by Rachel Cusk
As a child, he continued – his name, according to my drawing, was Christos – he had been extremely shy and awkward, to the point where his mother had decided to enrol him in dancing classes as a way of building his confidence. These classes, which took place in a nearby hall and were attended by local girls and a smaller number of local boys – barbarians all – were a torment to him on a scale that even now is difficult for him to convey. It was not only that he was overweight and physically unconfident: it was that he had a fear of exposure that drove him inexplicably, in such situations, to make himself fall over. It was a kind of vertigo, he said, such as drives people who are frightened of heights to want to jump; he simply couldn’t bear being looked at, and to ask him to dance was like asking him to walk a high wire, where the thought of falling must be so ever-present that it would eventually bring itself about. And fall he did, repeatedly and with anguish, flailing humiliated among the twirling feet of the other children like a beached whale, and consequently subject to much mockery, until the dancing teacher was forced to suggest that he stop attending classes and he was allowed to stay at home.
‘Imagine, then, my horror,’ he said, ‘when I finally went to university and fell in with a group of fine, committed, like-minded individuals such as I had dreamed my whole life of having as friends, only to discover that the chief hobby and pastime of this group, their greatest love – after politics – was dancing. Night after night they would invite me to dances and I would, of course, refuse. My closest associate in this social world, Maria, a girl with whom I had the most passionate political discussions, a girl I shared everything with, even my love of crosswords, of which we would complete several together each day – even Maria was disappointed in my refusal to participate in this traumatic activity. Trust me, she said, just as my mother had said before her – trust me, you’ll enjoy it. I came to believe, in the end, that if I didn’t dance I would lose Maria’s friendship, while at the same time being certain that once she saw me dancing I would lose it anyway. There was no way out, and so I agreed one evening to accompany them to the club they always went to. It was not at all what I expected, for the reason that it had nothing to do with the modern world. It was a place devoted to the style and music of the nineteen-fifties: people came there dressed, as it were, in costume, and danced something called Lindy Hop. Seeing this, I was more terrified than ever; but perhaps,’ he said, ‘the best way to confront our fears is to put them in costume, so to speak; to translate them, for the simple act of translation very often renders things harmless. The habits – one might almost say the constraints – of one’s personality and cast of mind are slipped free of; I found myself walking on to the dance floor,’ Christos said, ‘hand in hand with Maria, convinced that I should fall, and yet when the music started – an irresistible, happy music which, to this day, I am unable to hear without every trace of melancholy and doubt evaporating – I found myself not falling but flying, flying up and up, around and around, so fast and so high that I seemed to fly clear even of my body itself.’
My phone rang on the table in front of me. It was my younger son’s number. I picked it up and said that I would call him back later.
‘I’m lost,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where I am.’
Holding the phone to my chest I told the group that there was a minor emergency and that we would take a short break. I went out and stood in the corridor, where there were noticeboards with lists and advertisements and bulletins pinned to them: apartments to rent, photocopying services, concerts forthcoming. I asked my son whether he could see a sign with a road name on it.
‘I’ll just look,’ he said.
I could hear traffic in the background and the sound of his breathing. After a while he gave me the name of the street, and I asked him what on earth he was doing there.
‘I’m trying to get to school,’ he said.
I asked why he wasn’t going to school the way I had arranged for him this week, with his friend Mark and Mark’s mother.
‘Mark isn’t coming to school today,’ he said. ‘He’s ill.’
I told him to turn around and walk back the way he had come, telling me the name of each street he passed, and when he reached the right one I told him to turn down it and carry straight on. After a few minutes, during which I listened to his puffing breath and the tapping of his feet on the pavement, he said: ‘I can see it, I can see the building, it’s all right, I can see the building.’
You’re not late, I said, looking at my watch and calculating the time in England; you’ve got a few minutes to get your breath back. I reminded him of the directions in reverse that he was to follow afterwards and said I hoped he’d have a nice day.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
In the classroom the group was waiting, just as I had left it except that one student, a very large and soft-looking young girl who wore glasses with thick black frames, was eating an enormous savoury pastry whose meaty smell was quite overpowering. She held the bottom of the pastry in its paper bag while she bit slowly from the top, to prevent crumbs from falling. Beside her sat a young man as slim and dark and compact as she was soft and formless. He put up his hand fleetingly and withdrew it again. On his way here, he said, in a quiet, precise voice – I looked down to find his name, which was Aris – on his way here he had passed, lying by the side of the road, the putrefying body of a dog, grotesquely swollen and cloaked in swarms of black flies. He had heard the sound of the flies from some way off, he added, and had wondered what it was. It was a sound that was menacing while also being curiously beautiful, so long as you couldn’t see its source. He did not come from Athens, he continued, but his brother lives here and offered him a place to stay for the week. It was a very small apartment; he was sleeping on the sofa, in a room that was also the kitchen. He slept with his head right next to the fridge, on whose door there were various magnets he had had no choice but to examine, including one made of plastic in the shape of a pair of naked breasts, so crudely formed that the nipple on the right breast was significantly off-centre, a dissonance he had considered for many hours while lying there. His brother washed his clothes in the kitchen sink and then hung them all around the room to dry: he worked in an office and needed clean shirts every day. Every available chair in the room, as well as the shelves and window ledges, had a shirt draped over it. While drying, the shirts had taken the impress of the forms beneath them. Lying on the sofa, he had noticed this.
The girl beside him had by now finished her pastry and was occupied in folding the bag into a neat square, smoothing out the creases with her fingers. When she looked up she caught my eye and immediately dropped the paper square on to the table in front of her with a guilty expression. Her name was Rosa, she said, and she wasn’t sure whether her own contribution would be permitted. She didn’t know whether she had understood the exercise correctly. In any case, hers wasn’t like the others, and it probably wouldn’t count, but it was all she could think of. She hadn’t really seen anything on her way here: all that had happened was that she had passed the park where her grandmother used to take her in the afternoons when she was smaller. There was a little playground there, with a swing she used to sit on while her grandmother pushed her. This morning she had seen the playground as she passed, and had seen the swing, and had remembered her grandmother and the pleasant afternoons they spent together. She fell silent. I thanked her, and she gazed at me mildly through her black-rimmed glasses.
The hour was nearly up. The woman sitting directly opposite me, whose somewhat startled face was positioned beneath the face of the clock on the wall, so that the two shapes had become joined or connected in my perception to the extent that I had almost forgotten she was there, now said that it had been interesting for her to realise how little she noticed of the objective world. Her consciousness, at this point – she was forty-three years old – was so crammed full not just of her own memories, obligations, dreams, knowledge and the plethora of her day-to-day responsibilities, but also of ot
her people’s – gleaned over years of listening, talking, empathising, worrying – that she was frightened most of all of the boundaries separating these numerous types of mental freight, the distinctions between them, crumbling away until she was no longer certain what had happened to her and what to other people she knew, or sometimes even what was or was not real. This morning, for instance, her sister had called her very early – neither of them sleeps very well, so they often talk at this hour – to tell her of the evening she and her husband had spent at a friend’s house, where they were invited for dinner. The friend had just had her kitchen completely extended and refurbished, and the centre-piece was an enormous sunken glass panel in the ceiling that made the room as light and airy as a cathedral.
‘My sister’, she said, ‘complimented her friend on this stunning effect, and the friend admitted that in fact she had borrowed the idea from another friend, who had had her kitchen refurbished some months before. Since then, however, a most terrible thing had happened. The friend’s friend had invited a large number of guests to dinner. Shortly before their arrival she had noticed a tiny crack in the glass of the panel, as though something small but sharp had fallen on it from above. She was annoyed, because the panel had cost a considerable amount of money, and being all of one piece she didn’t see any alternative but to replace the whole thing, despite the fact that only one small area had been affected. The guests arrived, and during the course of the evening an incredible storm came in over Athens. The rain came down in torrents as the group sat and ate beneath the glass panel. They were marvelling at the acoustic and visual effect of the water on the glass when, with a great groaning and creaking, the whole thing suddenly collapsed on top of them, the flaw in the glass apparently having weakened the structure to the point where it could not bear the weight of the water falling on it.’
The woman paused. ‘This,’ she said, ‘you will recall, was told to me by my sister over the telephone, a story that neither affected her nor, strictly speaking, concerned her. And since no one, amazingly, was hurt, it wasn’t a story that would shock people and that you would tell for that reason. Nor did it really affect the friend who had told it to her in the first place, except by association, because she had a panel in her ceiling of the same type. So I received it, as it were, third-hand, but it is as real to me as if I had experienced it myself. All morning I was troubled by it. Yet like most people I hear of terrible occurrences – nearly all of them far worse – every day, through the newspapers and the television, and I wondered why this one had taken a place in my mind among my own memories and experiences, so that I was having difficulty telling them apart. The reality of my life is largely concerned with what are called middle-class values – the people that I know refurbish their houses often, as I do myself, and they invite other people to these houses for dinner. But there is a difference, because the people in the story sound a little grander than the people I know, most of whom could not afford to put a glass panel in the ceiling, though they would very much like to. My sister, however, moves in slightly more exalted circles than I do: this is something I am aware of as a source of tension in our relationship. I am, I admit, slightly jealous of her social life and of the kinds of people she meets, and sometimes I think she could do more to include me in the more interesting world she inhabits.
‘The second reason,’ she continued, ‘has to do with the story itself, and with the tiny flaw in the glass panel that eventually led to its entire collapse under pressure: the actual pressure of the water, and the more mysterious and intangible pressure of the people beneath it, who were admiring it while assuming absolutely that it would hold. When it did not, it became the cause of unutterable damage and destruction, almost an instrument of evil, and the symbolism of this arrangement of facts has a certain significance for me.’ She was silent for a while, the juddering second hand moving around the clock face above her head. I looked at my chart and found that her name was Penelope. ‘I would like’, she resumed, ‘to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown, where I have no identity and no associations. But how such a thing could be accomplished, and even where such a place might be, I have no idea; not to mention the relationships and responsibilities themselves,’ she concluded, ‘which drive me mad but at the same time make escape from them impossible.’
Each member of the group had now spoken, except for one, a woman whose name on my chart was Cassandra and whose expression I had watched grow sourer and sourer as the hour passed, who had made her displeasure known by a series of increasingly indiscreet groans and sighs, and who now sat with her arms implacably folded, shaking her head. I asked her whether she had anything, before we concluded, to contribute, and she said that she did not. She had obviously been mistaken, she said: she had been told this was a class about learning to write, something that as far as she was aware involved using your imagination. She didn’t know what I thought had been achieved here, and she wasn’t all that interested in finding out. At least Ryan, she said, had taught them something. She would be asking the organisers to refund her money, and would make damn sure they got her feedback. I don’t know who you are, she said to me, getting to her feet and collecting her things, but I’ll tell you one thing, you’re a lousy teacher.
VII
My neighbour asked whether I’d had time to do any sightseeing yet. We were in the car again, on the rackety road to the marina, with the windows down and his shirtsleeves flapping madly in the breeze.
I said that I had visited Athens several times before, and was familiar with the sights, though that did not altogether explain why I had as yet felt no urge to seek them out. He was surprised: he hadn’t realised I’d been here so often. He himself went to London, for example, all the time, but for some reason it hadn’t occurred to him that the same principle could work in reverse. When was the last time I had come? Three years ago, I said. He was silent for a while, his small eyes narrowed with a faraway look on the horizon.
‘Three years ago,’ he said musingly. ‘At that time, I had just moved back to Athens myself.’
I asked where he had gone to, and why, and he said that he had spent a period living and working in London. He had been offered a very good job by a bank there, he continued, and though he didn’t particularly want to give up the freedom of his life here, and especially his boat, he had a sense it might be the last such offer that came his way. And Athens at the time seemed full of his failures, or at least of things that had come to an end and in which he could find no possibility of renewal. In fact, he felt quite surprised, he said, to have been offered this job, because his opinion of himself had become very low. That is always a dangerous moment, he said, to make a big decision, when you are not sure of what you deserve. Evidently his friends shared his opinion, because all of them urged him, without hesitation, to take it. It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes. Perhaps, he said, we are all like animals in the zoo, and once we see that one of us has got out of the enclosure we shout at him to run like mad, even though it will only result in him becoming lost.
I said his image reminded me of a scene from an opera I liked – in fact I had found a recording of it in Clelia’s apartment – called The Cunning Little Vixen, in which a fox is caught by a hunter and kept in a farmyard with the other animals. He keeps her because he loves her, despite the fact she is destructive, and there is a value for her too in his attention, though its consequence is her captivity. But her nature drives her to seek the wild, and one day she escapes the farmyard and finds her way back into the forest; but instead of feeling
liberated she is terrified, for having lived in the farmyard most of her life she has forgotten how to be free. He was not familiar with that opera, my neighbour said; he, however, approached the prospect of the job in London with a reverse kind of fatalism, as though the very freedom of his life was something for which he was at last going to pay by going into harness. He, the scion of playboys and millionaires, would finally observe the penal servitude of a nine-to-five: he sold his house in Athens, bought a small flat in an upmarket part of the English capital, and took the boat out of the water. It is the only time, he said, in the twenty-five years of its history that the boat has left the element in which it lives. He had made arrangements for it to be stored in a warehouse in the centre of Athens; it is difficult, even now, for him to convey the emotion he felt watching it be lifted out of the sea and placed on a flatbed truck, which he drove behind all the way in his car, and then interred in its container deep in the city. And then off he went to London, sensing that he himself was about to suffer much the same fate.
I asked him what it was that brought him back from that interment, and he smiled. A phone call, he said. It was his second winter in London, and he was sunk in a dreary and lonely existence, trudging through the rain to work and back again, putting in eighteen-hour days at the bank and eating takeaways late at night in his carpeted prison, when the owner of the warehouse in Athens called him to say that there had been a break-in and that the boat’s engine had been stolen. The next day he handed in his resignation and was on a flight back. How refreshing it was, he said, how affirming, to feel such certainty. He had come almost to believe he was a person with no clear feelings about anything, particularly since the history of his loves had led him into such swamplands of failure, yet this attack on his property returned him to joy and life as though he had won the lottery. For the first time in years he knew what he wanted. The first thing he did, on his return, was buy the best engine he could find, though it did, he accepted, have a little more power than he needed.
