Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

On the afternoon of her father’s death, Isla takes a session with a man who was exorcised of evil spirits at the age of seventeen.

She lives in horror of slip-ups, practices saying their names aloud to counter her mental Rolodex: patients listed in order as Bug Eyes, as Taps His Foot When He’s Horny, as Big Hands, as Talks Like a Robot, as Tits. She’s good at her job, but the impulse to open her mouth and say something dreadful recurs and recurs.

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.

“I think they wanted to feel better,” he says. “I think they got it into their heads that something was wrong that could only be solved this way. They wanted to feel like they were taking action, given how little they could do anywhere else. It’s weird, because I don’t remember them being that religious, at first.” Toward the end of the session, Isla asks if he believes in the devil. “I don’t,” he replies—clasps his hands so the knuckles pulse as if filling and retracting—“I don’t, but I feel him anyway.”

Irene tips her head, tries to avoid the gaze of the woman sitting directly opposite. 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.

It’s depressing, all this thought that has nowhere to put itself, all this context and research with no place left to go.

Possessed of a sort of beady-eyed anti-charisma and no sense of volume control, he makes an art of rendering every interaction nine times as difficult as it needs to be.

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.

Agnes doesn’t like to have her phone on, treats it with the general apprehension due to anything prone to bite. Phones are how people reach you, and nothing very good can come from that.

Remember this: the world as it once was.

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.

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. 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.

Isla gazes out beyond the awning for a moment, tries to focus her mind on the task at hand. I think all this is my fault, she thinks to herself, looks down at her phone again, and finds it has locked. I think I was supposed to sort this out. Doesn’t know what she means by this. Pulls her map up again and squints at the route.

Unpleasant to say, but there’s no way to bury a body in earth that is flooded out.

Morbid, but still a subject requiring attention, the administration of death as due an update as anything else in unprecedented times.

One could bury one’s dead, once upon a time, and now it is impossible. Hardly something to be grieved in itself but still a lessening, a fact consigned to history along with almost everything else.

The true genius of Carmichael’s design has always seen its best expression in the domestic; he is the hero of the domestic space, its veritable caped crusader, snatching homes from sites grown uninhabitable and lifting them up out of harm’s way.

Irene always said it was showy that their father chose to live out in the millponds, where the water had already taken hold. Very “Look at me, look how well my house works, look how easy it can be to live.” He could just as easily have built himself a high-rise and ignored the problem, but he loved the illusion of harm’s way.

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?

It’s no wonder, she thinks, that her mother came to feel that something terrible was coming down upon her, in a house that seemed always to anticipate disaster.

and a mark she doesn’t recognize: little holes for eyes and something like a face scratched around it, slash of mouth like someone has taken the metal corner of a ruler to the table and dragged it across. She moves her thumb over this image, tries to recall Irene carving it into the wood and can’t, then leans closer, picks out what appear to be words scratched in the tiniest text to ring the face in several widening circles: in time in time in time in time in time in time in time in time. Jagged shape of each t, scored sharply. What a strange game one of them must have been playing, though exactly what it was escapes her memory.

It is difficult, these days, to know how to be. Not a new phenomenon, of course, but one lent a certain urgency by the situation. People protest, or forget to protest. People hoard food, hoard medical supplies, use them up and hoard them again. People get on, shop, work, attend lectures, complain that there is never anything good on TV. They suspect there is less time than predicted, throw parties to celebrate the endless ending, pretend the coming on of something new. It’s always been this way, always worsening. A contradiction: the fact of something always being the case and yet that case being flux, deterioration. Best not to recollect that once there were any number of options and now there are fewer.

The world has a way of erasing its own history. It can be easier to participate in this—to forget that one could once quite easily buy red meat, take the bus, visit certain countries—easier than it is to resist.

In bed, Stephanie turns toward the wall and goes on sleeping. Agnes glances at her, registers the horror movie beat of someone trying to evade the killer and thinking they’ve been caught. 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. Nothing more tedious than a person who wears their aversion to commitment as a blazon of their own originality. I don’t know what it is, why I find things harder than other people. I guess love is just different for me.

As a very young child she had often imagined her father to be in some sense carved or otherwise artificially constructed, while the rest of the people she knew she assumed to be hatched from eggs.

The first time you lose a parent, a part of you gets trapped there, trapped less in the moment of grief than in the knowledge of the end of childhood, the inevitable dwindling of the days. It is a concept that Isla often explains to her patients, leaning forward to describe the various forms of stasis. One can start to more fully understand oneself as finite, as coming from a person who was finite and having to inherit that trait, she has said on more than one occasion. When my mother died, she is more careful not to say, I became aware of the limits of things, of the fact of my own ending.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Isla hisses, slapping a palm down on the table in annoyance, “don’t you ever get tired of going on like this?” Irene sits back in her chair. Only you make me like this, she wants to say. You think I’m like this and that makes me worse.

The problem, of course, has always been her father, the sense of him shattered across her—first broken and then embedded. You act like this, as Jude said once, because you were raised by a psychopath who made you believe everyone was somehow in opposition to you or out to con you or waiting to abandon you.

She wipes her face with her shirt cuff and tries to remember the last time she got a decent night’s sleep. You were talking, Jude said this morning, passing a hand over her head, tilting her up to meet their eyes. You kept going on about noises, you said there were noises downstairs.

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.

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.

Your mother did something very selfish, Isla—she remembers this statement without warning, without any sense of how or why—it’s worth your knowing how selfish she’s been.

Isla looks down at the box in her hand, at the wineglass, tries to gauge the mess she would make if she dropped them. 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.

In the long second between the lift coming to a halt and the doors opening, Agnes looks at her and finds that she wants to tell her something. Wants to hold on to her arms and tell her that sometimes she worries she’s never felt anything but a blanketing sense of dread.

Agnes thought about the way some people know how to say your name better than others, say it like a fist rapped smart against a door.

“Just one of the many daily joys of living in exciting times. I don’t know about you, but it feels to me like it’s sort of worse at the moment, or getting worse, or something. But then I also don’t really know what we’re supposed to judge that against, or do about it, so I guess what’s the point in worrying?”

Television these days confines itself largely to constructed reality, to game shows where people compete to pay a month’s worth of bills or audition potential roommates. On a show Irene has found herself watching from time to time, the host conducts a series of contestants around a flat, then asks what they’d be willing to pay in rental fees. After all the contestants have entered sealed ballots, the host takes the top two bidders into a head-to-head. Irene can’t remember the last time she watched something interesting. She can’t remember the last time a new film came out. She has a friend who, at an early stage in her life, wanted to be an actress but was informed around age eighteen that there wasn’t a lot of call for that these days.

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.

Irene sits still for a moment, looks down at these little notes that their mother used to leave around the house for them to find and fight over, each addressed to the pair of them, never left for one and not the other. Dearest girls, reads one folded down toward the bottom of the pile, I know it won’t seem like it now, or even later, but things will begin to make sense in good time. She looks at this last, turns it over as if expecting more. No idea of the context that would have explained this, her mother’s writing listing sideways as if keen to be up and gone.

Irene finished the wine, accepted a glass of something stronger, and explained that she was writing her thesis on Christianity and silence, on the concept of a God who said nothing. God to me is something remote, a force that speaks through other people, and I think I’m starting to find that really depressing. Jude looked at her, and Irene felt a pleasurable sting of something, a vibration like a fingertip set against a string. Why depressing? Jude asked, and Irene shrugged, touched a knuckle to the rim of her glass, and made a circle. I think I’m just getting bogged down in how lonely it is, or how much I want to be spoken to, or something. In the Old Testament, God’s constantly rabbiting on, you can’t get through two verses without him giving orders to someone or setting up some ridiculous test or going on about himself. But then after the Apocrypha he clams up and you don’t really hear from him again. He retreats into this upper echelon of heaven like when a person gets really famous and it’s impossible to get through to them anymore. It makes everything more the job of an interpreter, and it makes us more reliant on angels and secondhand information and what people think it is God’s saying. I think I’ve started finding that difficult, or sad, or something, I don’t know why. And obviously that’s before you even get onto the more crucial question of what’s the point of further education, end time or no. Jude nodded, looking at her in an even way. So are you very into God...

There was a pause, people looking at their plates. Irene considered telling everyone that she had recently read a newspaper article about a newfangled indoor method of farming cows and then thought better of it. It would have involved explaining that she had cried for forty-five minutes in her office cubicle at the thought of their never being allowed outside. The pause extended, unfurled itself into the beginnings of real discomfort. Irene opened her mouth, imagined saying that after she’d stopped crying she’d spent twenty minutes googling veal farming, cows in the dark, do cows need sunlight to be happy, and so on until she realized it was time for lunch.

Anyway, at one point she sort of explained her symptoms to me, or I guess explained how she experienced it. Sometimes everything would be normal except she couldn’t find any of the right words, like someone had come along and wiped them. She said it could manifest as distortions in her vision, or like she was hallucinating different senses, hallucinating tastes and smells. She said once she thought she saw her own father, like he’d just wandered in from another timeline and was standing there, like she’d taken a wrong turn and ended up somewhere sidelong—a slightly different point in her own life. She said it was hard to tell what was real, she’d want to take a photo of a moment to check everything she was seeing in front of her was actually there. It was so strange, completely different from how I guess I’ve been taught to think about dementia? And she didn’t seem particularly unsettled, actually. I think there was some comfort in being able to remember it well enough to recount it, even if what she was recounting was distressing in itself.”

“And what did you say, exactly?” Isla now, in her therapy voice, the voice that strove for moderation while surreptitiously checking its watch.

“King Lear and his dyke daughters,” Irene said, and then wished she hadn’t.

“I don’t think,” Agnes now said, slowly and with the slightest inkling of a frown between the dark brows that were so like their father’s, “that you can fix however many years of him playing us off against one another by just having a little three-way chat and hoping he feels our combined wrath, or whatever. You know?” And here she looked to Irene, the first indication so far that she cared about Irene’s opinion. “I mean, we are what we are by now, aren’t we?”

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?

Funny to think about Isla, the only one who ever actually came out to him, now demanding solidarity. Isla, who had told him what Irene and Agnes never could and had absorbed what she later referred to as his feedback, while he went on knowing nothing about what Irene did with her days or who she lived her life with, went on knowing nothing about Agnes at all.

The three of them, trying to be less isolated and frequently failing, trying to be less conclusively the product of their past.