The Accidental Read Online Free PDF

road that leads to the village. It is very hot. She thinks of the house behind her, sitting there full of all its horrible things, and all their holiday things there too, arranged and different, like things floating on a too-hot surface. It is the moment before burglars walk in through the garden and just help themselves. But, since it’s the moment before this happens, the rooms downstairs are all empty, nothing in them but things, like the rooms are holding their breath in this hot summer air. Magnus told her that idea about how something on a film is different from something in real life. In a film there is always a reason. If there is an empty room in a film it would be for a reason they were showing you the empty room. Magnus held up a pen, then dropped it. He said if you drop a pen out of your hand in real life, that’s all it is, a pen you dropped out of your hand there on the ground. But if someone in a film drops a pen and the camera shows you the pen, then that pen that gets dropped is more important than if it’s just a dropped pen in real life. Astrid knows this is true but she is not completely sure how. When Magnus is speaking to people again she will ask him. She will also ask him, if she can remember to, about why she poked the dead animal with the stick without even thinking. Magnus will know the reason she wanted to and will explain it. That would be amazing, if she had had film of that animal, not dead yet but just before it was run over, the minute before it was run over. There it would be, sitting at the side of the road, whatever it was, a rabbit, or a cat, just sitting there with its eyes and paws etc.
    But it would only be really amazing if you watched it knowing what happened after it. You would know, but the animal wouldn’t. If you knew
this
and had film of
that
it would be exactly like if you were looking at a room before it was burgled. You would know, but the room wouldn’t. Not that a room can know things, as if a room could be alive, like a person. Imagine a room alive, its furniture moving round by itself, its walls calling across the room to one another. A living room, ha ha. Imagine if you were in the room, the living room ha ha ha, and you didn’t expect it to be alive and you went to sit down on a chair and the chair said get off! don’t sit on me! or it moved so you couldn’t sit on it. Or if walls had eyes and could speak i.e. you could come into a room and ask it what had happened in it while you were in another room and it could tell you exactly what
    Hello, someone says.
             
    Hello, Astrid says back.
    It is the person from this morning who was lying on the sofa in the front room.
    She is walking alongside Astrid. She has two apples in one hand. She weighs them both, looks them over, chooses which one to keep for herself.
    Here, she says.
    The apple comes at Astrid through the air and hits her quite hard in the chest. She catches it in the crook of her arm between herself and her camera.
    Astrid, the person is saying. Astrum, astralis. How does it feel to have such a starry name?
    Then she starts talking about stars. She says that because of light pollution from cities and streetlights, the night sky can’t be seen properly any more and that all over the western world the sky now never gets properly dark. In more than half of Europe, in America, all over the world, people can’t see the stars any more in the same way as they were able to in the past.
    She has a way of talking i.e. Irish-sounding, or maybe a kind of American. Though Astrid hasn’t said anything about how she’s going to the Curry Palace, she starts talking about it. She says has Astrid seen it and that it is a blatant act of local crime. Why else would anyone throw black paint at the door and windows of the only ethnic restaurant in the village? The only ethnic restaurant for miles around?
    Astrid holds her camera higher, then up near her eye, though it’s off and its lenscap is on. She hopes