Rachel Cusk - Saving Agnes

The man looked up and stared at her. Presently, he grinned and indicated a battered lime-green Cortina parked outside the house.

‘Joy ride?’ he said. ‘Me and you?’

‘No thank you,’ said Agnes smartly as she walked on, chilled by this untimely encounter with derangement.

‘Fuck you!’ she suddenly heard him shout behind her.

She quickened her pace tearfully as the cry wheeled in the air like a vulture, blocking out the sun. Fuuh-kyooo.

Agnes liked to believe there was some good to be gleaned from every situation, however bad it might seem, but when she had been working for a month at Diplomat’s Week magazine she realised the higher purpose of the benevolent universe was taking a little longer than usual to reveal itself.

She had been employed, for reasons she was not yet able to ascertain, as assistant editor of this illustrious weekly, but soon came to feel that she was not so much assisting as getting in the way. The pain of this suspicion would become particularly acute when, sitting in her overheated office, she would find herself transfixed by the arthritic motion of the clock on the wall, and, forgetting for a moment that her imprisonment was owed to an act of will rather than one of international terrorism, would become tearful at the thought that perhaps the rest of her adult life was to be wished away thus.

A hostage, then, only to fortune, and determined from the start swiftly to make good her escape, Agnes saw little point in absorbing herself in the dull round of tasks which befell her, and still less in cultivating meaningful relationships with her guards. The editor, Jean, was a grim and tight-lipped woman, whose all-encompassing role as high priestess of form and slave to detail meant that Agnes was ever within spitting distance of her wrath; a proximity made more terrible by the fact of Jean’s having devised an office system either so complex or so irrational that only she could understand it. The blame for Agnes’s complete failure to grasp any one of its labyrinthian tenets could therefore have been apportioned to one of several quarters, but her inferior position in a hierarchy which seemed to her to be riddled with the same predestined injustices as that of her family, rendered her wholly accountable.

‘Don’t buck the system, Barbara!’ Jean would cry as Agnes was discovered performing emergency surgery on a filing cabinet so full that it appeared to be vomiting sheaves of paper. Barbara was the name of Agnes’s predecessor, whose ghost evidently still walked for Jean.

‘I was only trying to help!’ Agnes would rejoin; but Jean, who wore the look of one doing things for the war effort, had long since formed the opinion that there was a saboteur in their midst and was not to be fooled by any such protestations of innocence.

Conspiratorial solace soon appeared in the form of Jean’s personal assistant, Greta, who returned from holiday just as Agnes was beginning to wonder if she would ever return to waking life. Greta was certainly personal, to the point of rudeness, with her employer, but Agnes was cheered to see that there was someone who was of even less assistance than herself. On first encountering her, Agnes had been somewhat alarmed by Greta’s transatlantic accent and air-hostess smile, but she soon learned that Greta had a curious allure, an ability to arouse unlikely behaviour in those around her, which lent her a strange and devilish beauty.

‘This city is bizarre,’ she sighed when arriving in the office one morning. ‘I was crossing the road over there when some guy in a truck drinking a can of beer stopped at the lights and just spat a whole mouthful all over me.’

The beer stain adorning the front of her jacket bore witness to her story and she waited, doe-eyed and credulous, for an explanation, while Agnes and Jean assured her that such occurrences were far from commonplace; which admission seemed only to baffle her further.

‘The guy in the truck?’ she said finally. ‘He kind of reminded me of my boyfriend back home.’

Greta was a Ukrainian Canadian, and if a marriage between these two cultures seemed unlikely, their brief encounter in the form of Greta was unregrettable. She had come to London six months earlier, and despite finding the city to be drab, tedious and inhospitable in the extreme, saw no reason why she should leave. In addition to her unconventional style of dress — she favoured garish colours and dressed as if in preparation for a carnival or costume ball: clownish stripes combined with military epaulets, Elizabethan ruffs with rakish ponchos — Greta’s voluptuous beauty and unsuspecting nature invited much attention, most of it, as far as Agnes could see, unwelcome.

‘I’m on a diet,’ she announced one lunchtime.

‘Why?’ queried Agnes, amazed that she should contemplate such an activity when her life already seemed to be in constant peril.

‘Oh, some guy came up to me in the street last night and said I was a fat cow,’ said Greta cheerfully. ‘He suggested I might try and lose some weight.’

As if it were infectious, Agnes too began to discover the discomfort of strangers, but the weightiness for her of such encounters could not be so easily lost. She began to attract the attentions of the mad, the vagrant and those down on their luck in a manner she hoped was no relation to recognition. Once a soft touch for these ragged moralists who inveigled her into sparing them her change, Agnes began to cross the road, begging for some change in her circumstances. She witnessed her expulsion from the civilised world daily as she completed the arduous journey to the misleadingly named Finchley Central, where the offices of Diplomat’s Week clung to the city’s edge like a penitent cliff-top suicide, hoping against hope that someone, anyone remotely sane, would stay on the train beyond Highgate; but by the time they reached Camden Town the majority of those whom she could not picture stealing her wallet had long since disembarked, and as the train blasted through the topsoil into the charmless overground world of East Finchley the last feverish, pulsating remnants of the mad morning rush were gone.

Until that moment Agnes usually managed to sustain the appearance of a thrusting young professional running on a tight schedule; but then someone switched on the lights, pulled off the mask, revealed the pretender for exactly who she was. Women fanned themselves and fainted in the aisles in dismay; men in tight tailcoats stood up, red-faced, and waved their programmes demanding redress. For she was none other than Agnes Day: sub-editor, suburbanite, failure extraordinaire.

AGNES Day was her real name, but this seemed to surprise no one other than herself. For her own part, she could not conjure up a single plausible reason why anyone should want to inflict a name such as that upon an innocent person. Agnes had, in fact, been the name of her father’s mother; and while most of the time she chose to overlook the rather pedestrian logic this coincidence implied, in moments of fear at the world’s cruelty she was forced to concede that to have inherited little from this lady other than her appellatory misfortune constituted something of a lucky escape.

As a child Agnes had been imaginative — a word often used to explain the character of a compulsive liar — and had enjoyed frequent changes of identity which, as far as she could see, it would have cost the small group of people who counted as her world in those days little to honour. A few times, in truth, they had attempted to humour her delightful precocities, their faces taut at first with suppressed smiles and later with irritation, but the rapid turnover of transmogrification often left them standing.