Accidents in the Home

by Tessa Hadley

  —I only got a two-two, he protested, blushing. It’s honestly not worth all this.

  —Nonsense, said Naomi, putting her arm around his waist and her head against his chest. We’ve had such hard times and such a lot of bad luck. Now everything’s turning out to be for the best. Here’s to you, my brilliant boy. Here’s to us. Isn’t this a bit better than where you last saw me?

  —I’d say so, said Angie. Better than that dump.

  Naomi and Angie had planned out the whole evening. They showed Toby around the garden, which belonged to the owners who lived downstairs but which they were allowed to use. It was a big garden, rather neglected, overtaken by clumps of pampas grass and wandering up among trees at its far end.

  —I’d love to get to work out here, said Naomi, who was good at plants. Perhaps they’ll let us put a few things in and do a bit of tidying up.

  —Perhaps, said Angie tolerantly, if we get the time.

  Then there were cocktails and hot homemade appetizers, followed by vegetarian lasagna and expensive ice cream. And for after dinner they had rented a video, Shine, which they thought would be suitable.

  —I know you’re not into blockbusters, said Angie.

  He politely didn’t tell them he’d seen it already, or that he hadn’t liked it.

  Over balloon glasses of brandy last thing, when they had pulled out the sofa and made up his bed, Angie explained to Toby that her name wasn’t short for Angela. She had been rushed into hospital when she was only a few hours old, and the nurses had called her Angel because they didn’t think she’d live. A man walking his dog in a park had found her abandoned under a bush, wrapped up in someone’s bloody nightdress. They never found out whose nightdress it was.

  —I’m the original babe in the woods, she said. Now, wouldn’t that make a great film? Haven’t I given you a fantastic subject? Complete with a happy ending too.

  Naomi poured herself a second brandy. She watched Angie with a private smiling concentration, nursing her glass in her warm palms and breathing the fumes, slightly drunk and exalted. Then she turned to Toby expectantly as if he was their audience and might applaud what she loved and had had displayed for him.

  When he settled down to sleep, Toby pulled the duvet tightly up over his ears. Their bedroom opened directly off the sitting room where he lay. He dreaded overhearing Angie making love with his mother (although no more than he had dreaded it with the men).

  * * *

  ANGIE WORKED with children in a play group run by the local council. Naomi had been doing office work for the Royal Automobile Club for a couple of years now; it was dull but it was safe, it brought the money in, she didn’t hate it. So they were both out all day; they stepped around Toby in his bed in the mornings while they were getting ready and made their arrangements in hurried undertones. When they pulled the door shut behind them at half past eight he sank back down into a sleep that ballooned with relief and lightness into the empty space.

  They left him notes in the kitchen: Supper at six-thirty if you’d like some (mushroom risotto); there were boxes to tick for YES or NO. He worried while he ate his cereals over what to put, and how often he could say no without offending them; it was always possible that they felt as grateful as he did on the nights he ate at Clare’s or bought himself chips. When he said yes, he had to spend all day trying to remember to get back in time. There was only one bus from town that came anywhere near the house and it only ran once every hour; if he got out of bed around midday, that didn’t leave him much time for getting things done. If he was late for supper, Angie would be silent and smiling and Naomi overemphatic in her reassurances that it didn’t matter as she hurried to warm things up.

  He did have things to do. Each day he set himself one task to accomplish: the travel agent’s to visit, or the doctor’s to organize his inoculations, or some item of clothing to buy, or insurance to arrange. He didn’t always accomplish it. Toby’s “task for the day” became a sort of jokey catchphrase with Angie, and it was true that he wasn’t very good at focusing single-mindedly on his purpose. However much he determined not to be distracted or to allow himself to be waylaid, there must be something in his face that gave away an openness to suggestion like a weakness. Anyone eccentric or garrulous always sat next to him on the bus. People selling political newspapers or giving out religious tracts or tickets for a club homed in on him from across a crowd, also refugees with an album of photographs of torture injuries and a petition to sign that turned out to involve contributing money. He never managed to avoid the eye of the homeless who were selling their Big Issue magazine, so that he always had to stop and explain to them that he didn’t have anything to spare. Then he’d find himself in a long conversation while the crowd flowed past as if he’d never been a part of it, on his way somewhere.

  The day he went to see his father he happened to have a book in his pocket that he had just bought from a man selling Socialist Worker; when he had tried to explain that he didn’t want to buy their paper because it seemed to him that their approach to politics was superficial and sloganizing, the man had produced from somewhere inside his coat a book of essays in tiny print on shiny paper, assuring Toby that he would find inside the deep-level analysis he was looking for. Toby accepted it rather than make a fuss, and then the man asked him for two pounds.

  Graham got very excited about the book.

  —God, I can’t believe that anyone still reads this stuff. Wonderful old Trotskyite nonsense. Listen to this: “Sooner or later, and despite all the immense obstacles on the way, the working class and its allies in other classes will bring into being an authentically democratic social order.” Ah, those were the days. And you paid two pounds? For this? Of course I was in the CP when I was at college. We’d have thought this was dangerous revisionism.

  He had to lend Toby two pounds to replace what he’d spent (Toby needed it for bus fare), and he went on reading out sentences about workers and mass movements in delighted irony until the toddler he was minding fell over his baby walker and had to be picked up and consoled. Graham’s third wife, Linda, worked in a psychiatric unit for teenagers and was the family breadwinner; Graham looked after the children, who were nine, five, and two.

  —I hear your mother’s having a lesbian fling, Graham said, expertly hoisting his little son’s legs in the air to change his nappy, wiping him with a sequence of torn-off chunks of cotton wool soaked in baby oil that he had laid out ready in a row alongside the plastic changing mat. He was looking austerely patriarchal; his hair and beard had turned a soft clean white. Clare had told Toby that he had played Santa Claus for Daniel’s playgroup, and also that he wasn’t selling much work. ‘Whether it’s because he’s not producing much, or because nobody wants it, we’re not sure.’

  —Yes, kind of, said Toby.

  —Poor old Naomi! Why can nothing ever be straightforward with her? Still holding up the baby’s feet, he spread a clean nappy deftly underneath his son’s bottom with his big right hand. And is it all going to end in tears as usual?

  —They’ve got a nice flat, Toby said.

  —In Leigh Mills, of all places! Frightfully respectable.

  —It’s got a nice garden.

  —I’m sure it’s all very nice. But rather her than me.

  Graham and Linda still lived in Kingsmile, near where Graham and Naomi had once lived together; but it had changed, and most of the big houses that had been bed-sits and student rooms had been renovated and repainted, their floors sanded, and the old fireplaces put back in. On the way to catch his bus (Graham had wanted to drive him back but had to pick up his nine-year-old daughter from ballet), Toby walked past the scrap of park where he used to play football with his friends before he got ill. A few boys now were scuffling or riding their bikes desultorily in and out of the trees. The trees were fatter and heavier, and the boys had expensive bikes and names like Dominic and Jake and Noah.

  * * *

  TOBY GOT HIMSELF so entangled with a couple of young evan
gelists that he ended up spending an evening at a house where one of them lived, not an ordinary family house but something like a youth hostel for religious young people. Different residents, lots of them African and South East Asian students, came and went during the evening, heating themselves solitary suppers in the microwave. They didn’t seem to know one another very well. Notices on pieces of paper were taped onto cupboard doors in the kitchen: instructions, complaints about stolen food or washing up, and a fluorescent poster for a concert, Christ Takes the Rap. The kitchen had a sickly smell like margarine.

  Toby had been invited, without quite realizing it, to a sort of prayer meeting. When the two young men had stopped him in town, asking him how he felt about consumerism and materialism, he had given them his telephone number without thinking, trying to get rid of them without seeming rude. Then when they rang him at Angie and Naomi’s flat, he had thought he’d better agree to meet them somewhere in order to explain that it would be awkward if they kept telephoning him because it was his mother’s number. He found himself sitting drinking instant coffee with seven or eight others around a bare Formica table under a central light. Only one of them lived in the house, and they were not all young. There was a man with a gray goatee and a paisley cravat whose wife had died of cancer (rather a long time ago, it turned out), and a middle-aged woman who was a buyer for Marks & Spencer’s and said reproachfully she wished she’d thought to bring some “snacks.”

  Toby listened to them talk. He didn’t recognize their experience; he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to feel as they felt that God was involved intimately in every tiny twist and turn of their experience, as interested in their lives as they were, partaking of their hopes and anxieties and indignations. Outnumbered by them, he wondered how they could possibly all be wrong. The buyer described how her faith had helped her to her latest promotion at work. The young man who lived in the hostel explained how God had given him a sign that he was to leave his college course in business studies and find work helping in the community (he hadn’t really found it yet, apart from stopping people in town and asking them how they felt about materialism). A girl from a family of refugees from Laos told how her secret prayers (her mother disapproved of her conversion) had ended in her father’s release after fifteen years in a reeducation camp. The man with the goatee said that his wife’s spirit often visited him, touching him and reassuring him as he went around doing the housework that she used to do.

  There was something attractive and disquieting about how casually they used words like faith and spirit and love and how they mixed together fantastic assumptions of God’s reality and agency with ordinary everyday know-how. Toby contemplated the possibility that perhaps the world really was this shimmering yielding fabric of opportunity and love and he was simply closed to it. With a banality that irritated him, he kept coming back in his mind to the question of the shower rail he had broken in Angie and Naomi’s bathroom the other day, grabbing it and ripping it out from the wall when he slipped under the shower because he’d forgotten to put the rubber bath mat down. There was no possibility—even if he prayed, even if God was real, even if there was a transcendent redeeming meaning to life and death—that that shower rail could be back in the wall and never have come out, that the big dirty holes in the plaster, full of a mess of screws and Rawl plugs, could be unmade, or that his mother could have not rushed in and looked at the disaster with such a frightened face (Angie was out). We could pretend I did it, she had said.

  This was a trivial point, he knew. He knew such trivial things could be interpreted as mere distractions from a larger theme. But he felt it nonetheless as a blockage, a stopping point that prevented his seeing God’s transformations. It was the real small accidental things that happened in time, he felt, that could not be altered or loosened. And he felt those real small things as implacably strong, stronger than all the rest.

  There was only one thing he could think of from his own experience to proffer modestly alongside all the signs and instructions and intimations these other lives had bristled with. Occasionally when he was facing a flat surface, a door or a wall—and especially when he was tired—he saw a brilliant flickering on it like the reflection of a conflagration behind him; when he looked quickly, instinctively, over his shoulder, there was never anything there. He wondered for a while whether to mention it. Then he decided not to. Told baldly, it would seem pretty insignificant. And he had always known it might only be a trick of the brain left over from his illness.

  * * *

  ONE SATURDAY, after he had been staying there for about a fortnight, Toby came back to the maisonette at suppertime and found the door open at the top of the concrete steps. Outside the door were some gardening things: trays of bedding plants, a trowel with soil stuck to it, muddy gardening gloves. From inside he could hear Angie’s voice. He thought she might be telling one of her funny stories, because his mother didn’t reply and Angie’s voice was pitched rather exuberantly rhetorical. When he got to the top of the steps he stopped, embarrassed, not quite able to make out what was going on inside. The room was shadowy at first in contrast to the bright summer’s afternoon. The white of Angie’s sleeveless sweatshirt came and went in the shadows.

  At first he thought it was sex. His mother was lying on her back on the floor, Angie crouched astride her, athletic in tight leggings, taking her weight on her arms when she hung over Naomi, then banging down hard onto her, crotch to crotch. They were both fully clothed. Naomi was lying with her head away from the door, Toby couldn’t see her face or Angie’s; Angie had her back to him. When Angie brought her weight down hard on Naomi, Naomi’s feet leaped weakly in the old stained canvas espadrilles she kept for gardening.

  He realized it wasn’t sex, it was violence.

  —He doesn’t make his bed, Angie was saying in a tone of mock surprised delight, banging down on Naomi once for each separate complaint. He puts the sofa back, but he just bundles up the sheet and duvet on top of it. The wastepaper basket’s full of his nasty tissues. He leaves a scum of shaving foam around the sink. He leaves the tap running. When he washes up he puts all the pans to soak and then doesn’t do them in the morning. His trainers stink the place out. He puts his dirty clothes in the basket and expects you to wash them, even though he’s here all day with fuck all to do. And he’s been smoking in here. Apart from the stench, I found the butts. Didn’t you hear me ask him not to smoke? Didn’t you?

  Toby thought his mother might be dead.

  Then, while Angie hung over her, weight balanced on her arms, Naomi turned herself over in one movement, face down onto the floor, wrapping her arms around her head, crying abandonedly.

  —You see? said Angie, thumping down on her again, making Naomi bounce and give out a sobbing grunt. Didn’t I?

  Then Toby saw, very clearly, a package lying on the carpet beside the two women, wrapped in soft thick opaque plastic, real with the banality of real solid things. He looked at it without recognition for a few seconds, but curiously, wondering what it had to do with the scene. As soon as he remembered what it was and was properly astonished at seeing it there, it disappeared.

  Angie was rocking more gently now on top of Naomi, back and forward and from side to side. The crying grew duller and quieter. Angie bent forward and spoke in a different, coaxing, tone into the hair on the back of Naomi’s neck.

  —So what are you going to do? she said huskily, as if it was a tease Naomi would enjoy too. What are you going to do with him? Come on.

  Toby retreated down the steps. He tried not to crunch the gravel on the path to the front of the house. The leaves of the trees dappling the bright sunshine as he made his way through the suburban street reminded him of what he’d just been watching, as if he were seeing it on film.

  —That neanderthal, Angie had also said. The graduate. You’ve got to be joking.

  It occurred to him that from inside the shadowy room the doorway must have been a brilliant oblong of light, and that when he stood
blocking it he must have cast a deep film-noir shadow, changing everything inside. His mother might have had her eyes closed all that time. She might have. But Angie had surely known that he was standing there.

  A CORRIDOR ran the length of the big house, from the top of the stairs at one end to a tall arched window at the other end, looking out over a sloping field down to the lake. Five bedrooms opened off each side of the corridor, and the last room before the arched window was a bathroom, the only bathroom. The bath had feet and thundering taps and peat-brown not-quite-hot water; the toilet had an overhead cistern and a chain to pull. The children had never had a chain to pull before, and they all wanted to use it. Only Coco was tall enough to reach by himself; Clare had to lift Lily up and help her give the sharp tug that emptied down more peat-brown water (they thought it was dirty). Then Rose balanced anxiously, gripping with her hands on the edge of the big wooden seat, and dribbled her tiny wee into the bowl. They waited for the cistern to finish its slow self-absorbed water music and be full again for her turn.

  This was County Clare, Ireland.

  There were enough rooms for everyone staying there that summer to have slept alone if they had wanted; but out of lack of experience in such solitude-bestowing living space, they all clustered together into the four bedrooms nearest the bathroom. Even Bram’s two sisters, aged twenty-seven and thirty-one, slept in a twin bedroom together, saying they needed to “catch up on their gossip.” Clare and Bram’s bedroom had damp-stained 1960s orange- and pink-flowered wallpaper, a green satin bedspread, and orange striped curtains in a felty synthetic material that floated rather than hung and kept out no light at all.