The Accidental (30 page)

Instead of going to the press conference, Eve had gone to her doctor’s surgery and booked herself in for injections. By now Eve had withdrawn money from HSBCs in many major cities of the world. She had been offered sex, mostly but not exclusively by men, almost as many times and in almost as many cities as she’d drawn out money. She’d drunk Coke in a hotel room in Rome. She’d drunk Coke in a bar overlooking a palace in Granada. She’d drunk Coke in a chalet bar up a mountain in Switzerland. She’d drunk Coke on several aeroplanes. She’d drunk Coke in a hotel bar in Nice on the Promenade des Anglais, across the road from a group of drug addicts on the stony beach. She’d drunk Coke in the air conditioning of a restaurant in a rich suburb of Colombo, through the front windows of which she had seen children living in a derelict tower with rags hanging from the holes where its windows should be. She’d drunk Coke in a filthily expensive bar in Cape Town. She’d been down a dirt track in Ethiopia in the middle of nowhere where there was nothing but scorch, nothing but flies, nothing to eat, nothing to farm, nothing but an old tyreless truck and some standing shacks, and the thin and always smiling people who lived there had welcomed her in, given her everything they had, which was almost nothing, then they’d swept her into their ramshackle bar like she was a whole festival and they’d presented her to the Coke machine, in front of which several of them had argued and nodded and clubbed together and shouted for more people until they eventually found enough money and let coin after coin drop into the slot until the can thudded into the dust-covered mouth of the machine.
I am posting this from the airport
, she wrote on the postcard home.
Just to let you know I just drank my last ever Coke.

She’d put coins in slots herself two weeks ago, in Las Vegas. Two weeks ago she’d flicked what she’d won there over the side of the Grand Canyon: meaningless small change thumbed into the biggest slot in the world. What would the payout be? what would thud down at her out of the world’s most massive machine? For luck, she’d flung her phone over the edge after the coins. It was worth something. It was international-ranging. On its screen the angry red icon shaped like a telephone receiver had been flashing at her for days. You Have New Messages. Before she threw it away Eve left a message on the home answerphone.

Hello Astrid, hello Magnus, hello Michael, it’s me. Just to let you know I’m at the Grand Canyon. I’m trying to think how to describe it. Actually it makes me think that every level pavement or road I’ve ever stood on was a kind of nonsense. I think I may feel vertiginous for the rest of my life. I’m sitting right at the edge. I’m on the south rim. The north rim is still closed, apparently. It’s ten miles away, apparently. A man at the observation point told me they used to be able to see the curve of the earth from one of these observation places, you know, with special telescopes, but now it’s not visible any more. There’s a small fence here where I am, but you can climb over it and look right down, I just have, and from here I can see this tiny strip of green at the bottom. Apparently it’s the Colorado River. There’s a Japanese man in front of me now. He’s having his picture taken. He’s standing out on a rock. It looks a bit dangerous. He’s on the edge in a way that’s giving me an urge to run at him and knock him over it. Lots of birds. Lots of, ravens I think they are. I can see goats as well, Astrid, down on the rocks. It’s as though I’m looking at a different planet, except for the tourists. It’s as though it’s earth before anyone was on it, except for the tourists. Of course, I’m a tourist too. It’s a bit bewildering, to be honest. It’s a bit overwhelming. It’s very beautiful. Its colours keep changing with the light changing. It’s so huge. Well, anyway, I’m about to throw my phone in. I have to throw something into it, and if it’s not going to be me, or that perfectly nice Japanese tourist, well. And I just wanted to leave you a message before I did. Lots of love.

Not all of this had been recorded by the home answerphone, which had made the beeping noise signalling the end of the allocated speaking space at about the time Eve was saying the words
from here I can see.

On the other side of the canyon, invisible to the naked eye, was her dead mother out on a ledge of rock, high on morphine in a hospital bed, singing hymns and songs all jumbled together.
Then sings my soul my saviour God to thee.
A nurse had come and closed the door.
Oh isle of my childhood I’m longing to see.
Her mother was forty-four, that was all. She couldn’t hold her head up any more; her head rested on her chest as if her neck was broken. Her neck didn’t work any more. She took Eve’s hand and held it so tight that it hurt and when she let go Eve had marks in her hand from her mother’s rings. She spoke to Eve, she said something that sounded like words but it wasn’t words. Eve had had no idea what her mother’s last message to her was.

I think you were old enough for it to be okay, Michael had told her when they first knew each other. You weren’t really a child any more. You were past the stage psychologists talk about where children, because they’re so young when they’re bereaved, feel bereaved forever.

It was meaningless, what she said to me at the end, Eve told him.

Not meaningless, he said. It had meaning because she said it. Even though you don’t know what she said, it had meaning because it went between you, from her to you.

Yes, Eve said.

It was just that the literal meaning itself wasn’t immediately comprehensible, Michael said. That doesn’t mean it didn’t mean.

This conversation was one of the reasons that Eve had married Michael. He had seemed a man with whom the right kind of dialogue would be possible.

Poor Michael. A girl called Emma Sackville had finally sacked his ville. The truth had been waiting for them on the answerphone when they got back from Norfolk. But one of the last times she’d talked to Michael things had sounded better. He had had a series of poems accepted by a small publisher. The TLS or someone wanted to publish two of them. He sounded ludicrously happy about it. But Astrid was still refusing to come to the phone, and Magnus had been at the library with a friend, revising for his exams.

Eve: Priesthood? What kind of priesthood?

Michael: I know. I told him he’d have to convert first, that you couldn’t just join and be a priest just like that, and he looked at me like I was some kind of idiot. But then, he always looks at me like I’m some kind of idiot. No, but he’s fine, he’ll be sorry he missed you, we’re fine, really.

Eve: And how’s Astrid?

Michael: Fine, we’re all fine.

Eve: Is she still wearing red all the time? Michael: Oh, you know. She’s fine. Don’t worry. She’s perfectly safe. She’s made friends. She’s working on an alternative school newspaper or something. She’s writing a manifesto for it, up in her room. Like mother, like daughter.

Eve: A manifesto? Not like me, I never wrote a manifesto. What kind of manifesto?

Michael: How would I know? It’s not as if she’d show me. She did let me choose a badge though. She’s made badges for herself and for her friends. She very grandly said I could have one.

Eve: Did she? God, you’re lucky. You’re doing something right.

Michael: There was a choice. A badge with the word imagine written on it or a badge with the word afraid.

Eve: Imagine or afraid?

Michael: Imagine or afraid.

Eve: Which did you choose?

Michael: Ah. That’d be telling.

Eve: Very telling.

Michael: Ha ha.

Eve: Give Astrid, give them both, all my love. Tell them I think of them every morning when I wake up and every night before I go to sleep. I picture them in front of me as if they’re here with me.

Michael: Well, they’re not. They’re very definitely here with me.

Eve: I know that.

Michael: I can tell because of the supermarket bills. And me too, though? You think about me too, don’t you?

Eve: Oh, I suppose so. I suppose I think of you occasionally. What will you call it?

Michael: What will I call what?

Eve: Your poem sequence. What’s it called?

Michael: Ah. Ha ha. I’d forgotten about that for a minute. I should speak to you more often. It’s called The Lady Vanishes.

Eve: The Lady Vanishes. That’s good.

Michael: It is good, isn’t it?

Eve: Are they paying you a lot of money?

Michael: Ha ha. Joke.

Eve: No, seriously, how are you for money?

Michael: Well, we’re still holding the fort, but the apaches are definitely on the attack and I don’t know that a sonnet sequence is going to hold them at bay for long.

Eve: So…?

Michael: So, no, I don’t know what we’ll do. I’m trying not to think about it.

Eve: Because I’m nearly out, myself.

Michael: Ah. Does that mean you’ll be coming home?

On the far side of the Grand Canyon was Eve’s mother. She wasn’t in a hospital bed at all. She was young and nonchalant, as if leaning against the sideboard in the kitchen having a quiet think. She waved to Eve and Eve saw that her mother was leaning on a thin layer of formica-covered wood above nothing but air, and that just below her feet, which were dangling in mid air, ravens circled and cawed. On the far side of the Grand Canyon was the man who had been her father. He was standing, operatic, on air, above an open grave 250 miles long, ten miles wide and one mile deep. He was older, bigger, balder; he was wearing a fine suit; he had his arms open to her. He waved too. He waved to her mother. She waved back at him. Then both Eve’s parents, together at last, smiled and waved goodbye like they were on holiday somewhere nice, like they were having the time of their lives and like their special relayed televised message to her had reached its end.

No. On the far side of the Grand Canyon was the north rim. It was shut because of the weather. It was out of season, even though it was the beginning of May. But you could see it by helicopter, if you wanted. All you had to do was buy a ticket, for God’s sake.

Then she’d thought, I should go north and see where he lived, at least. I should at least see where I might have grown up.

She bought her road map with cash. She bought her car on her credit card in Las Vegas. I don’t know if the card’ll be accepted, she told the man in the used-car showroom. The man, in his shirt-sleeves, had taken a liking to her. He winked at her and got out his manual credit card processor. I don’t trust you, lady, he’d said. But that don’t matter. I’m insured.

Now Eve was sitting on the porch of the dark house with her newspaper under her arm. The porch creaked beneath her. Maybe it was rotten. Was this his house? She had no idea. Did it matter? She looked up at the mountains. Out in the dark on the ridge, silhouetted in the moonlight, were all the selves she could have been. They had linked their arms and were doing a kicky Scottish dance. One of them was an American Eve. She had very good skin and had married well. She lived in this house whose porch Eve was on, with several children, all boys, and a husband who was a stud farmer; they owned those beautiful horses, those perfect fields. The Eve next to her was a rougher American Eve, who had grown up and never married anyone and always looked out for herself; she was tanned and healthy and golden and she worked her own farm and owned her own beautiful thoroughbreds. Her hands were lined and strong. She knew how to breed and break a horse. Next to her was Eve now, but Eve as she’d have been if her mother hadn’t died. She was happy. She radiated light. Next to her was the Eve who had stayed with Adam Berenski. She had a blank face. Next to her was the Eve who had never met Adam Berenski. She was unimaginable. Eve had no idea what she was like. Next to her was easier, it was the air hostess Eve had wanted, when she was eight years old, to grow up to be. She was glamorous and exact. Her sixties-style coat was buttoned to the top. Next to her was an Eve just like Eve was now, in reality, but one who buttoned the top button on the coat her daughter Astrid was wearing before she went out in the cold and rain, and felt real, good love as she did, not the kind of love that made you panic but the kind that made you happy.

The Eves stretched all along the black ridge. They waved at the real Eve like her dead parents had, and kicked their heels and danced as if at any point in a life you could simply have changed your mind and chosen another self.

Eve shook her head. She thought of the man in the bodybag whose dead face, made of minuscule dots of print, had been reproduced millions of times and sent all round the world and was, right now, folded under her arm, already outdated. She thought of the smiling girl soldier. She thought of the girl’s own eyes, her erect obscene thumb. They were reproduced in the same kind of ink and in the same kind of tiny dots as the man’s dead eye. The dead weren’t the problem. The dead could look after themselves. Eve was beginning to grieve for the living.

Was there any point in it, sitting outside on the porch of a dark empty house with its rag of a flag hung by its front door? Was it even his house? Say it was; would there be anything that she really wanted in there, or that anybody in the world really needed, if she were to break in? anything more than, say, an old mouldy coffeepot that hadn’t been washed out properly, an old scum-ringed cup in a sink that someone now gone might once possibly have drunk something out of?

What had she ever expected would happen? Did she think that, like in a story made up to make people feel better, she’d approach the house of her father and the house would instantly light up like a giant table-lamp, would suddenly blaze out of its dark and illumine the whole countryside with itself, that its door would open as if by magic and all the rose bushes would bow to her and offer their flowers to her as she came up its garden path? What was happy? What was an ending? She had been refusing real happiness for years and she had been avoiding real endings for just as long, right up to the moment she had opened the front door on her own emptied house, her own cupboards stripped of their doors, her own unpictured walls and unfilled rooms, no trace of her left, nothing to prove that Eve Smart, whoever she was, had ever been there at all.