The Accident

by S D Monaghan

  Would she be able to continue her pregnancy without David? Would it be possible? Tara contemplated the effort that would be involved in keeping the child safe, healthy and happy if she ended up alone. Children were in perpetual proximity to brain injury, dehydration, drowning, sunstroke. Tara sensed how little she understood about what was coming next. For weeks, her pregnancy had mostly just seemed like the anticipated arrival of a cool new piece of kit. She had a vague feeling, like a divination, of her approaching powerlessness, when her child’s needs would immediately take priority over her own. Recently, her friends had been trying to become involved with her pregnancy, already buying her dinky little socks, tiny pants, doll-like shoes – which for Tara often felt like they were preparing her for some imminent catastrophe. One had told her, ‘Tara, I don’t think you have a clue. When it arrives, you’ll realise that babies are real work. It’s not like painting or your old insurance job. It’s going to turn your life upside down. It’ll be a high-wire act just to get through the day. Motherhood is permanent. It’s there. It’s there. It’s there. But there’s one other thing – I’ve yet to meet a mother who regrets having children.’

  Tara looked down at her waist. From the moment she’d known she was pregnant, it had been her stomach that had drawn all the external attention. Soon the bump would begin to show. Most pregnancies became visible after twelve to sixteen weeks. About a month after that the ‘quickening’ would occur; the first faint fluttering movements of the baby in her womb. Apparently, for some parents, that was when the baby finally became alive.

  ‘Become alive,’ Tara whispered. She imagined the baby moving inside of her, growing stronger, getting ready to appear into the light. ‘Make things better with me and David.’

  As she went downstairs, her mobile buzzed. Is it Christine – already?

  ‘Tara? It’s Pete in New York.’

  ‘Oh.’ Tara had met Pete a few times, but had never spoken with him on the phone. He was just like any twenty-something American stockbroker, except that instead of being a stockbroker, he was an art dealer for private collectors and high-end commercial galleries.

  ‘Yeah – “oh”. Sorry to be calling, but obviously it’s important otherwise I wouldn’t be calling. There’s those contracts – David probably told you about them – they needed to be OK’d by the end of last week. We delay any longer, and Soho & Lanes are going to start pounding you with subpoenas like they’re predator drones.’

  Tara blushed as if it was somehow possible that Pete knew how bad things were between David and her. ‘I’m sure David’s dealing with it – call him.’

  ‘That’s just it. He’s not answering at his office. And he’s not picking up his mobile. And that’s odd. Dave always takes my calls. So where’s Dave?’

  I wish I knew. And I wish he was here with me now. And I wish he’d forgive me. And I wish we were still indestructible. Brightly, she said, ‘Today my husband has arranged to be unreachable. Hence, I cannot reach him. Can I help?’ Unexpectedly, a gripping shudder ran through her. What if David was missing, too? Then she relaxed into the relief that her husband was not like Ryan.

  ‘OK – basically I’ll give you the news that I was going to give him, which is: I don’t get those contracts back, like yesterday, then we all get fucked in the eye sockets.’

  Tara looked about the front room. Next to the TV was a media centre with a flashing modem, the DVR and other assorted lumps of equipment – one of which looked like a fax. She said, ‘Send them again. I think there’s a fax machine here.’

  ‘You want me to fax it to you? How about I send it in Morse code? Or use smoke signals? Fuck, I’ll just staple it to a pigeon’s chest. Jesus Christ – do you guys still get your porn from magazines?’

  ‘I was just trying to help.’

  ‘There, I emailed it. Check your inbox. And show it to David. Later.’

  Tara lingered in the hallway gallery. While the success of Erdős Landscapes had come out of nowhere – or rather, David had conjured its triumph from nothing – it wasn’t necessarily the scale of the success that gave Tara the most pleasure. It was the fact that she’d stayed true to her ideals – that popular art didn’t have to be commercial art. She’d also succeeded in an art world that was almost by definition masculine. Tara believed that most of the male painters she’d met were in love with being an artist, rather than with the work itself. They were the epitome of Renoir’s observation that too many painters spend their time fucking beautiful women rather than painting them.

  As she soaked up her work, Tara again experienced the sensation of being past her prime. It had been happening a lot recently. She was simply too old to start again. She’d never be able to do what she’d done so effortlessly just ten years ago – hustle her way in among the Dublin youngsters, get a first class degree, leave a pensionable job just because the city had felt alive and vibrant, as if it had a real arts scene – Paris in the 1920s, New York in the 1970s, London in the 1990s. Where had that Tara gone? For the last few months, she’d been so involved in designing her house that she’d rarely even thought of painting, never mind actually taking the time to lose herself in the private language of her work. But now that the house was finished, the old hunger had still not returned. Was that what pregnancy did? Gave you something else to fight for? Revealed all the other things as the baggage they were?

  Sometimes, the free-floating anxiety that had hovered above Tara since she’d discovered she was pregnant threatened to collapse on her like an avalanche. Even if she was still painting, she’d never land another bonanza like David had managed to secure for them. And even though the museums were still interested in her, they didn’t pay much, merely slowed down the extinction of her reputation. But it had been this art, and the year she’d spent making the rounds of all the openings, galas and launches – catching the light of every flash – that had got them what they’d wanted. Now most of their money was about to be gobbled up by the building society’s bridge loan. After that, the remainder would be incinerated with school and medical fees and all the other expenses that would come from being responsible for something other than themselves. That was assuming David would stick with her. The mere idea that he wouldn’t was almost impossible to imagine. But if the worst did happen, would she eventually accept his absence and drift back into insurance? Would she disappear into the countryside and live in solitude with her child? Would she move back to her home town? Without David, all these nightmares suddenly became her only options.

  Until recently, Tara had never been one for reminiscing. As far as she’d been concerned, old times were only good when you were there. But in the last year, Tara had found herself scrolling back through her Facebook page, digging out old photos, exploring the online street maps of her home town. She’d even taken a trip back for the weekend, but had found the questions unending once she’d arrived there. Was the journey down OK? It was. How is the painting going? It’s fine. Is Dublin fun? It is. Have you got a man? I do. And that was just the shopkeeper. This was also the first year that she’d hated the idea of her birthday: preferring not to tell her friends that she was thirty, to let it blow by, only checking for the damage in its aftermath.

  Tara looked into the front room and decided against bringing Christine in there – too formal. She tried to superimpose her father sitting in the Eames chair, reading the paper with his big black glasses perched on his nose, relaxing after a day’s work, waiting for his daughter to finish frying the kidney and onions in the tiny kitchen. He had regarded his widower life patiently – as if it was simply a long moment that must be endured. Was that why he’d decided to place a shotgun in his mouth? Had the years since her mother’s death become so leaden and weary that it had been as if a single year was just repeating itself over and over? Maybe he’d seen nothing ahead of him that he would enjoy, and when he’d looked back he’d seen nothing that he wished to remember? A child was meant to be enough to make a parent carry on, but Tara’s existence hadn’t been
sufficient for him. She accepted that her father had failed in his responsibility to her. But his death meant that she had somehow disappointed too.

  She entered the kitchen and began to make her breakfast shake. Moving around, she enjoyed the smooth quality of the drawers as they opened and closed like the doors of expensive cars. Bundled in the corner was an antique throw – a present from the curator of the New York Soho Gallery – that had, initially by accident, become Dora’s favoured bedding.

  ‘Dora, honey – pussss-pussss-pussss. Come on, sweetie. Brekkie.’

  Tara sat at the counter and sipped her smoothie. She was now waiting for Christine, and she couldn’t think of anything else besides waiting for Christine. She knew very little about this woman, except that she had no kids, and Tara assumed that both she and Ryan were happy with that. Tara felt that, like most durable marriages, Christine and Ryan’s was a comfortable habit neither wanted to break. However, she’d never spoken to Ryan about his wife or, in fact, about anything of real importance. Even when they’d been dating all those years ago, he’d rarely discussed his dreams, ambitions or his secret thoughts. It was probably why, in her early twenties, she’d become briefly infatuated with him – she’d seen Ryan as an exasperating crossword clue that she just couldn’t solve and couldn’t get out of her mind.

  It’ll be fine. After last night with David, you’re due luck. The doorbell sounded. Jesus. For a moment, the colour went out of everything. Tara took a deep breath, walked through the gallery and opened the door.

  Christine wore an open summer coat, a knee-length black skirt, teeter-tall heels and a tiger-print Prada top that showed lots of cleavage. Silver necklaces dangled beneath her throat. But what surprised Tara more than this medley of odd clothing was how old Christine looked. She was only in her early thirties but looked well into her forties, with a face that promised interesting stories in a hotel bar. The sides of her chin were grooved like a ventriloquist’s doll, which emphasised how her botoxed forehead was as smooth as polished clay. With thick, straw-blonde hair, dark eyeshadow and brown lipstick, the overall effect was of someone who used to have money and now struggled to maintain the appearance of being an aristocratic bohemian.

  ‘Christine, how are you?’

  Christine attempted to raise her botoxed eyebrows. ‘I’m fine. Well, not really. But it’s good to be here, to be doing something, you know?’ Her plummy, moneyed accent was sprinkled with BBC inflections, which Tara assumed were also counterfeit.

  ‘Well, come in.’ Tara ran her tongue around her lips. Her mouth was dry. This is good. This is not violent. This is not a terrible scene. She suppressed a grimace at the harsh echo of Christine’s heels on the reclaimed floor; she half-expected to see actual footprints forced into the maple wood. So this was Ryan’s wife. Tara pictured her over a decade ago as the type of ambitious twenty-year-old blonde who, after doing a six-week fashion and design diploma, got a job behind the make-up counter of a high-end store and within a year was the shop-floor supervisor. It was a lot to infer from just one minute of Christine’s company, but Tara trusted her first impressions.

  As Christine passed through the hallway, she stopped to admire one of the paintings.

  ‘My art,’ Tara said, redundantly. One just like it had been bought two years ago by an internet mogul for ten thousand euros. It was probably only worth one thousand now. The mogul kept Tara’s painting with the rest of his collection on his yacht – fifty million dollars of art, anchored in the Gulf of Mexico.

  ‘When Ryan told me that he was working on a famous artist’s house, I googled you.’

  ‘Not really “famous”.’

  ‘You are famous. Like I said, I googled you.’ Christine was briefly annoyed, clearly believing that modesty was one of the more boring traits a person could have.

  ‘Well, I suppose I was on Sky Arts once for all of two minutes. They just needed a face rather than art – a kind of artist-itute. Jesus, “artist-itute”. That’s awful. And hence why I shouldn’t ever be put in front of the camera.’

  ‘Well, no matter what happens, you’ll have done this.’ Christine nodded at the nearest painting. ‘That’s your mark. Your thumbprint on the world. The rest of us – we will never be known.’

  ‘God, I don’t care whether I’m remembered. My moment has passed. The art world is cruel if you’re not producing.’

  ‘Just because you’re having a baby doesn’t mean you can just quit. Who do you think you are? A till operator at Spar?’

  Tara forced a smile. How often has Ryan talked about me to Christine? I can’t believe he told her I was pregnant. Only a handful of people know. It’s not public knowledge yet. The prick. She tried to picture them having dinner together at home, but couldn’t. In almost a whisper, she said, ‘I hope we’re mature enough for the responsibility. For the baby, I mean.’

  ‘Ryan and I wanted children. Didn’t happen.’

  ‘Shit, I didn’t realise that.’

  ‘It’s no big deal any more. Hasn’t been for years.’

  ‘Still, sorry – I shouldn’t have been so blasé about mine. But it’s just early days in the first trimester. It’s all still so new.’

  ‘No worries. It’s me who asked. Honestly, it’s not “a thing”. I find the best way not to be always full of regret is to be bitter about it.’ She smiled broadly. ‘Kidding. Sort of.’

  Something about Christine didn’t make sense. Her eyes were deep mahogany and stared with a self-assuredness that was at odds with her appearance. The nebula of worn-out, downmarket glamour that haloed her did not tie in with her composure. Tara wondered if Christine really was just all smoke and mirrors. Had there been something else to her once – something before her marriage to the ladies’ man Ryan had ground her down?

  Christine got up close to another painting and said, ‘What is it about me and kids, huh? I don’t have any, but I work with them and I basically married one.’

  Tara laughed awkwardly. ‘Ryan. He’s impossible to imagine as old.’

  ‘Yeah. Me and Ryan go way back. We grew up in the same small town, you know? Went to the same small school. Though I was a few years ahead of him.’

  ‘That’s so romantic,’ Tara said, forcing a big smile.

  ‘Not really. I hated everything about my life until I was eighteen and got out of there. Clunnard is so hillbilly, the KKK would be the liberal party. You’re from the country as well, aren’t you? Ever go home?’

  ‘Not if I can help it.’

  ‘What about your family? They must be pleased with your success? After all, they created the artist. So people like me would presume you had a... an interesting childhood.’

  ‘My family isn’t interesting.’

  ‘Every family is interesting.’

  ‘My mother died when I was very young. I can’t remember her.’ Why are we talking about my family? I need to lighten this. We haven’t even got to Ryan yet. ‘Then Dad died when I was fifteen.’ Jesus. I said, lighten it.

  ‘That’s sad. How did he die?’

  ‘Just suddenly. One of those things.’ Tara didn’t like people knowing about her father. When people knew, they tried to draw her out, bond with her maybe, show her how empathic they were. She placed a hand on Christine’s elbow now and gently nudged her forward.

  As they entered the kitchen, Christine’s face warped as if she’d just swallowed a mouthful of salt.

  Tara said, ‘We mixed styles for the kitchen: industrial meets farmhouse. You hate it that much?’

  Christine laughed: an unpleasant burst of nasal noise. ‘Oh, that’s my thinking face. Ryan hates it. Everyone does.’ She clapped her hands, and as if addressing students visiting a museum, proclaimed, ‘It’s just like Ryan described. Very classical noir and industrial. Just love the pop-up plug in the island.’ Christine pressed down on the spring-loaded pad and up jumped a hidden socket tower. ‘Nice range, too – ye olden world holler-back. It’s all very pretty and very clever.’

  Tara, a country gi
rl, a woman who had had to work hard and take risks for everything she’d ever got, bristled with the awkward inability to take a compliment casually. ‘Well, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity.’

  ‘The house a talented artist deserves. You’re obviously someone with discriminating taste and money. My mother would’ve loved this place. She loved the rich but she didn’t know anyone rich besides Father. I suppose she loved them from afar.’

  Of course, Tara thought. So that was where a building developer’s wife got her plummy accent, her lavish mishmash bohemian style, the rocks on her fingers. She came from money. But she certainly didn’t have any great wealth now. When had she lost it all? Or perhaps she had never been given any of it in the first place? I wonder, was it Ryan’s fault? Did her parents disapprove of him? Did he spend it all?

  Tara was now beginning to wonder what Christine was doing with a man like Ryan. Confidence and magnetism were two of her defining characteristics. She was clearly someone who always deserved to be in the room. On top of all that, Christine was three years older than Ryan. Tara simply couldn’t see a woman like her deciding to settle down with a builder, even one that managed his own construction firm. She seemed too articulate, too pretentious, not to have seen through him the way Tara herself had done.

  It had only taken Tara six months to realise how Ryan’s mind operated. He’d simply had the astonishing arrogance of a young man who knew that he wasn’t very brilliant, but must convince the world that he is brilliant – at something, at anything. So the gift he portrayed himself master-commandant of was seduction – and he aced all the tricks. Ryan never told a beautiful woman that she was beautiful, assuming she would already know that. Instead, he hoped she’d notice it when he went on talking to her without acknowledging it. That she’d find it interesting. Many beautiful women are rarely told they’re funny, so he would always make sure to laugh during the conversation. On the other hand, he always told more ordinary women that they were beautiful, anticipating that they hadn’t been told that before and their gratitude would have no frontier.