The Accidental Read Free Page A

to do with the house. She comes with the package. Her mother and Michael have a joke they whisper when she’s round a corner out of earshot, or even when she’s not in the house and wouldn’t hear even if they shouted it, Katrina the Cleaner in her Ford Cortina. The Ford Cortina is a car from the 1970s; it is probably an oik car, though Astrid doesn’t get the joke; Katrina doesn’t actually seem to have a car; she carries the cleaning stuff along the road to the house from her own house in the village then carries it back again when she’s finished. They always act so juvenile as if they are being really the worst they can be, saying something really risky. Personally Astrid is above such things. People are just different from other people, is what she thinks. It is obvious. Some people are naturally not as suited to living the same way as other people, so they make less money and live a different, less good kind of life.
    There isn’t much light on the stairs. It will be quite an interesting effect. She watches the top of Katrina’s head through the viewer. She films her cleaning the stair. Then she films her as she moves down and cleans the next.
    Katrina the Cleaner shifts to one side, not looking up, to let Astrid pass.
    Excuse me, Katrina, Astrid shouts politely. Can I just ask you something?
    Katrina the Cleaner bends away from Astrid and switches the hoover off. She doesn’t look up.
    Can I just ask you how old you are? Astrid says. It’s for my local researches and archive. (This sounds good. Astrid tries to memorize it so she can use it to the Indian man at the Curry Palace.)
    Katrina the Cleaner says something downwards. It sounds like thirty-one. She definitely looks that old. She has switched the hoover back on again. Thirty-one is tricky. Astrid rounds it down. 10 per cent new, 90 per cent old. She films all the way round Katrina then films her own feet going down the rest of the stairs.
    This footage will come straight after the dead thing she taped on the road when she was walking back from the village last night. It was a bit like a rabbit but it wasn’t a rabbit. It was bigger than a rabbit. It had small ears and smaller back legs; it had been mangled by cars; its fur was matted with mud and blood. Four or five crows rose off it when she went towards it; they had been pulling scraps off it. She had found a stick on the verge and poked it with it. Then she had filmed it. At some point she is going to leave the camera on the table in the substandard lounge at exactly the right place on the tape and Michael will definitely pickit up and look at what’s on it, he is bound to, and he is such a loser he is really squeamish about things like that if they are happening in real life and not like on a stage or whatever.
    She stops, stands in the hall. The dead thing. What if it was alive but unconscious and she had poked it that hard and it wasn’t dead at all, it could still feel her poking it and only seemed dead because it was in a coma?
    Well but maybe it would be okay because maybe if it was in a coma it wouldn’t have felt it so much as it would have if it had been awake. In the four-wheel drive on the way here her mother and Michael did their usual Peep for Sheep game where Michael hits the horn whenever they pass sheep and they did their usual clenched fists in the air that they do whenever the car passes roadkill. It is supposed to honour the spirit of the dead thing. It is juvenile. Astrid liked it when she used to be upset by the dead things. But now she is twelve and they are just dead things for God’s sake.
    It is very unlikely that it felt anything when she poked it.
    She poked it for her researches and archive.
    Astrid puts her eye back behind the camera. Also it is important to look closely at things, especially difficult things. Astrid’s mother is always saying so. Astrid goes through the dark hall and into the front room. But the camera viewer floods with light so bright that she