by Toby Litt
‘I’m sorry,’ said Paddy.
‘Don’t be intellectually lazy,’ said Agatha, a little ridiculously, with a thick voice. Paddy, too, began to cry. His head was full of memories, his body ached as if he’d swum a hundred lengths the day before.
CHAPTER 12
AGATHA continued to get up later and later every morning until, after a while, she was getting up in the afternoon. At first she tried to go to bed the same time as Paddy, but there was no chance of her falling asleep such a short time after she’d woken up. She began to wait until he had started to breathe sleepbreaths, then took herself downstairs for another hour or two, three and four. She found she loved the nighthouse even more than she loved the dayhouse, despite the fright of the darkness. She left her glasses off – and everything appeared to her through a vague mist; she much preferred it that way. The hours of light were becoming too explicit for her – too hardcore in the rawness of what they exposed; she wanted a veil between herself and the seen world. Daylight wasn’t poignant enough to assist in the wanted pathos of her vision; things she had hoped by now would have become scrubbed or invisible weren’t. She needed all the human cavities, including her own, to remain enticing shadows, not red-gleaming orifices of failed defence. One night, towards the end of the first week, she turned off all the electric lights and lit a candle instead. She felt Victorian, in the pallid flicker of it – participant in a less light-loving age. Candlelight, she found, calmed her raging insides, head and otherwhere, was what they used to call bromide. A few days later it passed through her mind that what she really wanted were servants to light and raise a candelabra – then the front room would all be visible but would still glow with the gentle shine of candles. This was not something to which she gave a great amount of thought – it was an image; one that, if it came too close to being conscious, she rejected. Her job had caused her to develop a reflex against the past: she could never allow herself, during brainstorming sessions, during client meetings, to be seen going or looking backwards; not unless it was to some retro-futuristic vision of how ironically to sell, say, yellow fat – agency slang for all the various fake butters. But she had a deep reactionary seam, a conservatism that made her detest parts of what she was and feel disgusted with the whole of what she might, if she wasn’t careful, vigilant, become. If this happened, she knew, if she turned Tory, friends and colleagues of hers would say – fashionably, knowingly – that it had always been inevitable. Yet she knew that her politics were changing, aging, just as surely and in many of the same ways as her body: they were both becoming saggier, baggier, more porous and less forgiving. What had given her physical confidence after the birth of Max – the feeling of being a woman (not girlish), unapologetically, unmistakably – was now, since, the cause of its almost complete destruction. Paddy, she knew, felt it was horrendous that his own body remained unchanged, even with the ravage of her second pregnancy. He had done his best to allow himself as much as possible to age: he had neglected his skin, and it had gone dry and acquired some apologetic (to Agatha, and through her to all mothers) wrinkles. This wasn’t enough, he knew, but it was all he could do – and Agatha pitied him both for his efforts and his failure. In the same arabesque of mind, though, Agatha could curl around to a guilt that Paddy’s politics too seemed unaging; he was watching her drift rightwards. Her age, her aging bothered her less at night and far less than, on occasion, it had done recently. Most of all, for this was already firmly in the past, and distanced as much as anything by their distance from London, Agatha had felt her agingness whilst shopping for clothes. Then, if she found herself reaching towards any hangered thing with the merest hint of mutton, she felt nauseous; sometimes, when trying to look in a mirror at the sight of herself from behind, or assessing the effect of the length of a skirt, she had felt herself to be on the very very edge of old: even if this piece of clothing, this top or skirt usually top, were all right now, in six months’ time it would be quite unfeasible for her, for a woman her then-age (luckily, fashion and the change of season would already have rendered it ungenerallywearable by then). Even before she had had Max, winter had been welcome to her – for the relief it brought from exposing areas of no longer impeccable flesh (not that, when it had been impeccable, she had ever believed it so). Agatha realised how imposed and unfair her increasing belief in her own physical shitness was. She read fashion magazines before she went shopping, to see what she might want to buy, and then after she came back from shopping, to see what she could no longer wear without looking mutton. The purpose of fashion magazines, of all magazines, was to make one feel lack; Agatha had long ago made this fact out. It was one of the reasons she was, or perhaps now had been, so good at her job: she had great clarity of vision as to the viciousness, essentially, of what they at the agency were doing. The rhetoric of products was, these days, fairly undisguised, even when in the presence of the client; ‘advances in technology’ were discussed in terms of sexiness, not utility. There was, in it all, a strong ironic element of ‘Okay, girls, here comes the science’ with the coded message, ‘This is nonsense, switch off your brain for a bit.’ Agatha had been particularly good on haircare products, shampoos, conditioners, dyes – it was a specialisation that being a redhead, if only a dark and reasonably unginger one, had prepared her for from the first time she walked onto a screaming playground. Here, on her head, and in her head, she knew where the reservoirs of fear could be located – and she knew how to tap them, control the flow, and use them to irrigate with anxiety the ever-refilled fields of shelves with their irresistible products. Just as she knew this, she knew that her ideas of a pristine, pre-advertising past (the world’s, not her own) were sentimental: if her history-student friends had taught her anything in the college bar, it was that everything happened at least a hundred years before you think it happened (and that included the things that happened a hundred years before they did). There had been a human privacy and intimacy once, though; that Agatha refused not to believe in: the Victorians, some of them anyway, had been made of different stuff to us – of the Bible, John Bunyan, folksong, Dickens, George Eliot, scandal sheets. They were made more of the cold of fireless hearths, the dark-darkness of midnight houses and the frail light of carried-upstairs candles. She read Victorian poetry, remembering that once upon a time, before university, she had thought that poetry, writing it, might be something she would have something to do with. In this, she had become a disappointment to herself. An English degree, a first-class one, had taken away from her, or forced her to suppress and disguise, any language of passion – which meant any passion in the language read and any passion in the language she was allowed to use to discuss it. We care about this, the students’ constructed attitude was, because it is formally intriguing, sociologically revealing, not because it rips our heart out with the wild claws of a bear and reinserts it with the gleaming tools of a surgeon. It was this, however, the wild surgery to which her earliest literary readings had subjected her that she now wished to re-know, re-live. At fifteen, once or twice, she had read by candlelight, having realised that was what the first naughty or merely nightly readers of these books must have done. Now she tried to resurrect this, as if it had been a whole important long period of her life; it hadn’t, but also it had – an hour, the right hour, was an epoch; not just in youth, at any age of life. She was chasing, or beckoning, her own new epoch. It was important that she survive this one: in the flat she had done this in one way, by overcaring for Max and preparing for their move to the house; in the house, devoid of Max, she had to adapt. Night helped her think. Agatha knew her feelings towards suicide were not genuine and could be a little indulged – mainly she knew this because they expressed themselves within her as a misty nostalgia for the two or three periods in her life when she had been, truly, on the point of killing herself. Agatha was cute to herself (cute and deep) in her remembered past-self: she could not believe that a being so undamaged could have felt itself so wretched-wrecked. Nothing really bad had happe
ned to her before she was, what, thirty? thirty-two? Her father’s death. She knew this mood was a glimpse ahead, to looking back once more, as an old woman, if she ever made it, upon herself as she was today: deep, cute. The thought that she might in future have the capacity to have endured worse worsts, and be able to think with coolness and yet with life of all of it, that was of all possibilities the most terrifying. Not suicide, but survival – what if she had to suffer being stronger than herself, than her own heart? If only I’d done it then, her reasoning, had she attempted to reason herself through to clarity, would have followed – if only I’d attempted it, and succeeded, then I wouldn’t have had to go through any of this. That, she felt, though she did not think it, was a lovely notion, so gently beautiful: to pause her life as it had been. Exactly because Agatha had in the past known genuinely suicidal moments, she now knew exactly why her nostalgia was completely other. Her present feelings were a retrospective imposition of a desire to avoid the future that had not then happened but which now had. There were definite events which the imaginary death of her younger self would have forestalled. When she had truly felt suicidal, about a year before meeting Paddy, there had been no gentle feelings, no haze, only a clear gesture – a grab – towards the knife, and of the knife – a lunge – towards her. Some of the attractions and aversions, however, did remain the same. Just as before, the abdication of responsibility, the number of things death would save her from having to do or face or negotiate – that was the motive; or rather, that was what she, in her thought-movements, was fleeing. But she would, she knew, be making no positive decision towards death: now, the world was different, now there was Max, and also Paddy, but mainly Max, though Paddy wasn’t completely unimportant. Max if she had died would have been left with Paddy, and no memories of the mother who wasn’t even able to live long enough to reject him for who he really was.
Agatha sat straight-backed in the middle of the sofa, affirming her enthronedness within her own life. She queened it over the world for whole half-hours at a time: it was a good feeling, regality, almost unique, since, and what was most marvellous – though she did not marvel, because that would have ended the effect – was that she did not instinctively interrupt herself with guilt.
It was during one of the nights early in this week that Agatha first noticed something unusual about the sound of the waves. When she had been trying to go to sleep at the same time as Paddy, Agatha had often used to lull herself by listening to the very quiet and very distant sound of the soft waves on the pebbly beach. She longed – part of her longed – to go down to the sea itself, but she remembered that even when she had been at its edge in times before, had sat for an hour and stared out across it, or dipped her hand in up to the wrist, or – in summer – swum out beyond the breakers (she was a strong swimmer), even then she had not felt intimate enough with the differing element. There was always a preventative quality about the sea; her first sight of it forestalled any real understanding – which had, originally, been one of her reasons for being very keen to live within an intimate distance of it. Her childhood had been for the most part landlocked, but she remembered her eight or ten weeks at the seaside (in Devon and Cornwall, over the course of several summer holidays) as more lingering than the interior rest. Her seawards impulse was one of the most powerful she could recently remember herself having – apart from, perhaps, her griefwards one. In her mind, the two began to assimilate one another, and she became afraid that a visit to the sea would inevitably (like a visit to a patient in a mental hospital) be a courting of glamorous distress, at some level. As she listened now, seated on the sofa, the two rhythms ran over and across each other: her breathing and the hushing of the waves. At times, the two synchronized – she allowed them to synchronize; keeping her breath regular but at a different, slightly slower pulse than the sea. In this way, like two clocks with minutely different tick-tocks, there was an eventual coming-into-sync; at which point, Agatha matched her breathing exactly to that of the sea. It was a great relief and comfort; one of her most basic decisions being made for her – how to breathe and when. She had, ever since her first pregnancy, been very aware of the difficulties of breathing when it becomes self-conscious – and now she was self-conscious about almost everything almost all the time. (One day, not far off, she felt convinced, she would no longer be able to undress in front of herself – already she hid herself, when she could, from Paddy.) There was a definite danger that she would soon be taking every aspect of herself far too seriously – in a childlike way, believing that decisions she made about whether or not to breathe now, now, now or now were world-changers. She was particularly worried that she might find a way of becoming superstitious about her breathing patterns. (The remembered childself on the car journey, promising herself a present from her parents if only she could hold her breath until the next but one bridge across the motorway.) She was capable of it, and she feared these capacities – they seemed to operate for their own delight, these days. Enamoured of havoc, and with an almost homicidal curiosity – the smallest change, like the change which had already begun between her and Paddy, was enough to reduce her to her alone – Paddy gone, taking Max with him. Nothing comforted her but things which ran parallel; the sea-breathing – this she was able to bring to the point of ignorance: stripes lined up over stripes, when moved causing backwards ripples – like two fences seen, one in front of the other, whilst riding on a train.
This night, she wasn’t satisfied with the volume of the waves – she kept missing her rhythm. Perhaps the sea was too calm; she should check, by a proper listen. The obvious place was out of the attic window. But Paddy’s unspoken attitude to this was clear to her, as clear as if he had been whispering it into her ear: be brave. And perhaps, she felt, she could and should be. Night might make it easier. She went to the front door and began slowly to open it – an act which, in itself, did not yet terrify her, as she knew the act was in no way promissory. Paddy, asleep, definitely asleep (she had quickly checked), would never know of it. Her achievement, opening the door, would give him no increased hope, and her failure to follow it by a step into the street would cause him no dismay. As she opened the door, its heaviness and greater legality compared to the doors within the house struck her. The outside that she was becoming afraid of was not one of actual man-made or man-incarnated threat; what she feared was not the specific but the vague – not what it might do to her but the totality of the almost infinite vicious possibilities it contained. The air in front of her did not contain the simple blade of a knife, it was entirely blade and entirely, in every direction and encountered with every movement, edge. A single step forwards, she felt, and she would be cut to steak tartare – a smear of grey and red – meat-mist. Agatha stood and looked out through the knife-air, the edge-air, feeling the impossibility of it – it wasn’t a medium, it was a billion-billion tragedies. But she got as close to it as she could without getting cut. A young man walked past, head down, not seeing her, and it was like watching a shark in an aquarium or a tiger in slow motion – how did he not die? How did he make this his element? Agatha closed her eyes when she was sure he, still unharmed, was gone. She listened to the sea – and was amazed to hear that, since the last time she listened to it, a few moments before at the top of the stairs, after checking on Paddy, its pulse seemed to have slowed down. It sounded different, of course, she had expected that: louder, larger, deeper, but the pulse… She counted the seconds in between the waves, making it five. Inside, she heard every wave, she believed, not just every loud one or every seventh. A deep breath, and now she concentrated instead on what she could smell. Strongest was not the sea itself but the bittersweet of the seaside town, burnt sugar and bitumen. She could easily have told, blindfold, driven there by terrorists, that there was dense human occupation around her: toxins were upon many levels of the air. At this hour, she smelled no specific smells – no cooking, not even a car gone by with a broken exhaust. Agatha heard a seagull nearby make its plaint, she couldn
’t tell whether or not it was overhead. There was something unnerving, now, about the sound of the waves. Inside, she had to listen but not very carefully in order to hear them. Here, they seemed hardly audible at all – how was that possible? The house wasn’t capable of focusing the sound, making it louder – the soft crash, the crumple of wet momentary cliffs. She listened and was disconcerted by the illusion that the sound was coming from behind her, from inside the house. She suddenly became aware of her pyjamas, blue and white vertical stripes; old, soft, many-times-worn cotton. Embarrassed, though no-one was there, the young man gone, she needed to concentrate properly on the sounds. She could hear cars, and knew them to be – together with lorries – those on the main road, the one that ran along the seafront. The yawl and cark of seagulls was punctuation to this, as their shit was punctuation to the slate roofs and the concrete pavements. They were a fact to be accommodated, somehow – it wasn’t good to admit, even to oneself, that one would prefer them not to be there (despite this being the seaside, and them being a requirement). Acknowledging their presence didn’t make them any less aggressive; they had been known to steal food out of people’s mouths and in some ways it made the whole town seem more hostile. Not liking that thought, or its suggestion of an even longer self-containment, Agatha took a step back and closed the door. It was a couple of minutes before her breathing had slowed and calmed enough for her to listen again to what sea-sounds made it into the house. She heard them differently now: they seemed more human, more raggedy. That was what she thought initially. This time, she didn’t want to listen to them long, just hear they were still there. But it wasn’t possible for her to ignore the fact that the waves were louder in the house than outside. She walked to the back of the hall and listened; they didn’t seem quieter the further away from the door she got. To test again, she took herself into the back bedroom; they were the same. And again, she found, the same in the attic. Here, she opened the window in the roof – for only the second time since they had viewed the house; this, surely, should be the best and loudest place for hearing the sea. But it was quieter. Perhaps, she now worried, it wasn’t even the sea she heard outside, just cars going by on the London road. It was also, as she heard it, slower in pulse. Bringing herself inside, closing the double glazing, the waves were audible. But Agatha knew they couldn’t be what she heard them as being. Scientific and decided, she tiptoed downstairs and into the main bedroom; here, she listened to Paddy’s breathing. It wasn’t the same as in the attic or the hall – slower still, and more rasping. (Her heart was knocking her around, putting shaking blood in her hands.) She went into the nursery, and a memory engulfed her: standing over Max’s cot in the weeks and months after he had been born; each of Max’s breaths had had the emotional impact of a small loaf of bread being baked: the weighing, kneading, covering, leaving, returning, repeating, greasing, ovening, smelling. To lean over his cot as he slept small and growing was, for Agatha, richly to be fed. There had been no opposite to this, it was everything; she had hated herself for the essentialism of it, but there – that baking – was a hook on which she’d happily hang the coat of her soul: a moment of permanence. She had been greedy, she knew, asking for another little bakery-baby; after all, she only had one soul to hang – as long as it did not slip off, let it grow dusty where it was, for as long as it lasted there. The bread-thought left her when she stepped out onto the upstairs hall, making a deliberate break of the doorway. But it had left a suspicion with her; that the regular whooshing-swooshing sound that she could hear wasn’t the sea, or her breathing, or Paddy’s, but was coming from the house – was the house’s breathing. She didn’t believe this, and nor did she want to believe herself capable of believing it. Madness was, right now, something best not thought about. If the house could breathe, what if it started talking? (Her blood flipped from head to toe, and she shivered in response.) Only very rarely during her nights had she put music on – now she needed some. It wouldn’t matter if it woke Paddy up; that might force her to tell him what was happening. The stereo was in the front room, and Paddy’s old LPs were on a single shelf above it. She chose Billie Holiday – a singer who she felt sang what she (Agatha) was like: she wasn’t unaware that this, too, was how millions of other women, and men, felt. At this moment, ‘I Cover the Waterfront’ was Agatha’s lifesong, and she listened to it closely four times – ear up against the speaker cabinet. This, she was sure, wasn’t the recording she had first heard; that had been on a very cheap tape bought in a charity shop, subsequently (university) lent and never returned. That version had been frailer, even more moving in its loneliness and mistily hopeful despair than this one. Agatha knew herself to be in danger of sentimentality, didn’t mind. What did she have in common with a long-dead black American drug-addict ex-prostitute genius jazz singer? Except everything ever. Surely, she thought, that’s what Billie would have wanted? In the recording she could hear the desire to communicate – and possibly, too, the knowledge that this communication could be disembodied: the ghost of Billie coming out of radios whilst she herself was on a tour coach with the boys, or on an airplane, or in Europe, or dead. Agatha decided that, best as she could, she would forget the breathing. It wasn’t the fast-breathing of a baby – that she at least was sure of; it wasn’t, she hoped, the coming-to-life of a madness. When Billie Holiday stopped singing, Agatha remembered the moment she had left Max with her mother; through the just-closed front door, before she had even had time to turn away, hands still in the air from waving, Max’s small voice, ‘Where mummy?’ She had stopped to listen. Her mother, in the hallway, had said to Max, ‘She’s gone to get your new home lovely and ready for you,’ and Max had said, ‘Wheremummy?’ three times before starting to cry. The music was beautiful.