by Rachel Cusk
Amanda felt that if she were not married, it would not have been required of her to go to the butcher. These visits seemed to emanate from a core of physical embroilment, from a fleshly basis that sought out other flesh by which to feed itself. It all seemed somehow grotesquely related, the conjoining and making of bodies and the dismemberment and ingestion of them. She imagined that if she were alone she would have eaten only food that was white. A vegetarian friend of hers used to say that she never ate anything “with a face.” Eddie had a face. Amanda looked at it in the rear-view mirror.
“It isn’t nice to swear, Eddie,” she said.
Then she got out of the car.
Inside, the butcher’s shop was cold and smelled rankly of blood and sawdust. Eddie stood beside the refrigerated glass cabinets and stared uneasily at the cuts of meat with their white rinds of fat and the flesh-coloured sausages in twisted heaps on metal trays. Carcasses hung lividly from hooks in the window. A customer left the shop, and when the door closed the carcasses turned a little on their hooks. Red ledgers of bacon stood in rows in one cabinet, with an assortment of ribs and limbs and shoulders that seemed to have a strange, angry, autonomous life. Chickens sat in anonymous lines like parked cars, their pimpled, denuded flesh tightly wrapped in plastic: they sat, identical in their ranks, in an infinity of waiting. There was a fresh mountain of pork chops dotted with sprigs of parsley. Pieces of lamb were dealt out in a fan shape. There were some smaller, yellow, old-looking birds, like elderly relatives of the chickens. In front of them a group of tiny black-speckled eggs stood in an open carton. They had a monochrome, embryonic prettiness. They seemed to have come from some particularly malevolent factory of death.
Behind the cabinets the butcher and his two assistants, in their green aprons, stood in their tiled enclosure. They had a long sideboard with knives and trays and weighing machines on it, and a machine with a big circular blade. They were laughing at something, down at the far end. Amanda saw them laughing while the white, muscled arm of the butcher rose and fell, as he hacked the bone away from a joint of meat with a cleaver. He held the soft red part of the meat in his fingers. The men’s deep voices were indistinct, and they moved around while they talked and laughed. Their white crescent smiles moved around too, as though unbodied in the murky, meat-coloured light. One of them looked up and saw her and said something to one of the others.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said, coming towards her. “What can I get for you today?”
He was still smiling. Amanda noticed that his arms ended at the elbows. His two small, misshapen hands came out of them at right angles, like feet. She looked at them and then she looked at his face. She made herself look only at his face, at his eyes and mouth, which dragged down slightly at the corners. He had freckled skin and coarse, light-red hair that grew vigorously from his scalp.
“I’ll have some mince, please,” she said.
She moved her eyes to the window, as though there were something in the milling road outside it that was of particular significance to her, something she’d forgotten or thought of escaping from.
“How much would you like?” said the man.
“Oh,” she said, “half a kilo or so.”
“Half a kilo of the mince,” he said.
The smile had gone from his face. He seemed to wish to return to a world of plainness and exactitude. Normally she was served by the butcher himself, amongst whose liberal gallantries she could stay afloat in this blood-smelling place: he would ask her what she wanted the mince for, and how many she intended to feed with it; he had a concerned and tutelary air, a kind of complicity with her position, in the darkly secretive work of feeding her family. The man took a metal scoop and bent down into the glass cabinet; and she could not prevent her eyes from following him, from looking uncontrolledly at his strange, twisted little hands as they rapidly scooped the pink, mottled meat into a plastic bag. He had to bend far into the cabinet to reach it; he emerged with the bag dangling from the blind hook of his elbow, and placed it with a movement of his whole torso on the scales. Eddie stood beside her. He said, “Why doesn’t that man have any hands?”
Of all the members of her household Eddie was the one who most often led her into the senseless, run-down parts of life. Two or three times a day he put her close to the concept of failure and meaninglessness. As she could think of no appropriate answer to his question, she decided to ignore it and wait for the embarrassment to pass. She stood on her wire, swaying, while the turbulence of the situation moved slowly around her. The man weighed the meat and with his eyes on the scale shook a bit more off his scoop. His impassivity was like a wall in front of her.
“Four twenty,” he said, placing the bag on the counter.
She gave him the money, while Eddie stood and fingered the glass so that the spectacle of dismemberment behind it seemed to expand itself, to incorporate him. She saw his parts arrayed on metal trays, in fans and pyramids of flesh fringed with parsley.
“Mummy,” he said indignantly, “I asked you why—”
“Shut up,” she said.
In the car on the way home she kept looking into the rear-view mirror at the road behind her. Each time she saw the butcher’s rueful, enquiring expression, as he lifted his head when she called goodbye.
She and Eddie turned off the High Street and drove along the deserted park, then down St. John’s Avenue, where the trees looked bowed over in the rain, then down Bedford Road, and finally into Western Gardens, whose air of empty seclusion was complete, as though they had been folded further and further into the creases of a thick, unpeopled insulation through which the attrition of the outside world could no longer be felt.
“Mummy,” said Eddie, for she had explained to him as they drove the tragic effects of the drug thalidomide on a generation of babies, “it’s lucky you weren’t born without any hands.”
Amanda was surprised by this reaction: when she was with Eddie she forgot she ever had been born. She had told him the story in the belief that he might relate its menace, punitively, to himself.
“I suppose you could say that, Eddie.”
“They were stupid to take that medicine.”
“They weren’t stupid. Mothers aren’t stupid. The doctor gave it to them. They didn’t know what would happen. They only knew when the babies were born.”
“Oh.”
“It’s lucky I didn’t take it, because then you would have been born like that.”
She was speaking to the gravelled drive, on whose uncritical expanses the car was parked.
“Did the doctor want you to take it?”
Eddie sounded concerned at the idea that his fate had rested, even momentarily, on the precarious peaks of his mother’s mist-shrouded judgement. Anything could happen up there: it was a place of unpredictable danger and occasional savagery.
“No, Eddie. He didn’t want me to take it.”
Through the car window she could see her neighbour Jocasta Fearnley, dressed in a big man’s raincoat, doing something in her front garden on the other side of the wall.
“He didn’t give it to you because now he knows it’s bad,” Eddie concluded, as though trying to collate the various aspects of what he’d been told.
Something raised itself swiftly in her like a club, a desire to disclose to him the truth of herself. She wanted to hammer him over the head with it until his understanding of her was complete.
“The point, Eddie, is that I would have had hands. The man in the butcher’s shop had hands. They didn’t look like your hands, but they were still hands. It was his arms that were wrong. So when you keep saying, Why doesn’t that man have any hands, Where have his hands gone, It’s lucky, Mummy, you weren’t born without hands, you make people think you’re not really paying attention.”
“Oh.”
“When you said in the butcher’s shop, Why doesn’t that man have any hands, you were putting me in a difficult situation, because I couldn’t say, He does have hands, look! I coul
dn’t say that, could I? Because it would have been rude. It’s rude to talk about people when they’re standing in front of you. And it’s especially difficult if what you’ve said is wrong, because people can’t correct you without being rude as well.”
She was aware, staring at the gravelled drive, that she would continue to speak for ever unless she got out of the car. The rain came patiently down over the front lawn. Jocasta was still bent on her task on the other side of the wall. Water was dropping heavily from the bare, unruly branches of the Fearnleys’ birch tree on to her back. Her head went up and down—it appeared over the wall and then vanished again. It looked like she was repeatedly stamping on something.
Amanda was intimidated by the Fearnleys: it was as though they conducted their lives in a language that was unfamiliar to her, so that she had to translate everything they did into her native vocabulary. And yet there was no mistaking the fact—she had mistaken it at first—that this language was the sovereign tongue of the well-appointed principality in which James and Amanda Clapp now lived. Western Gardens, crescent-shaped, spacious, staffed by magnificent trees, was home to a race of whose existence Amanda had until relatively recently been ignorant. They went skiing and had houses in France or Italy. Their children went to private schools and were wild-looking and unkempt and had eyes that—unlike Eddie’s and Jessica’s—seemed actually to observe her as she went by. More perplexing, their houses and gardens were distinctly shabby, in spite of the fact that they had paid a fortune for them. Sometimes she thought they wanted to disguise this fact, for reasons that were unclear to her. They gave the impression that no ordinary transaction had brought them to Western Gardens: that they had somehow received it, or that they had always been here.
Amanda and James had trained their sights on Western Gardens in the earliest days of their marriage. They had tracked it through the thickets of Arlington Park’s property market, with diligence and a sort of prideful patience—it had taken them three years—and they had brought it down between them with a single bullet. They had studied this market at length, and had amassed a strange, compendious knowledge of it. They knew the ranking of every street—each side of every street, the direction of sunlight being a factor in establishing the desirability of a property—in Arlington Park’s canon of propitious places for a family to live. They knew how big the gardens were in Guthrie Road, how low the ceilings in Southfield Street, how restrictive the planning regulations on the Georgian properties that stood along the park. They knew so much that they could automatically conjure up from a bare address a picture of the life that was lived there, and its limitations. They had, in a sense, lived little aborted lives there themselves.
They had concluded, all things considered, that Western Gardens was Arlington Park’s first—or least flawed—address; and so it had surprised Amanda to discover that its reality could not be contained by her conception of it, learned as it was. Since they moved there, a feeling of colourlessness had stolen steadily over her, as though in the act of being made manifest the object of her desire had eluded her. In the lavish wrapping of their highly prized, ardently sought, thoroughly refurbished new home, Amanda felt strangely naked. She began to suspect some inadequacy in herself and James, a lack of substance that made redundant all her knowledge of what she had—or, at least, returned it to its dry, correct dimensions.
She sometimes thought it was people like the Fearnleys who caused her to feel this sense of inferiority. They spoke in loud, aristocratic voices and treated everything as a joke, except for their social lives, in which they were as commanding and conniving as a pair of politicians maintaining office. At the weekends their drive was packed with cars, their house and garden filled with a riotous, secretive commotion. Unless they were away, of course—then the place was silent, a silence almost as distracting as the noise, in that everything seemed to fall into the void of absence next door. They had violent arguments in which the whole family was engaged. Amanda heard them, even through the capacious defences of their respective houses. She would sit in her kitchen, and the sounds of slamming doors and full-throated screams came to her ears and made her feel that she was at the boundary, at the very brink, of everything disturbing and unsatisfactory that had happened in her life. She felt herself to be at the front line of the possibility that things might not turn out for the best.
“I’m digging a grave,” Jocasta called, raising her spade in greeting through the rain.
Amanda was lifting her shopping out of the back of the car. A feeling of precariousness had been steadily besieging her on the wire, ever since they left the butcher’s shop: it crystallised now into the belief that it was a human grave Jocasta was digging, for a member of her family she had either already killed or meant to. Hadn’t Max Fearnley been ill recently? Come to think of it, she hadn’t seen him for a week or two.
Jocasta drew close to the boundary wall. “Poor Samson,” she said. “Lydie found him in his cage this morning.”
Lydie was the name of the Fearnleys’ au pair, an etiolated Polish girl who came and went melancholically in her black leather jacket beneath a white wedge of peroxided hair. Amanda gave a shrill laugh and Jocasta looked at her snappishly. This was evidently one of the things that was not funny.
“Don’t let Sadie hear you laughing,” she said, glancing back at the house. “Samson was really her best friend. She said to me, Mummy, I know he’s only a rabbit, but I loved him more than I love some people. I said to her, Well, let’s give him a proper burial, shall we? At least we can give him that. Actually, she’s made him rather a lovely coffin. She used all the tester pots we got for doing the drawing room to paint it. It’s a sort of symphony of taupe. I said to her, Darling, how fashionable!” Here Jocasta gave a snort of mirth and raised her red-veined eyes to the grey heavens. “To be quite honest,” she said in a low voice, “I’m not altogether sorry he’s gone. I’m not sure it helps at fourteen for one’s best friend to be a rabbit. And she was terribly severe with him. She seemed particularly to enjoy the locking-up part.”
She delivered this last remark with her hands resting like a farmer’s on the handle of her spade. Her fingers were dirty, with red, sore nails. She wore a ring with a big diamond in its tarnished gold claw.
“My sister killed her rabbit by hugging it too hard,” Amanda said.
Jocasta looked troubled by this revelation. She did not seem to feel it belonged in the same ribald category as her daughter’s fondly punitive experiments.
“Did she?” she said. “And was that … love? Or—”
The rain came steadily down on their hair and on their faces. Eddie remained strapped into the back seat of the car. Amanda could see his white, accusatory face through the window.
“Oh, she loved him,” Amanda said. “She just forgot that he was fragile. She’s the same with men. She loves them so much that they run away.”
Beneath her raincoat Jocasta was wearing a stained blue smock-like garment and a pair of tracksuit trousers that had been trodden into the mud around the hems. Her hair hung in dirty-looking tails around her face. She wore no make-up except for mascara, which appeared old and made her lashes stand out in clotted spikes. She was looking at Amanda’s house. She seemed to be accusing it of something, or Amanda herself; something suspicious that arose from their mutual association.
“How are you getting on in there?” she said. “Are you getting on all right?”
“We’re fine,” Amanda said.
“I often say to Max, you know, those Clapps are very quiet, what can they be up to in there? We decided that you must have a secret life. Max thought your husband might be a spy, but I said no, that’s not nearly fun enough, and anyway, spies are always telling people that that’s what they are. No, I thought it must be something much naughtier than that.”
She gave Amanda a raffish smile with her yellowed teeth. Her small blue eyes in their striated pockets of skin twinkled with suggestion. Sometimes Amanda had seen her and Max going out for the e
vening and Jocasta looked beautiful. The sight of her then caused Amanda to feel that there were certain people she lacked the ability to perceive, just as she often failed to see in famous paintings what it was that they were famous for. It gave her a sensation of instability, like vertigo.
“We’re just boring,” Amanda said.
Jocasta looked astounded and slightly embarrassed by this reply.
“Oh, darling!” she cried. “You’re not boring—nobody’s boring! I didn’t mean to suggest that at all, you poor thing!”
Faint cries could be heard from the car where it was parked on the drive. Amanda turned her head. Eddie had got out of his car seat; his face and hands were pressed against the window. His mouth was open and his pink tongue was crushed against the glass.
“Look, we must arrange a time for you and your husband to come round and have a drink,” Jocasta said. “It seems ridiculous that you’ve been living here all this time and—Oh dear, someone doesn’t look very happy.”
Amanda went to the car and opened the door so that Eddie fell forwards on to the gravel. By the time she came back, with Eddie bawling and holding his hands to his face, Jocasta had returned with her spade to the foot of the birch tree.
“We’ll get out our diaries!” she called, waving her arm.
Inside the vault of her house Amanda felt secure, though the prospect of fresh sieges remained a possibility. Eddie wandered away from her, crying noisily, into the sitting room, where the large, pacific eye of the television enfolded him, unblinking, into the sky-blue-bordered depths of children’s programming that it had been relaying like a dream into the empty house all through the hour of their absence. Amanda went the other way, into the kitchen. There she pondered the arrival, in twenty minutes’ time, of any or all of the five women she had seen standing in the rain outside Jessica’s school and had invited back for coffee. She left the kitchen and made a wordless foray into the sitting room, in order to remove Eddie’s wet shoes from his insensate feet and place them in the closet in the hall. There she saw her shopping bags. She transported them into the kitchen and removed the little white sack of meat. It was small and obscenely heavy, like a bladder. She carried it dangling in her fingers and placed it in the fridge.