Saving Agnes Read online

  At thirteen, however, such concerns were unimaginable; and while the thought that one day the world might find her indispensable had often crossed her mind, the gloomy trajectory of the intervening period seemed then too high a price to pay for the brighter epoch that lay beyond it. Her belief in the charms of the distant future was unshakeable, but the unanaesthetised slowness with which formative years tend to pass made nothing but the immediate continuance of her own misery seem inevitable. The adult world was dream-like, and her own grasp of it myopic; and although later it did occur to her that, had she glimpsed then the life which actually awaited her, she might have flung herself without delay from her dormitory’s perilous window, at the time it was this very element of uncertainty which caused her hand to falter.

  It was the Lent term at school, a time of freezing beds, endemic viruses, and abstention from all but the trading of insult and abuse, which knew neither seasons nor abatement. Agnes had by now spent two years observing the business of persecution, and during her apprenticeship had had ample opportunity to ruminate upon the implications of what she understood to be its cyclical nature. The preceding term had seen no fewer than three heads hunted – one of whom had been bought out by her parents in the preliminary stages and was now enjoying life at a co-educational non-denominational establishment at three counties’ remove, while the other two were to be found, broken-spirited, loitering together as if joined by the hip in the corridors outside the music rooms which encountered the least traffic of any in the school – and with the climate so bullish, Agnes had returned for the new term with the dread certainty of higher quotas and increased efficiency.

  Her fears were realised within days as, entering her room one evening, she found a group of six board representatives seated jury-like on her bed, while Christine Poole read to them, in a voice so full of menace and mockery that a uniformed future seemed at that moment both glittering and assured, several extracts from Agnes’s diary which directly concerned, and, albeit less directly, maligned those present.

  Agnes had long since been driven by solitude to keeping a diary, and had for some time been nurturing an anxiety that, should this intimate tract ever fall into the wrong hands, it would precipitate exactly such a scene as she was now enduring. At first she had tried to enforce neutrality in her seamless ramblings, interspersing what loaded moments there were with liberal quantities of daily trivia and nonsense; but although her hand had trembled with presentiment as she wrote, her lack of other confidantes had, when compounded by habit, made the outpouring of her rage and misery uncontainable.

  The discovery of a self-signed death-warrant was so sensationally superior to the usual paltry findings of the investigation room that Agnes almost achieved a form of celebrity with it; but her punishment was correspondingly dramatic, and before long she found herself longing for the Siberian exile of her early days. Her friends’ terror campaign was a Mafia-style affair, whose bravado and lawlessness any cowed schoolchild might have found breathtaking to observe. Although occasionally – when, for example, precious objects would disappear from other girls’ rooms, to be discovered hoarded beneath Agnes’s bed – the hand of a subtler strategist was betrayed, generally the nightly dumpings of the contents of the kitchen bins over her sheets or the crude graffiti listing her defects with which the blackboards would greet her on her daily arrival in class reassured her that it was only a matter of time before such artless tactics drew the attention of the proper authorities, and with it their own demise.

  Several weeks had passed before Agnes, confident that she had been the victim of a bureaucratic oversight, took the impressive list of her woes to her form-mistress. She had deliberated long and hard over whether such a course of action would merely exacerbate her problems; but she was now in fear of her life, for having recently discovered that her expensive winter coat, while hanging in her wardrobe, had come to grief in a manner which, involving as it did the meticulous and time-consuming application of sharp scissors to heavy cloth, could not be easily passed off as accidental, her mother’s righteous and considerable fury promised to erupt over the horizon and vanquish her exhausted spirits at any moment.

  Her form-mistress listened to Agnes’s tale with tight lips and disbelieving eyes. Seeing her audience thus moved, Agnes allowed herself to weep rather copiously as she blurted out the range of her peers’ transgressions, and was gratified to see the emotions of her confessor’s face progress from sympathy to full-blown anger and enraged shakes of the head.

  ‘What can I do?’ Agnes finally cried, preparing to launch her full weight into the open arms which at any moment would surely be offered her.

  ‘Have a bit of backbone, for goodness’ sake!’ the woman had exploded. ‘Look at you – you’re pathetic! I’ve never seen anything so feeble in my life! Don’t you ever think about how lucky you are? There are children your age who can’t even go to school – why don’t you think about them instead of yourself? Hmm?’

  Agnes did; and instead of admitting that in fact she quite envied them, took herself off to a secluded corner of the chapel garden to consider her options, which were looking decidedly limited since the removal from them of adult intervention. Death, she soon realised, was the only solution; and with not a moment to be wasted, she succeeded in inveigling herself into the sick bay that very afternoon, where, cunningly distracting the ancient and bumbling nun charged with administering three hundred girls with potentially lethal drugs by alerting her to the presence of a fictitious mouse, she managed to secrete into her pocket an almost full bottle of aspirin.

  At first she could scarcely contain her excitement at what she had done, and was so overjoyed by her successful subterfuge that she delayed the implementation of her plan for a day or two. On the second evening, a visit from Christine Poole reminded her of her purpose; but as she was deliberating over the time and place in which she would most like her lifeless form to be discovered, with the maximum horror, guilt and tragic effect for all concerned, she began to feel a strange tickling in her throat. Half an hour later the sensation had grown distinctly uncomfortable. She drank some water and found she could barely swallow. Unable to face the thought of returning to the sick-bay, she removed two aspirin from the bottle, swallowed them, and went straight to bed. In the morning her head felt pounding and feverish. Her throat was by now inflamed. Again she was forced to dig into her supply, and continued to do so during the day. By evening, the bottle was worryingly depleted; although as she tried to go down to supper and found herself falling, disorientated, back on to the bed, it did occur to her that nature might have taken things into its own hands, thus temporarily shelving the problem.

  She was discovered in this pitiful state by one of the kinder nuns, who called a doctor, and by morning she was diagnosed as having contracted glandular fever. Her parents were notified and she was whisked from the convent’s fiendish portals with scarcely a backward glance. Her mother, noting Agnes’s wan appearance, could have been forgiven for thinking that its causes were more viral than psychological; but the six weeks she insisted her daughter take off school, during which time she ministered to her with loaded trays and maternal affection, nonetheless were sufficient to avert a fatality either way. Agnes returned to school to find another girl occupying her unenviable place; and although she was not brave enough to intervene in her defence, she liked to think that her obviously reluctant participation in that persecution with which by now, after all, she was so familiar, along with the occasional sympathetic glances she offered her when other eyes were turned, did not go unnoticed.

  Later, when she met John, she would sometimes be overwhelmed with relief that she had not taken her leave of life so peremptorily. One night, with an excess of intimacy, she had told him of her suicide manqué, in the hope that he would share her loving interpretation of destiny’s mysterious intervention. To her surprise, he had seemed barely moved by the thought of how close he had come to losing her.

  ‘Everyone does that, don’t t
hey?’ he said, as if surprised that she should mention something so commonplace.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Oh, I expect so. Or thought about it, anyway.’

  She had felt almost disappointed by his response. It suggested that her emotional register was in some way incompatible with his. How, if this was how he felt, would she ever encourage him to scale the heights of passionate love which ascended within her with every passing moment? After swapping suicide stories so casually, what was there left to live for?

  Chapter Fifteen

  HAVING always been advised to take the rough with the smooth Agnes did so; but found in her hands the two so successfully blent as to form a dull and coarse texture that bore little resemblance to either of its originators. She fondled her experiences too much, played with the past until it was dog-eared and tattered; its purer moments sullied by the oily press of palms, its horrors soft and elastic. Then, like moviestar monsters, her recollections would sometimes come back from the dead with a thrilling lurch, wringing out unplied reservoirs of sensation from places that had been thought drained.

  She began to grow suspicious of the future. There had been a time when she had thought that by forecasting its events she would therefore control them: she could never be surprised, for her mind was always in wartime, a busy operations room in which possibilities snaked like rivers over maps of foreign places. Now, looking back on the reality her dreams had become, she felt foolish for having thought herself forearmed. There was an inexorability to disappointment. It lived on, like something radioactive. It contaminated things. She began to think of herself as existing only in the present tense, a conduit through which the future flowed to become the past.

  She met her lover by chance in the street and they went for a drink in a pub that was too hot and crowded. She found herself sweating and babbling while he watched her, gaunt and quiet. Afterwards he left her on the road, his tail-lights glowing in mercurial retreat as he roared away. As she walked home her heart leapt at every shadow and barking dog. She soon broke her vow not to call him and gorged herself on his answering machine for two weeks with a hunger she did not attempt to control. It became something necessary, the reassuring click and hum, the sound of his voice trapped like an echo, like a ghost. When he picked up the phone himself one day she almost hung up in terror. To her surprise, he was kind and did not object to the idea of seeing her.

  ‘Let’s go somewhere,’ she said, emboldened. ‘Let’s get out of London for the day.’

  They arranged to go to Hampton Court the following Saturday, and Agnes’s spirits lifted once more. She made plans and bought something new to wear. In these sudden bursts of sunshine, she found she could bear to look at things.

  ‘Have you gone to the dogs?’ Greta inquired.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Agnes. The question seemed suspiciously perspicacious.

  ‘Oh, isn’t that what you say?’ Greta furrowed her brow like a perplexed student. ‘You know, where those skinny dogs run around after fake rabbits and stuff?’

  ‘Oh, I see what you mean. No, I haven’t. I don’t think it’s very nice, though.’

  ‘I’m going Saturday,’ said Greta firmly, as if decided by Agnes’s disapproval. She grinned mysteriously. ‘With London Transport.’

  Agnes shrugged, a gesture intended to divest Greta’s travel arrangements of the unwarranted importance with which she had seen fit to report them.

  ‘It is cheaper, I suppose,’ she said.

  She found it hard to talk to Greta sometimes. It made her feel as if she had not mastered even the basic verbal skills required to go comfortably through life.

  ‘Not London Transport,’ Greta groaned. ‘My friend – you know, the one I met on the tube. That’s what I call him. London Transport.’ She screeched with laughter. ‘It is cheaper, I suppose,’ she mimicked languorously. ‘You’re such a card, Agnes.’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d seen him again,’ remarked Agnes stiffly.

  ‘Oh, sure, I see him all the time. He works my station. We have a good time together,’ she mused. ‘He’s kind of weird, though. I went to his house with him one night and he showed me all this stuff.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Porno mags and stuff, I guess,’ she said vaguely. ‘Hey, guess where he lives? Somewhere called Tooting – can you believe that? What a place for a train-driver to live, huh?’ She made tooting noises like a train and laughed. ‘It is, however,’ she added with mock sobriety, ‘a real dive.’

  Agnes felt rather disturbed. She saw how easy it would be to sink without trace into a realm of strange men and nasty magazines and squalid flats in Tooting. One just absorbed what came along, she supposed, as if by osmosis. She had often wondered what would happen if she took up the offers of the men who commented upon her in the street. There was another world beneath the surface of the one she chose each day, a dark labyrinth of untrodden paths. Its proximity frightened her. She wondered if she would ever lose her way and wander into it. She thought of her lover, of her strange job, of her crumbling house, and wondered if she was already there.

  Agnes and Nina and Merlin went for a walk; or at least, that’s what Agnes said. Merlin said they were going for a moonlit celebration, and he took with him a bottle of wine. Nina said she didn’t know what they were doing, but could they please make it quick because she had to meet Jack later. Merlin’s aspect of festivity was in honour of the first three months of their communal living at Elwood Street; and despite the newborn whiteness of the first October moon, each privately suspected it had been much longer.

  ‘I don’t see why it’s such a big deal,’ panted Nina as they toiled in the darkness up the Blackstock Road. ‘It’s not like we’ve been there a year or anything. Three months isn’t an anniversary – it’s a trial period.’

  Agnes, terrified by the threat of a verdict, remained silent. Merlin gave Nina a friendly shove.

  ‘Get along with you,’ he said briskly. ‘You and your Roman calendar. This is a pagan ritual, woman. We’re going to toast the new moon.’

  Agnes was glad they had not stayed in the house with its gloomy crack, which seemed to her to be growing at an alarming rate. Such disintegration was unkind. It seemed to foist upon her the responsibility of propping and bearing. Sometimes the crack appeared larger than life. At others, it was a tiny manifestation of a larger slippage, almost like a gravitational force; a mud-slide, perhaps, tossing her away with its momentum like a cork on a violent wave.

  As they reached the park, Merlin suddenly darted away from them and ran off into the darkness howling.

  ‘Oh, God,’ muttered Nina as they trailed after him. ‘Merlin’s rediscovering his pagan virility.’

  There was a conspiratorial tone in her voice. They had banded together. Agnes slipped her arm through Nina’s as they walked into Highbury Fields. There were no streetlamps in the park. The darkness seemed suddenly private, up against her eyes like blindness. She gripped Nina’s arm, wanting to tell her everything; to confess the mortal sin of herself and let the black air absolve her words while her body hid in the shadows. They heard Merlin howl again, and then Nina was gone, darting off into the darkness to find him.

  ‘Come on!’ she shouted behind her.

  Agnes trotted disconsolately after her. The trees loomed, vague and monstrous. She couldn’t see anything. Merlin and Nina’s laughter faded into the distance. As she jogged unseeing over the dark grass she felt a wave of panic wash over her and she picked up speed. The road near the park had gone quiet. Everything seemed to be concentrated into the darkness, the silence, the pounding of her blood, the beating of her heart as she ran. It was as if she was without senses, living inside herself. It was as if she wasn’t there at all. Her fear turned itself inside out. She kept running. It seemed to her then that she could go on like that for ever.

  ‘Agnes? Can we come in?’

  Nina and Merlin put their heads round the bedroom door. Agnes sat up in bed and tried not
to look ashamed. She had not disappeared for long, really: she had just run round the park until she had happened by chance on the roadside, where her ardour had been cooled by the sight of houses and cars and she had come home. On her way she had heard them calling for her, and had had a strange sense then of being someone else: a lone jogger returning to a different life, who had heard two friends calling to a girl lost in the woods. She had pitied that poor girl and wondered if she would read about it in the papers tomorrow. Then she had walked slowly back to Elwood Street.

  She had hoped to feel a certain snarling, callous independence in doing so, but instead had been able only to think of a time when aged about twelve, she had taken her bicycle and pretended to run away. She had pedalled until she reached a grassy bank about a mile from the house, and then had dismounted from her steed, mounted the bank, and lain leisurely down to look at the sky. When it began to grow dark and she had judged enough time to have passed, she had climbed back on to her bicycle and had pedalled home, to find that her parents had worked themselves up not into the hoped-for lather of loving anxiety, but into a state of uncontainable anger. She had been shouted at, smacked, and sent to bed, where she was left to ruminate upon the now-proven fact that nobody loved her.

  ‘Are you okay?’ said Nina, looking at her strangely.

  ‘What happened?’ said Merlin, hovering uncertainly by the door.

  ‘I’m fine. Sorry,’ Agnes said, as if they might have preferred to find her lying mauled by a mugger’s knife beneath some tree. ‘I don’t know what happened. I was running after you and I couldn’t find you. So I came home. I was frightened.’