Saving Agnes

by Rachel Cusk

  They had gone to the Science Museum once. Exhibition Road on a rainy Sunday afternoon evoked childhoods not spent there, a sort of displaced nostalgia for tea and cakes and nanny in the schoolroom. At times like these, wet leaves from Kensington Park clinging to her shoes like beggars’ hands, the smell of bonfires besieging her nostrils, Agnes felt the force of a cultural memory take hold of her that was not her own. They had had tea and cakes in the small East Anglian town where she had grown up, but they had come from Sainsbury’s in packages and had made her feel sick in a way she was sure the steaming scone of yore wouldn’t have. Such disappointments were the fault of the Victorians, she thought, looking at diminutive knickerbockers in the V & A. Her strange regressive longings were always firmly rooted in that age, while other historical daydreams were enacted via the persona of an adult male in doublet and hose.

  Some time later, John suggested they move on to Science and Technology. Although just across the road, this edifice of concrete and plate glass was a world apart. Wandering the pale-floored forecourt studded with sculptural confections of plastic and steel like invaders from another planet, Agnes felt somewhat alien herself. The room was packed with self-possessed children dressed in primary colours.

  ‘This is crap,’ said one small blond specimen, pressing buttons and twiddling knobs with expert indifference while lights flashed and vast plastic molecules spun. Agnes was relieved they had not visited Natural History, where similar lights flashed in ominous patterns of invasion over diagrams of prostrate female thighs and pubic jungles.

  ‘Agnes!’

  John was examining a dimly lit booth on the far side of the room. As she approached, she saw he was seated in front of a large pane of glass and he motioned with his hand for her to sit in the vacant chair on the other side. She sat down opposite him. In the dark glass she could see her own reflection.

  ‘Watch this,’ he said softly.

  Her own reflection suddenly melted, to be replaced by his face grinning at her through the glass.

  ‘How did you do that?’ she queried.

  ‘Light,’ he replied. ‘The button on your right adjusts the light.’

  He turned it again and her own face reappeared. It was odd to see them occupying the same space, their heads floating disembodied in and out of the dark, under and over each other like symbiotic beings, like split personalities.

  ‘Now watch this.’

  He loved to surprise her, to entertain her with his mastery. She would, he knew, never think to press the buttons herself. That was one of the reasons why he loved her. She let him show her things.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said.

  All at once, she saw there was something wrong with her face. The eyes weren’t hers. John began to laugh behind the glass. Her mouth seemed to be laughing with him. Her jaw suddenly appeared to have become unusually square.

  ‘Stop it!’

  Her mouth moved again. Part of her was still there, but altered, like the face of a long-lost relative. The other part was John. He was in her eyes, across her forehead, around her chin. He was sitting in her head, rubbing his hands together gleefully. He had somehow found the space between them and he had rented it out like an apartment.

  ‘You see?’ he said. ‘Do you see how wonderful this is? This is what our children would look like.’

  Chapter Eight

  WHEN she was younger Agnes had wanted to be a boy, a fact which, like a South African passport or an inherited income, she had since expended much energy in concealing lest it expel her from the warm embrace of her ideological family. Now the world of men seemed distant and barbaric, but Agnes was unnerved to find that sometimes, observing from her hill-top the shaking spears and strange customs of this rival tribe, she was besieged by sensations of longing and familiarity. In the face of such uncompromising anthropological perspectives in her own camp as Nina’s (who, when questioned on the problematic issue of cohabitation between the species, had replied: ‘Why would a panda suddenly go off and live with a giraffe?’), Agnes feared that, unable to conform to the specifications of either side, she would be deserted by both. The deep-seatedness of her anxiety was revealed to her once in a dream, when she had found herself in possession of a giant penis like an elephant’s trunk and was forced to bundle it up beneath her skirt like a dark and terrible secret and walk around in mortal fear of its discovery.

  Her early ejection from the masculine world was remembered not as a gradual drifting away on a soft cloud of burgeoning femininity, but rather as a hideous eruption of deformities accompanied by a simultaneous rejection from the society of her brother Tom and his friends. If in the latter case this shunning had been precipitated by hazy boyish visions of Agnes, laden with sanitary towels, slowing down their cycling trips and becoming a cumbersome camper, Agnes was never told of it. Early manifestations of more tangible changes, however, had been volubly noted and were still uncomfortably memorable. Once, while at the swimming pool, Agnes had executed a graceful dive and had emerged to see Tom’s face contorted not with congratulation but disgust.

  ‘Yuk!’ he cried. ‘You’ve got hair underneath your arms!’

  Much of what followed proceeded along similar lines, with subsequent developments being acknowledged only when they were found to be repulsive.

  ‘Time we bought you some deodorant,’ her mother would say, sniffing the air as Agnes embraced her on her return home from school.

  ‘Can’t you get her a bra?’ her father would inquire as Agnes lunged, T-shirted, over a tennis court.

  Agnes, who had long since started patrolling her body for acts of hormonal terrorism, had already requested funding for security devices and had been turned down on the grounds that she had not yet officially reached puberty. Knowing from those heavyweights at school who had graduated early from childhood that legitimacy could be attained at the cost of a little bloodshed, Agnes finally committed the felony of false menstruation; a transgression which, while considerably taxing her imagination, allowed her to jump the queue undetected without any of the disadvantages she had heard about in corridors and common-rooms. Her deception, however, carried with it its own punishment. As time wore on, fact did not appear to be catching up with fiction. For two years Agnes existed in a torment of guilt and anxiety. She toiled beneath the burden of a double conceit as she tried to find ways of disposing of the stockpile of monstrous surgical swabs which her mother, regular as clockwork, placed in discreet paper bags in her room. She grew confused by the hybrid growth of both the lie and the abnormality it concealed, and on one occasion even indulged her fantasy so far as to ask her mother is she might change to Tampax. Her justification may have been honest – they were, she reasoned, easier to get rid of – but it gained her little moral or material ground. Indeed, it seemed even to retard her cause, for her mother had become shocked and flustered at the suggestion and had begun to babble in the most distressing manner about penetration, which led to a long discussion concerning intimate details of what she and Daddy did together when they were on their own. Already fully informed and disgusted on this score, Agnes found her situation becoming more complex as she was expected to feign innocence on top of the worldliness she had long been forced to pretend.

  Her joy, then, when at the age of fifteen the indubitable proof of her femininity finally arrived, was intensely private and tinged with remorse. Even when daubing and stemming with the best of them, Agnes felt that she had not done it properly. The redness of her own blood, official though it was, could not begin to compensate for all she had suffered.

  As she grew older Agnes realised, somewhat to her dismay, that really she had little to complain about with respect to her childhood. While her parents had claimed from the start that this was the case, their concomitant conviction that Agnes’s adolescent dissatisfactions were nothing but the offspring of her melodramatic and rather lachrymose disposition was less justifiably held. The pain Agnes had felt within the tastefully papered walls of her family home was, sh
e now knew, partly the product of her ignorance of the injustices of which the larger world outside them was capable. Nina, for example, had been brought up in a mock-Tudor villa in East Sheen, where all her friends called her mother ‘Margo’. But the subtler dramas of country living, with its cruel provincial ways, its sniping observations and censorious unwritten laws which bound young aspiring souls like the feet of Japanese women, could, Agnes later found, compete with the most scarred of childhoods. At university she was surprised to discover that a background such as her own was almost de rigueur: the régimes of the middle classes, she learned, ranked side by side with those of small Central American countries in terms of the abuses they perpetrated. But bashing the bourgeoisie required a certain distance from them; and having always judged herself fortunate in possessing two kind parents, she was understandably reluctant, not to mention afraid, to orphan herself so precipitantly. As time wore on she was glad of her reticence, for during the ensuing three years most of those who had so scornfully kicked over the traces of their past were driven either by penury or maturity to uncover them again. By then, even Nina herself was calling her mother Margo.

  It was only later that Agnes came to suspect she might have deprived herself of a necessary kind of exorcism by declining to follow her peers through this rite of passage. Hers was a life of small hurts, she realised, rather than gross abuses; but nevertheless it began to disturb her that, even thus embarked as she now was upon her adult life, she could still be ambushed by pain at things which should have been long forgotten. Incidents from her youth would sometimes surface unbidden in her mind like creatures from a murky swamp, and she would relive them with a freshness unsullied by the passing of time.

  ‘You’re off-loading childhood guilt,’ said Merlin comfortingly. He had grown up in a women’s commune in Hampstead and had an easy grasp of this sort of vocabulary, presumably the residue of a childhood which had not required off-loading. ‘It’s perfectly natural.’

  Agnes, worked up by his kindness into a spirit of confession, told him about a time when, at the age of about twelve, she had persuaded her brother Tom to stage his own death beneath one of the highest windows of their house. She had covered him in tomato ketchup and left him lying in a flowerbed while she ran to get her mother, who had, for some reason which eluded her at the time, become completely hysterical and, having elicited a confession from the treacherous Tom, had chased Agnes around the house with an egg-flipper. Merlin’s expression was one of uncertainty.

  ‘That is weird,’ he said. Seeing the devastation on Agnes’s face, he added: ‘The bit about the egg-flipper, I mean.’

  John had loved that story, Agnes remembered. She had told him a lot of things she would never tell anyone else, things that lurked in the pit of her mind smothered in a furry mould of guilt. He had hoarded these rancid pieces of her past and would occasionally bring them out and gleefully examine them.

  ‘What did you think she would do?’ he had asked, eyes glinting with an enjoyment which bordered on malevolence. ‘Your mother, I mean. What did you think her reaction would be?’

  Agnes thought about it for a while. She saw her brother’s small body curled up amongst the hydrangeas, the ketchup lurid in the sun.

  ‘I thought she would think it was funny,’ she said.

  Chapter Nine

  AGNES and he met religiously twice a week, although Agnes was beginning to experience heretical feelings of frustration at the formality of their arrangement. The unerring symmetry of Wednesday and Saturday oppressed her like a dentist’s appointment, and was equally as far from the passionate spontaneity she longed for. He would drive her home with a kind of reined-in intensity, his face set, his beautiful hands veined and strangely articulate on the steering wheel; but if at first she had thought this exercise to be a prelude to other transports of delight, she soon learned not to expect them. Sometimes he would come in, locking the car and following her to her room wordless as a shadow. Other times he would keep the engine running, looking at her like a taxi driver awaiting his fare while she talked too much and too loud to cover her embarrassment. At these times she often wondered if she should be doing something – if there was something everyone else did at times like these to force the moment to a resolution – but he was silent and left her no clues. Sometimes she felt as if they were both wrapped in cellophane, their mouths formless as melted wax.

  They whiled away afternoons in art galleries or parks, evenings in bars and restaurants. Often he would arrive late, making her wait for an hour or more. At first she wondered if he was putting her devotion to the test and she sympathised with his uncertainty accordingly; but he always seemed mildly surprised to see her there waiting, as if they had met by coincidence. On Saturdays they would go back to her house – always her house; his, which she had never seen, was somewhere in south London. The next morning he would return there without delay, mysterious and alone like an alien to its planet. Later she would try to find evidence that he had been in her room, and was often surprised to discover she couldn’t even remember anything he had said. She thought about John frequently and realised she could recall almost every word he had ever spoken to her. The less conventional order in which they had done things – restaurants for breakfast, the park at night – sometimes interfaced in her mind with the current course of events like a shadow. She did not entertain such recollections in the spirit of comparison: they floated disembodied and glittering like stars above the wheel of her fortune, detached recollections of a thing met by chance, like a banknote found in a gutter.

  ‘I feel as if I’m in control of a relationship for the first time,’ she told Nina.

  Stay with me, she had said one night; a Wednesday night when he had come in but then seemed inclined to leave. Don’t leave me on my own. To her amazement he had stayed, as if he didn’t care what he did, and had slept beside her all night. John would never have done that. If John had wanted to leave Agnes could have slit her wrists and it wouldn’t have stopped him. She had felt almost uncomfortable with his obedience and had slept little that night, unable to enjoy a thing so devoid of the pleasure of his desire, so single-handedly orchestrated by herself. His presence felt like a loan rather than a gift.

  ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘it’s what men have been getting for years, isn’t it? Passivity, obedience, servitude.’

  ‘Right.’ Nina didn’t look so sure.

  ‘Well, maybe he’s the ideal feminist man, then.’

  It had come to the point where she almost felt like she was using him, for, try as she might to force upon him the gift of her affection, he did not seem to want it. She supposed they were having an affair, a tiny, delectable confection. The thought that she might love him, might try and live off his unnourishing presence, almost amounted to a social gaffe. It would be like falling in love with a kitchen appliance. She laughed nervously, thinking of something.

  ‘He’s a bimbo!’ she cried.

  Nina lit a cigarette and stared into the middle distance.

  The first time he had come back to her house they had sat on her bed reading the next day’s papers, bought in advance in Leicester Square. Wishing she could procure more immediate aspects of tomorrow’s news with such ease, Agnes feigned deep involvement with a leader on the Middle East crisis while trying to deal with a crisis of her own. Why wasn’t he doing anything? If he didn’t want to make use of the strategic location she had offered him, why was he here? She shifted on the bed portentously and yawned, but even with all her defences down he seemed unwilling to attack. Initiation had never been one of Agnes’s strong points, and its meaning for her was double-pronged. A rare moment of identification with the male sex, strangely unrelated to the envoy beside her, came upon her as she launched into a long and rambling monologue about how many things she had to do in the morning, followed by a clumsy sort of half-hug, and found it had not been the conflagratory spark to his tinder she had hoped for. He seemed willing enough to respond in kind, but his simple mirroring o
f her actions reminded her uncomfortably of an annoying game her brother Tom used to play when they were children.

  ‘Mum, he’s copying me!’ she would cry, running to find her mother.

  ‘Mum, he’s copying me!’ Tom would echo, running and laughing behind her.

  Eventually she threw caution to the winds, switching off the light and removing his clothing in a manner she wished had seemed less matter-of-fact. She simply could not see how else they would get out of the situation without severe shame to them both. As it was, all available embarrassment was at least under her control. Filled with guilt and self-disgust she pursued her course, until finally he seemed to get the right idea; and now that they were rolling around together quite happily she didn’t have the heart to mention contraception. Having seemingly forced him into it, it seemed impolite, not to mention ridiculous, then to fight him off on the grounds she didn’t want to get pregnant.

  ‘Why?’ said Nina the next morning, horrified by Agnes’s story. ‘Why? You don’t have to do it, you know. You can say no.’

  ‘He didn’t ask,’ replied Agnes shamefully. ‘I started it. I didn’t know what else to do.’

  ‘Well—’ Even Nina seemed stumped by this one. ‘Well, why didn’t you just ask him to leave? You’re mad,’ she concluded confidently, sighing and walking off in disgust.

  In fact, they never did get round to discussing contraception, for reasons which had made themselves apparent on that first night and which Agnes would not have disclosed to Nina even at the price of salvaging some self-respect. To her surprise and horror, while she had drawn an unforeseen amount of pleasure from their congress, he had seemed, in her limited understanding, to have none. When they made love, the first night, the last night, and all the nights in between, in all of those languid and sweaty exchanges on which Agnes swiftly developed a frightening and unrestrained dependence, he never came. At first she thought he had; like a thief in the night, as it were, quiet and unobserved. Later, however, with the space between her legs feeling strangely empty and dry, the inevitable convergence of logic and biology forced the truth upon her. He would keep going until she wanted him to stop and then he would turn over silently, everything in his demeanour discouraging concerned conversational sallies of the encounter-group variety, and would go to sleep.