Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

Jude comes to work, deals with people increasingly likely to call them a cunt out of panic or exhaustion or simply because they want to call someone a cunt. Goes home again. Sleeps it off. Tries to remember what it was that they did, or liked, or expected, before all this became so all-consuming. Comes back to work again.

It is easy, Jude has always reflected, to love a difficult woman. Easy to become the solid place around which she gathers herself, all her insecurities and rages and vendettas, the mooring from which she hangs. Irene is a fucking nightmare, and lovable for it. Lovable because she asks consistently to be loved, a desire that streams from her spiteful, sparkling face, from the way she kisses, from the way she’ll sometimes jerk awake at night and stare around in panic. She expresses a constant desire to be better—tries hopelessly to cook, tries to let go of grudges—yet Jude loves the specific truth of what she is prior to trying as much as the fact that she always tries again.

Agnes in general is so strange to Stephanie, such a palpably dissonant mix of tender and standoffish, given to flinching away from affectionate gestures and returning half an hour later to ask for a kiss. She is good at housework, good at being quiet, good at fucking, terrible at listening to the tail ends of sentences, and always asking to have things explained to her twice. Her moods are unreliable, sudden spells of bad temper whipping up into snappishness that abates almost as soon as it manifests. Things that appear to upset her: being asked to share her thoughts when she doesn’t feel like it, being looked at affectionately for too long, loud noises, cold nights, her father’s house, the suggestion that she might want to talk to a professional about her relationship with her family.

Once upon a time, she watched a movie in which a man looked at a woman with whom he would never be allowed to live happily, surveyed her face as if surprised by every minute detail. Each time, he said, you happen to me all over again.

Her absence—itself like a presence, the sensation of something just over the curve of a hill, perhaps approaching, perhaps moving farther away. No one knows where she ended up, if she is even still alive. Their father behaved, for the most part, as if she had never existed, explaining once that she had been dead to him from the minute she left.

The idea of looking like her mother is something she has never considered. Having no recourse to photographs and no reliable accounts, she has imagined her mother only as a kind of blank, like the thumb planted square over the lens of a camera. Impossible to imagine herself resembling someone without features, without the eyes or mouth required to make up a face.

Looking like her father is, frankly, bad enough. She can’t quite articulate the discomfort at the root of all this, the fact that it sometimes feels less like discomfort and more like out-and-out fear. She can’t explain it, except to say that the thought of looking like someone seems only a prelude to the thought of acting like them. How long, if you really resemble a person, can you stop yourself from falling in step with them? How long until it turns out you are where they were hiding all along?

Isla nods and looks discreetly at the clock. 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.

Did you ever, she once said to Isla, apropos of goodness knows what, read any of the weird shit that actually goes on in Revelations? In the Book of Revelations, I mean. People think it’s just hellfire and brimstone, four horsemen and out, but actually the end times go on and on and on.

The rain appears worse because it is so. Hard days of little respite, of downpours turning at last to hail and then back again. Lightning, too, more often than usual. Families abandon rooms given up to damp, awake to leak-sprung windows and kitchens underwater. People throw themselves into deepening water, people disappear. And more than this. Strange things blown in on inner-city waters; a man who calls a radio station reporting what he claims to be the body of a seal thrown up against his door. People reach into their gutters to unstick the scuttled shards of razor clams and strange crustaceans. Oystercatchers roost on washing lines strung out upper windows, heads bent together as if comparing notes. A washing in, or a blurring together. One can picture the sea and the floundering remains of the city as less distinct, a bleeding in of lines once drawn in washable ink.

Agnes registers a curious sense of grief for her previous solitude, how easy it was to move through spaces as a single entity compared to the strange, hulling loneliness of waiting for someone with whom you arrived as a pair. 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.

Strange to think how seldom she has seen the top of their building from the ground, how often the high points of the city are obscured, lost to low clouds and the murk of constant downpour. A skyline incomplete without its crowning layer, a head snicked off at the neck.

The night is mauve, takes up too much space between them, and she rounds the pool at a half run, grabs Stephanie’s face, and kisses her—stupid kiss, insincere with alcohol and yet simultaneously too earnest to exist at any other time.

Organize, organize, organize. It is true, she thinks—with the pointless candor of a realization reached much too late—it is true that she always led Morven to believe she couldn’t be moved from one spot. She has always liked routine, safety, certainty, has liked being able to provide it for others, however much the flip side of that can easily become pressure, a dogged need to keep the day running at all costs. She had thought—assumed, it appears—that this was what Morven loved about her, that steadiness, the ability to plow on regardless of disaster. The fact, then, that Morven had ended up wanting to leave for this exact reason was destabilizing.

She sighs, drains her glass, and registers a painful stab of longing for Irene. Her sister, always resisting her steadiness, yet simultaneously demanding of it. Her sister, always reliably in need of an older sibling, reliably grudging about that need. Agnes, too, of course, although that’s different. Harder, somehow, to know what she is to her, or ever has been.

The problem with love, of course, is that it frequently asks too much of unlovable people. It can be hard, on even the best of days, to compel oneself to be selfless and patient and undemanding or even halfway reasonable when one is not given to any of those behaviors. But these are nonetheless the qualities that love demands.

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.

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

A stupid thing, Irene thinks, to have allowed a silence to grow like this. Silence, which was once the whole point of her studies, now uncorked and spreading wet and sticky over everything it touches—her relationship with Jude, her sisters.

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.

The problem, it occurs to her now, is anger—the huge, heavy, futile weight of anger and how good she and her sisters have always been at it. Anger and silence, as always, the way they allow it to rage out of all control.

She hadn’t pictured so much tiredness, so much bickering and scrapping, or the many little nicks and insincerities that amount to a normal sort of life. Even so, the truth of what she hoped for remains, lodged safe in the sink of Jude’s shoulders, in the way they kiss her, the easy manner in which they carry her to bed. It is, after all, enough to have this and be happy, if only in the fleeting moments that all other thoughts recede.

She has wondered, before now, whether thinking about God is part of this. Wondered whether endlessly circling the same topics, harping hopeless and uncertain on God and on silence and deep, drowning lack have simply functioned as ways to keep her unhappy, keep her tight in the grip of an answer she can’t help seeking. Perhaps, after all, God is simply a poached egg and a yolk cooked just as it should be. 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. Perhaps God is all of that and kissing afterward, kissing most of all, sore-mouthed and messy, half asleep and trying to remember if you locked the door and if you need to set your phone alarm for seven. Perhaps God is all of that and an apology.

Looking at Isla now, and from Isla to Irene, she tries to sort through the murk of her feelings toward them: the jostle of love and resentment, nostalgia, familiarity, the feeling of barely knowing them at all.

“We’re so grateful,” she says again, and then, “to your mother for the Gift and to you for the Granting. The world is out of step, you know, and the Granting will put it back in order.” Somewhere in Irene’s memory, a glitter of words gleaned from the website printout: The process of the Granting ensures that the intended object is offered over or, as it might be, exchanged. We must free ourselves from such binding tenets as “shame” when it comes to an act of salvation.

“We are grateful to your mother, too, of course,” Caroline adds, her gaze shifting swiftly from Irene to Isla before fixing tight upon Agnes again, “for the grace of her sacrifice. To set up an act of this nature takes not only years but a certain flexibility. You need a person born for the purpose, you see, born to someone wedded to the task. We are grateful—of course we are—to your mother for stepping aside. Though it was a terrible thing that after all her sacrifice she felt unable to stick around to see our work completed. She will miss out on a wonderful reckoning, but perhaps she was simply overeager. We will all give ourselves, in the end.”

She understood that, to restore balance, we would need to make sacrifices, to give something over to the cause.

In the second before she attempts to rip herself free, Agnes understands her father for the red herring he has always been and her life for the accident it isn’t. Sigils on the walls and floors and tables, her photograph laid out in its frame, the whole house set up like a soundstage for a long-intended final act.

What happens next—there are too many people. The article Irene’s mother once quoted for her ran as follows: The building is lightweight and built for family—one might marvel at the tensile strength of the mounted structure, the legs that extend to a seemingly infinite degree. There are issues to raise here, of course. Theoretically, the higher the structure is lifted, the more unstable it becomes, particularly when perched on what amounts to little more than a set of extendable stilts. The number of occupants, the weight of the house, the height of the structure might all, in certain circumstances, be an issue. However, it would be churlish to dismiss such a project in pursuit of a theory that is unlikely to require imminent testing.

The unfamiliar Persian rug, which some of the intruders have rolled up and set aside without Agnes’s notice, revealing a vast rectangular pattern of sigils scratched into the concrete floor. She looks down at this, as if from a very great height—the faces and markings gouged deep, the words written and overwritten: in time in time in time in time in time.

I think all this is my fault, Isla thinks to herself, tries to remember when it was she last thought this. I think I was supposed to sort this out. Her sister at her side and her sister on the floor and all of them, again, in this house that wants to kill them. All of them together and yet never enough on one another’s side to save them from disaster.

No, Isla thinks, and then, I’m not going to fucking drown. And then, I was supposed to sort this out. And then, I was meant to. And then.

What comes next will be trickier, of course. Snowfall and a drop in temperature, a world tilting, the suddenness of something new. Best to keep on, wherever this is possible. Best, in time, to swim back from a drowning place and continue, struggle back into dailiness, and live with the icing-over of windows, the frozen pipes and bad wiring and increasing impossibility. Better, in whatever small way, to go on until it becomes too cold to do so. Better to hold one’s hands to whatever warmth there is, to kiss and talk and grieve and fuck and hold tight against the whitening of the sky.