The Temporary

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘Who’s your girlfriend?’ Stephen had said when he arrived, grinning unkindly. The man slipped quietly away with a curt nod of the head, and Ralph had felt inexplicably guilty. Nevertheless, he had stayed where he was, offering to buy Stephen a drink and even laughing with him about his strange companion. The man had caught his eye sadly from the other side of the pub and Ralph had felt dizzy with malice.

  He went to the kitchen and opened the fridge, perusing it like a car engine. He had seen other men do that; not his father, of course, who would open the fridge door quickly and snatch something from it, as if worried that he would let the cold air out. One or two things lay inert on the metal shelves, like the contents of a morgue. A curling rubber leaf of ham languished in its collapsed packaging beside a small, waxy brick of cheese. He felt a wall of cold advance towards him and remembered that he was naked. There was a plastic bottle of orange juice lower down and he grabbed it, slamming the door of the fridge so that it recoiled jangling as if he had slapped it. He reached for a glass and then changed his mind, deciding instead to drink directly from the bottle. It was a cavalier gesture, and one which he felt led naturally on from his oversleeping, his nakedness, and perhaps towards a casual second phone call to Francine later in the day.

  He threw back his head to make a funnel of his throat, and for a moment the acidity of the juice was appalling, poisonous. His scalp prickled as he felt it coursing cold across his chest and into his stomach. He tipped his head back further and drained the bottle, before tossing it across the room towards the bin. It landed instead on the draining-board beside the sink and skidded on its side into an arrangement of drying crockery. A mug shot over the edge and crashed to the floor, exploding into shards among which its handle lay intact, like an ear. Ralph stared for a moment at the miniature disaster. He considered leaving it as it was, but his sense of his own drama had collapsed and he propelled himself to the broom cupboard for a dustpan and brush. He penitently gathered up the fragments of china, wrapped them in a newspaper which lay on the kitchen table, and threw them along with the plastic bottle into the bin.

  Some time later he slammed the front door and descended the steps, taking them jauntily two by two in an attempt to button up the mood of cheerful disdain which he had selected, as if from a drawer of tempers, to wear alongside his clothes. He felt better after his bath – could still feel its warm embrace on him – remodelled and fit for action. A determination to leave his mark on the day had driven him from the dragging influence of the flat, and he turned towards Chalk Farm Road filled with purposeful but undirected energy. In the distance he could see the brimming pavements flowing towards Camden Town and a plan to go to the market formulated itself, convincing Ralph that he had intended to do so all along.

  The sun was bright but weak and gave the day a deceptive appearance, casting a patina of warmth which did not convert the essential coolness of the air. The naked trees lining the road strained towards the light, greedy for its faint catalyst to burst them prematurely into bloom. It was spring, Ralph supposed, that long and amorphous season into which winter would occasionally recover and summer remit like a lingering low-level illness, never quite gripping at the throat with certitude. He groped for a date and remembered then that it was still only February. The year stretched before him in all its unavoidable detail, the hundreds of days and thousands of hours which he would endure as if something more lay at their end than mere repetition. He wished that he could be tricked, as others seemed to be, by the close of each week, seeing in their false endings the imminence of some sort of conclusion, like a soap opera. He wondered why he had never fallen into step with this pattern of days, comprehended in the helpful clarity of a week’s tiny eras – birth, growth, productivity, decline, dormancy, regeneration, played out beneath the celestial presence of longer phases of weather – a system which might ease the slow construction of his life. The year he had spent alone with his father, a chaotic tract across which no borders of time or habit were erected, had become in its elasticity the infinitely capacious repository of Ralph’s failings and he placed this latest grudge firmly within it. How could he, who had spent the most formative year of his youth, the year in which he was most pliant, most liable to gel in whichever crazy mould was nearest to hand, had spent that year ‘on the road’, a hostage to his father’s misfortune; how could he, then, be expected to see things as other people did?

  He fed himself from the tributary of his street into the main concourse drifting towards the lock, and in the suddenly thick press of bodies felt his exposure ease as they gathered him in. He had had days like this before, days when his spirits would gutter or flare at each movement of life, when he wrestled hourly with his recollections, at once their victim and their hero. It was good that he was out, although even here in the open air his father’s eyes were on him, shrivelled with whisky and immolated desire. He felt their reproach, as he always did when shrugging off portions of himself into the complaining vacuum of his absence. The problem was that it wasn’t a vacuum at all. He was merely relocating things he disliked about himself, slapping up hasty walls around them, building twisted, ridiculous corridors, papering over their leaks. He had complicated himself with introspection. He felt a longing to demolish it all and start again. His father had been a master of evasion, blockading all routes to the past, bricking up vistas of the future, until all that was left of him was a tiny room in which a man sat in an armchair watching television. He had once been a boy scout, though; the only photograph Ralph possessed of his father depicted him at the acme of his scouting career, when he had risen from amongst the ranks to become their general. He wore a cap and cravat, and stared out beyond the lens with triumphant eyes as if towards vanquished hordes. Later, his mind would travel back to that glittering epoch and he would endeavour gently to tell Ralph of it, in a hotel room where rivers of Terylene cascaded from the mouths of his suitcases and the air was warm with the rank perfume of their take-away dinner.

  ‘Dad, I’m reading,’ Ralph would implore, raising his book by the covers as if to shield him from the eye-watering woodsmoke of his father’s recollections.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ his father would confirm, nodding. ‘But a boy your age shouldn’t have to turn to books for company. He should be outdoors with other boys engaging in some form of organized activity.’ He would sigh and put his arms behind his head, like a man on holiday. ‘What do you say we play a hand of whist?’

  ‘Dad, I’m reading.’

  Once Ralph witnessed his father getting into a fight – or failing to get out of it, in any case – in a pub in Worthington where they had gone one evening for pie and chips and where Ralph was permitted to drink his lemonade from a pint glass identical to that from which his father sipped beer with womanly daintiness. Ralph had deliberately left the translucent spume on his lip while his father wiped his own away, watching him closely as he ate and drank.

  ‘Is it good?’ he said after each mouthful. Ralph nodded. ‘Never leave a moustache,’ he counselled, handing Ralph a paper napkin. ‘A gentleman never leaves a moustache.’

  Already his father had begun to deliver his epithets in the defensive manner with which he touted Terylene, at once sheepish and proud.

  ‘A gentleman,’ he repeated, ‘never has a sloppy lip.’

  It was shortly afterwards that he saw his father, gone to the bar to refill their glasses, borne away from his view in a sudden clutch of strangers and swept out through the double doors of the pub beyond into the street, his bald pate bobbing as if suspended in water. Ralph had thought to follow him out, but the barmaid had come to the table with his second pint glass of lemonade and had instructed him kindly to drink it. He had done so while she watched, drinking it all down in one go as he had seen other men do until she had laughed and told him he’d burst if he carried on like that; and what with all the excitement he had quite forgotten about his father until he emerged back through the doors with his shirt hanging out and his cheeks flushed dark red i
n a grotesque approximation of youth and vitality.

  ‘A word of advice, Ralphie,’ he had said, sitting down heavily beside him. His belly heaved in and out frantically. ‘Never show your wallet at the bar. Temptation, you see. The smart fellow always takes out a single note in advance.’

  Ralph asked him if you could make yourself burst by drinking too much all in one go.

  ‘Well, let’s see,’ said his father after a pause, furrowing his brow and screwing up his eyes intently. His upper lip glistened with sweat. He shook his head. ‘I don’t think it’s likely. No, I don’t think it’s likely at all.’

  Ralph would read in the evenings, devouring the pages of library books while his father dozed before the television with a hotel tooth-mug filled with whisky. Sometimes the empty glass would slip from his hand and he would wake with a start as it thumped to the floor.

  ‘Must have dozed off,’ he would apologize, rubbing his eyes and smiling crookedly. ‘Good book, Ralphie?’

  ‘Quite good.’

  ‘Ah, I see. What’s the plot?’

  He crossed the lock and plunged into a sea of stalls, through crowds whose lumpy shopping bags thumped against his calves, past Indian men selling garish explosions of clothing and girls with dead eyes and chalky faces around which shreds of hair hung like seaweed. He headed down towards the fruit market, craving the perishability of its offerings. When he reached it the market was noisy, a field of combat where red-faced stallholders shouted like disgruntled babies while produce which seemed overly bright was fondled by people who evidently weren’t.

  ‘Can’t you read?’ roared one of them, as a woman in a grubby knitted hat ran her fingers over a hill of oranges, touching them delicately like a blind person. She started at the sound of his voice, her eyes wide. ‘What does that say?’ persisted the stallholder. He pointed to a sign perched on the display, on which was depicted a large pair of melons with the warning ‘Please Don’t Squeeze’ emblazoned beneath them. The woman removed her hands from the oranges and left them to hang inertly by her sides.

  Ralph moved away quickly. Squashed fruit and bruised bits of vegetable lay trampled on the pavement, strangely ghoulish and unidentifiable, like the detritus of a serious operation. His foot slid on something pulpy and yielding, squelching beneath his shoe and oozing out around the sole. He limped along a few paces despairingly, trying to scrape it off against the kerb. It came away in smears, and by the time he managed to get rid of it he saw that he had spread it over rather a large patch of concrete. He looked around, embarrassed, and then walked awkwardly on as if nothing had happened. Moments later, recognizing the foolishness of his growing discomfort, he stopped at another stall and bought a bag of apples. The bag was made of brown paper and he had to hold it underneath to prevent it from giving way. He moved on, encumbered, through the nervous sunlight. As he approached the end of the small street he saw a well-dressed oriental girl bending over a large rubbish bin as if she had dropped something in it which she wanted to retrieve. She was exceptionally graceful, Ralph thought, fragile and luminous in that way Eastern girls were. People were looking at her as they passed. For a moment he thought ridiculously of offering to help her, but as he drew near he saw to his horror that the girl was clutching her belly with one hand and holding the other to her chest, while neatly depositing long ribbons of mucus and vomit into the bin. Her narrow shoulders shook slightly beneath her tailored jacket. He hesitated as a double wrench of pity and selfishness twisted in his chest. The girl would be grateful for kindness, he knew – she was alone, after all, sick and far from home! – but as he stood there the scope of the city seemed to unfold and chide him, bidding him to keep to himself, to go about his business in its common parts, its streets thick with souls, and then return directly to what was his, to what he knew. He permitted himself to walk past her. Later, walking back in the direction of the lock, he imagined himself stopping to help the girl, his arm strong around her convulsing shoulders, a handkerchief produced to smooth over her glistening lips. She leaned weakly against him, her eyes filled with tears and gratitude. He strained guiltily to return to her, but his legs carried him stubbornly on.

  Once, a few years before, he had stopped to help an old woman who had fallen over in the street. It was late and he had come upon her lying on the dark pavement with her skirts around her waist, her mottled legs veined and appalling in the street light. She had smelt unspeakable as he bent down, the awful stink of cheap beer and neglect, and when he tried to pull her skirt down over her legs, fumbling with it ineptly in a parody of male adolescence, she had opened her bleary yellow eyes and watched him helplessly, as if he were an assailant.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he had said awkwardly. ‘You’re going to be all right.’

  She had not been wearing underwear, and her flesh had looked both wizened and bloated, androgynous somehow, identifiable as female only by the bloodless lips of her genitals. A trail of ooze glistened over the tops of her thighs; and Ralph had felt a sudden surge of aversion, not physical revulsion exactly, but more of an intellectual certainty that there was nothing here for him, that to stay would constitute a defection from hope, from aspiration, from the business, the responsibility, even, of being himself. The street had been deserted, he remembered, and there was no one to see him as he left her there, scarcely believing what it was he was doing, and walked slowly on his way while her mute eyes burned at his retreating back.

  He stopped at a stall and began fingering cloth, not knowing what he was touching. Some girls were laughing near by and there was something in the sound which caught him and made him look up. Francine Snaith was standing no more than ten feet away from him, with a girl he did not know but whose voice he recognized from the telephone as that of her flatmate. A bolt of surprise stunned him and he drew back slightly, instinctively shrinking from an encounter. Francine was holding by its edge a piece of red silk – a shirt, he could see – while the animated stallholder waved his hands operatically, never taking his eyes from her. Ralph watched her face in profile, drawn by it into something approaching a trance. Her unconscious features welcomed his eyes, proclaimed themselves the property of appreciation, and as he travelled over the pearly surface of her skin, the symmetry of its ridges, the dark pool of her hair, he felt oddly as if he were touching her. She carried an aura of astonishing clarity about her which made everything else appear blurred, as if she were at the focal eye of a camera constantly trained upon her. The stallholder took the shirt by its other edge and they held it between them with an intimacy which struck Ralph as almost painful. Finally he nodded his agreement, and the tranquil surface of Francine’s face broke and made a smile. She dropped the shirt, opening a leather bag which hung from her shoulder and extracting a single note. Her activity buffeted him with waves of troubled longing. The stallholder folded the shirt carefully – caressed it! – and Francine took it, saying something to the girl beside her. She closed her bag and looked up. He had been so intent on observation that he had forgotten she could see him. Suddenly her gaze was upon him and their eyes collided before either could contrive to look away. Far from giving him the advantage of preparation, Ralph found that his minutes of secret gazing had rendered him awkward and detached. For a moment he could do nothing but look. Francine’s face was blank, and the thought that it was consciously so, that she was deciding whether or not to recognize him, flashed upon him during dreadful seconds. Finally, before it was too late, he found himself again and waved his hand. At the signal she hesitated momentarily, as if trying to place him, and then smiled her open acknowledgement.

  ‘What a surprise!’ he called out as she approached him, pronouncing the words rather too loudly in his determination to be the first to speak. He cursed himself for yesterday’s peremptory telephone message. If only he had known, how much better it would have been to have left things to chance! He felt heavy with the guilty scent of his desire, a desire no response had aired, in which he had been left to steep, and which now emanated
a rank odour of rejection which shamed him as keenly and publicly as if he were unwashed.

  ‘Yes,’ said Francine, reaching him. Her eyes were downcast, and it was a moment before she revealed herself to him. He examined her shyly again in disbelief, as if looking for some mistake in her face which might release him from his giddiness. She looked very calm, not with the suggestion of relaxation or dullness, but rather as if animation did not occur to her. There were no traces of it on her skin, and it struck him as he watched how carefully she held herself that she was surprised by her own beauty, that her custody of it, her refusal to wear it out with base uses, was a constant responsibility. The surprise of her eyes when finally she looked at him almost took away his breath.

  ‘How are you?’ he said.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  She was wearing a jacket too thin for the cold, and he noticed fondly how her hands had crept within its sleeves for warmth.

  ‘Good.’ There was a pause, and Ralph felt a terrible blankness envelop his thoughts. For a moment he could seize on nothing which would deliver them from the oncoming silence. ‘I always make the mistake of coming down here on a Sunday,’ he said suddenly, to his own relief. ‘I forget what it’s like. Each time I swear I won’t do it again, and every week I find myself back here elbowing through the crowds.’ He gestured vaguely, like a man doing magic tricks.