by Toby Litt
CHAPTER 13
AGATHA was immediately aware, as she woke up the next morning just before noon, of the breathing of the house. Although she could not remember her dreams, she knew that in them every rhythmic thing – her breathing, Paddy’s, Max’s, Rose’s, the alarm clock’s tick, the crump of the waves – had become one and the same thing. She didn’t want to think about this, so got up and made a noisy breakfast. Without Max, though, there was only herself around to make noise, and she was nowhere near as good at that as him: she put the radio on then turned it off, annoyed. The appletree in the garden was just beginning to show its buds – it distracted her for a couple of minutes before she realised she was listening, again, to the breathing. Perhaps, she thought, she should have told Paddy, woken him up when she got into bed with him. She wondered how he would have reacted, and was dismayed to think he would probably emotionally have taken it very well, whilst in the same gesture rejecting it intellectually. But with every moment that passed, now and now and now, and with every breath she heard uneventfully, she became less scared and more comforted. She went through into the front room and sat for a while with her book; she didn’t read it, she wasn’t yet sure if she could, and yet the sounds from the house were definitely unaggressive. If it had to be anything, she thought, then breathing was probably best. Finally, she began to read. Her new favourite spot for this was the back-to-front room. Every day, she would drag the armchair (heavy, leather) across the wooden floor to its perfect position – beside and back to the long windows: it was important, somehow, that Paddy not know this detail of her routine; she had always needed there to be something secret, something furtive about her reading for its fullest pleasure to make itself available to her. As a child she had always taken a book with her when playing sardines or hide-and-seek; and some of her hours of deepest immersion and greatest rapture had come from ignoring the bumps of those helplessly looking for her – and then having given up looking for her, their shouts telling her she’d won, adult voices joining in to threaten her with missed birthday cake or worse. There were a number of small deceptions like this which she found it necessary, or comforting, to practise upon Paddy. Drinking tea, she used Paddy’s exclusively-for-coffee mug – then washed it quickly, as if he were just about to come back, which she supposed wasn’t impossible. One day when he had left for work, definitely, she turned round in bed so that her feet rested upon his pillow – she had no idea why she was doing this, it wasn’t intended, she didn’t think, as a sign of contempt. Again, she would have liked smoking to be one of her daily secrets, but there was the impossibility of a regular supply of cigarettes. She thought about opening the door to the postman and asking if he could bring her some tomorrow – for a fiver; but that suggested an image of herself as a mad old lady or as a lascivious housewife, neither of which she could accommodate. She never masturbated, though she thought about it; she was waiting for something to happen before she did that – she had no idea what that something was or would be. This day, she read in the back-to-front room until she became hungry, by which time she realised that the breathing house scared her far less than she had been capable of scaring herself. Making and eating a very late lunch, she thought this thoroughly through. There were moments of watching, hearing and internally reading herself which Aggie had made special efforts to forget – even as they were happening. Sometimes, she now recalled, she had found herself parodying her own morbid thoughts – grotesquely imagining hacking Paddy’s killed body to bits on the kitchen floor; and at other times she ran through her least usually approachable nightmares at double-speed, turning them slapstick. These recognitions made Agatha, briefly, feel as if she were not a properly serious person, one whose sincerest feelings were only and always sincere. Alongside her guilt at moments of half-happiness, or simple self-absence, came these moments of self-parody and self-torture. She was, she knew, different now in many ways to what she had been when first visiting the house: a less confident person – a person less confident about being a person; it seemed a far more troubling, challenging thing to be. Previously, she had hardly been aware of how many machines inside her had worked since her birth without her having ever to tinker with them or even remove their covers; they had hummed, given off warmth, functioned in a way she now found astonishing – astonishing from the sad point of view of the mechanic, wandering around a vast floor covered with the parts of a machine, several machines, she had only now discovered she had the skill to take apart but not to reassemble. Agatha no longer felt convinced of her own persona: Agatha, Aggie, Mummy. The house, she realised, was full and had been for days, nights, of different versions of her; sometimes she walked in upon herself at her absolute worst, keening almost inhumanly on the bathroom floor – and would either run really run away or would collapse and join in; at other times she glimpsed herself going out through the front door not only as if none of it had ever happened but as if none of it ever stood a chance of happening (when she saw herself in ignorance, like this, she was disgusted by how much envy she felt); and again, she barged in upon herself on the sofa, breastfeeding three-month-old baby Rose. They had made the mistake of naming the unborn ‘Rose’, after a good friend who could now only be retained as a friend with a greatness more of grief – for they had also, mistakenly she now knew, told everyone, especially the named-after Rose, that this what what Baby Two was going to be called. During these awful moments, Aggie stood and watched as baby Rose struggled to focus her small brown eyes on her happy mother’s face. Another version of herself which she met, sometimes, was round-bellied and smiling and smug – seven-and-a-half-months gone, the pain just about to tap her on the shoulder. Before all this, Agatha had felt indivisible, now she felt, almost, plural – as if there were no longer an Agatha but merely a different Agatha and Agatha and Agatha and again Agatha every time she entered a different room. In comparison to this, the breathing was wonderful: if she had to choose a variety of madness, she would have no hesitation – to be in the bosom of an imagined giant was far better than splintered into a hundred confused and conflicting selves. Agatha felt strangely convinced of her sanity, though – glad that she was finding some unclichéd way to think of herself and act her thoughts out. By the time Paddy was due back that evening, Agatha was quite at ease with the idea of the house being, for her at least, in her need, alive: she would not tell him about it, if he needed to know about it then she trusted it would let him know.
When Paddy did finally arrive home, an hour late because of the train, he sensed almost immediately that something in Aggie had changed. He knew that, according to what she would tell him if he asked, she had done little more since last he saw her than read, watch television, clean, cook. He suspected that she had been visited during the day, that she had had company. (Normally, he might have thought someone had telephoned, but he knew that Aggie had stopped answering – knew because of all the messages left, all the calling-back and lying he had to do.) It wasn’t anything definite about her, nor any clues around the house; although he did begin to look for them – was this hair stuck in the bathroom soap hers or his or someone else’s? could he smell cigarette smoke in the kitchen or was it burnt toast? It was not leavings; it was that Agatha seemed changed by what he could only depict to himself as intervention, human intervention. Yet there had been nobody, as far as he could make out, to intervene. There was something new and definitely a little strange about her; decisiveness, decidedness – he feared that he knew too well what it was, and that it was an end to him together with her and Max. Some event, some realisation had occurred to her, he was becoming sure, but what could it possibly have been?
No, she hadn’t gone out; he could have told, from how she looked, acted and smelled if it had been that – Aggie would have looked windblown, just slightly. Instead, she had about her the atmosphere of some object brought out after years lost at the back of a wardrobe: a mustiness that could get inside even a marble. Paddy didn’t believe she was deceiving him in this, only in almost ev
erything else. He pushed his senses closer to her, and felt sure, again, that no-one had visited – a visitor, too, would have blown at the mustiness.
Facing her over dinner, he went through the thoughts that followed on from her deciding to leave him. As they weren’t talking, he had the time to argue it through semi-philosophically with himself. He regretted, in parallel, he couldn’t appreciate the rich food more: meatballs with mashed and butter-run potatoes. This decision of hers might show itself in opposite ways: either she would be in greater tension with him, until she found her moment for the announcement, or she would be more relaxed towards him, more caring because it meant so much less – care would have become finite, almost nostalgic. It is over, he thought, hating the pure audibility of the words in his head – a marriage, a good one; my marriage. Paddy was extremely lonely, and the thing in front of him, Aggie, which made him feel that was the thing which should have stopped him feeling that: her absent presence saddened and infuriated him. The house was a changed place, submerged; he felt a suffocation, and a huge weight pressing upon him from above – a weight like water. He was, if anywhere, at the very bottom of the sea. The light which entered his eyes was all ripples; looking at Aggie, he could see nothing without a shoal-like shimmer of possible tears.
Later in the evening, Paddy on the sofa, Agatha in the armchair, they began talking about the house, and whether they could afford it; both of them knew they couldn’t, not the way things were going, but talking about it at least showed they were making the effort. Suddenly, or at least suddenly to Paddy, Agatha broke out: ‘I need this!’ Paddy knew he’d heard her shout like this before – stop! – no! don’t! – to warn Max off dangerous things; never exactly in this way, though. ‘I need this house – I need the feeling it gives me,’ Agatha said, her voice no quieter. And now she diminished: ‘It makes me feel safe, loved. Right this moment, it’s the only thing that’s keeping me going.’
Paddy let this honesty thud, then said, ‘Thanks.’
Agatha resented his implied flirt; it made her hate him, a little – a tiny puff of poison, as from the spine of a tropical fish: ‘You know what I mean,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’ Paddy could still feel her shout, zinging in his skull – it had with a snap changed his mood: he knew he could, feeling as he now did, tell Agatha exactly what he thought of her selfish behaviour. This wouldn’t be, of course, what he thought; it would be a summation of the anger her perfectly understandable selfish behaviour created in him. Above everything else at this moment, Paddy did not want to say what he was thinking: It’s not me, it’s you; it’s your fault. He felt Agatha was forcing it out of him, and he didn’t know whether this was to make things between them better or to bring the whole of them closer to an end. He didn’t want to risk that; and he had already sat there without speaking for several pulses too long. ‘I do know what you mean, and I’m prepared to do everything I can to help keep us here – but I can only do so much.’ And Paddy realised he’d ended up, unwittingly, unwillingly, saying exactly what he most wanted to avoid saying.
He found Agatha’s reply shocking – she laughed. ‘This is being middle-aged,’ she said. ‘We’re here – we’re in the middle of all the things we hoped we’d somehow manage to avoid.’
If anything’s middle-aged, Paddy thought of replying, it’s your unnatural attachment to this house – your clinging bloody… This first reaction wasn’t sayable, and he had none ready with which to replace it. A pulse later and still all he could manage was, ‘Is that how you see it?’
‘I wouldn’t mind going to live somewhere different, if I knew I would feel the same about it and that –’ She seemed ashamed of what she was going to say, ‘it would feel the same about us.’ Paddy knew Agatha had been going to say not us but me, the sentence otherwise was unbalanced and inelegant. Her small self-correction, at least, was a sign of attempted reconciliation. ‘I’d live in a tiny one-bedroom flat with you and Max, on the top floor, if only I could be certain that I wouldn’t feel abandoned there.’
‘This isn’t rational,’ said Paddy.
‘No,’ said Agatha, ‘I’m not rational right now; I’m emotional – I’m desperate. I’ll take anything I can get – and right now that’s the feeling, which might be an illusion,’ delusion, thought Paddy, ‘that the place I live in isn’t entirely indifferent to what happens to me. I don’t want a moon – I don’t want to live on the moon.’ Agatha had embarrassed herself; still, she went on with what she most darkly meant, ‘I want to live inside a heart.’
‘What?’ said Paddy.
‘I’m fed up of not saying what I mean, what I really feel: I want to live somewhere that’s warm and liquid and pulses and is full of life – and that’s a heart. I’m inside it now; it’s like being with you.’
‘You mean like being with me used to be.’
‘Yes, I probably do,’ said Agatha, being at least consistent in her recklessness. ‘This house is a heart, and I’m not leaving it just because money tells me to; I’m not listening to money.’
‘I have to assume,’ said Paddy, ‘that you’re not deliberately trying to break us up.’
‘Not at all,’ said Agatha. ‘But I can’t go on lying. I’m not living in the same – I don’t know – universe as you any more: I disagree with your physics. We have to find some way of dealing with that.’
‘You’re admitting the chance we might split up.’
‘There’s always a chance of that; we’ve just pretended there wasn’t. For us to go on, we have to want it. Do you still want it?’
Paddy’s reply wasn’t instant. ‘Of course,’ he said, a pulse too late.
‘You want it enough to say that,’ said Agatha. ‘But you think about outside this relationship, don’t you? You imagine being with someone easier, someone younger.’