The Accidental (24 page)

But the thing is, when Astrid remembers that morning in the class, it all takes place inside her head in a kind of strange film with strange colours, everything bright and distorted, like the colours have had their volume turned up to full too.

Also, the astonishing thing is, she doesn’t need her father’s letters any more. They weren’t proof of anything really. It doesn’t matter that they’re gone. In fact it is a relief not to always have to be thinking about them or wondering what the story is or was. Her father could be anything, and anywhere, is what Amber said.

Afraid or imagine.

It is strange to be thinking about Amber as if she is in the past.

But she is.

But it’s not Amber that’s over, Astrid thinks, looking at the photograph of Michael with his hand on Magnus’s shoulder and both of them laughing, her mother smiling like that with her arm round Astrid, Astrid with her arm round her mother.

It’s finished now. That time’s over. I’m warning you.

(Amber’s car in the drive, Amber starting its engine up. Her mother blocking the doorway of the house. The sound of the car reversing on the stones, the sound of the car wheels going off the stones and on to the road, the dwindling sound of the car. Her mother coming away from the door and going back inside. The empty place in the front drive of the house where Amber’s car, moments ago, was.)

7.31 a.m. on the new digital radio alarm, correct to the millisecond.

The dawn is coming up red. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning. Red sky at night means that it will be a sunny day the next day. Red sky in the morning means storms, it is an old folklore way of predicting what is coming. It is something else that is amazing to Astrid, that shepherds are traditionally the people who look after the sheep, lying under trees playing their pan pipes in the summer with the sheep all grazing round them and choosing which of their flock get butchered and which don’t, and at school they sing The Lord’s My Shepherd and the readings are all about how God looks after the little children and the lambs, but only some lambs, only the ones who believe in Him, and anyway people eat lamb all the time and it only takes a few months for lambs to become sheep, and butchered.

Peep for sheep. Michael and her mother being kind, playing games from the front seats of the four-wheel drive.

There were sheep in the fields all round the holiday house. They must have been new sheep, bought in from somewhere else after all the foot and mouth pyres.

When Astrid thinks of the village the weirdest details come into her head like the lamppost next to the field on the road from the house into the village and all the high grasses growing round its base. Why would anyone’s memory want to remember just seeing a lamppost like that?

Astrid doesn’t know.

It is a fact, it is official according to the newspaper, that the world is actually getting darker, that most places are 10 per cent darker than they were for example thirty years ago and some are nearly 30 per cent darker. It is to do with pollution, possibly. Nobody knows. It is like the dawn going backwards, like the dawns on her beginnings tape, but in one very long very slow-motion darkening rewind, the dark coming down by tiny percentages each day in the daylight, so slowly that nobody really notices it.

It is like a curtain coming down in a theatre.

Except that it isn’t the end. How can it be the end of anything? It’s just the beginning. It is the beginning of everything, the beginning of the century and it is definitely Astrid’s century, the twenty-first century, and here she is, here she comes, hurtling through the air into it with a responsibility to heatseek all the disgustingness and the insanity, Asterid Smart the Smart Asteroid hurtling towards the earth getting closer and closer to the moment of impact and wherever her mother is in the world, she could wake up and look out of her hotel room window like Astrid is looking out of her window right now and see something coming down out of the sky like preternatural rain. She will look out of her window and she will maybe see the moment before it smashes a great big hole 10 km wide in front of her and blows all the doorknobs off the doors, blows all the furniture and stuff etc. out of her room and all the rooms and houses anywhere near it, it could come down anywhere, and it will have consequences everywhere, not just America or England, and in that moment her mother will think to herself that what she’s doing is stupid, that all along she should have been watching out, and all along she should have been somewhere else, not there.

Hurtling sounds like a little hurt being, like earthling, like something aliens from another planet would land on earth and call human beings who have been a little bit hurt.

Take me to your leader, hurtling.

The sky is red, a storm is coming and all the cute chipmunks in the world are potential firebombs. But for now Big Ben is still standing, like a tower that tells what time it is, and so are the Houses of Parliament, and so is Tate Modern, and the Eye, and the river is just the same old grey water with the sky dawning red above it, red all over the city of London, red through the window of Astrid’s room

the end result = Magnus has been invited to return to school when the new term starts on the 5th. The letters saying so came yesterday. They call what happened ‘the matter’. None of the letters mentions her name or specifies what ‘the matter’ is. One letter came addressed to Eve and Michael and one came addressed to Magnus himself. The one Michael opened said almost exactly the same thing as Magnus’s. We ask your respectfulness and confidentiality in the matter. We are glad to inform you. The matter officially closed.

The end result = they’ve got away with it.

The end result = nobody really wants to know.

It is a Wednesday today. It is the last day of the year. It is getting dark out there already and it’s only lunchtime. Magnus had been wandering about in the eye-hurting light of the shopping precinct. Now he is in the auditorium and the lights have gone down and the adverts are over and the film is playing. Up on the screen the actor pretending to be the Prime Minister has pretended to fall in love with the actress pretending to be the tea-girl. This film had been just about to start, so he had bought a ticket. It is about Christmas. It is full of shiny-looking people and houses, like watching a very long building society advert, or an advert for something, Magnus can’t work out exactly what. Watching it is like being hungry and having nothing to eat except, in fact, the kind of food sold in cinemas. The air in this cinema smells of cinema food, hot dogs and popcorn. Of course it does. Everyone with any brain knows they pump it in on purpose to make you buy food at the kiosk. It works. Most of the people round Magnus are putting food into their mouths without taking their eyes off the screen.

The escalators will still be going round and round in their grooves outside. Magnus had noticed it and then he had been unable not to notice it. He had stopped to watch the people coming down the down escalator and to watch how each step disappeared so neatly into the groove at the base of it as if folding into nothing as the people stepped off it and away into their futures, and the next step after it doing the same, and the next. One step had a piece of sticker or paper of some sort stuck into the metal at the front of it. It made the step more noticeable than the other unmarked steps. He watched for this step to come round a few times and for it to disappear. He went up on the up escalator and watched the steps ahead of him vanishing into the crack in the top of the machine and how the step he was on did the same. He was watching this so hard that the escalator threw him off it into the people ahead of him and then he was off balance so the people coming behind him stumbled into him too.

Sorry, Magnus said.

He was. He was really sorry.

He waited at the top of the down escalator until he saw the step with the sticker on it come round again. It was the label off a bottle of water, tattered with going round and round the treadmill system under people’s feet. But then he had to wait for it to come round again because an old man stood on it first. When it came round again he stood on it and rode it down to the floor below. He rode the up escalator again, to do this again. But at the top of the down escalator he began to think what he was doing was a bit mad, so when he turned and saw that the floor he was on was the one with the cinema, and a film was literally about to start, he bought a ticket.

Maybe it is a really good film and because he is being Lobotomic Escalator Boy he can’t actually tell whether it is good or not.

The end result = he is supposed to be relieved. Michael waved his and Eve’s letter in the air at Magnus. It’s okay, he said. It’s over. Simple as abc. I’ll phone your mother, tell her the happy ending.

The escalators carry on going round and round in their fixed direction circuit, folding mechanically into and out of themselves and carrying people on them up or down until the day is over and the precinct shuts for the night and they switch the power off until next morning when they switch the electrics back on and it all starts again. When the precinct is shut this cinema will be dark and empty, all its seats empty in their rows and the place dark as a cave, dark as the inside of a stone on the moon, dark as the inside of a human brain inside a head.

You can start to forget it now, Michael said holding the letter. You can let it go.

Simple as abc, 123. He can let it go, now that the old year is ending and the new year is beginning, because it will belong to that old year and new things will happen in this new year. He can let it go, as if it is a toy balloon filled with helium and he has been holding on to it by a piece of string, with the kind of stubbornness a small child has, and now he can open his hand and it’ll float off upwards into the sky and he can watch it getting smaller and smaller, further and further away, until he can hardly make it out any more. He can forget it. A simple act of subtraction. Him minus it. He can have his memory erased by a special laser pen-torch, like in Men in Black. Magnus likes Men in Black. He likes all kinds and genres of cinema, usually. At least, he did, before, when he knew what it was he was, and what it was he liked. He argued in the class debate about art, about how cinema was a greatly misunderstood art form and Citizen Kane was probably the greatest film ever made because of the genius way it was shot and framed from the different angles (though not his personal all-time-favourite, which was Bladerunner the Director’s Cut). This film he is watching now is something to do with the British film industry. Another actor on the screen has just pretended to fall in love with an actress pretending to be his Portuguese cleaning lady because he has seen her take her clothes off to dive into a lake and seen her afterwards all tousled up and with wet hair, much prettier than she was the first time he saw her. Magnus looks at the edges of the screen, where the edge of light of the film meets the blackness. He wonders why the thing films are shown on is called a screen. What is it in front of?

Behind this one is probably just a blank brick wall.

He thinks about the way that human eyes take the outside world and flash it back, like an upside-down film, on to the retinal screen at the backs of the eyes, then the brain instantaneously turns it the right way up.

There are two girls a few seats along from him and they seem to be quite engrossed in it, quite enjoying it. It is a girls’ film, after all, so Magnus shouldn’t have high expectations of it or even expect it to interest him. It is the genre of film that you are meant to take a girl to.

He imagines Astrid here next to him watching this film. Astrid wouldn’t just think it was shit, she would say it was. She would exclaim with boredom at it and people would turn their heads and tell her to be quiet. She isn’t old enough yet to have to pretend to like stuff like this. He smiles in the dark. Just before Christmas she set fire to the pile of leaves against the side of the shed and the whole shed went up in flames. It made Michael react; he came, almost running, down the garden with a fire extinguisher. Then he stood in the garden with them, laughing at the blackened shed. Michael’s all right. Then they all sat in the kitchen together for a while round the table and had coffee, something they’d never done before, round this particular table anyway. The table is a different shape from the old table, circular, not rectangular. It made a difference that night, that the table was a circle. Magnus wonders if Eve will like the new table when she gets home. Astrid is still refusing to speak to Eve when she calls. She even refused to speak to Eve when she phoned on Christmas day. Magnus has, however, more than once, come into the kitchen and caught Astrid flicking through the (now quite thick) wedge of postcards.

I thought you weren’t reading those on principle, Magnus said the second time.

I’m not reading them, Astrid said. I had to take them off the top of the fridge to open its door to get the milk out and they happened to be in my hand and I happened to look down at them, that’s all. It’s not the same thing as reading them.

The end result letters came yesterday morning. Yesterday afternoon Astrid was watching a programme called Killer Hornets from Hell. Magnus sat down beside her on the sofa and she told him how the killer hornets, which are ten times the length of the bees somewhere in South America, send their scouts out ahead to track down beehives then report back. Then hornets mob the hive, kill the bees and eat the honey. But then some bees got clever and worked out that these hornets die at a certain temperature, 116 degrees. But bees also die at a certain temperature. 118 degrees. So the next time a hornet scout was spotted by the bees, the bees somehow knew to surround the scout and vibrate together as a unified bee being until they reached–get this–exactly 117 degrees. Fucking brilliant, Astrid said.

Astrid, would you just call me a wankstain? Magnus said.

What? Astrid said.

Would you mind just calling me it? Magnus said.

You’re a wankstain, Astrid said.