Saving Agnes by Rachel Cusk Page A

winters and hot summers, had rejoiced in the ebullience of spring. An old taste of innocence and freedom rose salty in her mouth and was gone. The bare pavements and monotonous skies of her exile echoed everywhere the stark chords of disenfranchisement, and in the thrall of its hideous music shewas suddenly hit by a terror so large and black she thought it would surely crush her.
    The crack in the wall was getting bigger. It had begun to slope off to the left, wiggling crazily like a mountain path on a road map. Sometimes they could hear scratching and rustling sounds coming from within, and Agnes wondered if strange creatures might begin to squeeze out from between its jaws. Nina said it was mice. Merlin said it was sediment.
    â€˜Shouldn’t we get something done?’ Agnes asked him one night.
    â€˜No point,’ he replied, biting into a crescent moon of pizza. ‘The council are going to knock it down anyway. We’ll be long gone by the time the walls cave in.’
    â€˜Where are we going to go?’ She sipped red wine and focused her mind on this future dilemma from the comfort of her armchair.
    â€˜Dunno. I might buy a house, I suppose.’
    â€˜Oh.’
    Agnes, whose thoughts had been running more along the lines of the three of them with sleeping bags cosily bedding down in deserted shopping malls, was at a loss for words. The singularity of both his personal pronoun and his affluent future made her feel apprehensive. After a while, she said: ‘Merlin, do you get depressed at the thought of working? For ever, I mean.’
    â€˜Not really.’ He put down his plate, now adorned with bare, smiling pizza crusts, and picked up his glass. ‘It depends what you mean. Do I find working in itself depressing – enough, say, to give it up and find an alternative way of life; or do I find the notion of eternity depressing, the idea that the only thing separating me from my own funeral is a load of paycheques. They’re two different things.’
    â€˜Whatever,’ said Agnes irritably. ‘The first one.’
    â€˜Do I find work innately depressing?’ Merlin sat back and rubbed his stomach. He had become rather pompous since hehad started this job, she thought. That was what happened to men. Once they started wearing suits, they began to get their personalities off the peg too. ‘No, not really. I mean, it depends on whether you have anything you’d rather be doing.’
    â€˜Well, everyone does, surely?’ said Agnes impatiently. ‘Everyone would rather go to the beach or watch a movie than sit in an office, wouldn’t they?’
    â€˜To a point, yes. But day in and day out, I don’t know. It’s easier if you’re rich, probably. You can cater to your own boredom thresholds.’
    â€˜But rich people go on working, even when they can’t possibly spend all the money they’ve made.’ Agnes wondered why she never met people like the ones she referred to so often in her arguments. ‘I would never do that.’
    â€˜That’s why you’re not rich,’ said Merlin. ‘For rich people, money is the most interesting thing in the world. They enjoy making it. For everyone else – well, it’s a means to an end, I suppose. A way of eating and buying what you need and having a holiday. And a way of passing time.’
    â€˜That’s it!’ Agnes shrieked, banging the table top so that a wave of wine from Merlin’s glass slopped over the rim into a blood-coloured puddle. ‘That’s exactly what I mean! Passing time – don’t you find that depressing? I mean, if all we’re doing is trying to pass time, why don’t we just kill ourselves?’
    When she was younger, that sort of comment would have aroused groans and sighs from Agnes’s family. She was so melodramatic, they would complain. Why did she have to get so worked up about everything? Merlin