Transit

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘It’s pathetic,’ she said. ‘At my age I should be doing something more useful with my time. Everyone I know seems to be running marathons for charity. They spend all their time training and doing special diets, while I’m eating takeaways and living the emotional life of a teenager. Not that I could run,’ she added, ‘even if I wanted to. I can barely climb the stairs.’

  She had been to the doctor and been told she’d developed asthma from breathing dust. It’s from living in a building site for two years, she said. He’d given her an inhaler but she had lost the cover for the mouthpiece, so now the inhaler was impregnated with dust too.

  The waiter came to take our order and Amanda asked for herbal tea.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, when he turned to leave, ‘make that a hot chocolate.’

  He gave a small smile, writing on his pad.

  ‘Yes, please,’ she grinned, when he suggested whipped cream and marshmallows on top.

  She’d promised herself, she went on, that she was really going to do something about her health – she needed to lose weight, for a start – but instead she seemed to be surviving more and more on adrenalin, living in the moment, which made it impossible to stick to any kind of regime. She would wake up full of resolutions, but events had a way of overwhelming her so that she would end the day further away from her goals than she had begun it. Nothing seemed to last, no matter how hard she tried.

  I said a lot of people spent their lives trying to make things last as a way of avoiding asking themselves whether those things were what they really wanted.

  ‘You don’t really think that,’ Amanda said, with a glimmer of interest in her red-rimmed eyes.

  Maybe people run marathons, I said, to exercise their fantasies of running away.

  Amanda laughed. The argument with Gavin, she said presently, had happened because he had failed to turn up for the trip to Paris she had arranged for her birthday. They had been all packed and ready to go and Gavin had suddenly announced that he’d forgotten his passport. He’d gone to get it and hadn’t come back. Amanda had sat beside her suitcase as the house grew dark around her. She’d tried repeatedly to reach him on the phone but he hadn’t answered. She couldn’t cancel the tickets and the hotel because it was too late. A week had gone by without her hearing from him. But last night he had appeared on the doorstep with a roll of banknotes and given them to her.

  I asked whether she had accepted the money.

  ‘Of course I did,’ she said, lifting her chin defiantly. ‘I made him pay every last penny.’

  He had been very apologetic, she went on. He’d tried to make up some ridiculous story about what had happened but then he admitted that he had panicked about going to Paris and had run away. He was scared of going somewhere like that with her: at her house – the building site – he knew where he was, but the idea of being with her in a foreign city had just made him want to hide. He was nearly fifty, and the only holiday he ever went on was a week in Ireland each summer with the members of his golf club, playing in the rain with a group of men he barely knew. Before he met Amanda, he had grown very close to another woman client, a graphic designer in her thirties whose house he was refurbishing. The affair had gone on for months, the manual work running alongside the tortuous building of emotional tension, the slow trickle of feeling through the dense strata of Gavin’s nature. By the time the house was finished, the woman had lost patience and was no longer interested.

  ‘That’s where I came in,’ Amanda said. She picked up her cup with its gaudy topping and put it to her lips. ‘Whatever you do,’ she said, ‘don’t have a relationship with your builder.’

  The problem was, the more complex he allowed his vision of life to become, the further he removed himself from his own capacity to act. He was left tortured by the possibility he himself had so painfully evolved, of translating himself wholly into the middle-class world of which, until now, he had been the factotum. He was meant to be moving in with her but despite the fact that they’d been talking about it for a year, it hadn’t actually happened. He never said he didn’t want to, or that he had changed his mind. He just didn’t do it. But now, she said, she had given him a date, an actual specific day. If on that day he didn’t move into the house, their relationship was over.

  I asked her what day it was, and she told me.

  The thing is, she said, I feel sorry for him. He had a brutal childhood, which ended when his father put him out on the street to tout for work at the age of fourteen. Sometimes, she said, she and he will be talking about some aspect of the house and she’ll glimpse in his ideas and inspirations a whole other person, a person he could have been. He had told her once that a builder friend of his had come to Amanda’s house to look at something Gavin had done there. This friend had gone all over the house in silence. At the end he had said to Gavin, you’re doing this for yourself to live in, aren’t you? But when it came to it, Amanda said, he couldn’t make the leap.

  I asked where Gavin was living, if he wasn’t living with her.

  In Romford, she said, with his sister. He says it’s easier to run his business from there, but I know it’s because he can watch telly and eat a takeaway and no one expects him to talk.

  What Gavin did understand was how vulnerable you were when your house was being ripped apart. It’s like being on an operating table, Amanda said: you’ve been opened up and now there are men working in there and you can’t move until they’ve fixed you and sewn you together again. While Amanda was in that state, Gavin was capable of loving her. These days he worked on her house for free, in his spare time. The six projected weeks of building works had become two years and counting, while Gavin went off on other jobs during the day. She understood that this situation had come about through a strange misguided sense of honour, but all the same it was hard not to feel that she had become the butt of some immense practical joke.

  There was an element of fantasy, she went on, in the idea of male involvement: even someone like her, someone militantly self-sufficient and practical, someone prepared to roll up her sleeves if she had to, had fallen for the idea of being looked after. Gavin saying he would work for love rather than money had thrilled her and relieved her almost in the way that women used to be thrilled and relieved by a proposal of marriage. But love, she had been made to understand, was ultimately intangible: the thrill was all in her own head. Money would have got the work done: as things stood, she couldn’t see where it would ever end. She couldn’t even remember any more what it was like to live somewhere normal, where the shower worked and the heating came on and you didn’t have to cook on a camping stove or thoroughly remove the dust and dirt from your person in order to leave the house, rather than the other way around. The hardest thing was having to look smart for work: she had gone to meetings with grout in her hair and plaster under her fingernails, and once, without realising, paint all down the back of her suit, after she had leaned against a wet wall for a second on her way out. She went around like that for nearly the whole day before anyone told her.

  Amanda worked in fashion.

  ‘And in that world,’ she said, ‘no one ever tells you the truth about what you look like.’

  It’s strange, she went on, how sometimes you can believe something to be true when in fact the exact opposite is the case. I suppose I see it all the time in my work, she said. People wear things simply because they’re in vogue: at the time they think they look great, but when they look back a few years later they realise they looked awful.

  I said that perhaps none of us could ever know what was true and what wasn’t. And no examination of events, even long afterwards, was entirely stable. To take her point about fashion, if one waited long enough those embarrassing old clothes often started to look right again. The same forms and styles that from one distance seem to emanate shame, and to prove that we are capable of self-delusion, from another might be evidence of a native radicalism and rightness that we never knew we had, or at least that we were easily pers
uaded to lose faith in.

  Amanda started to raise her cup to her lips again and then put it down.

  I don’t want this, she said, grimacing.

  Fashion was a young person’s industry, she went on after a while. She herself had entered it at precisely the point – her early thirties – when a lot of the people she knew were starting to settle down and have families. In a way, she supposed, it was the inevitability of that fate that had impelled her to resist it and to move instead into a world that represented a prolongation of the very things her friends were giving up: fun, parties, travel. Even her best and oldest friend Sophia – I might remember her from the old days – even Sophia, her flatmate and long-time partner in crime, was at that time getting married and buying a house with her boyfriend Dan, who was in many ways Amanda’s male ideal: she had been happy living with Sophia and him; the three of them even went on holiday together, she in one hotel room and them in another, as if she was their strange grown child. At night she would feel a mingled sadness and security as they closed their door, behind which she could hear their voices murmuring while she went to sleep. In that period Amanda was offered a job, one that entailed the most hectic social life she had ever known. While her friends signed mortgages and announced pregnancies, Amanda existed in a whirl of fashion shows and parties and staying up all night, travelling to Paris or New York, going from nightclubs to meetings with barely time to shower and change her clothes, flirting with whichever men she met along the way.

  She had never found it hard to get men, she went on, or not very nice ones at least, but at a certain point it became clear to her that men like Dan were not to be found just wandering around the place. They were taken, owned, spoken for; in a way she despised it, their life of possession; they were like expensive paintings hung in the safety of a museum. You could look as hard as you liked, but you weren’t going to find one just lying in the street. For a while she did look, and felt as if she was inhabiting some netherworld populated by lost souls, all of them searching, searching for some image that corresponded with what was in their heads. Sleeping with a man she would very often have this feeling, that she was merely the animus for a pre-existing framework, that she was invisible and that everything he did and said to her he was in fact doing and saying to someone else, someone who wasn’t there, someone who may or may not even have existed. This feeling, that she was the invisible witness to another person’s solitude – a kind of ghost – nearly drove her mad for a while. Once, lying in bed with a man whose name she couldn’t even recall, she suddenly had a long, bereft fit of weeping. He was nice to her; he made her tea and toast, and suggested that she see a therapist.

  When I think about that time, she said, what is hardest to remember are my clothes. I remember the things I did, the places I went, the men and the parties and even the conversations, and in those memories it’s always as if I was naked. Sometimes, she said, I’ll dream about a piece of clothing, or the memory of something – a jacket or a pair of shoes – will come floating into my head; and I’m never certain whether it was something I actually owned, even if it seems so familiar that I’m sure at one point I wore it all the time. But I can never prove it. All I know, she said, is that I don’t have those things any more and I don’t know where they went.

  Her parents, she added, had made all their money from buying and selling property. Her childhood memories were of living in houses that were effectively building sites, houses that were always in a process of transformation. Her parents would painstakingly refurbish them and then, once the work had been done and the house felt like a home, promptly sell them. I learned, Amanda said, that as soon as things began to feel clean and nice and comfortable, that was the sign we were going to leave. She didn’t doubt that part of her attraction to Gavin lay in his association with the vocabulary of her childhood, as if he spoke a language only she could understand. She had been distant from her parents during her twenties and early thirties but these days they had re-entered her life to some degree: they liked being able to talk to her about insulation and subfloors and the pros and cons of converting the loft; the refurbishment of the house had given them some common ground. Perhaps when it’s done, she said, they won’t talk to me any more.

  She said she ought to be going: she had a meeting in town she was already late for. She stood up and began brushing dust off her clothes, darting frequent glances at me, as she had done throughout our conversation. It was as if she was trying to intercept my vision of her before I could read anything into what I saw.

  ‘Will you walk me as far as the Tube?’ she said when we were outside.

  She wheezed as we walked, holding her hand to her chest and taking two steps for every one of mine, her high heels clicking rapidly along the pavement. She wasn’t sure if I knew, she said, but she was trying to adopt a child. It was a labyrinthine process, so bureaucratic as to tempt you at every stage to give up, but she had been at it for a few months now and was making progress. The problem was, she couldn’t be put on a waiting list until the house was finished: no agency would even consider putting a child in a home that had live wires hanging out of the walls and no banisters on the staircase. And Gavin’s status was a problem: he either had to be there as a permanent fixture, or gone. The woman who was dealing with her at the agency – her case manager – had become a sort of friend, she went on. She had given Amanda cause for hope; she rang her up all the time to offer encouragement.

  ‘She says she recognises my capacity for love,’ Amanda said. She gave her unexpectedly merry laugh. ‘A lot of people have recognised that capacity, and made the most of it.’

  We arrived at the Tube station and Amanda rested her hand on my arm, panting and beaming. It had been nice to see me, she said. She hoped the building work went well; she was sure it would. If I was free one evening, perhaps we could meet and catch up properly. She searched in her bag for her purse and extracted it with a shaking hand. Then she let herself half-stumbling through the barriers, and with a little valiant wave she disappeared.

  It was the day the astrologer’s report had said would be of particular significance in the coming phase of transit.

  Tony was demolishing a wall. He stood brandishing his drill at the centre of a storm of dust and noise, a mask covering his nose and mouth. The floor had been lifted: the skeletal joists showed themselves, grey debris in the voids between them. Tony had made a gangway out of planks in order to walk from one place to another. The builder’s van was still in the shop, he said: the insulating boards were being delivered by lorry instead, and the delivery was late. While he waited, Tony was taking the wall down.

  ‘Is a cook-up,’ he said.

  Pavel was upstairs, sanding down the woodwork. Whenever Tony paused the drill the hissing scrape of sandpaper filled the house instead.

  ‘Pavel in bad mood,’ Tony said, lifting his mask. ‘Is best upstairs.’

  Pavel suffered from stomach aches, he added. It was difficult to know whether the stomach aches caused his bad mood or the other way around. Tony tried to make him stay at home but he wouldn’t. His theory was that Pavel was constipated.

  ‘He all blocked up,’ he said, winking, ‘with Polish homesick food.’

  Pavel came down the stairs and walked silently past us to his toolbox. His small boots were thickly coated with dust. He removed a fresh roll of sandpaper from the toolbox and returned wordlessly upstairs with it.

  Tony resumed his drilling. He was trying to dismantle the timbers inside the wall but they were stubborn and he had to yank them violently to get them out. One of them came away unexpectedly easily and fell across the joists with a crash. There was a volley of ferocious thumps from downstairs and then shortly afterwards the sound of someone furiously approaching up the steps outside. A series of thunderous knocks rained on the front door.

  Tony stood, drill in hand, and we looked at one another for a few moments.

  Outside, I could hear Paula’s voice. She was shouting. She said she knew I
was in there. She said I should come out: she would spit in my face for me. She had told everyone in the street about me: people knew what I was like, and my children too. She pounded at the door with her fist again. Come out here, she said. Come on, I dare you. Then there was the sound of her returning down the steps and a few seconds later the basement door slammed with such a crash that the whole building shook.

  ‘I go speak with them,’ Tony said, removing his mask.

  He put down his drill and went out of the front door, leaving it open behind him. I heard him knock on the basement door below. After a while I heard the sound of voices. The tone and cadences of Paula’s voice seemed almost to be coming from inside me. Tony did not return immediately and the house started to become cold. I wasn’t sure whether or not I ought to close the door. I went upstairs to my room but found Pavel there, sanding the windowsill. When he saw me retreating he stopped.

  ‘Please,’ he said, with a minute and courteous inclination of his head. ‘Is finished, come in.’

  We stood and looked down together from the window to where Paula had stood on the front steps below. I realised Pavel must have witnessed the whole thing. I asked him if he was feeling any better and he made a wavering gesture with his hand.

  ‘A little,’ he said.

  He started to fold up the dust sheets he had draped across the floor and over the bookcase adjacent to the window. Something in the bookcase caught his eye and his hand immediately darted out to take it. He turned to me with it, his face suddenly lit up, and said something rapidly in a foreign language. It was a book: when I didn’t reply, he held it out to show me.

  ‘You speak Polish,’ he said, pointing at the cover with his dusty finger.

  The book was in Polish, I said, but I couldn’t understand it.