by Toby Litt
And May said, ‘Yes – of course. We were at a –’
‘I don’t,’ said Agatha. She smiled sadly at her friend.
‘Do you see?’
May knew she had been left no way of answering and so left already thinking of her next, more successful visit. But the remark had given her a sense of true dangers, and her final glance was towards Max.
With May safely gone, Agatha decided to give Max his bath straight away – there was no point putting it off. She carried him upstairs, screaming, into the bathroom and turned both taps on full. She couldn’t yet tell whether this was routine or final – whether Max would soon be clean or not be. She began to try to undress him, which was difficult because he kept his elbows down and in, his knees touching. Another Agatha would have been able to flirt him out of his clothes; distractions would have been offered, a smooth flow of achieving talk. Now, it was resistance facing resistance, each with a clearer idea of what the other was about than what they were selfishly trying to do. Max wasn’t consciously surviving but was passionate in his delaying of the future; Agatha, resisting his resistance, wondered whether the way Max was behaving – his brave little worst – would decide matters.
By the time the bath was full enough, Max was wild-seeming, red-faced and naked. Agatha, however, let the taps flow some more and then some more. This in itself wasn’t an act but it could, if it so chose, become one. Max didn’t seem to be any more scared of the unusually deep water than he had been of the bathroom as a whole: his forebodings of the place, Agatha saw, were probably about to come true – which made her wonder what exactly they had been, and disappointed that, even if Max were to survive, she would never properly find out.
The water had almost reached the overflow, so she turned the taps off and, by reflex, stuck her fingers in to test the temperature. It was colder than tepid – the hot had run out; Max wouldn’t like it. And then she realised, quite horribly, that this might no longer matter: scald or shiver, his comfort was in the past – if.
She lifted Max into the water; he squealed as his feet touched the surface, then went quiet as the cold climbed his body. When he was fully in, he started squealing again – but this was no longer resistance, it was horrible pleading and Agatha wanted it to stop. Her son was a greater force than this – capable, if he wanted, of destroying the world. She was ashamed of how easily he had given in to her, to death if she was death. This weakness of his made her, for an instant, entirely despise him – and then she rebounded into compassion; not as if he was her child, as if he were anybody’s that she had been entrusted with bathing. But again she changed into hate: he should be more to her than just anybody’s – he should be sacred with life. She put her hand on the crown of his head, thinking at that moment that it had been the very first part of him to enter the world. Push him under or pull him out? She held herself there for longer than was in any way usual. Max would know – Max would sense something about to happen; it would be mad if he didn’t. The sense of freedom was hard to distinguish from the sense of all this already having happened. She wanted Max to convince her of the worth of living, and in himself, by being himself, he just couldn’t do that any more. This was so terrible, this one hopeless thought. Oh, she wanted Paddy to come through the front door and stop her stupid experiment – and this was exactly what happened. Now he was coming through the door, not the front door but the bathroom door, and she hadn’t heard him in the hall, or on the stairs. She had no time to pull Max from the cruelly cold bath, to calm him and normalize him. Now he was close beside her and now, together, they were lifting Max from the water, up in their arms, water going everywhere, not mattering. He knew – he must know. She helped him carry Max into their bedroom, where they wrapped him in one of their huge white towels. It was strange: Max wasn’t shivering or crying, he was laughing – and Paddy, perhaps, was magically turning the whole thing into a fun game. They weren’t tickling Max but he was laughing as if they were: laughing with a tensed stomach, laughing against. ‘You came back early,’ said Aggie. ‘Why?’ But Paddy didn’t answer because Paddy wasn’t there, and the hands which had saved Max seemed to have been hers alone.
CHAPTER 25
WHEN Paddy really came back, Aggie didn’t confess – not because she felt nothing had happened; she knew it had, and that it had been defining. But because she also knew, as certainly as she’d ever known anything, that it was conclusive. Max was saved; Max was safe. Her attitude to him had in a moment changed. With some guilt, she realised the sense of release she now felt was similar to that after her failed suicide attempts. They, looking back, had become cyclical, addictive. What happened with Max could only be a single occurrence: she had gone through it and now she was purged of it, permanently. One of the most important things was not to spend time doubting this. She had been changed both by what happened and what almost happened – most of all, by how close that almost had been. But in a nearly miraculous way, she felt, she had been changed back. Something inside her felt reset; what she had been so long lacking had become possible again: the sense of a start. There had nearly been an end – a really final one. With that danger gone, all was potential.
She welcomed Paddy home with restraint – euphoria would panic him, she knew. It was better, gently, to have the realisation come that there were things he need no longer worry about, or fear. Not only was Max safe, she was safe, too.
Despite being tired from the journey and emotionally exhausted by all the arrangements he’d had to make, Paddy was almost immediately aware that Aggie was better. She looked better, for a start – she looked as if health were not exactly hers but a thing that could be hers. There was a new clarity about her; not just her skin, her eyes. His insight didn’t go far enough to see this as a renewal, although he knew she’d got it back from somewhere. Right but wrong at the same time, he attributed the change to Max. It worried him he had had to be away himself for this to happen, but he was too generous not to be glad. ‘How are you?’ – he was careful to ask this before asking about Max, who he assumed was asleep upstairs.
‘I’m fine,’ Aggie said. Then she asked him about his trip. She found she was almost desperate to hear, not just to hear his news but to hear him speak – but she knew he wanted to go and see his son, so she took him by the hand and led him all the way to the crib.
On the stairs, Paddy thought they might be going to bed, and he was so tired, but the turn into Max’s room felt right as well as a relief. They stood for quite a while, silently looking.
Afterwards, they came downstairs and ate the food Aggie had made.
It was time for them to have the conversation. Neither of them had planned it, but it was happening in sync with both their thoughts: Aggie anxious it was coming too early, Paddy relieved it was happening at all.
‘We’ve had a rough time,’ Paddy said, not intending the start, and achieving it all the more efficiently.
‘Oh God,’ Aggie replied. They were now sitting at opposite ends of the sofa but facing in towards one another. On the floor were finished glasses of red wine – a quarter-full bottle; Max had been checked on and was safely asleep: nothing was there to restrain. ‘God-God-God, yes.’
‘Are you still thinking about Him – about God?’
‘Less and less.’
‘I suppose I should say “good”.’
‘I’ll say it for you. It’s just, now I have to live with all of everything – I can’t parcel any of it off.’
‘To put it in a box and address it.’ Aggie was mildly astonished Paddy had come this close to her imagery; then, all at once, she remembered how common this had once been for them – how coincidence was what they were. This had been one of their jokes: without consulting, they would both come back at the end of the day with bags of identical food – even when they’d been anticipating this possibility, and trying to buy something the other wouldn’t ever think of, something disgusting: curry pizza, tinned oysters.
‘That’s exactly how I always thought o
f it,’ she confessed, with a smile of deep encouragement. ‘Which is why I knew I was cheating.’
‘Have you given up on it?’
‘On God?’
‘On the box.’
‘You are my box – and don’t pretend you’re not, or that you don’t know it.’ The modulation into flirting didn’t completely surprise Paddy, as it would have done even a few hours before. ‘That’s not an easy job,’ he said.
‘But in return you get me as your box.’ On this, they each took a quick eye-journey inside the other’s head – couldn’t not.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Paddy, but still in hope. ‘That can’t be an easy job, either.’
‘You don’t use me enough,’ she said.
‘And you, the past few months, you’ve hardly used me at all.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I thought you were full.’
‘This is a bit silly,’ Paddy said. ‘Boxes.’
‘But they’re true: I thought I’d break you if I put any more in – split your sides.’
‘We’ve both been trying to protect the other…’
‘When they didn’t need it.’ Aggie managed to make this both a question and a conclusive statement. Paddy wasn’t prepared to seem sure. ‘Perhaps I did – it was so bad, so fucking awful.’
Aggie was glad Paddy had started to swear: it would make the rest of their talk freer – she could be more sloppy in what she said and hit her accuracies with greater sting.
‘Was it worse than now, your father?’
‘That’s different. I have to deal with the guilt of wanting that – and the fact that part of me is almost celebrating it. I knew my father, and I knew what he felt about it.’ Aggie was prepared to let Paddy speak at any length – the rest of the evening, if he wanted. ‘But how can you mourn something that hasn’t lived? You can’t, logically. You haven’t known it – and so you’re mourning a possibility, or you’re mourning all the possibilities it could have contained, which are infinite, as far as you can see them. That was why it was such a relief to know she had been a girl; because some, not 50 per cent, but some of those possibilities died. It’s very hard mourning an infinite being – and it’s very hard,’ he wanted to drop his level, one he’d never reached before, ‘to say these sorts of things. They seem to come out the wrong shape, as if I’m trying to make us into something special – and we both know, now, how many –’ He stopped.
‘They can’t speak like you,’ Aggie said. ‘You said that so well.’ She could cry, she knew, but it was delightful – part of the conversation, and to show him his effect. He didn’t move towards her; his instinct was right. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘it was like that for me, too. But also more specific. Not just that she was inside me, and I wanted to feel and so get to know her – I felt I did, and I’ll never know if I was right.’
‘Oh, that’s so sad,’ Paddy said, stating his heart.
‘I know.’
It could have ended there, the conversation; they were reconciled enough, at least for the time being. But Aggie still felt she had to say, ‘I hated you so much.’ Paddy had known but hadn’t expected this. He didn’t reply. ‘And it was impossible you didn’t hate me, too. I treated you despicably.’
He allowed himself, ‘No…’
‘But you didn’t seem worth treating with respect.’
‘That’s pretty harsh.’
‘I know – I’m sorry. You didn’t. I thought somehow you should have been able to intervene directly – to force me to feel differently. When you couldn’t, I hated you even more: you were weak. I needed you to do it for Max. I blamed you for the way I was treating him – which was unbelievable.’
‘Which,’ said Paddy, ‘was why I came close to hating you.’
‘It’s good to have him here.’
‘At last.’
‘If that’s the most you’re going to say.’
‘He has changed,’ Paddy said, ‘and I don’t think for the better. Whatever he is, it’s our fault, yours and mine; we have to cope.’
‘Coping’s not enough; we have to redeem.’
The truth of this was hardest for Paddy to accept, not its excessiveness – though it was far beyond the comfort of usual conversation.
‘I think I’ve been trying to do that from the start,’ he said, ‘right from when he was born.’
‘And only now we realise we didn’t need to.’
‘Not he was redeeming us?’
‘No. He didn’t care. And now we’re going to be corrupted by our own good motives – because we can’t not care, and he’s become too important. We don’t have to redeem for him, that again is too much. It’s for ourselves, and then it will be for him.’
‘Do we start by forgiving?’ he asked.
‘I suppose so. It’s obvious, but we’ll probably have to get used to that again – the shopping, normal days: I’ve been so perverse – not having him here when…’
‘It wouldn’t have been better. Not until now.’
‘We might have learnt something,’ she said.
‘Or broken it.’
‘He’s strong, as long as we don’t keep working at making him weak. We have to accept all the possibilities. Yes, he could die. So could we. We live with that but we live outside it, too. He lives outside it all the time, and we have to let him. I’m starting to think I can. It’s not exactly a trick, because I have to believe in it so deeply – both that he’s safe and that he’s unprotectable. His heart has to beat without my help. As much as I want to be inside him, checking it’s all working. And it’s the same with the rest.’
‘We won’t interfere with each other, you don’t think?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘The opposite. If we know, we can help – help not to, most of the time.’
‘You’ll be annoyed with me.’
‘I will, but not for long. I never am – not for more than half a year.’
He laughed at the acknowledged pain.
CHAPTER 26
A BRIEF discussion on the phone had made the whole funeral morning, in advance.
‘We can come round and pick you up,’ said May, ‘from your house – right from the front door. In the car.’
‘No,’ said Aggie. ‘We’ll walk over to you. We’d like to walk.’ She, changed, was aware Paddy was listening at her end, and that Henry at the other would very soon hear.
‘Are you sure?’ asked May. ‘We don’t mind. You don’t have to carry Max all that way.’
‘It isn’t far, is it?’ Aggie asked both Paddy and May.
‘No,’ said May. ‘Well…’ said Paddy.
‘We’ll be round in about an hour,’ Aggie said, definitely and definite in her wish to avoid pathos.
Half an hour later, the three of them were standing in the hall – although Paddy wasn’t sure he was ready, and Aggie’s doubts had begun before she said goodbye to May. About other things, she was certain. Paddy must know – Paddy must be told if he did not know already: about what had happened, and how she had come to explain it to herself; about the house, the breathing, the scrapes, the object. This was necessary, both for their future together and for its basis in a past during part of which she had been so separate from him. Oversimplification was a pleasure, now, as well as a danger; true complexity would be one of her ambitions, telling. She thought he did know – must know something. When they got back from the funeral, when Max was asleep, when the others had gone, when the anticipated moment arrived – as she relied upon it doing, with the house’s help – they would talk, again. But this time, she would try her best to exhaust the truth. If a whole night were necessary, Paddy would listen a whole night; listen, in a way, just as she had listened. This, Aggie knew; in this, she found the whole of her security – Paddy had always been patient.
‘Ready?’ he asked. Max was excited at the prospect of outside. He made familiar noises and bounced in a very Maxlike way.
‘I think so,’ said Aggie, trying to strengthen herself by admitting vulnerability.
/> ‘You don’t have to,’ Paddy said, and he saw how dutiful and pitiful he was; this didn’t displease him.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I do.’ She nodded, and he understood – going and opening the door for her.
She picked up Max and took Paddy’s hand, although he would have to let go when he locked the house behind them.
Aggie stepped forwards onto the doorstep, which she was aware had always been there as simply as this, and would always have been as physically simple to cross. She sensed Paddy’s patience behind her – how he would be prepared to arrive late at the funeral, perhaps even miss it, if that was what was necessary to bring her back to life. Paddy sensed what Aggie must be feeling; it was a similar panic to his the first time he took newborn Max outside. Then, he had begun to understand the instinct behind right-wing thought: all of this outsideness needed to be repressed – it was unspeakable it should be allowed to continue, wildly; discipline was required. Make it safe; make it completely incapable of harming the important things, most important of which was Max; make it Switzerland. He didn’t want to infantilize Aggie, but he now felt a similar protectiveness towards her. Why did everything have to be as it was? Why did it have to be so aggressive? The world, the moment they were out of the front door, would be upon them – it would be all they could do to hold together. Aggie was very aware of the sky. She had lived for what seemed like so long with ceilings instead; apart from those brief and relatively recent times in the garden with Max, and even then they had been canopied by the branches of the appletree. The street, she knew, was certainly going to be bizarre to her – bizarrely exposed (not just her to it but it to her). She stood there on the threshold, feeling how much space would soon be around her, and also how the surfaces there – dirty, gritty, detailed – would press in upon her eyes. But Paddy remembered what he had realised, the first time out with Max: all this terror on his son’s behalf was his own shame, nothing to do with Max-in-the-world. Happily, happily, the little boy would lick back at the tongues of strange dogs, run to embrace oncoming cars, become deranged with excitement when a shop window showed him himself and his father, in the world. And Aggie, too, felt for the first in a long time, exhilarated by the possible dangers of the world, and of her dangerous presence in it. The world would remain with her, would not protect her, might harm her, would harm her, but she would express herself – from now on – by joyous resistance and if not that by stubborn participation.