Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

A house, unlatched, is less a house and more a set of rooms through which one might be hunted.

Her sister Irene once said that, at pinch points, people always turn to the divine, or if not to the divine, then at least to the well-trodden. It’s a backup, she said, like a tested recipe. People love a ritual when things get hairy, to feel they’re doing something that thousands of people have done before them.

The leisure center situated on the thirteenth floor of the apartment block near work costs too much for what it is, but Agnes pays the entrance fee three times a week in order to swim in comparative silence and not have to think, for an hour, about dinner or her taxes or the number of times she’s rescheduled her cervical smear. She is not always lucky enough to be the only person at the pool, although the nature of her work allows her to pick odd times. There are any number of ways to be annoying in a public pool, even during designated lane swim, and Agnes is fairly sure that the list she’s compiled is more or less exhaustive. Men who join the medium lane, swim two incredibly dramatic lengths and then stop at the shallow end to breathe loudly for twenty minutes. Women in swimming caps who spend what seems like hours adjusting their goggles poolside only to overtake you with a school-teamy front crawl the second they start. People who swim too slowly. People who swim the wrong way. Anyone who chooses to do the butterfly, which is a stroke for cunts. Agnes can never tell which of them she hates the most and tries to avoid them all indiscriminately.

Thinking when swimming is not thinking but something more like elevator music. It comes as secondary to the fact of her body, to the bald imperative of motion, and it makes her feel easier, more physical, and less liable to come upon a thought that will cause her to scream and to never stop screaming.

Remember this: the world as it once was. The way things appear in the instant before they go under: first assured, then shipwrecked. The ease with which facts presumed permanent can change. There was dry land, once, and also the concept of drowning as emergency, a thing to be thrashed against. Now there is simply inevitability, the narrowing gaps between floodplains, islands of viable space on which people build doggedly, insistently, upward, away from the mess below. There is a horror movie adage that people are always running up stairs when they should be jumping out of windows, but what is a person supposed to do when all obvious exits are underwater? Places stack up, clench inward, people forced into ever closer proximity, one on top of the other on top of the other on top of the other. People can afford real security or else they simply cannot. Those who cannot live wherever and however they can, bunched together in tower blocks ill-equipped for modern circumstances, renting well over the odds, losing power, existing. It has been so many years—a decade of this, another decade before that of almost this. People take supplements, for vitamin D, for energy, complain the damp has reached their bones. It rains constantly and the fact of the rain, of the rain’s whole great impending somethingness, runs parallel to the day-to-day of work and sleep and lottery tickets, of yoga challenges, of buying fruit and paying taxes, of mopping floors and taking drugs on weekends and rea...

Irene tries to keep up with politics wherever possible, attends talks on police intervention, participates in mutual aid, though increasingly she can’t help feeling that her will to be seen taking part is not matched by her actual desire to do so. She used to rage, to get involved with direct action and instigate chaos, but her anger has waned over time, the way laughter eventually becomes forced, and what is left feels unpleasant but nonetheless easier.

There are, Irene has always felt, few frustrations to match that of being read a certain way by family members. To be misunderstood is one thing, but the curious hostility of a sibling’s approach lies less in what they miss than in the strange backdated nature of the things they choose to know.

The sensation, then, not so much of being misunderstood as of being understood too well at one time and then never again.

The truth is not that Jude is calm to the exclusion of all problems but rather calm in the face of them, calm as a method of attack.

Thinks Daddy—the line from the old movie—thinks Daddy, my Daddy. Thinks Every minute, every second, our bodies are eating themselves.

How, she wondered, was one supposed to grieve an absence when that absence was familiar? What, she wondered, was grief without a clear departure to regret?

At what point, she wanted to say, do we stop being the direct product of our parents? At what point does it start being our fault?

It occurs to her that there has always been one shitty witch in Macbeth, the one who never says anything useful and always just seems to be filling in space between the other two. Most of the time she feels like this witch is Irene, although sometimes it’s Agnes and sometimes it’s all of them, which doesn’t really make sense but still feels fundamentally accurate.

It is an accepted belief that things fall apart. The question of whether the falling apart is necessary is separate and usually secondary. People still discuss this, of course: the fact of the turn, the moment a warning mutated into the only possible outcome. When, people ask, was the last time you remember thinking Oh, it’s raining again. When was your last real sunburn, your last flying ant day, your last good look at the stars. It is easy to think about these things, recollections of things passing fast from your grip, and decide they are simply too much to acknowledge. Easy to imagine inevitability when in fact there might once have been any number of options. It was always going to turn out this way, spoken like a charm against pain, against memory. Sweat and sun feel like virtue, like expiation, so now damp and rain feel like failure, like an opportunity for some great act of heroism missed. Better, all things considered, to turn away from the fact of before until the thought fades again, the way a headache can suddenly cease, and all that exists is the now. The great washout of the world and no sense that it might have been otherwise.

The problem, of course, is the general worsening of things—things being housing, and the weather, and the State of It All. The problem is private companies springing up every other week to mishandle the business of dealing with it and siphon off funding in the process. The problem is the fact that there’s no money, and nowhere to put people, and the fact that they’re working on a skeleton staff with no time and no way to do more than they’re already doing. The problem is all this, but also a recent and much sharper decline.

Sometimes, she said, I fantasize about being a 1950s housewife and then I realize that all I’m actually getting off on is the idea of having enough money that I don’t have to work or worry about working.

She has been trying and failing to teach herself Crow pose. She tips forward on her hands, tries to wedge her knees into her armpits and immediately overbalances, ducks her head, and collapses on the floor. She isn’t very good at yoga but persists with a sort of dogged belief that she may one day conceive a talent for it. She sits on the rug beside her bed for a second, listens to the sound of her body turning itself right side up again. Listens for the sound of her stomach, the mild tinnitus buzz in her ears. No heartbeat, she thinks. Presses two fingers to the side of her neck, thinks, Quick, check you’re not dead. Sitting with her fingers against her throat, she locates her heartbeat after a couple of seconds, then wonders how she managed to misplace it.

People, she often feels, are far too literate in therapy-speak. She supposes it comes from television, from books or magazines—media suffused with the smooth dialectics of trauma. Patients come to her to talk about feelings of inadequacy stemming from an unsatisfactory homelife, about generational trauma and buried emotions and displaced panic at the thought of the end of the world. None of it incorrect, exactly, but it can sometimes be difficult to tell what they need her for, if they’ve already figured this out.

She doesn’t always like silence. It can bring up odd things, odd memories without a clear root or provenance.

It is easier, in some ways, to be single. Easy to move with the freedom of something untangled, bound for whatever brief destiny it likes. She has thought this, on occasion, wished herself away, alone, and able to fuck whoever, and then frightened herself at the prospect.

She feels drunk, aware of being drunk, aware of the compulsion to tell a personal story, to declare herself, to twirl.

You can never just climb down from something, Isla had once told her, you like to treasure up a grudge like something you’ve birthed and fed and sent to an expensive school.

A house, at night, loses all its comfortable dimensions. In the dark, one might quite as easily be walking on the ceiling as the carpet. Windows recede; the knowledge of familiar corners grows less certain. One might come upon a room and find it twice as large, busy with right angles.

The greater part of adulthood, Isla has always felt, lies in the acceptance of oneself as a fundamentally lone ranger, a person adept enough at changing a bulb and making a sandwich to get along more or less without help. One can work at this kind of independence, come to it in stages or all at once, but however much one perfects the art of paying taxes and otherwise keeping afloat, the fullness of adulthood can never be realized until a parent is beyond one’s reach. One might, at any time, sever ties and release a mother or father, might maintain such a rift for the rest of their natural lives, but death is irrevocable. Death, after all, puts an end to the argument, but it also prolongs the silence for good.

This is not altogether unusual, men insisting on striking up conversations where a nod and a grunt would suffice.

Any horror story could be said to work in two pieces: the fear of being wholly alone and of realizing that one has company.

Love, it seems, is bizarre in its moment of realization, too blatant to speak aloud.

We love people before we notice we love them, but the act of naming the love makes it different, drags it out into different light.

I’m scared, she imagines herself saying, that my house is going to fall down the hill with me inside it. I’m scared of the water in the basement. I’m scared that, if I were my wife, I would have left me, too.

Perhaps God is being fisted by the person you love most in the world, being taken apart one finger at a time until the whole of you is fucked out and pulled like a cord strung tight, white-eyed and waiting for crescendo.