Tessa Hadley: Accidents in the Home

Naomi snorted over her corkscrew. With an ax?

— Well, we’ll take it to the police tomorrow. See what they say. What shall I do with it for now? Naomi?

She shook her head in abandonment without turning around.

— In the shed, OK? Everybody happy?

He rewrapped the package with that scrupulously responsible concentration he always brought to minor domestic tasks, managing to communicate at once (the girls said) extreme willingness to do his bit with the helplessness of the creative artist who couldn’t be expected to do it very often.

He and Toby took the ax to the police station the next day. The police were as mystified as they were, wrote the details down on a form, and kept the ax. Haggis, who was often off school and who lived alone with his mother in a flat overlooking the place where they played football, said he saw a policeman poking about once behind the shrubs where Toby had found the cairn. Three months later, when everyone had forgotten about it, a card from the police arrived at Toby’s house saying the ax had not been claimed in the meantime and therefore if they wanted it they could collect it.

They didn’t want it, of course. Particularly, they didn’t want it, because in the meantime Toby’s dad, Graham, had left Naomi and Toby and Clare and Tamsin and had gone to live with the woman who would become his third wife, and with whom he would go on to have three more children even though he was already in his fifties.

Also they didn’t want it because Toby had started, shortly after the night they found the ax, to be ill. He began by suffering from headaches and a general feeling of weakness and malaise. For several months their general practitioner insisted he was malingering. Probably he thought it was something Naomi was making up or was producing in her son as a hysterical response to her husband’s leaving her. Naomi at that time would not have inspired confidence in her powers of diagnosis or in her authority as a responsible mother. Every night she drank a bottle of wine. She once went over to where Graham was living with his new girlfriend and stood yelling her opinion of them in the street and threw the bottle and broke a window (in the wrong flat, as it turned out). Another night she took an overdose of pills, and although she almost immediately threw them up again Clare and Tamsin called an ambulance just in case. She gave up the job she had had in a shop specializing in Native American crafts, and the household had to manage on social security and whatever Graham gave them, which wasn’t much and was naturally another source of grievance.

It was suddenly a very female and a very aggrieved household. Naomi and her two stepdaughters talked and talked about Graham and his vanity and his weakness and his lust and his selfishness and his fear of aging until the conversation ached and winced and they couldn’t bear to touch it anymore, for a few hours at least. Clare and Tamsin wouldn’t have anything to do with their father for almost two years. (It was the babies that coaxed them around to a reconciliation in the end.) Even Marian, the first wife and Clare’s and Tamsin’s mother (they lived with her at weekends), came around and joined in the “Graham conversation,” as the girls called it, on one or two occasions.

But Naomi knew there was really something wrong with Toby. In the mornings when she struggled out of her poisoned drunken sleep to get him up for school, she was at least sensible enough to tell the difference between an ordinary unhappy boy and this listless deadweight huddled under his Star Wars duvet. He even smelled sick.

— Darling, she said, her tongue thick with shaming fur, the broken pieces of her life taking up their swollen lurid waking places in her mind. Just describe to me exactly how it hurts, and where.

But he only moved his head once in frowning denial, not opening his eyes, his mouth clamped shut, keeping her out.

In the doctor’s surgery, her puffy pale face without makeup and her velvet skirt stained and crumpled, she insisted on knowing which tests could be done to find out what was the matter. The doctor even joked that she should try some herbal remedies or Red Indian charms. In the end the tests showed that Toby had a form of viral encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain, and he was off school for two years, with almost constant pain in his head and all over his body. He spent months in hospital, because the encephalitis weakened his immune system and made him prone to other illnesses; he had pneumonia twice. Naomi lost interest in the Graham conversation. She cut down her drinking; whenever Toby was in hospital she slept every night there too; she was silent, fixated, dull company except when she was talking to other mothers with ill children. The girls moved back to live full time with Marian.

At one point when Toby was very ill, his name was mentioned in Assembly at school and his class collected money for flowers. Two or three years later when he was better, he once bumped into Haggis (Haggis’s real name was James, and that was how Toby hailed him from across the street). Toby and Naomi had moved to a flat in a different part of the city, and Toby had started back at a different school. Haggis looked surprised to see him and told him they had all assumed that he had died.

* * *

WHEN TOBY was twenty he went away to University, where he studied for a Visual Arts degree specializing in film and video. When he came home at the end of his final year he planned to spend some of the summer with his mother and some with Clare and her husband and children, before he went off traveling with his camera. Naomi had moved again since he’d last seen her and had got out of an abusive relationship with a man with a mental health problem (before that there had been a married businessman who imported shoes). She was now living with another woman, Angie. Tamsin couldn’t deal with it and wouldn’t visit them, but Clare said it was a good thing. She said Naomi had fallen into a pattern of being treated badly by the men she got involved with, and this relationship with Angie was a sign of her wanting to break that pattern. She said women were kinder to women than men ever were, more appreciative and gentle and sensitive; and Naomi’s choice of Angie was a sign that at least she wasn’t willing her own destruction anymore.

Naomi picked Toby up from the bus station in her old Citroen. The car was as scruffy as ever and she had to move paper tissues, empty crisps packets, a Tampax box, secateurs, and rolling tobacco efore he could get into the front seat, but she looked pretty. She was wearing an embroidered silky top and jeans; she had had her hair cut shoulder length, and, as Clare said, it made her look younger because she didn’t look as if she was trying to. The lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth were still there, but crinkled with smiling. She was buoyant and childish and seemed rather overexcited, unlike his usual idea of her: small, dark, concentrated with suffering. Her silver earrings had some sort of symbol that might be a lesbian thing; Toby didn’t mind, as long as she didn’t try to corner him with it and make him say something.

— We’re nearly there. Look, Toby!

They were driving around a mini-roundabout at the end of a suburban street; an improvised banner was tied between two young trees. In red paint on a white torn sheet was written, WELCOME HOME, TOBY MENGES, BA!

There were tears in her eyes.

— Did you see, sweetheart? Realize how proud of you we are? Let’s go round again, what the hell!

This time she sounded the horn, blaring out one of the rhythms he used to clap at football matches with his friends. A car following them onto the roundabout sounded its horn too, probably in protest rather than sympathy.

Toby’s face was hot, he stared ahead, blinkered with embarrassment.