Rachel Cusk - The Temporary

‘I didn’t know I’d have to go to bed,’ said Francine, panic beginning to struggle in her again at the sight of the ward.

‘Oh, it’s not for long,’ said the nurse. ‘We’ve just got to give you a tiny injection, and afterwards you’ll want time to wake up. Just slip your clothes off for me now behind this curtain. There’s a robe hanging beside the bed.’

She manoeuvred Francine into a cubicle and then drew a flowered curtain briskly around her. Francine took off her jacket. She had only been in hospital once before, for her appendix, when she was a child. She remembered her mother stroking her forehead, her father nervous at the foot of the bed, jumping out of the doctor’s way. A sharp consciousness of her loneliness pricked her, and then she felt something else, something heavier. She wished Janice had come, saw her huddled beneath the bedclothes, her voice angry. The thought of not liking Janice made her panic. She needed her. She had said they would do it together. Quickly she took off the rest of her clothes and was surprised by the sight of her body in the white light. It looked mottled and bumpy with gooseflesh, and the purple tunnels of her veins seemed alarmingly close to the skin. She saw the spread of her hips, the pouch of her stomach, and realized that she had put on weight.

‘Knock, knock!’ said the nurse brightly, fiddling with the curtain. ‘Can I come in?’

‘Yes,’ said Francine, putting on the white cotton robe. It came down to her knees and fastened at the back. It looked like something a prisoner might wear, or a patient in a mental hospital.

‘All right? Just pop yourself on the bed.’

The nurse waited until Francine had clumsily mounted the bed and then sat down beside her. She was middle-aged, her face a creased history of smiles.

‘Am I right in thinking you haven’t anyone coming to collect you?’ she said, leaning forward confidentially.

‘Yes.’

‘The father couldn’t come?’

For a moment Francine couldn’t think of who she was talking about, and then realized it was Ralph.

‘He doesn’t know I’m here.’

The words crystallized something in her, a sudden crust forming around her tenderness and then covering it completely. She felt herself harden and glimpsed a person she could be.

‘I see.’ The nurse was impassive, looking at her clipboard. ‘And what arrangements have you made for getting home?’

‘I’ll take the bus.’

‘We usually recommend a taxi for afterwards, dear, just in case you’re not feeling too well. I can arrange one for you if you like.’

‘I don’t have enough money.’

The nurse turned a face full of sympathy towards her and Francine met her eyes, repelling the humiliation she offered. She looked surprised and drew her eyebrows together in an irritated, despairing point.

‘Right, well it’s up to you, of course. We did send you these details, and it’s up to you if you ignore our advice. It’s your decision.’ She stood up. ‘The doctor will be with you in a minute.’

*

The ceiling was rushing over her, its long, luminous tubes speeding and then flashing past as if she were flying. A pair of doors appeared ahead and she narrowed her eyes as the trolley shot towards their grim, closed lips with uncontainable velocity. They flew open just in time, like a fairground ride, and her limp body, warm beneath its blanket, swept through.

‘There in a minute, love,’ said a man’s voice above her.

She wanted it never to end, their fantastical journey, the trundling excitement of motion, the trolley to which she was strapped and secured, tiny now, her thoughts a bowl of bliss. She might stay here for ever, injected and looked after, rushed from place to place in her snug bed by green-clad men with kind faces. She closed her eyes, her body melting with the vibration of wheels, and when the vibration stopped she opened them again. She was in a room where everything was still. A crowd of people stood above her, their faces a ring of masked moons.

‘All right, Francine,’ said a woman’s voice. She couldn’t tell which face it was that spoke. ‘We’re just going to put you to sleep now.’

Someone clasped her fingers. One of the faces leaned towards her, a man’s face, his eyes large and frightening as an owl’s above his mask.

‘Ralph?’

‘Don’t struggle now, Francine. We’re just putting something in your hand.’

She felt a pressure on the back of her hand and seconds later pain filtered through the warm mist of her body. A dark tide of fear lapped at her and suddenly she was alone at its shore. She was alone. Where had everybody gone?

‘Francine?’

Everything would be all right. It would only be temporary, just for a while. There was nothing to worry about. Her cheeks were wet. Was she crying? Why was she crying?

‘Can you count to ten for us, Francine? See if you can count.’

Something unfurled, beat against her lazy walls. A flash of terror mired. Too late.

‘Francine? Come on, one, two—’

‘One … two …’

Ralph’s face, a bitter taste on the tongue of the ravenous dark.

Ralph left the Tube station and turned towards home, swinging his jacket over his shoulder so that it hung from the peg of his finger down his back. The evening was as light and warm as an afternoon, holiday weather, and the joyful consciousness of summer burst in on him suddenly like a revelling crowd and swept him up in its ebullience. He had experienced several such explosions of silent happiness lately, without ever growing accustomed to the mute flash of their radiance. He would feel each glittering bloom with wonder, fearing that it would be the last; but they were delicate, responsive things, and could be triggered merely by a thought or the lightest survey of his circumstances. He would only have to look at his desk, for example, the sleek telephone crouching in service, the console dignified as a butler, the friendly scatter of pens or the brimming boat of his tray, to feel warm with good fortune; and a broader glance at the pensive, lovely faces of his colleagues — Mark, Richard, and Angela, whose desks formed a firm, efficient platform with his own — their mouths sweet and unconscious with concentration but ready to erupt into laughter at the slightest shared hilarity, would almost stupefy him with pleasure.

His briefcase was heavy in his hand, but he swung its pendulum back and forth in ungrudging appreciation of its weightiness. He had brought some work home with him from the office, although he wouldn’t have time to do very much before the party. He liked to have it with him, in any case, to feel the daily accretion of his importance, the newly dense portion of his responsibility. When he had first started his job, he had felt such disbelief in the evenings away from it that he had begun to bring his briefcase home merely as proof to stay the dreamlike recession of his days. By the time his position fitted him, so comfortably that he could hardly remember its first stiffness, he had realized that working at home immersed him more deeply in the themes of the office, meaning that his grasp of them the next day was rather better than that of Mark and the others, and he made the furtive, regular execution of it a policy. He had been singled out for praise once or twice and felt his appetite for success increase.

The sun began its downward cant over the High Street and he forced briskness upon himself as he moved through the golden haze of its benediction, not wanting to be the grateful witness of beauty but its rightful and slightly indifferent recipient. He would walk to the party later. It was at Angela’s house — not far from where he lived, he had been gratified to discover, her sophisticated proximity sanctioning his own choice of the area anew — and quite a few people from the office had said they would be there. There would be other people too, of course, people he didn’t know. He waited for the habitual tremor of anxiety at the thought of their unfamiliarity, their slick, bored faces before him, but it didn’t come. Instead, he saw himself saying that he worked in television, with Angela actually, and watched their expressions flower with admiration and envy, or perhaps relax in a more companionable recognition as aloofness was dispelled. He wondered if he would ever tire of it, this fantastical self he could produce from his pocket like a jewel to murmurs of appreciation. It still amazed him to think of how completely, how magically, he had been transformed, plucked from his ignominy by a strong celestial hand, removed from everything he now realized he had hated and given what he now realized he had longed for, as if it was a gift!