We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Private Rites by Julia Armfield, a speculative reimagining of King Lear available now from Flatiron Books.
It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and old rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father, an architect as cruel as he was revered, dies. His death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.
The sisters are more estranged than ever, and their lives spin out of control: Irene’s relationship is straining at the seams, Isla’s ex-wife keeps calling, and cynical Agnes is falling in love for the first time. But something even more sinister might be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always seemed unusually interested in the sisters’ lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world.
ISLA
On the afternoon of her father’s death, Isla takes a session with a man who was exorcised of evil spirits at the age of seventeen. He is a new patient, referred from the counseling program at the hospital—white teeth and a voice whittled down from a scream. When he clasps his hands around one knee, the veins bunch up between his knuckles, pale blue against the jut of the bone. Isla tries not to notice this, inspects her own hands instead and the bitten-off edge of a cuticle. Bad habits; both the tendency to chew the skin around her nails and to notice a tic or a physical trait of a patient and allow it to grow, blowing up until it becomes their entirety, the characteristic against which all else seems to pale. She lives in horror of slip-ups, practices saying their names aloud to counter her mental Rolodex: patients listed in order as Bug Eyes, as Taps His Foot When He’s Horny, as Big Hands, as Talks Like a Robot, as Tits. She’s good at her job, but the impulse to open her mouth and say something dreadful recurs and recurs. Not unlike the irrational desire to dash a contemplative silence to pieces or to climb to some high place and jump, so it seems a compulsion born less of intent than of the simple fact of its own possibility. The fact that she could do it is more than enough. She reels it in, always. Reels herself in tight. Any minute now, she thinks, any second, I could crash this whole day into the wall.
He tells her his parents were the ones who pushed for the ritual—the patient, hands unclasped, now sipping water. Isla pauses, looking up from her notepad, asks him to say that again. She’s heard of this once or twice before, archaic practices resurfacing the way trends will, exorcisms like bootcut jeans, like mixing pattern with print. Two years ago: not her patient but a woman on television, face pixelated, discussing her experiences as a child of the Cult of Our Lady. And before that: a patient recalling how her parents would often wake her at odd hours and lead her out to their Japanese garden, let the blood from her arm, and pray for deliverance. Not a rampant fad, but certainly a recurring one, things being as they are these days. A memory, briefly summoned and then swiftly, professionally set aside: Isla’s own mother, white to the lips and muttering. Isla’s own mother, her face very close: This will only hurt for a second.
Her sister Irene once said that, at pinch points, people always turn to the divine, or if not to the divine, then at least to the well-trodden. It’s a backup, she said, like a tested recipe. People love a ritual when things get hairy, to feel they’re doing something that thousands of people have done before them. And so, the patient, telling a story that Isla suspects he has told before: the blood on the bed linen, his mother inviting the priest, the sensation of something first beckoned, then wrenched from his guts. He believes both that the ritual worked and that it didn’t, expresses appropriate levels of skepticism toward the concept of exorcism yet can’t seem to set aside the idea that his parents did what they did for the best.
“I think they wanted to feel better,” he says. “I think they got it into their heads that something was wrong that could only be solved this way. They wanted to feel like they were taking action, given how little they could do anywhere else. It’s weird, because I don’t remember them being that religious, at first.”
Toward the end of the session, Isla asks if he believes in the devil. “I don’t,” he replies—clasps his hands so the knuckles pulse as if filling and retracting—“I don’t, but I feel him anyway.”
“Thank you, Ted,” she says, thinks Ugly Knuckles, reels it in again, thinks that she ought to get someone in to look at the dark spot on the wall. The air conditioner purrs. Someone in a consulting room across the hall appears to be weeping. D’you ever have the thought, says a voice along the corridor, that it might be getting worse every day but you’re just so used to it that you aren’t noticing? Like maybe it’s really terrible and I’m just so cut off from it that I’ve lost all sense of size? Half the time I can’t get back to mine because the train’s fucked or flooded or whatever. Last night I got home at ten to midnight and I’m just like… “Well, that’s not bad.” Fucking council. Isla operates from a suite of offices shared with two other therapists, and the noises around her are never quite muffled enough. The building is crisp, masculine, yet somehow fleshly—its walls vibrating the way a creature might breathe in its sleep. On occasion, she will sit across from a patient and listen to the noise of other patients and other therapists in adjoining rooms, imagining them all held safe within the mouth of something vast and slumbering, unlikely to turn to one side, unlikely to swallow.
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She sees the patient out, asks him to remember that their meeting will be half an hour later next week. Did you know, she hears a voice saying in reception, that magnolias evolved before bees? They’re one of the earliest flowering plants—as a species they’re something like ninety-five million years old. She heads back to her desk and removes her phone from the drawer, notes an unfamiliar number has called and left a message. She considers this for a moment, makes a mental list of probabilities: Morven might have a new number (but I don’t want to talk to Morven), Irene might have a new number (but why would Irene call), it might be the insurance company, it might be the bank. She presses a button on her phone and waits, grinding one heel into the carpet. From her vantage point near the window, she can see down into the plaza below. The water is high today, lapping up against the edges of the elevated walkways, the sunken string of high-rise buildings sharp in unaccustomed light. It is midafternoon, threatening rain, agapanthus dying in a pot beneath the heating vent, and Isla hasn’t eaten lunch. When the call connects, the voice on the line is kindly, professional. They would like to know her surname, her date of birth; they would like to tell her that her father is dead.
IRENE
On the train, a girl at the other end of the carriage vomits into her handbag and passes it to her boyfriend. The boyfriend holds the bag away from himself, makes long and meaningful eye contact with the floor. It’s too early for this, Irene thinks, then messages Jude about it. Either it’s too early or I’m getting old. Jude responds that two things can be true and asks what Irene wants for dinner.
Three seats down across the aisle, a man is talking loudly into his phone while the woman beside him makes periodic tutting noises. Irene tips her head, tries to avoid the gaze of the woman sitting directly opposite. She hates making eye contact in public places, the idea of an inadvertent brush with someone best kept in peripheral blur. Some time ago, she accidentally winked at a woman while messing around with her contact lenses and the horror of that moment stayed with her well into the end of the day. Embarrassment, the potential for it, like something caught on the sole of the foot and hard to slough off again, a physical object she carries around at all times.
The light in the uppermost edges of the train windows is starting to turn, evening bleeding as if from a leak-sprung ceiling: incremental, then thickening, swelling as it falls. The afternoon is wide, peach-ripe—rain incoming as always and the windows greased with mist, the city grown porous and slack around itself. The gaps between rain are so few and far between that they barely count as gaps so much as temporary glitches. It will start again, she knows, before her journey is over, before she has the chance to disembark and enjoy the respite. The irritation of that, of having missed it, will simply be something to shoulder, like everything else. Irene often feels she can detect a certain amphibious quality in the people with whom she shares transportation, shares offices, shares the ingrown cramp of city space. Some days, she will squint her eyes and imagine a waterlogged sheen to the skin of the woman who hands over change at the newspaper kiosk, the man who touches her knee on the tram. People at work complain of bloated joints, persistent headaches, though only as one complains about anything that has always been the case. I don’t know, Jude will say in the sanguine tone they tend to apply to things unrelated to the Now, that I’d even know how to go back to things being drier. I don’t know if it would suit me at all.
But the whole point is that you were suited to it once, Irene replies on the days when she’s feeling disagreeable. When we were kids, when we were teenagers, even. The whole point is you were different once, too.
I know that, Jude says, but what’s the point in dwelling. Once you start, you’ll never get to the end of it.
Jude tends to operate like this, focusing solely on what’s going on right in front of them, as if everything else is irrelevant and incapable of causing them harm. That was Then, this is Now, like a screen set up to block peripheral vision. Irene has tried it, has sat and reflected that the house was Then but this is Now. That her PhD and all she planned to do with it was Then but Jude is Now, that work is Now, that the sofa and carpet and special soft furnishings she’s bought for the flat are all Now. The train is Now, she supposes, and the moment the girl at the end of the carriage recommences throwing up is Now, although then it is Now again and Now again and again until the girl is white and dry-heaving and the boyfriend sets down the still-reeking handbag, gets up, and moves toward the door. They are two stops away from the end of the line. This train route used to be longer, but old ends to old lines have long since been abandoned, stations drowned and duly cut off, trains diverted, raised above the water where possible or else supplanted by boats and water taxis, journeys thrown off course. Irene thinks about calling her sister and then dismisses it, thinks less seriously about calling her other sister but then leans her head back against the window and sighs.
She was trying to get to the end of a thought about souls, about the strange internal silence of something one might assume to be essential and yet which serves no tangible purpose. This happens fairly often. Thoughts crop up, unwanted, despite the fact that her PhD is a relic, discarded long ago in a panic that feels foreign to her now. She works, these days, for an office that administrates payroll for remote staff and agile workspaces, and the memory of her studies operates rather like an atrophying muscle, unconditioned but still prone to spasm when pressed a certain way. She’ll think that if one assumes that the soul is distinct from the physical form, then the soul cannot communicate, for it has no recourse to speech or any other form of expression with which to sign out its meaning. She will think that if this is the case, then one might extrapolate that the soul has no need of language, which poses questions about how it enacts control or influence over the human body and what the divide between silence and language means in terms of spirituality. She will think, I should write this down, but then find that the notion recedes the more closely she looks at it, until it reveals itself as little more than a muddy act of pointillism. It’s depressing, all this thought that has nowhere to put itself, all this context and research with no place left to go. Give it a rest, she will think to herself. You have a job and it isn’t actually this.
The train rattles over a series of point blades. The sky is closing in. Later on, the summer constellations will sharpen into being, though too far back behind cloud to be seen. Her phone vibrates in her pocket. She slides it out and checks the number, feels surprise quickly curdling into annoyance as she realizes her older sister Isla is calling. What, she thinks irritably, do you want. Whatever it is, can’t it wait.
Excerpted from Private Rites by Julia Armfield. Copyright © 2024 by Julia Armfield. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.
