fiction by sienna baker

The Accident

Charlie’s mother, Lily, had refused Charlie’s request for quite some time now. Originally, Charlie hadn’t cared that much; it had been a passing curiosity that he’d been able to, for the most part, shake off. But now he was older, about to turn seventeen, and there was a devastating hole in the project.

He had been tasked with writing a family history. Everything which had led to him being born, in living memory and records, of course. And he knew a great deal of it, this was true. He knew that his great-grandfather had been a quarter Spaniard and fought in the Spanish Civil War. He had included in the project that his great-grandfather had, during a routine outing, stepped on a landmine, heard the hardness of it under his foot and the click of imminent death. After making his peace with God, he removed his foot and waited to be blown apart, only to find that it was defunct. He had dug up the small thing, too small to think it could harm anyone, and re-buried it by an ash tree, promising himself that, should he survive the war, he would find it again and take it home with him. He did survive the war, and he did bring it home with him, and when he met Charlie’s great-grandmother, he had some of the metal shaved into a somewhat unconventional copper ring with which he proposed marriage. A tribute to his survival for a greater cause. 

He knew his great-grandmother and grandmother both had been artists, who’d married military men, and this had been a fact that both of them had resented. And his mother had grown up warning Charlie to stay away from the military, or any kind of job which would require him to put himself in danger—from others or from himself. At the time, Charlie didn’t understand what this meant. 

And there was now just one thing missing. One big hole in it all. He didn’t know how his parents met. 

He knew what happened after. He knew that, in the few years after they met, before he was born, they had spent much of their time traveling around Europe. He knew they stayed in tiny chateaus in France and Spain, that his father had taught his mother how to dance in their tiny, rented, Spanish kitchen. He knew he had been conceived on accident, a fact his mother had always reddened at mentioning, though one Charlie didn’t mind. He wanted more to fulfill his curiosity than anything else, and there was nothing that intrigued him more than unfilled gaps. 

His mother worried about him. Charlie was quiet and inquisitive. He was sensitive. He seldom revealed his feelings explicitly, but couldn’t stop them from manifesting in other ways. Nails bleeding from being picked at. A bitten, swollen lip. Time after time when he’d asked, she’d say, “You’re not ready yet.” Charlie had never understood why it was so important to his mother to keep this detail a secret.

But now he was seventeen. And now he was doing a project. 

“All right,” his mother had said, one night after they’d finished dinner. “What do you think?” She looked at Charlie’s father, Lachlan, who gave a wry smile.

“I’ve been trying to get you to tell him for years now. It’s a romantic story.”

“It’s not romantic,” Lily argued. Lachlan simply smiled, and cleared the plates. “Charlie,” Lily said to her son. “Go get your notebook. I’ll tell you how it all started.”

*

A few seconds before it happened, there seemed to be a hum in the air, and then, like the squeal and thud of a sliding door closing, the train clattered jaggedly to a halt. Lily supposed that these things weren’t too unusual—London was full of the sounds of machinery, track work, construction. But this was different, as indicated by the collective gasps and clambering from outside. She looked up from her book. Everyone in the train carriage, too, began whispering ardently, in confusion. Some rose from their seats and went to investigate. Out on the platform, a young child began wailing uncontrollably as her mother gathered her up and whisked her away from the platform. Others stood blankly, some with their hands over their mouths. 

Five minutes passed. Lily remembered a previous time on the tube that a soccer ball had rolled onto the tracks and gotten sucked into the train machinery, mangled beyond use. She crossed her legs and returned to her book.

Ten minutes. An announcement urging passengers to remain where they were. Many of those who seemed originally determined to remain in their seats now seemed to be sitting timidly on the edges of them.

Fifteen minutes. Lily, now, having been unsuccessful at distracting herself with her novel, was to do something extremely uncharacteristic of herself. She knew she was not an adventurer or a rule-breaker of any sort, but the bustle of the crowd out on the platform filled her with the type of apprehension borne only of uncertainty. She was now, she decided, to make a confident movement; as the train announcement dinged once more, warning passengers for the third time to stay in their seats until the train began to move again, she slipped out of the train doors onto the cold tube platform. They had stopped at Farringdon. The platform was mostly empty, except to her right where a huddle of people were straining around a strip of police tape, reaching from the nose of the train to one of the pillars on the platform. Policemen and paramedics were filing amongst the crowd, a select few ducking underneath the tape and beyond Lily’s line of sight. The rest were trying to shuffle the stubborn crowd away from whatever it was that so held their attention. 

Lily hated cops, and not in the sense that she was an anarchist or a criminal, but simply because she was so stark-afraid of authority that even glimpsing a red uniform would send her stomach to her throat. She had decided that coming out had been useless; she wouldn’t get through the crowd. But when she turned, an officer blocked her path back to the train carriage she’d been on. He advanced toward her, probably intending to shuffle her out of the way. She turned and scrambled in the opposite direction, flinging herself into the throng that crowded around the God-knows-what at the edge of the tracks. 

But when she reached the front of the crowd, she stopped dead, her vision streaked for a moment with clumps of red flesh and metal which her eyes couldn’t, at first, organize. After a few seconds all the parts came to make sense; a young man, face down, half his body crushed under the nose of the train. The one arm which was free was bent at an unnatural angle, his shoulder obviously dislocated when his arm was thrown behind his back as he landed. His skull had met with the metal railroad track, and the wound bled deep, deep red into the rocks and dirt below him. The vertebrae at the top of his neck—she could see the knobbles of bone through his skin – were jagged and snapped. Broken. He did not move.

Then, a hand on her arm which steered her away from the edge of the platform. “Miss, out of the way.” A different cop. She stood motionless, feeling ice-cold sweat collect in the crevices of her body, feeling her intestines twist and bubble and curl.

“Fuck. Fuck. Jesus, fuck.” Expletives and spit flew from her mouth onto the cold tiles of the platform. The air seemed to harden around her, and her lungs coiled in on themselves. She stumbled back further, but the muscles in her legs and feet seemed to atrophy and she fell flat on the concrete. The cop helped her up, and then to the train carriage. She sat and froze in place. 

“Miss, are you okay?” At first, the voice seemed far away, but like a bug that demanded one’s attention, her ears eventually focused in on it.

“Yeah.” She hardly gave the man whose voice it was a glance. He floated, irritatingly, into her periphery; a grey blob, blurring further as her eyes filled with water. 

“You don’t look it,” he said. “Do you need something to drink?”

“I’ve just seen a dead body,” she said, unthinkingly, willing her voice not to break.

“Ah.” He responded, officially taking up the seat beside her, to her mild dismay. “That explains the fuss. Went out to have a peek, did you?” She didn’t respond. “They are a bit shocking the first time you see them.”

“You’ve seen a dead body before?” she asked. She quickly regretted this; she had not wanted to actively engage him in conversation. But against her better judgement, she met his glance. He was soft-eyed, the first thing she noticed. She liked men who had soft eyes. Even better if they were blue, or grey, which his were, a sort of weird mix, like blue slate. And he had a boy’s scraggly haircut, despite looking about thirty-five. Usually, she would find this annoying and juvenile, but today, it was comforting.

“I used to be a fireman,” he said. “So, I’ve seen my fair share. This one was fully dead, aye?”

“What kind of question is that?” she said. 

“Well sometimes they bungle it.” He had a colloquial Scottish twang which she couldn’t yet tell if she liked. He said it ‘boongle’. 

“Bungle it?” she echoed.

“Well, you know. They jump onto the tracks but . . . they don’t quite get it right,” he said, crossing his arms leisurely. “You’ve got to pull them out off the tracks and they’re still half-alive. But broken into God knows how many bits.”

“Jesus, why would you say something like that?”

“Can’t afford to take things too seriously,” he responded, apparently unbothered by her accusatory statement. “I’m Lachlan, by the way.” He uncrossed his arms so he could extend one in her direction. She took it, unenthusiastically.

“Lily.” They sat in silence for a few moments. She hoped he would go away.

“I guess we’re here for a while, then, eh?” he said.

“Apparently.”

“I’m from Edinburgh originally,” he offered. “Just in London for a funeral. How about yourself?” She looked at him again, closer this time, trying to shake off the memory of the boy. He had the same colour hair, though, a mousy brown, and deep-set eyes, and thin, intriguing lips. He was handsome, she supposed absently, in a gentle, boyish way. 

“Must we do this?” Lily asked. “Can we not just sit in silence until…” She waved her hand vaguely, though it still had a tremor.

“Until they’ve cleaned his body up off the tracks? And wiped the steel clean of his blood? Carried him off in a stretcher? In a body bag, I guess it’d be.” Lily stared at him incredulously, her mouth pursed in disgust. “I’ve told you already,” he said calmly, “you can’t afford to take it too seriously. Death is everywhere. Comes for us all. You never know when. Personally, I’d prefer to have it knock me right out, so I never knew it was coming. Like a gun to the back of the head. Or a car crash, one of the ones where you die instantly.”

Lily unclenched her jaw and looked away from him, out the window, where the policemen were hissing and flitting about, shuffling people away. She felt nauseous. The air in the train was suddenly far too hot, and seemed to grip her by the throat and irritate her skin, suffocate her. She thought of the boy, his arm twisted, body crushed. His neck bones. “Isn’t it so strange to think,” she said, “that so many people that have experienced the world just like you or I, can suddenly be gone one day, just be snuffed out. Just not exist anymore. I always thought that was so strange.”

“Mmm,” he grunted thoughtfully, crossing his arms in relaxed fashion, as if she’d just told him the results of the weekend cricket match.

“Whose funeral were you at?” she asked, forgetting herself again. 

She was about to take back her question and try to shoo him away, when he said, “A little boy’s. Gregory.”

“That’s horrible,” Lily said. “How did he die?” She didn’t really want to know. Things like this made her feel sick, and she already felt green enough.

“House fire,” he said. “And it probably could have been prevented, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“My boss was too busy arguing with the volunteers for whose jurisdiction it was. Fire doesn’t take long to spread.” They sat in silence for a moment.

“So, you could have saved a little boy’s life if it weren’t for . . . for . . . bureaucracy?”

“Lots of people’s lives could have been saved if it weren’t for bureaucracy,” he responded, as if he’d said the line before.

“I don’t understand how you could do it. Fireman, you said?” He nodded. “I don’t think I could.” Lily wiped the sweat from her brow. She looked at her hand, slick with grease. She hid it in her pocket. “Seeing all that death and suffering.”

“Not everyone has the constitution,” he admitted.

“But why would you go to a funeral of a boy who you didn’t personally know? Surely you can’t have the time to attend the funerals of everyone who loses their lives in your vicinity.” To this, he had no immediate response. It struck Lily as the first time this had happened. The longer they sat in silence, the longer she realised he had no response at all; not a single witty comment. “How long does this usually take?” She asked, changing the subject.

“Depends on the extent of the damage,” he said. “Usually within the hour.” He paused. “Somewhere to be?”

“No,” Lily said. It was her afternoon off. “I’m coming home from the movies.”

“What did you see?” he asked.

“They’re having a ‘Vintage Week’ at the cinema downtown,” Lily responded. “I saw The Shawshank Redemption.” Lachlan grunted in approval, which surprised her – she expected him to have some snarky or insensitive comment to offer, but he sat quietly. As if gripped with a fear of the silence, she said, “I always cry when Brooks gets released from the prison. Because you know what’s going to happen. I always want to watch the film, and then when that part comes on…” He was looking at her now, in a way which did not make her feel uncomfortable, although perhaps exposed. “And then I always leave the cinema regretting that I’d gone in to see it.”

“You shouldn’t do that,” he said.

“Shouldn’t do what?”

“Regret doing something that made you feel.”

She chuckled, and at the force of the exhalation her throat felt dry and her voice cracked unwittingly. “Says the man who seems incapable of feeling anything.”

“Oh . . . no, no, no,” he said, furrowing his brow. “I’ve given you the wrong impression of me, apparently.” She was embarrassed now, on edge. At once she was incredibly aware of her body, sweating, the dryness of her mouth, the judgement she assumed must have been in her voice. She felt small, and wanted to take it all back, and then hated herself for caring so much about what this random man thought of her, and it all amounted to her silence as she waited for his forthcoming statement: “I feel far too much. About everything.”

She said softly, “Then how can you joke about death like that? Like it’s nothing at all?”

He looked off, absently it seemed, for a moment, in another world, before coming back to Lily’s and meeting her eyes. “It’s the only way to deal with it, eh?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, it’s better than crying every time you come out of the cinema.”

She grunted in soft, amused concession. “I don’t cry every time I come out of the cinema. Only with that film.”

“Right.”

A silence between them, which felt strangely awkward. A moment previously she would have prayed for a silence. 

“I need to move carriages,” she said at last.

“Why?”

“Because . . . we’re right under him.”

“Under who?”

“Under. . . .”—and she lowered her voice to scarcely a whisper, as if saying it would make it true, even though it was already true, but perhaps she had been mistaken, perhaps it had simply been a trick of the eyes—“the dead boy.”

“Hang on. Just sit with it.”

“Sit with it?”

“Just sit with it.”

She sat with it, even though she was unsure of exactly how. It seemed to make little difference, but she said nothing, because she didn’t want to make it seem like she hadn’t tried, because then she might disappoint this complete stranger, this random man to whom she had nothing to prove.

“So why are you so selective with your film crying?”

She faltered, for a moment, but at last spoke: “My Dad hung himself when I was eleven,” and the words seemed small, like those of someone who hadn’t quite delivered the joke right, but was nevertheless praying for some kind of meaningful response. From someone. Anyone. 

“Oh. Whoops,” he said it like someone who’d just stumbled into a bramble bush. He seemed about to say something to steer the conversation away when she said, with renewed energy and unprecedented boldness –

“I found his body.” And then: “My God, it’s fucking hot in here.”

“There’s a water fountain on the platform,” Lachlan said quickly, pointing out the window, jumping at the chance to have something else to talk about.

“Yeah, I’m not leaving the train again,” Lily said, holding herself rigid in the seat. “You know, you’re just like everyone else who learns that about me. Just so embarrassed and avoidant. You pretend you’re so okay with death, but you’re only okay with it in the abstract. When it becomes real, you shy away.”

Lachlan looked briefly put out by this comment. “You seem pretty avoidant of it yourself. Of death in general.”

“Oh, so I’m abnormal for being upset about seeing a dead body on the train tracks?” she said, aware that she was being far more abrasive than she normally would be. Part of her felt ashamed; part of her righteously indignant in the presence of this man who’d so rudely stepped into her life and seemed insistent on not leaving.

“No,” he said, “You’re perfectly normal for that.” He didn’t clarify further. She crossed her arms and looked away from him, annoyed. And then: “I’m not avoidant.”

“Then tell me what you really think,” she said.

“I think that’s an awful thing to have to go through,” he said.

“Yeah. It was,” she said. “After I found his body, I went to the garden.”

“The garden? Why?”

“My father loved tending to it. He’d spend hours with his hands in the dirt. It seemed futile, sometimes, trying to get the seeds to grow and sprout when the plant seemed insistent on dying. And yet . . . he would always try. Most of the time he’d fail. He wasn’t very good at it.”

“Hmm,” Lachlan said, thoughtfully. “It is a rare event when someone is naturally not gifted at something yet still persists.”

“I’m a florist now,” Lily said, ignoring him. “Much less exciting than being a fireman.” She turned her eyes back to meet his, uncrossing her arms and laying her hands gently in her lap. His posture hadn’t changed – he was still sitting, relaxed, stretched out, in his seat. 

“Much less traumatic.”

“Mmm,” she grunted, “I thought you weren’t bothered by such things as death.”

“I told you before, it’s not that I’m not bothered by them,” he said, with a sudden intensity in his voice.

“Then how do you stand it?” she said after a moment.

“Because maybe if I don’t, then. . . . ” It seemed to Lily to be the first time he had not had an easy response to something she’d said to him. “Then maybe nobody will. No, that’s not quite right. There would be others.” Lily waited. “If I don’t, then I feel more boys like Gregory, in the future, are going to die.”

“You just said that someone else would do it if you didn’t,” Lily said.

“I know.” Lachlan conceded. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s not rational . . . but I’m not a particularly rational person, I guess.” Lily thought he’d seemed the exact opposite; although now, she reimagined him in her mind, put the pieces in different slots. Perhaps she’d been wrong.

“What book is that?” Lachlan asked, pointing to the novel she had stuffed into her bag.

“Leonard Cohen’s biography. I’m Your Man,” she said.

“I saw him live once, here in London.”

“Really?” She was embarrassed at the sudden pep in her voice. And then, more levelled, “Most people I talk to don’t even know who he is.”

“One of the greatest living legends of all time,” he said. “Although, he probably wouldn’t like to be referred to as such. Which is another appeal of him. He’s no Mick Jagger. He’s better.”

“Did you know,” Lily started, “That when he was a teenager, he hypnotised the house maid and then asked her strip in front of him?”

“And did she?” Lachlan asked, with a wry smile.

“She did.” Lily smiled, mildly embarrassed. The muscles of her mouth seemed rigid, and it occurred to her that she hadn’t smiled in quite some time. “To be fair, she was hypnotised.”

“You’ll have to lend that book to me,” Lachlan said. “Does it teach hypnotism?”

“Unfortunately not.”

“Shame.” They both smiled, but not at each other, simply into the air.

“So, which version of ‘Hallelujah’ did you get when you saw him?” Lily asked after a few moments. “You know, he does a different one every time.”

“The one with the verse that talks about love not being a victory march, but a ‘cold and broken Hallelujah’.” He put on a sing-song voice at which Lily reddened. “And also the one where he very subtly talks about his lover’s lady parts.” Lily laughed, despite herself. It felt cruel, for some reason, like laughing at a wake. 

“Beautiful,” she said, softly. 

“Oh, so you’re not a prude,” he said, half in jest.

“To be fair, I did just tell you about Leonard Cohen hypnotically stripping his maid.”

“This is true.” The air seemed to have cooled around her slightly, but she could still feel the pockets of cold sweat at the hollows of her armpits and between her breasts. But she couldn’t ignore that his presence seemed to have cooled her, calmed her pulse, put her at ease. They sat for another few moments, in a silence again, but this time a comfortable silence, one that doesn’t beg to be filled. 

At once, the train groaned to a jolty start, bumped along its track for a moment, and then accelerated smoothly. As the train pulled away from the platform, Lily realised it had cleared of police and ambulances. She felt herself stuck to the seat, unable to move as they travelled over the rails where the young boy had been crushed.

“Well, that’s my cue to leave,” Lachlan said, climbing to his feet. “I’m the next stop.”

“Oh,” Lily said. She was suddenly uncomfortable at the prospect of being without him on the train. “Alright then.” She had altogether forgotten about the young man, crushed below the train, and now seemed far more disturbed by the fact that she may never see the man standing in front of her again; even though she tried to convince herself she was annoyed by him, he was a hypocrite, he was insensitive, she knew these things were not true.

“You’re not getting away that easily,” he said, with a little smile. She felt her heart rise under her ribs. He took a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, scribbled a series of numbers on it, and pressed it into her palm. “I’m not that far away, you know.” And with that, the train clambered again to its signature halt at the next stop and he was gone, as quickly and miraculously as he’d come.

*

The obituaries had labelled it an accident, but the footage from the station was difficult to misread. It had been a suicide, of a seventeen-year-old boy named Charlie Mason. 

Three years after his death, Lily and Lachlan conceived a child, a baby boy, whom they named Charles. Charlie, for short.

Sienna Baker is a nineteen-year-old writer from Sydney, Australia who specializes in short fiction, including genre fiction and memoir. You can see her other work in the Young Writer's Showcase (2020 ed.) and here.