Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

Irene pictures herself standing up in front of countless of her father’s friends, contemporaries, associates. Pictures herself saying Well, I used to eat chalk and vomit because I wanted to be a Christian mystic and I think a different sort of dad would have dealt with that differently.

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.

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. She looks down at the jacket and bag in her arms, wishes in a pathetic sort of way that Isla could gather herself enough to take charge of the situation because she isn’t equipped to do this herself. Sisterhood, she thinks, is a trap. You all get stuck in certain roles forever.

On occasion, she would note the impulse to run away and would instead do something rational like make the bed.

One of Stephanie’s housemates, 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.

“It is not my fault,” Agnes says after a moment and in an infuriatingly measured voice, “if you have certain expectations of our relationship that I never invited you to have. It is not my fault,” she adds, “that you insist on pretending that being sisters means anything to any of us.” “Well, it should,” Isla snaps, and notes that the blood from her hand is now dripping down into the sleeve of her sweater. Morven’s voice: You never think anybody likes you. “Well, it doesn’t,” Agnes replies, and then Irene is back, looking between them in apparent bewilderment, and Isla resists the urge to tell her that for all her academics she has the brain of a tin monkey clapping cymbals together. “What’s going on?” “Isla was just expressing herself,” Agnes says calmly.

Imagines her voice overlapped by their father’s—the viciousness to him, brittle trace at the tops of his teeth. The way he could be funny, genial, then breathtakingly cruel. He would get irrationally angry when you weren’t having a good time, when you couldn’t just get on with it. Can’t you just not be, he said to Isla when she told him she was gay. She feels furious in a way that is like being possessed, an emotion not entirely her own infesting her. “And that’s good,” she says. “It’s fine that you had an easier time of it and it’s fine that you never had to cope with our mother before he fucked off with your mother and—”

“It’s not about that, Agnes. It’s just hard to accept that basically the last thing our father did was choose to make a fool out of me and Irene for not taking his money and reward you for the same thing.”

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.

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.

They check their phone again briefly, note a message from Irene. I’m going to try to cook again tonight—a woman should cook, so I’m hearing. Yesterday evening, Irene tried to make a casserole and instead ended up burning the bottom out of a saucepan and setting off the smoke alarm. Prior to this disaster, Jude had leaned up against the kitchen counter to watch her: orange light from the overheads ringing her head like a corona and the way she clattered pots and pans, doing everything all wrong. 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. But just assuming my efforts are not successful, Irene texts as follow-up, I’ll also buy a microwave dinner. Just covering all bases. I love you, she adds, I just think you’re really fucking neat.

They went out onto the covered veranda and Jude pulled two emergency cigarettes from a pack in their back pocket, lighting one for Stephanie with a gesture that leaned toward chivalry in a way they couldn’t entirely help. Jude has always found it difficult not to hold doors, not to metaphorically doff a cap in a manner that feels increasingly like pantomiming gender at women who haven’t actually asked for it.

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.

It’s difficult to explain the appeal of such a painstaking act of acclimatization, except to say that every small step forward feels gently monumental. A few nights ago, Agnes rolled over in bed and fixed Stephanie with the sort of quiet, unworried look she only ever seems to take on during periods of darkness. The real Agnes, as Stephanie has come to think of this look, only visible when the light’s too bad to see it. I feel, Agnes said that night, apropos of nothing very much, like I’ve known you for years, and Stephanie smiled at this. Isn’t it odd that we never say that to the people we’ve actually known for years?

That’s not right, though, Stephanie said when Agnes had finished this story. We heard shouting. Jude and me. We were out on the veranda and it looked like a commotion, people trying to get away from something. Agnes frowned for a second as though in serious thought. I didn’t think I made a scene, she said after a moment. When she came for me that third time she grabbed my hair so hard I thought she was going to pull it out. But I don’t remember people looking. I just pushed her off me. That’s what I remember. I don’t think that’s what happened, Stephanie said. Baby, I think what happened is you screamed when she pulled your hair. I think what happened was everyone was looking when you threw the ashtray. I don’t know, Agnes said, picking at the skin around her thumb for a moment and then looking away. I don’t know how that could be true if it isn’t what I remember. She laid her hands flat on the kitchen table, seemed to inspect each fingernail in turn. When I was little, she continued, I used to think I was being quiet but then my dad would get angry anyway, so I guess it’s possible to be wrong about things. She added, in a low voice: I hate being touched when I’m not expecting it.

Agnes has no interest in looking like her mother, no interest in the idea of commonality, any quirks or expressions or features they might have shared. 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?

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.

It was a strange scene, colored by the unpleasant shimmer of a hangover, unfamiliar voices too loud and Irene somewhere across the room saying Yes, all three of us to someone Isla didn’t know. I’ve actually heard that on rare occasions people even have multiple straight daughters, if you can imagine that.

The cities appear fuller because they are. It might, in theory, seem wiser to decamp to higher ground, to places where the crush is less overwhelming, but in truth the cities are often the only places capable of sustaining any infrastructure. It is hard to shore up places that have been left without insurance, without plans for a future that looks like this. People make tracks for rural communities, only to find them ill-prepared, ill-financed, and drowning.

It’s still hard, though, all this pushing forward. Sometimes I think hope is a far less satisfying feeling than despair.

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.

Her father had remarried mere days after his divorce was finalized, had kept his daughters from the wedding as he would later keep them from their mother’s funeral, and the lack of control she felt over this brief span of weeks would sit with her long after the sting of the losses themselves had dulled.

She is working in the living room with one eye on the television; a group of people bearing placards about benefit cuts and collapsing social care have walked into the foyer of a dark-fronted building and glued themselves to the carpet. The image on the screen is momentarily chaos—arms aloft, a lunatic swing of the camera—and then abruptly switches to a man in a tremendous yellow raincoat who complains to an unseen reporter that if they really wanted to get their point across they could think about being less of a pain. What does this achieve, other than pissing everybody off and getting shit all over the carpet?

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.

Later on, she would go back to bed, take the memory away, and presently forget it. A story, recollected enough, becomes a fiction. 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.

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.

Cold shrink in the depths of her chest, reaching around toward her backbone. 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?

Silence, she wrote at one point, as part of a larger thought she never got to the end of, is not only a function of religion but of the Church as a whole. Silence pervades faith, but more than that it pervades the institution, a constant deafening silence, a holding back of crimes, of secrets, of the many sordid things the Church would rather not be known.

Agnes has heard sirens, more than once, sirens too loud for what she pictures when she thinks of sirens: ambulances, helicopters, isolated tragedies. This latest noise, whatever it was (and how even to describe it? The boom, the blast?) falls in with a larger percussion, the sense of a city shuddering itself apart.

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.

She is thinking this when it occurs to her that she ought to call Irene. A feeling out of nowhere, longing like a kick in the stomach: to be anything to anyone. She stands where she is and tries to imagine what she would say if she called, whether she might beg her sister to treat her like a competent older sibling, to at least make a show of considering her thus. Do you have any problems you need fixing? Could you maybe invent one and send it my way?

Irene’s finger throbs where she ripped the nail and she looks at Jude and wishes she knew how to stop making messes of things. 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.

Where, then, will they go, and how will they manage? She has listened to the radio, heard pundits speculating about a crisis point (a term she has been hearing since childhood), heard people arguing that this or that statistic is exaggerated, that nothing is changing, that everything is already lost.

Nearly there now. You can hear it if you listen: the slow dissolution, the panic becoming something else.

People do what they have always done, in the knowledge that choice is limited. Strange alarms go off in various parts of the city, once installed as a means of warning against something that no longer requires pointing out.

I feel embarrassed that his decisions are still governing the way I behave.” She pauses. “We don’t have to like each other or want to see each other. We don’t have to be family in the way I’ve insisted—I think I understand that now. I just don’t want the reason we aren’t a family to be anything to do with him.”

long strip of absence in the dark reflecting glass. Life, she understands, is a collapsing down, a succession of memories held not in sequence but together, occurring and recurring all at once. She’s in her father’s kitchen at the age of twenty-four, but so is she at age five, age nine, age eleven. She is standing where she is with her sisters and her father is here, and yet he isn’t.

“Do you think,” she says, “the problem was Dad, or did we just use it as an excuse for everything?”

“I want to apologize,” Caroline says now—it occurs to Irene, as she speaks, that her voice is priestly, liturgical, someone leading others through the catechism—“I want to apologize to you for the lack of restraint some of us have shown in recent months.”

“I know there have been others,” Caroline continues, following Agnes’s gaze and nodding at the woman in a manner that appears to reproach her, “people who have approached you or otherwise lost their grip. I can only apologize for this. If I had to blame it on anything”—here, a woman sings through the air in Agnes’s memory, mounts the embankment, and then streaks downward to splinter across the jetty—“I could only put it down to excitement. Anticipation, maybe. Everyone has been so very keen to meet you. That’s no excuse, of course.” Her voice is uncannily reasonable. “We’ve always been here, so we should really have better control. But, things being as they are, I think some of our number can be forgiven for abandoning their manners.”

“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.

She has been moving toward Agnes so calmly that her steps resemble nothing so much as the blocked-out pattern of a dance. She reaches Agnes now, takes her hair in one fist with a gentle grip, and then smiles at her. “Your mother was one of us from a young age, you know. She gave us to you,” she says now, “and you to us. It will be very easy, my darling, you mustn’t worry about that.”

Her lungs burn and she writhes, registers sheer rage at the thought of her youngest sister, whom she has never had time enough to love, being taken away from her.

They float there—the two of them, unable to speak, unable to move from the spot where their father’s house was, where their sister was, only minutes ago. They watch the snow fall and Irene thinks Isla and then doesn’t know how to finish the thought; Isla no, Isla wait, Isla help me. She holds her sister—her other sister—up against her chest and tries to picture what comes next.