Accidents in the Home

by Tessa Hadley

  * * *

  ONCE, TOBY found an ax.

  It was when he was about twelve; he was playing one evening with a gang of other boys in a grassed-over area with benches and young trees near his home. They were not allowed to play football there but they did, until late, until it was too dim to see the heaps of their coats used as goalposts, and their shouts bounced eerily against a sky slipping higher and higher away from them behind the dark.

  Toby went to fetch the ball from behind some bushes and found a small cairn of pale stones, each about hand-sized, neatly built in a concealed place between the bushes and a wall. The pile was as high as his knees; he almost fell over it, looking for the ball. He crouched down beside it and began taking off the stones one by one to find out what was underneath. He could hear the other boys calling, and then one of them broke through the bushes and breathed strenuously down at him.

  —Where’s the ball, Tobe, man?

  —I want to find what’s underneath.

  —Underneath wha’?

  The boy bent down to watch Toby’s painstaking dismantling. The others pushed in and soon they were all, five of them, pressed into the awkward space between the bushes and the wall, watching. You could see the stones because they were pale in the murky light, like Toby’s hands moving them.

  —Who made it? one of them asked.

  —Fuck knows.

  —Where’d they get those fucking stones from anyway?

  —I can’t see, Toby complained sharply back across his shoulder at one point, and they moved obediently out of what light was left. Afterward he thought incredulously sometimes of this moment of command and obedience; afterward, when through his long illness and absence he had lost his place in the hierarchy of boys and did not know any longer how to speak to them in a way that would effect any response or claim attention.

  Under the last stones of the cairn lay something wrapped up in thick plastic. The boys squatted around it, portentous with the mystery. One of them twisted suddenly to look behind them through the gap in the bushes.

  —What if someone comes?

  —It’s a gun, another said.

  But it wasn’t.

  Toby unfolded the plastic cautiously and the last light found a pale gleam in the shining head of a new ax. He picked it up by its handle and felt the sheathed smoothness of thick-varnished wood.

  —There’s blood on it! one of them said hoarsely, playacting their fears and frightening himself. Toby dropped the ax hastily onto the plastic. They all recoiled; a clotted shadow stuck to it might not be merely shadow.

  —Fuck off, he said, and picked it up again, turning its head this way and that. It was quite clean. He weighed it on his palm: heavy, and cold, and with a film of grease.

  * * *

  THE BOYS in the gang, although each had a family life that was quite distinctive and unrepeatable, belonged together in a social class apart from the one Toby’s family belonged to, and Toby was anxiously aware of this separation and of himself dissimulating it. Kingsmile was a mixed area of the city; the big cheap houses appealed to a few “arty” families, as Toby’s mother called them (the word would never have passed Toby’s lips), but most of them were turned into flats and bed-sits and student rooms. Since Toby had been playing out on the street, facts that had once been merely the warm enfolding substance of his life—his father the ceramicist, his mother with wings of long hair who sat cross-legged on the floor and rolled her own cigarettes—had to be steered around, the other boys had to be distracted from them. “He makes mugs and stuff,” Toby threw out when pressed, with calculated roughness, as if it were as incomprehensible to him as it was to them. He wished he lived in a home where the television was always on; he wished his mother would buy big plastic bottles of blue pop.

  Nonetheless the crowd of boys spent a lot of time in Toby’s room, because no one in that house ever questioned their coming or going, no one bothered to catch them out smoking cigarettes. The house was already full anyway, with a constant stream of visitors; the doorbell and the phone were constantly ringing, mostly for Toby’s two older half sisters from his father’s first marriage. The other boys never said a word against Toby’s parents, but still his shoulders went into a hunch of embarrassment when he led the sheepish file past his father’s workshop or his parents drinking wine at the oversized kitchen table.

  It was to Toby’s dad they took the ax.

  First they carefully rebuilt the cairn. They were all agreed they should not put the ax back.

  —If it was just for cutting wood why would they hide it here? Al said sensibly. So Toby rewrapped it in its plastic and smuggled it out under his shirt, the others crowding around him for camouflage. No one mentioned what they all imagined, that whoever owned the ax and had hidden it might be watching them, and might be enraged at this disruption to his plan, whatever it was. Solemnly they collected up their coats and gear and accompanied Toby home. Leaving the grassed area, they had to walk along beside the high wall of a disused small engineering works before they turned into the street before Toby’s street: involuntarily, they kept glancing upward, half expecting to see Him outlined maniacally against the sky, crouched on the top of the wall where broken glass was set into concrete, poised to throw himself upon them and reclaim his property.

  Toby’s mother had been crying.

  The bottle of wine between his parents on the table was empty, they hadn’t cleared up the meal around them, the salad was wilting into its dressing. Toby wasn’t embarrassed by the mess but wished it had been something more normal than salad and vegetable crumble. His mother blotted her cheeks with the backs of her hands, then with a tea towel. The black lines she always drew inside her lower eyelids were smudged and there were flecks of black in the tears in her eyes; her lips and teeth were stained blue by the wine.

  —Do you want anything to eat, darling? There’s plenty left. Anybody hungry?

  The others refused politely; bringing the ax out from under his shirt, Toby didn’t deign to reply. He addressed his father.

  —We found this. We reckon we should take it to the police. It wasn’t just lost, it was purposely hidden.

  His father looked as if he had to draw his mind from far away to attend to their package, but also as if he was pleased to have it drawn. He stood up in his slow and powerful way (at least there was that; he was six foot two and thirteen stone and used to box for his college), combing his fingers hard up into his chin through his beard. Toby’s half sisters said he did that when he felt the world was against him and he was willfully misunderstood: they had the whole repertoire of his gestures decoded.

  —Now, he said, in his rumbling big voice. Found what? Where?

  They unwrapped their trophy from its layers of soft thick opaque plastic, they explained the strangeness of their finding it. The new ax looked brash against the old pine table.

  —But I expect it’s just a tool someone’s bought and wrapped up to keep it dry, Dad said. We need to take it back to him.

  —If he was going to chop wood with it, why hide it under a pile of stones? Foggles repeated what Al had said earlier. Usually they didn’t talk much to parents, but in the importance of the moment the boys were forthcoming and serious.

  —And he specially brought the stones. There’s no stones round where he hid it. He must have brought them on purpose.

  —It’s like he didn’t want to keep it at home, in case anyone saw.

  —You shouldn’t have touched it, Tobe, Haggis said. Police might want to fingerprint.

  Dad smiled knowingly into his beard but he didn’t pick the ax up.

  —I don’t know if the police’ll really be very interested. There haven’t actually been many ax murders round here recently.

  —It’s interesting, Toby’s mother said, that we all assume it belongs to a man, planning violence against a woman.

  His dad didn’t look at her.—Do we all assume that, Naomi? I don’t think I’m assuming anything.

  —Well, that�
�s what I’m picking up. That’s what we’re all imagining. Some man planning some horrible secret thing, some way of hurting and destroying someone close to him. Somehow that’s what it makes me think of, the horrible ugly thing. It’s like a sign, a sign of cruelty and abuse. I don’t even want it in the house. Seizing the tea towel again, she turned her back on them all and started opening another bottle of wine.

  There were a few moments of polite apologetic silence, while the boys let the woman’s words pass. Toby’s dad rested his ten fingers on the edge of the table, his head slightly bowed. (The girls said this meant he was reflecting sorrowfully on the bottomlessness of his extraordinary patience.)

  —So what d’you reckon we ought to do with it, Dad?

  —I still think it’s a tool somebody bought and wrapped up to stop it from rusting. Maybe whoever prunes the trees at the park.

  Naomi snorted over her corkscrew. With an ax?

  —Well, we’ll take it to the police tomorrow. See what they say. What shall I do with it for now? Naomi?

  She shook her head in abandonment without turning around.

  —In the shed, OK? Everybody happy?

  He rewrapped the package with that scrupulously responsible concentration he always brought to minor domestic tasks, managing to communicate at once (the girls said) extreme willingness to do his bit with the helplessness of the creative artist who couldn’t be expected to do it very often.

  He and Toby took the ax to the police station the next day. The police were as mystified as they were, wrote the details down on a form, and kept the ax. Haggis, who was often off school and who lived alone with his mother in a flat overlooking the place where they played football, said he saw a policeman poking about once behind the shrubs where Toby had found the cairn. Three months later, when everyone had forgotten about it, a card from the police arrived at Toby’s house saying the ax had not been claimed in the meantime and therefore if they wanted it they could collect it.

  They didn’t want it, of course. Particularly, they didn’t want it, because in the meantime Toby’s dad, Graham, had left Naomi and Toby and Clare and Tamsin and had gone to live with the woman who would become his third wife, and with whom he would go on to have three more children even though he was already in his fifties.

  Also they didn’t want it because Toby had started, shortly after the night they found the ax, to be ill. He began by suffering from headaches and a general feeling of weakness and malaise. For several months their general practitioner insisted he was malingering. Probably he thought it was something Naomi was making up or was producing in her son as a hysterical response to her husband’s leaving her. Naomi at that time would not have inspired confidence in her powers of diagnosis or in her authority as a responsible mother. Every night she drank a bottle of wine. She once went over to where Graham was living with his new girlfriend and stood yelling her opinion of them in the street and threw the bottle and broke a window (in the wrong flat, as it turned out). Another night she took an overdose of pills, and although she almost immediately threw them up again Clare and Tamsin called an ambulance just in case. She gave up the job she had had in a shop specializing in Native American crafts, and the household had to manage on social security and whatever Graham gave them, which wasn’t much and was naturally another source of grievance.

  It was suddenly a very female and a very aggrieved household. Naomi and her two stepdaughters talked and talked about Graham and his vanity and his weakness and his lust and his selfishness and his fear of aging until the conversation ached and winced and they couldn’t bear to touch it anymore, for a few hours at least. Clare and Tamsin wouldn’t have anything to do with their father for almost two years. (It was the babies that coaxed them around to a reconciliation in the end.) Even Marian, the first wife and Clare’s and Tamsin’s mother (they lived with her at weekends), came around and joined in the “Graham conversation,” as the girls called it, on one or two occasions.

  But Naomi knew there was really something wrong with Toby. In the mornings when she struggled out of her poisoned drunken sleep to get him up for school, she was at least sensible enough to tell the difference between an ordinary unhappy boy and this listless deadweight huddled under his Star Wars duvet. He even smelled sick.

  —Darling, she said, her tongue thick with shaming fur, the broken pieces of her life taking up their swollen lurid waking places in her mind. Just describe to me exactly how it hurts, and where.

  But he only moved his head once in frowning denial, not opening his eyes, his mouth clamped shut, keeping her out.

  In the doctor’s surgery, her puffy pale face without makeup and her velvet skirt stained and crumpled, she insisted on knowing which tests could be done to find out what was the matter. The doctor even joked that she should try some herbal remedies or Red Indian charms. In the end the tests showed that Toby had a form of viral encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain, and he was off school for two years, with almost constant pain in his head and all over his body. He spent months in hospital, because the encephalitis weakened his immune system and made him prone to other illnesses; he had pneumonia twice. Naomi lost interest in the Graham conversation. She cut down her drinking; whenever Toby was in hospital she slept every night there too; she was silent, fixated, dull company except when she was talking to other mothers with ill children. The girls moved back to live full time with Marian.

  At one point when Toby was very ill, his name was mentioned in Assembly at school and his class collected money for flowers. Two or three years later when he was better, he once bumped into Haggis (Haggis’s real name was James, and that was how Toby hailed him from across the street). Toby and Naomi had moved to a flat in a different part of the city, and Toby had started back at a different school. Haggis looked surprised to see him and told him they had all assumed that he had died.

  * * *

  WHEN TOBY was twenty he went away to University, where he studied for a Visual Arts degree specializing in film and video. When he came home at the end of his final year he planned to spend some of the summer with his mother and some with Clare and her husband and children, before he went off traveling with his camera. Naomi had moved again since he’d last seen her and had got out of an abusive relationship with a man with a mental health problem (before that there had been a married businessman who imported shoes). She was now living with another woman, Angie. Tamsin couldn’t deal with it and wouldn’t visit them, but Clare said it was a good thing. She said Naomi had fallen into a pattern of being treated badly by the men she got involved with, and this relationship with Angie was a sign of her wanting to break that pattern. She said women were kinder to women than men ever were, more appreciative and gentle and sensitive; and Naomi’s choice of Angie was a sign that at least she wasn’t willing her own destruction anymore.

  Naomi picked Toby up from the bus station in her old Citroen. The car was as scruffy as ever and she had to move paper tissues, empty crisps packets, a Tampax box, secateurs, and rolling tobacco efore he could get into the front seat, but she looked pretty. She was wearing an embroidered silky top and jeans; she had had her hair cut shoulder length, and, as Clare said, it made her look younger because she didn’t look as if she was trying to. The lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth were still there, but crinkled with smiling. She was buoyant and childish and seemed rather overexcited, unlike his usual idea of her: small, dark, concentrated with suffering. Her silver earrings had some sort of symbol that might be a lesbian thing; Toby didn’t mind, as long as she didn’t try to corner him with it and make him say something.

  —We’re nearly there. Look, Toby!

  They were driving around a mini-roundabout at the end of a suburban street; an improvised banner was tied between two young trees. In red paint on a white torn sheet was written, WELCOME HOME, TOBY MENGES, BA!

  There were tears in her eyes.

  —Did you see, sweetheart? Realize how proud of you we are? Let’s go round again, what the hell!
>
  This time she sounded the horn, blaring out one of the rhythms he used to clap at football matches with his friends. A car following them onto the roundabout sounded its horn too, probably in protest rather than sympathy.

  Toby’s face was hot, he stared ahead, blinkered with embarrassment.

  —The banner was Angie’s idea. She hung it up last night, after it was dark. We were just praying it wouldn’t rain. She was so determined it would be the first thing you’d see.

  Angie and Naomi had found the house together; it was a maisonette, with a front door up concrete steps around the side of a white-painted nineteen-thirties semidetached. It didn’t look like Naomi’s usual sort of place—not “arty”—but the gardens were full of flowers and there were trees everywhere, as if the suburb had been tucked inside a little wood. Angie was waiting for them at the top of the steps before the car had even stopped. She was small and slight like Naomi, but younger and more definite; when they were together Naomi seemed dreamier and vaguer than she really was. Angie had short-cut hair and very bright eyes with a distinctive extra fold of firm flesh beneath them that made them pixielike; her glances, like all her gestures, were quick and pointed and compact.

  —Hello, Toby, she said, reaching out a small cool brown hand laden with silver rings. She had a butterfly tattooed on her upper arm and another one appliquéd onto her sleeveless white vest. Meet Angie: I’m the new light in your mother’s life. We’re both very proud of you.

  Toby felt large as an elephant—or perhaps a giraffe—between them in their little home. Their tables and chairs only seemed to reach somewhere around his knees, and he kept walking into doorframes as though they were built to a different scale. They had baked him a cake with three candles for the three years of his degree and decorated it with the University logo, which he didn’t recognize until they pointed it out. The sitting room was hung with paper chains and balloons and more WELCOME HOME banners; it was very tidy and bright and full of plants and pictures; there was even a color scheme, with a blue sofa (which would turn into a bed for him later), blue curtains, and yellow walls. They got out a bottle of champagne from the fridge. Toby didn’t know how to open it so Angie did, and they drank a toast to him.