Tessa Hadley: Accidents in the Home

He had to lend Toby two pounds to replace what he’d spent (Toby needed it for bus fare), and he went on reading out sentences about workers and mass movements in delighted irony until the toddler he was minding fell over his baby walker and had to be picked up and consoled. Graham’s third wife, Linda, worked in a psychiatric unit for teenagers and was the family breadwinner; Graham looked after the children, who were nine, five, and two.

— I hear your mother’s having a lesbian fling, Graham said, expertly hoisting his little son’s legs in the air to change his nappy, wiping him with a sequence of torn-off chunks of cotton wool soaked in baby oil that he had laid out ready in a row alongside the plastic changing mat. He was looking austerely patriarchal; his hair and beard had turned a soft clean white. Clare had told Toby that he had played Santa Claus for Daniel’s playgroup, and also that he wasn’t selling much work. ‘Whether it’s because he’s not producing much, or because nobody wants it, we’re not sure.’

— Yes, kind of, said Toby.

— Poor old Naomi! Why can nothing ever be straightforward with her? Still holding up the baby’s feet, he spread a clean nappy deftly underneath his son’s bottom with his big right hand. And is it all going to end in tears as usual?

— They’ve got a nice flat, Toby said.

— In Leigh Mills, of all places! Frightfully respectable.

— It’s got a nice garden.

— I’m sure it’s all very nice. But rather her than me.

Graham and Linda still lived in Kingsmile, near where Graham and Naomi had once lived together; but it had changed, and most of the big houses that had been bed-sits and student rooms had been renovated and repainted, their floors sanded, and the old fireplaces put back in. On the way to catch his bus (Graham had wanted to drive him back but had to pick up his nine-year-old daughter from ballet), Toby walked past the scrap of park where he used to play football with his friends before he got ill. A few boys now were scuffling or riding their bikes desultorily in and out of the trees. The trees were fatter and heavier, and the boys had expensive bikes and names like Dominic and Jake and Noah.

* * *

TOBY GOT HIMSELF so entangled with a couple of young evangelists that he ended up spending an evening at a house where one of them lived, not an ordinary family house but something like a youth hostel for religious young people. Different residents, lots of them African and South East Asian students, came and went during the evening, heating themselves solitary suppers in the microwave. They didn’t seem to know one another very well. Notices on pieces of paper were taped onto cupboard doors in the kitchen: instructions, complaints about stolen food or washing up, and a fluorescent poster for a concert, Christ Takes the Rap . The kitchen had a sickly smell like margarine.

Toby had been invited, without quite realizing it, to a sort of prayer meeting. When the two young men had stopped him in town, asking him how he felt about consumerism and materialism, he had given them his telephone number without thinking, trying to get rid of them without seeming rude. Then when they rang him at Angie and Naomi’s flat, he had thought he’d better agree to meet them somewhere in order to explain that it would be awkward if they kept telephoning him because it was his mother’s number. He found himself sitting drinking instant coffee with seven or eight others around a bare Formica table under a central light. Only one of them lived in the house, and they were not all young. There was a man with a gray goatee and a paisley cravat whose wife had died of cancer (rather a long time ago, it turned out), and a middle-aged woman who was a buyer for Marks & Spencer’s and said reproachfully she wished she’d thought to bring some “snacks.”

Toby listened to them talk. He didn’t recognize their experience; he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to feel as they felt that God was involved intimately in every tiny twist and turn of their experience, as interested in their lives as they were, partaking of their hopes and anxieties and indignations. Outnumbered by them, he wondered how they could possibly all be wrong. The buyer described how her faith had helped her to her latest promotion at work. The young man who lived in the hostel explained how God had given him a sign that he was to leave his college course in business studies and find work helping in the community (he hadn’t really found it yet, apart from stopping people in town and asking them how they felt about materialism). A girl from a family of refugees from Laos told how her secret prayers (her mother disapproved of her conversion) had ended in her father’s release after fifteen years in a reeducation camp. The man with the goatee said that his wife’s spirit often visited him, touching him and reassuring him as he went around doing the housework that she used to do.

There was something attractive and disquieting about how casually they used words like faith and spirit and love and how they mixed together fantastic assumptions of God’s reality and agency with ordinary everyday know-how. Toby contemplated the possibility that perhaps the world really was this shimmering yielding fabric of opportunity and love and he was simply closed to it. With a banality that irritated him, he kept coming back in his mind to the question of the shower rail he had broken in Angie and Naomi’s bathroom the other day, grabbing it and ripping it out from the wall when he slipped under the shower because he’d forgotten to put the rubber bath mat down. There was no possibility — even if he prayed, even if God was real, even if there was a transcendent redeeming meaning to life and death — that that shower rail could be back in the wall and never have come out, that the big dirty holes in the plaster, full of a mess of screws and Rawl plugs, could be unmade, or that his mother could have not rushed in and looked at the disaster with such a frightened face (Angie was out). We could pretend I did it, she had said.

This was a trivial point, he knew. He knew such trivial things could be interpreted as mere distractions from a larger theme. But he felt it nonetheless as a blockage, a stopping point that prevented his seeing God’s transformations. It was the real small accidental things that happened in time, he felt, that could not be altered or loosened. And he felt those real small things as implacably strong, stronger than all the rest.

There was only one thing he could think of from his own experience to proffer modestly alongside all the signs and instructions and intimations these other lives had bristled with. Occasionally when he was facing a flat surface, a door or a wall — and especially when he was tired — he saw a brilliant flickering on it like the reflection of a conflagration behind him; when he looked quickly, instinctively, over his shoulder, there was never anything there. He wondered for a while whether to mention it. Then he decided not to. Told baldly, it would seem pretty insignificant. And he had always known it might only be a trick of the brain left over from his illness.

* * *

ONE SATURDAY, after he had been staying there for about a fortnight, Toby came back to the maisonette at suppertime and found the door open at the top of the concrete steps. Outside the door were some gardening things: trays of bedding plants, a trowel with soil stuck to it, muddy gardening gloves. From inside he could hear Angie’s voice. He thought she might be telling one of her funny stories, because his mother didn’t reply and Angie’s voice was pitched rather exuberantly rhetorical. When he got to the top of the steps he stopped, embarrassed, not quite able to make out what was going on inside. The room was shadowy at first in contrast to the bright summer’s afternoon. The white of Angie’s sleeveless sweatshirt came and went in the shadows.