Rachel Cusk - The Temporary

‘Why’s that?’ said Ralph. He felt peculiarly unmoved, and it surprised him to notice that his heart was thudding.

‘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.