Rachel Cusk - Saving Agnes

While her opinion of the quality of her existence might not have been substantially altered by the events of the subsequent years, their almost redoubled number made them that much more resistant to attack. In moments of despair she would occasionally drift off to sleep thinking of how pleasant it would be never again to wake up, but come morning the memory of Diplomat’s Week ’s unedited pages or the imminent recurrence of her rent demand would send her careering back into consciousness with an admonishing jolt.

At thirteen, however, such concerns were unimaginable; and while the thought that one day the world might find her indispensable had often crossed her mind, the gloomy trajectory of the intervening period seemed then too high a price to pay for the brighter epoch that lay beyond it. Her belief in the charms of the distant future was unshakeable, but the unanaesthetised slowness with which formative years tend to pass made nothing but the immediate continuance of her own misery seem inevitable. The adult world was dream-like, and her own grasp of it myopic; and although later it did occur to her that, had she glimpsed then the life which actually awaited her, she might have flung herself without delay from her dormitory’s perilous window, at the time it was this very element of uncertainty which caused her hand to falter.

It was the Lent term at school, a time of freezing beds, endemic viruses, and abstention from all but the trading of insult and abuse, which knew neither seasons nor abatement. Agnes had by now spent two years observing the business of persecution, and during her apprenticeship had had ample opportunity to ruminate upon the implications of what she understood to be its cyclical nature. The preceding term had seen no fewer than three heads hunted — one of whom had been bought out by her parents in the preliminary stages and was now enjoying life at a co-educational non-denominational establishment at three counties’ remove, while the other two were to be found, broken-spirited, loitering together as if joined by the hip in the corridors outside the music rooms which encountered the least traffic of any in the school — and with the climate so bullish, Agnes had returned for the new term with the dread certainty of higher quotas and increased efficiency.

Her fears were realised within days as, entering her room one evening, she found a group of six board representatives seated jury-like on her bed, while Christine Poole read to them, in a voice so full of menace and mockery that a uniformed future seemed at that moment both glittering and assured, several extracts from Agnes’s diary which directly concerned, and, albeit less directly, maligned those present.

Agnes had long since been driven by solitude to keeping a diary, and had for some time been nurturing an anxiety that, should this intimate tract ever fall into the wrong hands, it would precipitate exactly such a scene as she was now enduring. At first she had tried to enforce neutrality in her seamless ramblings, interspersing what loaded moments there were with liberal quantities of daily trivia and nonsense; but although her hand had trembled with presentiment as she wrote, her lack of other confidantes had, when compounded by habit, made the outpouring of her rage and misery uncontainable.

The discovery of a self-signed death-warrant was so sensationally superior to the usual paltry findings of the investigation room that Agnes almost achieved a form of celebrity with it; but her punishment was correspondingly dramatic, and before long she found herself longing for the Siberian exile of her early days. Her friends’ terror campaign was a Mafia-style affair, whose bravado and lawlessness any cowed schoolchild might have found breathtaking to observe. Although occasionally — when, for example, precious objects would disappear from other girls’ rooms, to be discovered hoarded beneath Agnes’s bed — the hand of a subtler strategist was betrayed, generally the nightly dumpings of the contents of the kitchen bins over her sheets or the crude graffiti listing her defects with which the blackboards would greet her on her daily arrival in class reassured her that it was only a matter of time before such artless tactics drew the attention of the proper authorities, and with it their own demise.

Several weeks had passed before Agnes, confident that she had been the victim of a bureaucratic oversight, took the impressive list of her woes to her form-mistress. She had deliberated long and hard over whether such a course of action would merely exacerbate her problems; but she was now in fear of her life, for having recently discovered that her expensive winter coat, while hanging in her wardrobe, had come to grief in a manner which, involving as it did the meticulous and time-consuming application of sharp scissors to heavy cloth, could not be easily passed off as accidental, her mother’s righteous and considerable fury promised to erupt over the horizon and vanquish her exhausted spirits at any moment.

Her form-mistress listened to Agnes’s tale with tight lips and disbelieving eyes. Seeing her audience thus moved, Agnes allowed herself to weep rather copiously as she blurted out the range of her peers’ transgressions, and was gratified to see the emotions of her confessor’s face progress from sympathy to full-blown anger and enraged shakes of the head.

‘What can I do?’ Agnes finally cried, preparing to launch her full weight into the open arms which at any moment would surely be offered her.

‘Have a bit of backbone, for goodness’ sake!’ the woman had exploded. ‘Look at you — you’re pathetic! I’ve never seen anything so feeble in my life! Don’t you ever think about how lucky you are? There are children your age who can’t even go to school — why don’t you think about them instead of yourself? Hmm?’

Agnes did; and instead of admitting that in fact she quite envied them, took herself off to a secluded corner of the chapel garden to consider her options, which were looking decidedly limited since the removal from them of adult intervention. Death, she soon realised, was the only solution; and with not a moment to be wasted, she succeeded in inveigling herself into the sick bay that very afternoon, where, cunningly distracting the ancient and bumbling nun charged with administering three hundred girls with potentially lethal drugs by alerting her to the presence of a fictitious mouse, she managed to secrete into her pocket an almost full bottle of aspirin.

At first she could scarcely contain her excitement at what she had done, and was so overjoyed by her successful subterfuge that she delayed the implementation of her plan for a day or two. On the second evening, a visit from Christine Poole reminded her of her purpose; but as she was deliberating over the time and place in which she would most like her lifeless form to be discovered, with the maximum horror, guilt and tragic effect for all concerned, she began to feel a strange tickling in her throat. Half an hour later the sensation had grown distinctly uncomfortable. She drank some water and found she could barely swallow. Unable to face the thought of returning to the sick-bay, she removed two aspirin from the bottle, swallowed them, and went straight to bed. In the morning her head felt pounding and feverish. Her throat was by now inflamed. Again she was forced to dig into her supply, and continued to do so during the day. By evening, the bottle was worryingly depleted; although as she tried to go down to supper and found herself falling, disorientated, back on to the bed, it did occur to her that nature might have taken things into its own hands, thus temporarily shelving the problem.

She was discovered in this pitiful state by one of the kinder nuns, who called a doctor, and by morning she was diagnosed as having contracted glandular fever. Her parents were notified and she was whisked from the convent’s fiendish portals with scarcely a backward glance. Her mother, noting Agnes’s wan appearance, could have been forgiven for thinking that its causes were more viral than psychological; but the six weeks she insisted her daughter take off school, during which time she ministered to her with loaded trays and maternal affection, nonetheless were sufficient to avert a fatality either way. Agnes returned to school to find another girl occupying her unenviable place; and although she was not brave enough to intervene in her defence, she liked to think that her obviously reluctant participation in that persecution with which by now, after all, she was so familiar, along with the occasional sympathetic glances she offered her when other eyes were turned, did not go unnoticed.