by Rachel Cusk
She had gone to her room and lain staring at the ceiling in a state of high, thrumming alertness. Then, as she had already told me, she got up in the dawn and walked through the city again alone.
I asked her what the photojournalist had talked about, on their walk.
His wife, she said. About how intelligent she was. And how talented.
At some point he had told her that he and his wife had separated for a period. She had asked him why. He said it was because of work: the wife had got an important promotion which took her to the other side of the country, and he had things he wanted to do here, in Europe. They had lived apart for two years, each pursuing different projects. At the end of that time they had come together again, in their home in Wyoming. She asked him, boldly, if there had been infidelity. He denied it. Vociferously, she added.
I knew then, she said, that he was a liar, that for all his reportage and his honesty he was determined to keep himself untouched, to take without giving, to hoard himself like a greedy child. I knew, she said, that he wanted to sleep with me, had considered it thoroughly, and decided – from experience, I’ve no doubt, she said – that it was too much of a risk.
I asked her why she had felt such excitement, after this deflating encounter.
I don’t know, she said. I think it was the feeling of being admired. She was silent for a while, gazing towards the window, her face lifted. Admired, she went on, by someone more important than me. I don’t know why, she said. It excited me. It always excites me. Even though, she said, you could say I don’t get anything out of it.
She looked at her watch: it was late; she ought to go, and leave me in peace. She took her bag and stood up amid the dust sheets.
I said she should think about our conversation, and about whether anything had been said that might provide her with an opening. I said I felt sure it would become clear soon enough.
Thank you, she said, shaking my hand lightly with her slender fingers. I could tell she didn’t believe me.
We went out into the hall and I opened the door for her. The neighbours from the flat below were standing outside on the pavement in the grey afternoon, shabby in their coats. At the sound of the door they turned to look, their faces grim and suspicious, and Jane returned their look imperiously. I imagined her in the dusk of a Paris garden, untouched in her white dress, an object thirsting if not for interpretation then for the fulfilment at least of an admiring human gaze, like a painting hanging on a wall, waiting.
The builder’s van had broken down: the foreman Tony said it happened all the time. We were in Tony’s gleaming maroon Audi, driving to the hardware depot to pick up some materials.
‘This is nice car,’ he explained, taking his hands off the steering wheel to demonstrate. Inside, the car was spotless black leather. ‘I buy a car that never break down,’ Tony said, ‘and look what happen. It’s me has to go pick up cement.’
Earlier I had stood in the street and watched him line the boot carefully with dust sheets.
‘Like assassin,’ he said, grinning widely to show an impressive set of white teeth. ‘Room for two bodies,’ he added significantly. He pointed at the door to the basement flat. ‘In Albania,’ he said, ‘I know people – big discount.’
We sat in the slow-moving traffic with the radio on. Tony said he kept it on to improve his English. His daughter spoke better English than him, and she was only five.
‘Five years old!’ he yelled, slapping the leather steering wheel. ‘Amazing!’
The grey roadside inched along beside us. Tony glanced out at it frequently, drawing himself up in his seat. He drove erect behind his mirrored sunglasses with a single finger resting on the leather steering wheel. His big hard thighs were splayed comfortably in a perfect V. He wore a tight red T-shirt that showed his powerful chest and bulging forearms.
‘I love England,’ he said. ‘I love most the English cakes.’ He grinned. ‘Especially the hijack.’
You mean flapjack, I said.
‘Flapjack!’ he shouted deliriously, throwing back his head. ‘Yes, I love the flapjack!’
His daughter, he went on, enjoyed school – she talked about it all the time. In the mornings he would find her sitting fully dressed in her uniform on the stairs, waiting. Her teacher had told him she read better than some of the ten-year-olds.
‘My daughter,’ he said, jabbing his own muscled chest, ‘reading English better than the English.’
The family had moved to England three years before. The only person they knew when they came was Tony’s sister-in-law, who lived in Harlow. Since then Tony had persuaded his brother and cousin to come here too. He liked to have his family around him – he returned to Albania every couple of months, driving non-stop in the Audi until he got there – but he wasn’t sure it was so good for his wife.
‘It stops her getting used,’ he said.
Used to it, I said. It stops her getting used to it.
‘Yes,’ Tony said, nodding his head approvingly. ‘It’s good.’
It stopped her getting used to it, he went on, having her family to depend on. She had made no friends and was frightened of going anywhere on her own. She wouldn’t even go to their daughter’s school: it was Tony who dropped her off and picked her up and went to the assembling.
Assembly, I said.
‘I love,’ Tony said, grinning widely, ‘the assembly.’
Unlike their daughter, his wife could speak no English at all.
‘And my daughter,’ he said, ‘she don’t speak Albanian.’
She could understand a few things but English was the language she knew.
So effectively, I said, his wife and daughter couldn’t speak to one another. Tony nodded his head slowly, his eyes on the road.
‘In other words,’ he said.
At the depot I waited while Tony collected the builder’s order. I paid the bill and we set off on the return journey. On the road a small battered truck loomed up right behind us, blaring its horn repeatedly, and then swerved out so that it drew level with Tony’s Audi. The driver was waving his arms and leaning over to shout through the open window. He was a tiny, piratical-looking man with an elaborate black moustache. Tony laughed and pressed a button so that the electric window slid down. The two of them drove along, shouting back and forth in a foreign language, while the oncoming traffic emitted a cacophonous blaring of horns in protest. Presently the truck accelerated away, the contents of its open bed – rubbish sacks, old furniture, broken planks and piles of rubble – jolting up and down under the madly flapping tarpaulin.
‘That’s Kaput,’ Tony said, buzzing the window shut again. ‘He crazy. Even for Albanian.’
Kaput never left his truck, Tony said. He drove it all day and all night, round and round the city, collecting rubbish. Rubbish was a problem for people here, hundred per cent: there were so many regulations, and getting a skip cost a lot of money. It was cheaper to pay Kaput to come and take it away.
I asked where he took it.
‘He drive out till he see fields,’ Tony said, winking.
Albanians knew how to work, he went on, not like people here. Kaput didn’t even have a house: his truck was his house. He made more money that way. He sent all the money back to his village. Tony frowned.
‘The village of Kaput a bad place,’ he said.
Tony himself worked every day of the week. The builder wasn’t his only employer: he did all sorts of jobs for people – including the builder’s clients – on the side. He and Pavel and his brother intended to set up their own building firm next year. Tony grinned.
‘Pavel always say he going home,’ he said. ‘But I don’t let him. I lock his tools in my house. Sometimes he come and bang on the door in the middle of the night. I don’t let him in. He stand out there and shout and beg for his tools. I put my head out of the window and say, stop shouting, you wake up my daughter, she’s dreaming in English.’
He laughed loudly. I asked why Pavel wanted to go home.
&nb
sp; ‘He’s homestruck,’ Tony said.
Homesick, I said.
Pavel was the other man the builder had sent along with Tony to do the work. He was a small, quiet, melancholic person who I would sometimes see sitting on my doorstep in the grey dawn reading a book while he waited for Tony to arrive. On the first day, Tony had explained that he would be doing the demolition and ripping out, and Pavel would do the rebuilding and making good.
‘Destruction –’ Tony had grinned widely and placed his hands on his own chest, then pointed at Pavel – ‘construction!’
Pavel came out to help Tony unload the car. They stood and considered the bags of cement and Pavel asked a question.
‘English!’ Tony commanded. ‘Speak English!’
Tony told me that today they were going to be taking up the floor. I asked whether there would be a lot of noise. He grinned.
‘Hundred per cent,’ he said.
I went down to the basement flat and knocked on the door. There was the sound of the dog yapping and then, after a long time, the heavy approach of footsteps. Paula opened the door. At the sight of me, her face assumed an expression of distaste.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘What do you want?’
I started to explain that there would be some noise today but she spoke over me.
‘John’s been on the phone to the council to complain,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you, John?’ she called behind her. ‘He’s asked them to come out here and put a stop to it.’
She folded her arms and stood in the doorway looking at me.
‘It shouldn’t be allowed,’ she said.
There was a shuffling sound and John appeared behind her.
‘Get out the way, Lenny,’ he said hoarsely to the dog.
‘People like you,’ Paula said, to me, ‘make me sick. The way people like you carry on.’
‘The thing is,’ John said, ‘we’ve lived here nearly forty years.’
‘I hear you stamping about,’ Paula said. ‘You probably don’t even take your shoes off. You probably put high-heeled shoes on specially. You had someone up there the other night,’ she said. ‘It was a man, I heard him. Disgusting.’
‘I’m ill, you know,’ John said.
‘I heard you with him,’ Paula said. She gave a silly high-pitched little laugh in imitation and fluttered her fingers at her own cheek. ‘You think you’re fooling people but you’re not.’
‘I’ve got cancer, see,’ John said.
‘He’s got cancer,’ Paula said, pointing her finger at him fiercely. ‘And you’re up there dancing around in your high-heeled shoes and throwing yourself at men.’
‘I’m not well,’ John said.
‘You’re not, are you, John?’ Paula said. ‘But some people don’t care whether you’ve got cancer. They just carry right on.’
I tried to explain that once the floor was soundproofed there would be less noise between the two flats.
‘Oh, I’m not listening to you,’ Paula said. ‘I get enough of it living down here, listening to you all day and all night. It makes me feel sick,’ she said, ‘the sound of your voice.’
She was growing aroused: I watched her big body writhe slightly, her head twisting from side to side, as though something inside her was rising and unfolding, wanting to be born. She was, I saw, goading herself on: she wanted to traverse boundaries, as though to prove to herself that she was free. I stood there in silence. Her mouth was gathering itself and puckering and I sensed she was entertaining the idea of spitting at me. Instead she gripped the edge of the door and leaned her face towards mine.
‘You disgust me,’ she said, and with a great violent heave she slammed the door shut as hard as she could.
I went back upstairs. Tony had a hammer in his hand and had begun to lever up the plastic tiles. I told him that perhaps they shouldn’t do the floor today after all. He didn’t stop: he carried on levering up one tile after another and tossing them into a pile beside him.
‘Up to you,’ he said. ‘But I talk to them yesterday. They say it okay.’
I said I was very surprised to hear that.
‘She bring me and Pavel cup of tea,’ Tony grinned. ‘She ask why no one looking after us.’
Well, I said, today she’s threatening to phone the council and complain.
Tony stopped working and sat back on his knees, the hammer in his hand. He looked me in the eye.
‘Me and Pavel,’ he said, ‘we take care of it.’
I went out and walked towards the Tube station. It had an old lift that rose and fell with ponderous slowness between the platform and the street. The station was scheduled for closure the following year so that a new lift could be installed: a sign at the entrance stated that this closure would last for nine months. Every morning and evening smartly dressed people poured in and out of the station mouth, commuting to work or to school. They carried briefcases and satchels and coffee cups, talking rapidly on their mobile phones while speeding along the pavements, so that the impression was of a series of precisely timed manoeuvres into which their daily routine had been distilled. The station was so integral to this routine that I wondered what they felt when they passed the sign warning of its future absence.
The Tube station stood at a junction where five roads converged like the spokes of a wheel. The traffic sat at the lights, each lane waiting for its turn. Sometimes it seemed that the junction was a place of confluence; at other times, when the traffic thundered constantly over the intersection in a chaotic river of buses and bicycles and cars, it felt like a mere passageway, a place of transit. There was a café there, and I went inside to wait for my friend Amanda, who lived nearby and had asked if I wanted to meet for coffee. Despite the apparent convenience of this arrangement, I had to wait nearly an hour before she arrived. In that time I studied the café’s interior. With its bookshelves and aubergine-painted walls and antique furniture, it gave an impression of age and character while being, in fact, both generic and new. Amanda texted twice while I sat there: once to say that she was running late and then, a little while later, to tell me there’d been a bit of a disaster at the house and she was running later still. My younger son phoned and I spoke to him. It was just after eleven o’clock in the morning: I asked him why he wasn’t in lessons. It’s break, he said. There was a pause and then he said, how are you? After we finished speaking I sat and tried to read a newspaper. My eyes moved over the words without absorbing them. There was a picture of a large elephant beside a small elephant in a hot dusty landscape. There was a picture of a crowd protesting, their mouths open, in some city in the rain. A text sounded on my phone. It was from the Chair at the festival. He said he was afraid he wasn’t free to meet on Thursday, as I had suggested. Some other time perhaps, he said.
Amanda arrived. She had been about to leave, she said, when the indoor sprinkler system the building-regulations people had forced her to install as a fire precaution was somehow activated and it had started raining water all through the house. By the time she’d managed to disarm it everything was soaked: her clothes, her bed, all the paperwork in her office. Luckily she didn’t own very much in terms of furniture, no oil paintings or priceless antiques. The house was pretty bare: there weren’t even any carpets or curtains. Still, she hadn’t expected to be mopping floors this morning. She’d cleared up the worst of it and then left the windows open so that it could dry out by itself.
‘Which violates the terms of my insurance,’ she said. ‘But at this point I’m past caring.’
She had narrated the story of the sprinkler so cheerfully it was hard to believe it had actually occurred. In fact, she seemed almost animated by it. She wore work clothes – a tight black dress and a black jacket – and her eyes were bright with make-up. She was carrying a big sack-like leather bag, distended with the bulk of what was in it, on her shoulder and when she hung it over the back of the chair the weight caused the chair to tip backwards and crash to the floor. With a swift, darting movement she set it back on
its legs and sat neatly down, grinning, with the bag at her feet. Outside, the sun had come out: the light from the window fell directly on her face and caught the nap of her black clothing, illuminating a labyrinth of dusty creases.
‘I had to get these out of the laundry basket,’ she said. ‘They were the only things that were dry.’
Amanda had a youthful appearance on which the patina of age was clumsily applied, as if, rather than growing older, she had merely been carelessly handled, like a crumpled photograph of a child. Her short, fleshy body seemed to exist in a state of constant animation through which an oceanic weariness could occasionally be glimpsed. Today the grey tint of fatigue lay just beneath her made-up skin: she glanced at me frequently, her face crinkled against the sun, as if looking for her own reflection.
‘I know I look awful,’ she said, ducking her head. She picked up the menu and her eyes ran quickly down the page. ‘I was awake most of last night. I can’t even blame it on the kids,’ she added, ‘since I don’t have any.’
She’d been up until three in the morning, she went on, arguing with Gavin: recently she’d started yoga to try to help with her insomnia, but it would have taken more than a sun salute to get her off after that. Gavin was Amanda’s boyfriend, a large, sombre-faced man I’d met only once. He ran the building company Amanda had hired to renovate her house.
