Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

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

She’s good at her job, but the impulse to open her mouth and say something dreadful recurs and recurs. Not unlike the irrational desire to dash a contemplative silence to pieces or to climb to some high place and jump, so it seems a compulsion born less of intent than of the simple fact of its own possibility. The fact that she could do it is more than enough. She reels it in, always. Reels herself in tight. Any minute now, she thinks, any second, I could crash this whole day into the wall.

The stranger looks at her, white collar point sticking up on one side. She has a backpack, foldaway umbrella, good tits from the little her outfit chooses to advertise. I’d like, Agnes thinks to herself, to do all of that. I’d start at the collar and figure it out.

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.

What, she wondered, was grief without a clear departure to regret?

People like to feel that they’re working on something, to feel exonerated by the simple fact of self-reflection.

I’m really scared and I don’t think you are, like maybe this is enough for you. Or like it’s all you’re capable of wanting. And I don’t know what to do with that.

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.” “As much of your life as you’re allowed,” Agnes says without really meaning to, although Stephanie only shrugs again. “If you like.”

Irene shakes her head; thinks, for an instant, of the first time she told Jude she loved them, the moment that marked the end of waiting, of hanging around wondering what the big event of her life might be.

They had asked Irene around after more than a week of sustained texting during which Irene had at one point found herself typing I basically think the one job you have as a parent is to give your kid a childhood they don’t have to recover from and then wondering why on earth she was saying this to someone she barely knew.

Jude nodded, looking at her in an even way. So are you very into God then? Irene shrugged. No, not really. I don’t even necessarily believe in God, it’s just the idea of God, you know. Like someone telling you what you’re supposed to be doing, how you’re supposed to be spending your days. Jude gave this a considering look and then took Irene’s glass from her hand and kissed her and Irene thought OK and then Thank God and then how ironic that was.

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. Agnes considers saying something to them about this—Hi, Jude, it’s really cool how you’re a casual afternoon cooking show and you’re functionally married to my sister who’s like one of those unethical TV documentaries about a woman who went mad and murdered her entire family—but then remembers that Stephanie is standing next to her.

Wide waters, sloe-black and dense with detritus:

She beckons, turning away to gesture at something that becomes clear as Agnes approaches, edging her way past a graveyard of rain-bleached detritus: a disused barbecue, a couple of plastic folding chairs.

She takes up the piece of card and the website printout and places them both quite deliberately in the pile of detritus intended for the bin.

She would know that she heard her mother in the kitchen. Know, too, when she first met her stepmother, that she had heard her voice before. She would know this, but in time would cease to be quite so sure she knew it, the telling and retelling rendering it a dream, an act of childhood sleepwalking. She had simply made up a conversation between two women who should not, by rights, have known each other. She had stood, asleep and dreaming, at the bottom of the stairs.

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 certain distrust, she once wrote, pervaded early forms of Christianity when it came to the practice of silent prayer. Those who didn’t speak their prayers aloud were subject to significant social prejudice. What, after all, could they be wanting to speak to God about that they needed to keep from everybody else? Beneath this fragment, she had scribbled the words silence and lying? silence and schemes? followed by the semiunintelligible musing that If silent prayer is untrustworthy then what does that say about the God you’re praying to?

The rescue is the point, or at least the idea that reversal is still imminent. There is little the imagination can do with an ending that is already assured.

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.

It’s so hard, this girl said once, to want to save the world when you feel that you shouldn’t have to.

The night is wide, unstill, implacable. The city like a wishbone, ready to break in two.