Rachel Cusk - Saving Agnes

Later, when she met John, she would sometimes be overwhelmed with relief that she had not taken her leave of life so peremptorily. One night, with an excess of intimacy, she had told him of her suicide manqué, in the hope that he would share her loving interpretation of destiny’s mysterious intervention. To her surprise, he had seemed barely moved by the thought of how close he had come to losing her.

‘Everyone does that, don’t they?’ he said, as if surprised that she should mention something so commonplace.

‘Did you?’

‘Oh, I expect so. Or thought about it, anyway.’

She had felt almost disappointed by his response. It suggested that her emotional register was in some way incompatible with his. How, if this was how he felt, would she ever encourage him to scale the heights of passionate love which ascended within her with every passing moment? After swapping suicide stories so casually, what was there left to live for?

HAVING always been advised to take the rough with the smooth Agnes did so; but found in her hands the two so successfully blent as to form a dull and coarse texture that bore little resemblance to either of its originators. She fondled her experiences too much, played with the past until it was dog-eared and tattered; its purer moments sullied by the oily press of palms, its horrors soft and elastic. Then, like moviestar monsters, her recollections would sometimes come back from the dead with a thrilling lurch, wringing out unplied reservoirs of sensation from places that had been thought drained.

She began to grow suspicious of the future. There had been a time when she had thought that by forecasting its events she would therefore control them: she could never be surprised, for her mind was always in wartime, a busy operations room in which possibilities snaked like rivers over maps of foreign places. Now, looking back on the reality her dreams had become, she felt foolish for having thought herself forearmed. There was an inexorability to disappointment. It lived on, like something radioactive. It contaminated things. She began to think of herself as existing only in the present tense, a conduit through which the future flowed to become the past.

She met her lover by chance in the street and they went for a drink in a pub that was too hot and crowded. She found herself sweating and babbling while he watched her, gaunt and quiet. Afterwards he left her on the road, his tail-lights glowing in mercurial retreat as he roared away. As she walked home her heart leapt at every shadow and barking dog. She soon broke her vow not to call him and gorged herself on his answering machine for two weeks with a hunger she did not attempt to control. It became something necessary, the reassuring click and hum, the sound of his voice trapped like an echo, like a ghost. When he picked up the phone himself one day she almost hung up in terror. To her surprise, he was kind and did not object to the idea of seeing her.

‘Let’s go somewhere,’ she said, emboldened. ‘Let’s get out of London for the day.’

They arranged to go to Hampton Court the following Saturday, and Agnes’s spirits lifted once more. She made plans and bought something new to wear. In these sudden bursts of sunshine, she found she could bear to look at things.

‘Have you gone to the dogs?’ Greta inquired.

‘What do you mean?’ said Agnes. The question seemed suspiciously perspicacious.

‘Oh, isn’t that what you say?’ Greta furrowed her brow like a perplexed student. ‘You know, where those skinny dogs run around after fake rabbits and stuff?’

‘Oh, I see what you mean. No, I haven’t. I don’t think it’s very nice, though.’

‘I’m going Saturday,’ said Greta firmly, as if decided by Agnes’s disapproval. She grinned mysteriously. ‘With London Transport.’

Agnes shrugged, a gesture intended to divest Greta’s travel arrangements of the unwarranted importance with which she had seen fit to report them.

‘It is cheaper, I suppose,’ she said.

She found it hard to talk to Greta sometimes. It made her feel as if she had not mastered even the basic verbal skills required to go comfortably through life.

‘Not London Transport,’ Greta groaned. ‘My friend — you know, the one I met on the tube. That’s what I call him. London Transport.’ She screeched with laughter. ‘It is cheaper, I suppose,’ she mimicked languorously. ‘You’re such a card, Agnes.’

‘I didn’t know you’d seen him again,’ remarked Agnes stiffly.

‘Oh, sure, I see him all the time. He works my station. We have a good time together,’ she mused. ‘He’s kind of weird, though. I went to his house with him one night and he showed me all this stuff.’

‘What stuff?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Porno mags and stuff, I guess,’ she said vaguely. ‘Hey, guess where he lives? Somewhere called Tooting — can you believe that? What a place for a train-driver to live, huh?’ She made tooting noises like a train and laughed. ‘It is, however,’ she added with mock sobriety, ‘a real dive.’

Agnes felt rather disturbed. She saw how easy it would be to sink without trace into a realm of strange men and nasty magazines and squalid flats in Tooting. One just absorbed what came along, she supposed, as if by osmosis. She had often wondered what would happen if she took up the offers of the men who commented upon her in the street. There was another world beneath the surface of the one she chose each day, a dark labyrinth of untrodden paths. Its proximity frightened her. She wondered if she would ever lose her way and wander into it. She thought of her lover, of her strange job, of her crumbling house, and wondered if she was already there.

Agnes and Nina and Merlin went for a walk; or at least, that’s what Agnes said. Merlin said they were going for a moonlit celebration, and he took with him a bottle of wine. Nina said she didn’t know what they were doing, but could they please make it quick because she had to meet Jack later. Merlin’s aspect of festivity was in honour of the first three months of their communal living at Elwood Street; and despite the newborn whiteness of the first October moon, each privately suspected it had been much longer.

‘I don’t see why it’s such a big deal,’ panted Nina as they toiled in the darkness up the Blackstock Road. ‘It’s not like we’ve been there a year or anything. Three months isn’t an anniversary — it’s a trial period.’

Agnes, terrified by the threat of a verdict, remained silent. Merlin gave Nina a friendly shove.

‘Get along with you,’ he said briskly. ‘You and your Roman calendar. This is a pagan ritual, woman. We’re going to toast the new moon.’

Agnes was glad they had not stayed in the house with its gloomy crack, which seemed to her to be growing at an alarming rate. Such disintegration was unkind. It seemed to foist upon her the responsibility of propping and bearing. Sometimes the crack appeared larger than life. At others, it was a tiny manifestation of a larger slippage, almost like a gravitational force; a mud-slide, perhaps, tossing her away with its momentum like a cork on a violent wave.

As they reached the park, Merlin suddenly darted away from them and ran off into the darkness howling.

‘Oh, God,’ muttered Nina as they trailed after him. ‘Merlin’s rediscovering his pagan virility.’

There was a conspiratorial tone in her voice. They had banded together. Agnes slipped her arm through Nina’s as they walked into Highbury Fields. There were no streetlamps in the park. The darkness seemed suddenly private, up against her eyes like blindness. She gripped Nina’s arm, wanting to tell her everything; to confess the mortal sin of herself and let the black air absolve her words while her body hid in the shadows. They heard Merlin howl again, and then Nina was gone, darting off into the darkness to find him.