FROM THE ARCHIVE Departures by Micky Peters

One of the things Agnès told me, in the short time I was with her, was about an uncontacted tribe who lived on an island in the Indian Ocean, who had never discovered the secret of fire.

‘They carry it around in jars,’ she said. ‘Big clay jars, comme ça, like this,’ – she gestured with her hands the size of the jars – ‘and they never let it go out. They’ve passed it down for thousands of years, the same fires in the same jars. They never let them go out.’

‘But how did they get the fire in the first place?’ I asked, stirring her tea.

Agnès shrugged. ‘From lightning,’ is all she said.

Even though she was almost a hundred, Agnès still read a lot; there was always a book by her bed or chair, mostly non-fiction titles, often anthropological in nature, and she knew all sorts of bizarre facts that she liked to share with me. She never forgot my name, ever, or the name of anyone in her family, although she might as well have, because if any of them were really bothered about her then why was I there? They never called, never visited. It had been her neighbours, not her children, or her grandchildren, who had expressed concerns about her welfare, which led to my appointment. Her house was small and crammed with stuff, right at the end of a lane, with the garden bordering on the moor beyond. Agnès slept in the master bedroom, of course, and I was in the box room next door to that, surrounded by old sewing kits and boardgames, hundreds of items of junk that Agnès had never thrown away.

She told me she had been born in Lyon, in France, although she grew up in a village outside of it. She had slept in the attic as a child, she said, and when it rained, the roof would leak. She had come to England in the nineteen-fifties with her husband, had lived in the house by the moor ever since. He had died eight years earlier, and now she was dying too, of cancer, the doctors’ reports said, although they should really have just said old age, because she also had dementia, which seemed to affect her in these sudden spells of confusion and absence. When she had one of these spells, she would stare off into the middle distance, unresponsive when I tried to talk to her, her lips moving softly as though she was speaking to someone, as though she was peering, already, into the afterlife, and trying to communicate with whatever awaited her there. She had such a spell after she told me about the uncontacted tribe. I sat with her and held her hand. It was thin and cold, speckled with liver spots, the skin somehow dry and waxy at the same time, with no strength in it at all. I moved the book that rested in her lap and checked to see if she’d wet herself, but she was fine.

Her tea cooled on the table beside her. I thought about singing to her – that was one of the things they taught us, at the nursing school, that when someone is far away like that then we should sing to them, and it will bring them back again, and calm them down, especially if it’s an old song. But I didn’t know any of the songs they suggested – Oh Danny Boy or Scarborough Fair. I knew only the stupid pop songs I’d grown up with: Britney and Beyoncé and Christina Aguilera. So I kept silent, and looked out of the window at the thorny mass of the garden, at the empty washing line with crows perched on it, shaking their wings, at the turbulent purple clouds on the horizon as they came closer.

Eventually I got up and went into the kitchen, started washing the dishes. The water, that far out in the country, was cold, and had a brownish tinge as it came out of the tap, and smelled like earth. The whole house was cold and smelled like earth – Agnès had told me she didn’t like the heat on, and you could tell, because there was mould growing in every corner, damp climbing up the walls. My body, beneath my nurse’s uniform, was permanently tense while I was with her, braced against the chill. I wore layers to bed. I hovered above the toilet seat rather that sit down on it, because the touch of the frozen enamel made me want to cry out. But if I ever tried to turn the boiler on or light the fireplace Agnès got angry with me, and petulant, and she wouldn’t eat or drink, pinching her lips closed like a toddler, and even though she clearly hated me in those moments she’d scream if I made to leave the room. After I’d cleaned the dishes I went back into the living room, where Agnès was still in the chair, muttering silently, and I started cleaning up around her, wiping down the television and radio, consolidating the little piles of mail she left everywhere into one large stack, moving her slippers so they were by her small, curling feet.

Agnès was, as I recall, my fifth patient. Before I’d joined the agency, before I’d even been a nurse, my life had been quite different. I had actually been fairly wealthy, a trust fund kid, as they say, and until I was thirty, I’d never worked a day in my life. I used to just go to parties and lunches and things. I worked out with a personal trainer. I went to a facialist once a week, and an aesthetician, Doctor Moody, who gave me chemical peels and injectables. I had a boyfriend too, an American man named Ashton, and he worked in finance and had loads and loads of leather jackets, about twenty of them, and he used to take me out “for a spin” in his Ferrari at the weekends, where he’d drive too fast and I’d sit beside him, docile, watching him enjoy himself. He also had a tiny penis, and the fact that he had a tiny penis gave him a terrible temper – or at least that’s what I thought anyway – because he was always in a particularly bad mood after sex. He used to shave his pubic hair off entirely, I think to make it look bigger, even though it didn’t, and he insisted it was because it was more hygienic.

‘Pubic hair is dirty,’ he said once, when I asked him about it. We were sitting on his balcony and eating clams in a white wine sauce.

‘Is it?’ I said.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘It’s so germy down there. You can get disease trapped in there when it’s hairy. And it sweats more and smells. It’s better for it to be gone. It isn’t clean.’

‘I don’t know. Surely it’s cleaner than the hair on your head?’ I said. ‘People wash themselves down there every day. But most people don’t wash the hair on their heads every day.’

‘So, what’s your point?’

‘My point is, can it really be that dirty if you wash it every day?’

Ashton didn’t answer, just scooped another clam into his mouth. We didn’t discuss it again, and he committed suicide soon after that, by throwing himself off the balcony. I don’t think it was because of the pubic shaving conversation of course, but the two events are now somehow linked in my mind. I can’t so much as look at a razor without thinking of Ashton, falling to his death.

*

After I’d tidied the living room, I went back into the kitchen and organised Agnès’ medications for the night: painkillers to keep her comfortable, and antipsychotics in case her dementia took a turn for the worse. I got out her blood pressure monitor and put it on the countertop with the medications. Then I heard Agnès calling my name and went back into the living room.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘You can take the evening off,’ said Agnès.

Agnès used to sometimes say things like this when she got confused. She thought, because I brought her food and cleaned her house, that I was a domestic servant she could dismiss whenever she chose. ‘But I’m supposed to look after you, Agnès,’ I said, crouching down next to her chair.

‘I don’t care. Take the evening off,’ said Agnès.

‘But what if you need me?’ I said, in the kind of calm, pleasant voice they taught us to use at the nursing college. ‘I’m your nurse, Agnès. I need to stay here and look after you.’

‘Please leave me alone for one evening,’ said Agnès.

I stood up. ‘I can’t go if I know you’re still up,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to go to bed first.’

‘Yes, yes, fine, just let me be,’ she said, waving her tiny hand in the air.

I helped her up from her chair. It took her several attempts to rise, and she had to hold onto both my hands for support while I stood in front of her. We began the long journey up the stairs, and when we were up there, I helped her change into her nightgown and use the toilet. Only the tiniest droplet came out of her – she didn’t drink much, or eat much. It’s normally a sign, when someone gets like that, that death is coming, and soon. One of the other things Agnès told me is that, in Indian medicine, they say it’s because the element of fire in our bodies is dying out, rendering us incapable of burning fuel, and therefore leaving us with low appetites. After we’d brushed her teeth and I’d put her in the bed I went back downstairs for the medications and blood pressure monitor, came back up, and gave her the tablets with a glass of water. When she swallowed, the folds of loose skin on her neck swayed, she had to close her eyes to concentrate on the act of drinking. I took the glass, went downstairs again to fill it at the kitchen tap, and then returned to her bedroom where I placed it on the table beside her bed. I strapped the blood pressure monitor to her arm.

‘You know,’ I said, pushing the button on the machine. ‘I’m not supposed to leave you, Agnès. It’s my job to take care of you.’

‘I’ll be asleep,’ she said. ‘There won’t be anything for you to do.’

‘Still,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’ll go out.’

Agnès shook her head. The blood pressure monitor whirred – I could see it tightening on her thin arm. I thought about the time I’d walked into the bathroom and caught Ashton injecting himself with testosterone, a leather strap pulled taut around his bicep to make the veins pop. He’d told me it was to increase “performance” at the gym, but in reality, all it did was make his testicles shrivel.

Agnès’ blood pressure was normal – at least, for someone of her age and in her condition – so I packed the monitor away and went to draw the curtains. ‘Non,’ she said. ‘Leave them open.’

‘But it’s still fairly light,’ I said, turning around. Outside, the trees swished and blew. The dark clouds had come closer across the moor. ‘Will you be able to sleep?’

‘Just fine,’ she said.

I nodded, left the room, and closed the door. I went back downstairs and cleaned some more, then watched a bit of television. I heated up a can of soup for dinner, ate it, then washed up and went to check on Agnès. She was fast asleep, her breathing laboured and shallow, lying on her back with her mouth open, a strand of drool caught between her upper teeth and lower lip so it moved back and forth like a guitar string every time she inhaled and exhaled. She hadn’t wet herself; she hadn’t pooed herself. Her feet were a little bit cold, so I put another blanket on the bed. This was what I always did. My job was to make her comfortable.

After that, I went and relaxed in my room for a bit. I thought about what she’d said, about going out. Technically, it was a sackable offence, to leave a patient unattended when there was nobody there to take over, but still, in all the time I’d been with her she’d never once called out in the night for me. She could still, in an emergency, take herself to the toilet. She could still make it downstairs to the kitchen if she felt hungry. And she’d seemed so insistent about my taking the evening off – surely, I thought, it wouldn’t do any harm to leave her for a couple of hours?

I stood up from the cot bed, which I’d been lying on, and opened the tiny, built-in wardrobe in the corner of the room. It was truly miniscule, only about a foot and a half wide, but it didn’t matter because I had hardly anything to keep in there, just my spare uniform, my raincoat, and a black dress I kept for funerals. The first time I’d worn it had been to Ashton’s, which had been held in New York, where he was from, even though he’d died in London. His family paid for his body to be taken there in a coffin, in the baggage hold on the same flight I took to attend. I remember when we arrived at JFK we all had to wait around while they unloaded it, and through the smeary, rain spotted window I watched while people scurried about on the runway, moving him onto a special truck with flashing amber lights which beep beeped its way off to some hidden, sinister loading bay, and the next time I saw him he was being carried by pallbearers to a strange dais with a curtain around it, which closed robotically when the time came to cremate him. I put on the black dress.

It was only a short drive into the village. The hedgerows, thick with briars, surged up on either side, and a pheasant burst up out of one of them, flapped its wings, and disappeared behind me. A few flecks of rain pattered on the windscreen, so I switched on the wipers, but then I arrived at the green anyway, which was small and overgrown, with a monument in the middle of it to the soldiers killed in the wars. I parked my car and got out – the place was empty, the shops all shut up. I walked down the high street for a bit until I got to the pub, and went inside.

If its interior had once been charming, the pub had since fallen victim to a landlord who had evidently attempted to give the place a bit of an “alternative vibe”, and all the wood panelling had now been painted black, and the seats were all upholstered in black leather, and even the floor was black and covered in brown scuff marks and prints from the bottoms of people’s shoes. The lighting was at once inadequate and unflatteringly bright; beneath those naked, overhead bulbs, the faces of the customers looked like those of ghouls. I went and sat down on a stool, at the far end of the bar, near the toilet door. It smelled like urine and detergent. I ordered a rum and coke, and when it came, it was watered down.

‘Hi,’ a man said to me after a while, too loudly for the distance between us, because he was only about six feet away. He was sitting on another bar stool, with a pint of bitter before him, his two hands wrapped around it as though he was throttling it. He was probably only my age, but his grey face and his clipped, practical haircut made him seem older. His skin was dry and flaky, his lips chapped. A grim, sweaty-looking beard clung to his neck. I nodded a hello back at him, but said nothing. ‘How are you?’ he said.

‘I’m fine thanks,’ I answered, drinking my rum and coke.

The man shifted his weight up from his bar stool and moved to the one next to me. ‘That’s good to know,’ he said, as he sat. ‘I mean, you look fine. You look great, in fact.’

I shrugged my shoulders but didn’t speak.

‘My name’s Jethro,’ said the man. ‘But, uh, a lot of people call me Jet. My friends, my family. You can call me Jet, if you like.’

‘Hello, Jet.’

‘I’ve uh…I’ve not seen you in here before,’ he said. I shrugged again. He scratched pensively at his nose and continued. ‘Are you visiting someone in the area?’

‘I’m not visiting anyone,’ I said. ‘I live nearby.’

‘Nice,’ he said, and then gave a short, fake laugh – ha! ‘Whereabouts? I live over by the Thompson place, you know? The maize farm? You know it?’

I didn’t know it. I didn’t know where anything was around there, apart from the village and Agnès’ house. I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. I took a sip from my drink. ‘Not near there. By the old church,’ I lied. I didn’t know if there was an old church.

‘Oh yeah,’ said Jet, nodding. ‘Beautiful place. My grandfather’s buried there, actually.’

‘Oh,’ I said. I gave a quick, short nod. ‘Okay.’

‘What is it you do, if you don’t mind me asking? I bet you’re something glamorous. Flight attendant?’

I made a mirthful noise. Jet’s efforts to woo me seemed tragic in their banality. Ashton, by contrast, had seduced me at a party in Mayfair, celebrating the launch of a new brand of luxury vodka that came in a heavy, frosted glass bottle, at the bottom of which was the drowned carcass of a kind of spider whose venom, apparently, made the vodka more intoxicating. He had talked to me for precisely five minutes, because he told me he was “speed networking”, had taken my number, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, checked the handkerchief – now smeared with fake tan – and left. He texted me the next day, and we went for sushi. That was the kind of courtship I appreciated. ‘I’m a nurse,’ I said.

‘A nurse, wow, really cool,’ said Jet, nodding again, more confident now. ‘Must be tough, being a nurse. Me, I’m a jack of all trades – do a bit of everything. I do gardens a lot, and also guttering, cleaning windows, farm work. I sometimes pull shifts at the hotel down by the motorway exit – do you know it? The Pine Lodge?’

‘I don’t,’ I said.

‘Nice place,’ said Jet. ‘Great breakfasts. Hey – do you want to hear something wild?’

‘What?’

‘I was working there the other day, down at The Pine Lodge, and this guy – a fancy guy, you know? A business guy, he hadn’t checked out of his room on time. So, we talked about it for a bit, wondering if he’d just forgotten, or if he’d overslept or whatever, but then it got to evening and he still hadn’t checked out, so we went and got the spare key and went into his room. The guy had killed himself – can you believe that? He’d hung himself from the shower rail with his tie. The curtain was still pulled across so we didn’t know at first, but then we pulled it back and he was there, dead. Isn’t that wild?’

‘Mm,’ I said.

‘He’d completely rinsed the minibar of course, didn’t pay for any of it. And because he’d hung himself, all the blood had drained out of his head and was in his feet. His face was almost blue, you know? Like ice.’

‘Wow.’

‘Right?’ said Jet. He fell silent, his expression suddenly self-conscious. ‘Do you have any stories like that?’ he asked politely.

I thought about the moment I’d gone out onto the balcony, looked down, and seen Ashton’s skull smashed open like a watermelon, blood all over the pavement, with people standing around screaming. ‘No,’ I said.

‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was…uh…traumatic,’ said Jet. ‘Yeah, that’s the word. But I guess we don’t know what was going through his mind, do we? He must have been feeling very desperate.’

‘Very,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ said Jet, and nodded. ‘So, tell me ah – what was your name, sorry?’

‘Sarah,’ I lied.

‘Sarah, beautiful. So, tell me Sarah. Are you single?’

I looked at him. I decided to lie again. ‘I’m married actually,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ said Jet. The disappointment in his face was obvious.

‘My husband is away,’ I said. ‘He’s in Belfast. At a stag.’

‘Ah,’ said Jet, bobbing his head in a kind of nod. ‘Belfast, great city. Never been, but I’ve heard things. My mother’s a Catholic actually. She isn’t Irish though. Half French.’

‘Right,’ I said. There was only about half an inch left in my glass. ‘Well, he’s gone until tomorrow morning. So, to be honest, I’m looking for sex.’

Jet’s eyes widened. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Okay. That’s interesting. Your husband – you’re looking for sex, you said?’

‘He’s never satisfied me.’ I said. ‘He doesn’t even come close. I’m looking for something quick and hot. A one-time thing,’ I said.

‘Uh huh,’ said Jet. He took a sip of his bitter – I could see his hand was trembling. ‘Well, you know – ah,’ he said, putting the glass back down on the bar, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I’m single, and, you know, experienced.’

‘Interesting,’ I said.

‘Maybe, if you wanted,’ he said. He shifted on the bar stool awkwardly, and I experienced the kind of pity that is also disgust. ‘I could…’

‘Oblige me?’ I said.

Jet blinked a few times. ‘Well, yeah, if you want to put it like that.’

‘Could be fun,’ I said.

‘Okay, okay, wow,’ said Jet. There was a kind of panic in his voice, as though he couldn’t believe his luck, as though he had come across an opportunity that might at any minute be snatched away, so that he must, accordingly, act fast. ‘Well, we can go back to my place,’ he said. ‘I’m not far, just over by the Thompson place, I told you? It’s clean and, you know, private.’

‘Let’s just do it here,’ I said.

‘Here?’ said Jet. He sounded alarmed.

‘I always wanted to do it in the toilet of a place like this,’ I said. ‘Somewhere public. Seems kind of dangerous, don’t you think? Danger is sexy.’

I said it in such a deadpan voice it was laughable that Jet actually believed me. But he did. ‘Oh wow,’ said Jet. ‘Hot, yeah. I mean, I suppose it is sexy.’ He gave a cough, and then another of his wooden attempts at laughter – Haha.

‘Mm, yeah,’ I said. ‘Well, now you know. So, do you want to?’

‘Go here?’ said Jet. He looked around. ‘Wow, er, yeah. That’s – yeah, sure.’

‘Okay.’ I said. ‘If you go in first, and wait for me.’

‘Wait for you?’ said Jet. He half got up from his bar stool and wiped his palms on the front of his t-shirt, so he had dark smears where his nipples were.

‘Well, I can’t go in with you,’ I said. ‘I have a husband. What if people see?’

‘Oh right, yeah,’ said Jet. He stood in front of me and gestured for the toilet door. ‘I’ll go and wait in there then.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And you’ll…’

‘I’ll be there in a minute,’ I said.

‘Sweet,’ said Jet, bobbing his head again. ‘I’ll go and uh…get ready for you.’ He raised his eyebrows suggestively as he passed me. ‘See you in a sec,’ he said, and he went into the toilet. A waft of sewage smell emerged, as he backed through the door, his form receding into the shadows. Then the door closed.

I finished the last of my drink, got up, and departed. It was now raining very hard outside, and there were flashes of intermittent lightning illuminating the dark sky. I ran to my car and got in. The rain drummed on the glass and metal. I sat there for a short while, feeling the absence of feeling that I had become so used to. There are so many ways to leave things behind, I thought.

Eventually, I put my key in the ignition and drove home, the windscreen wipers beating back and forth, the lane, beneath the glow of the car headlamps, a stream. Jethro would have worked it out by now, I realised. He would be crushingly humiliated, would have drunk another glass of bitter to soothe himself. How predictable. I came to the end of the road, to Agnès’ house, and parked the car and went inside. It was quiet, but the lightning flashed as I climbed the stairs, and there was a clap of thunder almost instantly, like the storm was right on top of us. I heard Agnès call my name.

‘Yes?’ I said, as I went into her room. She was still in the bed, so small, like a child under her blankets. ‘Are you alright? Did you have an accident?’

‘Where were you?’ she said. ‘I called for you, but you didn’t come.’

‘You told me to take the evening off,’ I said. ‘But I’m here now, Agnès.’

‘Were you out in the rain?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘As-tu froid? Are you cold? Here, come into bed.’ She moved her arm, and with it swept back a corner of the covers to expose the pale expanse of the bedsheet.

‘That’s your bed, Agnès,’ I said, coming closer. ‘I sleep in the next room, remember?’ I checked her in the usual way – she was dry. ‘Do you need something?’ I said. ‘A cup of tea?’

‘Mm,’ she said. ‘The loose kind.’

There was no loose tea, but I went downstairs to the kitchen, ripped open a teabag, made her a cup, then brought it back up to her. She’d managed to prop herself up on the pillows and had switched on the bedside lamp. ‘Here,’ she said, patting the sheet again.

I thought about it for a minute, then got into the bed beside her. ‘Thank you, Agnès,’ I said.

Agnès drank her tea, and I sat there and listened to the rain as it beat against the window. The thunder was further away now, although the flashes of lightning made the bedside lamp flicker. Agnès’ face was thin, the darkness pooling in the hollows of her cheeks, in her eye sockets, in every wrinkle around her mouth as she sipped. ‘You finish it,’ she said, passing me the cup.

‘I think it might be better if I get my own,’ I said.

Agnès shook her head. ‘Non, finish,’ she said. I did as I was told. There was only a little bit left, the tea leaves floating around in a tiny puddle of water and milk. I downed it, and then Agnès gestured for the cup, and I gave it back to her. ‘I’m an old woman now,’ she said, ‘but I was young too, once. My grand-mère was an Algerian, a woman of the desert,’ she said. ‘Une sorcière. A witch, you know?’

‘Mm,’ I said. I wondered if maybe her medication was wearing off. ‘Perhaps you’re tired?’ I said.

‘She used to tell our fortunes like this,’ said Agnès, looking down into the cup. ‘From the tea leaves.’

‘That’s nice,’ I said.

‘Shall I tell yours?’ said Agnès, but she didn’t wait for me to reply. ‘I see terrible things in your future,’ she said. ‘Sad things, horrifying things.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘There isn’t much hope,’ she said. ‘But you will go on a journey. A very important journey. It will change everything for you. Your life will be long. You will see and do many things. You will die alone.’

At this, she put the cup down on the bedside table and turned back to me. She opened and closed her hands, in a book motion, as if to say – that’s it. Then she switched off the light and we lay down to sleep. The rain still fell, although the thunder and lightning stopped after a while. I didn’t dream, and when I woke up in the morning, Agnès had died. I knew it instantly. She was cold in the bed beside me, her skin perfectly white. I reached out to touch her, and her body was stiff, like marble, like a monument, and it smelled strangely sweet. Her life was over.

I do not know how long I lay there beside her, thinking of all she had said, but the sun was going down again by the time I called the doctor. The death was confirmed, her body removed. Officials notified her family. She was buried two weeks later in the graveyard of the old church, beside her husband. And I was assigned to a new patient. I have had dozens of them since – some young, but mostly old, and while they have told me many things, I cannot seem to get Agnès’ words out of my mind. She was right about the sad things, and the horrifying things, and I am sure she will be right about me dying alone. But while I have seen and done much in my life, I am still waiting for that journey to begin.

………………..

Micky Peters is a queer Anglo-Irish writer based in London, currently studying for an MA at City University. His work has appeared in Garageland Reviews and at The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, with forthcoming work in Misery Tourism.

Twitter: @micky_pete