Tessa Hadley - Accidents in the Home

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IN HIS DREAMS he was afloat on sheets, laundered and ironed into neat rectangles, wafting their perfume of washing powder. They flew out under him as they had flown out across the room under Marian’s proficient hands, like big birds balanced on currents of air.

He woke up hungry, to the smell of cooking.

For the first few days in the house at Besteaston the ordinary sensations of physical comfort — the sheets, the hot shower, the clean clothes, the central heating, the home-cooked food — were almost too much, as if his capacity for them had shrunk while he was on his travels: they made him drunk and muddled.

Tamsin wandered into the room wearing the ginger cat round her neck like a boa and eating a toasted sandwich; she sat cross-legged on her bed, which was neatly made even though she was still in her pajamas. (The whole room was neat, apart from him on his mattress: Tamsin, whose teenage floor had been uncrossably deep in dirty clothes and overflowing ashtrays and coffee cups growing mold, had had a Damascus Road conversion to cleanliness a few years ago, when she came back to Marian from living in her squat.)

— So what happened? she said.

— How do you mean, what happened?

— In India, stupid. On second thought, don’t tell me. It’ll be all the predictable spirituality-materialism, roadside-pickles, music and flowers, poverty-dysentery stuff.

— I didn’t get dysentery.

— That’s one thing then.

— I’ve taken loads of photos.

— Predictably. Luckily you won’t be able to afford to develop them. “This is an American girl I met, standing in front of a Hindu temple. This was Sanjay, our guide round the ruins of the ranee’s tomb.”

— Actually, something did happen.

Tamsin had just taken a big bite of sandwich; she narrowed her eyes suspiciously at him while she finished her mouthful. Oh, no. You found a guru. You saw through to the meaning of life.

— Not that kind of thing. I don’t know if I should tell you. I don’t want Mum to know. I don’t want anyone else to know, really. Just because there’s no point in anyone worrying about it.

— You’ve got AIDS.

He shook his head. An accident.

— What kind of accident?

— In a car.

— What were you doing in a car?

— We hired one. We were going to do some trekking in the Annapurnas.

— Who’s we?

— Me and some girls I met at the hostel in Kathmandu. Three girls, Dutch girls. I’d only met them the day before: they had the whole trip planned out; they had food and maps and toilet paper and everything. (Actually, toilet paper’s not much use, it’s better just to use snow.) They said I could come along, there was a space in the car.

— Did you sleep with any of them?

Toby blushed deeply scarlet. It’s not that.

— Too ugly?

— No. I mean, not particularly, that wasn’t the reason why. They weren’t those kind of girls.

— You bet, said Tamsin. They’re always those kind of girls, only you don’t notice. So, go on.

— We hired a car, Toby said. It looked all right. You couldn’t hire a car without a Nepalese driver. I think hiring a car was a mistake: most people get the buses, but one of the girls had sort of fixed on this, this girl called Bregje. She was mad enough that they wouldn’t let her drive. We’d hardly gone any way, we were about twenty miles outside the city, on the Pokhara road where it’s quite flat and runs beside a river. The car hit something in the road, a stone or something, which was ironic considering it was the only road in Nepal I ever went on that was surfaced and didn’t have too many potholes. But the car just — well, the axle snapped, I think. That’s what the man said, the one who was driving. Except his English wasn’t very good. The girls said it was his fault, they were going to try to prosecute him, they said the vehicle was unfit and all this stuff, they got kind of obsessed with getting justice, they kept arguing with the police and everything, and the Dutch consulate, and they got involved with this dodgy lawyer. But you know, the car looked all right but it didn’t look that good, they just don’t have the kind of checks we have over here, or the regulations, everything’s just different, you know?

— So was anyone hurt?

— There was this big crunch when we hit the stone, then the car skidded along and hit a post at the side of the road — maybe it had been a road sign once but now it was just a gray painted metal post, doing nothing — and it spun round and stopped. And you could see one of the wheels rolling off in another direction. It wasn’t really all that terrible, we weren’t going very fast, there wasn’t much other traffic. The girls were screaming, but I thought we’d be OK. One of the ones in the back next to me hurt her shoulder, the other one cut her lip where she hit the seat in front. I was all right. The girl in the front passenger seat looked as if she had passed out. I wanted to get her out of the way because the car had sort of twisted across and the front of it was sticking out into the road, and the driver had jumped out and was trying to look at the engine, for some reason. I managed to get her out of the car and carry her to the side of the road, she opened her eyes, I sort of laid her down and kept holding her hand and told her she was going to be all right. The other girls were trying to call somebody on their mobile phone, one of them was crying because her shoulder hurt, the driver was climbing under the front of the car, where it was propped up on one wheel. While the others were still calling — they couldn’t get a signal — she died.

— Just like that.

— Just like that. She was gripping my hand and then she just let go. It was so strange; it really hadn’t been such a terrible accident. It all seemed quite ordinary and calm, the others didn’t even realize what was going on, they were still trying to get through on their phone. It turned out she had broken her neck, but I still don’t know how. You try and remember what happened, but it all seemed quite sedate, the other girls were screaming but until the last minute she was still trying to grab the steering wheel from the driver and pull it round, I remember her shouting something angrily in Dutch, probably swearing, and the driver was probably swearing in Nepali too. It was quite funny really.

— Next minute she was dead.

— The trouble was I didn’t particularly like her. Out of the three of them, she was the one I didn’t like. She was bossy, kind of unfriendly in the way she said things, I don’t think she’d really wanted me to come along. She was a big girl, there was something about her that sort of spilled over as if she was unhappy with herself. She had a really pale face and her writing was huge. You know those people who do circles to dot their i ’s and take up two lines for a single line of writing? She was the one who’d made all the lists for the trekking.

— Ugly people die too.

— She’d made some big scene the night before, sulking and stomping off to bed early, because the others thought she was planning for them to walk too far every day. That’s what she was like; you could tell she put everything into planning some great future project all the time, and always overdid it, and then she’d be the first to be groaning and complaining when things went wrong.

— Only not this time. Sounds like good riddance to me. One less fat monster abroad, making everyone’s lives miserable.

— So it was strange that it was my hand she was holding, when it happened.

— Her personality was already over. That was just physiology. Biochemistry.

* * *

IN THE MORNINGS Clare went out early to go home and help her husband get their children ready for school, and Marian went to work (she was a teacher). Naomi had a new job at the box office in the theater. She didn’t have to start until ten o’clock, and she wasn’t drinking every night, especially now Toby was home. Even after a bad night she could still just about manage to pull herself back together in the morning. She showered and washed her hair and appeared downstairs looking fragile and pretty and with only — as Tamsin put it — a faintly piquant aura of abuse, the purple crescents under the eyes, the etched lines beside the nostrils, a patch of angry skin between her eyebrows, hands that shook as she reached out for her mug of coffee.