by Rachel Cusk
When Agnes spent her first night with John, they had known each other for several weeks, she recalled, and in that time had seen many films, some of which had laid out unsparing as a map the details of nights as yet unspent, words unspoken, injuries unfelt and partings unimaginable. When, after several lifetimes of experience in dark cinemas, the subject of sex seemed to Agnes to be accompanying them like a grumbling chaperone on their outings, she had begun to worry at his failure to acknowledge it. She had brought it up one evening herself as he walked her home, and though she knew she had not managed to pronounce the word with the comfortable familiarity she had aimed for, she was still astonished to be met by shrieks of mysterious laughter.
‘Why are you laughing?’ she had cried, stopping in the street and facing him furiously.
‘I’m sorry,’ he had said wiping his eyes. ‘It was just the way you said it. “Shall we have ‘sex’?” ’ He mimicked her cruelly, with a school-marmish emphasis on the last word. ‘Look, I don’t want to rush you, okay? The ball’s in your court.’
Left to content herself with that rather lewd-sounding epithet, Agnes went to the doctor and got a prescription for the Pill. Following the instructions on the packet carefully, she had taken them for a full month and during that time had developed a knowing air which suggested she was a woman of the world. As her time of readiness approached, she had informed John of the imminent arrival of his visa to her unexplored territories, and he had marked the date as if arranging a business meeting. Spontaneity, then, had not been a noticeable feature of her blooding; and it was for this reason, perhaps, that when they met on the day in question, and spent it assiduously together as if preparing for an exam, their conversation had been somewhat laden with uncomfortable silences and tense asides. As evening drew near, Agnes had become stricken by terror at his oddness. Surely he wanted to do this? Surely everyone wanted to? She had thought at the time there must be something wrong with her, but it was not until their innocuous fumblings had somehow come to a fruition she had observed rather than shared that she knew for sure.
‘Are you all right?’ he had said, rolling off her and staring at the wall.
She allowed herself to move her limbs, which ached from the rigid concentration with which she had maintained the position he had indicated for her to adopt some time ago. She turned on to her side and extended an awkward arm towards him, draping it over his ribcage like something tranquillised. Her lack of affliction worried her. Why shouldn’t she be all right? What was supposed to have happened?
‘I didn’t feel a thing,’ she said, aiming for cheerfulness.
At that he turned away from her completely, shrugging her arm from his side. Agnes realised that politeness was perhaps not the order of the day.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘It’s okay,’ he replied, misunderstanding her. ‘A lot of people aren’t that good at sex. Don’t worry about it.’
Had he circumcised her like an Asian bride, he could not have rendered her more effectively his. That night she lay awake confused and cried for fear of him; although later she was to cry at the thought of how easily they could never have met; and later still, at the fact that they ever did.
Though it was growing late, he suggested they go and look at the maze.
‘Get lost?’ she said, wishing she’d had the courage to abandon the interrogative inflection. ‘At this time of night? We’ll never find our way out in time.’
He had found her drinking tea in the small garden cafeteria, where she had gone giving up all hope of him. The manner of his discovery had annoyed her, for she had spent at least half an hour in the garden striking winsome poses of contemplation against various horticultural backdrops in the hope that he would happen upon her and be struck afresh by love. Eventually, however, she had grown cold and miserable and had stomped off in search of more reliable sustenance. His neglect stabbed at her heart, but shame at her presence in the tawdry tea-room left her no choice but to forgive him. Perhaps all was not yet lost. She could, after all, entrap him in the maze. She got up from the grubby table, her brown tray abandoned like a past life.
In the maze, Agnes suspected cheating, for it was surely not a superior sense of intuition which had sent him darting away from her down one alley and then another until she had lost him. Perhaps he had studied a map of it before they came or – worse still! – had spent those hours in which she had vainly searched for him in here, working out the best route. She had known men to do such things in the spirit of competition. They liked to trick and confuse her, setting up traps and then bursting in to save her with a victorious Ha! She chose an avenue at random and tried to memorise various leaves and twigs as she went, lest she should pass that way again.
A large bee cruised lazily around her head and then dived suddenly close to her face. She sprang back wildly as it boomed past her ear. Unobserved in the quiet green tunnel, Agnes twitched and laughed nervously. The sky overhead was leaking a dusky blue light and she wondered what would happen when it grew dark. Would they send in an efficient patrol to round up stragglers, or would they perhaps shout directions over a loudspeaker, the whole thing becoming suddenly like a sea or mountain rescue as their charges emerged forlornly, shaken and grateful? The sound of a child laughing caused her to jump. She looked around but it had evidently come from one of the adjacent corridors, for her own was empty. She had not realised how close they all were. Far from being comforted by the sound she felt menaced by it, like a blind person. The tall hedges chirped quietly around her. She wondered how her life had arrived at this moment: a path, a darkening sky, a child laughing, herself alone.
Some time later she gave up all hope of trying to maintain a sense of direction. She had heard that a monkey, given a typewriter, would in time produce the works of Shakespeare, and with new confidence in the genius of randomness she began turning and weaving aimlessly.
He would, by now, doubtlessly have found the centre and would at this very moment be lounging in it, triumphantly smoking a cigarette to mark his arrival. He would perhaps leave the glowing butt for her as testimony to his superiority, before sauntering out into the park where the warm streetlamps and night-time traffic on the road nearby invited him back into the city; she left trapped in the riddle of his rejection, the past he was putting behind him.
She turned into a particularly promising avenue and found it to terminate in a dead end. She wondered if she would always have to work so hard to find the point of things. She wanted to be sought rather than to seek. She wanted to be the point herself. In her mind they lined up, the people who had known her: a series of haphazard collisions, a motorway pile-up of twisted steel, their ruined fenders caught in a kiss, their bodies locked in a massive, involuntary, destructive embrace. She wondered if she had caused this noisy mess of tangled limbs and broken hearts; had gone the wrong way, steering crazy joyless arcs in the darkness, shooting the lights in the hope of encounter. John had once told her that if she gave people the freedom to leave, they would in all probability choose to stay. Agnes, in a state of emergency, could not contemplate the perversities of a free market.
She heard the sound of footsteps approaching down one of the dim tunnels. She looked up and made out the shape of a man. For a moment her heart leapt in a joyful arabesque at the thought that her lover had come to find her. As he grew closer, however, she saw that it wasn’t him. She tried to tug the smile from her face, but he saw it and looked at her curiously, perhaps wondering if he knew her.
‘That one doesn’t go anywhere,’ he said, indicating the path from which he had just come. He dug his hands in his pockets and trod heavily past her.
Agnes sat on a bench in the centre of the maze. It was nearly dark now. Only a few minutes earlier, a bell had rung into the silence to signal the imminent closure of the area. Really it was a sordid affair. She gazed round the grim enclosure with its overflowing bins and cigarette-strewn floor, its single tree graven with the names of lovers. She wondered who they
were, these people who saw fit to advertise their union in a place they would not see again; or perhaps would see later, alone, knowing now what they had so desperately wanted to know then, blushing perhaps at their faulty arithmetic which, in calculating that one and one made one, implied that now they were half the people they once had been. Perhaps they would add dates, like tombstones.
Two people came into the small clearing. Agnes watched them as they congratulated themselves. They paced its small distance like a prison cell and waited for something to happen. When it didn’t they looked at her suspiciously and then ambled back into the maze. She smiled to herself knowingly. There was nothing here. It was a hoax, an illusion of significance. She had lingered here merely to explore its pointlessness.
‘What was the point?’ she had said when he told her. ‘What did you want from me?’ And then, angry at his silence: ‘Why did you bother?’
The fact that there was someone else, that there had always been someone else, would cease to hurt in time. She had found him here, leaning against the tree with prophecy in his bearing, and in her foolishness had thought this augured well. He had surprised her, in any case. She wondered that he had told her at all. She would suffer for that later. For now, scavenging for clues in the empty room of his motive, she was content to be a fool. The bell rang out again as a low moon crested the sky like a lone, slow-motion surfer skating a vast blue wave. She couldn’t stay here. Here was the moment that could not be hung on to. That things couldn’t just stop was one of her main complaints against the world. She would take the train home, he having taken the car.
Chapter Seventeen
‘TRY four,’ said Nina, popping open a can of beer.
A small volcano of foam erupted through the aperture and she swiftly applied her mouth to it to catch the spillage. It was Sunday, and they were gathered indifferently together in the sitting-room like the wreckage of a rough weekend.
Merlin groaned and picked up the remote control, which he aimed at the television set. A picture of a large monkey nonchalantly scratching itself appeared on the screen.
‘Wildlife,’ he said. ‘We were watching this before, Nina. You told me to turn over, remember?’
‘Oh, yeah. How about three?’
‘Game show. Large spinning wheel, ugly spectacle of human greed and suffering.’
‘Two?’
‘Documentary on rise of capitalist economies. Same thing.’
‘One. Put it in one, Merlin. We have no choice.’
‘Walls have fallen over such things.’ They had spent most of the afternoon watching the liberation of Eastern Europe on television. Merlin flicked the remote control again. ‘Look, one’s a Western. Everyone happy with this? Agnes?’
‘Fine,’ said Agnes. She had been strangely disturbed by the scenes on the streets of Berlin and Budapest. Through the jiggling of a hand-held camera, they had witnessed the rough, unscripted love of humanity for itself; a far cry from the world of svelte, film-star embraces and edited dialogue in which she lost herself nightly. She had felt almost embarrassed by the reality of it.
‘I love these movies,’ said Nina contentedly. ‘The women always look so amazing. Orange hair and beauty spots. Really fake.’
‘They look like inflatable dolls,’ Merlin agreed. ‘Maybe we’ll start getting Easterns now. Frontier dramas with consumer durables.’
‘They’re propaganda films really, aren’t they?’ said Nina, still watching the screen. ‘Like those ones they made about British factories during the war.’
‘No, those were morale boosters. Westerns are just fiction, really. No one believes it was like that any more.’
‘Well, that’s what I said!’ replied Nina petulantly. ‘Propaganda. It’s just outlived its significance, that’s all. The only difference between these and the war films is that we still believe we run the world.’
‘I don’t think you can compare them like that.’ Merlin put his hands behind his head and looked at Nina expectantly.
‘Why not?’
‘Well, for a start it sounds like a conspiracy theory, which suggests a lack of moral vision.’
‘Oh, really?’ said Nina sarcastically. ‘So, when we butcher and proselytise it’s enlightenment, right? But when anyone else does it, it’s persecution. That sounds like a moral hallucination to me.’
‘We needed to win the war,’ Merlin replied calmly. ‘And I would go so far as to say it was one of those rare historical situations when there was a clear case of right and wrong. And we were right.’
‘Oh, come on!’ said Nina. ‘Do you really believe we charged in there for charity?’
‘Charity?’ exclaimed Merlin. ‘That’s an outrageous thing to say! Tell that to six million Jews.’
‘We didn’t care about them, did we? They were politically secondary! We were more worried about munitions factories than camps.’
Agnes stood up, white-faced.
‘Can’t we just enjoy the film?’ she said. Her voice warbled nervously. ‘I mean, can’t we just watch a film without – without holding a full-scale political debate? Why does everything have to be taken so seriously?’ The other two were looking at her in astonishment. She headed for the stairs. ‘Why do you have to take everything so seriously?’
‘Look who’s talking,’ said Nina audibly as Agnes retreated.
‘Oh dear,’ said Merlin.
‘I got a letter from London Transport this morning,’ said Greta dolefully on Monday.
She had, it seemed, tired of her underground admirer, but his affections were not to be so easily derailed.
‘What did it say?’
‘Say is putting it a bit strongly. Grunt would be more accurate.’
Greta’s hand dived into the packet of biscuits in front of her and emerged triumphant.
‘The guy’s a fruitcake,’ she continued between bites. ‘I’m amazed he can write. Cookie?’
‘Oh, thanks.’ Agnes took one and began to chew it. The soft, sugary mass on her tongue comforted her momentarily and was gone. She took another. ‘At least you’re getting some attention,’ she said.
It had been meant as a joke, but instead had the effect of sounding out the depths of her own desperation. Greta laughed loudly, her lipsticked mouth studded with crumbs which Agnes wondered uncomfortably if she should tell her about.
‘Yeah, it makes you feel kind of special getting fixed on by people who are funny in the head. Did I tell you he’s been hanging around outside my house?’ She inspected her nails. ‘I mean, we went out on a few dates and now he’s behaving like a pervert. I hate dates. Dates are things you eat.’
‘You’ve got some crumbs on your lip,’ said Agnes, who was beginning to feel upset.
Greta grinned and put her hand into the now empty biscuit pack, her fingers upon withdrawal laden with the offending matter.
‘Gee,’ she said hilariously, implanting a thick layer of crumbs over the meagre few already there. ‘Have I?’
The bus home was so crowded on Tuesday that Agnes could not get a seat. She stood by one of the doors instead, whose dark glass panel steamy with the oppressive breath of humankind informed her that she looked wan and hollow-eyed. She gazed at her reflection, sucking in her cheeks a little to deepen its shadowy aspect of suffering. The bus shuddered to a halt and the doors sprang open with a compressed sigh. A wave of sharp night air broke unpleasantly over the damp warmth of the interior. Agnes, moving to one side so as to allow others to disembark, now caught her fugitive reflection in one of the large fish-eye mirrors angled for the driver’s benefit from the ceiling. In it, her face appeared alarmingly large and pasty, with pores which gaped through an oily sheen of make-up. She looked away quickly, her heart plummeting.
‘Oh my God!’ said a man’s voice just then. ‘Oh my God!’
Agnes looked up. The man appeared to be looking at her. The other people in the bus were looking at her also, their faces blank as a row of sunflowers.
‘It’s you!’ he said, p
eering and smiling uncertainly. ‘It is you, isn’t it? Oh my God!’
‘Excuse me?’ said Agnes, as quietly as she could. She hoped he would take the hint and lower his tone.
He was middle-aged, with a face which seemed intelligent but trampish clothes and a lingering odour which proclaimed that even if he was, it certainly hadn’t got him anywhere. Her heart pounded with embarrassment as she saw that he was mad, and had singled her out as the subject of his rantings.
‘You’re the lady in the pub,’ he said, smiling again in a manner which seemed contradictorily urbane. ‘Aren’t you? God, how embarrassing.’
‘Why is it embarrassing?’ said Agnes, and was surprised to find that their audience found her curiosity amusing.
‘Well—’ He was still smiling. ‘I was in the pub and I’d had a bit to drink – is it you, actually? Is it? The lady whose handbag I was sick into.’
A few titters of revulsion emanated from the back of the bus. Agnes felt unusually calm. She smiled back at him and addressed him in her most authoritative voice.
‘In that case, I’m relieved not to be her,’ she said, casting a conspiratorial glance at the other passengers. They responded with a hearty gust of laughter.
The man looked nervously at them and then back at her. He appeared confused. The bus was alive with comment and several people looked at her approvingly. They liked her style. The man shook his head and walked lurchingly to an empty seat at the far end of the bus. He appeared crestfallen. Agnes got off two stops early and walked home in an agony of guilt.
On Wednesday she came home to find two men in boiler suits tapping expertly at the sitting-room wall.
