The Accidental Read online

  She is on holiday in Norfolk. The substandard clock radio says 10.27 a.m. The noise is Katrina the Cleaner thumping the hoover against the skirting boards and the bedroom doors.

  Her hand is asleep. It is still hooked through the handstrap of the camera. She unhooks it and shakes it to get the blood back into it.

  She puts her feet on top of her trainers and slides them across the substandard carpet. It has had the bare naked feet of who knows how many hundreds of dead or old people on it.

  When she looks in the mirror above the sink she sees the imprint of her own thumb below her cheekbone where she slept on her hand ! ! She is like the kind of pottery things her mother buys that have been made by real people (not factories), actual artisans working in hot countries who leave the actual marks of their hands in it as their signature i.e. she has signed herself in her sleep!

  She presses her thumb into the indentation it made. It fits perfectly.

  She flicks water over her face and dries it on the sleeve of her t-shirt rather than the horrible towel. She pulls her trainers on properly. She picks up the camera again and lifts the latch on the door.

  There are two ways to watch what you’re filming: 1. on the little screen and 2. through the viewer. Real filmmakers always use the viewer though it is harder to see with it. She puts her eye to the viewer and records her hand making the latch go up then down. In a hundred years’ time these latches may not exist any more and this film will be proof that they did and will act as evidence for people who need to know in the future how latches like this one worked.

  The battery sign is flashing. The battery is low. There is enough power to record Katrina the Cleaner gouging with the hoover tube at the inside of each stair. Katrina is something to do with the house. She comes with the package. Her mother and Michael have a joke they whisper when she’s round a corner out of earshot, or even when she’s not in the house and wouldn’t hear even if they shouted it, Katrina the Cleaner in her Ford Cortina. The Ford Cortina is a car from the 1970s; it is probably an oik car, though Astrid doesn’t get the joke; Katrina doesn’t actually seem to have a car; she carries the cleaning stuff along the road to the house from her own house in the village then carries it back again when she’s finished. They always act so juvenile as if they are being really the worst they can be, saying something really risky. Personally Astrid is above such things. People are just different from other people, is what she thinks. It is obvious. Some people are naturally not as suited to living the same way as other people, so they make less money and live a different, less good kind of life.

  There isn’t much light on the stairs. It will be quite an interesting effect. She watches the top of Katrina’s head through the viewer. She films her cleaning the stair. Then she films her as she moves down and cleans the next.

  Katrina the Cleaner shifts to one side, not looking up, to let Astrid pass.

  Excuse me, Katrina, Astrid shouts politely. Can I just ask you something?

  Katrina the Cleaner bends away from Astrid and switches the hoover off. She doesn’t look up.

  Can I just ask you how old you are? Astrid says. It’s for my local researches and archive. (This sounds good. Astrid tries to memorize it so she can use it to the Indian man at the Curry Palace.)

  Katrina the Cleaner says something downwards. It sounds like thirty-one. She definitely looks that old. She has switched the hoover back on again. Thirty-one is tricky. Astrid rounds it down. 10 per cent new, 90 per cent old. She films all the way round Katrina then films her own feet going down the rest of the stairs.

  This footage will come straight after the dead thing she taped on the road when she was walking back from the village last night. It was a bit like a rabbit but it wasn’t a rabbit. It was bigger than a rabbit. It had small ears and smaller back legs; it had been mangled by cars; its fur was matted with mud and blood. Four or five crows rose off it when she went towards it; they had been pulling scraps off it. She had found a stick on the verge and poked it with it. Then she had filmed it. At some point she is going to leave the camera on the table in the substandard lounge at exactly the right place on the tape and Michael will definitely pickit up and look at what’s on it, he is bound to, and he is such a loser he is really squeamish about things like that if they are happening in real life and not like on a stage or whatever.

  She stops, stands in the hall. The dead thing. What if it was alive but unconscious and she had poked it that hard and it wasn’t dead at all, it could still feel her poking it and only seemed dead because it was in a coma?

  Well but maybe it would be okay because maybe if it was in a coma it wouldn’t have felt it so much as it would have if it had been awake. In the four-wheel drive on the way here her mother and Michael did their usual Peep for Sheep game where Michael hits the horn whenever they pass sheep and they did their usual clenched fists in the air that they do whenever the car passes roadkill. It is supposed to honour the spirit of the dead thing. It is juvenile. Astrid liked it when she used to be upset by the dead things. But now she is twelve and they are just dead things for God’s sake.

  It is very unlikely that it felt anything when she poked it.

  She poked it for her researches and archive.

  Astrid puts her eye back behind the camera. Also it is important to look closely at things, especially difficult things. Astrid’s mother is always saying so. Astrid goes through the dark hall and into the front room. But the camera viewer floods with light so bright that she can’t see. She has to look away from it quick.

  She blinks. It was so bright it was almost sore.

  There is the shape of someone on the sofa by the window. Because of the light from the window behind the person, and because of the flash of light still filling her own eye with reds and blacks, the face is a blur of light and dark. Astrid looks down at the carpet until her sight comes back. She can see bare feet.

  It will be someone to do with the house, an oik from the village. It will be one of Michael’s students. Astrid blinks again and turns her back. She ignores that side of the room. She switches off her camera very attentively and collects the charger and the other battery from behind the horrible old paperbacks in the bookcase thing. She carries them through to the kitchen.

  Michael is peeling a pear on to a plate. The plate has been used hundreds of times by who knows how many people who have been in this house. He is peeling the pear with a knife which has a wooden handle. The wood of that handle has all the dirty washing-up water of all the times it has ever been washed by the hundreds of dead old people who lived here or holidayed here seeped into it.

  The toaster also has old other people’s crumbs in it. Astrid puts her camera stuff down by the chair, unrolls some kitchen foil and breaks a piece of bread off the uncut end of the loaf. She covers the substandard grillpan with the foil and lays the bread under the grill, which she lights. Then she sits on the chair by the door, swinging her legs.

  Who’s the person in the front room? she asks Michael who is cutting the pear into neat white slices.

  Something to do with your mother, Michael says. Her car broke down.

  He takes the plate with the pear on it and goes through to the front, humming a tune. He is humming that Beyoncé song. He thinks he is so now, i.e. he is completely embarrassing.

  Astrid knocks her hand against the side of the chair to see if it will hurt. It does, but not very much. She knocks it again, harder. It hurts more. Of course science can prove, typical and ironic, that her hand is not actually hitting the chair by dividing down the distance smaller and smaller. She hits it again. Ow.

  She waits for the bread to singe a bit.

  She can hear Michael in the front room talking in a loud voice. She opens the bin. The pear skin is coiled on the top of the remains of last night’s dinner. Its insides are bright white. She picks it out. He has peeled it in one complete piece. She holds it in her hand so that it fits back together again in the shape it took before he peeled it. The flap with the stick
attached sits on top like a hat. It is an empty pear!

  She lets the skin drop back into the bin, lets the lid fall. She washes her hands at the sink. Michael comes back through. She can see the smile he had on for the person in the front room fading as he does.

  That’s burning, Astrid, he says.

  I know, she says.

  He takes the grillpan out, opens the bin and throws in the toast, black side up, on top of the pear peel.

  If you’d cut it neatly in the first place, he says, it wouldn’t have caught like that.

  I like it burnt, she says under her breath.

  He cuts another couple of slices off the loaf and drops them in the toaster.

  No thanks, Astrid says.

  Michael doesn’t hear. He is such a wankstain. He is doing something with a cafetiere. His second name is stuck on the end of her first name and she has no say about it at all. She picks up her camera stuff and goes through to the hall. But she has no idea where the plug sockets are in the hall of this substandard house. She can’t see one. She knows where the sockets are in the front room and in the lounge part of the front room. Or she could go back upstairs, but typical and ironic it sounds like Katrina and the hoover are in her bedroom now. It doesn’t actually make much hygienic difference just vacuuming over a surface. Old people have licked the furniture with their dead tongues and ingrained the banister all the way up the stairs with skin flakes off their old hands.

  She goes back through into the lounge. The plugs by the tv are all being used. If she unplugs one she will probably be in trouble for something.

  The sound of vacuuming stops suddenly. The French windows are open. The room fills with the sound of the garden i.e. birds etc. She crosses back into the front bit of the room and unplugs a standard lamp. She plugs the charger in and stands up.

  In the yellow rectangle of sunlight coming through the high front window the person is lying stretched out on the sofa. Her bare feet are up on it like she lives here. Her eyes are closed. She is actually asleep.

  Astrid comes closer to the sofa.

  She is kind of a woman but more like a girl. Her hair is supposed to be blonde but Astrid can see much deeper dark in her hair at the roots of her parting. Her feet are up on the cushions. The soles of them are quite dirty.

  This close up she is younger than Astrid’s mother, younger maybe than Katrina, but definitely too old to be a girl. She isn’t wearing any make-up. It is weird. Her underarms aren’t shaved. There is hair there, quite a lot. Her shins and thighs and the backs of them are also not shaved. It is unbelievable. They are sheened with actual hairs. The hairs are like hundreds of little threads coming straight out of the skin.

  Less than a foot away from Astrid’s face the girl, the woman, whatever, has opened one eye and is looking straight at her with it.

  Astrid jumps back. There is a plate on the floor by the sofa. She picks it up as if Michael has sent her through for it. Carrying the plate ahead of her she marches across the room and straight out through the French windows into the garden and round the corner.

  She is out of sight of the house before she stops. Her breath is high and funny. It is weird to look at someone. It is weird when they look back at you. It is really weird to be caught looking.

  The plate is sticky with something. Astrid sucks a finger. It tastes sweet. She puts the plate down on the grass near the rockery. She dips her hand into a watering can to get rid of the stickiness. Then she wonders if it was water in the watering can. It might have been insecticide or weedkiller. She brings her hand up to her nose but it doesn’t smell chemical. She puts her tongue out and tastes it. It doesn’t taste of anything.

  She goes down the garden to the summerhouse. The summerhouse is just a big shed though it was advertised as a summerhouse; her mother and Michael have been complaining about it since they got here, since one of the main reasons for coming to this boring nowhere is so her mother can work in a summerhouse all summer like some writer from the past used to. She can hear her mother inside it from as far back as here. She is very loud, even on a laptop keyboard. She is writing and researching about people who died last century again. She types with two fingers incredibly hard like she is angry, though she generally isn’t, it just sounds like it.

  Astrid stands outside, by the door on which there is to be no knocking except in an emergency. She stands in this garden with all its old trees and bushes and all the fields and woods that go on and on beyond the house. She is not being disturbing in any way. Compared to those trees round the summerhouse she is the kind of meaningless tree that gets planted in the grassy areas of the car parks of supermarkets.

  The typing noise has stopped.

  What? her mother shouts in the summerhouse.

  Astrid takes a couple of steps back.

  I can hear you, her mother shouts. What?

  Nothing, Astrid says. I was just standing.

  Her mother sighs. Astrid hears the chair grind back. The door opens. Her mother comes out into the sunlight. She squints her eyes, steps back into the doorway and lights a cigarette.

  There, she says, and breathes out. Now. What?

  I didn’t want anything, Astrid says. I was just here.

  Her mother sighs again. A bird sings somewhere above them.

  Did you see that thing that happened to the Indian restaurant yet? Astrid says.

  Her mother shakes her head. Astrid, I can’t think about anything else just now, she says.

  She is always having to think about dead people from sixty years ago. They take up her whole mind when she is writing about them. Personally Astrid thinks there would be a lot more usefulness in finding out about things that were happening now rather than people who died i.e. more than half a century ago.

  When I woke up I had like a thumbprint here where I slept on my thumb, Astrid says. It was amazing.

  Mm, her mother says not looking at Astrid, who has her thumb on the place in her face where the imprint was.

  Like the blue pottery at home, Astrid says. You know how it’s got the thumbprint in it from the artisan who made it.

  Her mother doesn’t say anything. The bird is still singing, the same three notes over and over.

  It’s a really nice day, isn’t it? Astrid says.

  Mm, her mother says.

  This is how summers used to be, isn’t it, before I was born? Astrid says.

  Mm, her mother says.

  Like with days like this going on for months, like all the way from May to October some summers, i.e. like summers were perpetual in the past? Astrid says.

  Her mother doesn’t notice. She doesn’t react at all. She doesn’t even say Astrid stop saying i.e. like she usually says. She leans on the doorframe and carries on smoking. Astrid feels her own face redden. Cigarettes are completely insane. They are harmful. They smell terrible. They typically cause all sorts of diseases and not just to the person smoking them.

  She kicks at the tall grass round the wall of the summerhouse. She knows better than to say out loud the thing about not smoking. It is a thing you can only say at certain times.

  Who’s the person? she says instead.

  What person? her mother says.

  In the house, Astrid says.

  No idea, her mother says. Is Michael still here?

  Uh huh, Astrid says.

  Is Magnus up? her mother says.

  Don’t think so, Astrid says.

  Remember, if you go anywhere this afternoon take your mobile, her mother says.

  Uh huh, Astrid says. Her mobile, switched off, is in the bottom of one of the litter bins at school, at least that’s where she left it three weeks ago. If her mother and Michael knew this they would literally have kittens; they are still paying rental. Her mother thinks she is always safe carrying it, because of being able to call, obviously, but also because people can always be geographically pinpointed by the police by their mobile phones if they go missing. THINK UR SMART ASTRID SMART. U R A LOSER. UR NEW NAME = ARS-TIT. FACE LIKE COW
S ARS 3 HA HA U R A LESBIAN U R WEIRDO. It is dangerous, to bully. A girl died last term at Magnus’s school because of internet bullying. A letter came from Magnus’s school about it. You are supposed to tell people if you are being it. But that was at Magnus’s school. At some point soon Astrid will tell her mother that her mobile phone has been stolen.

  Have you eaten something? her mother is saying.

  I had some toast, Astrid says.

  Don’t do that, Astrid, her mother says.

  Astrid doesn’t know what it is she’s supposed to not do.

  What? she says.

  Kick like that, her mother says.

  She stops kicking. She stands with her arms out from her sides. She looks at her mother. Astrid is personally never going to be a size fourteen. It is gross. Her mother is gently tapping the end of the half-smoked cigarette on the frame of the door. When the cigarette has gone out she scrapes with her foot at the ash that fell, puts the half-cigarette back into the packet, goes inside the summerhouse again and shuts the door.