by Rachel Cusk
In the kitchen Eddie was standing staring out of the window, just standing there, in the middle of the spot where the old kitchen had once stood. He was looking at the garden in the rain. He always wanted to go out there: Amanda wouldn’t let him, except on perfect summer days, when the grass was dry and springy and unlikely to cleave to the soles of his feet. And even then, he wasn’t content just to sit in it—he had to dig things up, and carry woodlice around in his fingers, and make structures out of stones and twigs and leaves for snails to live in. Amanda had seen something on television about children eating such things, in conditions of starvation: cockroaches, snails, even rats and mice. Now, as he stood in the neutral-coloured vault of the kitchen, apparently paralysed by its blankness, she imagined letting him out into the garden to fend for himself, to pick up wriggling woodlice in his grubby fingers and feed them into his mouth, to make a shelter for himself to sleep in out of stones and twigs and leaves. It seemed the only alternative, to the sterility that adhered to her, to her heart that had no love in it. And if it was true that she had no love in her heart, then what was the reason for it? Her life had been an ordinary life: her parents and grandparents were ordinary, they had said and done ordinary things together. They had all lived together ordinarily, in their ordinary home. They had gone to sleep and got up again and eaten their meals and done their work in an ordinary way. If there was a wrong, then it was an ordinary kind of wrong.
Yet Gran had said she was cold: Gran, a tiny, limp, flaxen-haired creature with skin that felt like dust and watery, receding eyes. She had been a tiny, harmless woman, but now Amanda felt her as an oppressor, a scourge. What was her knowledge? What vision had she seen on the shore of death? And how, if it was only a vision of ordinariness, had Gran extrapolated from it such sweeping, seigneurial disapprobation, such condemnatory power? Love! Was love the disguise a necessity wore in the moment you bowed down before it? Did Christine Lanham love her husband, actually love him? Did Sally Gibson love her daughter, or did she fear her, fear her daughter’s ability to destroy her the way Betsy Miller—poor girl—was even now destroying her parents? Was love not, in fact, the first concession to death?
Amanda loved her silver Toyota: she was no fool. And she had loved Susannah’s rabbit, whose soft white body had struggled frantically in her arms. The feeling of love had besieged her: she had burned in it and lived in it both. She remembered it clearly. She had wanted both to have the rabbit and to be it. She had wanted to be Susannah. The fact that she was not Susannah—it seemed possible that this was the reason love could never gain a foothold in her. When Jessica was born—dark-haired, lavishly screaming—it came round again, the possibility of transference. But there was too much work to do, too much disorder and incessant change, too much protesting reality, for this dark, burning, jealous love to make a channel through. So she made Jessica resemble herself instead, her nervous indifference, her prejudice against chaos, her unblinking soul.
And Eddie was the stultifying noon of her life’s day, the grind: he was all unvarnished, unmitigated work. He did not, could not reflect her: he merely went through the hours ahead of her, displacing things in order that she should put them back. He had a pure relationship with her worst self. Now he stretched out his hand as though to touch the garden and his fingers met the window.
“Don’t, Eddie,” she said. “You’ll get marks on the glass.”
“I saw Granny in the garden,” he said.
“Granny? You mean Marlene?” Marlene was Amanda’s mother, who lived in Kent. “What was Marlene doing in our garden?”
“Not her. Old Granny. The one who gives me sweets. She was in the garden. I saw her.”
A shadow passed over Amanda.
“Old Granny can’t have been in the garden,” she said.
Eddie shrugged. “She was.”
“Old Granny died. She died this morning. She died in the place where she lives.”
“Oh,” said Eddie.
“Auntie Susannah was with her. She was holding her hand.”
Eddie considered this.
“Oh. Poor Granny. Will you tell her I like her?”
“I can’t tell her, because she’s dead. That’s what being dead means. It means you can’t tell people things any more.”
Eddie turned away from the window and looked at her. His clothes were rumpled. His eyes were large and tremulous. His hair stood up in tufts, like grass. He came towards her. In his face she saw the realisation of her own mortality. He seemed to want her to comfort him for the fact that one day she too would die. It was another piece of disorder she was expected to attend to, another thing she was expected to carry; he would slip off the knowledge, slip away from it having handed it to her, and go away lighter. And who carried her own deadly revelations, her ordinary terror? Her mother, sitting in her slippers in Kent, or caravanning, as she was now, in Wales in the rain?
He rested his head against her thighs, and then he put his arms around her legs and hugged her. A faint, uneven warmth came from his vigorous little body. She looked out of the window at the garden, at the backs of the houses in Bedford Road that always looked so undignified somehow, with their drainpipes and their electric cables and their patchy bits of mortar. At the front, where they could be seen, they were faced with handsome masonry and the hedges were pruned. The fronts were seen by strangers, by passers-by, while Amanda had to look at the backs every day. What was it about intimacy that encouraged such vulnerability, such dilapidation? Why was her solemn undertaking to spend her life with James and Jessica and Eddie repaid in her husband’s stained underwear in the laundry basket and his hairs from shaving in the sink, in her children’s discarded emotions? She rested her hands on Eddie’s small shoulders.
“I love you, Mummy,” he said, into her skirt.
“Silly boy.” She squeezed his shoulders.
“I’m always going to tell you things. For when you’re dead.”
“It’s not very nice to talk about people being dead, Eddie.”
She tried to disengage him from her legs, but he clung on.
“I don’t mind,” he said.
After all, she felt a little wave of recognition of him, a little sense of being overpowered by his small, forward-going nature. He rushed up and over her, a little wave going over a ridge in the sand.
Liz Connelly and Owen were still in the sitting room, watching television. She had almost forgotten about them. From where she stood she could see the kaleidoscopic edge of the television screen and one of Liz Connelly’s robust, black-trousered legs. She remembered the red stain, like a strange red flower, on the sofa and a bolt of sensation passed through her, a feeling of violence and confusion and shame. She had thrown the little boy on to the cushions. She remembered his soft, dry, appraising eyes.
Soon they would go; she would cause them to go. First, she would cause Eddie to let go of her legs. Then she would package the Connellys up and put them out in the rain, with the red stain remaining as a reminder of this day, this day of her life in which all the other days seemed to be coming together and showing themselves at last.
Then she would cook the mince.
The women drove to the mall in two separate cars.
Maisie Carrington went with Stephanie Sykes, in Stephanie’s tidy slate-blue Alhambra. Christine Lanham took her own car in case of emergency, and because all of them piling into one car to go out to Merrywood Mall might have led her to feel like one of a troupe of secretaries on an expedition to the shops.
It was nearly midday, and the rain fell on Arlington Park.
Christine collected Ella from nursery on the way. She parked the car on a double yellow line and ran in through the rain with her coat over her head. It was the same nursery Liz Connelly’s son Owen went to on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. In his absence Christine raised with the supervisors the issue of Owen’s aggressive behaviour towards the other children in the morning sessions, before tearing back outside, with Ella under her arm, to where Step
hanie and Maisie sat waiting, parked in the Alhambra behind Christine’s car with the engine running.
It was three miles from Arlington Park to Merrywood Mall. The road passed out through the lesser suburbs of Red-bourne and Firley. It was here that the residential flank of the city succumbed by degrees to the motorway interchange, and the first forlorn stretches of naked countryside lay amidst the oceanic concrete of giant car parks and warehouses. Christine drove with music on and Ella writhing in the back, her mouth stoppered by a dummy, a prophylactic beaker of milk clutched in her hand. The suburbs of Redbourne and Firley, seen through the windows of a car driven from Arlington Park, had an undistinguished aspect of organised anonymity; they were expedient places whose only tangible function was to provide shelter for human beings, as though in the service of a strategy too universal to account for individual lives. For two miles the route to the mall passed through the cortex of these regions and afforded a view to either side of the unrelieved symmetry of their long, straight residential roads, which elapsed precisely, like measured time, each one briefly showing its vista of identical houses and front gardens and driveways protruding like little paved tongues. In recent years the main road had been widened to take two lanes of traffic each way, which increased the tempo of the passing houses and made them seem more stranded than ever in their ignominious version of living.
Redbourne and Firley had another purpose in Christine Lanham’s view, which was to reacquaint those denizens of Arlington Park who passed through them with their own, more motivated condition; with the greater interest, variety, and refinement of their own habitat. There was nothing like going to Redbourne to remind you why you lived in Arlington Park, where too long a sojourn without the intrusion of contrasts could give rise to a strange, questing sense of having asked too much of life; of having taken excessive pains to seclude oneself from what was actually harmless and may even have been fruitful.
One look at Firley could cure you of that. Firley was a desert traversed by cauliflower-haired old ladies in motorised wheelchairs, and men who slowly washed the caravans parked in their front drives; by teenaged boys in baseball caps and headphones and hooded tops, their swaddled heads a V-sign to conversation, to life itself; by young girls in tracksuits that had seen no beneficial kind of sport, pushing prams the size of their own bodies and looking towards the road with expectant faces, as though thinking salvation might come to them by that route. There was nothing of any note in Firley, except for one house by the road which from mid-October proffered the most extravagant display of neon-lit moulded plastic Christmas decorations, including a giant Santa, sleigh, and reindeer on the roof which flashed on and off in a repeating pattern so that the reindeer seemed to gallop on luminous red legs. The children would strain at their seatbelts to see it as they went by, to see the reindeer spastically cantering and the riot of pulsing lights like a flashing fountain, a fountain of what seemed to them to be love, making its gaudy, eternal arabesques out there in the null redbrick obscurity of those straight, sempiternal streets.
At the traffic lights Maisie Carrington and Stephanie Sykes looked at the back of Christine Lanham’s head in the car in front and at the densely graven piece of her face captured in the rectangle of the wing mirror, in which she could see their faces side by side behind her.
Christine Lanham had a black, private fear of Redbourne and Firley; of Redbourne more than Firley, proximate as it was to Arlington Park and hence more threatening. Firley stood on the threshold of the motorway, where the road widened and ascended in a great concrete arc of human aspiration, and the traffic sped away, liberated, from the last dejected houses toward Merrywood Mall. But Redbourne was denser and more constricting, and every time she passed through it, Christine felt a fear from which the plain unlikelihood of its realisation could not protect her. It was the same kind of fear she had felt in childhood, when pondering the secret possibility that she might not be the true child of her parents: a retrospective fear of inauthenticity which seemed to reveal to her the vulnerability of her grasp on the real, the authentic life. Redbourne reminded Christine of the insufficiency of her control of destiny, the fatal slightness of its degrees, where the smallest shift to left or right could produce a world altered in every particular. Half a mile apart, in some places less than half a mile, Arlington Park and this textureless suburb were the very illustration of this principle. Geographically, half a mile was the slenderest of threads: that was how close she had come to living in Redbourne. Its presence was a constant hazard, in that it sustained a distinction in the face of which she could never feel entirely safe. Generally she only went there on her way to Merrywood, looking at its residents from the safety of her car and despising them the more for her sense of how near she was to being one of them.
The two cars passed out of Firley and on to the overpass, over the motorway with its stampede of traffic making for the grey horizon, and up the new four-lane road that ran like a fast, broad river past fields and farmhouses which had the diminutive appearance of relics, of old bones. There were a few sheep in one of the fields, next to a great, glinting car showroom, and further along a little cottage in the lee of a petrol station where four horses stood in a paddock. They stood all in a group, by the fence. There was something vaguely human in their demeanour, the disquiet of personality, which seemed to have replaced their animal natures. Thirty-foot-tall streetlamps lined the road as it ascended the hill, where enormous, pavilion-like supermarkets and warehouses had risen up one upon another: Tiles R Us, a bathroom emporium, two DIY superstores, an electrical goods warehouse, and a brand-new supermarket to add to those already there, standing in a fresh swirl of tarmac. A huge new pyramidal roundabout, rising forty-odd feet at its concrete centre, took three lanes of traffic and dealt them out in four different directions. On the crest of the hill stood Merrywood itself, monolithic, temple-shaped, light flashing off its glass-plated sides.
Recently Christine had read a letter in the correspondence page of the Arlington Gazette that had described Merrywood as “a tumour on the constipated bowel of the motorway.” She often wrote to this page herself. Once—her outraged response to a diatribe against mothers “ferrying around” schoolchildren and causing traffic congestion—they had put her sentiments in bold and called them Letter of the Week. Reaching for those same heights, she had given vent to a delirious, unconstrained anger. Did their correspondent wish them all to return to the Stone Age? Did he wish to inhabit an era in which freedom of choice and movement were the preserve of a privileged few? Perhaps he would prefer it if those who patronised Merrywood felt guilt and shame about their material prosperity—or better still, weren’t prosperous at all, lest in the absence of Merrywood they were forced to come in their hordes to the exclusive little establishments where he did his shopping!
These remarks lacked a killer blow, which Christine had presently understood would be impossible to administer, and also unnecessary: for Merrywood did indeed possess a creeping, unstoppable, vegetable growth, and if the paper’s correspondent wanted to see this as a bad thing, then that was nothing more than his choice.
The rain had stopped, and as they drew in formation into the car park the sun gushed through a rent in the sagging, dark-grey sky. The roofs of the cars, line after line of them, made a brilliant, undulating metallic field that stretched almost out of sight.
“Now why don’t we do this more often?” Christine said, through Stephanie’s lowered window.
“I don’t know,” Stephanie said suggestively, waiting to be told why they didn’t.
“I mean, there we all are, sitting in our houses feeding our children pureed carrots—why don’t we do this more often?”
The three women gazed upon Merrywood, whose vast plate-glass doors were opening and shutting mechanically all along its broad façade, ingesting and disgorging people.
“Perhaps we’re just too damned scared of our husbands,” said Stephanie, with a valiant, lipsticked smile which implied that this idea wa
s something she’d heard of rather than experienced for herself.
“Oh, sod them,” Christine said. “Though in fairness to Joe, he doesn’t mind me coming here. In fact, I think he wishes I came here more. He’s like, you know, for Christ’s sake, get yourself some decent clothes. Don’t just buy things for the children. Get yourself some nice things to wear.”
“You always look great!” protested Stephanie.
“You know how it is,” Christine said through the window. “After Ella was born I wore the same trousers for two years. It was like what they say about people when they get out of prison. In the end I didn’t know how to take them off. I needed to be rehabilitated.”
“Two years,” Stephanie said. “That must be some kind of record.”
“Stephanie never even needed maternity clothes,” Christine said to Maisie Carrington, who was in the passenger seat. “The rest of us were trying to convince our husbands that it was perfectly normal to look seven months pregnant a year after the baby was born, and then they’d see Stephanie.”
“I was huge after Jasper,” Stephanie said.
“You were not.”
“I was! I just covered it up.”
“I love just coming here,” Christine expostulated, surveying the brutal grandeur of the car park, where the sky still hurled down its unsteady shafts of light and the morning’s rain stood in beads on the coruscating metal of cars and made them look reborn. There were lavish puddles in the new tarmac where fleecy clouds and pieces of brilliant sky were reflected. “I don’t know, it just makes me feel good. It makes me feel that life is full of possibilities.”
She opened the back door of her car, where Ella sat gazing upwards through the window, her thumb in her fleshy mouth. She gripped her toy rabbit, Robbie, in her fist. Her hot little lap was full of crumbs, and patches of wetness where her beaker of milk had capsized across her legs. The back seat of the car was strewn with toys and dirty remnants of children’s clothing, and discarded cartons of juice and half-eaten biscuits. Occasionally Christine would sweep the litter out with a careless arm; it seemed to her that cleaning her car was a Redbourne thing to do. She put Ella in her pushchair and slammed the door, whereupon Ella began to wail and struggle furiously at the straps, holding out her arms beseechingly. Christine opened the door again, retrieved Robbie from his fallen position in the footwell, shoved him into Ella’s lap, and once more slammed the door. Robbie was grey and worn out with Ella’s need for him. He looked shapeless and insensate with the drudgery of love.
