by Rachel Cusk
‘Who is it, John?’ a woman’s voice had called from indoors. ‘John, who is it?’
They’d been civil enough, I said, until I mentioned my children. The woman in particular – her name was Paula – had not troubled to disguise her feelings. You’ve got to be bloody joking, she’d said to me, slowly, her eyes never leaving mine. We were in their sitting room; we’d passed down an oppressive corridor with a sagging, yellowed ceiling from which I’d caught a glimpse through the door to a bedroom where a mattress lay on the floor beneath a heap of filthy sheets and blankets and empty bottles. The sitting room was a cluttered, cave-like place; Paula sat on a brown velour sofa. She was a powerfully built, obese woman with coarse grey hair cut in a bob around her face. Her large, slack body had an unmistakable core of violence, which I glimpsed when she suddenly turned to take a vicious swipe at the shrivelled dog – who had been yapping ceaselessly throughout my visit – and sent him flying to the other side of the room.
‘Shut up, Lenny!’ she bellowed.
Amidst the clutter, I’d noticed a black-and-white photograph standing in a frame on top of the television. It showed a woman standing proudly on a beach in a swimming costume: she was tall and shapely and handsome, and my eye kept being drawn to the photograph not just for the relief it offered from the surrounding squalor but with an increasing sense of the woman’s familiarity, until finally I realised, from the tilted-up nose and pointed chin still visible in the bloated face in front of me, that the woman was Paula.
The man, John, had seemed slightly more propitiatory. We’ve had years of it, you see, he’d said in his hoarse voice. His skin had the blue-grey colour of breathlessness and his white hair was unkempt; white hair sprouted from his ears, and from a number of large moles on his face. The woman nodded, her pointed chin raised, her mouth in a line. That’s right, John, she said. Years and bloody years, John said. Them Africans, you wouldn’t believe the noise they made. You tell her, John, the woman said, you tell her. After that she had refused to speak further, and had sat there with her mouth clamped and her nose in the air until I left. I’d learned to tread, I told the builder, with all possible lightness in the house but it had been harder to instill this habit in my sons. They were used to living in a different way, I said.
The builder was silent, thinking.
‘I know trouble when I see it,’ he said finally. He’d had two major heart attacks in the last ten years. ‘And I don’t want to have a third,’ he said.
He asked whether anyone else had quoted for the work and I said they had: a Polish builder who drove an expensive car and said he had a reputation to consider; and a firm of young, efficient, well-spoken men who swarmed over the house in immaculate jeans and suede shoes, tapping information into their laptops, before admitting they were so busy they wouldn’t be able to start for at least a year. He asked for the figures and I gave them to him. He screwed up his eyes, his head tilted back.
‘It’s a rewire and a replaster,’ he said. ‘And this –’ he tapped the floor again with his foot – ‘will have to come up. Like I say, God knows what we’ll find.’
He could give me, he said, a ballpark figure, but a job like this always incurred extra costs. He’d do his best to make sure they weren’t high: he just wanted to be sure I knew what I was letting myself in for, that was all. While he spoke he had started walking around the kitchen, tapping walls, examining window frames, squatting down to wrench a small section of skirting board away with a screwdriver in order to look behind it, which elicited another volley of thumps.
‘Believe me, I’ve seen some neighbours in my time,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘With people living on top of each other the way they do here, it comes with the territory.’
He’d had people walk into properties where his men were working and try to wrest the tools from their hands; he’d had countless threats, legal and otherwise; he’d had people blaming him for their misfortunes, their illnesses and breakdowns, sometimes for their whole lot in life, because some people – he pointed down at the floor beneath our feet – will never take responsibility and are always on the lookout for someone else to blame. And no matter how obvious it might seem that he himself was not deserving of that blame, that he was merely the representative of someone else’s aims and desires and was only doing his job, he was nonetheless in the firing line.
‘Do you mind if I take a look out back?’ he said.
We went out to my half of the garden so that he could examine the rear of the house. When we opened the door a flailing cloud of startled pigeons rose flapping and whooping into the air around us. The builder put his hand to his chest.
‘Frightened the living daylights out of me,’ he said, with a wheezing, apologetic laugh.
The commotion of dirty-coloured birds settled heavily back on the window ledges and the drainpipes that criss-crossed the brickwork.
‘Christ alive,’ the builder said, screwing up his eyes. ‘There’s hundreds of them. I don’t like pigeons,’ he said, shuddering. ‘Horrible things.’
It was true that there was something malevolent about the way the birds crowded themselves, waiting, along their perches. Often they would skirmish, pecking and shoving one another flapping out into the air and then frantically scrabbling to regain a foothold. The houses to either side stood as though in feigned ignorance of the squalor in their midst: from here their tranquil, well-painted rear facades could be seen, looking out over tidy gardens with barbecues and patio furniture and scented flower beds. Often, over the summer, I had sat in the dark kitchen late in the evening watching the people next door, whose garden was just visible from the window: they were a family, and on warm nights would frequently eat outside, the children running and laughing until late on the lawn, the adults sitting at the table drinking wine. Sometimes they spoke in English but more usually they spoke in French or German: they entertained many friends and often, sitting in the dark in the unfamiliar room listening to the foreign hubbub of their conversation, I would become confused, forgetting where I was and what phase of life I was in. The light from the basement window would fall on the sordid garden so that it had the ghostly look of a ruin or a graveyard, with the spectral black angel rising at its centre. It seemed so strange that these two extremes – the repellent and the idyllic, death and life – could stand only a few feet apart and remain mutually untransformed.
To the right of mine was the professors’ garden, whose geometric design of gravelled paths and abstract statuary and fronded, esoteric plants suggested thought and contemplation. Sometimes I would see one or the other of them, sitting on a bench in the shade, reading. They had spoken to me once, over the fence, to ask whether I would mind giving them some of my apples, as my predecessor, they said, had been wont to do. The desolate apple tree in my garden was a Bramley, apparently. It yielded surprisingly good fruit: she had always given them a generous amount, which kept them in apple pies for the whole winter.
‘You haven’t made life easy for yourself, I’ll say that much,’ the builder said when we got back inside. ‘Like I say, it’s a can of worms.’ He looked at me quizzically. ‘It seems a shame,’ he said, ‘to put yourself through all this. You could always stick it back on the market, let some other idiot take it on. Buy yourself something in a nice new development – you’d have a lot of change left over, believe me, by the time you’re done here.’
I asked him where he lived and he said it was in Harringey, with his mother. It wasn’t ideal, but to be honest, if you spent all day working on other people’s houses, you didn’t have much energy left for being interested in your own. He and his mother got along all right; she was happy to cook an evening meal for him, and his diet was bad enough, let alone his lack of exercise. You’d think building was a physical trade, he said, but I spend all my time in my van. As a younger man he’d been in the army – he had that to thank for any physique that remained to him. Now that his heart was on the blink he’d had to start thinking about his health.
‘If you can call it thinking,’ he said, ‘lying in bed at night panicking for the thirty seconds it takes you to fall unconscious after a day at work.’
The faltering sounds of a trombone were coming through the kitchen wall, as they always did at this time of day: it was the daughter of the international family next door, who did her practice with such monotony and regularity that I had even come to learn her mistakes by heart.
‘It’s these single-skin buildings,’ the builder said, shaking his head. ‘Every sound goes right through them.’
I asked him when he had left the army, and he said it was more or less fifteen years ago. He’d seen some things in service, as you could imagine, but no matter how twisted up those situations became – even in his periods abroad – their component elements were basically familiar to him. What he’d seen in his years as a builder, on the other hand, was pretty much a foreign country.
‘Without wishing to imply anything,’ he said, turning and looking out of the window with his arms folded, ‘you get to learn a lot about people’s lives when you’re in their houses every day. And the funny thing is,’ he said, ‘that no matter how self-conscious people are at the start, no matter how much they begin by keeping up appearances, after a week or two they forget you’re there, not in the sense that you become invisible – it’s hard to be invisible,’ he said with a smile, ‘when you’re knocking out partitions with a claw hammer – but that they forget you can see and hear them.’
I said it must be interesting to be able to see people without them seeing you. It seemed to me that children were often treated in the same way, as witnesses whose presence was somehow not taken into account.
The builder gave a melancholic laugh.
‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘At least until the divorce proceedings start. Then everyone’s after them for their vote.’
In a way, he went on after a while, he felt his clients sometimes forgot that he was a person: instead he became, in a sense, an extension of their own will. Often they would start asking him to do things, like people used to ask their servants, things that were usually trivial but sometimes were so presumptuous he’d begin to doubt he’d heard right. He’d been expected to walk people’s dogs and collect their dry cleaning, to unblock their toilets and once – he smiled – to take a lady’s boots off her feet, because they were so tight she couldn’t get them off herself. He hadn’t literally been asked – if I would excuse his language – to wipe someone’s arse for them, but he didn’t doubt it was a possibility. Of course, he added, you got that in the army too. Once you put people in a position of power over other people, he said, there’s no knowing what they’ll do. But here the power balance is different, he said, because as much as your clients might hate you and resent you they also need you, for the reason that they don’t know how to do what you do.
‘My grandmother was in service,’ he said, ‘and I remember she used to say that the thing that always amazed her was how much people couldn’t do for themselves. They couldn’t light a fire or boil an egg – they couldn’t even dress themselves. Like children, she said. Though in her case,’ he added, ‘she never even knew what it was to be a child.’
He was acquainted with several builders, he went on, who had reached a position of fundamental disrespect under such circumstances: it could make you a dangerous person, the loss of fellow feeling. Someone like you, he said to me, doesn’t want to be falling into those hands. But there was an indifference, almost an ennui, that was dangerous too and that came from too much realising of other people’s visions and dreams: it was exhausting sometimes, to be held at the fine point of his clients’ obsessions, to be the instrument of their desire while remaining the guardian of possibility. He would get home after a day spent removing a set of brand-new tiles he himself had laid only a few days earlier because the client had decided they were the wrong colour, or after hours constructing a wetroom that was meant to replicate the experience of standing outdoors under a waterfall, and find that he barely had the energy to look after himself or his own affairs. He had removed entire kitchens that he himself would never have been able to afford and thrown them away; he had installed wooden floors of such costliness that the client had stood over him while he did it, telling him to be careful. And then sometimes he’d have clients who had no clue what they wanted, who wanted to be told, as if his years of labour had turned him into some kind of authority. It’s funny, he said, but when someone asks me for my opinion, or asks me how I’d do a place if it was up to me, increasingly I imagine living somewhere completely blank, somewhere where all the angles are straight and the corners squared and where there’s nothing, no colours or features, maybe not even any light. But I don’t usually tell clients that, he said. I wouldn’t want them thinking I didn’t care.
He looked at the chunky watch on his wrist and said he had to be going: he’d left his van parked outside and he knew what the traffic wardens around here were like. I accompanied him out to the street, which was quiet in the grey afternoon. We stood for a moment at the bottom of the steps and looked together at the house, which from the outside was the same as all the other houses in the terrace. They were compact three-storey grey-brick Victorian buildings, each with one set of steps rising to the front door and another going down to the basement. The door to the basement stood directly under the front door, so that the steps formed a tunnel-like space around the entrance, like the mouth to a cave. The houses had bow windows at the raised-ground level that projected slightly out from the building, so that when you stood there you had the feeling of being suspended in space above the street. A woman a few doors away was standing in hers, looking down at us.
‘It doesn’t look so bad from this side, does it?’ the builder said. ‘You’d almost never know.’
He stood there, wheezing, his hands on his hips. He said he’d just had a job cancelled, so if I wanted he could put a couple of guys here straight away. Otherwise we were probably talking about Christmas. He gave me his ballpark figure, which was exactly half what the other builders had quoted. For a while his screwed-up eyes travelled up and down the facade, as though looking for something they might have missed, some sign or clue of what was to come. They settled above the front door, where a curious feature was moulded into the white plaster, a human face. All the houses had them: each face was different, some female and some male; their eyes looked down slightly, as though interrogating the person standing at the threshold. The house next door had a woman with maidenly braids wound elaborately around her head; mine had a white plaster man, with thick eyebrows and a jutting forehead and a long pointed beard. There was, or so I told myself, something paternalistic and Zeus-like about him. He looked down from above, like the bearded figure of God in a religious painting looking down on the mêlée below.
The builder told me the guys would arrive promptly at eight o’clock on Monday. I should pack away anything I didn’t want ruined. With any luck, we’d set the place to rights in a matter of weeks. He looked down at the basement, where dirty net curtains hung in the squat window. The sound of the dog barking came faintly from inside.
‘There’s no fixing that, though,’ he said.
He asked whether I’d be able to find alternative accommodation at such short notice. The place would be a building site for a while: there would be a lot of dust and mess, especially at the beginning. I said I wasn’t sure what I would do, but my sons could probably go and stay with their father. His screwed-up eyes moved to my face.
‘He lives nearby then, does he?’ he said.
If the children were sorted, he went on, then we could probably manage. Everyone’s anxiety levels would be that much lower. He could leave one of the bedrooms till last: when everything else was finished, I could move into another room while that last room was being done. He opened the door of his van and got in. I saw the cab was full of empty cardboard coffee cups and discarded food packaging and scraps of paper. Like I said, the builder said ruefully, the job invol
ves a lot of driving. Sometimes he was in his van the whole day and ate all three meals there. You end up sitting in your own leavings, he said, shaking his head. He started the engine and shut the door and then wound down the window while he was pulling away.
‘Eight o’clock Monday,’ he said.
I asked Dale whether he could try to get rid of the grey.
It was growing dark outside, and the rain against the salon’s big windows looked like ink running down a page. The traffic crawled along the blackened road beyond. The cars all had their lights on. Dale was standing behind me in the mirror, lifting long dry fistfuls of hair and then letting them fall. His eyes were moving all over my image with a devouring expression. His face was sombre and I watched it in the glass.
‘There’s nothing wrong with a few sparkles,’ he said reproachfully.
The other stylist, who was standing behind a customer at the next chair, half closed her long sleepy lids and smiled.
‘I get mine done,’ she said. ‘A lot of people do.’
‘We’re talking about a commitment,’ Dale said. ‘You have to keep coming back every six weeks. That’s a life sentence,’ he added darkly, his eyes meeting mine in the mirror. ‘I’m just saying you need to be sure.’
The other stylist looked at me sidelong with her lazy smile.
‘A lot of people don’t find that a problem,’ she said. ‘Their lives are mostly commitments anyway. At least if it makes you feel good that’s something.’
Dale asked whether my hair had ever been dyed before. The dye could accumulate, apparently, and the hair become synthetic-looking and dull. It was the accumulation rather than the colour itself that resulted in an unnatural appearance. People bought box after box of those home-dyeing kits in search of a lifelike shade, and all they were doing was making their hair look more and more like a matted wig. But that was apparently preferable to a natural touch of frost. In fact, where hair was concerned, Dale said, the fake generally seemed to be more real than the real: so long as what they saw in the mirror wasn’t the product of nature, it didn’t seem to matter to most people if their hair looked like a shopfront dummy’s. Though he did have one client, an older lady, who wore her grey hair loose all the way to her waist. Like an elder’s beard, her hair struck Dale as her wisdom: she carried herself like a queen, he said, streaming power in the form of this grey mane. He lifted my hair again in his hands, holding it aloft and then letting it drop, while we looked at each other in the mirror.
