Ghost Story by Toby Litt

Author:Toby Litt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2004-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

ONCE during this week Paddy woke around half-past three in the morning, felt Agatha wasn’t there, waited for the loo to flush and for her to come back to bed.

When she didn’t, he went downstairs to find out what she was doing – which, on this occasion, was lying across the sofa with hands behind her head and eyes closed. A cup emptied of what had been coffee was beside her, on the floorboards.

Paddy didn’t wake her, and went back upstairs thinking that it wasn’t because she couldn’t sleep that Aggie was getting out of bed, it was that she didn’t want to sleep in their bed – didn’t want to sleep with him, perhaps couldn’t.

In this, Paddy was doubly wrong; Agatha hadn’t been asleep or dozing even – she had been very awake, thinking of her life and how the various bits of it had ceased to fit together, of the breathing and what it might mean. If Paddy had ‘woken’ her, if he had just said hello rather than tiptoeing in and out again (he, father of a two-year-old, was a world-class tiptoer), the misunderstanding would have been exploded. (She would have been annoyed but he wouldn’t have been deceived.)

Instead, he began from this time onwards to resent Agatha’s laziness in the morning, and to suspect that she didn’t sleep in, as she said she did, until the afternoon; she was up almost as soon as he was out the door (he believed) – she wasn’t having fun, but she was having breakfast.

Within a few days, Paddy would come strongly to resent Agatha’s being asleep when he left in the morning and even more her avoidance of their bed at night. He could think of no other reason for her behaviour than that she wished as far as possible to avoid his company, even when unconscious.

It was hard for him to understand how this aversion had so quickly developed – immediately after Agatha came out of hospital they had slept violently in one another’s arms, legs stepping, as if each were a doorway the other was trying and trying to walk or climb through. They woke one another up, constantly, but their definite presence – even as disturber – was enough to reassure the waker back to sleep. If they were not limb-entangled, there had always been some flesh-contact between them: the back of a hand against a buttock, an ankle against the sole of a foot. Now a physical estrangement, a divorce, which was how Paddy began to think of it, was beginning.

The following morning, when Paddy woke, he did not immediately remember the reason why he felt upset. Agatha, beside him, was fully asleep, and it was the sound of her breathing that reminded him of what he’d seen and learnt.

The bedroom was very dark, their curtains were very thick which meant that, now, Paddy couldn’t see Aggie’s face; but he lay there and looked across into the warm dark place where he knew she was.

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