Rachel Cusk - The Bradshaw Variations

The clock ticks steadily on the bedside table. After a while, Thomas goes back to sleep.

For the forty-five minutes that the doctor is late for the appointment, Howard thinks he is going to die.

The nurse is there, moving around the room. The sky at the third-floor hospital window is blank. Her white form glimmers: it creases and unfolds as she bends and straightens, nodding in the light like a white flower.

‘Would you like anything?’ she says. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

Her face comes near. It is painted: her youth is under the paint, as though some great sorrow has compelled her to inter it and don her painted death-mask.

‘Yes, please,’ he whispers. ‘Tea would be very nice.’

She goes away. Then she is there again: he hears the teacup rattling in its saucer. When she puts it in front of him he sees her pale forearm. There is a mark on it the size and shape of a coin. It is dark red, livid, like the mark of a brand on her bland flawless skin.

‘You’ve burnt yourself,’ he says.

‘I did it with the iron,’ she says. ‘That was silly, wasn’t it?’

He imagines her ironing, piles of white sheets, her nurse’s uniform. He sees the deadly steel tip nosing its way through the whiteness. It is terrible, the thought of her soft skin.

‘Please be careful,’ he says. ‘You must take care of yourself. We should all take more care of ourselves.’

She moves about, tidying, her eyes gently lowered. There is paint on the lids.

‘The doctor won’t be long,’ she says.

Howard watches the clock on the doctor’s wall. The second hand lurches trembling around the face. Claudia is parking the car. She dropped him at the front, not knowing they would bring him up here. He sees now that they should have stayed together. He sees that it is a trap. He has been lured from his family, his house, his car, his wife, by a trickster who has waited all this time, who waited by his cot and by his childhood bed, waited through the years in doorways and stations and city streets, in fields and on foreign beaches, in hallways and hotels and the passenger seats of cars; and lately, waited in the darkness of the garden, beneath the apple tree, for Howard to be alone. Claudia waved through the glass as she drove away. He remembers how confusing it was to be standing by himself in the grey entrance area. He was born in this hospital. It was as though Claudia had returned him here to be reabsorbed; as though she had driven away with his name, his identity, his actual life, and left his casing, his body, here, from whence it had come, like an empty bottle being returned to the brewery.

The door opens.

‘Mr Bradshaw?’

A man comes in. He is wearing a suit. There is a silvery sheen on the cloth that makes him seem not entirely real. Howard is afraid. The unreality of this man — he is young, brown-haired, has a harmless face — suddenly terrifies him. The man shakes his hand. He is like a game-show host shaking the hand of the winning contestant. Howard knows that anything could happen, anything at all.

‘I’ve got the results of your biopsy here. There was a, ah, dark area on the right lung that was causing some concern, is that right?’

He frowns, wrinkles his brow. He scrutinises his notes.

‘That’s right,’ Howard says.

‘Well,’ the man says, ‘I have to say that I don’t quite see what all the fuss was about.’

‘Really?’ Howard says.

‘There’s obviously been a touch of pneumonia on that side, but that’s not the end of the world, is it?’

‘No,’ Howard says.

‘Is it?’ the man repeats, widening his eyes and laughing.

‘No,’ Howard says, laughing too.

‘It’s rather a case of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Isn’t it?’

‘I suppose it is,’ Howard says.

‘Bed rest, yes,’ the man says, wagging his finger. ‘But a biopsy — whoa there!’

He slaps his knees and laughs again, and Howard laughs too, though he feels a certain consternation at what he has discovered here at the milled edge of life, the lunatics and incompetents in charge of the machinery.

‘Bed rest,’ he says, rising unsteadily from his chair. ‘That’s all?’

‘And plenty of fluids. Preferably non-alcoholic, Mr Bradshaw.’

‘Whoa there,’ Howard says weakly.

On the way home, he holds Claudia’s hand across the gearstick.

‘We could sue them, darling,’ he says. ‘That buffoon virtually handed it to me on a plate.’

‘What a good idea,’ Claudia says. ‘Shall we?’

He squeezes her fingers. He makes a vow, to be good.

She is planting a hydrangea in the shady bed behind the house. It is morning. The village lies stunned in its newborn quiet. The grass is silvered with dew. The soil is black, and riddled with life.

Just after ten her husband comes out; she hears his feet approaching on the gravel. They stop an arm’s length away.

‘I’ll say goodbye now,’ he says.

She rises, pain in her knees. Her hands are caked in soil. He puts out his own clean hand, palm up like a policeman to stop her.

‘No need to get up. I can say goodbye here.’

But she is already up, as he can see. She chaffs her hands to get the dirt off. Even so he winces, in his brushed blazer and clean shirt.

‘Am I not allowed to touch you?’ she says, advancing on him so that he stiffens with discomfort. ‘You do look smart.’

‘Best not.’

‘But I want to touch you!’

He smiles coldly. The day stands around him, pale grey, windless. Suddenly she feels a loss of weight, of density; she is being abandoned. She is being sealed up, in a place where there can be no touching.

‘I’ll be back at five o’clock,’ he says. After all, he is only going to the Bridge Society annual lunch in Tunbridge Wells.

She puckers her lips and leans forward, her dirty hands clasped behind her back. She receives his dry kiss. She could never touch her mother’s clothes, nor her father’s. They kissed her thus, across the chasm of departure. There is darkness down there, fathomless. She knows she mustn’t fall in. But the scented, smart atmosphere of people who are leaving tempts her. She wants to hurl herself towards them, dirty fingers clutching and clawing at their clean pressed garments. Yet she knows the chasm is there.

‘Goodbye,’ she says.

‘Goodbye.’

He is gone: she kneels down again in the earth. She picks up her trowel and digs a hole, as she used to dig in her sandpit as a child. She watches her fingers moving in the soil. She is surprised to see that her hands are old. She digs a hole for the hydrangea, and plants it, and carefully beds it in.

*

A jackdaw has got into the greenhouse and broken two of the panes. She opens the door to let it out but it continues to fly in slow circles above her head, round and round, never alighting anywhere. She goes back to the house and returns with a blanket. The bird has destroyed a whole tray of seedlings. Her plants are lying on their sides in little spills of earth. She is afraid of birds, an old fear: her father, a bad shot, the birds never dead but denatured, roiling in the grass, mad with disorganisation. This one, so black, so evilly circling, is like something she herself has caused. Her fear roams out in the world, causative. It is the loss of identity that she fears. The jackdaw, circling in its captivity, is programmatic. She grips the blanket, and at the right moment she springs up and catches it in the folds, and clasps its hooded form in her arms. It struggles: its beak pecks and pecks at her arm through the wool. She goes out into the garden and releases it.

Thomas is there, standing on the lawn.