The Accident: A Novel

The Accident

Also by Gail Schimmel

The Park (2017)

‘A gripping story. Schimmel has the rare gift of having great material for a story, but also being able to craft it into a story that feels real. Expect a lot … you won’t be disappointed.’ – Pretoria News

‘Gail Schimmel has the knack of Liane Moriarty … a cracking plot … perfect bookclub read.’ – Bookish blog

‘It is real, it is wise and witty … there is stomach-knotting unease.’ – without prejudice

Whatever Happened to the Cowley Twins? (2013)

‘It’s been a while since I could not put a book down. Nothing beats the feeling you get when you really want to know what happens next … This was my experience with this book.’ – Lali van Zuydam, Pretoria News

Marriage Vows (2008)

‘Marriage Vows … is as nuanced and layered as, well, yes a 10-tier wedding cake … This is an important debut by a local writer of real power, and I look forward to reading her next novel.’ – Arja Salafranca, Independent

The Accident

A Novel

Gail Schimmel

MACMILLAN

First published in 2019

by Pan Macmillan South Africa

Private Bag X19

Northlands

Johannesburg

2116

www.panmacmillan.co.za

ISBN: 978-1-77010-627-7

e-ISBN 978-1-77010-628-4

© 2019 Gail Schimmel

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual places or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Editing by Nicola Rijsdijk

Proofreading by Jane Bowman

Design and typesetting by Electric Book Works

Cover design by Hybrid Creative

Author photo by Nicolise Harding

To Thomas and Megan, my children, my world.

Part 1

February

Monday

Julia

My mother isn’t curious about my news.

She’s not like other mothers. When I phone and tell her I have big news, she doesn’t nag me, or beg me to tell her, or insist I come around immediately. I wasn’t exactly expecting her to. But I always have a small hope.

My therapist thinks I subconsciously remember a time when she was different, and that this is the source of my hope. Everybody (including Jane, my therapist) insists that my mother is like she is because of The Accident. Everybody says it like that, like it has capital letters, even my mother. My life has been defined by something that happened to my parents when I was two, something I wasn’t even involved in.

Maybe my mother was different before. When I was a child, I came up with the theory that she was a zombie. That she’d actually died in that stupid accident, but for some reason kept walking around like an alive person. ‘My mom’s actually a zombie,’ I told some of the girls at school. They didn’t believe me, so I invited them around to play. After that they still didn’t believe me, but they also didn’t not believe me. That’s how much like a zombie my mother was. And still is. Luckily, I was friends with the sort of girls who were very kind and who wouldn’t tease you even if your mother was a zombie. The sort of girls who went home and told their mothers how worried they were about me, with a zombie mother. Pippa Lee’s mom took me aside one day and gently told me that my mother was definitely not a zombie, just a bit sad. I nodded and said yes, I understood. And I allowed her to pull me to her large soft breasts and stroke my head, because it’s true that children of zombies are starved of physical affection.

When I told Jane my childhood zombie theory, she thought it was psychologically very astute. Jane’s theory is that the reason I’m not more screwed-up is because I was a particularly astute little girl. My theory is that therapists have to say that to make you feel better. Making you feel better is a big part of their job description. As far as I’m concerned, I’m okay because I had an okay childhood. Yes, my mother is distant and cold – even her hands are cold to the touch – but she provided for me, and she was always around, and she came to all my school events, and she never hit me or even lost her temper with me. Even when I tried to make her. Even in my teens when I went out with unsuitable boys and came home late and drunk, and fought with her. She just stayed calm and told me she trusted me. People have much worse childhoods, I tell Jane. I have a lot to be grateful for. Jane says this is a very mature attitude, and I feel better about myself, and as I leave the waiting room I wonder if she has different compliments for all her patients, or if she just recycles the same ones. I don’t really care – children of zombies take their compliments where they can find them.

So I’m disappointed but not surprised when my mother’s reaction to my announcement that I have news is to calmly arrange a visit two days from now.

I phone Daniel.

‘I told my mom I have something to tell her.’

‘Was she excited for us?’

‘I didn’t tell her about us. I just told her I have something to tell her. I’ll see her in two days and tell her then.’ I can almost feel Daniel’s confusion through the phone. ‘I’ve explained to you, Daniel,’ I say. ‘She’s not like other moms. If I announced that I’d decided to turn myself into a rhinoceros, she’d just nod and say, That’s nice, dear.’

‘Maybe it would help if I met her?’ says Daniel.

Daniel wants to meet my mom, and I don’t want him to – this has been an ongoing theme for the last two months. Ever since Daniel left his wife.

‘If she’s so calm, she’s not going to freak out about me,’ he goes on.

‘No, she won’t. I’m not worried about her. I’m worried about you. You might not feel the same way about me after you’ve met her. She’s very … indifferent.’

He sighs. ‘I love you. I don’t care if your mother’s an ice statue.’

‘Well,’ I say, ‘you’ll meet her in due course. Just let me tell her first.’

The problem, of course, is that Daniel isn’t thinking ahead. He’s just left his wife of ten years and their child. He isn’t thinking about having a child with me, even though he knows that’s what I want. He isn’t thinking about what sort of mother I’ll be, or even what sort of stepmother. But if he meets my mom, he’s going to think about it. He’s going to wonder if I’ll become like her. He’s going to wonder if he’s done the wrong thing.

Jane says I won’t become like my mother. She says she can absolutely guarantee it. She says I will screw up my children in entirely different ways.

‘Maybe I just won’t have children,’ I told Jane once. ‘Maybe that’ll be better.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she answered. ‘You’re always talking about how you want kids.’

Sometimes I wish I had the sort of therapist who just nods and says, ‘How does that make you feel?’

Jane has a lot to say about my relationship with Daniel, of course. She says I was attracted to him because he was unavailable, because that’s all I’ve ever known. She’s very worried that I won’t want him now that he’s left Claire. She’s especially worried because Daniel’s a very warm and effusive man. He’s always telling me how much he loves me and how excited he is about our lives together. Jane says I must be careful not to feel stifled. I tell her that’s not going to happen: I’m very pleased Daniel left Claire and is with me. I just don’t tell Jane how I creep out of his heavy arms at night because I’m worried I’ll suffocate.

And I don’t tell anyone that in a strange way, my mother’s phlegmatic reactions – while constantly disappointing – are also strangely comforting because they are all I know.

My mother is a zombie and my world is on its axis.

Catherine

When I get off the phone, I can hardly breathe I am so excited. Julia says she has some news, and she sounds happy. Her news can only be one of two things, either of which could be the beginning of my plan to kill myself.

I have spent twenty-six years waiting. Feeling nothing. Going through the motions. Waiting and waiting for the day Julia no longer needs me so I can end my pain. That day is finally coming.

After The Accident, people told me time would heal everything, that eventually it would just be a painful memory. For years I felt nothing except a longing to die – but I couldn’t because of Julia. Then I started feeling small flickers of life. When they started, I was hopeful. Everybody said all it takes is time, so I thought the flickers were the beginning of something – that I might be like everybody else and be healed by time. But they never took flight.

This is more than a small flicker of life, which is the most I have come to expect as I have navigated the years since The Accident. My body is fizzing with life, spilling over with it. I am so excited I can’t sit down, I can’t concentrate, I can’t do anything. I want to tell someone. But the only person I want to speak to is Mike.

The only person I ever want to speak to is Mike.

Julia

Now that I have an arrangement to see my mother, I need to think about what I’m actually going to say to her. In most situations, the mother would know about the boyfriend before there’s an announcement of them having moved in together. Never mind the rest.

But with Daniel it’s complicated, so my mother knows nothing. In fact, as far as she knows, we’re still at the stage where I’m great friends with Claire.

I met Claire at a pottery class about a year ago. I started pottery because my day job was boring, and I needed to do something fun and artistic.

People often find it hard to reconcile my personality with my job. I have untameable hair, wear loud colours, and every now and again I go off to Iggy Pop in my apartment. At home I am chronically disorganised, and I have a history of dead-end relationships. People expect me to be artistic, I think, or else they expect me to be a low achiever. There was a time I didn’t expect much from myself either, to be honest.

But I’m an accountant. And a really good one. And I think it’s because so much of my childhood had no answers, but accounts always have answers. From the moment I took my first high-school accountancy lesson, and the teacher said, ‘If it doesn’t balance, you know the answer is wrong,’ I knew this was the career for me. With my mom, I never know if my answers are wrong. With my work, I know. Accounting makes life seem fair. Jane says she’s heard of worse reasons to choose a career.

I don’t work in a smart firm where I get to wear power suits, though. I work in an old-fashioned business where my boss wears a cardigan, is freaked out by my wrist tattoo and regards computers with utmost suspicion. My colleagues are all older than me. Good people, durable people – but cut from the same dull tweed cloth. Our offices are in one of those converted old-Joburg blocks of flats. The other tenants have knocked out walls and put in fancy flooring and cool lighting, and generally made the place quite trendy. But our suite still has faded carpets and that rough plastering that accumulates little wells of dust. You can imagine the sad lives that were conducted in these rooms before it became an office block. Sometimes it feels like the whole place is covered in dandruff.

I really need to get out, to find a more stimulating position. But I don’t seem to be able to move. So last year I decided to do pottery.

Work probably wasn’t the only thing that led me to pottery. I was also lonely. I’ve always had loads of friends; nights out and laughs and get-togethers. But something’s happened in the last year or two. My closest group of friends has just kind of dissolved. My best friend, Heleen, who’s the most talented dressmaker and fashion designer, and was always up for a party … She had a baby. Her husband is all my fault, because she met him through me. He’s also an accountant – only he’s the stereotypical type. I never for one moment thought they’d get together.

I listened to all Heleen’s god-awful pregnancy tales, but it didn’t end when the baby actually arrived. Then it was all breastfeeding and sleep habits and baby nutrition and the relentless trivia of his life. I tried to understand, but it bored me to tears. So I don’t see Heleen much any more, and I don’t know if she’s noticed. And Agnes immigrated to Jamaica of all places, and now just posts enviable selfies on Facebook, and Mary-Anne kind of drifted off after she got married on a beach in Zanzibar and didn’t invite anyone, which made things a bit awkward, and Flora decided to study medicine at the age of twenty-seven and is now never available, night or day.

I found out about the pottery class from a notice in a shop.

It wasn’t my usual shopping area, and it wasn’t my usual sort of shop. It was an art-supply shop, and I’d only gone there to get the particular brand of pencil my boss favours. But I saw this notice about a studio nearby, and I felt like a person in a movie, tearing off the telephone number and stuffing it into my pocket. It took me a few weeks to actually phone, but eventually I did it, and the teacher had a new group just about to start, so it was like it was meant to be. And it was great.

The class was made up of five women, and the teacher had crazy curly grey hair that came to her waist. Amongst her neighbours’ carefully manicured suburban lawns and electric fences, her house was like Sleeping Beauty’s castle – high hedges covered in creepers, and a wooden gate that you simply pushed open. God knows how she wasn’t burgled daily.

It was just as well I wasn’t doing the class to meet men, I remember thinking. Of the five students, only Claire and I were under fifty, so naturally we gravitated towards each other. In normal circumstances, she’s not a person I would have chosen across a room – she’s one of those tall, thin, aristocratic blondes who looks like she’s either away with the fairies or thinking she’s a cut above everyone else. But we were the ‘young ones’, so we found ourselves sitting together at the introduction when we had to go around the circle saying why we wanted to do pottery and what we hoped to get out of it. The old ladies were a group of widows who all lived at the same retirement village down the road, and they basically said a different version of what I said – new hobby, something to do, artistic outlet. But Claire announced that she was probably going to be shocking at pottery – she just needed something to get her away from her husband and child once a week, and pottery had been the first thing she’d seen that was reasonably close by. I was a bit shocked, but the old ladies nodded and one laughed and said, ‘Been there.’

Claire wasn’t shocking at pottery – she was the best in the class. I didn’t know it then, but Claire is always best in the class, no matter what class it is. That first day, we learnt how to make snake bowls – those bowls where you roll the clay into a long snake and then coil it into a bowl. My snake looked like it had swallowed a series of small mammals – and my resulting bowl looked like a child had made it.

When I said that to Claire – who’d rolled her snake so thin, her bowl looked like some sort of perfect and magical air creation – she assured me I was wrong. ‘I have a child,’ she said. ‘Hers would be much, much worse.’

‘If she’s anything like you,’ I said, ‘I doubt that.’

‘Oh no, she’s like her dad,’ said Claire. ‘Totally without any imagin­ation.’ Then she laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t really mean that. Nina has lots of imagination. But two left hands.’

I don’t have lots of married friends or friends with children – other than Heleen, who makes it sound idyllic. I didn’t know you were allowed to say bad things about your children, or say that you wanted to get away from them. I also didn’t know you could slag off your husband. I figured her husband must be awful and her child particularly disappointing. The old ladies weren’t shocked though – they thought Claire was very funny. When she told us, at the second class, about how her husband, Daniel, was floored by the idea that he had to cook himself dinner on pottery night, the old ladies cackled and agreed that men were hopeless.

When the widows laughed, I didn’t like how it felt as if Claire had more in common with them than with me. She’s a person you find your­self wanting to impress. Like the most popular girl at high school – the one who doesn’t do anything special to be popular, and is nice and kind and interesting but never quite accessible. After the second class, I asked Claire if she wanted to come for a drink afterwards, though I was sure she would say no.

‘A drink? Now?’ She looked at me as if it was the most scandalous proposal. Then she smiled. ‘You know what, I think I will! What a divine idea. How mad!’

Then she turned and asked the widows if they wanted to join us, and I plastered a smile on my face and said, ‘Yes, please do.’

But they chuckled and said it was past their bedtime, and us young things must go and have some fun, and Claire laughed and said she wasn’t as young as me, and I was corrupting her completely.

When we got to the bar – which was more of a restaurant that served drinks – Claire looked around like she was in a foreign country. ‘Look at all these people out so late in the week,’ she said, though it was just after nine. ‘I forget that life goes on for other people.’

‘Life’s hardly stopped for you,’ I said. ‘You have a husband and a daughter. That’s amazing.’

Claire smiled. ‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ she said, as if we were talking about an entirely hypothetical scenario that had nothing to do with her. ‘Oh fuck,’ she added, ‘I’d better tell Danny I’m going to be late.’ She fished her phone out of her bag and sent a text. ‘He’s going to be so put out.’

‘Is he terribly possessive?’ I asked.

Claire looked confused. ‘God, no.’

I couldn’t figure out why else her husband would be put out by her having a drink after class, so I started to paint a mental picture of a selfish monster, a towering giant, who kept Claire a virtual captive in their house. Because Claire is so tall and aristocratic looking, I pictured him as very good-looking, to have captured her heart. And even that seemed glamorous – if Claire was being kept captive in a tower by an evil prince, then that was obviously this season’s trend.

And Claire seemed fascinated by my life. She made me talk about going out and clubbing and dating, which I hardly even did any more, and she laughed at my stories like I was hilarious.

And I was fascinated by her. Her, and her perfect pottery, and her unseen family.

Claire

I drop Nina at school ten minutes late.

Nina’s been at the same school since Grade 00, but now she’s in Grade 1, so they have to wear a uniform. While most of the girls were excited about it, Nina was appalled. She’s what my mother calls an ‘idiosyncratic dresser’, and what I call a ‘great, big mess’. Either way, after two years of expressing her individuality, she doesn’t like the conformity of a school uniform. So now she’s transferred all her originality onto her hairstyles. She has fly-away blonde hair like mine, and it’s difficult to execute her ambitions. This morning she wanted a French plait. I was quite proud of my effort, but she burst into tears because of the lack of a ribbon. Apparently ‘everyone’ knows a ‘real’ French plait has a ribbon threaded through the length of it. So, while she sobbed, I had to search for a ribbon in regulation school colours before undoing the plait and starting again.

She was still sobbing by the end, at which point I took ten deep breaths, told myself to find my Zen, and then screamed at her to get in the car. Which she did, muttering about how much she hated me, her hair and, above all, the ribbon.

And now we are late, and Mrs Wood has to pause her morning greetings to the class as we walk in. Nina hugs and kisses me effusively, as if nothing has gone wrong with our morning. Mrs Wood walks me to the door, apparently keeping the whole class silent with one glare. I wonder if she could teach me that skill.

‘Late arrivals are very disruptive for all the girls,’ she says to me at the door, and because I can’t bear being in trouble, I spend the next three minutes charming her while the class silently waits, and by the time I leave, I’ve volunteered to help with the cake sale next week. Nina winks at me as I go,