The Accidental Read Online Free PDF Page B

the person will see it and ask her about it. But the person has stopped talking now and is walking faster, a little ahead of Astrid. Astrid lowers the camera. She starts eating the apple. She hadn’t realized how hungry she is.
    How did you know? she calls. I mean about the restaurant?
    She hurries to keep up.
    How did I know? the person says. How could you miss it? How could you not know?
    Are you something to do with the house? Astrid asks.
    The person has stopped in the road. She is looking hard at the ground. She suddenly crouches down. Astrid sees a bee there, crawling on the rough tarmac, the large kind of bee, the furry kind. The person gets something out of the back pocket of her cut-offs. It is a little packet. She rips it at its corner and empties something out of it into the palm of her hand. She folds the corner of the packet and slips it into her back pocket again. She spits into her hand. It is gross. She is rubbing spit into her palm with her thumb. She scrapes her spit on to the road just along from the bee, which has stopped still now because something is close to it that’s bigger than it.
    The person gets up and walks on, licking her palm and rubbing it on the denim of her cut-offs.
    Astrid thinks about asking her how old she is. She looks at the person’s legs with the hair on them. It is obscene. She has never seen anything like it. She looks at the bare feet, walking on the road surface.
    Is it sore walking on your feet like that? she asks.
    Nope, the person says.
    Did your car break down? Astrid says.
    They are on a road Astrid doesn’t recognize now.
    Cars are a very bad idea in such a polluted world, the person says.
    Did you rent us the house? Astrid says.
    What house? the person says.
    The house we’re renting, Astrid says.
    The person finishes her apple and tosses the applecore into the air and over a hedge.
    Biodegradable, she says.
    Why did you do that back there, near the bee? Astrid asks.
    Resuscitation, the person says.
    She takes the sachet with the folded corner out of her pocket, makes sure it’s tightly folded down, then tosses it to Astrid. It is the square kind they have in café sugar bowls, the kind that has random information on it like the dates of birth of classical music composers or famous writers or the names of famous cars and horses that won races. On one side it says WHITE SUGAR . On its other there is the ripped-through picture of a fighter plane and the words ‘ LD WAR 2 1939 –1945 An Estimated 55 Million Lives Were Lost’.
    Keep it, she says.
    Astrid balances the apple and the camera and tucks the sugar into her own back pocket. All along the new strange road the person is talking about how, after the summer, the worker bees throw the drone bees out of the hive because there’s not enough food for all the bees for the whole winter otherwise and the drones’ usefulness in the hive is finished now that the queen has been fertilized, and the running of the hive is changing because of the summer being over, so what the worker bees do is chew off the wings of the drones then let them drop out of the hive on to the ground.
    What happens to them then? Astrid says.
    Birds eat them, probably, the person says.
    The drones do their best, she says, to hold on to the bees that are ejecting them; they hook on with their feet as their wings get chewed off. But for now, she says, the drones are safe. It’s only the beginning of summer.
    She is some kind of a bee expert. She is whistling now. She puts her hands in her pockets and walks along the road ahead of Astrid, whistling a tune like a boy would. Astrid is going down a road that she doesn’t know with someone she doesn’t know, and her mobile phone is buried in rubbish and she is now officially untraceable.
    How do you know my name is Astrid? she calls at the back of the person’s head.
    Well, that’s easy. The man told me, she says.
    What man? Astrid asks.
    The man. The man at your house, the person says. The man