Free Accidents Happen by Louise Millar

and destruction.
    Jack sat stunned, as Kate jumped up, ran to the alarm box under the stairs and punched in a number.
    Silence abruptly descended on the hall again.
    Jack leaned back against the radiator.
    Kate rushed back and grabbed his face, looking at the cut.
    ‘Jack. I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I was trying to stop you setting off the alarm.’
    She wiped blood from his cut with her fingers. It smeared across her skin. Nana would do it with a tissue, Jack thought, jerking his head away. Nana always had a clean tissue. Nana would put a gentle arm round him that smelt of flowers, and talk calmly, not swipe at the blood with bare fingers as if it were attacking her, and look at him in terror. ‘I didn’t mean to pull you so hard,’ Mum was gabbling. ‘Is your head sore? Do you feel dizzy?’
    He shook it.
    She stopped speaking and let her hand drop. He saw her rub his blood between her fingers. She had retreated again. Lost in her head.
    ‘Stay there. I’ll get a plaster.’
    She went in the kitchen, with her hand over her mouth. Jack sat in the hallway, fighting the tears that threatened to come properly now.
    All of a sudden, he felt ashamed. He was sitting on the floor, trying not to cry like a baby, with a scratch on his head. He looked up and saw himself in the hall mirror. What if Dad was watching him? Acting like a baby? Granddad had told him that he, Jack, was supposed to be the man of the house now Dad was gone.
    And just like that, Jack’s hate for Kate disappeared as quickly as it had come.
    As she hurried around looking in cupboards, her lips were forming words as if she were having a conversation with someone invisible.
    It took him a moment to work it out.
    ‘You have to stop this,’ she was mouthing. ‘You have to stop this.’
    What had he done? As she began to walk towards him, Jack dropped his eyes.
    ‘Jack?’
    He stayed still.
    ‘Jack? Darling.’
    Eventually, he looked at her.
    ‘Let me . . . do this . . .’ She knelt down and dabbed at his cut with an antiseptic cream that stung a little, and then placed a plaster over the cut. It was strange being this close to her. He could smell raspberry tea on her breath. He could see how the pale purple circles under her eyes grew deeper in tone under her dark eyelashes.
    ‘Are you sure you feel OK?’ She made him follow her finger with his eyes to be sure.
    ‘OK. Oh, Jack.’
    She sat back and surveyed his face. He saw her eyes working hard, as if she was thinking.
    She went to speak, then stopped – then tried again. ‘Jack. Listen. This is so bad. I don’t know how to say this to you, but . . .’ She looked him in the eye. ‘If anyone asks you how you got the scratch, I need you not to tell them that you hit your head on the radiator.’
    He waited.
    ‘The thing is, they might not understand that it was an accident. Nana, for instance. Or your teacher. So, if it’s OK, you could just say you fell off your skateboard. Is that OK?’
    There was such a pleading tone in her voice that Jack shrugged.
    She leaped towards him and threw her arms around him. He was too surprised to resist. Her body pushed into his face and he smelt her anxious sweat through the silk nightie.
    ‘Jack. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what is happening to me, but I will make this right,’ she murmured. ‘I just . . .’ She sniffed. ‘I just want you and me to be safe.’ It was such an unfamiliar sensation, being in her arms again, that Jack let his face press against the protruding bone of his mother’s shoulder and watched, curious, as a trickle of watery pink blood from his forehead seeped into the pores of her shoulder strap. He found himself hoping the stain would finally force her to throw it away. He stayed there, even though he knew the embrace was to make her feel better, and not him. Knowing that she was trying.
    The thing was, if he kept being angry like this, and destroyed her, he would also destroy any chance that his old warm funny mum, whom