Accidents in the Home by Tessa Hadley

Author:Tessa Hadley
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

TOBY BOOKED A FLIGHT home from Kathmandu on what turned out to be a bandh, a holy day when all wheeled vehicles are forbidden and those who venture out risk being set alight or stoned. He could not find anyone willing to take him to the airport. So at dawn he climbed over the wall of the compound where he was staying, walked with his pack for about a mile, then managed to hail the driver of a stray tempo, a motorized rickshaw, who was prepared to risk it before the 6 A.M. bandh deadline. The airport was shut when he got there; he leaned his pack against the concrete guard post at the entrance, sat down beside it, and waited. After a while they opened up and let him inside. It was evening before he got on a flight to Delhi. From Delhi—after a night spent asleep in a hard plastic waiting room seat, embracing his pack—he flew to Rome, where there were more delays; and from Rome to Heathrow. He arrived at Heathrow at eleven o’clock at night, the second night of his journey home.

From Heathrow he telephoned his mother. Angie answered the phone.

—Could I speak to Naomi, please? he asked.

Her voice was gruff and terse. Who wants Naomi?

Toby cleared his throat. He was embarrassed to say; he and Angie hadn’t parted on good terms when he left to go on his travels three months before.

—Naomi doesn’t live here. Naomi’s over. Naomi’s dead, said the voice, not bothering to wait for him to go on.

Then she hung up.

Toby frowned. He gave up the phone booth to a girl backpacker waiting behind him, went to an empty seat, and carefully counted over the English notes in his purse. There was not enough for a coach ticket home; he would have to hitch. He did not really believe that his mother was dead; if she had been dead, her friend would have listed those three things differently, surely: death would have come first. If someone was dead, you did not begin with other things about them. But nonetheless, an anxiety about his mother took up its old place in his chest like a little hard ugly manikin.

After waiting for about an hour at an intersection, he got a lift with an all-night lorry driver going west who took him to the nearest motorway junction to home; then he had to walk for three or four miles through the sleeping outskirts of the city, hoping he’d see a bus or a taxi or a phone booth. When he did find a phone he discovered that all the coins left in his pocket were rupees. He decided to go to the house in Benteaston where his half sister Tamsin lived with her mother; his father’s house was another long walk across the city in Kingsmile. Benteaston was on his way in from the motorway, Victorian and Edwardian terraces crawling up and down the hills; always respectable, now even desirable and professional.

He didn’t

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