Rachel Cusk - The Temporary

‘Well, it’s all in the mind, anyway,’ said Janice briskly. ‘Everything that happens in your body is under your control. I mean, maybe you’re feeling that you want a bit more attention, Francine, or a bit more security, and this is your body’s way of telling you. You have to listen to it. Just try and relax. Try and visualize’ — she gestured dramatically with her hands — ‘visualize the blood coming, pouring out. I can teach you some meditation techniques. They’re really effective.’

Francine gleaned some comfort from Janice’s advice, and as her inability to visualize the torrent of reassurance which any day must visit her was matched by a curious blank shielding her efforts to foresee what would happen if it didn’t, a neutral mood settled upon her which permitted several days to pass without much trouble. It was surprisingly easy to forget the threat which shadowed her. Had she seen Ralph it might have taken on a clearer, more imminent form, but a faintly sinister calm beset her whenever she thought of calling him and it barely troubled her to notice that he did not interrupt her silence. She had seldom been less conscious, and had a cure for anxiety been what was required Francine felt she had surely effected it.

It was only when she was walking home from the Tube station on Thursday night, towards one of the many suddenly empty evenings she had lately endured, that a piercing sense of her own loneliness visited her and opened with it the tightly barred gates of fear. An overcast sky understudied a precipitant darkness, and a harrying wind struck up while she walked, pulling at her clothes as if in an effort to attract her attention to a nearby danger. As she passed the petrified estate which silently crowded the road, large drops of rain began to hurl themselves at her like spit, and thus besieged Francine felt a bloated wave of self-pity surge forcefully through her and brim at her eyes. In the vacuum which followed it, an irresolvable panic construed itself, as if she had been caught in the sights of a weapon. The troubled sky puppeted the drama of her exposure, and for the first time Francine felt herself to be without shelter, cornered by facts she could not outwit. At lunch-time, still in her mood of slippery certainty, she had gone to a pharmacy and bought a small kit, the allure of whose pastel-packaged chemistry had at the time appealed to her as gentle. Now, with it unopened in her bag, it seemed impossible that so slight a device could still the cauldron of terror which had begun to boil within her.

When she got home, however, her tranquillity resurfaced from the tumult of her fears and she felt the tide of inevitability driven back once more by the magic of possibilities. She laid her bag carelessly on the kitchen table and went to run a bath. Submerged in warm water, she felt rapt in ignorance, and the elasticity of unknowing gave her a momentary sense of returned power. For a while she felt she could exist for ever in the current void, could make it habitable enough, but as the water cooled the merciless progress of time dragged her once more in its wake. She delayed her ministrations, drifting aimlessly to the bedroom and then the sitting-room in a vague pretence of occupation, but when finally she came to open the packet she felt raw and wet with fright. The execution of the test constituted a mild distraction from itself, and as Francine performed it she found herself forgetting the pressing intimacy of its conclusions. The instructions informed her that the interval of its diagnosis might be lengthy, and so when it began immediately to metamorphose before her eyes, she found herself unprepared for the translation of its results. Its filter had turned a bright and unmistakable pink, and her heart thudded like a drum as she scanned the leaflet for meaning. For a moment she could make no sense of it, and when finally she located the interpretation a malfunction of understanding caused the words to inform her that the test had been negative. Seconds later, reading it again, she gained the opposite impression. A terrible stupidity webbed her thoughts, as sticky as tar. She breathed deeply, trying to regain control over the insurrection of her powers of comprehension, and then allowed her eyes to travel slowly along the lines, enacting every sentence. The colour pink indicated that she was pregnant. She considered this, trying to find some concrete quality in the words which might hold down their meaning. They slipped and rose like balloons before her. She repeated them aloud, and it was then that a cold blade of acceptance penetrated her heart. She threw the leaflet away and wrapped the kit in the paper bag from the pharmacy. In her room, she opened a drawer and placed the bag in it.

Janice was out and had not said when she would be back. Francine went to the sitting-room and sat down, waiting for some direction to indicate where the rest of the evening might go. Once or twice she thought she would turn on the television or open a magazine, but the flicker of energy generated by the idea was inadequate to make her body perform it. Besides, the time was passing quite quickly as it was, and before long she would be able to go to bed. After a while, she had an odd sensation of looking at herself sitting on the sofa as if she were somebody else on the other side of the room. The image was unpleasant and she struck about, trying to find something on which she could fix her eyes. Janice kept a poster on the sitting-room wall, a blown-up photograph of a chimpanzee, and Francine looked at it for what seemed like the first time. Its hairy eyes held her until she was overpowered and for a while she disappeared, absorbed into its kindly, old man’s face. An explosion of exhaust from the road startled her and she wondered if she had been sleeping. She looked at her watch. It was ten o’clock. She picked up the telephone and dialled Ralph’s number.

‘Oi, it’s Friday night!’ called Neil from the door of the office. ‘Haven’t you got a home to go to, mate?’

He was wearing an overcoat which had a strip of fur around the collar. Its attempted projection of prosperity had somehow mutinied to make Neil look even shiftier than usual and Ralph felt a smile pull at his lips.

‘Soon,’ he said. ‘I’m going soon. I just want to finish something.’

‘Suit yourself,’ said Neil.

He waved his hand as if across a great distance and stepped awkwardly back into the corridor while still facing the room, as though worried that some physical attack might be launched on him if he turned his back, to complement the psychological assault already being perpetrated. Ralph stretched pleasantly and looked at his watch. It was seven o’clock, later than either he or Neil had ever stayed before. Although he had clearly finished his day’s work Neil had lingered stolidly in what Ralph understood to be the spirit of competition, shielding with a clumsy, subversive hand the newspaper he was reading at his desk, as innocent and obvious as a child. From the corner of his eye Ralph had seen the broad blank of Neil’s face turn regularly on its axis in nervous observation and had rather enjoyed the clockwork motion with which he looked, paused, and then lifted his wrist to glance incomprehendingly at his watch. Finally, with a raucous and guttural clearing of the throat, Neil had risen from his desk in defeat. After he had gone Ralph felt rather guilty at keeping him, for in truth he didn’t have much to do and in any case had no interest in making a show of his industry. He was merely compelled by a new access of energy which, although it had been generated to drive a specific part of his life into action, seemed also to infuse the rest of it with secondary force.

In the days since his afternoon with Stephen a new resolve had taken him in its grip, and he felt an earnest zeal at the thought of purging shadowy corners of the habits which had been allowed to gather there unseen. In the flurry of his activity he had not yet had pause to consider what actually had been achieved by it, and although he dimly knew that the most disorderly part of himself remained untackled, the atmosphere of regeneration often gave him the mistaken impression that the opposite was true. Francine’s disappearance over the recent days deepened his sense of liberation, and a residual cowardice suggested to him that he might be spared a detailed confrontation with her merely by upholding his end of the silence.