by Rachel Cusk
‘Everyone feels sorry for you!’ She waited, watching him until he met her eye before she delivered her meaning. ‘Your father was a disgusting tramp and you came from a council house, and even your precious Stephen was only friends with you because he was forced to be!’
Something dropped through his centre like a pebble thrown down a well, a long, silent fall. He felt its faint impact down in the pit of himself.
‘That’s not true.’ He sat back firmly on the sofa and folded his hands.
‘Oh, yes it is! He told me so.’ Her face was excited now. ‘He told me it was his punishment, to be friends with you!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He got into trouble,’ said Francine victoriously. ‘And the master’ – she used the word carefully, and Ralph suddenly knew beyond doubt that she was telling the truth, that somehow Stephen had really told her these things – ‘the master said that instead of being expelled he had to be friends with you, because nobody else wanted to. He said he wished he’d been expelled,’ she finished matter-of-factly.
Ralph opened his mouth but found himself disarmed. The litany of Francine’s voice assaulted him, hammering against his thoughts and then slotting in amongst them, into spaces he had not really known were there but which now he saw fitted them perfectly. He saw the matrix of truth, touched its cold, steely walls, and knew himself captured.
‘He told me other things too, all sorts of interesting things about you. He took me out last night to a wine bar and we got drunk and talked about everything. I told him how bad you were to me and he said it wasn’t surprising, considering your background, and I should just feel sorry for you, like he does. He says you’re jealous of him because of Belinda, because she liked him more than she liked you. She was all over him, he said.’ He heard her laugh. ‘And you still go to the pub with him! It’s pathetic, it really is. Just pathe—’
Ralph saw himself spring to his feet and put his hands about her throat, but it was only the warm shock of his skin meeting hers that told him it was real, that he was now committing an impossibility, a physical rebellion which demanded to occupy seconds and space and would change everything. Her neck was surprisingly thick, resilient with cords. He squeezed with his hands, frightened by the sudden silence and then amazed by it, and as he looked into her startled eyes his heart flew to his fingertips and for the first time he felt locked with her in an unutterable intimacy. For a moment she was still, long, glorious seconds of quiet in which he looked at the petrified face in his hands and knew himself completely, but then she struggled, clawing at him with rigid fingers, and he let her go. To his surprise she didn’t recoil from him but stayed motionless where she was, the panting sound of her breath the only trace of what had happened. He waited for an aftermath, for something to flow into the vacuum of what he had done, but the room seemed just then to stand still with the evidence of his crime, and hers, the impossibility of retraction. He prayed for her to do something simple, cry perhaps, something which would retrieve them from this desolation where they were too far to be heard or rescued. Finally, she lifted a hand and touched her throat with her fingers, and he saw there the imprints of his own in a ghastly tattoo. His palms burned.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said, astonished at the familiar sound of his own voice, its politeness. ‘I don’t know what happened.’
To his surprise he saw her lips unfurl in a curious half-smile, and as her eyes grew excited again he realized that he hadn’t changed anything at all, merely delayed the progress of a strange campaign by which he had long been surrounded.
‘He did it to me too!’ she said, the wing of a shriek flitting across her voice. For a moment he didn’t understand her, but then his shame came back to him with redoubled force, dragging with it all the things she had said, the sound of her voice, the chasm into which he had for a moment frozen his fall. ‘He pushed me against a wall and did it to me right there in the street! I asked him to!’
A cry crowded fluttering in his mouth and he let it escape, hearing its soft progress through silence. With a painful grinding of joints he finally felt himself turn away from everything he knew, from the ugly, familiar place where he had always been, and it was as if something else, a clear and frightening range of vertiginous truths, had been there, just behind him, all along. He saw the sweep of it in seconds, exhilarated and despairing, and felt a rush of knowledge pass through him. He had done wrong, a terrible, intractable wrong reached by a steep stairway of mistakes and failures, from whose top he could view all the things he should have done and realize only how far he was from them. His helplessness could not absolve him: he had failed to defend what was his as it floated alone in its troubled sea, had abandoned where he should have protected, had cast away his fragile creation and left it to cower at the drip of wine-toxic blood, the rooting jabs of a stranger, the unfriendly air in which he himself was betrayed and reviled.
‘Poor thing,’ he muttered, hardly knowing what he said. ‘Poor little thing.’
‘Oh, don’t feel sorry for me!’
Their eyes met. Ralph endured the final, fatal collision of their differences and felt laughter jump in his throat. He saw Francine pick up her bag and he gasped, putting out a hand to stop her.
‘Don’t you touch me!’ she shrieked, skipping from the compass of his arm.
‘Please don’t go, not yet.’
He fixed her with his eyes, trying to fill them with some as yet unspoken promise, some prize which might lure her back to him. For a moment he held her, but then the knowledge of his own emptiness leaked from him and her eyes grew bored and looked away. She turned and left the room with his voice still ringing in her absence as if it had been the signal of her liberation, and seconds later he heard her shut the door.
*
‘Is that you?’
Ralph’s voice was barely more than a whisper. Stephen’s phone had rung for a long time, hundreds of rings, each one pounding like a hammer in his heart. Then finally there had been the click of someone picking it up, and now just the sound of breathing.
‘Is that you?’
‘Who’s this?’ barked Stephen suddenly. ‘Speak up whoever you are or bugger off.’
‘It’s me. Ralph.’
‘It’s Ralphie! It’s my old friend Ralph,’ said Stephen, shouting as if to a room full of people. Ralph could hear static in the background and beyond that, nothing. Stephen was drunk, or stoned, or both, he could tell from his voice. ‘This is a bit of a late night for you, old chap, isn’t it? Rebelling at last?’
Ralph felt himself break again, a strange sensation of inner collapse, something giving beneath him like a rotten bridge and then the blurred velocity of falling. He had felt it several times in the hours since Francine had left.
‘Still there?’ Stephen tapped comically at the receiver.
‘Yes.’
‘What’s up?’
Ralph waited, but nothing came. Now that he was here, claiming what was owed to him, his injury seemed fluid and ungraspable, impossible to lift from the mire which surrounded it and hold dripping above his head.
‘You’ve – wronged me,’ he said finally, and then instantly regretted it.
‘I what? Speak up. Can’t hear you.’
‘You’ve wronged me.’
Stephen was silent for so long that Ralph felt himself begin to disappear. He heard a dry cough in the receiver, a clearing of the throat.
‘Look, what’s this all about? Are you pissed or something?’
‘No.’
‘You’ve gone a bit nuts, then, if you don’t mind my saying so.’
‘You’ve wronged me.’
‘Yes, so you keep saying. Can’t help you, I’m afraid.’
Ralph tried to speak and felt a terrible constriction at his throat. He thought of Francine’s face above his hands, the face of a doll, her eyes empty as marbles.
‘She told me,’ he said, his voice strangled. ‘Everything you said to her, she told me. I know ev
erything.’
‘Ah, I see,’ said Stephen. His laugh rattled in Ralph’s ear. ‘Well, I wouldn’t take it to heart if I were you. We were both a bit pissed, that’s all.’ He laughed again. ‘My God, she was—’
‘You told her things about me,’ interrupted Ralph. The sound of his own voice excited him.
‘Did I? Can’t say I remember.’
‘Private things. You told her private things.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’
He muttered something else which Ralph couldn’t hear. He sounded distracted, as if he wanted to be off the telephone.
‘All my life,’ began Ralph; but then he stopped, unable to say something so portentous.
‘What was that?’
‘I said, all my life you’ve fucked me up.’ He strained over the words, finding them hard and unnatural. ‘All my life.’
‘Nothing to do with me. Fucked yourself up. Pathetic bastard, that’s your problem. Nobody forced you.’
Tears sprang to Ralph’s eyes and he put a hand to his forehead.
‘You’ve taken things from me!’ he said desperately.
‘Look, you only ever had one thing worth taking. She wasn’t yours anyway. As for the other one, she wasn’t worth the trouble it would have taken to shag her. Those are the facts. Now, why don’t you just toddle off to bed and get off my bloody case?’
‘She’s pregnant!’ burst out Ralph.
Stephen paused for a long time.
‘Not by me, she’s not,’ he said finally. ‘Anyway, you’re well shot of her.’
Ralph felt himself smelted down to his hot, thudding heart, saw the room around him and dissolved into its walls, evaporated in its corners.
‘And you,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I’m well shot of you.’
Ralph could hear the measure of his breathing, up and down.
‘Oh. All right, then.’
‘I don’t want to see you again.’
‘Righty-ho.’
‘Do you understand?’
‘Yes, yes, I think you’ve made yourself quite clear. Goodbye.’
The line went abruptly dead and Ralph replaced the receiver. The silence around him was towering, enormous. He lay back on the sofa, stretching himself out so that he lay flat. Birmingham, Lancaster, Crewe. He closed his eyes and waited.
Seventeen
It was better than she’d expected, especially after the long, unnerving walk through a vast catacomb of cavernous, neon-lit corridors in which she had distinctly heard the dungeon sound of dripping, its echo ghostly behind her footsteps. On the way she had come across two or three berobed old women stranded in wheelchairs like spectral, crippled sentries at isolated outposts. She had followed signs to the clinic, pinned intermittently on walls down which green limous streaks ran like eccentric beards, and had finally arrived after what seemed like miles at a newer and more hospitable door made of wood and chrome. She pushed it and entered a hushed and carpeted enclave where telephones quietly chirped and potted plants proudly proclaimed the tiny region’s luxurious independence. Its immediate resemblance to offices in which she had worked, or even the agency where she used to go to collect her cheques and receive news of her next assignment, at first soothed and then disturbed her. She instantly warmed to the superiority of her treatment, but remembering the collapsed and crumpled faces of the corridor’s abandoned residents, their lumpy, useless forms rooted like unattended overflowing bins in concrete wastelands, she wondered at the severity of her own condition that it should elicit such reverence.
‘What name is it, dear?’
She turned and saw a woman standing near her with a clipboard in her hand. She was wearing a white uniform, with a stiff white veil of the same material covering her head. For a moment she thought nervously that the woman was a nun, for the soft, coaching tone of her voice and her ready, pliant face seemed to anticipate tearful confessions.
‘Francine Snaith.’
Francine moved closer to the woman as she said it, in an attempt at discretion. The woman had a plastic rectangle pinned to her breast with ‘Nurse Rogers’ written on it. She could now see the entire waiting-room from where she stood. Other stout, white figures moved soundlessly around a neat row of chairs on which six or seven young girls sat like novices. At one end of the room was a large glass window, behind which a man sat. The telephone rang and he answered it.
‘How are you feeling, Francine?’ said the nurse.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Any sickness?’
‘No.’
‘Good girl,’ she said, nodding and writing something on her clipboard. ‘Why don’t you just pop over and have a word with John behind the window there, and then you can sit down with the other girls.’
Francine crossed the waiting-room. All of the girls looked up in unison as she passed and she glanced back at them. Their pale, worn faces were eager with recognition, as if urging some sense of community upon her, and she looked away. She stood at the glass and waited while John spoke on the telephone.
‘Right,’ he said, nodding. ‘OK, that’s fine.’
He was young, with dark ruffled hair and a lean face, and when he sensed Francine standing there he looked up, smiling, and raised a patient finger. She saw that he was handsome, and she felt a wrench of frustration at the disagreeable fact of her presence there, the undisguisable nature of its shame.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said cheerfully, putting down the telephone.
‘It’s OK,’ said Francine softly.
‘Name?’
‘Francine.’
‘Francine, Francine,’ he muttered, looking down at a typed list. ‘Francine Snaith, 110 Mill Lane, Kilburn, London. That you?’
‘Yes.’ She smiled.
‘Well, Francine, we’re running a bit late this morning, but you should be called in about half an hour. All right?’
‘That’s fine.’
Francine leaned on the counter, closer to the glass, and he looked up. An expression of surprise flitted across his face and he looked back down at his page.
‘Let’s see. Right, how will you be getting back to Kilburn?’
She hesitated, unprepared for his question and flattered by the concern it implied.
‘I don’t really know.’ She wondered if he would offer to take her home himself.
‘Oh. Well, we normally recommend that patients take a taxi home afterwards rather than public transport. Could you give me the name of the person who’s coming to collect you?’
Francine was silent. A wave of nausea mounted in her stomach and hovered trembling.
‘Nobody.’
He didn’t say anything for a moment, his pen poised.
‘What about your boyfriend?’ he said finally, without looking up.
‘I don’t have one.’
‘What about this name you gave to your doctor? Ralph Loman, is he not your boyfriend?’
‘No.’
‘Is there a friend you could call?’
‘No.’
He raised his head slowly and looked directly into her eyes. His gaze was evaluating, calculating not her assets but her lack of them. She knew that he felt sorry for her. The small office in which he sat was bright and ordered. He raised a hand to his chin and she saw the mocking glitter of a wedding band on his finger.
‘Nobody at all?’ he said.
‘No,’ she said, hating him.
Janice had been meant to come, but that morning, when Francine had opened the door to her darkened bedroom, Janice had called out from beneath a mound of covers that she didn’t feel like it. Her voice had been irritable, and the room had smelt thick and sour. The night before, the woman who owned the boutique where Janice worked had come to the flat and demanded to speak to her. Francine had heard her shouting behind the closed sitting-room door, her voice interspersed with Janice’s indecipherable murmurs.
‘You’re lucky I’ve decided not to take this any further!’ she had sa
id several times, while Francine sat alone in the kitchen. Finally the door had flown open and the woman had marched past her without saying anything. When she had left, Francine had gone into the sitting-room. Janice was sitting on the sofa, smoking a cigarette.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Silly cow gave me the sack,’ said Janice, sucking in smoke. ‘Silly bitch.’
Francine asked her why, but she wouldn’t say.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. Her face was ugly, abandoned by expression like a room after a party. ‘I’m not worried. I’ve got other sources.’
‘I wish I did,’ said Francine.
Her job at Lancing & Louche had finished a week ago. Lynne had been odd about it, her voice unfriendly on the telephone. When Francine went to the agency to collect her money the receptionist said that Lynne was in a meeting and gave her the cheque herself. She had called once or twice after that, but the receptionist had told her that there wasn’t anything for her, and when Lynne finally called it was to say that she was very sorry but they were going to have to take her off their books.
‘Do you?’ said Janice, suddenly giving her a cool, appraising look; a look which reminded Francine of the looks men usually gave her. Janice looked at her for a long time. It made her nervous. ‘I might be able to help you out,’ she said finally, sending a long finger of smoke towards her.
‘You’d better sit down,’ said John. His manner was disengaged. ‘One of the nurses will let you know when they’re ready.’
Francine turned and saw that the other girls’ eyes were still on her. Their gaze was unembarrassed, knowing. There was an empty chair at the end of their row, but she walked past it and sat on one opposite. Eventually their eyes dropped to their laps, except those of a girl with long red hair who sat directly across from Francine. She was staring at a point above Francine’s head. She looked young, like a child. Francine saw that her face was filled with immediate terror, as if someone was about to attack her. She looked away abruptly, skirting along the row until her eyes fixed on a very fat girl slumped in a chair to her left. The girl’s face was vast and pasty, the bumps of her features resembling the deformities of vegetables, sly potato eyes, a lumpy tuber nose. She sat miserably with her legs apart, her thighs melting over the sides of the chair like warm cheese. Francine stared at her, trying to imagine the coupling which had brought her here, the kisses on her doughy breasts. The thought repelled her. She wondered how someone could have chosen that girl, selected her from others, and felt her own mysteries crumble and spoil.