The Accidental (25 page)

Would you just call me it again, a few times? Magnus said.

You’re a wankstain, you’re a wankstain, you’re a wankstain, Astrid said not taking her eyes off the television.

Is there a calculus for sadness? Calculus enables you to reach the correct answer without necessarily knowing why. Is there a calculus that lets you understand why and how you reached a wrong answer? The letters had come. It was the end result. Something was wrong with it.

That’s great, darling, Eve had said when she called back, her voice coming and going and breaking up. It’s (something) news. Wonderful news. Thank God. We (blank) faith in you. (blank) the school is being very sensible. Now you can put this all (something) and get on with your life. With your real life. With working (something) exams. It’s (blank) this coming year (blank) repercussions (something) rest of your life.

Isn’t there anything worse you can call me? Magnus said to Astrid as they watched the bees pick over the corpse of the hornet scout.

Nope, Astrid said. Wankstain is the worst thing I know.

(Astrid is not to be told anything about the school etc. Nobody is. As part of the non-expulsion agreement Magnus has agreed not to mention the name or case in public, and has been warned against mentioning it in private. Your respectfulness and confidentiality in the matter.)

You’re a killer hornet from hell, Astrid said.

That’s good, Magnus said nodding to himself because it implied relief. It implied that for doing the wrong thing he could be heated to death by the righteous exact calculation of innocent bees.

You’re a killer hairnet from hell, Astrid said.

Magnus, in the cinema, laughs out loud. The two girls along from him turn and look at him in the dark because it is the wrong time to laugh, nothing funny is happening on the screen, no one else is laughing in the cinema. The actor pretending to be the Prime Minister is pretending to make a speech about how he disagrees with American policy. He is doing this because a moment ago in the film he caught the actor pretending to be the American President kissing the ear of the actress pretending to be the tea-girl.

He watches as people on the screen make jokes about how fat the actress playing the tea-girl is supposed to be, though Magnus himself doesn’t think she’s particularly large, not really, not that noticeably.

Pascal made a bet with himself that there was probably a God and therefore a heaven and a hell. He reckoned that if he bet his life on it, if he lived his life as if there were, then he’d attain heaven. But if he died and there was nothing, then it wouldn’t really matter that there was nothing. There was no point, according to Pascal, in betting your destiny on nothingness rather than somethingness. That was a real waste of a bet.

I bet you there’s something that you would never in a million years be able to guess about me, Magnus said to Astrid.

You think you’re gay, Astrid said.

No, I mean it, he said. Something, I bet, that if you knew it about me you would never want to speak to me again or have me as your brother. You wouldn’t be able not to hate me.

He said it as if he were joking, as if it were a joke.

You think I’m gay, Astrid said.

The programme about the bees ended.

I hate you anyway, Astrid said. There’s nothing you could tell me that would make me hate you more than I already do.

She smiled sweetly at him. He smiled back. He was near tears. A programme about the events of 2003, now that 2003 was nearly over, had begun. The England Rugby team was standing, fists raised, in front of a huge roaring crowd. Then US soldiers sat around on regal-looking chairs in the dusty remains of a blown-open palace suite. Then there was an aerial shot of a police cordon round the edge of a small green wood. It was summer. Then in grainy magnified type, across the screen, the word sexed and the word up.

Is it something about your suspension and all that stuff being over? Astrid said.

Over. Easy as abc.

a). Magnus, pressing the button on the answerphone, sitting there as if waiting for him like a loyal dog, a dog who’s found his long way home after unbelievable travels, right in the middle of the floor in the otherwise empty dining room.

Three messages. One for Michael (from the university, about the girl who was threatening the law suit). One for Eve (from the legal office at her publisher’s, about the families). The other, echoing out round Magnus into the empty room. Milton requesting that Eve and Michael urgently notify the school.

Magnus, tossing and turning in bed.

He must have been spotted leaving the computer room on the right date etc. by the school cctvs. He must have been traced from something which left a trace on the hard disk. The cleaners cleaning the upstairs corridor must have identified him as being there in the school after hours that night.

Beyond the windows of Milton’s office the playing field, deserted for summer. Michael looking distant–it was the same week Michael heard about his job–and Eve clearly concerned about the way Milton kept warily glancing, like he couldn’t not, at what bruising remained from the black eye she got from Amber when she told her to leave and Amber coiled back her arm, her fist back as far as her own head, then punched Eve hard in the eye. Milton telling Eve and Michael: school investigation, recent tragic suicide, local press, their son Magnus, implicated, necessary suspension while all proper investigations.

Eve and Michael nodding, dazed. Eve’s arm round Magnus. Milton telling them. Jake Strothers, sitting crying on the pavement outside her house. Her mother opening the front door and taking him in and then phoning Milton.

(So it wasn’t closed circuit or hard disk or cleaners at all. It was Jake Strothers that did it. It was love.)

Milton emphasizing relief. The case had had such relatively low profile in the media. (No mention of Anton. Anton, completely getting away with it.) Milton believed the family wouldn’t press charges in any case. The case in any case the case the case in any case.

Everyone suddenly silent, looking at Magnus.

But it’s true, Magnus said.

I did it.

b). Magnus on the way home in the back of the car, his arms round himself, inside him his own bones, inside them nothing, concavity; child made of nothing. Eve and Michael in the front, nodding a lot. The words publicity, avoidance, necessity. Eve and Michael hugging him when they all got out of the car. Magnus in bed at 6 p.m., asleep. A huge hand lifting the stone slab off his back. A huge hand finally coming down out of the air and picking him up out of the crowd, weighing him, turning him over in its palm, about, any minute now, to raise him to a giant eye in the sky and have a good look at him.

c). Magnus going for questioning and investigation at the end of November. The secretary sitting him down in Milton’s office and Milton giving the speech at him. How surprised Milton had been to see, of all names, Magnus’s name. How Milton literally couldn’t believe. How in this case ‘true’ was ‘relative’. How Milton understood that Magnus clearly didn’t really mean. How hard the school had worked to exonerate Magnus. The importance of working hard this very important exam year. Bad influences and how to keep away from them. Contact with Jake Strothers, penalty of expulsion. Fortunate for Magnus, the unwillingness of the police to be involved in a clear case of suicide. Fortunate for Magnus, the very wise reluctance of the girl’s family to press the matter further. Imperative to Magnus, a temperament founded on the properness and decency of knowing when to leave stones unturned so that 1. the terrible bereavement the school had already suffered because of this unfortunate accident could be allowed naturally to diminish. And 2. the bereaved family could be allowed to continue their everyday existence without even more grief from troubling speculation and interruption. Did Magnus understand? this being the solitary question put to Magnus at the interview.

Magnus understanding, nodding and complying. 1. 2.

(a+b)
+c

= the end result

= the matter officially closed.

Simple, abc. Mathematics. To find the simple in the complex, the finite in the infinite.

Yes, Magnus said, it’s about the suspension and stuff being over.

What about it? Astrid said. What happened?

On the screen Bob Hope was telling a joke to some Second World War troops. They were showing this on tv because Bob Hope was dead. He had died in 2003.

Doesn’t matter, Magnus said shaking his head.

Astrid rolled her eyes.

Like I want to know anyway, she said.

The Second World War troops roared with laughter.

Actually there is something worse than wankstain, Astrid said.

What? Magnus said.

You, Astrid said.

Thanks, Magnus said.

You’re welcome, Astrid said flicking channels. 2003, gone in the flick of a button. It made him feel minimally better. He slouched down further into the sofa.

Now Magnus, in the cinema, imagines Jake on the pavement and the door opening behind him and the kindly lady coming out, picking him up off the ground. She would take him into the front room and sit him on the sofa and she would make him a cup of hot chocolate, or tea, something hot and comforting anyway, and bring it through and put it in his hands, and he would be crying so much that his tears would fall in it, and she’d take the cup and put it on the table and take his hands and say, now now, come on, it can’t be helped, it’s okay, it’s over. And then she’d get up and go through and phone Milton and say, Mr Milton, one of the boys is here who.

Or maybe she wasn’t kindly at all. Maybe she was crazy and hurt and angry, her face still all lined from crying and not sleeping; maybe she got Jake by the hands and she dragged him in and threw him on to her front room floor and shouted and swore at him, and threw the cup she had in her hand at him, and threw everything within reach at him, plates, pictures, a vase, a table, everything–until they were both exhausted with the shouting and the sadness and everything broken all round them and both just sat in their own exhaustion staring at nothing until she got up and went through and phoned Mr Milton. And said–what? Hello, Mr Milton, this is Mrs ******, the mother of ********* ******, who can’t be mentioned, the girl who died, remember, and one of the boys is here who.

It was the mother or the brother who found her, in the bathroom. Magnus knows what her little brother looks like. He is at Deans. Everybody at Deans knows what he looks like, and he will know who Magnus is now; everybody knows which boys were suspended.

They will walk past each other in the school corridors.

That noise Magnus can hear beyond the film’s music and actors can’t be the escalators. It is an impossibility. There is no way he would be able to hear them in this auditorium with its cinema-sound-level soundproofing. It must be the noise of the projector he can hear. The film is almost over now because everything is adding up in it. The actors from all the different segments of story have all met each other at the school nativity play or at the airport and smiled and waved at each other like they all live in the same world and they’ve known each other all along. The actress pretending to be the Portuguese cleaner has said yes to getting married to the actor most famous for being in the Jane Austen adaptation. Everybody has laughed at the fat actress pretending to be the fat sister of the Portuguese cleaner. The film is supposed to be about love. But its only message, as far as Magnus can make it out, is not to be too fat if you’re a girl or everyone will think you are laughable and no one will want to marry you.

Along from him one of the two girls is crying. He wonders if she is crying because the film has moved her or because she thinks she’s too fat. The girl is crying and crying. She isn’t in the least bit fat. Her friend puts her arm round her. Magnus finds himself hoping that Astrid has a friend like this, who will put her arm round her if she is one day sitting crying in a cinema. But at the notion of Astrid crying in a cinema, especially at a film like this, the Astrid in his imagination sticks her middle finger up at him, and at it.

But what if Astrid came to a film like this one and was reduced by it, like this girl along from him? What if Astrid is nothing like the Astrid in his head is, when she’s out in real life? She might have to be different. Girls have to be a certain way with each other, the same as boys do.

In a minute Magnus will have to leave the cinema. The credits are almost over. He will have to go back out of this place, like this place is a safe cave with its shadows flickering on its wall, where it’s easy to pretend that there’s nothing but the shadows. Out there, there’s the escalators going round and round in their fixed directions. The things you’re supposed to buy all the time. The end of the year. The people looking at people and not looking at people. What will he do when he sees her little brother in the corridor in the new term, in the new year? Will he pretend not to see him? Will he look straight through him? Will the little brother pretend not to see Magnus? Worse. Will he look straight at him?

A group of men were chained inside a cave, and all they saw, all they could see and all they’d ever seen of the world was the shadows their own fire made on the walls. They watched the shadows all the time. They spent their days watching them. They believed that’s what life was. But then one of them was forced out of the cave and into the real world. When he came back into the cave and told the others about sunlight, they didn’t believe him. They thought he was mad. Magnus can’t remember the end of that story. Does the man who’s seen the outside world go mad? Does he leave the cave, the only place he knew, and go somewhere else, exiled from his old friends and from the only life he’d known before that, inside the cave? Do the men chained to the cave floor kill him, because they’re so disturbed by what he keeps saying?

The crying girl and her friend are waiting to get past him. He stands up to let them pass, then he follows them out of the cinema and into the glare of the shopping precinct. He feels protective. He walks behind them, protecting them without them knowing, all the way to the escalators and down, concentrating on the back of the one who was crying and has stopped now, is glancing red-eyed round her. Her friend is talking. She nods and answers. They both laugh. That’s better. Also, it has got him to the bottom of the escalator without him having to think about the escalator.