by Rachel Cusk
‘Miss Franklin?’ called a nurse, coming into the waiting area.
The young red-haired girl shot to her feet and Francine was disconcerted to see that large, childish tears were rolling down her cheeks. An older woman whom Francine hadn’t noticed stood up beside her and gently put an arm around her shoulders, whispering something in her ear. Her hair was red too, streaked with grey, and she realized to her amazement that the woman must be her mother. A gorge of jealousy rose to her mouth.
‘Come on, love,’ said the nurse softly, taking her by the hand. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.’
The girl strained like an animal, resisting her hand, and for the first time Francine felt a bolt of fear fly through her. She gripped her bag, seeing herself quite clearly running from the room, her feet echoing down the empty corridors, out into the car park past impervious porters and sleeping ambulances, melting into the busy pavement along which waiting traffic throbbed. The singularity of her imprisonment erected its swift bars around her and she struggled against them as her thoughts reasoned her back into the room like diplomats. There was no escape from that which ticked like a bomb inside her, that which her enemies had implanted and she was entrusting those around her to remove. She calmed herself with thoughts of the purge which would free her, the gratifying image of Ralph, Stephen, the hungry blockage in her belly, the confusing maelstrom of her past, all of it sucked mechanically from her, leaving her new and gleaming, a vacuum to be filled with delightful, unknown things. She had been told it wouldn’t hurt. It didn’t matter anyway. Her body felt heavy and used, sluggish with nausea and mistakes. She almost looked forward to its cleansing. Afterwards she would begin again.
A nurse walked past her, her uniform efficient and trustworthy. It wasn’t that bad here, after all. She had wanted a private clinic, of course, but she hadn’t had the money and she couldn’t have asked Ralph. It would have spoiled her plan of telephoning him afterwards to tell him what she had done. She thought of telling him she had gone to a private clinic and making him pay her back. It was the least he could do. She needed money. Anxiety closed around her as she thought of the rent, counting weeks with a beating heart. She hardly had enough to last her until the weekend. She had to get another job. Lynne wouldn’t give her a reference, she’d said as much. Personnel had lodged a complaint. Francine was too unreliable these days, and she had her own reputation to consider. There was something else, Janice’s offer, waiting darkly like a stranger at the door. It made her uncomfortable and she shied from it dimly. She would think about it later. As she shrank from it, it caught her in its ropes and reeled her back, insinuating itself, not discouraged by her firm rejection. Her thoughts were relenting to its persuasions. What else did she have? It might take her weeks to find a job, and then another week’s delay until she was paid. It would only be for a while, a temporary thing, just until she sorted herself out. It was easy, Janice said it was. It wasn’t how you would think. You didn’t have to do anything if you didn’t want to. She knew people, she said, people who would really appreciate Francine. She had laughed at how shocked she was.
‘How else do you think I could afford this?’ she had said, raising her glass to Francine and gesturing at the room.
The door to the waiting-room opened and a man in a bomber jacket came in. He stopped, looking around.
‘Over ’ere, Ian,’ said the fat girl.
He grinned, and Francine watched him hesitantly cross the room, his hands stuffed in his pockets. The other girls shifted up the row to make room for him and he sat down, putting his arm around the fat girl’s shoulders.
‘All right?’ he said, his face close to hers.
‘Yeah,’ she said, patting his knee.
The girls were watching them with silent interest.
‘Couldn’t get off earlier. Barry didn’t turn up for his shift till ten past. Bugger was out on the piss last night.’
‘Was he?’ The girl laughed, her mouth forcing up mountains of flesh on her cheeks. ‘That’s typical, that is.’
‘Miss Snaith?’ The nurse arrived again with her clipboard. ‘Is Miss Snaith here?’
Francine froze for a minute and then stood up.
‘Right, dear, come along with me.’
She led Francine through a swinging door at the other end of the room. Beyond it was a long white ward with military rows of beds along its walls. In one of them, the young girl lay immobile, her red hair streaming like blood across the pillows. Her mother sat beside her, reading a book.
‘I didn’t know I’d have to go to bed,’ said Francine, panic beginning to struggle in her again at the sight of the ward.
‘Oh, it’s not for long,’ said the nurse. ‘We’ve just got to give you a tiny injection, and afterwards you’ll want time to wake up. Just slip your clothes off for me now behind this curtain. There’s a robe hanging beside the bed.’
She manoeuvred Francine into a cubicle and then drew a flowered curtain briskly around her. Francine took off her jacket. She had only been in hospital once before, for her appendix, when she was a child. She remembered her mother stroking her forehead, her father nervous at the foot of the bed, jumping out of the doctor’s way. A sharp consciousness of her loneliness pricked her, and then she felt something else, something heavier. She wished Janice had come, saw her huddled beneath the bedclothes, her voice angry. The thought of not liking Janice made her panic. She needed her. She had said they would do it together. Quickly she took off the rest of her clothes and was surprised by the sight of her body in the white light. It looked mottled and bumpy with gooseflesh, and the purple tunnels of her veins seemed alarmingly close to the skin. She saw the spread of her hips, the pouch of her stomach, and realized that she had put on weight.
‘Knock, knock!’ said the nurse brightly, fiddling with the curtain. ‘Can I come in?’
‘Yes,’ said Francine, putting on the white cotton robe. It came down to her knees and fastened at the back. It looked like something a prisoner might wear, or a patient in a mental hospital.
‘All right? Just pop yourself on the bed.’
The nurse waited until Francine had clumsily mounted the bed and then sat down beside her. She was middle-aged, her face a creased history of smiles.
‘Am I right in thinking you haven’t anyone coming to collect you?’ she said, leaning forward confidentially.
‘Yes.’
‘The father couldn’t come?’
For a moment Francine couldn’t think of who she was talking about, and then realized it was Ralph.
‘He doesn’t know I’m here.’
The words crystallized something in her, a sudden crust forming around her tenderness and then covering it completely. She felt herself harden and glimpsed a person she could be.
‘I see.’ The nurse was impassive, looking at her clipboard. ‘And what arrangements have you made for getting home?’
‘I’ll take the bus.’
‘We usually recommend a taxi for afterwards, dear, just in case you’re not feeling too well. I can arrange one for you if you like.’
‘I don’t have enough money.’
The nurse turned a face full of sympathy towards her and Francine met her eyes, repelling the humiliation she offered. She looked surprised and drew her eyebrows together in an irritated, despairing point.
‘Right, well it’s up to you, of course. We did send you these details, and it’s up to you if you ignore our advice. It’s your decision.’ She stood up. ‘The doctor will be with you in a minute.’
*
The ceiling was rushing over her, its long, luminous tubes speeding and then flashing past as if she were flying. A pair of doors appeared ahead and she narrowed her eyes as the trolley shot towards their grim, closed lips with uncontainable velocity. They flew open just in time, like a fairground ride, and her limp body, warm beneath its blanket, swept through.
‘There in a minute, love,’ said a man’s voice above her.
She wanted it never to end,
their fantastical journey, the trundling excitement of motion, the trolley to which she was strapped and secured, tiny now, her thoughts a bowl of bliss. She might stay here for ever, injected and looked after, rushed from place to place in her snug bed by green-clad men with kind faces. She closed her eyes, her body melting with the vibration of wheels, and when the vibration stopped she opened them again. She was in a room where everything was still. A crowd of people stood above her, their faces a ring of masked moons.
‘All right, Francine,’ said a woman’s voice. She couldn’t tell which face it was that spoke. ‘We’re just going to put you to sleep now.’
Someone clasped her fingers. One of the faces leaned towards her, a man’s face, his eyes large and frightening as an owl’s above his mask.
‘Ralph?’
‘Don’t struggle now, Francine. We’re just putting something in your hand.’
She felt a pressure on the back of her hand and seconds later pain filtered through the warm mist of her body. A dark tide of fear lapped at her and suddenly she was alone at its shore. She was alone. Where had everybody gone?
‘Francine?’
Everything would be all right. It would only be temporary, just for a while. There was nothing to worry about. Her cheeks were wet. Was she crying? Why was she crying?
‘Can you count to ten for us, Francine? See if you can count.’
Something unfurled, beat against her lazy walls. A flash of terror mired. Too late.
‘Francine? Come on, one, two—’
‘One … two …’
Ralph’s face, a bitter taste on the tongue of the ravenous dark.
Eighteen
Ralph left the Tube station and turned towards home, swinging his jacket over his shoulder so that it hung from the peg of his finger down his back. The evening was as light and warm as an afternoon, holiday weather, and the joyful consciousness of summer burst in on him suddenly like a revelling crowd and swept him up in its ebullience. He had experienced several such explosions of silent happiness lately, without ever growing accustomed to the mute flash of their radiance. He would feel each glittering bloom with wonder, fearing that it would be the last; but they were delicate, responsive things, and could be triggered merely by a thought or the lightest survey of his circumstances. He would only have to look at his desk, for example, the sleek telephone crouching in service, the console dignified as a butler, the friendly scatter of pens or the brimming boat of his tray, to feel warm with good fortune; and a broader glance at the pensive, lovely faces of his colleagues – Mark, Richard, and Angela, whose desks formed a firm, efficient platform with his own – their mouths sweet and unconscious with concentration but ready to erupt into laughter at the slightest shared hilarity, would almost stupefy him with pleasure.
His briefcase was heavy in his hand, but he swung its pendulum back and forth in ungrudging appreciation of its weightiness. He had brought some work home with him from the office, although he wouldn’t have time to do very much before the party. He liked to have it with him, in any case, to feel the daily accretion of his importance, the newly dense portion of his responsibility. When he had first started his job, he had felt such disbelief in the evenings away from it that he had begun to bring his briefcase home merely as proof to stay the dreamlike recession of his days. By the time his position fitted him, so comfortably that he could hardly remember its first stiffness, he had realized that working at home immersed him more deeply in the themes of the office, meaning that his grasp of them the next day was rather better than that of Mark and the others, and he made the furtive, regular execution of it a policy. He had been singled out for praise once or twice and felt his appetite for success increase.
The sun began its downward cant over the High Street and he forced briskness upon himself as he moved through the golden haze of its benediction, not wanting to be the grateful witness of beauty but its rightful and slightly indifferent recipient. He would walk to the party later. It was at Angela’s house – not far from where he lived, he had been gratified to discover, her sophisticated proximity sanctioning his own choice of the area anew – and quite a few people from the office had said they would be there. There would be other people too, of course, people he didn’t know. He waited for the habitual tremor of anxiety at the thought of their unfamiliarity, their slick, bored faces before him, but it didn’t come. Instead, he saw himself saying that he worked in television, with Angela actually, and watched their expressions flower with admiration and envy, or perhaps relax in a more companionable recognition as aloofness was dispelled. He wondered if he would ever tire of it, this fantastical self he could produce from his pocket like a jewel to murmurs of appreciation. It still amazed him to think of how completely, how magically, he had been transformed, plucked from his ignominy by a strong celestial hand, removed from everything he now realized he had hated and given what he now realized he had longed for, as if it was a gift!
He had been lucky, of course, but what astonished him now was to remember how little he had cared about it at the time. He had seen the job advertised in a newspaper and had forlornly applied, his sense of the need to change himself dutiful and fatigued. Swept through each stage of the process, a fateful, almost comical languor had gradually come over him. He had thought of nothing, had formulated no dizzy or concrete hopes, but a strange intuition had tugged him on as if by an invisible thread until he knew that this chance was to be his, that it was being pressed upon him as if by ordination. He had not been surprised when he got the job, and its marvellous result had only dawned on him later, rising up from the darkness of his suppressions and urging him towards belief. What did surprise him was how quickly it had replaced everything that had gone before it. Within days of his succession, the banishment of his past was so complete that he hardly knew himself. He was once more in his bright infancy, the howling spectres of experience purged. Fearfully inspecting his nascent self, he saw that all his cords were cut, and for a while his severance terrified him. Nothing that had made him remained. Once familiar faces became fragments of nightmares, old feelings the faintest of memories for which he could not now find words. He was still wary of his darkness, wondering if one day he might turn a corner or open a door and topple again into its swirling chasm. Occasionally he had felt a frantic, amnesiac urge to summon up purposefully the things which he knew, rather than felt, had once mattered, but as he dug, poised for sorrow, at the withered tentacles of his roots, he could find no life in them. Even there, the fleshy, sturdy stubs of his new existence already held him. The joy of it came to him tentatively, but eventually he accepted its truth. He lived and breathed independently.
He crossed the lock, his swift steps bringing him abruptly up over the blind of its rise behind someone walking ahead of him along the pavement. He had been going too quickly, jogging more or less, and he reined himself back to avert a collision. For a moment the figure was only vaguely in his sights as he adjusted his speed to accommodate it, but then something came to him too late in a terrible flash, a recognition of a present danger, and in the next minute he saw her. Her ambulant back reared up before his eyes, the metallic sheet of hair swaying above a tall and angular form, her purposeful, predatory stride. Panic bolted from him as if at a gunshot. The girl slowed, sensing him behind her. Any second now she would turn around. A tumult of old fears roared like trains through the junction of his thoughts, and he swerved abruptly off the pavement and on to the side of the road, still walking, unable to stop, as if he were caught in the web of a magnetic field. A speeding car passed within inches of him. In the instant before the angry shriek of its horn he closed his eyes and when it came he felt his legs grow numb beneath him. At the periphery of his vision he saw her head snap round and in that moment an invisible path opened up for him across the road. He flung himself towards it with a thudding, thankful heart, his senses wild and alert. Her eyes burned at his back. He reached the other side, panting, and drove on up the pavement with his head clamped straight in
a rigid vice of will. He mustn’t look back, he mustn’t. He sensed her moving parallel with him across the road like a shadow. His turning was up ahead, only a minute’s walk away. A second later something broke and he couldn’t stop himself from glancing over his shoulder. She was walking fast, her face trained on him like the barrel of a gun. He was almost there now. His feet pounded the pavement like flagging horses. He heard a shout from behind and when he looked around she was cutting across the road towards him. She glittered like a blade in the melting air. He began to run.
About the Author
Rachel Cusk was born in 1967 and is the author of seven novels: Saving Agnes, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Temporary, The Country Life, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, The Lucky Ones, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award, In the Fold, Arlington Park, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and The Bradshaw Variations. Her non-fiction books are A Life’s Work, The Last Supper and Aftermath. In 2003 she was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young Novelists.
By the Same Author
fiction
SAVING AGNES
THE COUNTRY LIFE
THE LUCKY ONES
IN THE FOLD
ARLINGTON PARK
THE BRADSHAW VARIATIONS
non-fiction
A LIFE’S WORK: ON BECOMING A MOTHER
THE LAST SUPPER
AFTERMATH
