Rachel Cusk - The Bradshaw Variations

Leo is in the fast lane of the A23 when Susie tells him to pull over, right now. She has her hand over her mouth. In the lay-by she leans out of the car door and retches over the tarmac. Juggernauts thunder past, one after another. The Vauxhall rocks with the vibrations. In the back seat, Justin and Madeleine are silent.

‘That’s the worst,’ Susie gasps, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Her long scarlet fingernails flash against her cheek, a blood-coloured bouquet. ‘When nothing comes up.’

An uprush of air pressure slams into the side of the car and is sucked instantly back. They rock from side to side: for a few seconds they are in the lee of a monster, engulfed in the roaring, churning wheels, the crazily flapping tarpaulins.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Leo says nervously. ‘Those things come so fucking close.’

Susie flips down the passenger mirror, reapplies her lipstick. She turns around in her seat, scanning the road through the back window.

‘I’ll tell you when,’ she says.

They stop twice more before they get there. On the winding B-road Susie groans and clutches her stomach. The cows look up at them from the fields as they pass. A mile from Little Wickham there are crows hopping around a tattered carcass in the middle of the road. Leo stops, blares his horn. They are picking at the bloodied flesh and fur, unheeding. He blares again, revs the engine. He can see it was a rabbit. He can see a torn ear, a crushed fragment of skull.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ he says. He realises he is trembling. ‘Leave the bloody thing alone.’

Reluctantly they lift themselves away on their black wings and settle on the verge, their beaks engorged. Susie puts her hand on his knee. She is all right now. She keeps her hand there, firm.

‘Nearly there,’ she says.

It is a grey day, gusty, the bare trees twitching and irritable, the countryside lying in unconscious mounds of rough vegetation. Ma is on the front lawn when they pull up the drive. She is wearing a funny hat, a man’s jacket, thick socks that she’s tucked her trousers into.

‘Oh, hello!’ she says, through the car window.

She sounds surprised. Leo and Susie joke about it, the way his parents always seem surprised to see him, despite the fact the visit has been arranged: not a pleasant surprise and not a shock either, just a mild lack of expectation, like when you’ve forgotten something and it turns up again. There’s an imitation Susie does, lifting one eyebrow very slightly, widening her eyes, the hint of a query in the voice. Oh, hello? She gets it exactly.

His mother’s clothes say it all. She isn’t putting herself out, put it that way.

‘Leo,’ she says, when he gets out of the car. She hugs him. He can feel her gnarled vigorous body through the clothes, her eternal unstoppable sufficiency. ‘And Susie.’ Susie gets a hug too. Her high heels are sinking into the grass.

‘Get you, darling,’ Susie says, fingering the man’s jacket, the crumpled old hat. ‘Get your fashionable androgynous look.’

Ma screeches with laughter, delighted. Susie knows how to handle her, has always known. Justin and Madeleine are banging at the car windows.

‘Oh dear, shall we let them out?’ Ma says.

‘Let’s leave them there,’ Susie says. ‘I could do with a day off. We can toss them in a bag of crisps at lunchtime.’

Ma screeches again. Susie hams it up, her bad mother act, and Ma soaks up every last drop of it. She wants to be in the club, the gang.

‘Don’t!’ she says. ‘I was forever locking mine in the car — I’d go off and forget about them for hours!’

At home Susie does an imitation of that too. Once I didn’t see Leo for seven years! I completely forgot about him!

‘Thomas here?’ Leo says.

‘Not yet. I can’t think where they’ve got to — they phoned hours ago to say they were leaving. And the others aren’t coming at all because Howard’s unwell. I’ve got this great big joint of beef and at the moment only us to eat it.’

It’s another thing, the way after fifteen years she doesn’t seem to know that he and Susie are vegetarians.

‘Oh well,’ he says, because she makes it sound as though it isn’t enough to have him there, as though without Howard and Thomas the day might as well be cancelled, because she has so many other things she needs to be getting on with. His father is coming out of the house, peering around like a policeman investigating a disturbance. He sees Leo and Susie, changes his expression to one of recognition. Leo wonders how long he waited inside before coming out. He imagines him pressed against the wall beside the curtains, his eyes screwed up, trying to see through the crack.

Susie is getting the children out of the car, fussing over them now, straightening their clothes. He shakes his father’s hand.

‘Nice to see you,’ his father says.

Inside the house there is the old darkness, the old smells. Flossie is in her basket. The clock in the hall ticks. The house is cold. The scarred wooden floor, the hunting prints with their unfunny antique humour, the faded William Morris wallpaper full of strange, devouring forms: it is more than familiar, it is thick with subconscious life, like a forest in a fairy tale. The house is haunted, Leo knows it is. Only once, when he was seventeen, he spent the night here alone. Something said his name, sat on the bed. He had been asleep and the feeling of a weight on the bed woke him. It made it worse, to have been asleep. It is worse to go into something unconscious. He shouted at it to go away, went all round the house turning the lights on and shouting. To shout at nothing is to break some contract with yourself, with reality. Thinking about it now, he sees that his life has been punctuated by such incidents. Reality is personal too. He’s had to break it to advance himself, to go forward. It’s the only way he can get to the place where he feels comfortable.

‘Work going well?’ his father says. ‘Any new commissions recently?’

‘It’s all right,’ Leo says. ‘It’s much the same.’

He doesn’t know where Dads has got hold of this commissions idea. Leo is a copywriter. He writes copy for the same agency he has always written for. Yet every time he sees his father he starts talking about commissions. It sounds like an army word: it isn’t a word Leo has ever applied to himself. He supposes it’s his father’s way of rationalising the troublesome fact that Leo is not an employee. He is freelance, a mercenary, a soldier of fortune. One day he’ll receive his commission and off he’ll go into the sunset.

‘How about you?’ he says. ‘How is everything?’

‘All right.’

There is a silence. Leo looks around for Susie, but she isn’t there. He needs her. He doesn’t know what to say. He feels the silence consuming him, swallowing him up.

‘How’s the garden?’ he says.

His father looks mildly at him with his cold eyes. He wears a cravat at his throat. His snow-white hair is plastered into place.

‘Not much happening in the garden at this time of year. Just some pruning, cutting back for winter. We’re thinking about thinning out some of those trees over by the garage. The roots are starting to undermine the foundations.’

‘Really?’ Leo says.

‘The problem is that your mother won’t hear of any of them being cut down. The tree surgeon came out to explain it to her, but he couldn’t seem to make her understand. We rather wasted his afternoon, I’m afraid. I wouldn’t be surprised if he took us off his list, which would be a pity.’

Justin and Madeleine are petting Flossie in her basket. She snaps her jaws a little, rolls over. They tickle her coarse old belly and she lies back, stiff with pleasure on her filthy blanket. Leo looks at their soft hair, their new fresh skin, feels the tension of love for them, as though in this place his love were illicit.