The Accident

by S D Monaghan

  ‘Damn,’ David muttered, and he too made his way towards the stairs. Down below, a fluorescent-lit corridor led towards the toilets. Kev had managed to overtake Tara and now stood in the middle of the passageway, making himself a phenomenal plug to seal off her advancement. As Tara tried to squeeze by, Kev nudged open the door to the men’s toilet and dragged her inside while simultaneously copping a feel – multitasking. The door closed behind them.

  David, from the other end of the corridor, stared with incredulity. Had that really just happened? It was as if he’d witnessed an alligator snap a person from dry land to the river bed and a second later nothing remained, not even a ripple. He rushed to the door and pushed it open. Inside, opposite the two unlocked stalls and a row of urinals, Kev was holding Tara by the throat, pressing her spine against the wash-hand basin.

  ‘David!’ Tara’s eyes widened as she twisted free of the thug’s grip.

  Kev’s pinpricked pupils sized David up.

  He was in this now. How long had it been since his last fight? A decade? There were those times back in the Cawley Estates when he’d woken up with an eye closed over and dried blood gluing his cheek to the pillow. Even when he’d won, though, it had felt like he’d lost. But all that had mattered in the gang was that you’d fought a good fight.

  ‘Get out,’ David ordered, maintaining eye contact, speaking loud and clear as if he was trying to control a dangerous animal.

  Kev laughed. ‘Fuck off, cunt, before I stab ya.’

  David recognised the coked-up jitteriness of his movements. Take him out quick. Kev lunged forward and David punched him in the face. Globs of blood erupted from both nostrils and splattered against the mirror.

  ‘Oh my god!’ Tara exclaimed.

  David’s fist was daubed in red. He thought of diseases.

  ‘You’re fucking dead!’ Kev roared, spreading his legs to balance – and to inadvertently divulge – the swinging punch that was about to be thrown. The tip of David’s trainers connected perfectly with his balls. The force lifted Kev an inch off the ground before he dropped to the greasy tiles. He rolled over like a large round log: his eyes shut tight, hands jammed between his legs, his entire body shivering. A hiss escaped his lips, slowly and agonisingly.

  ‘Is he gonna be OK?’ Tara asked. Kev was in a foetal position, taking short breaths.

  I hope so. ‘Yeah. He’ll be fine.’

  Tara was clearly shaken up, but she tried to restore her daredevil, whatever-happens-will-happen demeanour, and said, ‘Thanks, Prof.’

  ‘Lecturer,’ David automatically corrected her. Wired with the rush of adrenaline, it was beginning to dawn on him what he’d just done – beaten a young man in the company of his twenty-five-year-old student. ‘C’mon, let’s go.’

  They made for the door, and moments later escaped into the street like drowning sailors plucked from the sea. They kept going, walking with an icy wind that had dislocated several brollies and made Dubliners struggle against it like mime artists. Finally, they stopped at the River Liffey boardwalk. Leaning on the wall above the black, fast-flowing water, they looked at each other. Tara pulled up her collar against the knife-sharp wind. David noticed graffiti on the wall behind her –

  ONE NATION UNDER CCTV.

  Looking over the wall to the murky river, Tara asked, ‘David – are you really pro-war? The others say that you are.’

  David was stunned that she wasn’t talking about what had just happened. Then, just as suddenly, he was disappointed. After everything they’d just been through, they were already back to the old tutor/student conversation. Quietly, he answered, ‘No, I’m not pro-war. As you suspected.’

  ‘Knew.’

  ‘Yeah, knew. The others should listen better.’

  ‘I read your essay on The Modern War in the Journal of Twenty-First Century Studies – which, for the few days it took me to get my head around it, was much more interesting than the talks going on in the Baltic States and the Middle East. But I gave you a chance to correct the others in class today. You didn’t take it.’

  David smiled. ‘It’s bad form to dishonour a good story. Honestly, I couldn’t care less about politics, and since I’m a history teacher, that’s a concept many people find difficult to understand. But it’s always the same – the centre right will rule until we get tired of them and replace them with the centre left. And so it goes, just two rival gangs, power-sharing.’

  Tara laughed. Then she said, ‘What happened tonight was... I don’t know what it was... But if you hadn’t been there... Look, this is our secret.’

  David stared into her wide eyes, her broad smile, her white teeth. Time had stopped. He imagined her as everything he thought a perfect woman should be: smart, funny, interesting and hot. After a full semester of seeing her once a week, he still knew so little about this Tara Brown. Only tonight was he beginning to see what she was like, bit by bit. And each new bit he liked. Each new bit invigorated him.

  Tara continued, ‘And by the way, it really was a great semester. Thanks for everything. See ya – OK?’

  David swallowed the sound of his deep, dismal sigh. Down in the river, a pleasure cruiser rumbled by. With one-way glass and not a sign of a crew member on the decks, it radiated a ghost ship isolation. Tara stepped away from him, and it felt like Velcro tearing from Velcro.

  * * *

  Eighteen months passed before David saw Tara again.

  He’d taken a shortcut through St Stephen’s Green – a city park anchored by a landscaped pond. He was holding a plastic bag filled with water and the three neon tetras he’d just bought at the Trop Shop. His smaller fish had been disappearing one by one over the last few weeks, and he suspected it was because of the baby Siamese fighter that had recently become an adult. At night, he liked to sit by his aquarium to unwind with a book. However, recently his tank had no longer been the altar of respite from his mother’s deteriorating health, the pressures of taking so many classes and the new unpleasant sensation that he was beginning to recognise as loneliness.

  Walking through the park, David deeply inhaled his cigarette. He wasn’t enjoying the metropolis the way he used to because the summer was making his gloom so much more uncomfortable. The long stretches of daylight offered little cover, and other people’s happiness felt aggressive, in his face. I’m thirty-seven, damn it. Recently David had got into the habit of reminding himself how old he was. Sometimes he wondered if he was suffering from depression. Other times, he reckoned he’d simply become a grown-up.

  Standing beneath the park’s arched exit, the bag of neon tetras by his side, David was drawn towards the artists lining the fence with their canvases. He drifted along, looking at the mostly slapdash still lifes and inexpert landscapes. But then he happened upon a row of paintings themed on atlas pages. The largest frame contained a map of the world with each country painted a different colour to its neighbour. The smaller frames held just one continent each. David found maps to be totally compelling. He appreciated their perfection; the assuredness that an exact map was uncontaminated verity with no room for estimation or dispute. And of course, every map contained history. In fact, maps were history. Power created territory and territory needed to be marked, carved up or amalgamated. Precise records of these changes needed to be taken and—

  Then he noticed her. Tara was only ten feet away, wearing a plaid shirt, jeans and brown hiking boots. Her straight fringe was high on her forehead, almost goth-like. It emphasised the smoothness of her forehead, her composure. She was talking to two men. One of them was a construction worker in a hi-vis jacket and hard hat. With hands on hips, he gave Tara his full attention, as if he could see through denim – and she radiated in it. The other man was in a grey suit, his face the colour of cereal sat for too long in milk. He flicked through his texts, disinterested. The large scroll tucked beneath his arm made him seem important.

  David flicked away the cigarette like a speeding bullet into the road. He didn’t need distractions. So this was
what Tara was doing now. He didn’t know whether that was thrilling or a disappointment. Over the past eighteen months he had never been able to walk by a certain burger joint without thinking, That’s where we had our adventure. What adventures is she having now? Since he’d last seen Tara, David had dated three girls, but he’d only allowed the third one to last more than a few months.

  The construction worker kissed Tara on the cheek and David immediately resented another man enjoying her when he couldn’t. Tara was waving goodbye and saying, ‘OK then, see you around sometime. Miss me.’ David watched the handsome builder and the suit retreat into the throng of lunchtime office workers.

  It’s your turn now.

  David moved on to the next canvas, pretending to study the painted delicacy like it was an algebra equation. Then he turned, manifested a look of astonishment – as if he’d only now recognised a favourite pupil that he hadn’t seen in over a year – and said, ‘Hey, it’s me.’

  Tara’s eyes widened. ‘Oh, wow. That’s so weird. I mean, great too. But... Hi.’

  She doesn’t even remember your name. David felt himself reddening. She has no idea who you are. You’re Cicero, not Mark Antony. You’re Laertes, not Hamlet. You’re Lodovico, not Othello. ‘It’s me... From…’

  ‘I know exactly who you are, Mr Miller. Are they fish? Live fish?’

  He squinted through the clear plastic. ‘A few neon tetras. I’ve got an aggressive Siamese fighter that has whittled down my tetras and guppies over the last few months. Gotta restock.’

  ‘How fabulously nerdy of you. I wish I had a fish tank.’

  ‘Well, they’re hard work. You have to keep an eye on the alkalinity and the hardness of the water.’ Stop talking about fish. No one besides you and the ten other loyal customers of Trop Shop care about fish. ‘Anyway, I’m getting in the way of you selling your work. I saw you with that builder and the other guy. They were probably buying your—’

  ‘Ryan? Buying art? Ha! No chance. He’s just an old boyfriend. What is it about today? I haven’t seen him in ages and then, bang – you come along too.’

  ‘Ryan? Your old boyfriend? That was him?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Has his own construction company now. Takes lunch with architects with boarding-school names – like that dick, Gordon, who thinks he sweats expensive cologne. They’re renovating a private members’ club on The Green. Hey, you actually remember him? Jazus, I didn’t think you’d met Ryan.’

  ‘I just have a knack with names and when you mentioned “Ryan”, it came back.’

  ‘Forget Ryan. Because here we have David the historian, the scholar so bright a major university let him teach without having even started his PhD. I can’t flick by the History Channel without thinking of you.’ She smiled, demonstrating either the generosity of her praise or the subtleness of her sarcasm.

  ‘Ah, it’s a loser’s game; at some point there’s going to be too much history for anyone to keep up with. I really should bail from it.’

  ‘Bullshit – you were the academic dog’s bollocks. We all loved your class. Seriously. It was the only class where every time it was over I’d look at my watch and think “Already? Noooooo!”’

  David looked to his feet. He wanted to say, ‘Really?’ He wanted to hear more.

  ‘So how’s uni going? Professorship yet?’

  ‘Still lecturing. Still haven’t started the PhD,’ David muttered, as if admitting he’d been in jail on sex offences. He wanted to lie. But he had no lie to tell. There was nothing in his life that he could grab onto and exaggerate into something that it wasn’t.

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Way.’

  Tara laughed, and David wondered if she was laughing because she recognised that old-school riposte, or because she’d never heard it before because she was too young to have seen the movie that his generation stole it from. ‘See, my mother had a stroke a while back, and just as I was settling down to give the PhD a lash, her health deteriorated further. She needs twenty-four-hour care now and... Well, I’ve got to keep teaching and taking the classes to pay for that. And I’m giving extra tutorials and whoring myself to every society and Ladies’ Club talk night that’ll take me. See, there’s only me. My sister’s in Australia and is basically useless.’

  ‘Wow – fair play,’ Tara said, almost disbelievingly.

  ‘To be honest, I find the situation less than super-great. But, you know…’ He inhaled and sealed his full lips into two straight lines.

  Tara said, ‘After Trinners, I was stuck in an office for nine months. An insurance company. Nothing happened there. Ever. And I hated everyone. Know why? Because they were just like me. And I was just like them – a bland, mass-produced, Styrofoam office drone. But they were happy and I wasn’t. And that made me feel spoilt and pretentious. And it took me almost a year to realise that I really was spoilt and pretentious. I wanted more from life. I felt I deserved it.’

  ‘You’re not spoilt.’

  ‘Would’ve preferred if you’d zoned in on the “pretentious” adjective.’

  David gestured to her art hanging on the rails. ‘You want to be an artist, so of course you’re pretentious. Not that you aren’t yet an artist. I just mean that you aren’t yet on the cover of Modern Painters or Frieze. But I’m seriously impressed, Tara. It takes balls to proclaim a creative profession – the in-your-face narcissism of it. Respect!’

  They both laughed, and David felt a ripple of freedom blow across his face, an adrenaline rush of pure pleasure that he hadn’t enjoyed in months.

  ‘So tell me, why are you drawing maps? Miss my class that much?’

  ‘Of course I miss your class – but these aren’t snapshots of war, or records of hostile powers at a moment of suspended animation. That’s what you said about maps, I believe. But this is different.’ As Tara gestured to her paintings – like they were hanging in the Guggenheim and not on a park fence – her easy-going expression transformed into an illustration of gravity. Her smooth forehead creased as she told him about the series she was still working on called Erdős Landscapes.

  After a while David said, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ He even managed to sound amazed, despite the fact that he was barely listening as he watched her lips move, her eyes widen, her neck contract and expand.

  ‘Since all countries on any map can be identified individually with just the use of four different colours, the mathematician Paul Erdős thought... Oh, no. Rain!’

  Drops began to fall – big ones that went splat; not the usual summer’s drizzle. It was seconds away from a torrential downfall.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ Tara said, beginning to untwist the metal twine pinning the nearest frame. David set the neon tetras gently on the ground and set to work on the largest painting – the one of the entire world. The rain was getting heavier and starting to shake the leaves above their heads.

  Tara said, ‘If you can, take it across the road to the pub. Buy a drink if you have to. Just don’t let any water get onto it. I’ll be over in a minute once I undo the other two.’

  David stepped onto the road, ignoring the horn blare from the nearest car. The painting was almost too big for his hands to grip each side of its width. In seconds, the rain would begin to splatter the frame and dribble down the canvas. What pub? The painting was blocking his view and the drops were coming faster now. He kept going straight, up the broad steps to the porch of the Shelbourne Hotel, where the porter must have thought he was somebody else and opened the door for him.

  David continued into the swish lobby, which was packed with tourists, business people and lunching Dubliners. His arms aching, David lowered the painting to the thick carpet and leaned it against the flock wallpaper. Bending to regain his breath, he glanced back at the entrance. It was raining hard outside – a burst of a downpour that fell with a religious conviction. Did Tara see where he’d gone? He hoped so.

  Suddenly, someone squeezed between David and the painting. Hotel muscle? Already? But instead of security, David was f
aced with the back of a man’s head of tight grey hair as he stared down upon the painting.

  David cleared his throat and the man reached behind him, making a ‘with you in a minute’ gesture with his palm. He crouched so that he could get his face right up to the canvas. Finally, the man stood. He was over six feet high. Dressed in a light suit, his face was bland and formless like a worn coin, so that it was hard to gauge his age. But he also seemed rich enough for it not to matter what he looked like.

  ‘The name’s Scott. Hi.’

  Scott’s mid-American accent reminded David of shopping malls and neatly creased white socks, and of teenagers driving huge new cars – everything he’d envied when he’d been a teenager; everything he’d barely believed could exist somewhere in the world for someone his age.

  ‘David.’ They shook. Scott’s hand was warm and sweaty. David concentrated hard on not wiping his palms on the side of his jeans.

  ‘I love your country. I love that it’s still Catholic.’

  David made a ‘huh?’ face. No one’s Catholic any more. But quickly he offered something that he thought a pious American tourist would like. ‘So you’re a man of strong faith, Scott?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he replied, as if David had asked him if he was human. ‘Aren’t you?’

  Before David could reply, Scott added, ‘I pray to Him and I want Him to hear me. But does He? The only thing I know for certain is that when you talk to God you don’t expect miracles. And yet, here we are.’

  ‘Here we are?’ David glanced at the lobby doors. Where was Tara?

  ‘A miracle occurred just a day ago. I was in Africa yesterday. We’re doing the next Harvey Mac movie down there.’

  ‘The Harvey Mac movies?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Release has been put back till next year. Was supposed to be Christmas.’

  ‘So what exactly is your line of work?’

  ‘I’m Scott McCoy. Producer. And you?’

  ‘David... History lecturer.’ David suddenly felt a swell of free-floating anxiety. Scott oozed prosperity and refinement, and when confronted with great wealth, David experienced awe and revulsion: feelings as confusingly tangled as lust and disgust in the face of sex. David imagined the tasteful mansions this man must own all over the world, that would entertain bankers, lawyers and businessmen passing through from Vienna, Paris and New York. Men worth tens of millions. More. He was probably the type of rich person who didn’t throw parties – he would throw balls. No doubt he was only used to exceptional people.