Tenant
Mr. Percival Butters met Agnes Schreikopv in the July of the year. The weather glowed cheerfully over the town, gorseflower golden skies smiled on the county’s hilled havens of green and on its banked houses, churches, pubs, educational buildings. In peopled quadrants, the traffic of the world was brisk, bright, and as good-humoured as the heavens.
A hatted priest, vested in the summer green of Ordinary Time, pottered nonchalantly into Forne Street from the church threshold. Having reached for it eagerly, a hand passed into his, a brown hand. Agnes Schreikopv took the time to properly shake the priest’s hand as she made off from church that Sunday morning. The mass had been bright, brilliant, and brisk. She moved with gentle hurry, had moved in such a gentle hurry all morning, as she had an appointment with Mr. Butters in town immediately following eleven o’clock mass. Yet Agnes lingered as her hand entered the firm, friendly clutch of the priest’s. To feel that mastered, authoritative touch, it was comforting. She was so often alone, anxious, indeed- sometimes- almost abrasively self-contained. So, she lingered as she shook the priest’s warm, manly hand, and his face smiled, big and round and squeezed, at her soft dark face. But she had to move on as, behind her, the rest of the congregation spilled from the mouth of the church. And off she hurried up the hill.
Agnes was due to meet with a homeowner who was accepting student lodgers ahead of the new academic year. She’d applied for tenancy and been accepted. Mr. Butters wanted to meet her ahead of her arrival in September. Agnes had made her application to the property of Mr. Butters with a canny, cheery covering letter. Evidently, he had looked upon it favourably. There was none of her in the writing, its buoyant prose evinced a grace and easefulness and merry she did not possess. Yet it was penned in her own script, the very same curling, italicised penmanship. The tone was warm and winning. She’d handwritten the covering letter at her mother’s bureau. She’d unbuckled the bureau lid, and its jaws had yawned fully open, clicking into place. From a little shelf within the bureau, Agnes’ mother’s mother, Ava, looked at Agnes, a framed, inquisitve likeness trapped in darkened violet. Agnes had penned the covering letter in fountain pen, with quick fluent scratching. It gave Agnes pleasure to remember that, as she hurried up the hill’s moderately steep incline to the café where she was due to meet with Mr. Butters, though she didn’t well know why. In her memory, behind her, as she sat hunched over that bureau desk, in the curtained living room, her mother Maria approached. Agnes could hear Maria breathe, laboured breaths. Maria laid a hand on Agnes’ shoulder. My girrrrrrrl she crooned at length. My goooooood girl. Her face was veiled. Agnes shivered as she completed her ascent, thinking of her mother. She had reached the crown of the hill.
Agnes turned and went only a short distance west, down Exonian Streset. She was before the blue and cream façade soon enough: Penny’s. In she went with a clink of bell over her head. She identified Mr. Butters immediately, seated at a table of his own, just a short distance up the thin length of interior. He was reading a newspaper, spread capaciously upon the table, but flat so his bespectacled complexion was not concealed, nor the lower lip that protruded in a pout and quivered pensively, nor the occasional feline twitch that whipped periodically like a short sharp needleprick across his face. Her footsteps approached him and he raised his head like a hawk, slowly withdrawing from warm slumber in his plumes. He spoke in a voice, wheezing with tobacco and dry as dust- he’d to lick his lips and splutter slightly every so often:
“Agatha?” he said.
“Agnes,” she corrected politely. “Good morning, Mr. Butters”.
“Afternoon now,” Mr. Butters corrected. “Percy, please,” Mr. Butters corrected.
Agnes seated herself. Mr. Butters asked Agnes if she would like anything. She replied tea. Mr. Butters laid his hand astride his mouth to amplify a hoarse shout across the short distance from where he and Agnes were seated to the counter.
“A pot of tea please Vi!”
Vi- who had no face- brought a small pot of tea to the table post-haste. Agnes warmed her insides with some tea and made cordial conversation with Mr. Butters. She didn’t feel exactly fond of him, but she didn’t fear him or distrust him, there was something quite genuine and curiously placid in his stern, courteous desiccation. Agnes ran over the basics with Mr. Butters, which part of the country she was from, her mother’s nationality, no father, second year at the county university, history and politics.
“So you’re going into the second year?”
“Yep,” Agnes answered.
“First year go alright?”
“Pretty good I think, yeah, talented lecturers. They can shout really loud. It’s a big lecture theatre. Their voices reach the cheap seats”.
“Were you in halls last year?”
“Yeah. All the way down the hill, by the station.”
“History and politics…amazed…” his speech was made incoherent by a laugh… “amazed it can all be covered in three years, you’d think the two were too hefty to breed into one…”
“Yes, they are big subjects. Like two sumo wrestlers. Like two morbidly fat people making love.” Agnes said. Mr. Butters laughed. He liked Agnes. He was about to respond when she continued: “You see, some subjects are small subjects, or medium subjects. Like geography, that’s a medium subject. Or English. But mine are big subjects”.
“And what do you hope to get into doing with these big big subjects?” Mr. Butters demanded to know.
“I don’t know. What a question!” Agnes replied curiously. “I’ve never been asked such a question in my life”.
“Well answer me this…” Mr. Butters began. “How come a Pole is so brown?”
“My mother was raped by a Ghanian man”.
“Oh right, that makes sense” Mr. Butters replied. Agnes drank some tea.
“Any ailments?” Agnes asked.
“What a personal question!” Mr. Butter’s answered. “Prostate cancer, slow developing.” Then he ventured: “Are you a virgin?”
“No,” Agnes replied. “I have copulated. I even had a miscarriage when I was seventeen.”
“Did you really!” They were quite interested in one another now. Mr Butters said: “I have never had a miscarriage. But I was responsible for one. That was a long time ago.”
“Did you ever father a foetus that survived?” Agnes asked.
“I certainly did. A son. He’s in prison now for arson. Burnt down a publisher’s. Most of it anyway, the tit. He tried to be a poet but his poems stank. He’s a prick”.
“And are you married?”
“No, I never married. Cora was my partner but we never married. She was my other half. She killed herself.”
“Is that so?”
“Yep. But, you know- it is what it is.”
“That’s the right attitude,” Agnes said. She’d finished her tea. “My mother’s a ghost you know. She walks the earth. She’s not even benign. She’s a demon.”
“Unfinished business is it?” Mr. Butters said.
“Indeed. Some people have unfinished business when they die that’s just the way…”
“Hasn’t everyone?”
“Perhaps. But some people’s business is more unfinished than others”.
“Agreed”. There wasn’t a soul in the café. Except Vi, and her no-face, behind the counter. It was a silent room. The windows flowed with the traffic of the oblivious world.
“Did she stop breathing…your mother?”
“She did. As most ghost’s have. She drove her car into a wall. Not on purpose, mind. She was killed on impact. I nearly died.” Agnes bowed her head in short memorial tribute. Then she looked up, very slowly, and out of the darkness of her eyes a light seemed to shimmer, like moonlight gleaming on a streak of tears. With great, deliberate slowness Agnes said “I am so so grateful to be alive. I was a bit down in the dumps last year. But I feel very hopeful about the future”.