1.
ISLA
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. He is a new patient, referred from the counseling program at the hospital—white teeth and a voice whittled down from a scream. When he clasps his hands around one knee, the veins bunch up between his knuckles, pale blue against the jut of the bone. Isla tries not to notice this, inspects her own hands instead and the bitten-off edge of a cuticle. Bad habits; both the tendency to chew the skin around her nails and to notice a tic or a physical trait of a patient and allow it to grow, blowing up until it becomes their entirety, the characteristic against which all else seems to pale. 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. 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.
He tells her his parents were the ones who pushed for the ritual—the patient, hands unclasped, now sipping water. Isla pauses, looking up from her notepad, asks him to say that again. She’s heard of this once or twice before, archaic practices resurfacing the way trends will, exorcisms like bootcut jeans, like mixing pattern with print. Two years ago: not her patient but a woman on television, face pixelated, discussing her experiences as a child of the Cult of Our Lady. And before that: a patient recalling how her parents would often wake her at odd hours and lead her out to their Japanese garden, let the blood from her arm, and pray for deliverance. Not a rampant fad, but certainly a recurring one, things being as they are these days. A memory, briefly summoned and then swiftly, professionally set aside: Isla’s own mother, white to the lips and muttering. Isla’s own mother, her face very close: This will only hurt for a second.
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. And so, the patient, telling a story that Isla suspects he has told before: the blood on the bed linen, his mother inviting the priest, the sensation of something first beckoned, then wrenched from his guts. He believes both that the ritual worked and that it didn’t, expresses appropriate levels of skepticism toward the concept of exorcism yet can’t seem to set aside the idea that his parents did what they did for the best.
“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.”
“Thank you, Ted,” she says, thinks Ugly Knuckles, reels it in again, thinks that she ought to get someone in to look at the dark spot on the wall. The air conditioner purrs. Someone in a consulting room across the hall appears to be weeping. 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? Half the time I can’t get back to mine because the train’s fucked or flooded or whatever. Last night I got home at ten to midnight and I’m just like … “Well, that’s not bad.” Fucking council. Isla operates from a suite of offices shared with two other therapists, and the noises around her are never quite muffled enough. The building is crisp, masculine, yet somehow fleshly—its walls vibrating the way a creature might breathe in its sleep. On occasion, she will sit across from a patient and listen to the noise of other patients and other therapists in adjoining rooms, imagining them all held safe within the mouth of something vast and slumbering, unlikely to turn to one side, unlikely to swallow.
She sees the patient out, asks him to remember that their meeting will be half an hour later next week. Did you know, she hears a voice saying in reception, that magnolias evolved before bees? They’re one of the earliest flowering plants—as a species they’re something like ninety-five million years old. She heads back to her desk and removes her phone from the drawer, notes an unfamiliar number has called and left a message. She considers this for a moment, makes a mental list of probabilities: Morven might have a new number (but I don’t want to talk to Morven), Irene might have a new number (but why would Irene call), it might be the insurance company, it might be the bank. She presses a button on her phone and waits, grinding one heel into the carpet. From her vantage point near the window, she can see down into the plaza below. The water is high today, lapping up against the edges of the elevated walkways, the sunken string of high-rise buildings sharp in unaccustomed light. It is midafternoon, threatening rain, agapanthus dying in a pot beneath the heating vent, and Isla hasn’t eaten lunch. When the call connects, the voice on the line is kindly, professional. They would like to know her surname, her date of birth; they would like to tell her that her father is dead.
IRENE
On the train, a girl at the other end of the carriage vomits into her handbag and passes it to her boyfriend. The boyfriend holds the bag away from himself, makes long and meaningful eye contact with the floor. It’s too early for this, Irene thinks, then messages Jude about it. Either it’s too early or I’m getting old. Jude responds that two things can be true and asks what Irene wants for dinner.
Three seats down across the aisle, a man is talking loudly into his phone while the woman beside him makes periodic tutting noises. 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. 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.
The light in the uppermost edges of the train windows is starting to turn, evening bleeding as if from a leak-sprung ceiling: incremental, then thickening, swelling as it falls. The afternoon is wide, peach-ripe—rain incoming as always and the windows greased with mist, the city grown porous and slack around itself. The gaps between rain are so few and far between that they barely count as gaps so much as temporary glitches. It will start again, she knows, before her journey is over, before she has the chance to disembark and enjoy the respite. The irritation of that, of having missed it, will simply be something to shoulder, like everything else. Irene often feels she can detect a certain amphibious quality in the people with whom she shares transportation, shares offices, shares the ingrown cramp of city space. Some days, she will squint her eyes and imagine a waterlogged sheen to the skin of the woman who hands over change at the newspaper kiosk, the man who touches her knee on the tram. People at work complain of bloated joints, persistent headaches, though only as one complains about anything that has always been the case. I don’t know, Jude will say in the sanguine tone they tend to apply to things unrelated to the Now, that I’d even know how to go back to things being drier. I don’t know if it would suit me at all.
But the whole point is that you were suited to it once, Irene replies on the days when she’s feeling disagreeable. When we were kids, when we were teenagers, even. The whole point is you were different once, too.
I know that, Jude says, but what’s the point in dwelling. Once you start, you’ll never get to the end of it.
Jude tends to operate like this, focusing solely on what’s going on right in front of them, as if everything else is irrelevant and incapable of causing them harm. That was Then, this is Now, like a screen set up to block peripheral vision. Irene has tried it, has sat and reflected that the house was Then but this is Now. That her PhD and all she planned to do with it was Then but Jude is Now, that work is Now, that the sofa and carpet and special soft furnishings she’s bought for the flat are all Now. The train is Now, she supposes, and the moment the girl at the end of the carriage recommences throwing up is Now, although then it is Now again and Now again and again until the girl is white and dry-heaving and the boyfriend sets down the still-reeking handbag, gets up, and moves toward the door. They are two stops away from the end of the line. This train route used to be longer, but old ends to old lines have long since been abandoned, stations drowned and duly cut off, trains diverted, raised above the water where possible or else supplanted by boats and water taxis, journeys thrown off course. Irene thinks about calling her sister and then dismisses it, thinks less seriously about calling her other sister but then leans her head back against the window and sighs.
She was trying to get to the end of a thought about souls, about the strange internal silence of something one might assume to be essential and yet which serves no tangible purpose. This happens fairly often. Thoughts crop up, unwanted, despite the fact that her PhD is a relic, discarded long ago in a panic that feels foreign to her now. She works, these days, for an office that administrates payroll for remote staff and agile workspaces, and the memory of her studies operates rather like an atrophying muscle, unconditioned but still prone to spasm when pressed a certain way. She’ll think that if one assumes that the soul is distinct from the physical form, then the soul cannot communicate, for it has no recourse to speech or any other form of expression with which to sign out its meaning. She will think that if this is the case, then one might extrapolate that the soul has no need of language, which poses questions about how it enacts control or influence over the human body and what the divide between silence and language means in terms of spirituality. She will think, I should write this down, but then find that the notion recedes the more closely she looks at it, until it reveals itself as little more than a muddy act of pointillism. It’s depressing, all this thought that has nowhere to put itself, all this context and research with no place left to go. Give it a rest, she will think to herself. You have a job and it isn’t actually this.
The train rattles over a series of point blades. The sky is closing in. Later on, the summer constellations will sharpen into being, though too far back behind cloud to be seen. Her phone vibrates in her pocket. She slides it out and checks the number, feels surprise quickly curdling into annoyance as she realizes her older sister Isla is calling. What, she thinks irritably, do you want. Whatever it is, can’t it wait.
AGNES
She’s in charge of the music on Wednesdays, which is what makes the Wednesday late shift bearable. She picks music to smooth the afternoon along: inoffensive country or pop songs that obsess over long drives, over loving, over women who move a certain way. Jason describes the work as senseless killing labor, which is overdramatic and typical of the way he refers to almost everything. In Jason’s parlance, Mondays are a fascist rite of passage, commuting a soulless death parade. 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. Not to say that Agnes doesn’t also find the work tedious, but it hardly helps to go on about it.
The way it works, most days, is that he takes the orders and she makes the coffee. On Tuesdays and Thursday mornings, they have Svetlana, who fills in for Agnes and siphons sugar off into a takeaway container, an ongoing act of blatant theft that Jason is always just about to deal with. On Fridays and alternate Saturdays, they have Liam, who fulfills his duties immaculately and with a rather bone-chilling intensity, walking the café at closing time with a broom that he often appears on the precipice of turning on the customers. Agnes doesn’t mind the job, works her shifts and goes to the swimming pool, eats her lunches in the back room sitting on an upturned crate. 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.
The tips of her fingers still smell like chlorine from the pool, a smell that never seems to leach away in its entirety. She likes to swim before the late shift, though the pastime has turned out to be an expensive one. There used to be places to swim that didn’t cost eight pounds fifty, but the municipal pool closed years ago and the swimming club never reopened after a billboard came down in an electrical storm and took out most of its café. The leisure center situated on the thirteenth floor of the apartment block near work costs too much for what it is, but Agnes pays the entrance fee three times a week in order to swim in comparative silence and not have to think, for an hour, about dinner or her taxes or the number of times she’s rescheduled her cervical smear. She is not always lucky enough to be the only person at the pool, although the nature of her work allows her to pick odd times. There are any number of ways to be annoying in a public pool, even during designated lane swim, and 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 indiscriminately.
Swimming can be exceptionally calming, but only if conditions are right. Agnes swims only breaststroke, the way the majority of women without swimming caps tend to, and when she swims she thinks about things too insubstantial to stand to attention on dry land. Her mind moves with the pointless rolling momentum of B-roll, flicking blandly from songs she used to listen to, to actors who died, to dinner, to the fact that Dylan Thomas, when young, looked like literally every ugly boyfriend of every straight friend she’s ever had. 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. It is in this frame of mind that she has occasionally fucked someone in the swimming pool changing room—her brain, still buoyed along on this trivial pathway, allowing her to catch the eye of a woman in a tan-colored bathing suit, a woman with a nose ring, a woman with a buzz cut and legs of no appreciable shape. Earlier this afternoon, she pushed two fingers up inside a stranger, discovering in that moment an ugly tattoo just south of her pelvic bone, and moved her hand in a rough, hectic rhythm until the moment of release. It is very easy, she has found, to present herself as simply a body, to take her towel off in a changing stall and think of nothing and to feel much better for the break.
“Do you think,” Jason is saying now, “that it’s maybe a cultural thing? Like, Svetlana steals the sugar because she somehow values sugar? Cappuccino to take away for Stephanie. You know what I mean? Like maybe it’s something her family does.”
Agnes sets about pulling a shot of espresso, rolls her eyes as Jason leans back against the counter to look at her. Her fingers, she has realized, smell both of chlorine and a little like the woman she fingered at the swimming pool, which is likely some kind of health and safety violation, though she isn’t particularly minded to do anything about this.
“I don’t know what you mean by cultural,” she says, tamping down the coffee and locking the filter into the machine. “Svetlana grew up in basically the same place I did—she’s always going on about how we would have competed at county indoor athletics if she hadn’t broken her leg in year ten and I’d ever done any athletics.”
Agnes pulls the shot, sets it aside, and starts steaming milk.
“Well, I don’t know,” Jason says. “Maybe it’s a learned behavior. Whatever the case, it’s got to stop.” He holds up a hand to a new customer who is now leaning across the counter trying to get at the biscotti jar. “Sir, if you could just stick to your side of the counter, I’ll deal with that for you.”
Agnes pours the milk over the espresso in the takeaway cup and scribbles Jeremy on the side, slides it down to the pickup window where the customer is waiting. “Takeaway cappuccino.”
The girl is tallish—dark hair—and Agnes immediately wants to fuck her. It happens like this sometimes: impulse driven sharply upward and into her gut. She looks at the stranger now inspecting the name Jeremy on the side of her coffee cup and thinks Yes, that and then can’t remember the name she was supposed to have written.
“Sorry,” Agnes says, “I have this thing where I just—I don’t write names correctly.”
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.
“Oh right,” the girl says.
Agnes nods, shrugs one shoulder. “Always been a problem.”
“So you just”—the girl raises her eyebrows, and Agnes notes the new way her face arranges itself, the gentle upward kink to one side of her mouth, preparatory to a smile—“you just pick any name?”
“Usually, yeah.”
“Is it sort of a spite thing or a dyslexia thing?”
“Depends on the day,” Agnes says, and the girl snorts.
“Cortado to have in, for Lionel.” Agnes looks at Jason, who is now handing three bagged biscotti to the man at the other end of the counter.
“I’d better get on with that.”
“And what are you going to write on his cup?”
The girl is grinning at her now, and Agnes aims for nonchalance.
“See where the spirit takes me, I guess.”
“Well, if you need a name,” the girl says, reaching for a napkin from the box beside the stirrers, “mine’s Stephanie.”
* * *
The day has been a throwaway thing—hot too late into the afternoon, tables sticky with spilled coffee, with packet sugar opened and emptied and mashed with the back of a spoon. Agnes mops while Jason deals with the shutters. She is tired in a way that seldom leaves her, a tight, acidic exhaustion. 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. It is raining again, of course; downpour after a very brief respite. The front window is opaque with water, and the certainty of that feels deadening—the wet walk and the inner-city ferry, the trudge up nineteen flights of stairs. She takes out her phone and holds down the button to wake it up, pulls from her pocket the napkin with the number scribbled sideways up one corner: Stephanie, call me (by my name). 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. She plugs in Stephanie’s number to save it, ignoring as she does so the rush of messages and missed calls that burst across the screen: landlord, bad date, FREE delivery on six-pack of our award-winning doughnuts, use code FREE003. She is about to turn it off again when a series of more recent messages flash up, each attributed to the number saved as I (1). She schools her face, holds her hands very still—though this is pointless as no one is looking at her—thinks Be quiet nonsensically to herself.
Hello Agnes, I have tried to call a number of times now, I need to talk to you.
Agnes, please can you turn your phone on.
Agnes, I’m not sure if the gray tick means you’re not reading this or you simply haven’t seen it but either way, please can you give me a call.
Another message follows, this one sent from a different number, labeled I (2).
Agnes you stupid bitch answer the phone
She looks at this for a second, swipes a tea towel across the surface of the serving counter, and wonders which of her older sisters she ought to call back. Soon enough, she will leave work and make her way across the elevated walkway to the point where the stairs lead down toward the jetty, and pause for a moment at the highest point of the slope. You can see a long way from here—rain clouds interspersed at irregular points by narrow bursts of early-evening sun in faraway parts of the city. People getting raptured, she thinks whenever she sees this, always somewhere other than here.
Copyright © 2024 by Julia Armfield
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