Transit

by Rachel Cusk

  After that episode, Dale said, he had had a period in which every time he saw someone he knew or spoke to them – and increasingly with people he didn’t know, with clients or strangers in the street – he was literally plagued by this sense of them as children in adults’ bodies. He saw it in their gestures and mannerisms, in their competitiveness, their anxiety, their anger and joy, most of all in their needs, both physical and emotional: even the people he knew who were in stable partnerships – relationships he had once envied for their companionship and intimacy – now looked to him like no more than best friends in the playground. For weeks he went around in a sort of fog of pity for the human race, ‘like some bloke from the Middle Ages wandering about in sackcloth ringing a bell.’ It was quite disabling, he said: some days he actually felt physically weak, and could barely drag himself to the salon. People assumed he was depressed, ‘and maybe I was,’ Dale said, ‘but I knew I was doing something I had to do, I was going somewhere, and I wasn’t going back if it bloody killed me.’ At the end of it he felt empty, purified, like he’d had a massive mental clear-out. Thinking back to that New Year’s Eve, what he’d felt was that there had been something enormous in the room that everyone else was pretending wasn’t there.

  I asked him what it was.

  He was squatting down behind me by now painting the hair at the back so I couldn’t see his face. After a while he stood up, reappearing in the mirror with the plastic dish in one hand and the paintbrush in the other.

  ‘Fear,’ he said. ‘And I thought, I’m not running away from it. I’m going to stay right here until it’s gone.’ He scrutinised the painted hair from all sides, like an artist examining a finished canvas. ‘It shouldn’t be long now,’ he said. ‘We’ll leave it to settle in for a bit.’

  He just had to go and make a quick call, if I would excuse him. He had his nephew staying with him at the moment; he ought to let him know that his plans for this evening had changed and that he’d be home after all.

  ‘With any luck,’ Dale said, ‘he might even have found it in himself to cook something.’

  I asked where his nephew had come from and he said Scotland.

  ‘And not one of the trendy bits,’ he said. ‘For some reason my sister keeps herself in the arse-end of nowhere.’ He’d been there once or twice to visit her, and it was only forty-eight hours before he was seriously considering talking to the sheep.

  The nephew was a funny fellow, Dale said: everyone had decided he was autistic or Asperger’s or whatever it is people call you these days when you’re not like everyone else. He’d left school with no qualifications: when Dale went up to visit he was unemployed and sitting throwing rocks down the hill into the quarry for amusement.

  ‘He’s changed a bit since then, fortunately. The other night he even asked me whether I’d used fresh herbs in the pasta sauce, or “just” –’ Dale made the inverted commas with his fingers – ‘the dried ones.’

  I asked how the boy had ended up coming to London, and Dale said it was after a conversation he’d had with his sister. She told him the boy had started saying disturbing things to her, that he felt he was living in the wrong body or living in the wrong person or something like that.

  ‘He doesn’t say a word in months,’ Dale said, ‘and then he suddenly comes out with that. She didn’t know what to make of it. She asked me what I thought it meant. I said I’m a hairdresser,’ he said, ‘not a psychologist.’ He picked at a few stray strands on my head. ‘But obviously I had a hunch. I told him if he could pack a bag and get himself on a train, he could stay with me in London. I said to him, I’m not looking for company: I like my life just the way it is. I’ve got a nice flat and a nice business and I want to keep them that way. You’d have to do your share, I said, and I’m not putting someone up who doesn’t work, because I’m not a bloody charity. But you’d have your freedom, I said, and London’s a big place. If you can’t find what you’re looking for there, you won’t find it anywhere. And a week later,’ Dale said, ‘the doorbell rings and there he is.’

  He hadn’t been entirely surprised, he admitted: his sister had tipped him off a couple of days earlier, just so he’d have time to hide anything she might not approve of. And for those two days, he did find himself having some second thoughts. He wandered around the rooms of his flat, noticing their cleanliness and order; he savoured the peace of the place, his freedom to come and go as he liked, to return home after work and find it all just as he had left it. ‘The idea,’ he said, ‘of having someone always there, someone I had to talk to and clean up after, someone I would basically have responsibility for, because at sixteen you’re really still a child and this one had never been outside a tiny Scottish village in his life: well, you get my drift,’ Dale said. ‘I thought, I must be insane, giving all this up.’

  I asked whether any of those fears had been realised and he was silent for a moment. I watched him in the mirror, his arms crossed over his stomach, where the faint paunch stood out from his wolf-like frame.

  Obviously at the beginning, he said, they’d had some moments. He had to teach his nephew to do things as he liked them done, and nobody learns in an instant: he of all people knew that, from training up novices at the salon. You need time, he said, time and consistency. But it had been two months now, and they rubbed along together quite well. The boy had found work as a trainee mechanic; he had a bit of a budding social life, and even came out clubbing with Dale on occasion.

  ‘When I can be bothered to put away the pipe and slippers,’ Dale said, ‘and haul myself out the door. Shared life,’ he went on, ‘can never be the same as being on your own. You lose something,’ he said, ‘and I don’t know if you ever get it back. One day he’ll leave, and the thought has occurred to me that I’ll probably miss him – that the place might feel empty, where before it felt complete. I might have given up more than I bargained for,’ he said. ‘But you can’t stop people coming in,’ he said, ‘and you can’t ask what’s in it for you when they do.’

  He crossed to the reception desk to get his phone, and I looked at the boy in the chair beside me, whose wild dark hair was now cropped short. He was shooting frequent, imploring looks at his mother, who remained determinedly absorbed in her book.

  ‘That’s coming on nicely,’ Sammy said to me. ‘You going anywhere special tonight?’

  I said that I wasn’t, though I had to go somewhere the following evening.

  ‘You’re usually good for two or three days if he styles it properly,’ Sammy said. ‘You should be all right. Right then,’ she said to the boy, ‘let’s have a look at you.’

  She put her hands on his shoulders and faced him in the mirror.

  ‘What do you think?’ she said.

  There was no reply.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘what have you got to say for yourself?’

  I saw the boy’s mother glance up from her book.

  ‘We’ve got a right one here,’ Sammy said. ‘A right man of mystery.’

  The boy’s knuckles were white where they gripped the armrests of his chair. His sallow face was clenched. Sammy released her hands and in an instant he had sprung to his feet and was tearing off the nylon gown that was fastened around his shoulders.

  ‘Take it easy!’ Sammy said, stepping back with her palms raised. ‘There’s expensive equipment in here, you know.’

  With strange, lunging movements the boy strode away from the chair towards the big glass door. His mother got to her feet, the book still in her hand, and watched as he yanked the door open and the black rainy street with its hissing traffic was revealed. He had pulled the handle so forcefully that the door continued to revolve all the way around on its hinges after he had let it go. It travelled further and further, until finally it collided heavily with the tiers of glass shelving where the haircare products stood in their neat rows. The boy stood frozen in the open doorway, his face lit up, his cropped hair as though standing on end, and watched as the bank of shelves disgorged a landsli
de of bottles and jars which fell and rolled with a great thundering sound out across the salon floor, and then itself collapsed in a tremendous shrieking cascade of breaking glass.

  There was a moment of silence in which everyone stood absolutely still, Dale with the phone in his hand, Sammy holding the boy’s discarded cape, the mother with the book clasped in her fingers; even the Glamour-reading woman finally looked up from her magazine.

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Sammy said.

  The boy shot out through the doorway and disappeared into the wet, black street. For a few instants his mother stayed where she was, in the glittering field of bottles and broken glass. She wore an expression of stony dignity. She stared at Sammy, her eyes unblinking. Then she picked up her bag, carefully put her book in it, and walked out after her son, leaving the door open behind her.

  The trees were a mixed blessing, Lauren said. Their massive forms, hulking in the darkness like ogres or giants, stood everywhere in the town. They rose towering amid the buildings and along the roadsides: she had to admit they were quite dramatic. Where we were walking the thick trunks were driven like piles into the pavements, so that the slabs rose up and down in a series of undulations with the pressure of the roots from underneath. Some of these roots had penetrated to the surface: their blind, snake-like forms, thicker than a human arm, lay impacted in the stone. They were a constant tripping hazard, Lauren said; and at this time of year, when the leaves started falling, the whole centre would be carpeted two or three inches deep in foliage that got so slimy the place became an ice rink.

  She asked whether I had had a pleasant journey from London, despite everything. The branch line was the problem: the London train only had to be delayed by a few minutes for you to miss the connection. It happened all the time, and it was hard to run a literary festival when the authors – through no fault of their own, of course – turned up late. But the town’s inaccessibility, she conceded, was also its beauty: the winding route through dense wooded valleys, the chasm-like glimpses of river and hillside as the train wound deeper and deeper into the lofty emptiness, was spectacular. She herself usually drove, for the sake of convenience. But the train journey was very nice.

  We were hurrying up and down the undulating pavements, turning left and right and left again, while every so often Lauren glanced at the slim watch she wore on her wrist. The light from the street lamps gilded the dense black foliage above our heads. A few drops of rain had started to fall: they made a smacking sound on the leaves. We ought to be all right, Lauren said, looking again at her watch. It was lucky I was a fast walker: with some authors – no offence intended – that wasn’t always the case. I should have a few minutes just to settle in and get the introductions over with: the others, she had been told, were waiting for me in the green room.

  We had arrived at an institutional-looking building in the town centre whose doors stood open so that a square of electric light extended out into the street from the crowded lobby. Lauren stopped at the threshold and pointed inside. The green room was the second door on the left, she said: she was sure I would find it without difficulty. She herself had to go to the hotel to collect another author. She took a small umbrella out of her bag. You never want to be without one of these here, she said. She hoped the event would go well: they usually seemed to. The festival drew very enthusiastic audiences. I suppose, she added, somewhat doubtfully, there’s not that much else here to do.

  When I pushed open the heavy wooden door to the green room I was instantly engulfed in heat and noise. People sat eating and drinking at round tables; a group of four men sat at one, and when the door closed heavily behind me they all turned their heads to look. One of them got up, and came forward with his hand extended. He introduced himself as the person who would be chairing our event. He was much younger than I had expected him to be, very lean and slight, but when we shook hands his grip was almost violently firm.

  I apologised for being late, and he said that it didn’t matter at all. In fact, there’d been a problem with the electrics in the tent: there was a lot of rain earlier in the day, apparently, and something had got wet that shouldn’t have, or at least that was his understanding of it; anyway, whatever it was, it had sounded pretty fatal. But they said they were fixing it now – all it meant was that the event would take place a quarter of an hour later than scheduled. He and the others were having a drink while they waited. He sensed it wasn’t quite the done thing – a bit like the crew of a jumbo jet drinking before take-off – but it hadn’t seemed to worry the others at all, and they were the ones who people had come to see. Frankly, he said, this lot won’t take much chairing: one question sets them off for hours.

  We had reached the table and everyone stood up and shook hands, then sat back down again. There was a bottle of wine on the table and four glasses; the Chair went off to get a fifth, after offering me his seat. I had met one of the men around the table before; the other two I didn’t know. The man I knew was called Julian. He was big and fleshy and strangely childlike, like a giant boy. He had a loud voice and a manner which looked always to be on the verge of some clumsiness or mishap but which in fact was rapidly and pointedly satirical, so that you’d been accurately mocked before you even realised you’d been seen. I had been struck before by the energy and readiness of this facility in him, which always seemed to be held at boiling point, waiting to receive and reduce its object. An aura of discomfort hung faintly around his big body, which he moved often as though to dispel it, crossing and recrossing his heavy legs, lunging forwards over the table, turning this way and that in his chair.

  He was telling the others about another festival where he had recently made an appearance, to read from the memoir he had written about his childhood. The book described growing up as the child of his stepfather, his father having abandoned his mother while she was pregnant, before he was even born. ‘So at least it was nothing personal,’ he said, and paused for the others to laugh. After the reading, a man had approached him from the audience and, drawing him to one side, had made the astonishing claim that he himself was the true father, Julian’s biological parent. Julian wrinkled his nose.

  ‘He was that smelly,’ he said, ‘you had to pray that it wasn’t true.’

  This man claimed that he had documents at home that proved the relationship; he spoke of Julian’s mother and his fondness for her and the happy times they’d had together. While he was speaking, a second man had come from the audience and, tapping Julian on the other arm, had made exactly the same claim. They were positively crawling out of the woodwork, Julian said. It was like Mamma Mia!, except in Sunderland in the rain.

  ‘It’s not a very well-known festival,’ he added, to me. ‘I don’t think you’d like it.’

  He’d become a bit of a festival tart, he went on: to be honest he’d go to the opening of an envelope, especially if the envelope had his name on it. He just couldn’t get enough of it, the attention.

  ‘It’s like my mum on her two weeks in Lanzarote,’ he said. ‘Soak up every bit of it while you’ve got the chance. None of your gradual, even tanning – I’m wanting to get positively barbecued. If this is my moment in the sun, I intend to gorge on it.’

  He cupped his hands around a large chunk of air, and opening his mouth wide, crammed it in.

  I noticed that the Chair glanced at me frequently while Julian spoke, as if he were anxious I might react badly to something that was being said. He had a small, handsome, slightly furtive face and bright bead-like eyes. His black hair was thick and clipped very short, so that it almost looked like an animal’s fur. After a while he leaned forward and touched my arm and asked if I had met either of the other writers – Julian and Louis – before. Louis sat on Julian’s right. He had straggling, shoulder-length, greasy-looking hair and his face was thick with stubble. His torn leather jacket and stained jeans made so obvious a contrast with Julian’s luxurious navy suit and mauve silk cravat that his appearance seemed, despite his attitude of slouching in
difference, premeditated and deliberate. He watched Julian closely, and whenever he smiled at something Julian said, he disclosed an uneven row of large brown teeth. The person on Julian’s other side was a much younger, angelic-looking boy whose flax-coloured hair hung in ringlets around his face. I had missed his name when the introductions were being made: I guessed that he was Julian’s boyfriend. His pink bow-like mouth curled up at each corner, as did his round, blue, unblinking eyes. He wore a dark blue tight-fitting coat that was buttoned up all the way to the throat and he kept his hands plunged in the pockets, as if he were cold. Presently he turned and leaning into Julian’s ear said something to him, before getting up to leave.

  The Chair looked at his watch and said we should probably be making a move. In the corridor outside he fell into step with me while Julian and Louis walked ahead.

  ‘Does it make you nervous,’ he said, ‘doing things like this?’ He paused while some people passed coming the other way and then fell into step with me again. ‘I find I’m delighted when they ask me,’ he added, ‘but then I’m very glad when it’s over.’

  We reached the end of the corridor and opened the door: beyond it the geometrical shapes of formal gardens lay in darkness. The rain fell in great ragged sheets over the rectangular lawns. Some hundred yards away stood a large floodlit marquee. The Chair said it looked like we’d have to run for it. We set off into the dark and the rain, down the straight gravelled path that led to the entrance to the tent. The others ran ahead, Julian shrieking and holding his suit jacket over his head. It was further than it looked and the rain unleashed itself with a sudden burst of intensity while we ran. The Chair kept looking behind at me to make sure I was keeping up. When we reached the other side all of us were breathless and dripping. Louis’s hair hung in sodden rat’s tails around his face. Julian’s shirt had dark patches of water on the shoulders and back. The Chair’s stiff, springy hair had little clear trembling beads in it, which he shook away like an animal shaking its pelt. We were met in the entrance by a man with a clipboard, who asked the Chair quizzically why he hadn’t taken us along the covered walkway. He pointed at it with his pen, a canopied boardwalk behind us that ran along the side of the gardens directly to the place where we now stood. The Chair laughed embarrassedly and said that he hadn’t known it was there; no one had told him. The man listened to this explanation in silence. Obviously, he said, the festival didn’t expect the general public – let alone the participants – to arrive at an event soaking wet. Unfortunately there was nothing he could do at this point. The audience was already seated and we were late as it was. We would have to go in – he looked at the red-faced, wet-haired, dishevelled group – as we were.