Outline: A Novel

by Rachel Cusk

But I do accept, he said, that it was not unreasonable for her to want me to go to Athens. He hadn’t quite given me the full story – in fact her mother had been taken ill. It was nothing too serious, but she needed to be admitted to the hospital on the mainland, and his wife’s Greek wasn’t all that good. But he thought they could manage, his wife and her father together. The father-in-law’s parting remark, then, was more ambivalent than, in the first version, it had seemed. We had by now fastened our seat-belts, as the voice on the intercom had asked us to, and for the first time I saw lights below as we swung quivering downwards, a great forest of lights rising and falling mysteriously through the darkness.

  In those days I was so worried all the time about my children, my neighbour said. I couldn’t think about what I needed or what she needed; I thought they needed me more. His words reminded me of the oxygen masks, which had not, of course, put in an appearance over the past few hours. It was a kind of mutual cynicism, I said, that had resulted in the oxygen masks being provided, on the tacit understanding that they would never be needed. My neighbour said he had found that to be true of many aspects of life, but that all the same the law of averages was not something it paid to base your personal expectations on.

  II

  I noticed that when we walked along narrow stretches of pavement beside the roaring traffic, Ryan always took the place on the inside.

  ‘I’ve been reading up on statistics for road deaths in Athens,’ he said. ‘I’m taking this information very seriously. I owe it to my family to get home in one piece.’

  There were often dogs lying collapsed across the pavement, big ones with extravagant shaggy pelts. They were insensate in the heat, motionless except for the breath faintly moving in their sides. From a distance they sometimes looked like women in fur coats who had fallen down drunk.

  ‘Do you step over a dog?’ Ryan said, hesitating. ‘Or do you walk around it?’

  He didn’t mind the heat, he said – in fact he was enjoying it. He felt like years of damp were drying out. His only regret was that it had taken him till the age of forty-one to get here, because it seemed like a really fascinating place. It was a shame the wife and kids couldn’t see it too, but he was determined not to ruin it by feeling guilty. The wife had had a weekend with her girlfriends in Paris just now, leaving him to take care of the kids alone; there was no reason he shouldn’t feel he’d earned it. And to be perfectly honest, the kids slowed you down: first thing this morning he’d walked up to the Acropolis, before the heat got too intense, and he couldn’t have done that with them in tow, could he? And even if he had, he’d have spent the whole time worrying about sunburn and dehydration, and though he might have seen the Parthenon sitting like a gold and white crumbling crown on the hilltop with the fierce pagan blue of the sky behind, he wouldn’t have felt it, as he was able to feel it this morning, airing the shaded crevices of his being. Walking up there, for some reason he’d remembered how, in the bedroom of his childhood, the sheets always smelled of mould. If you opened a cupboard in his parents’ house, as often as not there’d be water running down the back of it. When he left Tralee for Dublin, he found that all his books were stuck to the shelves when he tried to take them down. Beckett and Synge had rotted and turned to glue.

  ‘Which suggests I wasn’t much of a reader,’ he said, ‘so it’s not a detail I give out that often.’

  No, he had never been to Greece before, nor to any country where you could take the sun for granted. His wife was allergic to it in any case – to the sun, that was. Like him she’d been raised in the damp and shade and the sun brought her out in purple spots and blisters; she couldn’t cope with heat at all, which induced migraines and vomiting. They took the kids to Galway for holidays, where her parents had a house, and if they were desperate for a break from Dublin they could always go back to Tralee. It’s a case of home is where when you have to go there they have to take you in, he said. And his wife believed in all that, in the family network and Sunday lunch and children having grandparents on both sides, but if it was left to him he’d probably never cross his parents’ threshold again. Not that they did anything particularly wrong, he said, they’re nice enough people, I just don’t think it would occur to me.

  We passed a café with tables in the shade of a large awning, and the people sitting at the tables looked superior, so cool and watchful in the shadows while we toiled incomprehensibly through the heat and turmoil of the street. Ryan said he might stop and drink something; he’d come here earlier, he said, for breakfast, and it had seemed like a nice place. It wasn’t clear whether he wanted me to sit down with him or not. In fact he had phrased it so carefully that I got the impression inclusion was something he actually avoided. After that I observed him for this characteristic, and I noticed that when other people were making plans, Ryan would always say ‘I might come along later’ or ‘I might see you there’ rather than commit himself to a time and place. He would only tell you what he was doing after he’d done it. I met him by chance once in the street and noticed that his slicked-back hair was wet, so I had asked him outright where he’d been. He admitted he’d just swum at the Hilton hotel, which had a large outdoor pool, where he had posed as a guest and done forty lengths alongside Russian plutocrats and American businessmen and girls with surgically enhanced bodies. He had felt sure the pool attendants were watching him, but no one had dared interrogate him. How else were you meant to exercise, he wanted to know, in the middle of a traffic-choked city in forty degrees of heat?

  At the table he sat, like the other men, with his back to the wall so that his view was of the café and the street. I sat opposite him, and because he was all I could see I looked at him. Ryan was teaching alongside me at the summer school: from a distance he was a man of conventional sandy-coloured good looks, but close up there was something uneasy in his appearance, as though he had been put together out of unrelated elements, so that the different parts of him didn’t entirely go together. He had large white teeth which he kept always a little bared and a loose body poised somewhere between muscle and fat, but his head was small and narrow, with sparse, almost colourless hair that grew in spikes back from his forehead and colourless eyelashes that were hidden for now behind dark glasses. His eyebrows, however, were fierce and straight and black. When the waitress came he took the glasses off and I saw his eyes, two small bright blue chips in slightly reddened whites. The rims were red too, as though they were sore, or as though the sun had singed them. He asked the waitress if she had non-alcoholic beer and she leaned towards him with her hand cupped around her ear, not understanding. He picked up the menu and together they studied it.

  ‘Are any of these beers,’ he said slowly, running a tutelary finger down the list and glancing at her frequently, ‘non-alcoholic?’

  She leaned closer, scrutinising the place where his finger pointed, while his eyes fixed themselves on her face, which was young and beautiful, with long ringlets of hair on either side which she kept tucking behind her ears. Because he was pointing at something that wasn’t there her bewilderment was long-lasting, and in the end she said she would have to go and get her manager, at which point he closed the menu like a teacher finishing a lesson and said not to worry, he would just have an ordinary beer after all. This change of plan confused her further: the menu was opened again and the whole lesson repeated, and I found my attention straying to the people at other tables and out to the street, where cars passed and dogs lay in heaps of fur in the glare.

  ‘She served me this morning,’ Ryan said when the waitress had gone. ‘The same girl. They’re beautiful people, aren’t they? It’s a shame she didn’t have the beer, though. You can get that everywhere at home.’

  He said that he was seriously trying to cut down his drinking; the past year he’d basically been on a health kick, going to the gym every day and eating salad. He’d let things slide a bit when the kids were born, and anyway it was hard to be healthy in Ireland; the whole culture of the place militated against
it. In his youth in Tralee he was pretty seriously overweight, like a lot of the people there, including his parents and his older brother, who still regarded chips as one of their five a day. He’d had a number of allergies too, eczema and asthma, which no doubt weren’t helped by the family diet. As a child at school they’d had to wear shorts with knee-high woollen socks, and the socks would adhere horribly to his eczema. He still remembered peeling them off at bedtime and half the skin of his legs coming off with them. These days, of course, you’d rush your child off to a dermatologist or a homeopath, but then you were just left to get on with it. When he had breathing difficulties, his parents would put him out to sit in the car. As for the weight, he said, you rarely saw yourself with your clothes off, or anyone else without theirs for that matter. He remembered the feeling of estrangement from his own body, as it laboured in the damp, spore-ridden climate of the house; his clogged lungs and itchy skin, his veins full of sugar and fat, his wobbling flesh shrouded in uncomfortable clothing. As a teenager he was self-conscious and sedentary and avoided any physical exposure of himself. But then he spent a year in America, on a writing programme there, and had discovered that by effort of will he could make himself look completely different. There was a pool and a gym on campus, and food he had never even heard of – sprouts and wholegrains and soya – in the cafeteria; and not only that, he was surrounded by people for whom the notion of self-transformation was an article of faith. He picked it up almost overnight, the whole concept: he could decide how he wanted to be and then be it. There was no pre-ordination; that sense of the self as a destiny and a doom that had hung like a pall over his whole life could stay, he now realised, behind him in Ireland. On his first visit to the gym he saw a beautiful girl exercising on a machine while at the same time reading from a large book of philosophy that lay open on a stand in front of her, and he could hardly believe his own eyes. He discovered that all the machines in that gym had bookstands. This machine was called a step machine, and it simulated the action of walking upstairs: from then on he always used it, and always with a book open in front of him, for the image of that girl – who to his not inconsiderable disappointment he never saw again – had fixed itself in his head. Over the course of the year he must have ascended miles’ worth of stairs while remaining in one place, and that was the image he had internalised, not just of the girl but of the imaginary staircase itself, and of himself forever climbing it with a book dangled just in front of him like a carrot in front of a donkey. Climbing that staircase was the work he had to do to separate himself from the place from which he had come.

  It was more than just a stroke of luck, he said, that he happened to go to America: it was the defining episode of his life, and when he thought about what he would have been and what he would have done had that episode not occurred it frightened him in a way. It was his English tutor at college who told him about the writing programme and encouraged him to apply. By the time the letter came college was over and he was back in Tralee, living in his parents’ house and working at a chicken-processing plant, and having an affair with a woman much older than himself who had two kids he didn’t doubt she’d got him lined up to play father to. The letter said that he’d been offered a scholarship, on the basis of the writing sample he’d submitted, with a paid second year to follow if he wanted to earn himself a teaching qualification. Forty-eight hours later he was gone, taking a few books and the clothes he stood up in, on an airplane and leaving the British Isles for the first time in his life, and without a clue really where he was going, except that sitting above the clouds it appeared to be heaven.

  In fact it so happened, he said, that his older brother left for America at more or less the same time. He and his brother never had all that much to say to each other, and at the time he was barely aware of Kevin’s plans, but thinking about it now it was quite a coincidence, except that Kevin hadn’t had a stroke of luck to send him on his way. Instead he’d joined the US Marines, and probably at much the same time as Ryan was treading the step machine, Kevin was also shedding the flab of Tralee at boot camp. For all Ryan knew he might have been down the road, though America is a big place and it was unlikely. And of course the job involves a lot of travel, Ryan said, with apparent sincerity. By a further coincidence both brothers returned to Ireland three years later and met in their parents’ sitting room, both of them now fit and lean; Ryan with a teaching qualification, a book contract and a ballet-dancer girlfriend, and Kevin with a grotesquely tattooed body and a mental condition that meant his life would never again be his own. The imaginary staircase went down, it seemed, as well as up: Ryan and his brother were now effectively members of two different social classes, and while Ryan went off to Dublin to take up a university teaching post, Kevin returned to the damp bedroom of their childhood, where excepting the odd stay in mental institutions, he has remained ever since. The funny thing is, Ryan said, that their parents took no more pride in Ryan’s achievements than they accepted blame for Kevin’s collapse. They tried to get rid of Kevin and have him committed on a permanent basis, but he kept being sent back to them, the perennial bad penny. And yet they were also faintly scornful of Ryan, the writer and university lecturer, living now in a nice house in Dublin and about to marry, not the ballet dancer but an Irish girl, a college friend from the time before America. What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.

  His narrow blue eyes fixed themselves on the young waitress, who was approaching through the shade with our drinks.

  ‘Oh, run away with me,’ he said, as she leaned over him to place his glass on the table. I thought she must have heard him, but he had judged it precisely: her superb, statue-like countenance didn’t flicker. ‘What people,’ he said, still watching her while she walked away. He asked whether I was at all familiar with the country and I said that I had come here, to Athens, on a somewhat fateful holiday with my children three years earlier.

  ‘They’re beautiful people,’ he replied. After a while he said that he supposed it wasn’t all that hard to explain, when you considered the climate and the way of life, and of course the diet here. When you looked at the Irish you saw centuries of rain and rotten potatoes. He still had to fight it in himself, that feeling of contaminated flesh; it was so hard to feel clean in Ireland, the way he’d felt in America, or the way you felt here. I asked him why he had come back, after he finished his Masters, and he said there were a lot of reasons, though no one of them was particularly powerful. It was just that all together they amounted to enough to nudge him back. One of them, in fact, was the very thing he had liked most about America at first, which was the feeling that no one really came from anywhere. I mean obviously, he said, they had to have come from somewhere, but there wasn’t the same feeling of your home town waiting to claim you, that sense of pre-ordination that he had miraculously felt himself climbing clear of as he first rose above the clouds. His fellow students made much of his Irishness, he said: he found himself playing up to it, putting on the accent and all that, until he’d almost convinced himself that being Irish was an identity in itself. And after all, what other identity did he have? It frightened him a little, the idea of not coming from somewhere; he began to see himself as not cursed but blessed, began almost to rekindle that sense of pre-ordination, or at least to see it in a different light. And writing, the whole concept of transmuted pain – Ireland was the structure for that, his own past in Tralee was the structure for that. He suddenly felt he might not cope with the fundamental anonymity of America. To be perfectly honest, he wasn’t the most talented student on that programme – he had no problem admitting that – and one reason, he’d decided, was this same anonymity his peers had to grapple with and he didn’t. It made you a better writer, did it not, not having an identity to fall back on: you saw the world with less troubled eyes. And he was more Irish in America than he’d ever been at home.

  He began to see D
ublin as he used to see it in his mind’s eye as a schoolboy, with scholars on bicycles sailing like dark swans through the streets in their black robes. Might what he had seen all those years before be himself? A dark swan, gliding through the protected city, free within its walls; not the American version of freedom, big and flat and borderless as a prairie. He came back in a moderate blaze of glory, with his teaching job and his ballet dancer and his book contract. The ballet dancer went home six months later, and the book – a book of short stories, well received – remains his only published work. He and Nancy are still in touch: in fact, they talked on Facebook only the other day. She doesn’t dance any more – she’s become a psychotherapist, though to be honest she’s a little bit crazy herself. She lives with her mother in an apartment in New York City, and even though she’s forty years old it strikes Ryan that she is unchanged, that she is more or less exactly the same as she was at twenty-three. And there’s him with his wife and his kids and his house in Dublin, a different man in every way. Stunted, is what he sometimes thinks about her, though he knows it’s unkind. She’s always asking him if he’s written another book yet, and in a way he’d like to ask her in return – though of course he never would – whether she’s had a life yet.

  As for the stories, he still likes them, still picks them up and reads them now and then. They get reproduced every so often in anthologies; a little while ago his agent sold the rights to a publishing house in Albania. But in a way it’s like looking at old photographs of yourself. There comes a point at which the record needs to be updated, because you’ve shed too many links with what you were. He doesn’t quite know how it happened; all he knows is that he doesn’t recognise himself in those stories any more, though he remembers the bursting feeling of writing them, something in himself massing and pushing irresistibly to be born. He hasn’t had that feeling since; he almost thinks that to remain a writer he’d have to become one all over again, when he might just as easily become an astronaut, or a farmer. It’s as if he can’t quite remember what drove him into words in the first place, all those years before, yet words are what he still deals in. I suppose it’s a bit like marriage, he said. You build a whole structure on a period of intensity that’s never repeated. It’s the basis of your faith and sometimes you doubt it, but you never renounce it because too much of your life stands on that ground. Though the temptation can be extreme, he added, as the young waitress glided past our table. I must have looked disapproving, because he said: