Saving Agnes Read online

  ‘You just don’t want other people to have what you can’t get,’ Tom was saying. ‘You don’t really care about the poor or the homeless. It’s your fear of failure that’s behind it. If nobody wins, you can’t lose.’

  ‘What do you call winning?’ Agnes rejoined, inflamed anew. ‘Sitting around and making money out of other people’s misfortune, like you? What about people who actually do care about things, who reject a system they didn’t choose in the first place? Are they losers just because they refuse to play the game?’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about caring! You’re the one who wants to turf her own parents out of their home, remember? I’ll tell you what I care about – I care about them.’ He pointed towards the house but his gesture also encompassed the dogs, who, splayed on their sides in the long grass and breathing heavily, bore a poignant enough resemblance to their masters to further his cause. ‘They’ve worked all their lives for this. How do you think they feel when you throw it back in their faces just to make yourself feel better? I feel sorry for you.’

  ‘Watch out, Tom,’ sneered Agnes. ‘You’re becoming a bleeding heart.’

  ‘Actually, it’s your brain I’m worried about. Your precious brain, with all those years of private –’ he emphasised the word – ‘private education that have gone into it.’ Tom had always nursed a sizeable chip on his shoulder about Agnes’s superior academic prowess, but would not have seen this as any reason to identify with her protagonists. ‘Well, it’s rotted with self-pity, if you ask me. You’ve overfed it with your precious socialism and your bloody feminism so it’s got fat and lazy. You’ve given it so many excuses that it’s stopped working, along with all your leftie feminist friends.’

  ‘Nothing that a good screw wouldn’t cure, is that it?’

  Agnes herself was impressed by the fluent delivery of this masterful stroke. She wished Nina could have been there to witness it. Tom, being a staunch defender of family values, visibly blanched at the slight to his sister, before realising that she herself had delivered it.

  ‘That’s about the measure of it,’ he said. ‘If you could ever hang on to a man long enough for him to give you one.’

  With this he began walking back to the house, perhaps realising that his descent into the realm of the personal would in all probability render certain of his own regions vulnerable to attack.

  ‘Talking about brains,’ Agnes yelled after him. ‘Whatever happened to yours? Do you think we should send out a search party?’

  The next day, they drove back to London in silence.

  ‘What would you like to eat most in the whole world?’ said Agnes.

  She and John were starving in India, and Agnes was torturing them both with her imagination. The fan above their bed turned slowly, stirring a soup of hot air and flies.

  John leaned over and kissed her warm and fragile neck.

  ‘You,’ he said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  GRETA’S mother called the office every week long-distance from a remote farm in Saskatchewan, where, Agnes imagined, large crows perched on telegraph wires which looped crazily over lonely acres of prairie. Greta would talk to her for what seemed like hours, murmuring inaudibly into a receiver already insulated by her cupped hand, as if her mother were a spy or a secret lover. One day, however, the call came when Greta was out of the office for the afternoon; and Agnes took it with a prurience provoked as much by this suggestion of mystery as by the aspect of miracle she had formerly noted.

  ‘I want to speak to Greta Sankowitz,’ enunciated a woman’s voice carefully over a sudden static squall.

  ‘She’s not in the office at the moment, I’m afraid,’ replied Agnes. As her mind traversed the vast distances over which they were conversing, she wondered if she should take this opportunity to make one or two observances in the spirit of human commerce; ask about the weather in Saskatchewan or life on the farm, for example, in exchange for news of Finchley Central.

  ‘Excuse me?’ said the voice after a pause.

  ‘Yes, I’m still here.’

  ‘Who is this speaking?’

  The woman sounded frightened. She spoke slowly, as if mistrustful of foreigners or telephones. Agnes felt guilty that she should be contributing to anyone’s feelings of technological alienation, and decided to clarify the situation.

  ‘My name’s Agnes,’ she said. ‘I’m a friend of Greta’s. We work together, actually. Greta won’t be back until tomorrow, but I’ll tell her then that you called.’

  There was another pause. Waves of static crashed against the receiver and Agnes wondered if the woman had been cut off. She had an image of Mrs Sankowitz, tumescent and clutching a shopping basket, orbiting untethered in hyperspace like a giant loosed zeppelin. After a minute or two the woman spoke again. She sounded almost catatonic with terror.

  ‘Yes? I’m trying to speak to Greta Sankowitz.’

  When Agnes related this occurrence to Greta the next morning, embarrassment at the memory led her to embellish her narrative with hazardous technological incidents, as if Greta should be protected from the knowledge that two people so closely connected to her had completely failed to communicate with each other in her absence.

  ‘It was a terrible line,’ she said generously. ‘She sounded so far away.’

  ‘Oh, she always sounds like that,’ said Greta.

  ‘Don’t you miss your family?’ Agnes inquired.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘What are they like?’

  ‘Oh, pretty normal, I guess. My mom is really cool. She’s had it kind of rough. My dad’s a son of a bitch.’

  ‘What about your siblings?’ said Agnes, swerving away from a head-on collision with unpleasantness.

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Your brothers and sisters.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. You really want to know about all this?’

  Agnes nodded.

  ‘Well, there’s my brother Clary, he’s in the army. He’s kind of a fascist enforcer type. I guess he takes after my dad. Then – let’s see – then there’s my sister Joanne, she married this real sleaze called Douglas. They moved to Ohio. Then there’s Lynette – she’s divorced and now she sings in this nightclub in Montreal. She’s really neat. Then there’s my sister Samantha, she married this guy called Steve. They’re cute but sort of weird.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well.’ Greta rolled her eyes. ‘Samantha – she’s my sister – she used to be really pretty, okay? She was the best out of all of us, really. Anyway, Steve lived in our town and he was the best-looking guy. So the two of them start dating, and when they were eighteen they got married. So, all is well. Anyway, they bought this farm and everything was fine until they started getting fat.’

  ‘Both of them?’

  ‘Yeah, that was the thing. These two gorgeous people. At first everyone just said, well, they’re in love, they’re happy – you know, some folks like to live a little round the middle when they settle down. But it kept happening, a bit more and a bit more. I guess they both just love to eat. After a couple of years they looked like a pair of giant slugs.’

  ‘But that’s awful!’ said Agnes, aghast. ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Greta shrugged. ‘They’re real happy together. They just got fat, I guess. What about yours, anyway?’

  ‘My family?’

  ‘Yeah. No, your frilly drawers.’ Greta grinned. ‘Dumbo.’

  There was a time somewhere in the past when her parents had stopped being parents and she and Tom had ceased to be children. While it was hard to say which metamorphosis had precipitated which, or indeed if they were merely coincidental, it was still harder to locate the moment when the change had actually taken place, for there was within it no aspect of violent severance. It was more of a reversal of roles than a disassociation from them. There had been a time when Agnes’s parents were in charge, and they had worried, commanded, and spoken in hushed tones accordingly. Now their mystery was somehow no longer intact. Now A
gnes and Tom worried and advised, and even, occasionally, criticised their parents’ behaviour.

  While unable exactly to date this turn of events, Agnes aligned it in her mind with the period when, in some way she was never able to define but which she recalled with ineffable sadness, things had, for want of a better explanation, ceased to be real to her. Unlike the murky exchanges of adulthood, this moment – and it happened, literally, in a moment, nothing more – still retained a clarity which allowed its details to be summoned up at any time.

  She had been walking down a street in the provincial town where her convent school lodged like a malignant tumour, passing the hour of parole before study by wandering, in the company of two or three other uniformed girls, along the shop-fronted pavements in the hope of glimpsing within these bright glass-plated spheres the promise of a future as yet unimaginable, though undoubtedly seductive. Normally on these excursions they purchased nothing that could so effectively liberate them from their imprisonment, but rather things that confirmed it: coloured pencils, ink-pens with flowered cases, logo-bearing rubbers; things which put a fatal insignia of identity on the nightmare of school, and which suggested it was not just a fleeting and horrible dream. She had, at the moment in question, been neither happy nor particularly unhappy. It was a grey afternoon in March, still light beneath a low cloudy sky. She walked beside a girl called Christine Poole, while the other two walked behind. She didn’t know what it was they were talking about, although the fact that they must have been talking impressed her now as amazing; even then, at the age of thirteen, when she knew so little about the world, she had been pronouncing and articulating.

  In any case, what she did remember was that they had paused on the edge of the pavement to cross the busy road, and there, in a grey and unremarkable town-centre, watching for gaps in the traffic, she had suddenly felt her mind disengage and float away from it all. It was most unexpected. She had become frightened, sensing that something irrevocable had taken place, and had forced herself to speak in an attempt to recover her sense of there-ness.

  ‘I don’t feel as if I’m here,’ she had said to Christine Poole; and she remembered very clearly what had happened next. First of all, she realised her voice sounded distant, as if she were listening instead of speaking. Secondly, Christine had looked at her as if she were mad. These two events now seemed to have characterised much of her later life.

  It was, then, with the onset of what she now termed ‘aloofness’ that she identified her parents’ regression. Two further incidents from that period stuck in her mind confirming her suspicions. The first was brief, and concerned her mother in much the same way as a snapshot taken unawares in a secret moment. Agnes was hunting for an old jumper which she suspected her mother might have secreted to the laundry basket, or worse, to the dustbin, and failing to locate it, had gone to attempt negotiations for its rescue. She had called her mother’s name, and, receiving no response, had begun searching one by one the rooms of their house. Agnes’s certainty that her quarry had such limited possibilities for escape did not, in her mind, make any matter for leniency. She had finally tracked her mother down to the small room off the kitchen where the laundry was done and had begun a furious address on the subject of her lost jumper.

  Her mother, whose back had been turned, turned around to face her; not in the manner of one surprised, but with that same quality of aloofness which Agnes had begun recently to detect in herself. The picture she had, and which still came back to her so clearly, was that of her mother’s face in the moment before she had seemed to engage with the intrusion. She had looked dreamy, certainly; but there was also a split second in which Agnes was uncomfortably aware that her mother didn’t recognise her.

  The second incident concerned her father, and was far spicier and more horrific that the first. During more or less the same period, Agnes’s father had begun to breed rabbits. He kept them in a shed beyond the vegetable patch and was unfailingly dutiful and tender in his ministrations to this nascent colony. Agnes early on became fascinated by these small creatures with their glowing eyes, and would often accompany her father to the hutches; although once she had seen a large rat lying nonchalantly along a beam in the shed, and had postponed her visits while dreams of its long, rubbery tail had haunted her sleep. One night, her father had trudged off by the light of a gas lantern to perform his caretaking duties, and had come rushing back a few minutes later in a state of great excitement.

  ‘It’s Ed McBain!’ he had cried. ‘She’s having babies!’

  In his fondness for the creatures, her father had named them all after his favourite writers of detective stories; although the genre, unfortunately as it turned out, had not allowed for much variety in terms of gender.

  Agnes alone felt compelled by this news to trail after her father in the rain out to the rabbit hutches, and the two of them settled themselves on overturned apple crates, with the lantern suspended overhead from the erstwhile perch of the hideous rat. At first there was little to see within the straw-lined hutch. The mother-to-be crouched at the far end, her body quivering. Agnes could see the red points of her eyes, which in the sepia light seemed to her to be infused with a strangely devilish intent.

  ‘Here they come!’ whispered her father excitedly. ‘Look – just there. Can you see it?’

  Agnes looked in time to see a peculiarly pink-fleshed ball drop into the straw beside the mother rabbit. It squirmed, tiny and myopic.

  ‘It doesn’t have any fur!’ she cried.

  ‘It’s not supposed to,’ reassured her father. ‘That comes later. Look, there’s another one.’

  The tiny flesh-balls were dropping every few minutes into the straw, where they began to move and unfurl pinkly like foetal fists. Agnes and her father sat in wondering silence, while the gas lamp hissed above them and the smell of straw suffused their nostrils with its dust. Agnes knew there was a miracle at hand.

  ‘What’s she doing now, Dad?’ she asked.

  The rabbit had, apparently, finished her labours and was snuffling about the new-born bundles with her whiskered snout.

  ‘I think she’s cleaning them,’ her father replied.

  The rabbit looked up as he spoke. She seemed disconcertingly to be staring at them. Agnes felt strangely uncomfortable beneath her eyes. Then, as they watched, the rabbit turned back to her progeny and took one in her mouth.

  ‘Dad?’ said Agnes. ‘Dad?’

  He did not reply. They sat there in silence as the tiny back legs disappeared into the rabbit’s mouth and – unmistakably! – she swallowed.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Agnes, as the rabbit bent her head and took another bundle between her small teeth. The baby rabbit wriggled as it disappeared into the cavity. ‘Dad, we’ve got to do something! We have to do something!’

  Neither of them looked at the other as the rabbit swallowed. She appeared to be growing fatter as they watched. She ate a third baby and a fourth. Her eyes grew dreamy.

  ‘Dad, why don’t you do something?’ Agnes cried. She stood up and faced her father as tears began to form in her eyes. Her father sat still, hunched disconsolately on his apple crate.

  ‘What can I do?’ he said. ‘It’s nature’s course.’

  ‘You can take her out of the hutch – you can stop her! Look, there’s only three left!’

  Her father shrugged impotently.

  ‘She probably didn’t have the nutrients to support them,’ he said. He began to sound rather cross. ‘It happens sometimes. It’s the survival of the fittest. We can’t interfere, Agnes.’

  Agnes stared at him in disbelief. She was not afraid of his anger. She knew that he was wrong. Turning back to the hutch, she saw the last of the tiny rabbits disappear. Tears began pouring down her cheeks. She felt sick. The mother sat sluggishly in the hutch, her belly inflated and obscene. Agnes couldn’t believe that her father – an adult, a maker of decisions, a protector and punisher – had been so weak. She heard him stand up behind her and she turned around. Hi
s face was ashen. Then before she could say a word, he bolted out of the shed and into the garden, from where she could hear the sound of retching.

  ‘Who’s your best friend?’ Agnes asked her mother.

  They were in the car on a rainy Monday morning, on the way to school. Agnes’s knees, which were blue and bony, protruded from beneath the hem of her darker blue skirt. She thought there would never be anything other than this: driven through the rain, her skirt too short, school waiting like a fate worse than death.

  ‘Your father,’ said her mother, changing gear. ‘Daddy is my best friend.’

  ‘Oh, Mum! He doesn’t count.’ Agnes felt wounded. No one ever took her questions seriously. ‘Who’s your real best friend?’

  Like most people, Agnes had once toyed with the idea of ending her life before it had really begun, and at times it struck her how much subsequent failure she might have saved herself had she but been able to count teenage suicide as one of her early successes.

  Her plans for ending it all had progressed to a respectably advanced stage, but what surprised her now was not so much her failure to bring them to a triumphant, albeit fatal, fruition, as the fearlessness with which, faced by certain of life’s problems, she had lighted on self-slaughter as the most effective means of solving them. This was perhaps the fault of nothing but the mere thirteen or so years which she had by then accrued; an interlude brief enough still to qualify as a trial period, a sort of fourteen-day satisfaction clause during which time commitments could be reneged upon and life handed back unsoiled.

  While her opinion of the quality of her existence might not have been substantially altered by the events of the subsequent years, their almost redoubled number made them that much more resistant to attack. In moments of despair she would occasionally drift off to sleep thinking of how pleasant it would be never again to wake up, but come morning the memory of Diplomat’s Week’s unedited pages or the imminent recurrence of her rent demand would send her careering back into consciousness with an admonishing jolt.