by Rachel Cusk
‘Why do you worry so much about where you’re going to be after you die?’ John had once said to her. ‘You never give a second thought to where you were before you were born.’
Nina was usually at Jack’s house in the evenings, but when he went away for a few days she came back. When Agnes came home she found Nina in the kitchen cooking supper.
‘Do you want some?’ Nina asked, indicating a pile of as yet unassembled ingredients.
‘Oh, thanks,’ said Agnes, taking off her coat. She hadn’t spent time alone with Nina for weeks. She wondered what they would talk about.
‘Jack tells me you had a contretemps with his friend in Hampton Court,’ Nina announced presently, resolving Agnes’s dilemma.
‘That’s right.’
‘So have you heard from him since then?’
Nina removed a cucumber from its cellophane packaging and began to slice it.
‘Who says I was expecting to?’
‘I dunno. I just supposed you were. You do have a history of post-coital obsession, you know.’
Nina began cracking eggs to make an omelette. Agnes looked at the empty egg carton which read LAID AND PACKED THE SAME DAY, and thought of how many times she had been.
‘I don’t want to hear from him,’ she said.
‘Fine. I think you’re well out of it.’
‘Well, fine.’
Agnes tried to remember the last time she’d had a warming conversation with Nina. There was something gritty and abrasive between them which rubbed every time they spoke.
‘So what was he like in bed?’ said Nina presently, obviously mistaking the moment for one of intimacy.
‘Fine!’ Agnes gushed.
It irritated her that after everything she still felt a residual loyalty to him. It was almost atavistic, like an instinct that should have been phased out by years of evolution and feminism. Nina was facing her expectantly, apparently awaiting further revelations.
‘Actually, it was strange,’ she confessed.
‘What do you mean?’
Agnes contemplated her position. What if Nina should take the side she herself had just deserted, and conclude that his dysfunction was no one’s fault but her own? She seemed strangely alerted to the presence of a mystery, in any case, standing there with arms crossed, waiting.
‘Well, you know what he’s like,’ Agnes offered. ‘He always seems half-asleep or something. He makes you want to check his pulse.’
‘What do you mean, “strange”?’ Nina persisted.
‘Well—’ She felt herself writhing. ‘He didn’t – he couldn’t – I tried, I really did, but it never made any difference because he still didn’t—’
‘Come?’ interjected Nina smoothly.
‘Yes,’ breathed Agnes. ‘I thought it was my fault.’
‘No, it’s pretty normal.’
‘Is it?’ She felt almost smug. ‘It’s never happened to anyone else I’ve been with.’
‘No.’ Nina looked at her oddly. ‘I meant it’s normal for people like him.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
There was a long and awful moment of silence. Nina turned away and began absorbedly chopping vegetables.
‘I shouldn’t have said anything. Forget it.’
‘No!’ Agnes cried. ‘No, I won’t forget it!’ She banged her hand dramatically on a counter-top for effect. ‘So – so just tell me, okay?’
Nina looked up at her coolly and then returned to her vegetables.
‘You asked for it,’ she said above the ominous thud of blade against board. ‘If you really want to know, he’s a smackhead.’
‘A what?’
‘Smackhead. Heroin addict, for God’s sake. I thought you knew. They often have problems like that – sexual problems. I thought you knew,’ she repeated.
Agnes wondered if she understood what had been said. The words appeared to be floating around her in big inflated balloons, like a comic strip. She thought of the gaunt cipher of him, the quiet greedy suck of his presence; his long silences behind the bathroom’s bolted door when she had thought he must surely be dead or sleeping; the heat of him, his black bullet eyes saying nothing.
‘How could I know?’ she said then.
‘How could you not know? What, are you blind? How could you spend all that time with a person and not know a thing like that?’
‘He didn’t tell me.’
‘Well, that explains everything,’ Nina said sarcastically.
‘Well, how did you know, then?’ said Agnes as the strange fact of it occurred to her. She was beginning to feel sick. ‘How did you know? Did he tell you? Did he?’
‘No. Don’t be stupid.’
‘So who did?’
‘Jack.’
A sudden surge of adrenalin made her feel almost buoyant. She put her hand on Nina’s shoulder and forced her to face her. Nina’s face betrayed a fleeting shadow of fear at the physical contact, as if it suggested things had got out of control.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Agnes demanded.
‘There was no reason to.’ Nina shrugged away Agnes’s hand. ‘And anyway, Jack asked me not to.’
So that was it, then. If only she had looked, how much she might have learned! Had she but guessed at the shady deals, the backhand bribes, the double-crossed hearts of others, for how much might she sooner have forgiven herself? It was Agnes’s nature to emulate others, not to judge them; how happy they must have been, with her to please them as well as they pleasing themselves!
‘He obviously didn’t want you to know,’ Nina conceded. ‘Otherwise he’d have told you, wouldn’t he? Look, maybe he was embarrassed about it. Maybe he didn’t want to hurt your feelings.’
‘What?’ Agnes laughed wildly and Nina looked startled. ‘What was it you said to me that time, about men being animals? So what are we saying now – that he didn’t want to hurt my feelings? You’re obviously a believer these days. I suppose you also knew,’ she added, triumphant at having a revelation of her own to hand, albeit one which could inflict injury on no one but herself, ‘that he was seeing someone else all along? Maybe you thought I shouldn’t know about that as well.’
‘I didn’t know that, actually. Was he really?’
‘Don’t bother defending him!’ Agnes shrieked. ‘I won’t listen! I know where your loyalties lie – I won’t be making that mistake again!’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Nina snapped. ‘Don’t get hysterical. You’re behaving like he’s a serial killer or something. Or maybe –’ she looked at Agnes curiously – ‘maybe you really are as innocent as you pretend to be. Maybe you needed to wake up. If you ask me—’
‘I don’t ask you!’ Agnes cried, putting her hands over her ears and turning to leave the room. ‘In fact, I don’t think I even like you very much.’
Chapter Nineteen
AGNES Day was letting herself go. The phrase did imply a certain freedom from imprisonment, but its effects were far from captivating. Hair sprouted freely over her unmown slopes, where bulges swelled like molehills. Skin sagged here and flaked there, puckering like a contour relief map. A distinct whiff of human flesh could be caught in the groves where exotic flowers used to perfume the air. Surrendering to the final molestation of art by life, Agnes abandoned her brush and palette and barely faced the world.
By becoming that which she had always feared – or perhaps had always feared she already was, underneath – Agnes knew certain things would have to be sacrificed. Men no longer looked at her as she passed, and while initially her heart had plummeted at the realisation, her spirit nestled further into the safe folds of a hermaphrodite sensibility. To think of herself as undesirable was second nature; to read it in the eyes of others was something else altogether and required some defence. She would give vent to her feelings in the privacy of her room at night, when she would cry and claw at her body with rage.
Eventually, however, she came to see that her despoilment carried within it its own defence. Her blank
face and new folds of flesh were at once her protection from the world and her submission to it. They made her invisible. In times of despair she was tempted to return to her old ways, but never tried for fear of discovering that she couldn’t. Her renunciation of those things seemed to her then to have meant nothing but the death of everything she had once held dear.
Her career at Diplomat’s Week, meanwhile, began to flourish. She became expert at locating errors and discrepancies, and on more than one occasion saved the day by insistently carrying out last-minute checks even as the pages were being borne off to the typesetter’s. She wrote an article for the magazine and was surprised to find it accepted. She suggested new formats and saw them pass into legislature with scarcely a blinking eye.
‘We might have to give you that bonus before long,’ said Jean beamingly, who of late had been observing rather than participating in this show of labour.
‘How about me?’ said Greta. ‘I have to watch her. It makes me tired.’
Like someone who had come out of hiding, Agnes began to speak openly about her work with her acquaintances. In doing so, she discovered that it was possible, with but a modicum of glamorous embellishment, to make almost anything sound interesting if you described it in the right way. She talked about deadlines and copy dates, hymned galleys and bromides, discussed at length with fellow publishers the problems one encountered in the company of typesetters and printers. One companion was evidently so moved by her narrative that he offered to come and meet her for lunch so that the scene might be evoked in his mind more clearly.
‘Where’s your house?’ he questioned imperiously.
‘Highbury,’ replied Agnes in bewilderment, before realising to which establishment he was referring.
What irked her was the malevolent coincidence with which the application of her workmates seemed to falter in direct proportion to her own increase in zeal. At first she had thought this was merely the fault of her own altered perspective, but it soon became clear that Jean and Greta had fallen prey to rogue circumstances. Greta seemed detached and morose; Jean, on the other hand, radiated a nervous joy of the type which automatically generated its antithesis in those who encountered it. She had lost weight and begun to wear make-up. She arrived late, appeared distracted for most of the day, and left early. Agnes wondered if she and Jean had somehow exchanged personalities in a midnight astral collision.
‘She’s like a goddamned mosquito,’ complained Greta. ‘Zip zip, buzz buzz – THWACK!’ She grinned. ‘I used to have this really neat electronic insect exterminator back home.’
The strange coincidence of Jean’s new-found ecstasy with a sudden recurrence of phone calls from someone called David from the Church of Christ the Evangelist, as he unfailingly announced himself, could not but solve the mystery.
‘So what’s with this David geezer?’ Greta boldly asked. She had lately taken to spicing up her narrative with eclectic touches of native vocabulary. Agnes saw it as a bad sign that she had resumed relations with London Transport. ‘Are you two going together or what?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ Jean replied. ‘If that’s how you want to put it.’
‘I do,’ Greta assured her.
‘Well, I suppose we do see each other quite often,’ replied Jean, feigning a puzzlement designed to suggest she had never thought of it in quite that way before. ‘He’s a very nice man – so, so dignified, if you see what I mean.’
‘Dignified Dave,’ said Greta rolling her eyes. ‘Hot damn.’
Further questioning revealed that David was a born-again Christian and that Jean had lately taken to accompanying him to church. It was really very interesting, she said. Quite fascinating, in fact.
‘She must love him,’ opined Greta as Jean left the office. ‘She must love him a lot.’
When Agnes thought of love, she saw her lover, or her ex-lover as he should now be called, thus in visions: the sucking syringe finger, the sweet steel needle, penetrating himself as he had her once upon a time. She knew nothing could compete with the liquid love he channelled into his own veins, careful not to spare a drop, no love, ultimately, lost between them. She decided she should get an AIDS test and asked Nina pointedly one Saturday morning how one could best contrive to have such a thing.
‘No need,’ said Nina shortly, unruffled by Agnes’s accusing eyes and brave tone. ‘He wasn’t a junkie. He didn’t use needles.’
She returned to the perusal of the magazine in her lap, while Agnes experienced a surge of annoyance, unmitigated by relief, that she should have to request details of her lover’s intimate habits from her treacherous ex-friend.
Curiosity, however, compounded her plight and she could not refrain from asking: ‘So how did he do it, then? I mean, how did he actually take the stuff?’
‘Smoked it,’ said Nina, not actually adding ‘stupid’ but severely implying it. ‘Needles are sleazy.’
‘Thanks a lot,’ said Agnes, in a tone which required no subtext.
It was after that that she really felt for the first time she had lost him. It was almost as if she was disappointed by this latest intelligence, dependent as she had been on the depth of his malignity to fuel her own angry responses. When she was younger, she had used to think in moments of severe pique at her family that they would all be sorry if she died; and death had seemed a small price to pay for the satisfaction of remorse. Now, imagining him going about his business with a conscience clear and bright as a lightbulb, she realised that such vengeance was not to be hers. He had done her no wrong, apart from preferring someone else. And whose fault was that?
‘You should smile more,’ John used to say to her. ‘You look better when you smile.’
It had never occurred to her to point out that if she had felt better, she would by implication have smiled more, for rearrangement was an inexorable part of their routine. He would tell her to wear this jacket, change that shirt, do her hair this way instead; and she really saw no reason why the expression on her face should not fall within the territories under his jurisdiction. He wanted to improve her, presumably so that he could love her more.
‘When I phone you up,’ he said one day, ‘you’re always in. Why is that?’
Whenever he was due to call, she always waited faithfully by the phone, dispatching other callers hastily lest he should find the line engaged and refusing to leave the house for a minute.
‘Well, it would annoy you if I wasn’t there,’ she reasoned, although bewildered by his question. ‘Wouldn’t it?’
‘Not necessarily. Sometimes it’s good to be frustrated. It makes things more exciting – it makes the object of your frustration more desirable. Do you see what I mean?’
‘No, I don’t. I don’t see what you mean. Are you saying you want me to go out specially when you call? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Forget it,’ he said lightly.
She couldn’t forget it. His perversity upset her. She knew it was all in the interests of making him love her more, but it looked to her as if he was running out of ideas. Until now, he had never actually asked her to love him less. Nevertheless, once or twice she did run to the bathroom at the sound of the telephone ringing and had leaned against the locked door, her heart beating senselessly until it stopped. It hadn’t seemed to change things much.
Nina spent even more time at Jack’s house after her argument with Agnes. Merlin started working late. Sometimes he and Agnes would meet in the kitchen at unsociable hours and they would stay up and drink beer while Nina’s room lay dark and empty above them like that of a missing child.
‘It’s like when someone walks out during an argument,’ said Agnes one night. ‘You’re left with all this anger and nowhere to put it. It seems really unfair. I mean, she started it, right? It was her fault. She should apologise.’
‘You did say, if I remember correctly, that you didn’t like her very much.’
‘I don’t.’
Merlin leaned wearily into the sofa.
&nbs
p; ‘You have to,’ he said. ‘All our names are on the lease. Besides, she’s your best friend. You have to like your best friend.’
Agnes told him about her early experiences of best-friendship at school, where the title was nothing if not transient and could be purchased or lost for the small price of a treasured object – a coloured pencil perhaps – given or withheld, or a favour done. ‘Swap me your rubber,’ came the cry. ‘I’ll be your best friend!’
Never one known for her stock of fancy stationery, Agnes had always found best friends to be in short supply. Once or twice she had purloined one with the bargain-basement currency of loyalty and love, but this kind of investment became more risky in view of the inevitable transformation of friend to enemy which had characterised relations amongst her peer-group.
‘It was always worse if you’d been their real friend,’ she said. ‘When they turned against you it meant they knew things about you. I don’t know, it was just worse.’
‘Well, presumably it was more hurtful,’ said Merlin. ‘But why did they turn against you in the first place? What did you have to do?’
‘Nothing. It just had to be your turn. Someone would suddenly say, “I think so-and-so needs to be taken down a peg or two, don’t you?” and that was it.’
‘The call to arms.’
‘I suppose so: Everyone knew what to do. It was all very matter-of-fact.’
‘Did anyone ever refuse to join in?’
‘Yes, sometimes. They were like invisible people, though. Outcasts. No one ever talked to them. Thinking about it now, I suppose they were actually quite brave. I would never have dared to do that.’
‘So why – why did the bullied become the bullies, if you see what I mean? How did people have so much power one minute and then none at all?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it. Once you’ve had power over people, maybe they hate you more. At the time, it was just what you did to protect yourself.’
