The Long and Spectacular Life of Agnes Magnusdottir 24

1971

 

"I love you, I love you, I love you."

    Agnes slid out of bed naked and did a kind of pirouette. She was no ballerina and tumbled down onto the carpet in a fit of laughter. From this prone position she could view the spines of the books on the precarious looking shelf above her bed, The Golden Notebook, A Room of One’s Own, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, The Magic Toyshop and so on, but not the body of the boy she had just left behind. 

    "I say, are you alright?"

    The boy’s tousled head appeared now looking down at her from the edge of the mattress and she was conscious suddenly of her nudity. While this was perfectly ok in theory, she had long imagined being naked with a boy and wasn't a woman’s body hers to do with as she pleased?, she had never done it in practice.

    Should she cover herself up? 

    And had she really just told the boy that she loved him? It was simply that the pleasure of it had been so unexpected. 

    The girls she had spoken to about it since arriving at Sheffield Polytechnic had said losing your virginity was a painful and dreaded experience best got over and then forgotten. On the contrary for Agnes it had made her scream out in joy and sent these huge flushing waves course through her body.

    I love you. 

    The boy was still looking down at her. How long had she been lying here? Should she have shaved her pubic hair into a thin neat line, or off altogether, is that what he was thinking, or did he think her better with her clothes on? The boy had the most amazing blue eyes. They were Dostoyevskyian. Or Balzacian. She wasn't sure yet how she would describe them. 

    "I can do toast," she said. She had thought about using the phrase ’post-coital toast’ but didn't want to appear pretentious. "Would you like toast?"

    When she came back, her bare legs sticking out from the oversized shirt she had hastily pulled on and which she thought made her look like someone who might inhabit a Pablo Picasso studio, Benjamin, she remembered his name now, how she had screamed it out in ecstasy, was fully dressed in the clothes he had arrived in and so confidently shucked off, and tying his shoelaces. 

    "I'm awfully sorry," he said. His voice was public school posh. This was something Agnes had very quickly learnt to recognise. Along with the confidence these boys had, seeming to believe the world and everything in it was theirs by right. "I've got to shoot off. Big exam later today. Terrible timing. Sorry."

    "But I've made toast," said Agnes.

    "Thanks!”

    Benjamin grabbed both slices from the plate. One for him. One for her.

    "Don't worry. I can let myself out. I'll see you again. Yes?"

    She realised only after he had gone that they had forgotten to swap phone numbers. But he had said he would see her again. That was good. Climbing back into bed her body brushed again a wet patch. Had that been him or her? And was that why he had left?

    Turning over she caught the smell of him on her pillow and it came to her what he had looked like naked, the way his penis had stuck up so straight and away from his body. It made him look like a piece of furniture, his penis a lever you could pull to open up a drawer or something to hang a coat or a hat on.

   After thirty minutes of trying to still her racing mind she put the light back on and reached up to the bookshelf to retrieve her journal. In here was the novel she was working on. It was going to make her famous. World famous. She worked at a new passage, fiercely concentrating, until the bells of the nearby church started to chime and made her realise something. It was a Sunday and that meant it was impossible Benjamin had an exam. He had used her and then he had lied to her.

    It was a week later when she bumped into him again. She was at a house party with two of her friends from the flat share. She had been telling them that she seriously thought she was a lesbian when Benjamin appeared from the kitchen. He dressed differently to the other boys. He always had on a shirt and tie and his trousers were tight all the way down not wide and flared as was the fashion. There were rumours that he had been ’naughty’ at his boarding school and that explained why he wasn't studying at a more prestigious university. He had been expelled and the cloud of whatever it was that he done was still hanging over him. 

    "Hey," he said, he had come up close and she could smell that smell again, the one that had been on her pillow, "is it true that you are an orphan?"

    She tried to find the right tone, both sad and strong at the same time, but this was difficult because John Lennon and the Plastic Yoko Band were blaring out impossibly loudly from the phonograph, already the third time it had been on. 

    "Shall we dance?"

    She promised herself that this time she wouldn't be so easy, she wouldn't take him home or do anything with him, she would teach him a lesson, but when after five minutes of dancing he asked her if she wanted to go upstairs she found her resistance crumbling. 

    "I like orphans," he breathed into her ear on the stairway. "Parents can be such a drag." 

    He shut the door of the bedroom he had pulled her into and pushed her up against it. 

    "I say, did you see that Tom dancing?"

     All of a sudden his face had taken on an ugly pout.

    "The way he wiggled his arse all about he looked like a right poofter. He might as well have put it in a shop window."

    Then without further ado he put his hands on her jeans and pushed them down along with her knickers.

     "You are on the pill, aren't you?"

    It was dark in the room but she could see him fumbling at his own belt. What was wrong with her? She had never wanted anything so much. Was it because she had abandoned her parents and so was looking for a replacement? She had read something similar in one of her books. But it hadn't talked of this raging desire in her crotch. Was she a freak like her father? Not that he was a freak. But he was a liar and a cheat and she didn't think she could ever forgive him. And as for Vickers... 

    "I've been on the pill for years," she said attempting a blasé tone and then she added, thinking that this might make her sound like a slag, "Well not years. But it's better to be safe than sorry. You never know what's around the corner."

    This time when Benjamin pulled out she made sure she didn't tell him that she loved him. She had given it a tremendous amount of thought and come to the conclusion that this was what had made him run. So instead of saying what she truly felt she bit the inside of her mouth and courted to ten. Then she pulled her packet of cigarettes out of her jeans pocket and lighting one she said as casually as possible, "Thanks Benjamin. That was the forth or fifth best fuck I've ever had."

    This statement seemed to catch him off guard. He had been pulling up his pants but now he stopped and stared at her.

    "Wait until I tell Tom about you," he said. "We were talking about this very thing in the taxi on the way over. Tom said that all girls are the same. It has to be flowers and romance and dating. Tom is reading philosophy so he knows all about this stuff. He said that a man can never have the same relationship with a girl that he does with another man, that the two sexes are eternally divided. In his opinion during Greek times they had it all spot on. You should hear him talk. He could convince an elephant it didn't like bananas. But you disprove his point. The way you just did that with no emotional attachment. I think I might have misjudged you. You could be my mate I reckon. Just what I am looking for. A man in my position needs someone like you by his side." Before Agnes had time to say anything in reply to this quite long speech, and what exactly did he mean?, it sounded nonsense, Benjamin said, "Look, what are you doing in the Christmas hols? It's kind of a free for all at our house but if you would like to tag along then you are more than welcome to join in in the shenanigans. Normally I'm piss bored by the whole affair. That's the problem with being the oldest boy with three younger sisters." 

    Agnes felt something cold and wet run down the inside of her thigh.

    "High times will be had by all," she said.

 

The novel Agnes was working on was largely autobiographical. It was about a girl growing up in the Scottish Highlands who finds out that the man she is in love with and is planning to marry is in actual fact her father’s lover. When anyone asked her she said she was writing in the style of Emily Bronte. It was called Agnes Fall and it was one of the best things ever written.

    On a Wednesday night she attended a creative writing group in Broomhill. The other attendees were mostly women and they were all older than her. She didn't mind this because it meant that they were always bringing her homemade cakes and asking her if she was keeping warm enough and getting enough sleep. At polytechnic sometimes she found it difficult to maintain the cool aura she felt she needed to display in order to be liked. She had taken to wearing these oversize glasses she had bought in a secondhand shop, the prescription of which hurt her eyes, and she always carried with her a huge handbag full of the dozen or so books she said she was reading. That was who she was.

    When she was at the book group she didn't have to wear the glasses or bring the bag with her. She could be herself. 

    The longer she was away from her home in Scotland the more difficult it became to think she could ever walk back into that life. And she was still angry at her father. He had betrayed her. That was something she would never get over. Sometimes when she was feeling down she would lock herself in the bathroom and stare intently at her own face. 

    "What is wrong with me?" she would ask and then she would slap herself, bring her palms hard against her cheeks until they were red and raw.

    Every week at the writing group they took it in turns to read out a piece of writing they had done based on what they had talked about the week before, ways of describing a building or a person, or writing a piece without using an adjective, or using only dialogue. At the previous week’s meeting, however, Agnes had revealed she had been working on a novel for the past three years and this week they had agreed she would read a segment of it out.     

    She spent two whole days agonising over which part to read. She thought, perhaps, she should start at the beginning. The beginning was, after all, what someone would read if they picked her book up in a book shop and were trying to make a decision to buy it or not. But her mind kept coming back to the most dramatic scene. She wanted to really wow her audience and make them see what a great writer she was. 

    Chris, the man who ran the book group, probably gay but claimed to be ’just happy’, had arranged the chairs in a circle in his large front room. Behind the chair where Agnes was to sit he had placed a lamp. There were nibbles on the table and two bottles of wine, one red and one white. 

    "So," said Agnes, "I'm going to jump straight in. It'll become pretty clear what is going on. It's what they call the pivotal scene."

    As she read she was unable to keep the emotion from her voice. She imagined herself standing at a lectern in Carnegie Hall.

    When she finished she was surprised to see forty minutes had passed. 

    "Well thank you for that," said Chris. "It was very..." His voice trailed off as he reached forward for his wine glass. 

    The other women, there were the usual six of them, women of a certain age, some of their ages more certain than others, made polite noises and then Marjory, whose piece on The Peak District National Park, Agnes had referred to a ’maudlin’ said quite bluntly that she hadn't liked it. She uttered a few rambling statements before finally saying, "I don't know how you've managed to make such a dramatic event so boring."

    Agnes looked around the room, expecting someone to leap to her defence, or to jump in and say how wrong Marjory had been but it was then that she realised that the polite noises she thought she had heard were gentle snores. Two of the women had fallen asleep. The other three were looking embarrassedly down at the floor, out of the doorway, or towards their sleeping comrades.

 
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