by Toby Litt
‘I want to be with you,’ said Paddy. ‘Difficult as you are.’
‘No. Don’t answer by rote – let’s try to say new things. I want to live in a heart – that’s my ideal home; I haven’t said that before. It feels,’ she reached for, ‘released. Now you say something.’ Agatha was in a particular, peculiar state; for Paddy it was like watching something fragile, a vase, bouncing on a hard surface, marble, having survived the first impact of fall.
‘I want to live with you,’ said Paddy, deliberately failing to make an effort of imagination. He wanted to annoy Agatha out of this distressing-for-him mood.
‘You do live with me,’ said Agatha, ‘that’s not exactly visionary.’
Paddy was shamed into something closer to what he wanted to say: ‘I want to live with you as you were before this happened.’
Agatha was shocked. ‘You want to live in the past?’ she said.
‘I want to live – I want not to have to live with so much damage,’ said Paddy, attempting eloquence. ‘I want a life that isn’t almost unbearable every day.’
‘Is it?’ said Agatha. ‘Am I? Is that how you see me?’ She didn’t seem bitterly angry, as he’d expected her to be; so divorced was she from normal feeling and conversation, her reaction now was curiosity.
‘I don’t think I see you any more,’ Paddy said. ‘I don’t think I know you, or understand me.’
‘Then how can you love me?’
‘Oh,’ said Paddy, ‘much much too easily.’
‘But do you know what you’re loving me for?’ Agatha was mischievous and also emotionally vicious; playing with multiple griefs. ‘Is it for who I am and for the future or for what you remember me being, and the past?’
‘At the moment, it’s for the past and what I hope you’ll be again.’
‘I won’t,’ she said, as abruptly as she could. ‘No-one is ever anything again – it may seem like they are, but they’re in actual fact always moving forwards, away from what they’ve been. How can I pretend that what happened didn’t?’
‘I don’t want that,’ said Paddy.
‘It changed me more than anything has ever changed me.’
‘Of course I know that,’ said Paddy.
‘To pretend to be the same would be perverse – I wouldn’t be worth living with any more; I’d be a robot doll acting myself out.’
‘You asked me what I wanted,’ said Paddy, believing they were on the point of a permanent break. ‘I told you.’
‘You did,’ said Agatha, ‘thank you. Now I know you a little better. I thought you wanted something like that, and I was becoming annoyed at you because you wouldn’t admit it. Now you have, now that your me-nostalgia is out in the open, I feel better; do you feel better?’
‘I feel humiliated.’
Agatha looked at Paddy with more eye-adhesion than before. Inside, she had been juggling selves – she had been acting out a scene she really wanted to go through with but couldn’t do so entirely as herself. She asked: ‘Humiliated by me or by what you want?’
‘I can be clever,’ said Paddy, ‘and paradoxical, and say that I’m humiliated because what I want is a you who isn’t you. But I just feel confused: you’re deliberately being elusive, and I feel flatfooted, slow – and I’m afraid I’m never going to be able to catch up with you again. Where are you getting this energy from? I’m exhausted.’ He had a pulse or two’s pause. ‘I want to give up, that’s what I want to do. I don’t want to have to make the effort of going on, being with you, being alive, any more. It doesn’t seem worth it – not without some help or encouragement. I need a sign from you; that it’s going to be worth it.’
‘I am helping you,’ said Agatha, becoming with every moment more compassionate. ‘This is helping you.’
‘It isn’t,’ said Paddy.
‘It’s a sign,’ said Agatha, snapped straight back at him, lovingly. ‘If I didn’t think it worth it, I wouldn’t be bothering with this, would I?’
‘Why are you so impish? I can’t see anything to be energetic about.’
‘I’m being energetic against – that’s where my energy comes from. It’s a fight; I’m thinking and hating my way out of where I was a few seconds ago.’
‘I’m surprised you’re not more exhausted than me.’
‘I probably am,’ said Agatha, ‘inside.’
It was the glimpse of a gap-of-need Paddy had been wishing. ‘Come here,’ he said. Agatha moved matter-of-factly across from the armchair to the sofa. She sat down within hugging distance, and Paddy brought her into his shoulder – but felt more vulnerable, perhaps, than he had since the first time he ever tried to embrace her, not knowing if he’d be rejected or not. He still often felt doubt with regard to her affection for him; there was this degree of thought-formality about it: affection, regard. Agatha in his arms felt like a benediction from a far authority, although he knew it was, in fact, she who had granted herself. He wanted to feel she was in need of something from him – in need of him. He felt she was but feared she wasn’t. He couldn’t see how she could leave him, not if she weren’t prepared to leave the house. But she could ask him to leave, and he would have to go; he would take it seriously, realising she had never asked him anything similar before, and he would have to accept it would be up to her to decide whether or not she had been wrong. This wouldn’t, he felt, happen; the end, with Aggie, would be a true, clear finality. Still, for this moment at least she was in his arms – where she felt a huge desire that Paddy, in some way she couldn’t at all see, some fatherly way, could prove himself adequate to the situation. Agatha was judging him against criteria she could only establish once he’d failed to meet them; the game wasn’t invented yet, it was improvised.
CHAPTER 14
ONCE during this week Paddy woke around half-past three in the morning, felt Agatha wasn’t there, waited for the loo to flush and for her to come back to bed.
When she didn’t, he went downstairs to find out what she was doing – which, on this occasion, was lying across the sofa with hands behind her head and eyes closed. A cup emptied of what had been coffee was beside her, on the floorboards.
Paddy didn’t wake her, and went back upstairs thinking that it wasn’t because she couldn’t sleep that Aggie was getting out of bed, it was that she didn’t want to sleep in their bed – didn’t want to sleep with him, perhaps couldn’t.
In this, Paddy was doubly wrong; Agatha hadn’t been asleep or dozing even – she had been very awake, thinking of her life and how the various bits of it had ceased to fit together, of the breathing and what it might mean. If Paddy had ‘woken’ her, if he had just said hello rather than tiptoeing in and out again (he, father of a two-year-old, was a world-class tiptoer), the misunderstanding would have been exploded. (She would have been annoyed but he wouldn’t have been deceived.)
Instead, he began from this time onwards to resent Agatha’s laziness in the morning, and to suspect that she didn’t sleep in, as she said she did, until the afternoon; she was up almost as soon as he was out the door (he believed) – she wasn’t having fun, but she was having breakfast.
Within a few days, Paddy would come strongly to resent Agatha’s being asleep when he left in the morning and even more her avoidance of their bed at night. He could think of no other reason for her behaviour than that she wished as far as possible to avoid his company, even when unconscious.
It was hard for him to understand how this aversion had so quickly developed – immediately after Agatha came out of hospital they had slept violently in one another’s arms, legs stepping, as if each were a doorway the other was trying and trying to walk or climb through. They woke one another up, constantly, but their definite presence – even as disturber – was enough to reassure the waker back to sleep. If they were not limb-entangled, there had always been some flesh-contact between them: the back of a hand against a buttock, an ankle against the sole of a foot. Now a physical estrangement, a divorce, which was how Paddy began to think of it, was begin
ning.
The following morning, when Paddy woke, he did not immediately remember the reason why he felt upset. Agatha, beside him, was fully asleep, and it was the sound of her breathing that reminded him of what he’d seen and learnt.
The bedroom was very dark, their curtains were very thick which meant that, now, Paddy couldn’t see Aggie’s face; but he lay there and looked across into the warm dark place where he knew she was.
He was angry at her, and partly wanted to wake her and tell her why; however, he also had become aware, uncannily, of what her being there meant – what it meant about her as a person.
He could tell that her head was more intensely her than her feet: he would have hated to say, or even to think, that it gave off ‘vibes’ – yet when he was directing his feelings, mainly his love but also his annoyance, towards her through the darkness, he did so towards her head – he was angry at her head – because he knew it was her head in which her Agatha-ness was most powerfully vested.
It did, in a way, reassure him: this unconscious Agatha was Agatha set apart from the stage of grief she was in. She wasn’t some eternal Agatha but was one he knew – the earlier Agatha, sleeping on the sofa, had been different. Not a stranger: an Agatha glimpsed as if single, separated from him and from Max – a possible future Agatha. Paddy’s dark gaze at her now was partly an attempt to kill this image and partly a simple enjoyment of the calm of her, that she could still be calm.
Recently she had had terrible nightmares, which made her shake, shout, kick and wake both of them up.
It felt, this early situation, more communicative, more fructifying, more blood-enriching than most of their conversations.
Paddy’s alarm clock clicked, and he got to it before it went off; it was large, brass and extremely militant, but Agatha was learning to sleep through it. He lay there for another few minutes, projecting his day upon the ceiling: sometimes, at this hour, he thought in a philosophical way, more often of students and admin, plagiarism and pastoral care. His life, last week, had begun to feel pointless: he wanted to have Max there with them, in order to remind himself why he was doing what he did. The argument didn’t hold: he had done the exact same job before they’d had Max – but after Max was born it had been easy to make him the universal motive; and the job, with the commute added on top, felt different. There was something humiliating about being so exactly in sync with the majority of the working population. Being a commuter was a constant exercise in received contempt. To begin with, Paddy had come back with traveller’s tales he wanted to tell Aggie but did not – stories of people’s unbelievable selfishness on the London train: of a pregnant woman, obviously exhausted, left standing by six young men comfortable on their seats; of elbows, knees, toecaps and their various aggressive uses; of the annoyances (for him) of the people-in-the-way, the people-who-stop-and-gawp. The irony of this, with regard to his subject, was a very old and dull one for Paddy: he had been working for several years on a book about scepticism – the difficulty of proving that other people, or more specifically that other people’s minds, exist. A common-sense philosopher of the sort Paddy definitely was not might have argued that a single journey on the 7.15 to Charing Cross was all that was required to settle this question for ever.
Paddy did not believe, particularly lying in bed in the morning, that he had proved anything much of anything – perhaps what he had written would, one day, help someone, someone more brilliant, to construct a brilliant proof; he had, like so many thousands in departments around the world, been attempting to clarify as close to absolutely as possible the language in which the question was framed. Scepticism did not excite his students very much, and Paddy often worried that he was boring them; then he remembered his own boredom at university, and how grateful he now felt towards it, how necessary it had been for his intellectual development.
He had been teaching the same courses for several years, and the amount of preparation he these days had to do for each class was minimal. He would leave the house with a plastic wallet of typed-up notes in his bag, and the train journey up to London gave him enough time to hold them up to his face and review them. As long as he took the correct plastic wallet, he was fine. (He did not always take the correct plastic wallet.) Occasionally, when he felt like putting in the extra effort, which his students didn’t really deserve, he would reread one of the books or papers around which their course had been structured. This, for his pride, was always a difficult toad to swallow: these arguments seemed so flawed, and yet the papers that contained them had such a monumental presence in his mental life – and had done now for almost half that life. He was a philosopher, he sometimes said, in order to disagree – and not just with others but with himself, and with himself about the idea of ‘others’.
He swung himself out of bed; Agatha did not wake, and he felt his anger towards her rise and then subside – let her sleep, let her sleep for as long as it took. He showered and shaved then got dressed in the back bedroom, having left his clothes and shoes there the previous evening. This morning he wouldn’t have breakfast. Before leaving, he went and gently kissed Agatha goodbye. It was a conscious attempt at forgiveness, his gesture, but it was never likely to work. She shrugged, not wanting to wake more than she had to. Then Paddy went quietly down the stairs and out the front door. He was far from understanding the truth of everything, though – most of what he was thinking was wrong. For in fact, Agatha did superstitiously touch Paddy whenever she got back in bed with him, eventually, at three or four in the morning. The touch had to be very light, the caress of an earlobe or the stroke of an exposed shoulder blade (Paddy slept nude; Agatha in her stripy pyjamas), but she could not sleep until she had assured herself that he was warm and real and alive – and also separate from her, in his dreams (whatever they were; however similar to hers). Before touching him she listened hard to his breathing, her own breath held until she was sure it was Paddy and not just the sound of the waves she was hearing. (This was before the realisation they weren’t waves; afterwards, she just listened to confirm his sleep.) She had to get very close, careful not to make too big a dip in the bed – she listened with her head above his; his breath had a very slight rasp on the intake, which reassured her now, where before it had worried her (lung disease, his father), and once upon a time when they first went to bed together had kept her awake. After she had touched him, Agatha reclined in Paddy’s midnight smell, the fug of unconsciousness around him, the manly fetidness, that bouffed out from under the sheets, stale and floppy; it had, she was almost scientifically sure, a soporific effect upon her.
And many times, Agatha had come into the bedroom when she knew Paddy to be asleep, and had looked down upon him. With the door half open and the landing light on, she could see the outline of his face. (Paddy’s was the right-hand side of the bed, beside the door; she had to be careful that a beam of light, through the crack in the doorjamb, didn’t lay itself ribbonlike over one of his eyes.) When Paddy looked at Agatha, as she slept, he was yearning towards her; when Agatha looked at Paddy, in his sleep, it was in consideration of what it would be never to see him again. Her regard was more judgemental – as if, as was the case, she were trying to work things out about him, about her and him. Her look was not harsh, she felt it to be full of pathos, but the pathos was a magnetic field, returning inwards to herself; it did not reach or electrify Paddy. Once, one night, she did feel great emotion towards him – went down on her knees so as to risk looking right into his face, but this was as Max’s wounded father, not as her husband. As that, more often, she imagined him to be dead and was watching her imaginary reactions, calibrating her imaginary emotions. What would it be like, if… In her more morbid moments, she did come to check if he was actually still alive: it happened that, now and again, downstairs, she began to believe he wasn’t, and had to go and disconfirm this. In the shining doorway, she could no longer tell what it was she hoped for. Paddy’s death would offer solutions, of a sort. She felt it to be not good or desirable
but powerful and moving; it might take that or something like it to bring her back to life. At other times, she came in to see that Paddy was still breathing in order to reassure herself counterintuitively that Max, miles away in his cot at her mother’s, was similarly alive. It didn’t mean anything, this connection, but she was shamed to find it almost worked: a case of whether things generally were right with the world, or whether it was all hurt and hell and hurt and, again and again, loss.
Then there were the few hours when they were both asleep and had turned a little towards one another and begun to breathe in sympathy – either exactly together, on the beat of breath, or at opposite ends of a see-saw of inhalation-exhalation; in with out and out with in. This lifted and dumped them, unconsciously; both drew strength from it – the up was more important than the down, and the sympathy was most important of all. Good days tended to follow these good, if brief, together-sleeps.
CHAPTER 15
IN the security of the breathing house, Agatha tried, systematically, to think herself to the bottom of her thought. She wanted to be inwardly analytical, wished to find a way of figuring her inner self – or selves – for herself; she couldn’t, though, was thwarted, almost before beginning and not just cheaply-paradoxically by herself: Freud had vandalized her psyche. There were within her objects-not-objects to which he had appended names and assigned locations and, which was worse, allotted functions. It was a vast fairground ride – with this lifting that and that coming across to turn this other this way and that. All of which had made her inaccessible to herself: these names, Ego, Superego, Id, were utter anathema – and just as the word Jesus (unhearable, unsayable) had kept her distanced from Christianity (Jeee-ssusss), so they kept her from what she hated calling but still wanted to call authenticity. She felt a great need to reclaim the parts of herself she had given over into the language of others, the great-grandsons and -daughters of Freud, bubblegum pop psychologists, selfish and helpless writers of self-help manuals; she needed to create almost from nothing her own verbal version of her mind, body and spirit. She believed, started trying to believe, in transformation, becoming grotesque, not self-beautifying. She deliberately tried to make herself remember the violence of the first birth when she breathed purely animal: total breaths, breaths so huge they tore muscles in the chest. At that time, and for a short while afterwards, she had felt in possession of a body capable of living itself to pieces: a machine operating at its resonant frequency, screws falling off. There was too much talk in the common world of madness. Agatha knew that, if she had been capable of going mad, with all that was rending inside her as well as out, she would have then, birthing. Something strange was needed, now, something like what poets have – or used to have; something estranging, as Freud himself must once have been estranging. (She knew, she felt.) He had lost his poetry, expelled it from himself and been therefore exiled by others from it; she demanded the right to misunderstand who she was in her own way. To him she would grant this, the inevitability of self-misunderstanding: that wasn’t his insight, merely a strong repetition. It was the teaching of the fathers – know thyself – know thyself, because, at the moment, thou art a stranger to thyself. Analysis would have given her tools, and tools – objects – were the last thing she wanted. (Better to be a stranger to what came along, far better that than to be smugly anticipated by some bastard in a swivel-chair.) Her insides felt chaotic, were completely unfairgroundlike: there were no objects, unless a cloud or a smudge or pathos or debt can be an object. All was unclarity, and she couldn’t help but feel it was better, more honest, that way. Around these non-objects was a mist, an acidic mist, which reduced any burst or bloom to a particoloured vapour. Objects were always trying to form inside her, and some of them might even have deserved the name of thoughts or nascent actions. Shoots and trunks of definiteness were reduced to skeleton forms, and then reunited with the smeary mist. How could this be analysed? Erect a scaffold and it was haze before it was half begun; here, there were no structures: clouds, marvellous from the ground or from above, banal when seen from ascending, descending, whited-out planes. Agatha felt herself to be the cloud not of unknowing but of unforming, for the cloud was in a way a form of knowledge. It was gnosis, not reckoning or argument. Projected within the cloud, at times, were discernible penumbrae – these were not made by objects but by different thicknesses of cloud. Mist, and mystery, and the possibility that all this was self-mystification: Agatha wondered whether it wasn’t that she didn’t want to face hard facts: she was the corrosive one – attempting to prevent anything substantial coming to birth within her. Her dead daughter had been an enactment of this, a dreadful making-physical of what she hadn’t wanted: her womb full of acid, dissolving, her baby-cloud, made and unmade, her red flower. In which case, what was Max? Had he survived and stayed solid by virtue of being male? And what Freud had stolen from her inner life, she felt, cinema and television had stolen from her outer. As she grew older, Agatha became aware of the way gestures spread through populations – the embarrassment of seeing white Englishmen, in imitation of Americans in films, giving one another the ‘high-five’. She felt this, too, in her own most profound physical acts: even at her most destroyed, weeping beneath the blast of the shower, she had felt herself to be in imitation of scenes she had seen, copying what actresses-pretending-to-be-destroyed had done. This tore her: even putting roses on the grave had seemed to her secondary, or tertiary (actors learning from actors). Probably, she thought, people-before-cinema had based their gestures upon those of people around them. Perhaps in moments of argument they had become melodramatic, histrionic, like the actors in stage-plays they had seen. Agatha wasn’t in any way sure that something essential, Edenic, had been taken away from humanity – but she felt lacerated by inauthenticity whenever she tried physically to express, to herself, what she felt she was feeling. At some points in the past – these thoughts weren’t entirely new – she had even been desperate enough to consider taking some sort of class to explore movement and dance. But that would have been replacing one set of clichés with another. Hollywood, she had come to feel, was homicidal; it wanted to kill the human element in all behaviour. Perhaps she was idealizing a pre-cinematic world – one where people had kept most emotions unexpressed, because they had not yet been taught the codes of flickering face and body. What were the chances she would ever feel unaffected again? This wasn’t self-consciousness, it was style-consciousness – and that was why she hated the problem so intensely. She wanted to get at herself – wanted to feel the breath of her own life upon her face, even if it was bad breath.