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Authors: Rachel Cusk

Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (12 page)

BOOK: Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation
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Y looks at his watch. We need to stop now, he says.
 
 
I go with Z to the cinema and when we come out I say something about the film that he doesn’t understand. I say it again, then I say it in a different way, but he still can’t see it, can’t grasp my meaning. I feel, suddenly, that I’ve lost my power of communication. The loss feels as tangible as if I’d boarded an aeroplane and flown to a country whose people didn’t speak my language, nor I theirs.
Z lives alone. His flat is simple and of modest size. In my own house I am never still; I charge from top floor to bottom and back again, from room to room, like a dynamo revolved and revolved by some elemental feeling of dread. I’m trying to keep the house alive. I worry that if I stop I’ll forget, that I’ll look up again to find that it has become a ruin. Sometimes it feels as though I inhabit a mirage, a projection; that the real house has gone but the children don’t know, don’t realise that I’m behind the curtain like the Wizard of Oz, frantically turning knobs and adjusting microphones to keep the illusion going. In Z’s flat I don’t move. I can’t: there’s nowhere to go. I watch the light moving and changing through the rooms. I listen to the dim sounds from outside. I become aware of myself, too close, like a stranger sitting down right next to me in a train carriage full of empty seats.
Z waits for the cloud of the cinema trip to pass over, waits for the clamour to die down. He cooks, runs a bath, gives me a book to
read. He is as sensitive to events as the bulrushes are to the stroking wind. His flat is quiet. Nothing ever changes there: when I visit, I find everything exactly where it was the time before. He says, sometimes you say things before you’ve understood them yourself. For you the saying is a kind of working out, he says, like doing a sum on a bit of paper. You can’t always expect people to grasp it. But I want you to know what I mean, I say. So do I, he says. I want to know what you mean.
It’s late at night, too late to run away from something whose nature I can’t in any case discern. It’s just a shape in the darkness, understanding or its opposite, I can’t tell.
 
 
Y says that my relationship with him – Y – is helpful because it can’t ever become sexual. He claims that I find this relieving. He says this is why, with him, I feel safe.
I talk a lot with Y about X but increasingly I find I am reluctant to mention Z. In the neutrality of Y’s consulting room the whole bloodstained past has been unravelled, the war with X, its causes and key battles, its moments of drama and shame, but of Z very little is said. I find that I am protective of the silence around Z. The old war can be turned into words, but a living silence ought not to be disturbed. Things might be growing there, like seeds under newly ploughed earth. Week after week Y and I sit like Odysseus in his cave, processing the violent past in reams of talk. The present is a talking present; but of the future what can be said?
The apple tree outside has shed its leaves. It has started to rain, after the long dry clanging days of summer. The drive to
Y’s house is slow, the windows wet with condensation, the lorries sending up sprays of muddy water, the sky overhead sagging with iron-grey clouds. When I walk up the cul-de-sac the wind buffets and whirls among the trees and houses. Sometimes I wonder why I come here when the coming is so iterative, so forced. Having to come here sometimes feels like the biggest problem I have. I feel like a lonely man visiting a brothel, the money changing hands, paying for understanding as some people pay for love. And just as that is not love, so this cannot be understanding. What, then, is it?
I am certain Y will say that my feelings of rebellion against psychoanalysis are predictable and meaningful; that my rebellion can be encompassed by that against which I am rebelling. Occasionally we have discussed the ways in which a therapy might be brought to an end, but it always sounds to me rather like dying, long and drawn-out, a matter not of choice but of some greater law of genesis and cessation of which we are, apparently, at the mercy.
I don’t say these things aloud: perhaps unwittingly, Y has alluded from his web of talk to the existence of the nonverbal universe, and I intend to go and live there.
 
 
Love, Z says. Do you want to use that word?
Make me something, I say. Give me something. Bring me something. Not love, or at least, not only love.
Z sighs, shakes his head, reminds me to pay my speeding fine. I lean against him. His skin is always so hot. When I get close
enough, it feels like sitting next to a fire. Yet when I am further away he is a purely reflective surface, like the sea in certain moods. I watch him, watch the light move across him, watch the rippling surface. The clocks go back; the days get darker, but the sea retains its light. I buy a coat, because it’s winter now.
In the town she came from it always felt like there were more people in the cemeteries than walking around the place on their own legs. The cemeteries were bigger than the parks in that town. High-speed trains crossed the flat countryside nearby in great bounds, Paris to Antwerp, Zurich to Brussels, but she never felt the trains contained living people either. They passed behind the lines of headstones, a blur of velocity, moving so fast it almost looked like they too were standing still.
But then one day she got on a train herself, and now it was the town that seemed to move. She sat next to her suitcase and stared out of the carriage window as it all moved away from her, the grey houses and rain-darkened streets, the concrete factory yards, the cemetery under the same low furrowed sky; moved away from her like a stranger who has passed her on the pavement and walked on, without recognition or regret.
 
 
She is scared. She thought in the new place she would feel free but she doesn’t. She feels tied by long tethers. When she makes the slightest movement, she feels it all along the length of her bonds.
The man collected her from the station. Welcome to England, he said, and then his talk ran away from her like a cataract going over a cliff. He wore young people’s clothes, a leather jacket, red sneakers on his feet. On the car journey she understood almost nothing of what he said. She sat rigid, frozen beside him. It was as if the car was full of noise, the sound of mad crashing and banging and shrieking, but he couldn’t hear it. She sat in her seat, frozen, glancing at him sometimes while he talked.
Out of the window she saw tilting streets of white houses, every street crowded with parked cars, and big birds picking at litter on the pavements. When she got out of the car she looked up. The sky was much further away than it was at home, and full of chasing clouds. She followed the man up the steps to the front door of a house and waited while he searched his pockets for his keys. The woman was standing in the hall. Sonia couldn’t see what she looked like because she instantly came forward, startling her, and kissed her on both cheeks. She took Sonia’s bag, the little handbag with the chain of square gold links, and put it on the hall table. She asked questions, tea, did Sonia want a cup of tea, and Sonia shook her head. Then she turned and went up the stairs, still talking. Sonia followed her. She opened the door to a room with a bed in it, a wardrobe, a desk, and Sonia went in. Then she said something and closed the door and went away.
Sonia stood there in her coat. She needed her handbag but it was downstairs. She wanted a cigarette. She went to the window and looked down. There was a little garden, flowers, a tree. There was a knock at the door and the man came in with her suitcase. He put it down beside the bed and went away again. She stood in her coat and waited.
 
 
‘How is it?’ Kurt said on the phone. ‘What’s it like? How is the house?’
‘Big,’ she said.
‘Did you give them their gifts?’
Kurt helped her choose the gifts. The only place to buy things was the general store, where they sold newspapers and cigarettes and food that could stand on the shelves for a year without rotting. They chose key rings for the children, one each, and for the parents a jar of some pickle Kurt said was the right thing to offer no matter what it tasted like, because it was a speciality of the region.
‘Of course I did,’ she said.
‘And the children? How are they?’
She hadn’t really paid much attention to the children. She felt like a child herself. During dinner she couldn’t eat or speak. They sat around the table, the father and the mother, the two children and her. They felt, the two girls, a little like rivals; dimly she saw them across the table, two beings competing with her for the evening’s resources, almost for consciousness itself. Something was happening to her, to her, yet everyone seemed to think something was happening to them too. The woman kept petting the younger girl and putting her on her lap. When they had finished eating the woman got up to clear the plates. Sonia hesitated and then she got up too and began carrying things to the sink. The woman seemed pleased. Oh thank you, she said.
‘They’re OK,’ she said to Kurt. She told him she had helped with the dishes.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s good. Remember you’re there to help. You’ll get used to being there. It’s difficult at first. Everything will seem strange. You’ll feel homesick.’
She did not say, did not say that what sickened her was, in fact, the thought of home. The paralysing terror she felt was the opposite of homesickness. It came from her sense that there might be nothing else for her, that she had come out into the world and met its strangeness and indifference like a fist in her face.
‘It will all seem better tomorrow,’ Kurt said. ‘I’ll call you again in the evening on my break, same time.’
Kurt was working for the summer in a chicken factory. He worked nights because the pay was better. On his part of the line they took out the chicken’s insides, sealed them in a little plastic bag to preserve them, and put them back in the chicken again. Like education, Sonia said. She lay on her bed, darkness at the window, the metal phone hot against her ear. She had failed her English certificate and couldn’t complete her college course without it: it was Kurt’s suggestion, to defer her place and come here. You can live for free, he said. You live with a family, you help them around the house, and you come back speaking English. She didn’t say: if I spoke English I wouldn’t come back at all.
‘All right,’ she said. She didn’t ask him anything about himself. She had two pills in her purse she was going to take in a minute, to make her sleep. ‘Bye.’
 
 
The house is big. There are rooms with no one in them, full of paintings and old furniture like a museum. She looks through the
doorways but doesn’t go in. She goes downstairs and straight out to the garden, to smoke.
Later she leaves the house and walks around the town. The woman has taken the children to school. She says one day Sonia can take them, but for now she’ll do it herself. Sonia understands better when the woman speaks than the man. Yet the woman talks about things that don’t exist. There’s something that comes from her, something other than words. It’s as if she isn’t contained in her own skin. She spills out and Sonia can see the spillage. She can see what is meant as well as hear it. The woman talks about the future and the past but what she wants right now isn’t obvious. So Sonia goes out and walks around.
In the town centre there are so many shops they make a kind of noise. There’s a feeling of crisis, almost of panic here: the plate-glass doors stand open, loud music plays, the pavements are swarming with people. The shops are huge inside, like caves, and she stands at their mouths, being shoved by passersby. She watches the customers moving around the aisles, rifling and discarding with the unselfconsciousness of looters. There are long queues at the tills. She doesn’t know whether what she is seeing is poverty or luxury.
She goes to look at the sea. The beach is quieter. There are people walking their dogs. The water is grey and fretted by wind. She sits on the shingle, smoking. A man approaches her, a young skinny man in black trousers and a black T-shirt with a picture of a wolf on it. He asks her for a cigarette. They talk for a while. She is surprised that when she says English words they work and he understands. He sits quite close to her on the shingle and stares into her face while she talks. He seems to be interested in her: the feeling is uncomfortable, like a needle probing at a vein. His face is
pale; his eyes are green, with long black lashes. She tells him a bit about her family, her home town. Then he mentions that he comes from Lithuania and immediately she wants to get up and leave. She thought he was English, but now she knows his interest is the interest of a lost boy, someone alone who saw her aloneness as if it had been written across her face.
On the way home she passes a little shop hidden in a side street whose window is all decorated with strange pictures, brooding flowers with black outlines, roses shedding drops of blood, daggers with snakes twined around their blades. It is a tattoo parlour. She stands for a long time looking at the window. Then she goes back to the house.
 
 
Sonia, the woman says, I really need you. Sonia understands that part of the sentence: the words are the words of the American song they play in the bars at home. The rest is harder to make sense of. The woman wants her to go shopping. She writes a list. She draws a map, with a big cross on it for the supermarket. She gives her money, large notes with a thread of silver running through them.
Sonia spends a long time in the supermarket. The supermarket is nice: she feels happy there. She looks at the food. She wanders the aisles, caressing things. At home she does the shopping for her mother. The supermarket is a long way from her mother’s house and she has to bring the bags back on the bus. She carries the bags into the kitchen, where her mother and her mother’s boyfriend are usually sitting smoking and drinking coffee. They don’t thank her; they barely even look at her.
But the woman thanks her. She seems overjoyed. Well done, she says. Well done. Did you get lost? She taps the watch on her wrist, shows the time to Sonia. Sonia has been away for three hours. I was worried, the woman says. I was worried you’d got lost.
She goes to her room and lies on the bed. She bought a package of brownies at the supermarket and she eats them lying there. There are so many that she can eat them without worrying the pleasure will come to an end, but all at once it does and the package is empty. It starts to get dark. She doesn’t turn on the lights. She feels sleepy. She lies there, drifting, in her clothes. When the knock at the door comes she is startled; she must have fallen asleep. The woman calls her name through the door. Sonia gets up, her head thick. Yes? she says through the door. The English word comes so strangely from her mouth. The woman asks her if she can come downstairs. I need you, she says.
 
 
The two little girls don’t talk to her and she doesn’t talk to them either. She sits on a chair in the corner while they do whatever it is they do. She reads a magazine. When they fight it is harder to concentrate on reading. The magazine is in English. The words are like little pieces of grit in her eyes.
The woman keeps coming into the room and going out again. She seems to be looking for something. There are frown lines on her face. The children put out their arms as she passes, like drowning people. Sonia, she says. Sonia.
In the evening she hears the man and the woman talking. Their
conversation never stops. She wonders how they could possibly have so much to say to one another. And in English, too – she knows that isn’t a problem for them, but it makes her feel tired. She has started to take three pills at night instead of two. All day she is exhausted and then at night she is flung about in a whirling kind of chaos, all the lights on in her head, spinning and spinning in the splintered darkness. Kurt says her mind is having trouble processing all this new information. He says it will pass. He asks if she’s thinking in English yet.
 
 
The woman isn’t pleased with her any more.
Sonia, she says, we need to have a talk.
Maybe later, Sonia says.
It is first thing in the morning and her head is so stuffy with pills she can barely see the coffee grains she is trying to spoon into her cup.
I’m taking the children to school, the woman says. There is the sound of broken glass in her voice. When I come back I want to talk.
Sonia sits at the kitchen table in her pyjamas, waiting. She has found an over-sized cup in one of the cupboards and that is what she makes her coffee in. It is as big as a bowl. She fills it right to the top, the hot milk frothy and sweet, just a few coffee grains stirred in. It takes her a long time to drink it. Sometimes, when she’s finished, she makes another one and takes it back to the table. The kitchen is a nice room and she likes to sit here, drinking coffee. A whole morning can pass like that.
The woman returns. She is frowning. She says, you have to get dressed in the mornings. You have to get up and dressed.
I’m tired, Sonia says.
I want you up and dressed and downstairs by eight o’clock in the morning, she says. I want you to help me.
Sonia says nothing.
You need to make friends with the children, she says. It’s not up to them. It’s up to you.
Sonia says nothing.
I want you to cook, the woman says. I want you to cook dinner. I want you to do the laundry. I want you to tidy up around here.
Sonia stares at her. Her eyes feel very wide open. She can’t close them or look away.
You need to do these things, the woman says, or you’re going to have to go home.
 
 
The man goes away. The woman says he will be gone for a week. In the evening Sonia sees her through a crack in the sitting-room door. She sits alone, smoking and staring into space.
Sonia takes four pills and in the morning is woken by the sound of banging on her bedroom door. She is too far away to answer. She can hear gulls screaming somewhere outside. She drifts back into a black-edged sleep. Later, the banging starts again.
BOOK: Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation
8.97Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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