A Life's Work

by Rachel Cusk

  Slowly the year rolled over: summer turned to autumn. My daughter learned to crawl and then to stand as the days drew in and it started to rain. Her development was not, as I had expected, taking the joyful form of a sprightly liberation from the paralysis of babyhood. Instead it was a slow and frustrating business. Watching her was like watching a film running backwards. Her body was tormented by some invisible force that made her get up and fall over again and again, that caused her to struggle and stretch, like someone drowning, for a chair leg or table top to which to cling. It was as if she were fighting to emerge from quicksand. My head ached with the tension of her efforts. It became dangerous to leave her unguarded for even a minute, for her physical drive was like sand issuing from a fathomless hourglass, like time: it flowed from her in a constant stream which we fought to channel and contain, spilling hazardously over when the telephone or a knock at the door occasioned a moment of neglect. I recalled remarks I had carelessly heard other parents use, phrases like she never stops or she’s on the go all the time, and pondered what they actually meant. An instant’s distraction would find my daughter inching over the top of the stairs, pulling electrical leads that were about to bring the kettle or iron down on top of her, delving into the rubbish. She husked records from their sleeves and shredded letters in their envelopes with the speed of a harvesting peasant. She aimed herself at bottles of bleach or hot cups of tea, trundling across rooms like a slow but deadly missile and changing course only if someone actually went and stood between her and her target. Suddenly our life was like a drama in which a bomb is being disabled against the clock. We were, all at once, the slaves of time, and we kept our daughter to the kitchen so as better to contain her ticking, to contain her power to destroy. Only when she was upended, neutralised by sleep, did the ticking stop; interludes which washed swiftly and soundlessly past us like flood waters, bearing away the pleasure of books or conversation too quickly for us to do more than grab at them.

  The business of looking after a child possesses a core of unruliness, a quality of continual crisis, and my version of motherhood lacked, I saw, the aspect of military organisation with which such a core should be approached. I do not use the word ‘military’ lightly: conscription to the world of orthodox parenthood demands all the self-abnegation, the surrender to conformity, the relish for the institutional, that the term implies. People understood this in the town in which we now lived. Its residential recesses were ‘geared’ to the good mother. This, I came to understand, was why so many mothers lived here. Here you could be free from the torments and temptations of life on the outside, from bars and movie theaters and shops selling impractical shoes. Here the restaurants had high chairs and changing facilities, the buses wide doors and recesses for prams. The exalted sphere of the university, its silence, its privileged, patriarchal enclaves, lived on undisturbed. A hierarchy was in place and its provision extended from the lowest to the highest.

  A health visitor came to see us in our embattled kitchen. She produced sheaves of leaflets and laid each one lovingly on the table for me to study while behind her the baby looted her handbag undetected. Have you taken her to toddler group, the health visitor enquired. I had not. Like vaccinations and mother and baby clinics, the notion instilled in me a deep administrative terror. I took the baby to shops where I tried on clothes, to cafés in the centre where students sat packed in a fog of cigarette smoke. I took her for walks across bumpy fields where the stroller became mired in mud. I took her to London, where she cried frantically in noisy restaurants, in traffic jams. The health visitor produced a typed list of groups in my area. It helps, she said, to meet other mothers. You can chat, and even have a coffee if you feel like it. I sensed that I should feel abjectly grateful for this lowly provision. As it was I drank cup after cup of strong coffee alone, and smoked cigarettes in the garden when my daughter was asleep. I’ll see, I said. I suppose it would be good for her to meet other babies. As far as I knew, my daughter believed that she was the only one of her kind. I worried that the truth might come as something of a shock.

  The kitchen floor had a hard, tiled surface. We put down rugs, but in spite of them several times each day my daughter’s head would make contact with it. She would pull herself to her feet and stand, often for ten or fifteen minutes, before falling slowly backwards, ramrod straight like a felled tree. During the long seconds of this fall, whoever was with her would run towards her, occasionally diving or skidding like a baseball player lunging for base or even fielding a cushion towards the spot upon which her head was about to make contact; and in the moment of impact they would freeze, suspended in a posture of horror and protest by the sound of her skull hitting the tiles. The narrative of her adventures ran on in the background of our lives like a radio. Sometimes we attended to them and sometimes we didn’t, but some miniature quest was always underway, stairs being scaled, cupboards excavated, objects scientifically analysed for their properties. Pain had lent her a certain toughness, a core of bravado which made her unwilling to admit failure or distress. I would occasionally look up, alerted by silence, to find her hanging grimly from a cupboard door or from the rungs of a chair in which her feet had become trapped. The world of things was her unresting opponent, her wilderness, and she took the risk of its instability, its unpredictability. One day she pulled herself to her feet on the rungs of her heavy wooden highchair, and it fell on top of her. I watched from the doorway, too far away to intervene, as she fell straight back on to the tiles with the tower of the highchair bearing down on her. Her head hit the tiles with a crack. Seconds later, the highchair’s protruding wooden tray smacked against her forehead with the force of a sledgehammer. I picked her up and ran out into the street with her. I didn’t know what else to do. It was as if I were surrendering her, or making some appeal for her safety to the outside world. There was a dent in the centre of her forehead. It turned yellow with bruising. Every time I looked at it I felt ashamed.

  One morning I found the health visitor’s list under the kitchen table. It informed me that a toddler group was convening in fifteen minutes’ time at a church hall a few streets away. We put on our coats and set out along the windy pavement beneath a low grey sky, hurrying through the indeterminate heart of a suburban mid-week morning, through the flat terrain of the unimportant, the unoccupied, for all the world as if we were rushing to make a train or a meeting or a thrilling date. The hall was a modern one-storey building attached to the flank of a Gothic church. Inside, a circle of empty chairs had been methodically placed around a tidy miniature landscape of toys. We were the first to arrive. A busy, nervous woman wearing a small silver crucifix on a chain around her neck told us to write our names on stickers and attach them to our clothes. We stood about, shy and agonised like people at a party. The woman asked me if this was my first time at the group and I said that it was. My daughter set off determinedly for the toys, displacing one of the chairs. She picked up a plastic fireman’s helmet and put it on her head. I don’t know if they’ll all come, confided the woman anxiously. I shouldn’t think they will. You see, the holidays have started. I asked which holidays these were. She mentioned the name of the expensive private school whose manicured playing fields bordered our garden. I wondered what these holidays had to do with me, and realised that the answer was nothing. So you see, said the woman, it might not be so good this week. Oh well, I said. Presently she asked me if I had lived here long. Only a few weeks, I replied. And is your husband attached to the university? she enquired.

  Other women were arriving. I saw them through the windows, coming up the path with their strollers. Hel-lo, yodelled the organiser, beaming, hel-lo. She rushed hither and thither, administering stickers. My daughter’s face was sombre beneath her helmet, her demeanour important. She tended the toys authoritatively. Presently she caught sight of me sitting alone and came over to place a plastic turtle with wheels and mad revolving eyes comfortingly in my lap. Released from their strollers, the other children moved towards the toy
area like people arriving at work and began to occupy themselves. A small boy approached my daughter and stood silently in front of her until she relinquished the blue teddy bear in her hand. She appeared to understand perfectly what was going on, which was more than could be said for me. I had not conversed with anyone outside my family for several weeks, and now appeared to be suffering from a form of Tourette’s syndrome. A woman asked me how I liked the area in which we were living, and to my concern I found myself embarked on a lengthy denunciation of it which I was apparently unable to curtail. I saw, as if from a great distance, her worried face, her uncomprehending eyes. So what do you do? I said abruptly. This only appeared to make the situation worse. Julia bakes marvellous cakes, the woman next to her informed me after a pause. Really? I said, with frantic delight. I’ve always thought I’d love to be a baker. Do you make any money out of it? The two women looked at each other like schoolgirls, with horrified eyes. What does your husband do? somebody asked me. When next I looked at my daughter, I saw that a child with straggling hair and crossed eyes was gripping her by her thick red curls and banging her head repeatedly on the floor. Cordelia! trilled the child’s mother distractedly. Cordelia! The organiser was bringing out cups and saucers which clattered loudly in her shaking hands. Steam rose from a boiling kettle. She went about the room, bending discreetly towards the groups of talking women. Coffee, she mouthed to each one in a stage whisper, as if she were interrupting important meetings. Nearby, Cordelia’s mother was discussing Cordelia’s proclivities. Whenever she sees a black person, she said fondly, she just bursts into tears! It’s quite embarrassing really, she added above the laughter of the others. She’s obviously, you know, a bit frightened. They nodded their heads sympathetically, hands over their smiling mouths. Coffee? whispered the organiser next to my ear.

  Over at the coffee station, a broad woman with a vast bosom and a brutal helmet of grey hair asked me how many children I had. One, I said. She appeared disappointed at this meagre reply. Oh well, she said, I’m sure there’ll be more. Immediately I recognised her as one of a local species I had seen and heard countless times in the past weeks, at the doctor’s surgery, at the shops. Before we came to live here, when we were looking for a house, we had met just such a woman whose mouldering property we had come to view. When we rang the doorbell she had burst forth, dressed like a plain-clothed nun, looking wildly around her. Where are they? she had cried. Who? we asked, bewildered. The children! she said. Where are all the children? I’ve got five, the woman before me now stated matter of factly. You’ll find it gets easier. She told me that her eight-year-old daughter was about to go to France on an exchange programme. Gosh, that’s quite young to be going away on your own, I said. How long is she going for? A year, said the woman breezily. So that’s one less to worry about. She looked at me concernedly. That’s what I mean when I say it does get easier. I saw that my daughter was standing on her own in the middle of the room. She looked bewildered. The organiser tinkled her spoon against her coffee cup. Ladies! she cried. Ladies! I think it’s time for some songs, don’t you? For the first time, I noticed that there was a man in the room. He wore thick glasses and his hair stood wildly on end, as if he were being electrocuted. He was sitting on his own. A small, plump girl clung silently to his knee.

  We all sat on the chairs, in a circle with our children in our laps. The organiser placed herself at the centre. She was holding a teddy bear, not, as I had at first thought, as a child-substitute but as a girl-guidish symbol of leadership. Singing seemed rather an intimate thing to do with people I hardly knew, but it was, at least, preferable to conversation. We began with ‘The Wheels on the Bus’, a hymn to public transport to which everyone except me knew both the words and the accompanying hand movements. ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ followed. I was quite happy to sing, finding something profound and absolving in the naïvity of the words. I clutched my daughter’s warm little body. Sometimes, in such moments, she and the world forgot their quarrel and convened to assure me that I could protect her, enclose her, look after her. She struggled in my arms and I set her down. She lurched intently across the floor and prised the teddy from the organiser’s hands. I looked about for the man and saw that he had gone. Row, row? said the organiser to the group. There was a chorus of approval. I knew the tune of this one, but the words, I soon found, had changed.

  Row, row, row your boat

  Gently down the stream.

  If you see a crocodile

  Don’t forget to scream!

  The final line was followed by a communal shriek, pitched unthreateningly high so as not to frighten the children. Not long after, we left the town and moved elsewhere. The memory of our time there faded quickly, leaving the strange taste of a dream. Although she never learned the song, my daughter loved the scream that accompanied it. Even if the fluting sound she made was incongruously welcoming, I admired her ability to seize the punchline, the kernel of a thing. Every time you sang the words delight would dawn across her face, and she would remember, and scream.

  A Valediction to Sleep

  My daughter’s birthday chimes another anniversary besides hers: it has been a year since I had an uninterrupted night’s sleep. I ponder this fact like someone who has been kept in exile by the machinations of some impenetrable bureaucracy, promised again and again that tomorrow or next week the passport, the tickets, the papers will come and they can return home; because for each night of that year I have sincerely believed that sleep will be returned to me. My hopes are tarnished, threadbare. I thirst for the privacy and solitude, for the oxygen of day’s lung, night. Instead the hours of darkness are a bleak corollary of those of light, an unpeopled continuum in which I remain on duty, like a guard in a building from which everyone has gone home.

  This can’t, I am sure, be normal. I suspect some failure in myself: of force, of identity, of purpose. I remember hearing, in my pre-maternal days, of the phenomenon of ‘broken nights’, and remember too feeling the youth and vigour of my will flex itself at the mention of this and other examples of infant tyranny. If I ever have a child, I said – I hope only – to myself, I simply won’t let that happen. A strange desire to crush the privileges, to deny the claims of children would beset me when I heard about the ways in which they ruled their parents; and I see it occasionally now, in other people, when I tell the story of my nights; their primitive desire for my harshness, for me to break the hold and hence the hopes, the optimism, the clamouring innocence of the very young. Perhaps children expect what we ourselves no longer dare to; or perhaps we feel sure in some deep and unprovable way that our own long and lonely nights were never so lovingly attended; that we were left, as the literature of the time advised, to cry.

  I remember the night sleep left me. It happened in hospital. I had suspected nothing. Several hours earlier I had had a baby; people had come and gone, flowers had been brought. Darkness fell. Presently it was half past ten or so, time to go to sleep. I wrapped the baby up in blankets like a new purchase, a present that I would unwrap and look at again in the morning. I slept. When I woke again some time later, it was to realise with real surprise that the terrible, persistent wailing racketing through the ward was ‘me’, as people now say of their mobile phones. My new purchase had gone off in the dead of night like some alarm I didn’t know how to disconnect. The penumbral bodies of the other women began to roll in their beds, like tethered boats in a sleeping harbour stirred by waves of noise. Presently someone tutted. In the same ward the night before, under similar circumstances, I too had tutted. I wasn’t tutting now. I felt for the first time the discomfiting spotlight of responsibility, its glare rude in the darkness, and since then I have not closed my eyes without the expectation of opening them again to that light which is not the blessed light of day but is rather a visitation, a spectre, a summons to the secret, lawless world of night. Sleep, like a great bear, a soft, warm, vigilant guardian of unconsciousness, had rolled away with a yawn and padded off elsewhere, never, it
seems, to return. I have put bears in my daughter’s crib, amongst other things, as if to suggest that I know something she doesn’t about comfort and safety and sleep, but their glassy, affectless eyes are blind to our nightly dramas. Without the consecration of sleep, darkness is rearmed with all its mythical terror. I can’t pretend that I don’t feel it too, that by now I would be amazed if she did sleep through these sinister gulfs between the days, my childish fear of which has been re-ignited by hers. Repose has left our house, and I don’t know how or from where to summon it back.

  In the early months of my daughter’s life I felt my own tiredness as a physical shock. The spring of activity, given no chance by night to uncoil, felt as if it were being wound tighter and tighter in my chest, derailing all my natural tensions and corralling them into one, great, explosive point of fatigue. In the morning I would sit up in bed, the room listing drunkenly about me, and would put a hand to my face, checking for some evidence of disfigurement: an eyebrow, perhaps, slipped down to my cheek, a deranged ear cluttering my forehead, a seam at the back of my skull gaping open. The day was sometimes a sticky mire to be laboriously crossed, the air unbreathable glue; and sometimes a frantic, untethered cloud speeding across the sky, upon which I could never gain a foothold. Once or twice the baby slept for a stretch of five or six hours, and I would wake feeling as if I had been punched. I began to speak with a curious lisp, and would put a hand to my mouth several times a day to check that my tongue was not lolling out of it.

  Gradually the distinction between day and night dissolved entirely, and I became prey to daydreams and hallucinations, remembering conversations that had not occurred, glimpsing strange creatures through windows and in corners, a continual buzz of activity in my head both infernal and remote, as if a television had been left on in a next-door room. At night I began to experience a particularly sinister visitation: a second baby came to inhabit my dreams, one for whom my ministrations were so exacting that I could not attend to the first. This second baby would cry and I would feed it, informing the world thickly through the darkness when the first baby too started to cry that I could not feed that one as I was busy with this. I would wake with a start, convinced that I had rolled over and smothered it, or sweep the floor beside my bed with a frenzied hand, sure that it had fallen out, while the real baby slept on in her cradle.