by Toby Litt
This time, they rolled around for a while, play-fighting. Agatha had wanted play, Paddy was managing to respond – perhaps they were both aware of Max close by in his room and how he had already changed what they were prepared to do. For the moment, though, even as Agatha held Paddy down and gently bit his lower lip, then less gently, there was no abandonment, or only hints of the future possibility of it – but none of the hints could reveal how fardistant that future might be. They had lost any confidence they might once have had in the potentialities of this act: union was a there – not a word they either of them thought, but an area of concept towards which they felt they were meant to be heading: coming together. Agatha could not help thinking of a woman from her antenatal classes who had so wanted to avoid tearing that she rubbed wheatgerm below her vagina for all nine months of pregnancy, to soften it, make it more stretchable; and then, when the birth came, the split had gone upwards, ripping her clitoris completely in two. After this intrusion, Aggie’s head became full of graphic gynaecological illustrations of exactly what would soon be taking place and the possible consequences of that having taken place. Difficulty. Deformity. She might have to stop, which she really didn’t want to do – part of her was gleeful at returning to physical communication with the man who was her husband: he felt and smelled and even sounded good. Aggie became nervous, nauseous: she tried hard to forget about her body, what it had once been and what it now was; the wrecked, the repaired – forget it in one way, in others remember it.
When they lay together, Paddy always instantly forgot that he was so much taller, standing, than Aggie; she was and had always been a bigger, more dominant sexual presence than he – as a persona, more existent, confident in that existence. She had been, he knew, a great deal more sexually experienced than him, beginning their relationship. He had early on felt the usual male insecurities and she had used the usual words and means of tender reassurance. But it hadn’t merely been inexperience, it had been intensity of presence: Paddy had never been able fully to participate in his body – sports at school had been awful and even now running was a humiliation: his knees were besotted with one another, couldn’t pass without kissing. He had always known that whatever swiftness he possessed was mental. But now, Paddy revelled in being close to Aggie’s face, skin, hair. His old familiarities came back to him; he had, each instant, a thousand tiny recognitions and remembered above all, and this full-consciously, that he knew this woman well – better than anyone. It was never predictable where her pleasures were going to hide, but Paddy was confident now that he’d find them, just as he’d found them many so many times before. He was all for her – alive to her sensations, wishing them exquisite; crafting her experience, worried that it might be a wrong one.
They were turbulent, together; lips crushed against teeth; elbows found their way into ribs; his fingers snagged on knots in her days-uncombed hair – Ow! she said; sorry, he said; it’s okay, she said, just be careful. He knew that to say, I am being careful would turn sex into argument – sex as that wasn’t a bad thing, sometimes necessary, but now they very badly needed sex as agreement; agreement, at least, to have sex. But perhaps it was going to be both that and argument, anyway; the debate and conclusion their bodies were having and reaching was about time and timelessness – could they still look forward, after all that had happened? Could they remember their future? Close up and gentle, rough and fragrant, their faces caressed one another, they caressed one another’s faces – Paddy was stubbly, Aggie worried her skin might be too dry, papery. Their bodies were winning the argument, overcoming time; they were gently, stupidly, physically wise. Wisdom wasn’t necessary, but only to keep going and doing in the hope that the right would occur and the wrong be avoided or, if not, then only be momentary – and it wasn’t bad, the doing, it was fine, and then it got better. It was fuck and sex and yes it was good right now especially if, yes that was it, that was it, keep going, keep going, like that, just like that. Try not to think, thought Paddy. He was afraid of his clumsiness, all his possible mistakes – they would not do. It would not do; Aggie wanted to break away, to save them from some approaching disaster; but just then, Paddy came – wept within her – his eyes opening, grabbing, and she felt the full tenderness of his achieved vulnerability. Something comic in her had always wanted to slap him round the face, at this precise moment; she doubted he’d even really notice, or mind. She was glad to remember this impulse, it was a definite retrieval from the person she’d been – it reconnected. The feeling was a little like being coked; curiosity as to what was next took over from any code of behaviour. She remembered drugnights and felt a body-nostalgia to be back in the middle of one of them – sitting round in a circle of friends, talking shit; she had always felt cosier taking drugs like this, in private: then, if someone insisted, go out to a club (usually they just wanted to talk more shit – Paddy, now touching her, had been there for one of these evenings but had felt and looked and behaved like an incomer). Agatha, the racing driver of her own big-engined motormouth: neaaaow! – negotiating the hairpin bends of her childhood, zipping past the pile-ups of later life. From this, her audience would learn something; cocaine gave her this certainty – it made her a little schoolmarmish, prim – when coked, she liked to organize people – even get them to play organized games; truth games, of course. She also liked to be outraged and, on more than one occasion, violated. That had been before Paddy. She remembered going down the stairs into the cellar; how she had thought about sex with Paddy. That memory was enough – Aggie was surprised by her orgasm, mugged by it; she came, hugely, with a heave. And almost as soon as she did, she began to cry – the heavings of her chest continuing the same but now ending in sobs. It too had mugged her, this sorrow; she hadn’t spotted it, round the corner: it wanted things from her, possessions, griefs she had held precious and carried around with her. Paddy knew this, saw it as he looked across at her and felt better for seeing it – some release had been achieved, at least.
Afterwards, after she had gone to the loo, Aggie went down into the kitchen – what was there to eat? She was very hungry – she hadn’t felt this hungry since being pregnant. With delight, she found Paddy’s shopping bag. Through the ceiling she blew him a kiss. There was bread, butter, marmalade – to start with she would have some toast with butter and marmalade. She got a knife from the drawer and cut the white loaf into thick slices – a little thick for the toaster, but she shoved them in anyway. Too hungry to wait for them to do, she grabbed an apple, took a bite, then reached into the bag for some Brazil nuts. Boiled eggs, she then decided, would go very well with the toast. Unsalted butter, and Marmite instead of marmalade; soldiers to dip. Paddy, who was still in bed and had been expecting Aggie to rejoin him put on his dressing gown and came to find her: he had started again to think about his father, and this time he wanted to turn these thoughts into conversation. Aggie had already changed her mind about the boiled eggs and was now boiling some vinegared water in a pan to do them poached. After a few moments, when this seemed to be taking too long, she put a full kettle on to boil. The toast had started to burn but she didn’t notice until too late. She pulled the black oblongs out of the toaster, burning her fingertips – carried them across to the bin, dropped them. ‘Hello,’ said Paddy. ‘What’s going on here?’ It was half-past nine at night. ‘I’m hungry,’ said Agatha. As she said this, she was slicing some more bread for toast, if anything, thicker than before. Bacon would be just great – fried, not grilled. Do this properly. Aggie set the toaster, fetched a frying pan, put it on the fiercest gas ring so that the blue flames reached all the way up its sides. Paddy asked, ‘You’re having breakfast?’ ‘Egg and bacon,’ she said. She went over to the vegetable tray: ‘With grilled tomatoes – if you’d like some.’ (She had now decided to fry the eggs as well.) ‘No, thanks,’ said Paddy. He would have liked to give Agatha a proper kiss, but she was moving too fast, too erratically. He thought of their joke, when they saw Max, or any child, playing over-violently, be
coming fractious: T-minus fifteen and counting; T being Tears. This would come crashing, but it was good to see Agatha so energized – about food, though? She had fretted over her weight for months, since. The water was now boiling in the pan (the kettle, unnoticed, had clicked several moments before): Agatha added some salt and some more vinegar (she had changed her mind back to poached eggs, more healthy), then – unable to persuade Paddy – cracked in three eggs. The bacon, she put under the unpreheated grill, soon to be joined by the sliced tomatoes. In the meanwhile, she poured herself a glass of milk and after putting the bottle away drank it in one, got the bottle back out of the fridge and poured herself another one. Paddy tried not to smile at her milk moustache. She was making him forget his dead father. ‘Are you sure you don’t want anything?’ she asked, biting the corner off one of the even more burnt pieces of the second round of toast. Paddy wanted to join in but felt he would be being dishonest if he did and Aggie would sense this and hate him for it. He just wasn’t hungry. ‘I’m alright,’ he said. The tomatoes, halved, went under the grill, and Aggie buttered the toast – taking another couple of bites as she did so; after which she cut another slice of bread and put it in the toaster, to replace the one she had almost finished. ‘Come on, come on,’ she said, squinting at the slowly grilling bacon. Paddy watched. Agatha took a step back. ‘How long have the eggs been on?’ she asked. ‘About a minute and a half,’ he replied. Agatha looked at the buttered toast on her plate. ‘They’ll be done now, won’t they?’ Paddy didn’t want to be caught criticizing Agatha’s cooking. ‘Well…’ he said. She looked down into the saucepan, across the top of which a white foaming scum had formed. They had a piece of kitchen equipment especially designed for plucking poached eggs out of water – Agatha reached for it now, unhooking it from the rack, and dug into the foam: the egg rose out semi-translucent, undone, and then the yolk split and spilled onto the hob. Agatha shrieked in disappointment – and carried the remains of the egg across the kitchen, dripping yellow and translucent through her fingers all the way. She thumped the metal thing against the side of the sink, splatting what little was left of the egg down the plughole. Paddy did nothing. Agatha walked back over to the cooker, through the eggy mess on the floor, and immediately dug around in the saucepan for another egg. It, too, wasn’t done – gelatinous and sloppy. She got this one halfway to the plate before it slipped through one of the gaps in the spiral spoon and fell right down between the oven and the kitchen unit; it broke as it hit the floor, and yellow splatted out at Agatha’s toes. ‘Why aren’t they done yet?’ said Agatha, very petulant. Again Paddy held himself back from suggesting she leave the remaining egg a little longer. This time, Agatha picked the plate of toast up from the side and held it just over the edge of the saucepan. A smell of meaty burning was coming from somewhere. The third egg was lifted from the water and dropped immediately onto the toast – where it slopped around, still translucent and, even to Agatha, clearly inedible. She put the plate down on the hob, where it couldn’t sit straight, tipped slightly – sliding the egg off and down the other side of the oven. Crying now, but angrily, Agatha yanked the tray out from under the grill – too violently – some of the boiling fat that had been on top of the now part-charred bacon leapt onto her feet and she dropped the grill tray in shock. It clattered to the floor, spraying more hot oil on her ankles and spilling the tomato halves – still hard and uncooked – in all directions. In a final gesture of despair, Agatha pulled the plate of wet toast off the hob and onto her lap as she let herself slip onto the floor. And now it would be alright, Paddy judged, to say something: a moment before, and Agatha would have snapped at him to go away. He knelt down and put his arms around her; he decided not to speak, though. Aggie sobbed and asked him why everything always went wrong? He didn’t answer. He thought of carrying her through into the front room, but didn’t want to risk getting oil on their sofa. He lifted her up onto the sink, he was big enough, she light enough, and put her feet under the cold tap. Upstairs, Max started to wail as if in sympathetic distress.
CHAPTER 24
MAX did not wake up the next morning until almost half-nine; clearly, Agatha’s mother had made him fit in with her hours, and at least this made Agatha’s adjustment from night-wakefulness to day slightly less abrupt. Paddy was able to see him for half an hour, but then he had to get on the phone and make arrangements for the funeral, deal with his father’s solicitors, tell people. This was how it would be for the next two or three days.
After the first relief of having him back, Paddy realised how estranged he felt from his son: all the time he had put in, over the past two years, of evenings, weekends, of being a present father – and still Max would only be comforted, ultimately, by his mother. There were some terrible looks Max gave him : Who the fucking hell are you? Even the fucking seemed to be unmistakably in place. It would take months of redoubled effort; and Agatha’s paralleled efforts, which he could already see, and which he fully believed in and supported, would only make it harder for him. Perhaps it would be a good idea to take a fortnight off, spend it at home; it was still several weeks until the Easter holidays – perhaps by then, he thought at his worst moments, the damage would be irreparable; perhaps it already was. Paddy envied the nonchalance, the unanxiety of previous generations in their parenting. He was sure, on some levels, that this preoccupation with a child’s happiness – constant, perpetual – was decaying for both the child and the parents: it was, to steal an idea given by Agatha’s mother, a mouth perpetually full of sweets – that these were Max’s milkteeth did not matter, the taste was inculcated, the whole life was guiltily being set. One of the maxims of child-rearing that Agatha and he had always been agreed upon was that a child should, fairly early in its life, become aware that it was not the only thing in its parents’ lives – this was a main reason for their wanting a second. A knowledge of lack of centrality was something that seemed to have benefited the children of their exemplary friends. The better balanced among these were the ones with a mix of care and really-don’t-care. Parents had to be able to maintain the illusion at least that the child was independent of them, and that they were independent of it. This wasn’t easy; and the people Paddy could think of who had gone one way or the other, and the extremes of clinginess and destructiveness to which their children had swung in reaction, were a pretty grotesque crowd. One mother they knew had a three-year-old who refused to have his hair cut; she had to do it whilst he was asleep. Yet now, what was left but Max? He was on his way to being an only child, with all the attendant problems; this was something that they had never wanted, in fact had been explicitly, statedly, to each other and to others against – two or three was the number they had been aiming at.
They made the house safe. Paddy went out and bought three stair gates, something they’d never needed in their flat. He felt a sad pride as he screwed them one by one into place (this, at least, was something he could do – not that it was beyond the skill of Aggie) – at the bottom of the main stairs, the top, and the bottom of the attic stairs. This was as he’d envisaged – it made him feel adequately fatherly; it was a holy chore. Paddy knew Max was quite old to be developing a technique for the stairs; luckily, they were carpeted with thick, non-abrasive wool.
Max back in Agatha’s life brought with him love, shit, noise and a thousand distractions. She remembered why they had once called him the Monster. The weeks with his grandmother had not been well spent. Change, decline, had been inevitable, but it was no less devastating for that – its inevitability was its ultimate devastation. Max had regressed, and it would take Agatha a hard week even to get him to acknowledge the potty. Her mother preferred nappies; they made her feel in charge of the whole process. She was a demon changer and had always offered to do nappy duty whenever she came round. This, inevitably, was accompanied by a short speech on improvements in diaper design. She had become an aficionado of brands, and Max had been spoilt – getting used to the plumpest, most environmentally destructive ones. Whe
n her mother spoke on this subject, Agatha felt she could remember the safety pin sticking into her chubby infant thighs – what kind of memory was this? A wanted and needed one, confirming and opposing what her mother said. Max had become more babyish in other ways, too. His grandmother had, it seemed, talked to him, all the time, in goo-goo-goo language; he was burbling quite happily, every trace of undissolved words gone. There was a lot of recuperative work to be done, and Agatha became furious with her mother for having necessitated this. She hated the idea that Max, so young, had forgotten things. (Often in the past she’d had to prevent herself treating him like a project, a work project, with goals to be set, targets to be achieved, a defensible outcome.) He was far more excitable – Agatha blamed her mother’s sweet tooth – and more implacable when angry. Max, too, was far less distractable than he’d been before; his distractions required planning; for which there was no time – she being occupied, most of the time, with failing fully to distract him. Perhaps this was inevitable, she thought; perhaps it would have happened anyway, whatever had or hadn’t taken place outside him. But it gave her another set of guilts, these ones far more specific than those she had replaced.
Max made it feel a very different house: when he was awake, there were very few moments of pause. Aggie, the first full day, tried to get him to take his afternoon nap, to allow her to catch up, but he seemed quite out of the carefully inculcated habit.