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Authors: Rachel Cusk

Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (13 page)

BOOK: Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation

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Yes, she says hoarsely.

Get up, the woman says through the door. Get up now. Downstairs Sonia finds her in the kitchen, washing the floor with a mop. She plunges the mop in the bucket and bangs it against the floor.
She chases it into the corners. She is all hard angles and frowning lines. For the first time since she came here Sonia sees something she recognises: anger.

What’s wrong with you? the woman says. Why can’t you get up? Pills. I take some pills, Sonia says.

What pills?

From the doctor. They make me tired.

What are they for? Why does the doctor give you pills?

I stayed in hospital, Sonia says. It was a long time ago.

Why were you in hospital?

Sonia stares at her wide-eyed. She feels suddenly soft, against this hard anger. She feels relieved.

I hurt myself, she says.

On purpose?

Sonia is silent. She wants to smile, to laugh, to dance, but she feels so beautifully soft that all she can do is yield. She gives a little nod.

How long were you there for? In the hospital?

One year, Sonia says. My sixteen year.

OK, the woman says, shaking her head. OK.

The man had entered her compartment on the train. She was going away to boarding school because her mother said she couldn’t be at home any more. At this school you slept and ate your meals, and that was where she was going. The man talked to her while darkness fell outside the windows of the speeding carriage, wadding the flat wastes like a kind of black fog through which the spectral forms of darkened factories sometimes loomed and then vanished. He reminded her of her father, with his steel-framed glasses and his hair with bits of grey in it. He locked the carriage door and he took her long ponytail in his hand and
twisted it through his fingers. Then he yanked it so hard she thought her neck would break.

I should have been told this, the woman says. Her arms are folded tight against her chest. She stares out of the window at the garden. Don’t you think I should have been told this?

The man went to prison eventually. Her mother said it was a terrible thing, to ruin a man’s life. She said Sonia must have provoked him. So one evening Sonia cut her wrists, and her arms too for good measure. She was put in a psychiatric hospital: that was where she met Kurt.

I’m going to have to phone the agency, the woman says. I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to go home.

I can’t go home, Sonia says. I have nowhere to go.

I’m sorry, the woman says again. She looks at her watch. God, I’m late, she says. I’ve got to pick up the children and I’m going to be late.

She rushes away and Sonia hears the front door close. After a while she goes outside to smoke a cigarette. The sky is iron-grey and heavy. A gust of wind makes the door to the kitchen slam. While she smokes a kind of darkness seems to gather over the garden, to tower over it, growing and leaning like a black cliff. She puts out her cigarette. The rain comes hard and fast. It’s only a few paces back to the house from the garden but by the time she gets in she is wet.

A little while later she hears the front door open, the sounds of footsteps and voices in the hall. Sonia comes out of her room. The woman stands in the hall with the two children. Water drips from them on to the hall floor. The woman wears only a T-shirt: it is so wet that Sonia can see her skin through it. She sees that the younger
child is wearing the woman’s coat; the older one has her umbrella. Water runs from the woman’s hair. She is shaking so violently that Sonia can hear her teeth knocking together. She tries to speak.

I, she says. I.

Then, very slowly, her body racked by tremors, she begins to climb the stairs, leaving a trail of water behind her. She passes Sonia without speaking on the landing. The children are still standing, staring up at her, in the hall. She goes into her bedroom and closes the door.

Sonia makes the noodles in cream sauce that her grandmother used to make for her when she was small. Her grandmother lived in a big house in the countryside and Sonia would spend the school holidays there. Sonia loved her grandmother. She puts lots of grated cheese on top of the noodles. She is frightened they won’t like it but the children eat it all.

The woman does not come down. After dinner Sonia goes up and knocks at her door. There is no reply. After a while she opens the door a little. The woman is lying in bed, asleep. Her tangled hair spread over the pillow is still damp. Sonia takes the children upstairs and runs the bath for them. She finds their pyjamas in their rooms. When they try to go into their mother’s room she stops them. Mummy’s sleeping, she says. At midnight she looks in again. The woman is exactly as she was, sleeping, except that the covers are pushed back. She is still wearing the clothes she got wet in.

Sonia sets the alarm on her phone to wake her up in the morning. She is about to take her pills and then she doesn’t. Before breakfast,
when she looks in, the woman’s eyes are open. The whites are yellow. She tries to speak. Water, she says. Sonia gets a jug of water and a glass and puts them beside her bed. The woman gets up on her elbow to drink. The glass shakes violently in her hand and the water spills. She falls back against the pillows. She tries to say something but her eyes keep closing. Sonia goes downstairs, where the children are waiting for her. The younger one asks her to brush her hair. Sonia brushes it and then she braids it smoothly into a high plait. The little girl goes to look at herself in the mirror and when she comes back she seems pleased.

They show her the way to school. At the gate Sonia isn’t sure what to do. Then she gives each of them an awkward little hug and they run off into the playground.

The man calls. Sonia tells him the woman is ill. Oh dear, he says. He asks her if she can manage on her own. Of course, she says. That’s great, he says. It’s difficult for me to come back. That’s a real help.

The woman lies in bed for hour after hour. Sometimes she can speak and sometimes she can’t. The children, she says. Occasionally Sonia notices that the bed is completely soaked. The woman has a fever. Sonia brings her water. Kurt calls and she describes the woman’s symptoms. Pneumonia, he says confidently. When the children return from school they ask to see her. She replies that Mummy’s ill and needs to be left alone. She makes gingerbread for them, with a special cream-cheese icing. They want to stir the mixture and she lets them. The next day, when they are at school, she walks around the town. She goes to the supermarket and chooses what she likes.
She goes to the shops and looks at the clothes. She passes the tattoo parlour. She stands outside it, looking at the pictures on the windows. Then, after a while, she opens the door and goes in.

The man behind the counter is reading a newspaper. He has big hoops in his ears. She stares at them so as not to stare at the rest of him. His skin is like jungle, like ivy. The patterns swarm all the way up his throat. He shows her pictures in a book. He says, once you’ve done this you can’t change your mind, you know that don’t you? She chooses a rose, just one. Where? he says. She bares her shoulder. She is careful not to let her sleeves slip down. She doesn’t want him to see the scars on her arms. While he works he talks but she doesn’t understand what he says. He doesn’t hurt her much.

She buys a book for the little girls, a children’s book in her own language. She teaches them a few words. She points at things and says the name in her own tongue, and they repeat after her. When she goes in to give the woman her water, she finds her sitting up in bed for the first time. Her face is bloodless and white. Her hair is matted. The room has a strange smell.

Where are the children, she says.

With me, Sonia says. They are with me.

Tell them to come up, she says. I want to see them.

Maybe later, Sonia says. We are cooking just now. You need to rest.

The man is coming back. She has cleaned the house. She has made everything look nice. She is cooking a special meal, mushrooms in cream sauce, fried onions, potatoes with melted cheese, and the
children are helping her cook. The younger girl hurts her finger on the metal grater when she is grating the cheese for Sonia. She cries. She says she wants to see her mother. The sobs go through her in big shudders. Sonia finds her a plaster and wraps it around the finger. She gives her a piece of gingerbread. She takes her on her lap, as she has seen the woman do, and to her surprise the little girl lets her.

Well done, the man says when he comes back. He looks around at the tidy house, at the kitchen full of good smells. Well done. I don’t know what we’d have done without you.

He hugs the children. He goes up to see the woman but soon comes back down again. He says she is asleep. He says he is starving hungry. They sit around the table, the four of them, eating her food. Just as they are finishing a sound comes from upstairs. It is the sound of footsteps. The footsteps are slow; sometimes they stop and then start again. After a while the woman appears in the doorway. She is wearing a crumpled nightdress. Her hair stands up in a shock. Her lips are a bluish colour. She is very white, and much thinner than she was before. She puts her hand against the doorway for support. She looks at them all sitting there. She tries to smile.

Hello, she says.

Sonia doesn’t speak to Kurt so much any more. When he calls, she sees the number flashing and decides not to answer. She is too busy to talk to him. She has made some new friends and often in the evenings they go out. They go to bars and clubs; they go dancing. Sonia has bought a new top, backless, to show off her tattoo. People compliment her on it so often that she goes back to the tattoo parlour
and gets another one, a long flowering bramble that twists all the way down her spine.

She takes the children to school in the mornings and in the afternoon she picks them up again. On the way they hold her hands. They sit in the kitchen making things, pumpkin cupcakes, strudel, the things she used to make with her grandmother. She had forgotten these things until now. When Christmas comes she makes a felt calendar with them, like the ones she used to have. She sews the pockets, one for each day, and puts a chocolate in each one. The children help her hang it on the wall. Look, they say to the man. Look what Sonia made us. Well done Sonia, he says. Well done.

The woman stays in her room. Sometimes she comes and stands in the kitchen doorway. She doesn’t seem to know what to do. She looks at Sonia and the children and she goes away again. These days it is the man Sonia takes her orders from. He writes the shopping lists. He teaches her to cook some English dishes. She understands that her food is too heavy; she learns to cook things that are more refined. One day he asks her what she is doing and she tells him she is making the herb marinade for the chicken. He laughs. You’re a fast learner, he says. He tells her how much her English has improved. He corrects her mistakes.

At Christmas they buy her a present, a white woollen coat that buttons up tight around her body. She has given them a large stollen she baked herself. She phoned up her grandmother and asked for the recipe. When they unwrapped it they all clapped and exclaimed. She has never worn anything like the white coat before. They watch her try it on. The woman says, it looks lovely Sonia. She is sitting in the corner, biting her nails. Sonia can tell from the expression on her face that the woman chose the coat herself. She
thanks her. Later she puts it in a bag under her bed, and pushes it as far into the darkness as she can.

The man has moved into a different bedroom. Sonia sees his things there when she goes in to clean. The woman spends all her time in the room they used to share. She comes down at mealtimes and sits silently at the table. She doesn’t eat the food Sonia has cooked.

Things are a bit difficult at the moment, the man tells her. You’re being a real help. Well done.

Sometimes she hears them shouting at each other. They stay up until late at night. During the day she hears the woman crying in her room. In the evenings, when they’ve finally gone to bed, Sonia goes down to the kitchen to eat cereal. Her body has started to crave starch. The food they eat is all protein, and she misses the comforting feeling of blandness filling her mouth. Sometimes she will eat a whole box, saturating the bowl to the top with milk. Where’s all the milk gone? the woman will say, angrily, in the morning.

One evening she finds the woman in the kitchen alone. She is smoking and staring out of the window. Oh hello Sonia, she says.

Can I smoke too? Sonia says.

Go ahead, the woman says, waving her hand to show that she doesn’t care.

They sit there and smoke in silence. Then the woman starts to ask her about her family. She asks about her father, her mother, about where they live.

My parents divorced, Sonia says. They live far apart from each other.

How old were you? the woman asks.

Ten I think, Sonia says.

And who did you live with? the woman says. Your mother or your father?

BOOK: Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation

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