by Toby Litt
‘I fucking hate it,’ said Paddy. ‘I fucking hate death. I’ll call later.’ They said goodbye, Paddy telling her he loved her. She said, ‘I love you,’ and she said it again a second time and a third time; so that he would know it wasn’t conventional or avoiding-something: he did, she sensed, he understood; he put the phone down.
CHAPTER 21
AGATHA called her mother to let her know what was happening – and the question immediately came up: ‘Do you want me to bring Max round?’ Again, Agatha tried to explain – without saying anything too direct – why this wasn’t a good idea. Her mother refused to understand, but was not cruel enough to force Max upon her. There was a possibility, Agatha sensed her mother felt, that he might be neglected. Although the idea that she would be such a failed mother that she might damage Max worked to her advantage, in keeping her mother off, Agatha knew the resentment was likely to last years – on both sides.
When finally she was able to put the phone down, the house felt like pure relief. Although it was early, for her, Agatha went and lay on top of the bed – where she fell asleep until morning.
What woke her was another call from Paddy: his father was still alive. He had not regained consciousness but had become threateningly stable.
‘It was being awake that was killing him,’ Paddy said. ‘He was trying his hardest to die. And now he can’t do that any more, he’s doing better. He could go on for, I don’t know, a month.’
‘Come home, then,’ said Agatha, who felt slightly changed by her own night of unconsciousness but hadn’t had time to work out how.
‘No,’ said Paddy. ‘I have to stay here.’ Agatha knew there was no point asking why – this, waiting it out, had become Paddy’s task. He was stubborn, particularly when caring; she had her own memories of this, and her own pride in it.
‘Can I bring you anything?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t come.’
‘I could…’
‘Look after yourself,’ he said, then became embarrassed. ‘It’s not really my father any more. But he’s still my responsibility. How’s Max?’
They talked for a while about the latest Agatha had heard, which was nothing, really.
‘My father thought he was great,’ said Paddy. ‘It was good he was able to know him. I have to get back.’
They said goodbye without saying the word love – both of them knew that last time had been an extreme point, and so would the conversation after the death, but for now they would be a little moderate.
Afterwards, Agatha began to feel very glad that the last time she’d seen Paddy she had kissed him and told him what a good man he was. Even if her reason for doing this had been completely confused, it had – given what had happened since – been exactly what she would wish to have done. All she hoped was that Paddy hadn’t started to interpret it as it had been attempting, for her, to mean; that he had it as love rather than imminent departure.
During the day that followed, her mother phoned again and again, to ask what was going on – eventually Agatha lied, telling her she was about to leave for the hospital so that she could be with Paddy; that cut down on the calls but did not stop them completely. When Paddy phoned again, mid-afternoon, Agatha told him about the lie. He said he’d deal with her mother if she left messages wanting to speak to her. ‘My phone’s off, anyway – most of the time.’ Paddy explained, in return, that he’d called Henry and told him what the situation was. ‘He said if there’s anything…’ Agatha said she’d be fine but was glad she had an explanation of how May had found out – for she, too, had begun calling often, imploring Agatha to pick up, then leaving emotional messages.
Late in the afternoon, May came round, knocked and then shouted through the letterbox. Agatha had been making coffee in the kitchen so wasn’t embarrassingly in view when May walked past the front window. ‘Aggie,’ May called. ‘Come on, Aggie – it’s not good! You shouldn’t hide yourself away like this.’ Agatha hoped almost to the point of actual prayer that the next-door neighbours were out, wouldn’t hear this mad implied version of her. May slammed the letterbox a few times as hard and loudly as she could, shouted, ‘I’m really annoyed with you. You have our number. We want to help.’ Then, just in case, she wrote a short note and shoved it through the door. Agatha waited half an hour at the back of the kitchen; the note might be a trap for her shadow behind the glass. When eventually she dared the hall, she didn’t want whatever May had written to make her cry so picked the folded piece of paper up and stuck it one of the cookery books.
Paddy phoned again, that evening, to say that his father’s condition was unchanged. ‘So it’s another night in that lovely hotel,’ he said.
Agatha was worried he would have heard something about May’s attempted visit, but if he had he was tactful enough not to mention it.
After her full sleep of the night before, Agatha stayed up until three or four. She sat on the sofa, thinking. She tried to think about how she should think about her life, how judge it if she couldn’t escape from it or even take a step back, not abstractly or wankily (she thought this word), but as a practical way of deciding what to do with it next: leave Paddy or not leave Paddy; (she was reassured by the sound of a scrape – a rarity recently) have Paddy move out or move out herself; take Max or not take Max. How would it be, this new life of hers, without the features they had so constantly for the last years given it? It might, she was afraid, be a little like being alone in a house with nothing to do; her present was her possible future. Only of course, as she knew, it wasn’t. A split from Paddy would mean ground-floor flats in puke-ridden streets; distance between herself and Max would mean a different self, one capable of maintaining that distance indefinitely. Even as she kept her son off now, she knew it was a perversion: partly she was afraid if she had him back she would never let him escape the circumference of her arms – not even at night. Suffocation was possible, definitely, metaphorically and not.
Whilst she was going through all this her eyes were sometimes open, sometimes closed. Occasionally, the lights gave a flicker – or perhaps it was more that the room seemed to change, slightly. Agatha wasn’t at all able to perceive how. She knew how easy it would be for her to add seeing things to her probably-mad capacity for hearing them. But she didn’t just doubt her senses, she doubted her doubt of them – and, yes, now and again, she felt that there was a quick difference about the room. It was too quick, at least to begin with, for her to be able to tell what it was – which was why she’d firstly put it down to a flaky electricity supply. An hour or so after midnight, she lit a candle and turned off the overhead. The room still, occasionally, seemed to alter. It was unnerving, particularly as it did not coincide with the scrapes; these she still, very rarely, noticed – only one or two. The breathing was present, but not as a constant – sometimes there were long gaps between breaths, and when they did come they seemed slowed-down. No longer could she have mistaken them for wave-crashes. Agatha’s growing anxiety began to exhaust her, until eventually she gave in and took herself up to bed. Before she fell asleep she had time to notice that this room, too, once or twice, even in the dark, seemed to flicker with difference.
The next day was quiet, interrupted only by calls from Paddy, which she took, and messages from May, which she tried to ignore. Apart from the garden visits of cats, climbing the flowery appletree, and the ignored knocks of a meter man (she presumed), she was left quite alone. This made for practical problems: food, mainly. Everything fresh had already gone, there was a very little milk, almost no coffee, and basics such as rice and pasta were only enough for a tasteless meal or two more. From what was left in the cupboard, experimentally bought packet soups, stale biscuits, pickled onions, she improvised lunch. There was a large packet of porridge oats, and she had a bowl of them for dinner, milklessly glutinous. What she ate, though, wasn’t particularly interesting to her; during the day, it – whatever it had been before – had been getting worse. She had begun, in half-moments, when she wasn�
��t really occupying herself, was just present in the body but a couple of steps back from the threshold – she was beginning to catch glimpses; no idea what these were of, none at all: they replaced the flashing sense of the rooms changing: her eyes were getting better at catching these moments. Only very gradually, over the next few hours, did she begin to work out their rules. One of the later realisations was that it wasn’t an it but a they or even a him or a her. This had inevitably been preceded by a connection: the breathing and it; its breathing. The glimpses, though, to begin with, really were only that; things, forms, seen through a gap in the trees from a between-towns train. At first, when it was still an it and didn’t breathe, she perceived it as a cloud – and so this was the first of their rules she worked out: they floated. Also, when glimpse after glimpse added up to what, with some effort of synthesis, could be taken as an impression, she realised that they did not always float the same height off the floor: at times they seemed almost and in some flashes tantalizingly upon it, wavering a few fingerwidths above; at others, they were in the air by two or three feet. This perception led to another, glimpse-gained: that their shape changed in accordance with their distance off the floor. There was a very basic rule: the further up, the wider. From the start, Agatha had thought she was seeing heads in the shapes; this, she didn’t allow herself to trust: faces had always troubled her – she saw her father’s in fires, wallpaper patterns, leaves of trees, behind-eyelid shadows, sometimes she saw it in apparently complete blankness, the brown carpet of their flat, its whitewashed walls. But she realised after a while that it was in fact, though fact wasn’t exactly how it felt, heads and not faces that she saw. This fine distinction enabled her to approach belief: heads were more factual, less sentimental; she would have wanted faces not heads. The glimpses seemed to be without colour and even without light or dark; when she began to make them out, it was more as a weight become visible – as if the molecules of the air by sagging slightly had revealed some presence between or within them: what little was there wasn’t where it would have been had nothing been there. The heads, without (to begin with) faces, had a greater density than the rest of the glimpses – theirs was a darker weight. Though she doubted everything she was seeing and at times dismissed it with relief, she somehow felt the heads as more massively present and so doubted them less. Once she had determined the rule which related distance off the floor to width, she began to notice that the heads disposed themselves as they would have done on human bodies: when the body reclined, the head was at one end – perhaps slightly raised; when the body stood, the head topped it off. There was an in-between state, too, which she realised was the commonest, where the body seemed truncated, not at the length of either standing or lying. This was sitting, and in this position, once she had recognized it, the bodies were slightly easier to discern: she sensed the angles, shoulders and knees. She wanted to see hands, a hand – for some reason, over and above heads, or even faces, this would have been a confirmation of if not the humanity then the human form of the them, whatever they were. As gradually she worked out their rules, she began to get more and more from each glimpse: it felt, because of this, that the moments the glimpses were there were lengthening, although really she was increasingly aware of what she was looking for, what this time she needed to check. Another of their rules, if they could be called that, was that they weren’t at all fussy about where they appeared or when; they seemed to have no preference as to rooms, conditions of light, time of day. For Agatha went through a second and a third and a fourth night without Paddy, and endured also the days in between. The food had almost completely run out, even the porridge – which she now hated. There were tiny apples on the tree, but when she tried eating one it bitterly corrected her. And, in truth, she hardly noticed the hunger – and, if she did, it seemed a fitting accompaniment to all the other sorts of emptiness she was feeling. Throughout this long time, Agatha stood in the breakers of a rough sea of dread: mostly, only her ankles were cold-scalded; sometimes – a freak wave – her mouth and nose went under. In a way, she was glad at last to have something to ascribe the scrapes and breathing to; it was better thus than completely without cause, though perhaps no less mad. The breathing, however, before it altered, slowed, had seemed constant, characteristic, as if it came from one person always; the glimpses, although she knew them far less well, seemed more variable. She wasn’t completely sure they were always the same entity; she wasn’t, most importantly, sure whether the heads contained male thoughts or female. (The thought of their thoughts terrified her for several hours.) What reassured her most of all was that the glimpse-figures seemed to be completely unaware of her. Once or twice she tried stepping towards them, though the moment of their presence lasted long enough for her only to begin to move; they did not react, their heads did not lift. When this failed, Agatha tried saying boo (it helped to keep the sound comic – a scream would likely have affected her more than them) – this they ignored or were unable to hear. As far as she was able to tell, the figures lay, sat and stood completely separate from her – a different universe, at the very least. Something in this, after a while, was a disappointment to her; it meant they weren’t there for her – this was the vanity of her grief: of course the house was centred and dependent upon her, so why shouldn’t everything in it be, too? She had by now become accustomed to her earlier terrors; both the breathing and the scrapes were as sympathetic elements of the house as the floorboards which she knew to creak and the ceiling-corner spiders’ webs she had not bothered to dust away. Part of her believed that, with an act of will, she could make it all go back to what she had previously thought of as normal; another part that if she ever tried to exercise her will, the entire network of weird relations that had been established would evaporate – the house itself would cease to exist, and she would be left either buried beneath a pile of rubble, splinters and shards or standing on an oblong patch of brown earth between the neighbouring intact houses. The continued reappearance of the glimpse-forms, by resisting the destructive possibility of her will, became another of her terrible reassurances. And she began, perhaps partly as a result of this, to change her interpretation of them – after all, they were appearing to her and her alone. The absence of anyone else in the house wasn’t allowed to obstruct her particular logic – she had had, she was now becoming aware, slight glimpses even whilst Paddy had been around; he had never mentioned seeing anything unusual here – and the flaw in this, that she and he hadn’t been anywhere near confidentiality ever since they moved in, was also explained away: had Paddy been sufficiently unnerved, their estrangement would have ended – he would have spoken, maybe not deliberately or articulately, maybe it would have been a whimper or a yell, but he could not have suppressed such flashing and repeated fear. As she looked at them harder, whenever during the third and fourth hungry nights they appeared, another perception came upon Agatha: although the attention of the glimpse-person wasn’t concentrated directly upon her, it was upon something. There was not exactly an object but a part of them she could sometimes see which wasn’t a part of them; it had even less of a definite form than they did – was sensed as an area opposite in substance to what they were; buoyant to their weight. She made guesses as to what it was, a thing they carried and which held their gaze away from her – it was a mirror, a hole in space, a skull, a book. There was no reason, she knew, why their focal point should have a name she would have been able to guess or give. With annoyance, she was unable to dismiss the possibility it was some kind of crystal ball in which they tried to see the future. Falsely or not, Agatha began to suspect that their focus was, after all, upon her – and the more intensely and intimately for being indirect. It began to be an argument that the glimpsed never did look directly at her, or at anything else around them; she was being, she came to sense, ignored – ignored, though, only to be all the more intensely focused upon through the not-object. For several hours, the fourth night, she went down the path towards believing that what they had a
nd held was, in true fact, her soul – which was why she was unable to see it and also why she felt inspected and known within it. They became for this brief epoch of thought her definite guardians; in their hands (she now assumed hands for them) she was both held and beheld. Taking this as her truth, she found it more difficult, when they made their one or two next flash-visits, to see them from the point in the room where she was physically standing or sitting. Instead, she felt herself to be in their hands looking not up at their head, their face, which with its possible gain in insight was what she would have wanted, but out towards where she – Agatha – bodily was. This happened in instants, and she experienced it not as mirror or television but as a real being-outside-herself. And this, which might have been expected to terrify her most of all, horrify with ideas of madness again, was a timeslice of sensation that made her cry afterwards for long minutes out of transcendent relief: at last, she was away from what she was – she was held by someone else and held as something else – not daughter, wife, mother. It gave her the oddest following feeling, that she had all the release and guilt of having slept with someone other than Paddy without ever actually having done so. It was an instant of total unfaithfulness – not just to him but to herself as herself. The transformation of being loved for different reasons, in a different way – the new sense of existence that she imagined an affair might have given her – this came upon her all at once. And such an extraordinary moment could not but change her when she returned to Agatha, hardly having left. She wept hugely, with sobs like axe-blows – weeping for how much she loved Paddy and how estranged from her he must feel. Although she wished it, she knew she would never be able to deceive herself into thinking that the glimpsed were Paddy or Paddy-outside-himself. They, or he or she, cared for her and loved her, as she had felt, in a completely different way – and it was this otherness of affection from what she knew so much better as Paddy’s which made her mourn that so overwhelmingly. It was mourning, she realised – it, his love, had been allowed to die; she had not necessarily killed it but she had held it still so that it might cease to live, so that Paddy might help her put it to death. Yet what destroyed her most of all was the possibility that she was mistaken – that this love lived, and she had succeeded only in paralysing it, causing it to suffer, yes, and weaken and begin suffocating, but not finally to die. Paddy did not exist in a glimpse: it was his triumph and his tedium that he was always there. And, she realised, he was constant if not in his love – she had assisted in making that an impossibility – then in his attempt at love. Suddenly, she could not believe her own stupidity and ingratitude and lack of grace, and all towards him. In the next glimpse, which turned out to be the final, climactic one, she felt herself looking out from the caring hands at an Agatha who was as alone and guilty as she had ever been – a woman who had quite possibly succeeded in turning the best of everything into the worst. This devastated her. She panicked, phoned his hotel, only to have the man who answered refuse to put her through. Later, she realised this man had been perfectly reasonable – the time must have been around four in the morning, her voice would have sounded to him as an insane female warble of distress. He said he would pass on a message, and she, out of frustration, said no, not to say she had rung. She called Paddy’s mobile but he had turned it off for the night; she left no message. A minute later, she called Paddy’s mobile again and said over and over that she loved him – when she was cut off, she called back and said it again. She apologized for everything she had been and done, since. A while later, she called back and apologized for sounding so mad. She wanted to tell him to ignore how distressed she had been, she was better now, but she knew her best honesty had been in her first, uncontrolled message. Then she sat back to wait for his call and to worry her way towards a way of dealing with it. After an hour, the one between five and six, she became aware that she hadn’t during that long time had a single glimpse. She felt completely and deservedly abandoned.