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A house, unlatched, is less a house and more a set of rooms through which one might be hunted.
Outside: the rain—the fifteenth day of it, and little sign of easing. The storm drains flooded out, the nearby green and football pitch and petrol station forecourt underwater.
A silence, followed by the breaking of a silence.
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.
D’you ever have the thought, says a voice along the corridor, that it might be getting worse every day but you’re just so used to it that you aren’t noticing? Like maybe it’s really terrible and I’m just so cut off from it that I’ve lost all sense of size?
The building is crisp, masculine, yet somehow fleshly—its walls vibrating the way a creature might breathe in its sleep.
She hates making eye contact in public places, the idea of an inadvertent brush with someone best kept in peripheral blur. Some time ago, she accidentally winked at a woman while messing around with her contact lenses and the horror of that moment stayed with her well into the end of the day. Embarrassment, the potential for it, like something caught on the sole of the foot and hard to slough off again, a physical object she carries around at all times.
It’s work, in that it requires just enough concentration to keep her mind from wandering without demanding very much. She has perfected the art of pouring shapes onto the top of a latte but doesn’t often bother to do this. She enjoys writing the wrong names on the sides of people’s takeaway cups.
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
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She can catch her reflection in the polished chrome of the Gaggia and find herself surprised to recall the arrangement of her face, that her eyes and mouth and all her features come together quite in the way they appear.
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
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It’s exhausting, as it always was, to live with such a breadth of things to take up one’s attention—exhausting, the way there can be too much world, even in its final stages. Exhausting, to be so busy and so bored with no time left for either.
Their father built houses, which is to say he designed them and let someone else construct them. He was responsible for great portions of the city as it stands today, the upward heave of a population trying to scramble out of water. Stephen Carmichael: the man, the myth.
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.
A person can be thirty, thirty-five, and yet still largely described by her sisters in terms of things that happened to be true at the age of seventeen.
The sensation, then, not so much of being misunderstood as of being understood too well at one time and then never again.
Irene’s turn-ons include being bitten until her neck bleeds, being told her flaws by someone who understands them, and being fucked hard and brutal until she’s able to go to sleep.
Jude, too tall and too attractive, with their easy manner and unfailing ability to produce a spare pen or chewing gum. Jude has always made Irene want to be better, or at least to appear to be so, to be calmer and more generous, easier and less enraged.
Sleep has never been easy because sleeping brings with it the possibility of dreaming, of faces that turn queasily toward her in almost-familiar settings, of eyes leering down upon her, a sense of being watched. In dreams, she packs herself tight into a box and hopes this will be enough to evade some questing creature, holds the lid shut with two fingers and tries to ignore the sound of something breathing nearby. In dreams, fabric grows across her mouth to prevent her from screaming, and when she tries to do so she wakes and wishes she had never slept and turns the lights on to obliterate the
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A thought she once had: if she sent the same message to both Irene and Agnes, Agnes would ignore it, whereas Irene would send her thirty messages about a word that she’d misspelled. Why can’t you both just be nice to me, she thinks, and then feels pathetic.
They came first and she came second, and the weirdness of that has never gone away. She has often thought of Agnes as something that happened to her and Irene: a small and squalling baby, abandoned within a year of her birth by her mother and left to be managed by everyone else.
She will smile—her mouth, kissed thing, attempting to recall its secondary purposes—and Agnes will want to tell her where she spent today, that her father died and she saw him and then left without speaking to her sisters. That she had been so afraid to look at him but that, when she did, the sight made her feel such a heap of nothingness—not a nothingness brought on by grief but by an absence of grief, an absence of anything at all—that she had to leave or risk opening her mouth and speaking the void aloud. She won’t say this, will only bring Stephanie’s hand to her mouth and bite it, just
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pastiche
Open space, still flooded out but cleaner, wider, better sanitized, a place that might once have been referred to as suburbia but that now more typically falls under a newer umbrella term: the millponds.
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?
The world has a way of erasing its own history.
It’s not a nice quality (and, more to the point, it is not an interesting quality), this tendency to react to the prospect of intimacy with immediate panic. She is aware, painfully aware, that there is nothing more tedious than a person who turns to another and says, I don’t know, I just find it hard to stay interested in someone who actually likes me.
The concept of looking after her father was never something with which she managed to reckon—her father a figure she saw predominantly as impervious, a structure much like those on which he spent the majority of his time, unaffected by weather or external stressors.
Hard enough, at the age of eight, to speak aloud what she knew of their father: that he accepted her presence only because she was already there.
He liked, Agnes knew, to push you to excel and then to cut you down when you did so. Well done, he would say when she used a word he had taught her, now let’s find you one that’s actually difficult.
She looks at her sister, the square chin and long green eyes, the way she holds her head like something heavy she is trying to carry back from the supermarket with both hands already full.
The problem has always been the way her father treated her mother, that he loved her and then ceased to love her, the way this withdrawal caused her first to unravel and finally to die. The problem has always been the way he left them alone in the house for long periods, the way he spoke to his daughters, the way he pitted one against the other—left each to struggle for a love they should have known they couldn’t earn. The problem has always been squaring one fact with another, her father’s great ease and easy cruelty.
hagiography
She shields her eyes, turns toward the sun, and finds she cannot tell if it was always this color. She tries to remember how it feels to be warmed by something other than the wet-flannel press of humidity.
People allow therapy to work when they want it to, but the point of the process is seldom the end result. She has patients who come to her twice a week only to repeat themselves, to detail the same obsessions, same behaviors, same indifferent little squalors and embarrassments. People like to feel that they’re working on something, to feel exonerated by the simple fact of self-reflection. I know I can do better, one woman has been known to say to her on average seven times per session. No one ever gives me credit for the fact that I’m aware
Morven once said she was too wedded to this repetition, that her job was becoming a waste of her, a slow sinking in the mud. Morven, who had studied anthropology for years only to end up in whatever job would pay her, who had seemed to awaken to this squandering all at once, not only as it applied to her but as it applied to everyone. You’re going to spend your whole life with these people who never seem to get a lick better. Your whole life on their problems and then it’s going to be over and you’re never going to have breathed real air.
Attempting to recall when it was that people realized the emergency was already upon them, the warning signs noted, then duly forgotten in favor of squabbling about small things, about taxes and football championships and protests that caused offense or caused traffic, of doggedly plowing a course.
At their wedding, Morven said that she felt relieved to love her, that loving made everything easier. Enough to just be us, she said, despite everything, though this of course turned out to be untrue.
She starts to cry just like that, with her hands full and unable to wipe her face, cries about her father, or about her mother, or about herself in a pointless, waning present. She cries—perhaps—because her father once told her she was spiteful and parents, she has always felt, should have to like their children more than that.
“Well, sure,” Stephanie says, equably enough, “but there’s things you want and things you want, aren’t there? I mean, there’s things you have to do to stay alive and then any space you have left over to make staying alive feel bearable, you know?”
“Way I feel,” Stephanie says after a not uncomfortable pause, “is that there was never going to be a situation where I wasn’t going to have to work, so the least I can do is have a job that invades on the actual substance of my life as little as possible. In some ways I think it would be worse if I had a job that was more interesting but that encroached on my downtime more. At least this way I can have as much of my life as possible to hang out, to go dancing, to do this, whatever.”
Irene has always registered a low note of panic at the thought of getting rid of any possessions. She is prone to treasuring her most trivial items, ticket stubs from the ferry, old water bills, books she didn’t really like. This is never so much in the belief that they’ll one day come in handy as that the act of throwing them out will somehow trigger their long-withheld purpose, a sudden and obvious use revealing itself only as she watches the item fall from her hands.
An unspoken thought between them: the essential fact of Irene as a creature akin to a hermit crab, whose outer shell seems ostensibly tough but is only the home to a very soft animal, and the secondary fact of Jude as the only person who really knows this.
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?
The scrape of her sister like nails down a blackboard, somehow engineered to always be pissing her off. I don’t care for you to come in and organize me when I’ve organized everything for you. I don’t care to look at you, Isla thinks, when someone loves you the way Jude loves you.
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.
Jude is standing in the doorway looking the way Jude tends to look: kind of hot and kind of like they’ve been airlifted in from another genre of TV show.
As a child, Irene had imagined Agnes as something opaque, edgeless, like a pottery cup, filled with things she couldn’t see. She had snuck into the nursery and imagined smothering her in the throwaway fashion young girls often picture great acts of terrible violence.
Beck—a hot butch with a number of worthy causes—looked at the two of them when Stephanie explained where they were going that weekend and rolled her eyes. So you got serious because someone died in front of you and now you’re going on minibreak to a funeral. That’s the gayest thing I’ve ever heard.
