‘She’s like a goddamned mosquito,’ complained Greta. ‘Zip zip, buzz buzz — THWACK!’ She grinned. ‘I used to have this really neat electronic insect exterminator back home.’
The strange coincidence of Jean’s new-found ecstasy with a sudden recurrence of phone calls from someone called David from the Church of Christ the Evangelist, as he unfailingly announced himself, could not but solve the mystery.
‘So what’s with this David geezer?’ Greta boldly asked. She had lately taken to spicing up her narrative with eclectic touches of native vocabulary. Agnes saw it as a bad sign that she had resumed relations with London Transport. ‘Are you two going together or what?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ Jean replied. ‘If that’s how you want to put it.’
‘I do,’ Greta assured her.
‘Well, I suppose we do see each other quite often,’ replied Jean, feigning a puzzlement designed to suggest she had never thought of it in quite that way before. ‘He’s a very nice man — so, so dignified, if you see what I mean.’
‘Dignified Dave,’ said Greta rolling her eyes. ‘Hot damn.’
Further questioning revealed that David was a born-again Christian and that Jean had lately taken to accompanying him to church. It was really very interesting, she said. Quite fascinating, in fact.
‘She must love him,’ opined Greta as Jean left the office. ‘She must love him a lot.’
When Agnes thought of love, she saw her lover, or her ex-lover as he should now be called, thus in visions: the sucking syringe finger, the sweet steel needle, penetrating himself as he had her once upon a time. She knew nothing could compete with the liquid love he channelled into his own veins, careful not to spare a drop, no love, ultimately, lost between them. She decided she should get an AIDS test and asked Nina pointedly one Saturday morning how one could best contrive to have such a thing.
‘No need,’ said Nina shortly, unruffled by Agnes’s accusing eyes and brave tone. ‘He wasn’t a junkie. He didn’t use needles.’
She returned to the perusal of the magazine in her lap, while Agnes experienced a surge of annoyance, unmitigated by relief, that she should have to request details of her lover’s intimate habits from her treacherous ex-friend.
Curiosity, however, compounded her plight and she could not refrain from asking: ‘So how did he do it, then? I mean, how did he actually take the stuff?’
‘Smoked it,’ said Nina, not actually adding ‘stupid’ but severely implying it. ‘Needles are sleazy.’
‘Thanks a lot,’ said Agnes, in a tone which required no subtext.
It was after that that she really felt for the first time she had lost him. It was almost as if she was disappointed by this latest intelligence, dependent as she had been on the depth of his malignity to fuel her own angry responses. When she was younger, she had used to think in moments of severe pique at her family that they would all be sorry if she died; and death had seemed a small price to pay for the satisfaction of remorse. Now, imagining him going about his business with a conscience clear and bright as a lightbulb, she realised that such vengeance was not to be hers. He had done her no wrong, apart from preferring someone else. And whose fault was that?
‘You should smile more,’ John used to say to her. ‘You look better when you smile.’
It had never occurred to her to point out that if she had felt better, she would by implication have smiled more, for rearrangement was an inexorable part of their routine. He would tell her to wear this jacket, change that shirt, do her hair this way instead; and she really saw no reason why the expression on her face should not fall within the territories under his jurisdiction. He wanted to improve her, presumably so that he could love her more.
‘When I phone you up,’ he said one day, ‘you’re always in. Why is that?’
Whenever he was due to call, she always waited faithfully by the phone, dispatching other callers hastily lest he should find the line engaged and refusing to leave the house for a minute.
‘Well, it would annoy you if I wasn’t there,’ she reasoned, although bewildered by his question. ‘Wouldn’t it?’
‘Not necessarily. Sometimes it’s good to be frustrated. It makes things more exciting — it makes the object of your frustration more desirable. Do you see what I mean?’
‘No, I don’t. I don’t see what you mean. Are you saying you want me to go out specially when you call? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Forget it,’ he said lightly.
She couldn’t forget it. His perversity upset her. She knew it was all in the interests of making him love her more, but it looked to her as if he was running out of ideas. Until now, he had never actually asked her to love him less. Nevertheless, once or twice she did run to the bathroom at the sound of the telephone ringing and had leaned against the locked door, her heart beating senselessly until it stopped. It hadn’t seemed to change things much.
Nina spent even more time at Jack’s house after her argument with Agnes. Merlin started working late. Sometimes he and Agnes would meet in the kitchen at unsociable hours and they would stay up and drink beer while Nina’s room lay dark and empty above them like that of a missing child.
‘It’s like when someone walks out during an argument,’ said Agnes one night. ‘You’re left with all this anger and nowhere to put it. It seems really unfair. I mean, she started it, right? It was her fault. She should apologise.’
‘You did say, if I remember correctly, that you didn’t like her very much.’
‘I don’t.’
Merlin leaned wearily into the sofa.
‘You have to,’ he said. ‘All our names are on the lease. Besides, she’s your best friend. You have to like your best friend.’
Agnes told him about her early experiences of best-friendship at school, where the title was nothing if not transient and could be purchased or lost for the small price of a treasured object — a coloured pencil perhaps — given or withheld, or a favour done. ‘Swap me your rubber,’ came the cry. ‘I’ll be your best friend!’
Never one known for her stock of fancy stationery, Agnes had always found best friends to be in short supply. Once or twice she had purloined one with the bargain-basement currency of loyalty and love, but this kind of investment became more risky in view of the inevitable transformation of friend to enemy which had characterised relations amongst her peer-group.
‘It was always worse if you’d been their real friend,’ she said. ‘When they turned against you it meant they knew things about you. I don’t know, it was just worse.’
‘Well, presumably it was more hurtful,’ said Merlin. ‘But why did they turn against you in the first place? What did you have to do?’
‘Nothing. It just had to be your turn. Someone would suddenly say, “I think so-and-so needs to be taken down a peg or two, don’t you?” and that was it.’
‘The call to arms.’
‘I suppose so: Everyone knew what to do. It was all very matter-of-fact.’
‘Did anyone ever refuse to join in?’
‘Yes, sometimes. They were like invisible people, though. Outcasts. No one ever talked to them. Thinking about it now, I suppose they were actually quite brave. I would never have dared to do that.’