Rachel Cusk - The Temporary

Approaching his flat in the failing light a sudden prophetic fear passed over him, as if something were about to happen, and in the next moment he saw a figure standing outside his front door. He couldn’t see her eyes but he knew from the erectness of her head that she had seen him. He slowed his steps while his thoughts, busy with the provision of sedatives, instead struggled to manufacture panic. What was she doing here? He was close enough now to see her face, and felt himself so simultaneously drawn and repelled that he stopped altogether, wondering if he could find another avenue which might carry him through what at that moment seemed impossible to bear.

‘Don’t worry,’ she called out, seeing him halt. ‘I only want to get my things.’

Her words were lobbed awkwardly towards him, and hearing them he knew that she had selected them before he had even arrived. He wondered what else she planned to say to him, and the thought made him want to grip her shoulders and shake her until it all fell clattering out of her mouth to the pavement.

‘Oh.’ He walked carefully past her to the door and took out his keys. His hands were trembling. ‘Come in, then.’

In the stronger light of the hall he risked a glance at her as she came in behind him. Seeing her face he felt as if he had never been away from her, as if he had woken from a forgetful sleep and felt the memory of her drop like a weight through his empty spaces. It was a moment before he realized that she looked awful, quite unrecognizable, and it was in his mouth to ask her what was wrong before remembering that this was how things always began between them.

‘I’ll just let you get on with it, shall I?’ he said, opening the inner door to his flat.

She didn’t answer, but he saw with despair from the slight shrug of her shoulders that she still wanted to talk to him, to prise reactions from him like teeth. The gesture reminded him of his relation to her, her strange significance which was so surprisingly easy to forget when she was there before him. The pregnancy seemed not to be a part of her physical presence — if only he could see into her, look through her walls just once as if they were made of glass! — although now, noticing her curious deterioration, he wondered if this were its manifestation: something gnawing malignly at her insides, the proud extension of his own self, feeding, growing, planning its escape. Her face was deflated, the skin collapsed like a tent on the narrow ridges of her bones, and the hollows of her eyes were painted with shadows. He reminded himself that their poetry was a delusion, a limerick which he must not hear, and he turned away from her and walked into the sitting-room. Moments later he heard her in the bathroom, opening cabinets. He sat on the sofa, rigid with the tension of her presence. In a few minutes she would be gone. He desperately wanted a drink, but he knew he would not sustain his detachment if he made one. He would offer her one too, and she would jam her foot through the crack of his kindness and force herself in. He closed his eyes for a minute and when he opened them again she was there, standing in the doorway.

‘That was quick,’ he said stupidly, rubbing his eyes.

‘There wasn’t much.’

She watched him as a thick silence spread over the room. He looked down, unable to bear her gaze, while a polite impulse to make conversation fought in his chest.

‘So that’s it, then!’ he burst out finally, meeting her eyes.

‘Oh, I’ll be gone soon,’ she said acerbically, for once understanding him at the very moment in which he wished to be most opaque. ‘I just wanted to tell you something I think you should know.’

‘And what’s that?’

He caught the split second of her hesitation, and knew suddenly that he had been wrong, that she hadn’t even thought of what she was going to say until that moment.

‘I’m going to keep the baby,’ she said, throwing his gaze back at him defiantly. ‘I’ve decided.’

Ralph found that he could not take his eyes from her, although a fierce desire to pound his own head with his fists had gripped him. He felt the tide of confusion begin to rise again, the great gorge of their debris swilling on its surface, and he held his breath.

‘Well?’ she said. ‘Don’t you have anything to say?’

‘No,’ he said. His voice was a whimper and he put his head in his hands.

‘Why not? You have to say something. I’ve said I’m going to keep the baby, and you—’

‘What baby?’ He heard the shout come from him, and then the slam of his hand on the coffee table. The room capsized in an angry blur. ‘It’s not a bloody baby, for God’s sake! It’s not a baby!’ He wondered what sounds would fall from his lips if he ceased to restrain them with words, what grunts and howls and strange language. He felt an eruption at his eyes, his face growing messy. ‘I don’t love you, do you understand? I–I barely know you, I don’t actually know who you are!’ A drop of mirthless laughter spilled from his mouth. ‘Please leave me alone. Do you hear? Leave me alone. ’

He hadn’t been looking at her but he sensed her suddenly come at him, and then felt the dark flaps of her coat baffling around his head. He realized to his astonishment that she was hitting him with her fists and he put out his arms to protect himself.

‘How dare you?’ she panted, drawing back. ‘How dare you speak to me like that? I know about you!’ Her voice hauled itself higher on a new rope of initiative. ‘I know all about you!’

‘What do you know?’ he spat back, laughing. ‘You don’t know anything about me at all!’

‘Yes I do!’ she said triumphantly, folding her arms. ‘I know what you are — you’re a fake!’ She waited, watching him, and when he didn’t do anything she said it again. ‘You’re a fake! You act all superior and high and mighty, but you’re not, are you? Oh, I’ve found out everything!’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ said Ralph.

He felt all at once calm again. He wondered if she had actually lost her mind, but then realized that he was merely seeing more clearly into it: its accumulation of junk, its piles of magazines from whose covers trapped, vacant beauties stared, its reels of bad films, its numbing hours of television; all these broken, abandoned versions of reality strangling her soil, clogging her consciousness. She lived beneath a dictatorship of nonsense; she imitated that which itself was only an imitation, and try as he might to search for her in this hall of mirrors, he would find time and again only comical, distorted reflections of himself. The worst of it was that, despite everything, he saw she had been capable of dragging him down with her; for every soft, silly thing she threw at him concealed a sharp rock of implication, the fact that he himself had chosen her.

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Her voice sung with affected mimickry. ‘Oh, very realistic. Is that what they taught you at your posh school, then?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Ralph gaily, suddenly finding the whole exchange hilarious.

‘It’s not how your parents talked, though, is it?’

‘I shouldn’t have thought so,’ he replied, pausing with surprise. ‘I don’t really remember. Look, is that what this is all about? I hardly think it matters how my parents spoke.’

‘You lied to me!’ she shouted. Her fingers stiffened into fists and her face, hanging above him, was a lamp of anger. He saw that she was incensed, quite genuinely, and realized that she had expected him to be ashamed. ‘All this time you’ve been looking down your nose at me, acting like I’m not good enough, and it’s me who should feel sorry for you !’