Rachel Cusk - Saving Agnes

So it was that Agnes, knowing herself to be a fake, and being fatally attracted to the unforgiving expert sex, spent her days in mortal fear of discovery. Guiltily she hid the tools of her loathsome trade; filled with self-hatred, she left her bed, on those sparse but nonetheless harrowing occasions when there was someone sharing it, to scrub from her the unnatural stench of the night’s activities. She would meet her own eyes in the mirror and would see them fill with tears as they contemplated the red and blotchy character of their surrounds. Before she numbly set about superimposing with artifice the glowing and satisfied visage the evening had somehow failed to supply, she sometimes felt the hatred almost reaching down and dissolving her fear. Something wild and indecipherable had taken hold: for had she been discovered then, bare and trembling in the cold bathroom, all the acrimony in the world would have been but confirmation. She derived a strange comfort from knowing she was as naked as the truth.

Few, then, would have perceived that Agnes Day felt less vanity than guilt as she readied herself for an assignation in central Islington. Her destination was the stranger encountered by the bathroom door, and the brief memory she had of his quiet and critical bearing informed her that her preparations would require exceptional assiduity if he was also to become her destiny. She met the glance of her bare face like that of a stranger and eyed her naked body with the indifference of a bored husband blunted by years of custom. Robed and daubed, however, she recognised herself once more, and scrutinised her reflection front, side and back as if in preparation for attack. She wore her hair long, a trick intended to clear up any queries as to her gender. As a child she had often been mistaken for a boy, and although now she felt she possessed sufficient evidence to refute any such claims, the memory of those who once doubted lingered uncomfortably at the back of her mind.

As it was still light Agnes walked the distance, crossing Highbury Fields just as the sun raked over the soft pastel sky and disappeared, leaving it scarred with violet welts. Boys kicked balls and wheeled aimlessly on bikes, their cries fluttering up through the trees like fugitive birds, their shadows long and skinny as poles.

‘All right, darlin’?’ someone shouted to her.

A row of teenagers sat on a bench like crows on a telegraph wire, blowing artless clouds of smoke from summer cigarettes through their gappy, grinning mouths. Agnes passed behind a tree and used her temporary occlusion to tug at her skirt, wishing it were not so short. She felt suddenly vulgar with her cardboard face and gashed bleeding mouth, shown up by the delicate evening, the whisper of twilight, the soft texture of leaf and sky. Her perfume clawed at the translucent scent of flowers and grass until she felt almost nauseous.

She passed through the park and regained the thundering roadside. A lorry roared by her with a hot rush of diesel. The sudden commotion was deafening. She stood on the concrete pavement in terror. People looked at her as they shoved past, some with annoyance, others, the men, with a kind of sneering admiration. She thought of him waiting for her, and for a moment the whole predictable chute of their putative future opened out there on the roadside: a saga of love and loss, a lightning cruise around places she had seen before. At that moment she would have stayed there, paralysed, until dogs cocked their legs against her; but the oddity of her predicament soon forced itself upon her, and she began to walk. Perhaps, after all, he could save her. Perhaps he would.

He was late, but Agnes had learned not to mind that; indeed, she expected nothing less. She sat at a table out of sight of the door but perfectly angled by a window which afforded a view of the street, so that she would receive information of his arrival early enough to be able to greet it with studied indifference. Outside night had fallen, and she found her gaze wandering into the darkened street, where a decrepit neon sign over the launderette opposite read WE CLEAN CURTAINS AND LOVERS. She got on well enough with anticipation. In her view, the experience of things before they happened generally provided the most pleasing version of events. It occurred to her that believing in anticipation was not unlike believing in God, another of her covert vices. It was the same drift of soul and mind towards perfection, and to Agnes the thought of perceiving the world without this dimension was to see only shadows and not the things which cast them.

There had been times, of course, when she had gambled all and lost, when she had thought her heart would surely break with disappointment that reality had not exceeded — or even matched — her imaginings. Nina, whose belief in the concrete was almost architectural, had often advised her to expect less; the reasoning being that what she did receive would thus seem like more. Agnes considered that now, as her malicious watch told her he was fifteen minutes late. She tried to imagine him coming in, flopping down uncouthly opposite her, drinking tepid vats of stinking beer until she thought his gut would explode; then belching, perhaps, a hand on her knee.

So successful were the effects of this unpleasant hallucination that she began to feel rather sick. She closed her eyes and it was then that she suddenly felt the elusive breath of him beside her, the warm, clean smell of him, the soft expensive touch of his coat against her arm. He bent over and planted a smooth kiss on her forehead, tender as a blessing. The practised air with which this gesture was accomplished did not entirely pass her by. She was glad he knew what to do. She had been foolish to underestimate him. He was, as she had seen when first they met, a professional. That, she hoped, was something they had in common, for a start.

ONCE Agnes had been in love and since then she had just been in pain. The men she knew now drifted in and out of her life like ships in a harbour; some staying for a brief, inebriated night of rest and recuperation, others weighing anchor for weeks. She examined every new face for augurs of past prosperity, but her Golden Age had never been revived. Such traffic as she encountered, however, intermittent though it was, kept her a slave to hope; although she didn’t know whether her renaissance would take the form of a resurgence of old joys or the onset of new ones, she was confident salvation was at hand.

Having recognised love once, she thought she would know it again, but resemblances are cruel: grinning skulls behind painted masks, deceiving the eye to fool the heart with empty promises. She had seen John’s face in other faces, had pursued him on filthy pavements in the rain and then stopped, duped and foolish, her chest pounding wildly with disappointment. Then she would feel herself take wing, plunging and diving and wondering if she might not find more happiness up there among the birds and rooftops. But the pain of it dragged round after her like a ball and chain; and while she was her own jailer, he held the key. Without him she could not contrive to escape from herself. He had made her what she was and then he had left her. She was a house with no occupant, a church with no religion. She had never known loneliness until she’d had company. Agnes’s father was a tall man. Like most children Agnes had had her adoption fantasies, but as she grew older she learned to accept her own considerable height as a natural gift; and later still to seek a man who could see eye to eye with her on such matters.

Consequently she was rather mystified when, at a party in her first term at university, she found herself accosted by an unquestionably handsome, but equally indubitably diminutive, stranger.