Rachel Cusk - In the Fold

‘Where have you been?’ I said. I said it with lively curiosity rather than accusatory grimness, but there was only so much camouflage the words themselves would accept.

‘At mum and dad’s,’ she replied, somewhat stonily. She didn’t say anything else. Again I had the sense of two unambiguous meanings combined to make a force of highly systematised confusion. This time it appeared to me as the coloured tubes of copper filament, one live, one neutral, that lie side by side in the white plastic vein of an electric flex. Either she had gone to her parents as a place of refuge from me; or she had gone there and been made unhappy by them. Or both: her refusal to elaborate left the question charged.

‘Did they give you something to eat?’ I said.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘They were just in a complete state.’

‘What about?’

There was a second of tinny silence.

‘Mum found a lump on her breast. Or rather, dad found it, as he kept telling everyone. I’m sure it’ll turn out to be nothing.’

‘When was this?’

There was another pause. I heard Rebecca take a drink of something and swallow.

‘This morning. They went down to the hospital and had some tests done on it.’

‘When will they get the results?’

‘I don’t know. A few days, I think. I’m sure it will be nothing.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ I said.

‘I’m sure it will be nothing,’ said Rebecca again. ‘Anyway, they’ve gone completely wild over it. They’ve really gone for the amateur dramatics. There’s no, you know, let’s wait and see what the test says. Dad won’t let her out of his sight — he even followed her to the toilet and stood there talking to her through the door. They sat there all evening holding hands as though mum had just been told she’d got a week to live. What’s really annoying,’ she continued, ‘is that dad’s already wanting to scale things down at the gallery so that he can look after her. He’s even saying he wants to cancel Niven’s show.’

‘That’s a shame,’ I said.

‘I told him, you know, wait until we’ve actually got a diagnosis before you start cancelling things! Whatever happened to, you know, positive visualisation?’

‘I’m sure it won’t come to that.’

‘Oh, they’re still in the dramatic phase, you know, big statements, big gestures, the whole roadshow. But that’s exactly when they can decide to make an example of someone. It’s right when they’re in the middle of an emotional trip that they suddenly need something to bite on, you know, just to show that they’re not all talk. What I hate,’ she continued, ‘is the fact that they think their world is more real than anyone else’s. I know we all think that in a way, but with them it’s all about other people. It’s in being witnessed that their life becomes real for them. Have you ever noticed,’ she said, ‘how they’re always losing friends and making new ones? Everywhere they go they find more people. You turn your back for a second and they’ve collared someone else and started telling them about their sex life. Then when they’ve done that they tell them about your sex life. Then eventually everyone gets into the habit of this frankness thing and they all start to behave badly, and then they fall out. People like that shouldn’t have children. All they want children for is so that they can have more material, more life, more things to talk about, more actors in their pathetic domestic drama —’

‘I think you’re being a little hard on them.’

‘It’s no wonder that none of us have had children of our own,’ said Rebecca. ‘We know what they’ll be made into — victims, food for the predators!’

‘Except you, of course,’ I said.

‘What’s that?’

‘You. You’ve had a child.’

Rebecca gave a strange little laugh.

‘I was thinking about something else,’ she said vaguely. ‘Anyway, they’re sort of down on Niven at the moment.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, something to do with dad giving him money to get something for him and him not getting it and not giving dad the money back. It was grass, I bet. They make a big point of never mentioning drugs in front of me. They think it atones for something.’

I said nothing. I steadily extended my silence forwards like a hydraulic arm with which I intended to push Rebecca over the precipice of enquiry.

‘How are you, anyway?’ she finally said.

Now that she’d asked, I found that I didn’t want to tell her anything about myself. I found myself thinking about Ali’s lump, identifying with it almost, with the lump itself. Wrongly, I suppose, I attributed to it qualities of vulnerability that I felt myself in that moment to share. I realised presently that it was the prospect of its excision that caused me to feel this.

‘I miss you,’ said Rebecca.

Still I did not speak. A little surge of adrenalin caused my heart to thump. This did not signify excitement exactly, more a feeling of fear. I did not in that instant make a native connection between Rebecca’s missing me and the possibility of mercy or benevolence or love. It seemed, rather, to hint at the possibility of violence.

‘Though I think it’s good,’ she continued, ‘for us to be apart.’

‘Do you?’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ she said. ‘It was what you always used to say, that the loosest ties are the strongest.’

‘I never said that.’

‘You’ve always said,’ reiterated Rebecca, ‘that we should lead more separate lives. I can hear you saying it now.’

‘I didn’t mean that we shouldn’t see each other.’

‘Letting go has been the hardest thing for me.’

‘I never said anything about letting go! I only meant that we shouldn’t hold each other responsible for all our problems.’

‘I’ve been very angry with you, Michael, really angry, but I’ve adored you too. Never forget that. And you’re also the father of my child. You always will be.’

‘I only meant that there’s a limit to how much you can relate to another person. Beyond a certain point it just becomes chaos — chaos!’

I found that my skin had drawn very tight around the top of my head. This was an effect Rebecca could have on me.

‘You’re afraid of passion, Michael. You’re afraid of blood on the floor. But the thing is, I’ve always been a very passionate person and if you won’t allow me to express it then you know I’ll just turn on you. I’ll turn on you.’

In a way, I admired her for this kind of talk. Even when I’d listened, agonised, to her regaling that terrified boy with it in the pub, I felt too a sort of anarchic thrill at her lack of shame. To me, these fits of self-description were the closest she came to a creative act. It was herself she was creating, yet I felt sure that her state while she did it was not so distant from that which she yearned to attain, in which she would find herself enabled to make something that could actually stand apart from her.

‘All my life,’ she was saying now, ‘all my life I’ve been looking for something straight and fixed, something dependable, something I could pour myself into that would hold me.’

I guessed she was going to say that I was that thing.

‘And you were it, Michael. You were that vessel. You said to me, come on, I’ll hold you. I’ll contain you. I’ll give you routine and stability. I’ll give you a home, I’ll give you a baby if you want one. But don’t think that you can grow. Don’t think that you can move, or change. Because if you do I’ll crack. My nice strong walls can’t take pressure from the inside. I’ll crack and I’ll break and in the end I’ll shatter.’

‘ You will?’ I said, confused.