Tessa Hadley: Accidents in the Home

— 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.