Free Saving Agnes by Rachel Cusk

convent school where she had grown up had been red in tooth and claw with female cruelty; and when her new friends spoke of the women’s community, Agnes was beset by images of hooded nuns, ungodly punishments andpeer-group persecution. Unspeakable things had gone on there, things which she had thrown into a cauldron of grief and terror in her heart and which now bubbled like a noxious soup of carping, taunting, bitching, menstruating femininity. The taste of it still rose in her throat like bile. Eventually she could talk of male oppression as freely as anybody; but in those days the cheerful indifference of men and their unemotional talk, although later a source of grief and frustration, was something of a relief.
    Agnes bought feminism because she was afraid of women; and, as with so many things in her life, when she was driven by her sense of what ought to be it was some time before truth eventually caught her up.
    The first thing she perceived about feminism was that it allowed women to be fat and ugly. As if such qualities were infectious, Agnes secretly put this idea to one side. Like aspirin, she found ideologies hard to swallow whole. Indeed, her mother had often railed at her for what she called her ‘pick and mix’ attitude to religion. Agnes’s God floated on a soft cloud of love and forgiveness and was far too busy trying to justify famines and earthquakes to care whether Agnes told lies or used contraceptives. Along the same lines, she selected equality and freedom from domestic servitude from her new creed, and disdained the promise of liberation from the trappings of the feminine stereotype.
    â€˜If we’re truly free, then we’re free to wear make-up,’ she told Nina, who for some reason did not seem impressed by such logic.
    Agnes was not particularly enamoured of the feminine stereotype: it just so happened that it offered a convenient and effective means of disguise. She created herself daily, and did not want to know – or others to know, for that matter – what murky truths lay beneath her finery. That by disguising these smaller truths she was merely uncovering several larger ones was clear only to those who threatened to address the defect of her superficiality; but what to them was a disorder, was to Agnes the very thing that kept chaos at bay. Feminism wasfor her a war of words, a catalogue of social injustices that were as interesting but as unrelated to her as a history book. She saw in its medicines no cure, merely a placebo of self-acceptance that could aid only those with a less intimate knowledge of the rules of deception than herself.
    â€˜Your understanding of the relationship between form and content needs work,’ wrote her tutor at the bottom of an essay, but Agnes saw in such comments no clues; only a vast sea wall beyond whose forbidding stone a boiling ocean crashed and foamed like a rabid dog.
    Later, Agnes found easier ways of justifying self-adornment. By exploiting the currency of their social acceptability, she argued, women could precipitate change from the heart of the patriarchal establishment. She shared this opinion with her parents when she went home one weekend.
    â€˜Chaps are more likely to listen to a pretty girl,’ mumbled her father, nodding his agreement behind a newspaper.
    â€˜You look amazing,’ said John, watching her undress in the shuttered light. ‘You look like a stork.’
    It was ninety-eight degrees in the dark. The white sheets were limp with sweat. They were in Seville, with the sounds of mopeds and laughter from cafés making waves through the thick air. They were melting in Seville. It seemed to Agnes they were dying in Seville.
    â€˜Thanks a lot,’ she said, turning from him. Her pique fizzled and blunted itself in the heat.
    â€˜Don’t.’ John sat up in bed. ‘Don’t move. Let me look at you.’
    She turned around, the bars of light from the shutters appearing to