by Rachel Cusk
He did not acknowledge her apology and she turned away, her gaze loosely focused on her concave reflection in the door. She looked dwarfish and squat. Walking down the street sometimes, she would catch sight of herself in a shop window and her heart would plummet and rise with mingled horror and love. Beneath the tumultuous act of self-recognition, however, she never stopped experiencing a sense of relief that she was there at all. Merlin had once told her that if she looked in a mirror whilst travelling at a high enough speed her reflection would disappear; but at present the events in her life had not achieved the velocity required even to resemble progress.
Agnes shifted nervously. The motion of the train had again pressed her against the man behind. The hard edge of his briefcase was knocking against the back of her thighs. She shifted again, this time more ostentatiously to show her irritation. The briefcase lodged itself more firmly, right underneath her buttocks. She glanced nervously at the other passengers and then turned round in an attempt to catch his eye, but in the vice of bodies clamped around them she could not do so without further aggravating her plight. A sudden shift in pressure, however, allowed her room to look down at the offending briefcase. She went rigid with horror. No! It couldn’t be! She averted her eyes and stared fixedly ahead. Blood burned in her cheeks. It couldn’t be! Looking around again, this time with stiff deliberation, she saw that it was true. There was no briefcase: just a monstrous bulge of blue pinstripe, an accusatory cloth-covered protuberance proclaiming her most secret and shameful places.
With as violent a thrust of her body as their confinement would allow, Agnes attempted to escape her tormentor without alerting those in the carriage to the nature of his affront. Her heart was pounding. She had heard of such things before; of girls emerging from crowded trains, the backs of their legs splattered with semen. She felt quite faint with nausea. In the carriage, it was impossible to move. The rocking train seemed lewdly to be exacerbating the situation. She wondered if she should broadcast her violation to those around her; but although she knew her only alternative was to suffer in silence, the compromise which such a declaration to a carriage full of strangers would force upon her seemed at that moment worse than that which she was currently enduring. She thought of what Nina would say if ever she discovered that Agnes had aided the enemy, had become the very handmaiden of Satan himself, by passing over an opportunity to fell a Goliath by exposing him in flagrant indelicacy. This proved a more effective spur, and, impelled by fear of such an accusation, she managed to twist her body round so that she was looking him in the face.
Surprisingly, his features were exhibiting a terror which uncannily resembled her own. He was sweating profusely and began to shake. Really, it was hard to tell who was threatening whom. She looked down at his trousers and saw they had regained their proper shape. His eyes followed hers shamefully. She opened her mouth, about to speak. There, she wanted to say. You have put down your weapon. Like this, we have no quarrel with each other. The train drew into a station and in the sudden bustle she was swept away from him. He put his hands in his pockets and disembarked without looking back at her.
The carriage filled up again with people. Looking around, Agnes felt suddenly angered by their slavish submission to silence: strangers passing one another by, while in their minds a thousand babbling mouths spoke of sadness, of worry, of loneliness. Why couldn’t they all just sit down and talk about it? Why couldn’t she lean over, touch the arm of a stranger, ask them what they thought of love? If they could not do it here, deep beneath the city, circulating like plasma around this strange subterrane – if they could not talk of the heart here in the heart – then where?
Run to ground by the trains, Agnes took shelter on the buses. The overground journey to Finchley Central was far more laborious, entailing at least three changes of vehicle, but it seemed a fair exchange for the less pressurised form of human commerce it afforded.
Like most children Agnes had once thought transport the central focus of any outing, regarding A and B as two unrelated points of departure and arrival between which, however, was to be found the real fun. In those days cars had seemed an inferior means of conveyance; like Christmas, they cordoned off the family into a compression chamber of solitude, which isolation seemed to render its members fractious and ill-behaved. Moreover, they emphasised the tiresome power structures which already characterised the hierarchy of their home.
‘Don’t distract your father!’ their mother would call from the realm of adult responsibility in the front seat, with its flashing control panel and ominous wheel.
‘Mum, he’s hurting me!’ Agnes would yell from the hotbed of insurrection behind, as they were carried off against their will.
Trains had seemed then to afford a greater degree of equality and, as they proffered their tickets to the inspector with unwarranted nervousness, to bind them together in the face of uniformed authority as if they were attempting an illegal border crossing or smuggling contraband. The presence of strangers, too, ensured their enjoyment of one another’s company in a manner somewhat foreign to their own hearth.
‘Really, darling?’ said their mother as Agnes entertained her with a thoughtful monologue on why Jessica-at-school’s birthday party had been so superior to her own, while their father guffawed benevolently at a story of Tom’s involving a dead rat he had put in another boy’s desk.
‘Kids,’ they would say, shrugging hilariously at their companions in the carriage.
Now Agnes disdained the trains, and found she enjoyed the bustle of the roadside, despite their congested and tortuous progress along it. ‘Hold on tight!’ warned the conductor as the open-ended 19 careered around a corner and Agnes did so, warmed by the thought that this man, who didn’t even know her, nevertheless did not want to see her flung through the cavity in the vehicle’s side and mauled between tyre and tarmac.
She examined her fellow passengers in this spirit of benevolence and felt cheered by their differences. Women in saris and monkish robes, through which their long chattering hands protruded with the jangle of bracelets and the flash of rings, sat beside truculent boys with indolent eyes and fluffy nether lips, thighs splayed and arms folded like adolescent pashas in garish track-suits. In front of her, two vast West Indian women were packed into one narrow seat, merging and spreading into the aisle beyond like a mountain range. Agnes looked at the palm trees and orange groves depicted in the fabric of their ebullient head-dresses and wondered, guiltily, at their wilful disenfranchisement from such splendour. Picking out from the crowd a few of her fellow-natives, the women with tired faces and straggling perms, the men with ill-fitting suits and threadbare heads, shoes the grey of shopping malls, pigeon-chested and pot-bellied, her wonder doubled. Could they not go at least? she thought. Could they not sample for a while the lapping oceans and languorous palms, the chirping forests and somnambulant lakes and sweetly choiring minarets? Whatever deprivation they found there could be no worse than that of this concrete island with its poisonous drizzle, its sewer-lakes, its banshee road-drills and filthy streets. Could they not get together and solve each other’s problems?
Agnes seemed to hear, as if from around her, dissenting voices which appeared to take exception to her vast cultural exchange programme. Condescending! they cried. Racist! Her thoughts short-circuited with self-doubt. It was so hard sometimes, having to think for oneself. A loud blare of horns from the surrounding traffic seemed to chorus their disapproval. A stream of cars backed up and ground to a halt on the road ahead. She got off the bus and walked.
Chapter Twelve
ON Monday morning Greta arrived later than usual at the office. Agnes was sitting alone proof-reading the details of the embassy of St Martin and the Grenadines, and had been transported in spirit if not in body to a palm-fringed beach on which she and her lover sat while a warm ocean fawned at their feet like an affectionate cat.
‘Is there anyone in there?’ whispered Greta volubly, while occluding herself behind the doorframe.
‘The coast is clear,’ said Agnes.
‘Good.’ Greta bounded with more agility than grace on to Agnes’s desk. She produced a paper bag from which she extracted a cake that looked like a road accident. ‘Sorry to leave you in it. I got tied up.’
Agnes leaned back in her chair and looked at Greta’s shoes, which were high-heeled and festooned with a bondage of straps and laces.
‘I met this guy on my way here,’ continued Greta between bites. ‘I was going to be on time for once, too.’ She yawned, displaying mashed vistas of jam and cream. ‘We met in the tube station, so I knew it was destiny. You can’t ignore things like that. Anyway, I showed him my ticket and we just sort of got talking. He was really nice.’
‘Why did you show him your ticket?’ Agnes wondered if she had missed something. It was a suspicion she often entertained about herself.
‘What? Oh, I get you. He works for them, you know, the tube people. He’s the guy you show your ticket to. He was really nice,’ she repeated, shaking her head and smiling. ‘We had a good time together.’
‘So—’ Agnes hesitated before requesting further elucidation. Greta’s details tended to obscure rather than clarify. ‘So what exactly did you do?’ she asked finally, overcome by curiosity.
‘We went for a ride.’
‘You mean you just went off with him in his car? But you don’t know anything about him! He could be anybody!’
‘I told you,’ said Greta calmly. ‘He works on the tube. He had one of those neat tickets where you can go anywhere you want without paying. So we just rode the trains together for a while.’
‘How far did you go?’ asked Agnes, with some anxiety.
‘Northwood.’
‘Do you want some coffee?’
‘Sure.’ Greta smiled. ‘That would be nice.’
Making coffee, Anges grew increasingly troubled. The mysteries of social intercourse had never seemed to elude her so completely. Beside Greta’s chance meetings, her own encounters seemed both laboured and conservative. Did not everyone ponder, observe and ruminate before electing a mate? Or perhaps she was blind to it; perhaps the world around her crackled with fusion and fission, while she blundered with every step through electric fields of sexual activity, secret currents of attraction! How else had they come about, the infinite pairings on which the world had depended through all its ages? Had it been left to her, she thought glumly, Adam and Eve would even now remain absorbed in the round of art galleries and cinema trips which her romantic protocol judged the fit testing ground for love.
Within a very few minutes, however, her mind had found reassurance in the further contemplation of Greta’s predicament. What matter was there for envy, after all, in the attentions of those not encountered by recommendation or reference? She had been right to disapprove Agnes did not condone social separatism, but nor did she attempt to subvert it. While largely ignorant of those details which distinguished one echelon from another, she was growing increasingly expert in the machinations of that underworld which underpinned them all. The subtle propinquity of this realm, mingling as it did with the city’s pattern, was almost disarming. One could be blind to its close mystery, and yet be ambushed by its missionaries on every corner. Their individual plights concealed their numbers. Agnes pitied their predicament but remained disabused of their innocence. They had nothing to lose, and therefore would stop at nothing. She must take it upon herself to salvage Greta from the clutches of despots and dissemblers. She must set her on a course where malicious chance could not intervene. She would invite her to a dinner party.
‘What are you doing on Saturday?’ she said as she went back into the office.
‘Nothing,’ Greta replied. ‘Unless you can make me a better offer.’
The first time Agnes kissed a boy she was thirteen. There had probably been other kisses before then, pecks on the cheek and such, little moth-like eruptions of schoolroom fantasies; but her first proper kiss occurred when she was invited to a party at a large house owned by a local farmer, where the surrounding gentry landed, bomb-like, for frequent such festivities, with explosive consequences.
Agnes, understandably nervous in the face of such a mountainous social opportunity, deliberated long and hard over the choice of the outfit in which she would most expeditiously scale its heights. In the end, fear had made her suggestible; and she had worn an old dress of her mother’s, a boned black affair with breastplates like ice-cream cones which projected an unsubstantiated pertness, and which, she was assured, had smoothed many a path to social congress in its time. Once arrived, however, Agnes speedily understood that that time had long since passed. She grew uncomfortable as her attire drew an excess of wry, comical glances, and a noticeable deficiency of admiring ones. Some of the boys, wearing their fathers’ dinner jackets, seemed equally uncomfortable; but it was the others, the ones with the arrogant, laughing mouths, the tall ones who tossed their lank hair out of their eyes and smoked cigarettes, whom Agnes watched. Her heart sank as groups of girls with long curly hair and cloud-like dresses came into the room, laughing and smoking cigarettes with mouths which were more delicate but just as arrogant.
Made polite by desperation, she had allowed herself to become engaged in conversation with a tall, spotty boy who believed her when she lied about her age. He was with a friend, one of those boys whom Agnes had so liked the look of, and who seemed to be looking at her. Agnes ignored the spotty boy and instead giggled and jabbered at his friend. The friend stared at her, his hands in his pockets.
‘That dress makes you look fat,’ he said finally, sauntering off.
Left with the tall spotty one, Agnes allowed herself to be drawn outside and comforted. She recoiled at the feeling of his tongue in her mouth. It seemed rather unhygienic. Their teeth knocked together as they kissed.
‘Don’t,’ she said, as his hand crept under her skirt and attempted to inveigle itself into her knickers.
Her father, come to collect her at midnight, had caught them thus intertwined and had observed a tense silence on the way home. Agnes had spent the next few days in an orgy of alternating guilt and self-congratulation, and had worn poloneck sweaters for two weeks in the height of summer to hide the lovebite which swelled painful as a boil on her neck.
‘You know guys?’ said Greta.
‘I suppose so,’ Agnes replied.
‘Well, they say dumb things, right? Like this friend of mine, okay, her boyfriend says to her that she’s got a really big butt. All the time, like she really wants to talk about it, right? I mean, change the fucking record.’
‘And does she?’
‘Does she what?’
‘Have a big – you know.’
Greta leaned back in her chair and thought about it.
‘I guess,’ she said.
Once, in a tone of mild surprise, her lover had told her that her shoulders were actually quite tiny, as if someone had just accused them of the opposite. Surprised by his attention to her detail, she had allowed herself to be warmed and flattered by his compliment; if compliment it was. Over the next few days, catching sight of her reflection with a renewed increase of zeal, she was surprised to notice that her shoulders, far from receding, appeared to be growing larger with every glance. At first she assumed that their bulkiness was directly attributable to her own magnified interest in them; but eventually, trying on without success one of the close-fitting jackets which she now plucked eagerly from every shop rail she passed, she was forced to admit a more pedestrian and disturbing truth. Her shoulders were not tiny; in fact, by some standards, they could be judged quite broad. His comment, which for some time had been casting its bright and attentive beam around her troubled mind, became all at once rather menacing. It circled her like the fin of a shark, hinting at a black and malicious force beneath.
‘What really gets me,’ Greta concluded, ‘is that it’s kind of like they think they’re trying to get on our level. Like they’re being kind of friendly, you know? I mean, they
think we really think about that stuff.’
Agnes’s dinner party on Saturday was an unremitting failure. Her Brylcreamed and blazered guests, selected as if from a line-up for their suitability as companions for Greta, had seemed to detect something untoward in their gathering and had remained diffident and ill-at-ease. Agnes had spent the early part of the evening luring their interest with Greta’s forthcoming attractions; but as the night wore on, it became apparent that Greta would have to be taken off the bill of fare.
‘I can’t believe she didn’t come!’ fumed Agnes as she and Nina were clearing up. ‘After all the trouble I went to – all the effort I made!’ She clattered plates noisily in the sink. ‘It was for her. I wanted her to meet nice people. Is there anything wrong with that? I just wanted her make some friends.’
‘She’d have had more chance at a bloody outpatients’ Christmas party,’ said Nina. ‘I don’t know where you found that bunch of bank clerks.’
‘They weren’t that bad! Anyway, it doesn’t make it right. She should at least have phoned to make an excuse. Maybe – maybe something’s happened to her. Maybe she’s been hurt.’
Nina cackled. ‘Grievous bodily harm has never looked so good,’ she said.
‘How can you say that?’ cried Agnes furiously.
‘Okay, but it’s still a bit suspect. It’s like you’re trying to control her.’ Nina began putting things away. ‘You’re not her mother, you know. You can’t relive things through her. You just have to get on with your life and let other people get on with theirs.’
A loud knock on the door just then inflamed Agnes’s heart with hope at her own defence. Nina ran to open it. It was Jack.
‘How’s it going?’ he said as Nina hustled him past the kitchen and into her room. A few minutes later, Agnes heard muffled whispers and giggles escaping from beneath the door. She continued clearing up in a desultory way and then decided to phone her lover. She let it ring for several minutes but there was no answer. She wondered where he was.