for a fortnight in case of the invasion. They re-open a week later. All six black out their neons. The Great Dictator. Boy Meets Girl. The manager of the Alhambra, Mr O.H. Campbell, walks onstage in the middle of a Frank Sinatra film. Victory in Europe. Everybody cheers. Victory over Japan. Great Expectations. Gone With the Wind. Crying children are carried out of Bambi in the middle of the forest fire. People buy their own tvs and watch their own coronations. The screen gets three times bigger. Cinerama. Cinemascope. Widescreen. NaturalVision. A lion leaps out at the audience. The Greatest Show On Earth. Ben Hur, again. The Ten Commandments, again.

An ant crawls up a blade of grass growing out of a crack in the tomb of Cecil B. De Mille. The Plaza stops showing films. The Queens burns down. The Empire closes. The Playhouse starts Bingo. Barefoot in the Park. Far From the Madding Crowd. Natalie Wood and Robert Redford laugh on their way home from the movies in This Property Is Condemned. Demolished. Demolished. Bingo club. Demolished. Bingo club. Seventh-Day Adventists’ church. Demolished. Demolished. Open-air car sales. Demolished. Supermarket. Demolished. Furniture store. Demolished. Church. Demolished. Night club. Demolished. Demolished. Nightclub. Demolished. Restaurant. Listed façade. Bingo club. Demolished. Demolished. Demolished. Demolished. Steve McQueen’s Porsche crashes on the racetrack. Will he be all right? The Bradford Empire. The Plumstead Empire. The Willesden Empire. The Penge Empire. The Colchester Hippodrome. The Glasgow New Savoy. The Aigburth Rivoli. The Dingle Picturedrome. The Kirkwall Phoenix. The Harrogate Scala. The South Shields Scala. The Leeds Coliseum. The Kirkcaldy Rialto. The Clapham Majestic. The Darlington Alhambra. The Perth Alhambra. The Luton Palace. The Largs Palace. The Stroud Palace. The Bristol Palace. The Maida Vale Palace. Fade to circle. Fade to black. They knock down the walls and all the films stand up out of their dead selves, transparent as the superimposed souls of the dead getting up out of their corpses.