by Rachel Cusk
“Sometimes you think the world’s gone mad, don’t you?”
“Excuse me—Freddie !”
The wind blew and the kites zigzagged overhead and a plastic bag went bowling across the grass in the sun. The woman on rollerblades pushed her pram along the path. The baby waved its little grasping hands in the air. Effortfully the woman drove it with her wheeled feet, wobbling over ridges in the tarmac. The kites dodged and dived above her. Dogs tore across the path. The baby waved its tiny fists in the sun. People ran past in their white shoes, overtaking. They ran as if they were bearing important news. One after another they ran past the wobbling woman towards the horizon, like solitary messengers bearing away the information of every passing minute.
In the children’s playground the swings went back and forth. In their bright padded coats the children staggered from the slide to the see-saw, or sat on the little wooden animals, their cheeks red in the wind. The mothers stood in their fenced enclosure and watched people moving across the park. The people moved and everything around them moved too, the clouds hurtling across the sky, the tossing sun, the grass bending this way and that in the wind, the branches and the bushes, the kites and balls, the dogs and the springing birds, the cars passing along the distant road. The whole mechanism of the world, running on, running like a machine: time poured into it like a blank river, and set off all these infinitesimal movements!
It was painful, in a way; for them, it was a form of agony to watch it. Standing on their wood chippings in the playground, the women were as though snared in the mechanism. They were caught between the blank river and the churning wheels. Trapped as they were, every movement caused them pain. The diving kites hurt them. The people in their white shoes seemed to be trampling them underfoot. The dogs frightened them and made their hearts thump in their startled chests. It was only the swings going back and forth that they could tolerate.
The mothers of the schoolchildren no longer had to stand in the fenced enclosure. They stayed far away from it, in their smart coats, on the other side of the park. Whenever they saw it, saw new children on the swings, saw new women standing there self-consciously, it caused them to feel a strange sense of bereavement. They were seeing something they knew but had lost. It was a feeling with which they were familiar. It was this that had given them their powerful understanding of life. They knew that you lost the good along with the bad, both equally. They weren’t interested any more in things you could lose, in time or love or the feeling of a baby in your arms. They were interested in things that stayed with you for ever: houses, possibly husbands. And themselves, of course. What they wanted to avoid was destruction. Like politicians, they were interested in survival.
“Oh, Freddie, look at you! You’re soaking. Well, you’ll just have to stay like that. No, we’re not going home. You’ll have to stay wet. What did you think was going to happen if you rolled around on the grass? I’m sorry, but it’s not my problem. No, I don’t care if you’re cold. You’ll have to put up with it. You should listen in future when I tell you not to do something.”
The women sighed, and moved their eyes circumspectly around the park.
“They’ve got to learn, haven’t they?” Freddie’s mother said.
Her friend nodded. “You’re making a rod for your own back otherwise.”
“They’ve got to know what the consequences are.”
“It’s like everything. You can’t protect them for ever. They’ve got to become independent. They’ve got to listen. They’ve got to know that if they don’t listen they’re putting themselves in danger. You tell them not to run out in front of cars and they’ve got to listen. You tell them not to go off with strangers and they’ve got to listen.”
They stood in the wind and the sun, arms folded, eyes moving.
“Isn’t it awful, about that little girl?”
“Yes! What was she called?”
“Betsy Miller. She was taken from a park, you know.”
“Do they know what’s happened to her?”
The woman shook her head, her eyes on the horizon. “That’s why they’ve got to listen.”
Now the older children were coming into the park: groups of pubescent girls with long ponytails, tall thin boys with their school ties loosened around their necks, sixth-formers talking on their mobile phones. Their bodies seemed to be struggling against their clothes. It was cold, but most of them carried their coats and sweaters and wore their shirts unbuttoned at the neck and hanging out at the waist. They were like creatures made of a substance that clothes would not adhere to. The girls had bare, hairless legs beneath their school skirts. They shrieked and tossed their hair and talked excitedly as they walked along. They shrieked as though everything tickled them, as if the whole world were a ticklish place that beset their writhing, sensitive forms. The sixth-formers slouched and moved their lips at their phones. Some of the boys walked alone, their satchels strapped across their chests, their hands in their pockets. They plodded across the park looking at their shoes.
The shrieking girls flapped and settled like birds on the benches. Some sat on the arms, some precariously on the high back. The old man looked at his watch. After a while, he rose, helping his wife to her feet, and they walked slowly off down the path. The kite made a dive near the bench and the girls shrieked and looked at each other and shrieked again.
A willowy girl walked slowly across the grass amidst the chasing dogs, talking into her phone; and her absorption seemed to drive itself steadily onwards like the prow of a boat through yielding water, so that the dogs and the people fanned out behind her like ripples, dispersing, vanishing.
Two sixth-formers slouched past the mothers in their smart coats. They flicked their manes of hair. They murmured in each other’s ears. Their skirts were short and their long, bare, insolent legs were smooth and brown. Automatically the women looked at their watches.
“Well, I suppose we’d better be getting home,” one of them said.
“Yes, time to get back,” said the other. “Freddie! Come on, we’re going! Freddie!”
In the children’s playground the women were buttoning coats, brushing down trousers, wiping noses. They strapped their children into their pushchairs, and one after another they let themselves out of the gate: out into the park, out into streets where everything moved, where time set everything whirring and churning and grinding again and you felt the agony of the turning wheels.
After they’d gone, boys in their school uniforms hopped over the fence and sat on the swings, and walked up and down the see-saw so that it thumped on the wood chippings. The shrieking girls lit off from the benches and moved in a chattering flock across the park.
The wind died a little; the men packed up their kites.
The lowering sun receded behind the clouds. The trees were still. A flat, grey light enveloped the park. The jackdaws came down from the branches on big, quivering black wings and hopped over the grass. They cawed to one another, opening their sharp, terrible beaks. The traffic rumbled on the road. Here and there people ran silently on the paths. A child’s glove lay forgotten on the ground.
Quietly, the park filled with its own inhuman atmosphere. It renewed itself in the grey light. It fell into a kind of trance, an old stillness. Cold air rose from the earth. The bushes darkened. The paths lay in shadow. The trees grew indistinct.
All around the city the lights were coming on.
At a quarter to four, Juliet started to prepare the library for the Literary Club.
Arlington Park High School for Girls was a Victorian building that stood along the park in its own grounds, behind high stone walls. It had a faint look of a hospital or hospice, with its circular lawn and flower beds hedged round with municipal tarmac. All day, middle-aged women strode purposefully here and there, clutching armloads of paperwork and files. Bells rang; the grounds filled and then emptied again. At lunchtime the rich odour of reheated food suffused the building and hung in a meat-smelling shape around the doors.
It took Juliet at least fifteen minutes to rearrange the library for the Literary Club. Though it was after school hours there was always some sixth-former at a table in a corner who looked as though she’d been there for a year, slumped over in an irremediable swamp of paper and chemistry textbooks. Juliet tried to persuade them all to leave so that she wouldn’t feel self-conscious if the discussion grew heated. There was a study room assigned for the purpose, she told them one after another, and each time they would sigh and slam shut their books and heave themselves resentfully to their feet. It was always the scientists who were the worst. They had a sort of maleness about them, an aura of election. Once or twice they had asked why the Literary Club couldn’t move to the study room instead. Juliet informed them that exclusive use of the library on the last Friday of the month was and always had been a perquisite of the Literary Club. If they wanted to stay here, they’d have to join. She gloried, a little, in this part of the fifteen minutes. She felt she was in a sense on the front line, defending art from the barbarian forces of rationality.
She pulled out all the tables and moved the chairs into a circle. Then, on a tray, she brought in her controversial supplies of coffee and biscuits. The headmistress had pointed out to her that consumption of food and drink in the library was forbidden, but by the slenderest of margins Juliet had prevailed. She explained that she wanted the Literary Club to have a relaxed, social atmosphere. Unlike her forebear, the present headmistress did seem to find this quite surprising. She seemed to wonder what a relaxed, social atmosphere had to do with anything that occurred on the school premises and did not, in however tangential a way, have a positive bearing on examination results. In this respect, Juliet felt, she was a much smaller mountain than any of her predecessors, who would surely have taken a more rounded view of life. It was all anybody thought of now, flogging these girls for all the grades they could get out of them. The better the results, the more pupils, and revenue, the school attracted.
And what was it all for? What was the point of it? In what sense did the girls, even the scientists, profit from their hard work and their grades? Sooner or later they would meet a man and it would all be stolen from them. That girl with her chemistry textbooks would meet a man, and little by little he would murder her.
At the Literary Club, Juliet tried to stave off this inevitability, in whatever limited way she could. She tried to acquaint them with the nature of the beast. They were meant to select the book for the next month’s discussion by committee, but unrepentantly Juliet steered them towards works that represented the truth, as she saw it, of female experience. She intended to keep things as contemporary as she could, and to prioritise women writers; but how could she resist Madame Bovary? How could she fail to direct them towards Anna Karenina, towards a woman dead on the railway tracks, put there by men? Then, sometimes, she capitulated and let them choose for themselves. Often they chose something that had been adapted into a film. The discussion always took an odd turn when that happened. The girls compared the book to the film, appearing to believe that the second had preceded the first. They referred to the characters using the names of the actors who had played them. Juliet would drink her coffee and stare out of the window, and try to relish the fact that at that very moment Benedict was walking home with the children and putting his key into the door of an empty house.
A girl with a long rope of hair down her back and an armful of chemistry textbooks slammed into the library and looked around blankly at the new arrangement of tables and chairs, the circle of coffee cups. Her shirt was untucked, more by accident than design, Juliet imagined. The headmistress, Mrs. Shaw, was a stickler for shirts being tucked in. She walked around the school making little downward tucking motions with her hands every time she saw one out. She looked as if she were doing a square dance. It was exactly that marginal, fixated type of control that convinced Juliet that the centre, the core of life, was being neglected. Who would teach these girls? Who would tell them the truth? Not Mrs. Shaw, doing her square dance for the punters. Besides, the school uniform was not of the sort with which it was advisable, or even possible, to take liberties: a regulation tartan kilt, a shirt, a dark-green blazer. Some of the girls wore ballet slippers, louchely trodden down at the heels. Most of them wore at least some jewellery. A few wore perfume. Juliet would smell it when they came to her desk at the end of a class to hand in their exercise books. Did they know why they wore it? Did they know why they put jewellery on themselves, and perfume? Or was it blind instinct, blind, a native need to display themselves, to attract?
“I’m afraid it’s the Literary Club in here now,” she said to the blank-faced girl.
“Oh.” The girl surveyed the chairs, the coffee cups.
“You can join us if you like,” Juliet said. “It doesn’t matter if you haven’t read the book.”
The girl said nothing.
“We’re doing Wuthering Heights,” Juliet said. “They’ve just made a new film of it.”
With her chemistry books clutched to her chest she appeared to be thinking.
“What time do you finish?” she said.
“Sometimes we run over,” said Juliet, “but we’re usually all done by quarter past five.”
She was about to add that she was sure she could find someone to give the girl a lift home afterwards if that meant she wouldn’t be collected. The girl moved towards the door with her armful of textbooks.
“Right,” she said. “I’ll come back at five-fifteen, then.”
Juliet heard the others in the corridor outside.
“Come in!” she called.
In they came, farouche in their ballet slippers. One after another they looked at Juliet and gasped. A few of them merely widened their eyes. One of them made a sort of grimace, as though the sight of her hurt. Then, one after another, they went and sat down in their chairs. Immediately they began to lean across and murmur in each other’s ears.
“Thank you!” said Juliet above the noise, her hand self-consciously at the bare nape of her neck. “That’s quite enough, thank you.”
The other teachers had responded to the disappearance of Juliet’s hair in funny, anomalous ways. It was as if this dramatic act had caused them to come out of their little lairs and burrows, their little private tunnels of life. Suddenly she saw how different they all were. Nikolai, the enormous Greek-Cypriot maths teacher, had clasped her in his giant arms and embraced her, bellowing, “A new life! A new start!” over and over in her ear. The women in the office had touched their own cropped, styled heads. Was it a rite of passage, this cutting off of hair? Juliet had never thought about it before. She met the classics teacher, Mrs. Perkins, in the hall, and Mrs. Perkins had blushed and sped up, nodding her head up and down. “Much more practical!” she whispered happily as she went by. As for the headmistress, she approached Juliet at the end of the day, after eyeing her from afar down various corridors. Such encounters were not, Juliet felt, Mrs. Shaw’s forte. She lacked the wit for them. She lacked the ability to see a thing and know it for what it was. In vain she strove for the majes
tic style of Mrs. Walker-Jay.
“I see you’ve had the chop,” she said deeply, making the tucking motion, only this time around her neck.
It didn’t sound right. Wasn’t the chop what men had, when their wives decided they couldn’t stand any more children?
“I feel like a new woman,” Juliet said. In a way it was true. “I don’t know what took me so long. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”
Mrs. Shaw’s own hair was a wispy little perm, silver with blond highlights.
“Is it?” she said. She seemed troubled. “It’s lovely on a young girl, though, don’t you think?” she continued unexpectedly. “I like to see long hair down a young girl’s back.”
Juliet supposed she’d at least get a laugh out of Benedict later with that one.
Another knot of girls drifted in, trailing their copies of Wuthering Heights, sixth-formers in black eyeliner flicking back their fringes, shuffling in their ballet slippers, hunching their shoulders and walking from their hips. There was a girl with her hair in a single bunch on the side of her head. There was an enormous girl and her tiny best friend. All of them gasped at the sight of Juliet, shaven-headed like a nun. It began to irritate her. Did their lives lack excitement? Had they never seen someone have a haircut before? It was unnerving, to have so much of their attention; to be the object of their depthless gazes, the subject on their pink, delicate lips. All day, from class to class, it had been so. It made her realise how little of their attention she usually had. It made her realise how immersed they generally were in themselves, in their fresh new bodies, in their vain little heads. They were so vain, so conceited! They went through life never looking at anyone, never thinking of anyone but themselves! In the grounds Juliet often saw their mothers, smart, competitive women who nonetheless shrank a little, visibly withered, when Hermione or Emily or Laura came slinking out like a self-satisfied little cat and handed over her schoolbag like a duchess. Even some of the sixth-formers were still collected by their mothers: they sat waiting outside the gates in their big, expensive cars with the engines running, applying lipstick to their wrinkled mouths in the rear-view mirror.