There was a rabbit. It was dead. Joscelyn knelt beside it. She wiped her fingers through its spilt eyes and smudged the mess across her jeans. She was thirteen. She carried the rabbit by one ragged foot. It flopped against her thigh. The clouds smouldered on the horizon and then- gathering, gathered- they spread towards her as she walked along the marshes, the meaty salt smell of the wet clay fecund, explicit, like guts. She took off her clothes and squashed herself into the smooth clay hollows. Womb-like, sheltered. Rain fell. Heavy, obscuring rods of it.
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In her more generous moments, Joscelyn assumes that everyone does this. She is on a train. She is listening to music. She's twenty. Everyone is, as she is, eyeing one another, gently amused, wondering, poised, who will be the first to break, who will be the first to stand up and say, Okay, fine- you win. I can't pretend anymore.
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She worked jobs for years at a time waiting for that to happen. It never did. Her boyfriends never did it either. Joscelyn came to realise that they weren't pretending, or that they didn't know they were pretending and so she had no choice but to play along. It was a lie she didn't know how to talk about. She thought it might be harder to lie to women.
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The subject responds instinctively. She wipes her fingers through its spilt eyes. There is a storm. The clouds are purple. The clay smells thick, meaty. Edaphic and strange. It is a moment of the body. It is about death. It forms a powerful if indefinable impression that bleeds into her future experiences, colours and informs them in all sorts of strange, inextricable ways. The impressions are so richly intertwined and so complexly coded that they form a vague and stirring sense of angst that can only be expressed in the hope: there is more than this. Joscelyn will come to enjoy spending time in cheap B&Bs. Empty corridors, tatty rooms, foreign languages heard through the walls. These things and many others will be tied associatively, obscurely, to those marshes, to that dead rabbit.
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Occasionally, a dramatic turning point will necessitate a re-examination of the lessons. Those that are unhelpful can be cast aside. The maths is unpicked. People change. Though this generally only happens as the result of a cataclysmic emotional break-down in the subject.
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Something happens, internal or external, which casts events, perhaps even the subject's entire life experience, in a new light. Pathos is achieved in a number of ways. The change is obviously ephemeral, or the change is absolute, or the change is glimpsed but ultimately denied.
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She thought it would be harder to lie to women. She met Agnes beside a helicopter in Victoria Park. A man with a broken neck was strapped to a gurney. The women moved to Bath. Agnes' family lived in Bath. Agnes was Sudanese, had been in the country since she was six, had failed the naturalisation test nine times. How am I supposed to remember this stuff?  Joscelyn was twenty-nine. Agnes stood in the brightly-lit kitchen with a ladle in her hand. Everyone thinks you're such a nice woman, she said. But you're not. You're judging everyone. How dare you?
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Agnes was pregnant the year before they met. She miscarried. She starts arguments in bed. Joscelyn stares at the ceiling. Agnes pummels the mattress with her heels and screams, I want her back! I want her back! Meaning the baby. Agnes responds to her emotions uncritically. There is no pause. Joscelyn admires this. It is within the pause that the pain of being conscious is most pronounced. Joscelyn feels pale beside her. Agnes' anger was, as it were, wrenched loose with her unfinished child. Her spite is acidic, raw, difficult to look at. Agnes is, bodily. Joscelyn buys a book about emotions because it occurs to her that she doesn't understand what they are. That is, how we experience them, where they are located. When Joscelyn says, I am sad, what does that mean? Where is she sad? What is that feeling- any feeling -made of? Being as the subject remains entirely speculative, a comprehensive discussion on what emotions actually are and why we feel anything at all is deferred until chapter ten.
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Chapter Ten, pg 834: Nobody knows.
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Joscelyn said this: I am trying to respond honestly. I ask myself, how do I honestly feel? How to pin the feeling to a sentence, a phrase, long enough for it to be true? Because I don't know, I have to start calculating, and as soon as I start to do that, I am writing. It's just the way it is. We've learnt too many words. I could bark at you. That would be closer. Joscelyn wrote about this in her little writing space under the window. She wrote long-hand with a good pen she'd had, by then, for ten years. She wrote while Agnes packed some things. But it wasn't always like this.
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More. Agnes: It's not because you're a writer, Jos. It's because you're a selfish cunt. And she walked out, the room held in a taut stasis. Significance printed against the wine-glasses. A folded newspaper stained with a damp handprint. Joscelyn stood quietly, poised. And then: writing tips out. It was there in the palm of her mind, round and complete. She became an audience for herself.
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Agnes finds her notebooks and tosses them out the window. Joscelyn comes home from work and Agnes is sitting on the couch with her arms folded, weave on wonky. She says, Where are your notebooks, Jos? I don't know, Agnes. Where are my notebooks? Agnes swiftly turns her head away and snorts. Harrumph. It's comical. Joscelyn leans over the balcony. Her notebooks spread-eagled on the lawn three floors down. Maths? Is that what this is to you? Agnes is crying. If she really is hurt by the things Joscelyn writes, then why does she demonstrate this hurt in such a theatrical, comical way? Because this is how we manage, she decides. Because we have to do something.
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It wasn't always like this. If she has more or less always lived in a constrained way, constrained by the stultifying knowledge that this performance creates a distance between people that can never be closed, then at least her writing used to afford some release from that. There was felicity and motion and colour. There was a joy in language. She slowly boxed herself in. Her writing became so cramped she could not move within it. Yes: maths. That's all this is. How to explain to Agnes that this is a tragedy? That Joscelyn is a martyr? That this is as diagrammatic, as spare and constrained as it is because there is too much love here, not because there is none?
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More. She was twenty-two. She was at the kitchen table, drinking. The dog wheezed in the hallway. It had been sick a long while. She knelt in front of the dog. She put her hand over its muzzle. It coughed, hot and stifled into her palm. Its chest heaved. A leg kicked out. It defecated as it slackened into death. She dug a big square hole in the garden, lit a cigarette and blew smoke towards a full white moon, a weird, pearlescent halo around it staining the clouds. She buried the dog next day and by then the body was stiff. More.
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Joscelyn stood before the Neva. She was thirty-five. She watched the water, its asymmetric bobbing. St. Petersburg was given her through books. Full with the memory of them, she began to reinterpret the city. She turned away from the water. The Bronze Horseman was there. She pressed her cold fingertips to her eyes. We are chasing our own longing. We think the fact that it exists means that it must have a purpose, otherwise why would it exist? And round and round we go with this.
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Through her relationships with animals, for example. Those deaths. Or the relationship between Joscelyn and her parents. For example. Or those quiet moments of self-confrontation, in bathrooms, in B&B rooms. A single bed dressed in yellowish linen. Children playing in the yard out back. Above the bed, someone has written with a pencil in big letters: I'ma pick up da world and drop it on your fucking head. A life through these moments. Sequencing. Emphasising here, subduing there. Threading the discourse with symbolism like a slyly secreted breadcrumb-trail.
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Perhaps she learnt that by trusting people she is rewarded with intimacy. Or the opposite: that when she trusts people she exposes herself, she risks being hurt, and she is. She should / shouldn't trust people.
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Before Agnes leaves, Joscelyn edits. In-House work, promotional videos. They are corporate and artless but the process is liberating. In the no-second cut between frames, when she digitally splices a 'now' onto a 'now', she captures the present, the pause, the wordless gasp that occurs when one steps behind one's thoughts. To contemplate the edit is to be tipped out of the self. Words press 'then' onto the page, and it withers. There is something humiliating about it. It is shameful, she decides. She burns her notebooks. She requests a work transfer and moves back to London.
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She walked down Stratford Broadway. The streetlamps already lit, the sky a gauze of white. Her grandfather was flying a model helicopter when an aneurysm burst in his brain and- lights out- he dropped dead. Her mother called. Come home. Joscelyn looked at her feet. What am I thinking? Is this grief? Shock? She took a train back to Essex. She walked along the sea front. The tide was harsh, violent. She remembered walks along the marshes. She remembered her dog. What is this? This associative melange? It is poetry. She knew that she would soon start writing again. The wordless power of the edit had purged her. A purple bruise on the horizon and the scoured salt-tang on the air immersed her once more in the richness of herself. We are a flux of perceptions. We string them together and insist on a consistent self. It is a mechanical process, but an undeniable opulence is resultant. She stops by the boating lake. The short choppy waves are apparently symmetrical, cuffed off-kilter by a stiff breeze. A row of cut-topped poplars sway warily. She stands before a poplar. She touches it. Surely, she thinks, there is something else going on here. The pieces of a life, assembled in this way and no other, make for an experience that cannot be reduced back to its component parts. In the end, we cannot account for ourselves.
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The kettle flicked boiled, a roiling cloud of steam stroking the underside of the cupboards. Her mother stood by the back door. Joscelyn sighed. She put a hand on her head. An involuntary gesture- grief, shock. Her mother gave a brief half-smile, catching her in the lie, exposing her performance. Their relationship is characterised by a tacit complicity. Joscelyn is trapped. She cannot tell her mother to stop exposing her performance because to do so would be to admit that it is one.
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