The Accidental Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements and Thanks

  My mother began...

  The Beginning

  The Middle

  The End

  Ali Smith: The Accidental

  By the Same Author

  Acclaim for Ali Smith’s: The Accidental

  Copyright

  for

  Philippa Reed

  high hopes

  Inuk Hoff Hansen

  far away so close

  Sarah Wood

  the wizard of us

  Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.

  John Berger

  Shallow uniformity is not an accident but a consequence of what Marxists optimistically call late capitalism.

  Nick Cohen

  The whole history dwindled soon into a matter of little importance but to Emma and her nephews:–in her imagination it maintained its ground, and Henry and John were still asking every day for the story of Harriet and the gipsies, and still tenaciously setting her right if she varied in the slightest particular from the original recital.

  Jane Austen

  Many are the things that man Seeing must understand. Not seeing, how shall he know What lies in the hand Of time to come?

  Sophocles

  My artistry is a bit austere.

  Charles Chaplin

  acknowledgements and thanks

  Thanks to Carla Wakefield for the original accidental.

  Thank you, Charlie, Bridget, Kate, Woodrow, Xandra, Becky, Donald, Daphne and Stephen.

  Thank you, Andrew and Michal, and Simon and Juliette.

  Thank you, Kasia.

  Thank you, Sarah.

  My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town’s only cinema. One short flight of stairs away, up behind the balding red velvet of the Balcony curtain, the usherette was yawning, dandling her off torch, leaning on her elbow above the rustlings and tonguings of the back row and picking at the wood of the partition, flicking little splinters of it at the small-town heads in the dark. On the screen above them the film was Poor Cow, with Terence Stamp, an actor of such numinousness that my mother, young, chic, slender and imperious, and watching the film for the third time that week, had stood up, letting her seat thud up behind her, pushed past the legs of the people in her row and headed up the grubby aisle to the exit, through the curtain and out into the light.

  The café was empty except for the boy putting chairs on tables. We’re just shutting, he told her. My mother, still blinking from the dark, picked her way down the scuffed red stairs. She took the chair he was holding and put it, still upside down, down on the ground. She stepped out of her shoes. She unbuttoned her coat.

  Behind the till the half-submerged oranges in the orange juice machine went round and round on their spikes; the dregs at the bottom of the tank rose and settled, rose and settled. The chairs on the tables stuck their legs into the air; the scatters of cake crumbs underneath waited passive in the carpet for the vacuum cleaner nozzle. Down the grand main stairs leading out on to the street, where my mother would go in a few minutes’ time with her nylons rolled in a warm ball in her coat pocket, swinging her shoes in her hand by their strappy backs, Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer smiled out from behind their frames exactly like they’d still be smiling, faded and glamorous, a decade out of date, at the blaze of light that blackened the staircase five years later when the junior projectionist (cheated out of a job he believed was his; the management had hired a new projectionist from the city when the old projectionist died) gutted the building with a tin of creosote and the dropped end of his cigarette.

  The expensive Balcony seats, where smoking was forbidden? Up in smoke. The Stalls with their deep-seated leathery smell? Gone forever. The velvet drapes, the glass-bowl chandelier? Blowaway ash, a sprinkling of tiny broken shards of light on the surface of local history. Next day’s newspapers were adamant, an accident. The man who owned the cinema claimed the insurance and sold the demolished site to a cash and carry warehouse called, rather unimaginatively, Mackay’s Cash and Carry.

  But that night back in 1968 in the nearly closed café the voices were still booming modern love behind the walls. The music was still soaring out of nowhere. Just before the part where the filth get Terence Stamp and put him where he belongs she had fastened her heels behind his back and my father, surprised, had slipped and grunted into her, presenting her with literally millions of possibilities, of which she chose only one.

  Hello.

  I am Alhambra, named for the place of my conception. Believe me. Everything is meant.

  From my mother: grace under pressure; the uses of mystery; how to get what I want. From my father: how to disappear, how to not exist.

  The beginning

  of things–when is it exactly? Astrid Smart wants to know. (Astrid Smart. Astrid Berenski. Astrid Smart. Astrid Berenski.) 5.04 a.m. on the substandard clock radio. Because why do people always say the day starts now? Really it starts in the middle of the night at a fraction of a second past midnight. But it’s not supposed to have begun until the dawn, really the dark is still last night and it isn’t morning till the light, though actually it was morning as soon as it was even a fraction of a second past twelve i.e. that experiment where you divide something down and down like the distance between the ground and a ball that’s been bounced on it so that it can be proved, Magnus says, that the ball never actually touches the ground. Which is junk because of course it touches the ground, otherwise how would it bounce, it wouldn’t have anything to bounce off, but it can actually be proved by science that it doesn’t.

  Astrid is taping dawns. There is nothing else to do here. The village is a dump. Post office, vandalized Indian restaurant, chip shop, little shop place that’s never open, place for ducks to cross the road. Ducks actually have their own roadsign! There is a sofa warehouse called Sofa So Good. It is dismal. There is a church. The church has its own roadsign too. Nothing happens here except a church and some ducks, and this house is an ultimate dump. It is substandard. Nothing is going to happen here all substandard summer.

  She now has nine dawns one after the other on the mini dv tape in her Sony digital. Thursday 10 July 2003, Friday 11 July 2003, Saturday 12, Sunday 13, Monday 14, Tuesday 15, Wednesday 16, Thursday 17 and today Friday 18. But it is hard to know what moment exactly dawn is. All there is when you look at it on the camera screen is the view of outside getting more visible. So does this mean that the beginning is something to do with being able to see? That the day begins as soon as you wake up and open your eyes? So when Magnus finally wakes up in the afternoon and they can hear him moving about in the room that’s his in this dump of a substandard house, does that mean the day is still beginning? Is the beginning different for everyone? Or do beginnings just keep stretching on forwards and forwards all day? Or maybe it is back and back they stretch. Because every time you open your eyes there was a time before that when you closed them then a different time before that when you opened them, all the way back, through all the sleeping and the waking and the ordinary things like blinking, to the first time you ever open your eyes, which is probably round about the moment you are born.

  Astrid kicks her trainers off on to the floor. She slides back across the horrible bed. Or possibly the beginning is even further back than that, when you are in the womb or whatever it’s called. Possibly the real beginning is when you are just forming into a person and for the first time the soft stuff that makes your eyes is actually made, formed, inside the hard stuff that becomes your head i.e. your s
kull.

  She fingers the curve of bone above her left eye. Eyes fit the space they are in, exactly like they were made for each other, the space and the eye. Like the play she saw with the man in it whose eyes were gouged out, the people on the stage turned him so the audience couldn’t see, then they gouged out his eyes then whirled the chair round and he had his hands up at his face and he took them away, his hands were full of red stuff, it was all round his eye sockets. It was insane. It was jelly or something similar. It was his daughters who did it or his sons. It was one of Michael’s tragedies. It was quite good though. Yes, exactly, because at a theatre the curtain goes up and you know it’s the beginning because, obviously, the curtain’s gone up. But the way the lights go down, the audience goes quiet, and right after the curtain goes up, then the air, if you’re sitting near the stage, you can actually smell a different other air with bits of dust and stuff in it moving. Like when Michael and her mother made her go to the other tragedy that was completely insane about the woman who loses it and kills her children, but before she does she sends them, two boys, really small boys, off the stage, they actually come down into the audience and walk through it, the mother has given them poisoned clothes etc. to give to the princess their father is marrying instead of her and they go to a house or a palace somewhere behind the audience, this doesn’t happen on the stage, it doesn’t happen anywhere except in the story i.e. in your head but even though you know it doesn’t, you know it’s just a play, even so, somewhere behind you the princess is still putting on the poisoned things and dying a horrible death. Her eyes melt in their sockets and she comes out in a rash like if terrorists dropped spores on the Tube. Her lungs melt and

  Astrid yawns. She is hungry.

  She is starving, actually.

  It is literally hours till anything like breakfast even if she wanted to eat anything in this unhygienic dump.

  She could go back to sleep. But typical and ironic, she is completely awake. It is completely light outside now; you can see for miles. Except there is nothing to see here; trees and fields and that kind of thing.

  5.16 a.m. on the substandard clock radio.

  She is really awake.

  She could get up and go and film the vandalism. She is definitely going to do it today. She will go to the restaurant later and ask the Indian man if it is okay to. Or maybe she will just film it without him knowing in case he says no. If she went right now there would be nobody there and she could just do it. If anybody happened to be up and around at this time of the morning (nobody will, there is nobody awake for miles but her, but if there were, say there were) they would just think oh, look, there is a twelve-year-old girl playing with a dv camera. They would probably notice what a good model the camera is, that’s if they knew anything about cameras. She would tell them if they asked that she is a visitor for the summer (true) filming the scenery (true) or that it is for a school project (could be true) about different buildings and their uses (quite good). And then maybe there will be vital evidence on her mini dv tape when she gets home and at some point in the investigation into the vandalism someone in authority will remember and say oh that twelve-year-old girl was there with a camera, maybe she recorded something really what is the word crucial to our enquiries, and they will come and knock on the door, but what if they aren’t still here for the summer, what if they’ve already gone home, some investigations take quite a long time, well then the authorities will trace her back home with their computers by looking up Michael’s name or by asking the people who own this substandard house and, because of her, things will finally be put right and a mystery like who is responsible for the vandalism at the Curry Palace will actually be solved.

  This is a quintessential place. Her mother keeps saying so, she says it every evening. There don’t seem to be many other people here on holiday regardless of how quintessential it is, maybe because it’s not actually holiday time yet, officially. People in the village do a lot of staring even when Astrid isn’t doing anything, is just walking about. Even when she isn’t using her camera. But it is nice weather. She is lucky not to be at school. The sun has come out on most of the dawns she has recorded. This is what a good summer is like. In the past, before she was born, the summers were better, they were perpetual beautiful summers from May to October in the past apparently. The past is a different century. She herself will probably be the one to live longest into the new century out of all the people here in this house right now, her mother, Magnus, herself, Michael. They are all more part of the old century than she is. But then again her whole life, mostly, was lived in the old century. But then again their whole lives were too, and percentage-wise she has already lived 25 per cent of hers in the new (if you start at 2001 and allow for the next six months of this year now to have already happened). She herself is 25 per cent new, 75 per cent old. Magnus has lived three out of seventeen in it so comes out at. Astrid works it out. Magnus is 17ish per cent new, 83 per cent old. She is 8 per cent more in the new than Magnus. Her mother and Michael are way out there on a much much more significantly small percentage in the new, a much much more significantly large percentage in the old. She will work it out later. She can’t be bothered now.

  She shifts on the substandard bed. The substandard bed creaks loudly. After the creak she can hear the silence in the rest of the house. They are all asleep. Nobody knows she is awake. Nobody is any the wiser. Any the wiser sounds like a character from ancient history. Astrid in the year 1003 BC (Before Celebrity) goes to the woods where Any the Wiser, who is really royalty and a king but who has unexpectedly chosen to be a Nobody and to live the simple life, lives in a hut, no, a cave, and answers the questions that the people of the commonweal come for miles around to ask him (most probably a him since if it was a her she’d have to be in a convent or burnt). People who want to know answers to things have to knock on the door of the cave, well, the rock outside, she picks up a rock and knocks it against another rock, this lets Any the Wiser know that someone is waiting. I brought an offering, Astrid calls into the dark of the cave. She has brought an offering of croissants. You probably can’t get good croissants in the woods, like you can’t get them out here. Both Michael and her mother have been complaining about no croissants since they got to this substandard village which is typical and ironic since they’re the ones who wanted to come here and have made her and Magnus come and made her even more weird and unlike everybody is supposed to be than she already is, though with any luck by the time school starts again in September Lorna Rose and Zelda Howe and Rebecca Callow will have forgotten about her being taken out of school early two months before.

  Astrid concentrates them out of her head. She is at the door of a cave. She is carrying croissants. Any the Wiser is delighted. He nods at Astrid to come forward.

  He glints at her through the darkness of the cave; he is old and wise; he has a fatherly look in his eye. Answer my question, oh revered sage and oracle, Astrid begins.

  But that’s all she can say because she doesn’t have a question. She doesn’t know what to ask him about, or for. She can’t think of a question, not one she’s allowed to say inside herself in actual words to herself, never mind out loud to a complete stranger, even a stranger she’s made up.

  (Astrid Smart. Astrid Berenski.)

  She sits up. She picks up her camera, turns it over in her hand. She shuts its screen away, ejects the beginnings tape, slides it into its little case and puts it on the table. She clips the non-beginnings tape into the camera instead. She lies on her back then shifts over on to her front. By the end of their time here she will have sixty-one beginnings, depending on if they go home on the Friday, the Saturday or the Sunday. Sixty-one minus nine, i.e. still at least fifty-two more to go. Astrid sighs. Her sigh sounds too loud. There is no noise of traffic here. It is probably the fact that there is no noise that is keeping her so awake. She is completely awake. In a minute she will go and film the vandalism. She closes her eyes. She is on the inside of a hazelnut; she fits
against the shell perfectly, as if she was born in it. Her head has it as a helmet. It fits the curve of her knees. It is completely enclosed. It is a complete room. It is completely safe. Nobody else can get inside it. Then she worries about what she will do about breathing, since the nut is completely sealed. She begins to worry about how she is doing any breathing now. There is obviously a finite amount of air, if any, inside a hazelnut. Then she begins to worry that Lorna Rose and Zelda Howe and Rebecca, if they were ever to find out she had ever had a thought like that she was inside a hazelnut, would think she was even more laughable and a mental case. Lorna Rose and Zelda Howe are playing a game of tennis on a public court in a park. Astrid walks past with Rebecca. Rebecca and Astrid are still friends. Lorna Rose runs across to the fence and tells Astrid and Rebecca they should come and play on the court next to the one she and Zelda Howe are playing on, and then the winners of each game will play each other to find who out of the four of them is the best. Astrid looks at the court she and Rebecca are supposed to play on. Its surface is all pieces of broken glass. She is about to say no but Rebecca says yes. But look at the glass, Astrid says because it is insane. Coward, Zelda Howe says. We knew you wouldn’t do it. They have put the broken glass there on purpose as a test. If you want to play on broken glass you’re an idiot, Astrid tells Rebecca. Rebecca goes into the court and crunches about on the broken glass. A man comes. He is one of their fathers. She is going to tell him about the glass but before she can he calls everyone except her over to the fence and breaks a Cadburys fruit and nut bar into four equal pieces. He gives a piece to each of them. She looks to see if he’s eating the fourth piece himself but she can’t make out his face, he is too far away. There is something in her hand. It is her camera. If she can get this on film she will be able to show someone everything that’s happening. But she can’t lift the camera. It is too heavy. Her arm won’t work. A doorbell rings, miles away. It is at home. There is no one at home but her. The hall is as big and empty as a desert. Astrid runs along it to answer the door. The hall seems never to end. When she does get to the door she is doubled over, she has run out of breath and she is frightened that whoever is behind it will have gone by now because she took so long. She opens it. A man is standing there. He has no face. He has no nose, no eyes, nothing, just blank skin. Astrid is terrified. Her mother will be furious with her. It is her fault he is here. You can’t come in, she tries to tell him, but she has no breath. We’re not here, she breathes. We’re on holiday. Go away. She tries to shut the door. A mouth appears in the skin and a great noise roars out of it like she is standing too close to an aeroplane. It forces the door back. She opens her eyes, rolls straight off the bed on to her feet.