Saving Agnes

by Rachel Cusk

  She left the building and headed for the tube station. As if sensing her new-found command, a train came immediately. She boarded it and the crowds seemed to part like water before her, affording her a choice of seats. As the train was set in motion, Agnes felt the very tracks reverberating with her intent. Her face reflected in the window opposite looked severe but heroic, and the other passengers maintained a respectful distance. She drew herself up, ruminating upon the defence a sense of self-importance could provide against the importunate presence of the general public.

  As the train rattled downhill towards Camden, however, the mysterious nature of her crusade began to nudge against her consciousness. What manner of thing could it be that had laid Greta, normally blithe and buoyant in adversity, so low? Perhaps she had received bad news from Mrs Sankowitz, her voice leaking through the interference from Saskatchewan to relay the particulars of death or destitution. Or something closer to home, a burglary or even an attempt upon her life. Perhaps she was unwell. Agnes disembarked at Camden with less composure than she had set out. What help was she, who knew so little of the world? What comfort could she offer, what unconventional wisdom, that she did not herself require? She trudged disconsolately over the lock and turned into Greta’s road. Perhaps, worst of all, Greta was merely suffering from world-weariness and angst; and for that, Agnes knew, there was no cure.

  She knocked softly at Greta’s door, half-hoping not to be heard. Within seconds, however, the door flew open and Greta was before her. Her eyes were red and her cheeks puffy, but otherwise she seemed unharmed. She stood back to allow Agnes through.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said when they were in the sitting-room. Before Agnes could take steps to defend herself, she added: ‘I’ve got tea, decaff, or juice.’

  ‘What kind of juice?’ said Agnes, playing for time.

  ‘Mango.’

  ‘I’ll take tea.’

  The preliminaries over with, they sat down in two facing armchairs. Greta’s flat was small but light. Being on the ground floor, Agnes could observe passers-by on the pavement outside. That combined with the comfort of her chair and the steaming cup of tea could have served to make the ensuing silence quite pleasant, had Agnes not found herself becoming rather annoyed. It was her job to comfort and reassure, but she could surely not begin it until Greta had completed her own task of confessing, weeping even, and most importantly requiring her assistance. She began thinking about the more straightforward work she had left behind at the office.

  ‘You’d better go,’ said Greta. ‘I’m sure you’re busy.’

  ‘Not at all,’ replied Agnes politely. ‘How are you, anyway?’

  ‘Fine, fine,’ mused Greta vaguely. ‘The proofs are due back tomorrow and since I didn’t show up there must be heaps to do.’

  ‘Jean’s taking care of it,’ said Agnes, abandoning her only means of escape, ‘It’s almost finished, anyway. What’s wrong with you, actually?’

  Greta gazed at her. She seemed to have no intention of replying. Agnes found something quite unsettling in her bearing, as if she had left her body to go through the motions while her mind hid somewhere dark and quiet.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about my father,’ Greta volunteered. ‘Normally I don’t think about him, but today he’s been on my mind.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I really hate him, you know.’

  Interesting though this was, Agnes could not help but wonder nervously where it was all leading.

  ‘Why?’ she said, hoping for something specific. ‘What makes you hate him?’

  Greta gave an explosive snort of laughter.

  ‘Well, what particularly?’ Agnes persevered. ‘I mean, why has he been on your mind?’

  ‘Well, I was thinking about the last time he spanked me, actually,’ Greta replied. ‘He pulled down my pants, you know, and did it with his bare hand.’

  ‘How old were you?’ said Agnes. She couldn’t think of what else to say.

  ‘About sixteen. What a sleaze, huh?’ Greta folded her arms over her chest. ‘Not that it was anything unusual. It was just kind of part of the scenery in our house. He used to beat all us girls, and my brother too until he got too big to hit. The first time I remember him doing it was when my parents came back from this trip to Toronto. My dad used to go there sometimes for work and Mom would go to shop. Anyhow, they left the others in charge which was pretty dumb, seeing as they were into some weird stuff in those days. When my folks were away they could get pretty wild.’

  ‘How old were you?’ said Agnes. It sounded even less interesting second time around.

  ‘About six, I guess. What they used to do was, they would smoke a lot of pot and then they would make me smoke some. Then they used to dress me up in funny clothes, like my sisters’ lingerie, you know, suspender belts and things. Then they would put this big fat joint in my mouth and take pictures of me. Like that. Weird. Anyway, I remember my dad coming in the room and everyone stood up because they were so surprised. They didn’t hear the car or anything. I was kind of lying on this sofa in this dumb underwear and I couldn’t get up because I was so stoned, and he just stared at me, like stared without saying anything. Then he threw the others out and he came over to me and spanked me. You little tart, he said. Thwack.’ Agnes flinched. ‘That’s what he called me, a little tart. I was, like, six!’

  Agnes sat in silence. She wished she had never asked Greta about her father. She was unequal to such revelations. There had been a time, a while ago, when she had felt embarrassed by Greta’s candour and somehow superior to it. Now, however, she felt embarrassed by her own inadequacy. Greta had shown her a secret wound, and Agnes had merely driven slowly by like a prurient motorist past a pile-up. She remembered the first night her lover had come back to her house, when they had sat on the bed exchanging pleasantries while the unspoken thrashed and flailed between them. She wondered when exactly in her life she had ceased to act, had ceased to be effective. Every time she came to the brink of another person, their borders lapping, she would draw back, afraid to jump across.

  ‘Has something happened?’ she said then, rather stiffly.

  Greta nodded. Tears began to roll down her cheeks.

  ‘I was raped!’ she cried, shaking her head. ‘I – he raped me!’

  ‘Who?’ said Agnes, horrified. ‘Your father?’

  ‘What? No, not him. That guy, the one – the guy I met on the tube. London Transport.’

  She began to sob uncontrollably. Agnes got out of her chair and knelt awkwardly beside her.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she said. This was a line borrowed from innumerable television dramas which Agnes had hoped to pass off as her own.

  ‘Not really,’ gasped Greta, her chest heaving.

  Agnes regarded her in agony of uncertainty. The television dramas had never dealt with rebuffal. She put a tentative arm around her, and felt Greta sag heavily against it.

  ‘He came here last night,’ she said thickly. ‘He said he wanted to talk so I let him in. I let him in!’ she cried, turning her shiny face incredulously to Agnes. ‘And he wouldn’t leave, so I said I was going to call the police and then he just kind of came up behind me. And there was nothing I could do. Nothing! He was really strong, you know? I didn’t know people were that strong. I just – I just screamed and screamed.’ A strangled laugh escaped from her throat. ‘And then I hit him with that hat-stand over there. I guess I must have drawn blood. And then he left.’

  Agnes felt Greta’s body shake, and then realised that she herself was shaking. She felt sick to her stomach. Her heart felt strangely as if it were actually bleeding. She also felt something else, something rather like anger or disappointment; a blind, enraged surge of bitterness that the world should turn out to be so cruel and inferior a place, when all they had ever done was believe in its authority.

  Down at the police station, Greta sat on a bench while Agnes attempted to attract the attention of one of the officials on duty. The station was b
leak and neon-lit, and the air was heavy with misdemeanour. A man with wild nest of grey hair was striding up and down the waiting area, ranting at those who entered.

  ‘It’s black against white,’ he informed Agnes. ‘The forces of evil are rising up, all around! They come by night – they come by night, in the darkness, when we can’t see them. They prowl through the streets!’

  ‘Go home, then,’ said Agnes curtly. ‘That way you won’t have to worry about it.’

  The man strode off, muttering. A few minutes later, Agnes secured a policewoman and related Greta’s misfortune. The woman went to make her a cup of tea. When she returned, she informed Greta that she would have to go to hospital, but that first she would have to give details of the incident. Greta assented quite cheerfully. She seemed to have recovered some of her composure.

  ‘And then I whacked him over the head with a hat-stand,’ she informed the balding policeman who was taking notes.

  ‘A hat-stand.’

  ‘Yeah. Victorian mahogany with these kind of curly bits at the top. Oh, yeah, and when he was leaving I yelled after him, “You bastard, you could at least have worn a condom.” ’

  The policeman’s face twitched.

  ‘Is that all?’ he said.

  ‘Well, what did you expect me to do?’ Greta demanded. ‘Invite him back for goddamned elevenses?’

  Finally Agnes got Greta home. She put her to bed, and stood for a moment watching her sleep. Her face was open and vulnerable. It alerted Agnes to the presence of something new in herself, something small and hard like a marble. By the time she left, it was growing dark.

  Agnes was stalking the streets which once had stalked her. The elegant Georgian façades of Camden, which by day showed daring glimpses of adventurous curtain and flashes of brave scrubbed pine, by night glimmered palely behind shutters in streets which now seemed empty and afraid. Another city had taken charge, crawling down from trees and out of sewers, roosting in doorways among overstuffed garbage bags and trawling the littered pavements of the high street like antithetical shoppers. It was doubtlessly the latter’s aspect of ownership which nightly sent the management scuttling back to their terraces to ponder the insuperables of social injustice over dinner and wine, and there were many occasions on which Agnes would have joined them. For tonight, however her loyalties lay with those whose hearts were hard. They were not emasculated, as she had been, by sympathy. Their cold nights and hungry days had lent them a certain menace. She had seen their misery eulogised in various artistic black and white photographs, a Brueghel glow of quirky despair in their faces as their souls shone beneath the skin for want of better lodging. Well, tonight she too lived in her own skin, homeless. Tonight she was a predator, sly as a guttersnipe.

  She reached the lock and paused on the bridge for a moment looking out over the canal. The water looked dark and thick as blood. There was no moon overhead and the sky was black, like an empty space. A car passed behind her and someone shouted, ‘Don’t jump!’ through the window as it sped away. People were so careless with one another, she thought as she turned and continued walking. They should be taught a lesson, and who better to teach it than they, the underclass, those who had been wronged?

  A man walked past her on the pavement. He had been eyeing her uncertainly as he approached, as if trying to discern whether she was an object of admiration or studied avoidance. It was a look she had been getting a lot lately. Her signals had been growing dimmer and harder to read. She stared at him rudely, which at least had the effect of resolving his own dilemma. He looked away and dug his hands in his pockets.

  ‘Hi, sexy!’ she said loudly as he walked by her.

  She heard him stop on the pavement behind her. She could feel his shock without even looking back at him.

  ‘What?’ he said, as if to himself.

  She walked on unperturbed and eventually heard his diminishing footfalls as he walked away. Agnes smiled to herself. Weakness, she thought then, was, after all, nothing more than fear. Strength, consequently, must be becoming that which you feared. She began to laugh. Soon she was laughing so hard that she had to sit down in a doorway and clutch at her sides.

  ‘Keep laughing, love. They say it stops ye crying. That’s what they say, eh?’ said a woman next to her.

  ‘I suppose so,’ replied Agnes, getting a grip on herself. She had thought she was alone.

  ‘What’s so bloody funny anyway?’ said the woman.

  She had a high-pitched voice and a Scottish accent. She was so tiny that Agnes would have mistaken her for a child had she not already seen the handbag face clenched tight as a withered fist. She wore a red coat and was sitting with her knees drawn up and her feet in a plastic bag.

  ‘Tell us, Miss Tee-Hee, what’s the joke?’

  ‘Oh, it’s only an old joke,’ said Agnes. ‘The one about the man and the woman. It’s not really very funny.’

  ‘La-de-da! Well, tell us it anyway, hen. I could do with a laugh.’

  Agnes began to make something up. She had never been very good at telling jokes. Halfway through her rambling narrative, the woman began to cough. Her whole frame shook with the effort of trying to contain the bronchitic explosions within her bony chest. Presently the attack receded and she leaned back against the wall.

  ‘Ha’ ye got a cigarette for me, hen?’ she whispered, peering up at Agnes with chastened watery eyes.

  ‘No,’ said Agnes. ‘I could buy you some if you like, but I don’t think they’d make you feel any better.’

  The woman closed her eyes and leaned against her. She appeared to be asleep. Through her coat Agnes could feel she was as brittle as a bird. Her breath rattled and wheezed its way out of her pursed lips. A few minutes later she awoke.

  ‘I’ll tell you a secret, hen,’ she said. Her face brightened. ‘I’ll tell you something no one else knows. Can I trust ye? Can I?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Look at tha’!’ The woman thrust out a skinny arm from within the folds of her coat, her spidery hand fluttering as she turned her arm about for Agnes to see. ‘What d’ye make of tha’?’

  ‘It’s very thin,’ ventured Agnes.

  ‘Well, I can see tha’! You don’t need glasses to see tha’.’ She clenched up her face and nodded. ‘I’m just bones, me. I don’t need you to tell me tha’.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Agnes.

  ‘What’s sorry? I’m the one should be sorry.’ Her eyes closed again and she swayed unsteadily back and forth. ‘Ha bloody ha. Tee-hee-hee. What’s so bloody funny anyway? Eh?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m not laughing.’

  ‘I’ll tell ye something.’ Her eyes snapped open. ‘I’m dying, that’s what. Nae much more o’ this for me.’ She laughed a little and began to hum ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. ‘No more Leicester Square for me. Goodbye to the high life.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Agnes.

  ‘Course I am! Who else would be, eh? Am I sure, she says. Did ye nae look at this arm?’ Her mouth chewed drily on air. ‘It’s a long way—’

  ‘Is there anything I can do? Would you like me to take you to the hospital or – or maybe you have someone I could call?’

  The woman stopped singing and scrutinised her closely.

  ‘Good thing my Jacky’s not here,’ she said firmly, nodding her head.

  ‘Who’s Jacky? Is she a friend? Maybe we should call her.’

  Another seizure, however, prevented the woman from replying. She shook silently. When she raised her head, Agnes saw that in fact she was laughing.

  ‘Ay,’ she gasped. ‘Good thing Jacky’s away. Aye, it’s a good thing.’

  ‘Who is Jacky?’

  ‘He’s my boy, hen. Who else but my lovely boy? “Is she a friend?” ’ she mimicked. ‘Good thing Jacky did nae hear tha’ – he’s a great big thing, that he is.’

  ‘Well, where is he?’

  ‘He’d want to be here, though. Pretty thing like yourself, ye’d have your hands full.’ She laughed, rockin
g herself.

  ‘Why isn’t he helping you?’ she burst out.

  ‘Aye, you’d not get a moment’s peace. That’s a fact, that is.’ She closed her eyes and leaned back. ‘I believe it’s my bedtime.’

  ‘Where are you going to sleep? You can come and stay at my house if you like. We can take the tube. It’s not that far.’

  She opened her eyes.

  ‘Have ye got any clothes?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I can give you some.’

  ‘It’s a bit worn.’ She plucked at the sleeve of her coat. ‘That it is. A bit worn. But it’s a lovely red. A lovely colour, that red. Just ask for Annie and they’ll tell ye where to find me. Ask anyone here.’ She indicated the barren sweep of the dark high street.

  ‘But what about tonight?’

  ‘I’ve got me bed right here.’

  She patted the doorstep and closed her eyes. Agnes removed a note from her wallet and crumpled it into the tiny fist. As she did so, the eyes opened.

  ‘Dunnae forget,’ she said. ‘Just ask for Annie. Ye can put them in a bag and ask for Annie.’

  ‘I won’t forget. It was nice to meet you.’

  ‘The pleasure’s all mine, I’m sure,’ said Annie demurely.

  Agnes got up. She had other business to attend to. As she turned to leave the thin arm scuttled out from beneath the coat and grabbed her hand.

  ‘Dunnae forget,’ she said. ‘Or I’ll haunt ye. I will. I’ll haunt ye.’

  In the tube station everyone was transient except the transients, who hovered by the barriers like vultures waiting to swoop. The escalator trundled around like a mobile tongue disgorging diminishing gobs of passengers out into the cold night. It was getting late. People wrapped their coats around them and eyed those in the foyer suspiciously. They hurried out to the street, anxious suddenly to be home.

  Agnes did not look at them as they passed. She was looking instead at the two guards who were hanging around the wooden booth by the ticket barrier. One of them spat at the wall. The other one had his hands in his pockets and was whistling.