by Rachel Cusk
He led us through a black-curtained entrance to the back of a makeshift stage. The murmur of conversation could be heard from the audience on the other side. From the back the stage was a raw structure of planks and scaffolding poles but at the front the platform was sleek and white and well lit. Four chairs had been arranged in a conversational pattern around four microphones. There was a small table beside each one with a bottle of water and a glass. We walked on to the platform and the audience fell silent. The lights were dimmed so that they quickly disappeared into darkness and the brightness on stage seemed to intensify.
‘Have we come to the right place?’ Julian said, speaking into the darkness and looking around himself with pantomimed confusion. ‘We’re looking for the wet T-shirt competition. We were told it was here.’
The audience immediately laughed. Julian shook out his jacket and made a face as he gingerly put it back on.
‘Wet writers are a lot more fun than dry ones. I promise,’ he added, above a second wave of laughter. From the darkness came the sound of them settling into their seats.
Julian had sat in the first seat and Louis had taken the one next to him. The Chair sat in the seat after that. I sat at the end of the row. The Chair was laughing at Julian’s remarks along with everyone else, his legs crossed tightly at the knee, his costive eyes darting around the interior of the marquee. He had a notepad on his lap and he opened it. I could see handwriting on the open page. Louis was watching Julian with his brown teeth slightly bared.
‘I’m told that sometimes I can be a bit forward,’ Julian said to the audience. ‘I don’t always know when I’m doing it – I have to be told. Some writers pretend to be shy, but not me. I say it’s the quiet ones you want to watch, the tortured souls, the artists, the ones who say they hate all the attention. Like Louis,’ he said, and the audience laughed. Louis laughed too, baring his teeth even more, his pale blue eyes with their yellowed whites fixed on Julian’s face. ‘Louis’s the sort who actually claims to enjoy the writing process,’ Julian said. ‘Like those people who say they enjoyed school. Me, I hate writing. I have to sit there with someone massaging my shoulders and a hot-water bottle in my lap. I only do it for the attention I’ll get afterwards – I’m like a dog waiting for a treat.’
The Chair was looking at his notes with studied nonchalance. It was apparent that he had missed the opportunity to intervene: the event had set off like a train without him. Water dripped from my hair down the back of my neck.
All writers, Julian went on, are attention seekers: why else would we be sitting up here on this stage? The fact is, he said, no one took enough notice of us when we were small and now we’re making them pay for it. Any writer who denied the childish element of revenge in what they did was, as far as he was concerned, a liar. Writing was just a way of taking justice into your own hands. If you wanted the proof, all you had to do was look at the people who had something to fear from your honesty.
‘When I told my mother I’d written a book,’ he said, ‘the first thing she said was, “You always were a difficult child.”’
The audience laughed.
For a long time she had refused to discuss it, the writing; she felt he’d stolen something from her, not so much the facts of their shared story as the ownership of it.
‘Parents sometimes have a problem with that,’ he said. ‘They have this child that’s a sort of silent witness to their lives, then the child grows up and starts blabbing their secrets all over the place and they don’t like it. I’d say to them: get a dog instead. You had a child but actually what you needed was a dog, something that would love you and obey you but would never say a word, because the thing about a dog,’ he said, ‘is that no matter what you do to it, it will never, ever be able to talk back. I’m getting all heated,’ he added, fanning his face. ‘I’ve actually managed to dry off my own clothes.’
The place where he spent his childhood – just in case anyone here had had the bad manners to turn up without reading his book – was in the north, in a village that didn’t feature on any tourist map nor in the annals of history, though it was probably extensively documented in the files of the local social services department. It was poverty the modern way, everyone living on benefits, obese with boredom and cheap food, and the most important member of the family was the television. Men in that part of the country had a life expectancy of fifty.
‘Though unfortunately,’ he said, ‘my stepfather continues to defy that statistic.’
His mother was given a council house when he was born – ‘one of the many perks,’ he said, ‘of having me in her life’ – and before long was being courted by various men. The house was a desirable corner property, with an extra half a bathroom and a few feet more crappy outside space than its neighbours: the suitors were literally queuing round the block. He didn’t remember the actual arrival of his stepfather, because he was still a baby when it happened; and isn’t that the worst, Julian said, to be hurt by something before you even know what it is. In a sense he was damaged goods before he even became a conscious being. Coming to himself was like opening a Christmas present and finding that what was inside was already broken.
‘Which in our house,’ Julian said, ‘it usually was.’
Before long, his mother and stepfather had two more children of their own, Julian’s half-sisters, and Julian’s status as an outsider, an unwanted burden, was openly admitted as a fact of daily life.
‘It’s funny,’ he said, ‘how when parents do things to their children, it’s as if they think no one can see them. It’s as if the child is an extension of them: when they talk to it, they’re talking to themselves; when they love it, they’re loving themselves; when they hate it, it’s their own self they’re hating. You never know what’s coming next, because whatever it is, it’s coming out of them not you, even if they blame it on you afterwards. Yet you start to think it did come out of you – you can’t help it.’
His stepfather rarely hit him – he’d say that for him: it was his mother who dealt out the beatings. His stepfather’s cruelty was of an altogether more refined variety. He would go to any length to underscore Julian’s inferiority, questioning his entitlement to food and drink, clothing, even to occupying the house itself. You almost had to feel sorry for him, Julian said, counting the chips to make sure I didn’t get too many. And that obsession, that cruelty, was a kind of attention in a way. It inculcated in Julian the belief that he was special, because the fact of his existence was made noticeable in everything that happened. And that fact was becoming increasingly unbearable to his stepfather, who only didn’t hit him, Julian now realised, because he knew that if he started he wouldn’t be able to stop.
At the bottom of the garden there was a shed which nobody used – his stepfather wasn’t exactly the DIY type – and which was basically full of old junk; Julian couldn’t remember exactly when this shed became his permanent home, but it must have been after he’d started school, because he remembers his mother making him promise not to say anything to the teachers. But from a certain point Julian was no longer allowed in the house: a space was cleared out there for a mattress on the floor, his meals were brought out to him, and he was locked inside.
‘A lot of writers like sheds,’ Julian said thoughtfully. ‘They use them to work in – they like the privacy.’ He paused, while a faint ripple of uncertain laughter rose and died away again. ‘A Shed of One’s Own,’ he added. ‘I did consider that as a title.’
He wasn’t going to say much about what he felt in those years – which lasted until he was around eight and was readmitted, he didn’t know how or why, to the routine cruelty of the house – the fear, the physical discomfort, the animal-like contrivances he came up with to survive it: that stuff was all in the book. Writing it had been both a torment and a relief, like pulling a knife out of his own chest: he didn’t want to do it, but he knew that if he left it there the pain would be worse in the long term. He made the decision to show it to his family, to his
mother and also to his half-sisters: at first, his mother accused him of making it all up. And part of him almost believed her: the problem with being honest, he said, is that you’re slow to realise that other people can lie. It wasn’t until one of his half-sisters corroborated his story with her own memories that the subject became open. What followed were months of negotiation: it was like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but without the assistance of Kofi Annan; there had been some unpleasant scenes. He wasn’t obliged to get his family’s permission but he wanted it anyway, because it wasn’t enough for it to be simply his truth, his point of view. Point of view, he said, is like those couples who cut the sofa in two when they get divorced: there’s no sofa any more, but at least you can call it fair.
When he was fourteen, he was on his way home from school when his eyes were met by the extraordinary sight of two men, two foreigners, standing outside the village shop. They were from Thailand; they had bought a house in the countryside nearby, a sort of stately home, with enormous formal gardens. They had come into the village to place an advert in the shop window, for someone to mow the lawns once a week. Julian had been stopped in his tracks by the sight of these two exotic creatures, these apparitions in the grim, grey landscape he knew to death. The shop was closed and the men asked him if he knew when it might reopen; and then, looking him frankly over as he had never been looked at in his life, asked him whether he himself might be interested in the job. The lawns were extensive; they thought it would probably take a whole day each week to mow them all. He could do it at a weekend when he wasn’t at school; they would be pleased to drive him there and back, and to give him lunch.
For the next two years, he spent every Saturday pushing the mower up and down the vast, tranquil green lawns, up and down and up and down, so that it felt like he was slowly unravelling his own life, unwinding it and going back to the beginning. It was like having therapy, he said, except that I got very sweaty, and lunch was included. Those lunches – elaborate, fragrant meals eaten in the formal dining room of the house – were an education in themselves: Julian’s employers were highly cultured, well-travelled men, collectors of art and antiques, versed in several languages. It took Julian a long time to piece together the nature of their relationship, two grown men living in luxury together without a woman in sight. For a long time he was simply too stunned by his change of circumstances even to wonder about it, but then, gradually, he started to notice the way they sat side by side on the sofa drinking their post-prandial coffee, the way one of them would rest a hand on the other’s arm while making a point in conversation, and then – they’d got to know him better by this time – the way they kissed each other quickly on the lips when one or other of them left to drive Julian home at the day’s end. It wasn’t just the first time he’d seen homosexuality: it was the first time he’d seen love.
These two men were the first people he ever told about the shed. He’s often been called brave for writing about it, but in fact, once he’d done it once, he’d blab his story to anyone who’d listen. You only need one thing, he said, you only need the door to be left unlocked once. For a long time, after he’d moved to London and started the process of becoming himself, he was a bit of a mess. He was like a cupboard rammed full with junk: when he opened the door everything fell out; it took time to reorganise himself. And the blabbing, the telling, was the messiest thing of all: getting control of language was getting control of anger and shame, and it was hard, hard to turn it around, to take the mess of experience and make something coherent out of it. Only then did you know that you’d got the better of the things that had happened to you: when you controlled the story rather than it controlling you. For him language was a weapon, a first line of defence – he might not be brave, but he’d certainly answer to bitchy. The thing is, he said, once you’ve been picked out, once you’ve been noticed, you won’t ever fit back in your box. You have to walk around naked for the rest of your life, and if there’s something of the emperor’s new clothes about writing, there are worse ways of hiding your nakedness. Most of them, he added, are terrible for your health, and a lot more expensive.
Anyway, he said to the audience, he’d taken up enough of their time. Agonising as it was for him, he had to let the others get a word in. And on top of that he’d gone and done what he always did, which was give away the whole story so that some of them might think he’d saved them the trouble of reading it themselves. Frankly he didn’t care whether they read it or not, so long as they bought a copy: he believed there were some for sale on the way out.
The audience laughed and broke into spontaneous, heartfelt applause.
‘I’ve been called a self-publicist,’ Julian added, above the noise, ‘but I learned everything I know from him.’
He pointed at Louis.
‘On the contrary,’ Louis said. ‘I spend so much time in your shadow I’m starting to get a vitamin deficiency.’
The audience laughed again, with only a little less enthusiasm.
The trouble was, Louis went on, his book had come out at the same time as Julian’s and so they kept turning up at the same events, like two travellers who keep meeting at the same staging posts.
‘Sometimes it’s a relief,’ he said lugubriously, ‘to see a face you recognise in an unfamiliar place. Other times you think, oh no, not him again.’
There was a faint, uncertain smattering of laughter. It’s limiting, Louis went on, to be known: you can’t behave without inhibition. You can go to the ends of the earth but if you meet someone there who knows your name, you might as well have stayed at home.
‘I don’t want to be known,’ Louis said, into a silence that was all at once cavernous. ‘I don’t want anyone to know me.’
He spoke in a slow, slightly hypnotic monotone, hunched in his chair so that his straggling hair fell forward over his face and his stubbled chin was almost resting on his chest.
When he wrote his book, he said, what he desired was to express himself in a way that was free of shame. One source of that shame was other people’s knowledge of him: yet what they knew was not the truth. The truth, he realised, was something he assiduously hid from others. When he wrote his book it was this desire to be free of shame that drove him on. He wrote it in the belief that he was addressing someone who didn’t know him at all, and who therefore he didn’t have to be embarrassed in front of. That person was effectively himself.
There was another reason, he said, that he was put on a platform next to Julian so often, and that was that both their books were categorised as autobiographical. That made things easy for the people who had to organise events like this one. But in fact his and Julian’s books had nothing in common at all. They might almost be described as functioning through mutually oppositional principles.
‘The other day,’ he said, ‘I was sitting in my study staring out into the garden and I suddenly saw my cat, Mino, on the lawn. Mino had a bird pinned to the grass between his paws. The bird struggled and flapped while Mino watched it interestedly. Mino was enjoying his power and anticipating the moment when he would fulfil it by biting the bird’s head off. At that moment there was a sudden noise, some sort of bang or report from the road, and Mino looked up, distracted. The bird seized its opportunity and struggled free and flew away.’
It had surprised Louis that the bird was so resourceful. But it had to be admitted that Mino was getting old: in his younger days as a hunter he would never have allowed his paws to loosen their grip even while his mind was off its guard. Also, Louis could have saved the bird himself by standing up, opening the door and shooing Mino away. He had been thinking, in that moment, about success, and about the fact that the book he had written in the filthy and oppressive basement studio that used to be his workplace had through its worldwide sales transported him here, to this large and pleasant room in the pleasant home he now owned with a view of his beautiful gardens. He had also bought several new items of furniture with his money, including the Mies van der Rohe chai
r in which he had at that moment been sitting. He could feel the soft leather beneath his thighs; his nostrils were full of its rich, luxurious smell. These sensations were still quite alien to him, yet he was aware that they were causing a new part of him, a new self, to grow. He had no associations with them but those associations were being created right now, while he sat there: he was actively and by small degrees becoming distanced from the person he had been, while becoming by the same small degrees someone new.
He had wanted to finish these thoughts, to think them to their completion and discover what he truly felt about his change of circumstances: was it self-satisfaction or shame? Was it the vitriolic feeling of having defeated the people who had once belittled and humiliated him, or was it guilt at having escaped them and turned his experiences at their hands to profit while their own lives remained miserably untransformed? These meditations were interrupted by the arrival of Mino in his line of vision and by the story that started playing itself out before his eyes. As he became absorbed in the story – brief though it was – of Mino and the bird, Louis was aware of the feelings of responsibility it was immediately beginning to invoke in him. He watched the bird feebly flap its wings while Mino held it pinned to the earth. Nobody, he realised, was controlling that story: either he needed to act and intervene, or he would be hurt by the sight of Mino killing the bird, because it was of course with the bird that he identified, despite the fact that he knew Mino and that Mino was his cat. As it was, the incident was quickly resolved: the narrative had somehow taken care of itself. What that narrative looked like was the triumph over adversity – Louis himself had attributed the qualities of determination and resourcefulness to the bird – but in fact there had been something far more profound and disturbing in his witnessing of these events, which in themselves meant nothing, but to which his feelings of responsibility and knowledge gave an entirely different cast. His public identification with his cat Mino was in conflict with his private identification with the bird: the sense of responsibility, he realised, came from the active realisation that those two things were about to collide. Part of him must hate Mino, yet Mino was part of himself. Watching the bird get away, he was reminded of the randomness and cruelty of reality, for which the belief in narrative could only ever provide the most absurd and artificial screen; but greater still was his sense of the bird as symbolising something about truth. Despite his new circumstances, he recalled very well the way he used to be in the world, particularly the way he had played cat, as it were, to his own bird. For as long as he could remember he had felt it inside him, the frantic presence of something trapped that ought to be wild, something whose greatest vulnerability lay in its capacity to lose its freedom; for years he had exerted power over that thing, mindlessly, programmatically, much as Mino had exerted his power over the bird. Sitting in his pleasant study with the smell of leather in his nostrils, watching the activity on the lawn, the ease with which he recalled that old state of mind convinced him that he had in fact re-entered it, that the bird had been trapped anew and was once again frantically flapping inside him. After all, it was in its nature not to learn, not to retain knowledge: once it became trained, its nature was transgressed and it was no longer free.