Rachel Cusk - The Bradshaw Variations

She dresses, like an actor assembling a costume. Head of Department: tailoring for responsibility, black for rebelliousness. She gives thought to this, to her appearance, her part. Today she wears unconventional shoes, a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt under her jacket. She lets her hair go frizzy and wild. She puts things into her satchel, looks at her watch. At this hour of the day each minute is an entity, solid. They cross her consciousness like stepping stones cross a river. She has to be careful not to lose her footing. Upstairs she creeps into Alexa’s darkened room to kiss her sleeping form goodbye. When she does this, it is as though her parents are watching her. They observe her movements with the same upright bafflement as they might watch a foreign art-house film. The smell rises from Alexa’s bed. Later, when Tonie opens the airing cupboard, it billows out at her from the clean sheets and pillowcases. She smells it on her coat; sometimes she smells it on her food. She tries to give it a name: futility, mortality, meaninglessness. It represents the loss of illusion. Down in the kitchen she says to Thomas,

‘Have you noticed a strange smell?’

He thinks about it. ‘What of?’

Death, she thinks. Wasted time. Rotting beliefs, sending out their stench.

He is reading Kobbe’s Complete Opera . He turns one of its thousand pages, wafer-thin, like the pages of the Bible. ‘There was a smell, but I traced it.’

She lifts her brows in amazement. She imagines him alone here during the day, moving stealthily through the rooms like an Indian in a western. She imagines him kneeling, his nose to the floor.

‘Where to?’ she asks.

‘The cupboard in the hall. It smelt awful. It was full of old shoes.’

‘Oh.’

She is in charge here now. She is alone, at the head of her life, subject only to craziness like a king in Shakespeare. It is what she has wanted, to free herself from authority. She has put so much behind her that she is a little frightened of what is to come. She will go to work each day, that’s all. She will do her job. What else is there for kings to do?

All sorts of things were forecast: weather systems with long, lashing tails spiked with blue or red, winds bearing ferocious hails of arrows, rods of sunlight showing like lances around a shield of cloud that shed blue droplets in the shape of tears.

Leo needs a coat. He looks in the shops on West Hill Road, where big dirty buses thunder past the lit-up window displays, and the pavements are crowded, even on a Tuesday morning. West Hill Road is where the big chains are, and the pound shops, and the junk-food places you can smell from a hundred yards away. It is where people who spend money go, as opposed to people who make it.

‘What happened to the coat you wore last year?’ Susie said, when he told her that morning where he was going.

Leo shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘What coat did you wear last year?’

She seemed confused, as though it was not just the coat but the year itself that had been mislaid.

‘I don’t know.’

‘No, really,’ she pleaded, touching his arm. ‘What was it like?’

But Leo couldn’t remember either. He and Susie clutched each other shakily and laughed, glancing in each other’s red-rimmed eyes. Justin and Madeleine sat stiffly at the breakfast table watching their parents.

‘You must remember your own coat, ’ Madeleine said, disbelieving.

‘I don’t!’ Leo protested. ‘I must have lost it.’

‘He probably left it somewhere,’ said Justin. ‘He probably got drunk at some party and forgot it.’

Leo has not gone to Temple Street, as Susie advised him to — Temple Street with its faux-Victorian street lamps and planters full of shrubs, its little boutiques like silvered webs with a black-clad assistant waiting inside like a charming spider. A saxophonist plays atmospheric jazz on the swept pavements in Temple Street. But he has not gone there. He has come to West Hill Road, where men and women with colourless hair and shapeless bodies carry giant bags stuffed full of clothes and shoes from China or Taiwan, as cheap and unflattering as the ones they already have on. From the top of the bus Leo watches them coming and going through the big electric doors. They come out and stand for a moment in the ferment of the threshold, where the shop’s air conditioning meets the gusty grey air of outside. The turbulence ruffles their hair and makes their clothes balloon and shrink against their bodies. It is as though they are being momentarily handled by some careless god. He sees the way they brace themselves against the frisking wind, their look of determination. They cling on to their purchases, glancing to left and right.

There is a coat Leo wants. It is a long coat in a dark colour. He looks for it in the men’s departments as impatiently as if it is an actual coat he possesses and has mistakenly left somewhere. And it does appear to him as a sort of soulmate, this coat: as something home-like and familiar, like Susie. It is strange, to be searching these huge stores, in which all the world’s randomness seems constantly to be being incarnated in these millions of orphaned garments, for a piece of home, a piece of his soul. It is as though he is looking for himself. And the longer he looks, and fails to find something he recognises, the more strange he feels himself to be: yes, this is what distinguishes him from the others, who rake through rail after rail of jackets and jeans and sweatshirts with a thoroughness that he would almost call professional, were it not so obsessive and so debased.

Most of the men he knows are at work at this time of day. Even Susie is at work, at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning. It is only Leo who can feel cold at that hour and have the freedom to go and buy himself a coat. In Marks & Spencer he tries on three or four. He is shy, and slightly disgusted. It can feel like a kind of prostitution, the first cold forays into a shop. His needs are so private, so over-fashioned by his imagination, and the shops so concrete and matter-of-fact: it takes a while for him to warm up, and reshape his desires to match what is actually on offer. This is why people like Susie do their shopping in Temple Street. They don’t cast themselves out into the world when they need to buy a coat. They go to places that specialise in what they want.

There are two other people in the men’s department, a couple, shopping together. The woman goes into raptures about whatever unexceptional garment her eye happens to fall on.

‘Oh, isn’t this nice!’ she keeps saying to her husband.

In each coat he puts on Leo looks like a different person. He is surprised: he wouldn’t have thought it was possible. On the hangers these coats have a vague look of uselessness, but when he puts them on they are startlingly powerful and complete. There is a navy blue one with square shoulders and a tapered body that particularly disturbs him. It is the coat men of his age wear over their city suits, or have hanging from a peg in their company cars: men Leo knew at school, as boys, who still seem frozen in childhood in spite of their paunches and their balding heads. Wearing that coat, there seems to be no difference between himself and them. This is the son his parents wanted, this red-faced man in the mirror with a coat that suggests a job in banking: he knows it beyond any doubt. He takes it off and puts on a horrible black tailored cashmere that turns him into an undertaker.

‘Oh, that’s lovely . Isn’t that just lovely ,’ the woman says.

She speaks so sombrely, so profoundly, that he has to turn his head. He sees her, a nondescript person with cropped, rigid hair, holding up a tan-coloured anorak. Her husband is a tall silent hunk of grey flesh who stands behind her with his giant hands hanging lifelessly at his sides.