by Rachel Cusk
“Ready?” Christine said to the others.
Stephanie stood there in her little buttoned-up jacket and boots, with Jasper neatly in his pushchair, as though she were modelling her own life.
“Ready,” she said with a little laugh.
Maisie Carrington was wearing old jeans with a skirt on top, a big, roughly knitted jersey of a marshy, indistinct colour, and a used-looking tweed jacket. She looked like she was wearing more than one outfit, as though in case of sudden destitution. Beneath her untidy black hair her face was solemn.
Christine pointed at her. “You haven’t got a child!” she observed.
Maisie looked around her. She seemed dumbfounded.
“They’re both at school,” she said.
“I only just noticed,” Christine said, thinking that the last thing she’d do if she didn’t have children to look after was spend time with people who did. “Isn’t that funny?”
Maisie Carrington had recently moved with her husband and two children to Arlington Park. They’d come from London. Every time she saw her, Christine felt a pricking desire to secure her, almost to neutralise her: there was something about her that raised again and again in Christine’s mind the uncomfortable spectre of degrees, that caused her to wonder whether Arlington Park was to London what Redbourne was to Arlington Park. It was strange: she wanted to secure her and yet she was a little dismayed now by how easily she had succeeded. She had found that the easiest way to capture people was to get them at anchor, when they were tethered by children and their time was a kind of public commodity, an open space into which others were free to intrude. It surprised her that Maisie Carrington would elect to spend her own time with herself and Stephanie Sykes: it disappointed her a little.
Christine didn’t have to think about what she would do if she was on her own, because she never was.
“I didn’t realise how far it was,” Maisie said, a little apologetically.
It was Christine who had invited Maisie to have lunch with Stephanie and herself; and Christine who had claimed—she had sensed some early resistance to the idea—that Merrywood was just “up the road.” It was Christine, reluctant now to back down at the impediment of Maisie’s carlessness, who had urged her to come in Stephanie’s car—with the result that Maisie was trapped at Merrywood for the next two hours with no means of escape, entirely at Christine’s behest. She had a sense of her own brute strength at having achieved all this unopposed: perhaps Maisie, with her aura of London, was all fragility, all easily crushed sensibility. Perhaps fragility was what an aura of London was.
And on top of that, the Carringtons were coming to her, Christine’s, house for dinner this evening, which might well be the end of them, which might be the last straw. They would return to London with terrible, hilarious stories of Arlington Park, and entirely through Christine’s fault Arlington Park would have lost two of exactly the kind of unusual people that made it the interesting, vibrant place it was.
“I just meant, you know, how amazing. How amazing to have some time for you. None of us have enough time for ourselves, do we? Granted, you might not always choose to spend it here … But once in a while it’s fun, isn’t it?”
“Enough gabbing, girls,” said Stephanie Sykes, raising her pencilled eyebrows impatiently to the heavens.
There were so many people like Stephanie Sykes in Arlington Park that you could have laid them end to end all around Merrywood car park and still not have accounted for them all.
“I miss them when they’re at school,” said Maisie, which deepened Christine’s confusion still further. “I think it’s because I can never resolve my relationship with them at home. They go away and I feel this sense of incompletion. Look at that,” she added suddenly, stopping as they walked through the car park and pointing.
Christine looked. Maisie appeared to be indicating something at the far side of the car park, beyond the automatic barriers. There was a patch of rough ground beside the delivery and collection warehouse, where you drove to pick up large purchases. Cars were buzzing to and fro up the slip road. Beyond it Christine could see the shabby white shapes of what looked like three or four caravans. They had washing lines strung between them, with children’s clothes hung out to dry.
“Gypsies,” Maisie said. She shook her head. “What a place to have to live. Right where people come to pick up their sofas.”
Christine pondered the caravans and tried to work out what Maisie’s remarks signified. It wasn’t the nicest thing to have a pack of Gypsies staring at you when you came to collect your sofa, she could admit, but it wasn’t the end of the world either.
She sensed again the presence of the aura of London, like a fog through which she couldn’t properly make anything out.
“I don’t think they’re really doing any harm,” she said, trotting to catch up with Maisie and Stephanie. “I mean, when you think about it, it’s not such a bad place to put them. At least they’re out of the way here. I’m sure the police would move them if they caused any trouble.”
“They’re people,” Maisie said quietly, so that Christine felt fretful and a little bellicose, and determined to defend the pleasures of Merrywood from the threat of spoliation, from whichever quarter it was coming.
They left the car park and passed through the great glass doors with their chrome portico into the atrium of the mall, where glass escalators ascended in constant rotation through three floors to the transparent dome of the roof, so that all the layers of the building could be seen from below. It was like an illustration of the chambers of the heart: people were carried upwards by the escalators, eventually to re-emerge, oxygenated by shopping. At the centre of the main hall a huge fountain steadily pumped out its jet of water amidst fronded networks of plants, and bunches of coloured balloons drifted silently around on their tethers as though they were suspended in liquid. A steady level of mysterious hydraulic sound filled the echoing, daylight-coloured spaces, though there was music running just beneath the surface of it and human noises, strangely muffled and indistinct, like a commotion heard under water: the rise and fall of voices that came in loops and sudden reports, the piercing, shrill call of babies, the syncopated hoots and shrieks of rubber shoes on the tiled floors, and the spontaneous mechanical birdsong of mobile phones. The place was full of people, on the escalators, all along the glass-fronted galleries, milling in the broad avenues that led off the main hall; yet the strange acoustics and saturating, glassy light deadened the sense of human congress, so that they seemed almost to be swimming or floating rather than walking. The conditioned air negated the smell of bodies. Instead, the atmosphere was divided into invisible regions of perfume, and a continuous odour of coffee and baking stood around the open-air cafés like a replacement for walls and language.
Maisie, Stephanie, and Christine paused at the fountain, in whose tiled shallow pool people had flung their spare change, and the children strained at the straps on their pushchairs to put their hands into the cold, chlorinated water, and to explore the foliage of the plastic plants in their pebbled tubs. On a bench beside the fountain a fat girl sat holding a little pink carrier-bag printed with the word Me, tied at the top with a pink ribbon, like a present for her solitary, gazing self. The people moving around the hall and up and down the escalators gave an impression of blinding whiteness: girls with white, toneless skin and pale hair drawn tightly back from their faces; large white women with the wobbling, creamy bodies of blanc-manges; men in clean white trainers and white, ironed T-shirts from which the chemical smell of washing powder briefly emanated before being drawn up into the air vents; teenagers in immaculate tracksuits and baseball caps, some of them thin as wraiths, with skin the white of shrouds and protuberant teeth and the eyes of starving children. There were tiny girls dressed like angels and poodles and show ponies, little boys dressed as miniature sportsmen or lumberjacks, girls with new babies in prams wrapped in blinding white blankets who raked the glass ceiling with their flimsy gazes, girls with je
wellery and fake fur who shrieked with laughter. Here and there toddlers on leading reins bellowed and staggered about insanely in small, echoing chambers of noise.
“Where do we start?” Christine said, opening her eyes very wide.
The three women proceeded down the broad central avenue of the mall. An oncoming delegation of people in wheelchairs, some of them propelling themselves, others gazing off unseeing to one side with their chins in their chests, caused them to separate a little. They passed mobile phone shops and shops selling trainers, sports shops and jewellery shops and shops with headless white moulded mannequins standing conversationally in the neon-lit windows. Rotating billboards were suspended from the ceiling above them on long wires. A close-up photograph appeared of two laughing mouths about to kiss, then a photo of a couple lying on a laminated wooden floor like mating insects, she on his back, a glass of wine standing next to them. There was an image of a small pile of abandoned clothes on a beach, like the remains of a suicide, with the blue sea stretching beyond it to the horizon and the words Free Yourself above.
They entered the department store at the far end of the mall and were instantly engulfed by the cosmetics section. Women with painted faces and white coats, like actors playing surgeons, stood in their laboratories of beauty and pinioned passers-by with enquiring looks from beneath their narrow, arched brows. There was a buzz of excitement in the hot, scented hall. Stephanie and Christine rubbed lipsticks on to the backs of their hands and then rubbed them off again, and Stephanie bravely accepted the ambivalent compliments of the salesgirl for the youthful appearance of her skin—“given your age”—while Maisie shrank from the offer of a free trial colour-matching session, as though the woman had threatened to wrench her teeth out with a pair of pliers.
In Ladies’ Fashions a small female crowd had gathered around a platform where a woman with a microphone was dispensing what a notice board described as a “Fashion Workshop.” The white crowds did not by and large seem to have penetrated the sedate fastnesses of the department store, particularly not Ladies’ Fashions. Here the heads were grey and the colours autumnal, as though their garments were the indication of an episcopal seniority, in the service of which they had gathered here to hear new interpretations of the gospel of discreet self-presentation.
“Let’s see this,” said Christine, in a low voice of seminary urgency.
“This look is very now, very this season,” the woman said into her microphone, which was suspended in front of her lips by a headset, to enable her to put on and take off the items under discussion, “and it’s particularly easy on those of you like me who are a little bigger around the hips than they’d like to be.”
She removed one jacket, becoming momentarily entangled in the wire from her headset, and put on another. Her cream lace undergarment had come loose from the waistband of her trousers. The flesh of her arms and chest looked red and distressed.
“She hasn’t got big hips,” said one of the grey heads to another. “She’s as slim as a flower.”
“Some of you might be wondering, if you’re too long in the body like I am, what you’re meant to do with your spare tyre—I see we all know what I mean by that,” she said into the generalised laughter. “What you’re meant to do, if you’re wearing this shorter kind of jacket, with that great wobbling band of fat around your middle—come on, ladies, admit it!”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” murmured Christine, her fingers resting critically on her chin.
“Let’s face it, ladies, no one wants to see our flabby tummies and our flabby tits any more! And another thing—most of us don’t want them to! We’ve all had enough of that, haven’t we?”
Muted cheers of approval.
“I think she’s very attractive,” said a woman in front of Christine.
The woman removed her latest jacket and bared herself to the audience in her rumpled, ill-fitting cream lace. Her face was flushed and her blond-streaked hair tousled. She raised her arms to them in appeal.
“Mummy!” Ella shouted.
“What I want to turn your minds to—what I want to fix your attention on, ladies, are the magic three Ts.” She lowered her voice. “Tailoring, tailoring, and tailoring!”
“Mummy! Mum! Mummy! Need the toilet!”
Maisie, Stephanie, and Christine were forced to descend to the basement in search of a toilet for Ella. In the furniture department Christine sat on the edge of a bed and said:
“I’m not being funny, but I found that frankly depressing.”
“It was a bit over the top,” Stephanie said.
“I mean, is that all there is to look forward to? Is that all there is on the other side of all this bloody hassle? Frigging tailoring? I’d rather be some fat old slag propping up the bar in her white stilettos—I would!” she insisted, when Maisie and Stephanie laughed.
They were sitting in a simulation of a child’s bedroom. The white particleboard bed was tented in white netting suspended from a hoop overhead. The bed was neatly made with a pillow and duvet, on whose pink cover the word Princess was inscribed repeatedly in different fonts. One of the struts was coming out of the headboard, and it sagged where Christine sat on it. There was a white particleboard chest of drawers, and a wardrobe with a pink, plastic-framed oval mirror fixed to the door. Mirror, mirror on the wall … was written on the glass in scratched transfers.
“That woman made me want to slit my wrists,” Christine added mildly, gazing off into the furnished labyrinths of the basement.
Extravagantly padded white leather sofas were arranged around a chrome and glass coffee table the size of a pond, and numerous sterile arrangements of dining-room furniture hosted their invisible meals for four and six and eight. At the far end there were rows of double beds, stark and unmade, like waiting graves.
“Why?” Stephanie smiled, shaking her shiny head. “Why did she get to you so much?”
Christine did not reply. Ella, released from her pushchair, was investigating the hostilities of her new home. She pulled open a drawer from the little white chest and it made a cracking sound as it fell to the floor. Silently Christine rose from the bed and shoved the drawer back on to its runners.
“I wouldn’t like to shock you, Stephanie,” she said.
“You can’t shock me,” Stephanie asserted, smiling.
“As I say,” Christine reiterated, after a pause, “I don’t want to shock you both, but it’s things like that that make me think one day I’m going to have to do something desperate. That woman talking about flabby tits—I can’t explain.”
They rose, wheeled the pushchairs into the lift, and returned to the ground floor.
“The thing is, Stephanie,” Christine said, “you probably never wanted to be a hairdresser.”
Stephanie’s pert, pretty face wore an expression of indecision, as though she was facing the fact that this possibility was excluded from her for ever.
“I mean, you probably always wanted to be a primary-school teacher, with a husband who makes lots of money and a gorgeous house and four lovely children.”
They re-entered the echoing main concourse of the mall, where a large, shapeless woman with short hair brutally sculpted around her broad, doughy face was shouting “Savannah! Savannah!” and a tiny, pale, limp-limbed girl was wandering uncertainly towards the escalators.
“What I’m saying is that you’re actually very lucky,” Christine said. “We’re all actually very lucky. Before I met Joe I was the sort of person who ate tinned fruit salad and bought Blue Nun for a dinner party. We were the sort of family that had all our meals in front of the telly. My mum used to go to the bingo on Thursday nights. That isn’t to say she wasn’t a lovely person,” she added, steering the pushchair after Stephanie through the open doors of a shop. “She was a lovely person. She still is a lovely person, though she likes a drink and she won’t have anything to do with her grandchildren.”
The shop was a clothes shop, in whose windows the headless mannequins wore sequinned b
ikini tops and tight miniskirts and trousers so low in the crotch as to abrogate the power of suggestion.
“What do you think, girls?” Stephanie said over her shoulder, with a game little smile that made her mouth turn down at the corners. “Shall we risk it?”
“Why not?” Christine said.
“I love it here,” Stephanie said. “I just love it. All these fabulous trashy clothes—it’s fine so long as you don’t wear them all at the same time,” she qualified. “And everything’s so fantastically cheap.”
“Stephanie!” said Christine, raising her eyebrows. “I’m surprised at you. There you are at the school gate in your teensy little mohair wraps and your calfskin boots—we had no idea you had this other side!”
“Don’t you find that sometimes you just want to wear something really slutty?” Stephanie said, reddening prettily as she raked through a rack of clothes and engaged the brake of Jasper’s pushchair with her heel.
“I can’t say that I do,” Christine said, giving Maisie a wide-eyed, comical look. “As I say, all that stuff’s a bit close to home for me, Stephanie. I might find myself reverting to type. I might just go home and find myself cracking open a bottle of Blue Nun.”
“Where do you buy your clothes, Maisie?” Stephanie said.
Maisie Carrington was standing with her hands clasped in front of her and a vacant expression on her face, like an overgrown child awaiting collection.
