Rachel Cusk - Saving Agnes

Merlin, to her surprise, began to smile. His reaction would have driven Agnes to further excesses of outrage had she not soon perceived that he seemed to be looking at someone else. He smiled again and waved his hand.

‘Friend of mine,’ he said. ‘Hang on a second. I’ll be back.’

He got up and went to a table where a blond girl was sitting. They greeted each other effusively. Agnes fiddled uncomfortably with a beer mat. A man came into the pub and sat down at the bar. He was looking at her. She looked back defiantly. She felt rather audacious after her outburst. He was bearded and wore a respectable suit. Presently, he got off his bar stool and came over to her table.

‘I suck girls’ cunts,’ he said calmly, standing before her.

Agnes looked at him dumbfounded. His choice of vocabulary left her own impoverished. She managed to shake her head. He shrugged, smiled at her briefly, and then turned and went back to the bar.

‘Who was that?’ said Merlin, sitting down.

‘I don’t know.’

She was still in a state of shock. She had never heard anything so disgusting in her life. One never knew. Really, one knew nothing at all.

‘I want to go home,’ she said.

‘Oh. Whatever you say.’ Merlin drained his glass, his Adam’s apple moving up and down like something alive trapped in his throat. ‘Okay, let’s go.’

They got up to leave. The man turned around and stared at her; like someone normal, someone in a crowd, his face boarded up like a derelict place.

‘It’s happening to me,’ Agnes told Greta. ‘What happens to you — you know, when people come up and say strange things? Well, it’s happening to me.’

‘Maybe the world’s just getting meaner.’ Greta shrugged.

‘But there must be more to it than that!’ Agnes cried impatiently. ‘Haven’t you ever wondered why it happens? What makes people think they can just come up and — and say anything they like?’

‘Yup, it’s a mean old world,’ sighed Greta. ‘All you can do is be mean back.’

Agnes gave up. She sat down at her desk and found herself too distracted to work. Finally, she got up and decided to get some fresh air, albeit at the risk of further accosting.

‘You can’t show people you’re sad,’ Greta announced as Agnes reached the door. ‘What goes around comes around. They sniff it out. Like goddamned dogs. Then they give it right back to you, only worse.’

The crack in the wall now stretched from floor to ceiling. Agnes had tried to camouflage it with posters but they peeled off with the damp, resulting in a worse defect on display than the concealed original. It was November now, a month of iron skies and stormy nights. As the cold seeping into the house turned from an invigorating freshness to a disturbing presence, Agnes felt the sensibility of change being forced upon her; for she saw in the long, cavernous fault intimations of the irretrievable sundering of future from past.

‘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.