by Rachel Cusk
“I don’t know,” she said. She shrugged helpfully. “Lots of different places.”
“You’ve got a very idiosyncratic look,” Christine said. “A very—what’s the word?—eclectic look. Like what you’ve got on now. The skirt over the trousers. That’s a very individual, eclectic look.”
“Thanks,” Maisie said.
“Bloody hell,” Christine said, arching her eyebrows at a passing salesgirl. “She looks like she should be at school.”
“You’ve got to try not to think about it,” Stephanie said fervidly. “You’ve just got to think, you know, I’ve got a right to be here. I’ve got money, I’m female, and I’ve got a right to be here if I want to be.”
“I’m just thinking, you know, what about the pushchairs? They’re sort of blowing our cover, Stephanie, don’t you think?”
“Half the sixteen-year-old girls who come in here have pushchairs,” Stephanie said, a little impatiently.
“That’s a sobering thought,” Christine said. “Expressed with real feeling, Stephanie. I’m thinking, you know, maybe tailoring isn’t so bad after all. I’m not being funny here. I’m thinking, what’s so wrong with looking your age? What’s so wrong with looking like what you actually are?”
The shop was narrow but deep, and broadened at its far end into a kind of cavern, where shoes and boots and sandals rested on innumerable Perspex stalks and jewellery in abundant gilded clusters hung from metal trees. All through the centre of the shop and high up the walls on both sides clothes were crammed on to rails, so that from the door they had the appearance of a silent, motionless crowd, or the categorised remains of one. The hordes of spangled tops and tiny jackets, of empty dresses and flattened trousers and ghostly, customised T-shirts, were like the lineaments of a lived existence, like the contents of a museum commemorating an elapsed era of rudimentary human intercourse, of social incidents so fleeting and voluntary that no one had bothered to come and flesh them out. They hung there in all their pernickety, suggestive design, tented in shadow, while loud music held them in its perennial moment of synthetic consummation, and outside, in the echoing, light-filled mall, motiveless people came and went as though they were traversing the fields of purgatory.
Maisie said, “I don’t understand why they always play this music.”
“What do you mean?” said Christine. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Oh, nothing,” Maisie muttered. “Except that it’s full of hatred. It’s all about people hating each other.”
“I can’t really hear it,” Christine said.
“Oh, come on, girls,” Stephanie exhorted. “Get into the spirit of things.”
“What do you mean, it’s about people hating each other?”
“The words,” Maisie said, putting her hands over her ears.
“I quite like it,” Christine said, swaying from side to side. “I’m getting quite into it. Stephanie, I’m feeling a dangerous purchase coming on. I’m thinking, you know, let’s show some cleavage. I’m thinking, let’s show our—what did she call them?”
“Flabby tits,” Stephanie said loudly, and then put a hand over her mouth. “Sorry.”
In the changing rooms, a girl with a long, white belly like a root and mournful kohled eyes gave them a plastic docket and said:
“There’s room for the buggies in the one at the end.”
“See?” Stephanie said as they hastened down the row of empty curtained cubicles. “I told you.”
“We’ve been upgraded,” Christine said, “to the teen pregnancy suite.”
“Maisie, haven’t you got anything?” Stephanie said, bending down to let Jasper out of his pushchair, holding the docket between her white, even teeth.
Maisie smiled and shook her head, and seated herself on the padded bench in the corner of their cubicle. Stephanie stowed her bag and pushchair in another corner. Christine drew the heavy purple curtain and hung her clothes neatly by their hangers on a hook. They were like itinerant people arriving in a new, exiguous room.
“You’re making us all feel trivial, Maisie,” Christine said. “She’s going to go home and tell her husband what a sad, trivial bunch of women we are. She’s going to ring up all her London friends and tell them about us.”
“Your husband’s very handsome, Maisie,” Stephanie said, with her smile that turned down at the corners.
“The thing is,” Christine said, “I’m having the time of my life here. I mean, we’re all so responsible, aren’t we? Most of the time we’re all such good people, aren’t we? We’re all such good wives and good mothers, and there we are feeding our families these healthy meals and taking our children to piano lessons and making our houses all perfect, and sometimes”—she lifted her shirt over her head and revealed her large, blueveined breasts in their white wired bra—“sometimes you just want to have some fun, don’t you? Sometimes I think, God, I could just bring all this down. I could just bring it all down around me. What do you think?”
She turned from side to side in a straining violet chemise tied with little strings at the back.
“Actually,” Stephanie said, “that looks really nice.”
Christine pondered herself for an instant in the mirror.
“Nice for pulling pints at the Coach and Horses,” she said, unbuttoning it again. “God, Stephanie, that’s fantastic.”
Stephanie had put on a tight green dress with a Chinese collar and a slit all the way up the leg. She twisted around and looked at herself with her head over her shoulder.
“You look amazing,” Christine said. “Doesn’t she look amazing?”
Stephanie turned to the front again. Her face was excited.
“It’s a bit over the top,” she said.
“If I had your figure I wouldn’t care what it was,” Christine said.
Jasper stumbled over his mother’s handbag and hit his head against the mirror.
“Oh, darling!” Stephanie cried, wading through the clothes in her green dress to pick him up.
He bawled with his small hand to his forehead as Stephanie resurrected him from the floor.
“Oh, sweetheart! Does it hurt?”
He roared and buried his face in her shoulder, running his hands up and down the unfamiliar silky fabric of her dress. Stephanie sat down with him beside Maisie on the padded bench. She cradled him and rocked him to and fro, ministrations to which her outfit imparted a kind of exotic theatricality. A moment later Ella also began to cry, regarding herself in the mirror.
“Don’t you start,” Christine said. “I quite like this,” she added, turning to them in another top.
“Does it fit?” Stephanie said, over Jasper’s laments. “It doesn’t look like it quite fits.”
“I really like it.” Christine looked at herself from one side and then the other. “Oh, Ella, what is it?”
“Are you sure?” Stephanie said.
Christine’s face was flushed. She rummaged in her bag and took out a beaker of milk, which she thrust into Ella’s hands.
“There,” she said. “No, I really like it. I really like the colour.”
“You’ve got quite a few things in that colour,” Stephanie observed.
“Have I? What, in purple?”
“You’re often wearing purple.”
“Am I? What, like a bishop? Is that what people say? Oh, look, here comes Christine in her bishop outfit.”
Stephanie laughed uncertainly.
“No, not at all,” she said.
“Here comes the vicar in drag,” Christine persisted. “Here comes the fucking Purple Lady.”
“Christine!” said Stephanie shrilly. “I was only talking about the colour.”
“I like the colour.” Christine regarded her reflection with narrowed eyes. “Ella, if you don’t shut up I’m going to rip your tongue out of your throat.”
“We should really feed them before long,” Stephanie said. “Are you hungry, sweetheart? Jasper, sweetie, are you hungry? Shall Mummy get you some lunch?”
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br /> Jasper nodded and pawed her dress.
“Mummy’s just going to try on one more thing. One more thing, all right?”
There was a momentary silence while the women removed their outfits. In their underwear they looked strangely destitute, abandoned, like women whose husbands have gone off to war. They moved their learned purplish limbs, their complicated breasts and bellies, as though they were a little thrilled at their freedom but on the verge of a killing knowledge of what it implied.
“I don’t think so,” Stephanie said, in a black cocktail dress held up by thin sequinned straps over the shoulders.
“Why not?” Christine shrugged. “I think it looks great. I think you should buy it.”
“You’re so sweet!” Stephanie cried. “You want everybody to have everything.”
“That’s what bishops are like, Stephanie. That’s what men of the cloth are fucking into. Here comes the puuuuurple lady!” Christine sang, sweeping up Ella in her arms and dancing with her around the narrow cubicle.
Outside in the shop a sudden crowd had formed at the till, of girls with sunglasses pushed back on their heads and girls in tiny vests, girls with hair chemically coloured, curled or straightened, fat girls with white elephant’s legs in short skirts, girls who were morose or screamed with laughter or talked into their mobile phones.
“This is annoying,” said Christine. “There wasn’t anybody in here when we came in.”
They stood in the queue. Christine had her purple top draped over her arm. The children were strapped protesting into their pushchairs. Ella was leaning out over the seat and flinging herself sideways at her mother’s legs. Christine looked at the others.
“Aren’t you buying anything?” she said to Stephanie. “Aren’t you going to buy that dress?”
Stephanie wrinkled her nose and shook her head. Christine looked straight ahead of her, into the fleshy, chattering forest of girls.
“This is annoying,” she said.
The restaurant was on the top floor and had vast semi-circular windows on three sides that showed three grey views: one of the car park, one of the slip road and the distant motorway, and one of the grilles, pipes, and vents that characterised the domed roof of Merrywood when seen from above. There was a dead seagull lying in one of the gullies, its livid yellow beak flat against the roof, its oiled feathers moving stiffly in the wind.
Inside, a field of Formica-topped tables and chairs covered the carpeted expanses of a hangar-like space that seemed permanently on the brink of a generalised chaos. People threaded through displaced chairs and tables with laden plastic trays. Everywhere landslides of shopping bags spilled out into the aisles, and children’s toys and coats lay unnoticed on the floor. Uniformed workers moved around the tables with big sacks, sweeping the discarded casings of dead lunches, the plastic cartons and cardboard and cellophane, the straws and water bottles and paper napkins, the entire packaged forms of the restaurant’s Kids Lunchboxes like an unbroken set of geological remains, into their rustling depths. Big groups sat at some tables, their chairs pushed back, presiding raucously over the wreckage of food and trays and rubbish in their midst. Men sat with their arms folded over their swollen bellies, their heads erect, their scrutinising eyes moving around the room like silent searchlights. Elderly couples occupied tables for two, gazing off to either side of them as though watching facing television sets. Pairs of women in their fifties and sixties, dressed as if in preparation for a random event that might lead to their helpless forms being handled by strangers, talked steadily, with their heads close together, large, glossy shopping bags at their feet like well-behaved pets. Here and there a solitary person sat with a book, ingesting a sandwich by self-conscious increments.
Maisie, Stephanie, and Christine moved along the line with their trays, approaching the steaming bedlam of the serving hatch, where elderly men and confused, exacting women were embroiled in long, hopeless, querying exchanges with the staff behind the counters.
“Does the vegetable soup have meat in it?” one lady enquired.
The fleshy Filipina girl standing by the soup shook her head, her arms folded.
“The last time I was here,” a white-haired, stammering man confided to her, “you did a battered fish. A battered cod. Do you know? A fish in batter.”
He was so persistent that she turned and went back into the kitchen to enquire. She returned and folded her arms and shook her head.
“Only what’s here.”
“What’s that?”
“Only what’s here,” she repeated, finally leaning forward to say it into his ear.
Stephanie had a prawn salad in a plastic dome. Maisie had a sandwich skewered by a toothpick with a regal radish on the top. Christine ordered a hamburger and chips.
“Ten minutes,” stated the girl.
“I just can’t win today, can I?” said Christine. “All right, I’ll have something else. No, I won’t, I’ll have the burger and chips. I don’t mind waiting.”
Around the walls of the restaurant was a series of enlarged photographs mounted on huge panels, of grass and wildflowers with a background of brilliant blue sky. The grass was the colour of a billiard table. Each blade was a foot high.
“That’s nice,” said Christine automatically, glancing up at one as they sat down at their table. “This is the first time I’ve been up here,” she added.
“It’s like a ferry,” said Maisie.
“What do you mean?” said Stephanie, looking around her dismayed, as if she thought she might discover she was in fact on a ferry and might be late to collect the children from school.
“It’s like a cross-channel ferry.”
“I’ve never heard that before,” said Stephanie, placing a prawn delicately in her mouth with her fork.
“Everyone looks like they’re going somewhere without actually moving.”
“Is it the views?” Christine said, perplexed. “Is it those big windows with all that sky around?”
“Why did you and your husband leave London, Maisie?” Stephanie enquired, as though that might explain her peculiar observation.
Maisie withdrew the toothpick from the centre of her sandwich, which fell over on to its side, spilling out marbled shards of salad. She gathered it up and took a bite out of it.
“We thought it would be nicer somewhere else,” she said with her mouth full.
“The question isn’t, Why did you leave, Stephanie,” Christine advised her. “The question is, Why would you stay?”
“So it wasn’t because of your husband’s work or anything?” Stephanie persisted. “It was because you actually wanted to leave?”
“He didn’t want us to leave,” Maisie said. “He thought it was a bad idea.”
“He didn’t want you to?” Christine said. “Why not?”
“Your food,” Maisie said. “There’s your food.”
The girl from the kitchen was wandering amidst the tables, an expression of resignation on her face.
“Let me get this straight,” Christine said when her hamburger had come to rest like a pale, puckered planet before her. “Your husband thought it was a bad idea, with two small children, moving from a city of eight million people to Arlington Park. Why exactly did he think that?”
“Not just here,” Maisie said. “Anywhere.”
“What, anywhere at all?”
“Anywhere you’d go because you thought it was less.”
“Less what?” said Christine, confounded.
“Less anything. Less difficult. He thought that as soon as we got there we’d forget why we’d left and then we wouldn’t know why we were living there.”
“Everyone’s leaving London now,” Christine said, picking up her hamburger with both hands. “It’s not just the people. It’s all the problems they bring with them. It’s the pollution and the crime and the drugs. And terrorism! No one’s even thought of that, have they?” She leaned forwards, holding her fingers fastidiously out to either side, and bit. “That’s one
thing you’re safe from here. I mean, why would anyone bother to drop a bomb on Arlington Park? Why would they?”
“I’m more frightened here than I was in London,” said Maisie.
Christine stopped chewing in astonishment. “What of?”
Maisie did not reply.
“Are you worried you’ll go to seed?” Stephanie said, as though this were a hazard she’d once heard of.
“Let me tell you, there’s no bloody excuse for going to seed in Arlington Park!” exclaimed Christine. “For people, it’s not second-best to anywhere. They may not have degrees, or doctorates, or fascinating jobs—they may not be the wealthiest people you’ve ever met, or the most famous and important, but believe me, the people I see here every day are the most diverse, interesting, courageous group of people you’ll find anywhere! Take the women I meet at the school gate,” she continued, with her mouth full. “You could say they’re not important, you could even say they’re not great intellectuals. The fact is that they do a bloody good job, and they’re all interesting, compassionate people. They all want to help each other and make life easier for each other—they’ll pick your child up from school if you’re running late, they’ll do your shopping if you’re ill, and all of them have got children to pick up and houses to run themselves. I mean, how many people do you know in London who would care if you dropped dead in the street?”
At this juncture Stephanie excused herself and took Jasper off to the toilet.
“Are you all right for tonight?” Christine asked Maisie in a low voice, once she’d gone. “Dinner at our house, tonight?”
Maisie looked as though she had either forgotten dinner at Christine’s house or wanted to.
“We’re, um, looking forward to it,” she said.
“It’s just that I didn’t want to mention it in front of Stephanie. Not that I’ve got anything against Stephanie. She’s a really, really nice person. She’s not the world’s greatest intellectual—I mean, you’re never going to hear anything from Stephanie that you haven’t heard a thousand times before. But as a kind, nice person who looks after herself and looks after her kids, you can’t beat her.”
