Rachel Cusk - The Bradshaw Variations

‘Oh. I suppose so.’

‘Hanger?’ She waves it in the air, a plastic shape.

‘No, thank you.’

Leo feels deflated. Somehow, in the course of that exchange with the woman at the till, the desirability of the brown coat has peaked, has reached the summit of what it is or ever could be. The woman hands him the plastic bag containing his rumpled grey jacket. She has folded it carefully: she has smoothed the exhausted fabric with her long, brilliantly varnished nails. She seems to take pity on it, this discarded piece of his life. She seems to feel for it, for all unwanted things, for everything that is old and abandoned: he feels that by her folding and smoothing she has criticised the world for its inhumanity.

‘Very nice,’ she says, when Leo puts the new coat on.

She gives him a little approving smile. He looks at his watch. It is a quarter past ten. He takes his card and his receipt and stuffs them in his coat pocket. The pocket’s silky lining, cold and unfamiliar, closes around his hand.

Her mother has different faces. Sometimes she has a face like a witch. It is on the back of her head, not the front. Alexa sees it when she walks up the stairs behind her.

In the mornings, when Tonie comes into her bedroom, Alexa pretends to be asleep. Often she is asleep. It is the presence in the room that wakes her up: she feels it through her closed eyes, something warm and soft and attentive, though at first she doesn’t remember what it is. She keeps her eyes shut. She lies still. She thinks her mother will love her better that way. She feels beautiful, lying completely still in her nightdress. She is like a doll. She imagines her mother looking at her and loving her. But at the same time she knows she is pretending.

‘Are you awake?’ Tonie whispers.

There is the tiniest smile on Alexa’s lips. Her mouth wants to twitch at the corners, feeling it. But she stays totally still. She wants her mother to think that she is a girl who smiles in her sleep. The bedclothes rustle beside her. The mattress creaks. Her mother’s hair tickles her face. She kisses Alexa’s cheek. Sometimes Alexa will pretend to wake up then, like a princess waking from her enchantment. She will yawn and stretch her arms, and say, ‘You woke me up,’ in a pretend-sleepy voice.

But sometimes she remains still, smiling, with her eyes shut. She wants to bring her idea, her pretence, to perfection. She wants to fool her mother entirely. There is something she senses she will gain if she succeeds. She waits to receive the kiss. It comes out of the infinite blind distances beyond her eyelids. She never knows quite when it will come. Afterwards she hears her mother softly leave the room. She hears the door close.

When she opens the curtains the day is already in motion, alive, waiting for her to get up. She stands at the window in her nightdress. The sun bursts and bursts again against the glass. The wind is tickling the bare branches of the trees, jiggling them up and down, up and down. A dead leaf twirls past, spinning through space. Alexa watches a tiny airplane stitching a white line across the blue sky overhead. She watches a bird springing amidst the waving branches, alighting and then springing again.

Her father walks with her to school. His feet are next to hers, going along the pavement. His shoes have big frowning creases in them. They wink and frown at her as they walk. They are old and angry and brown, with drooping laces.

‘You need new shoes, Daddy,’ she says.

‘Do I?’ He stops and looks down at them. ‘These are all right, aren’t they?’

‘They’re old. And the laces are too long. They’re dirty.’

‘They can still take me where I need to go,’ he says.

She laughs. She imagines the shoes walking all by themselves, all around the world; something you could hitch a ride on, like a bus.

‘You could attach little rockets to them,’ she says. ‘And wheels.’

‘Rocket-powered shoes,’ he says, and she laughs again.

They reach the road, where the cars come like waves out of the horizon, building and rising and breaking, going over with a roar. They cross to the other side.

‘I can go on my own from here,’ she says.

‘Don’t you want me to come?’

She shakes her head. He bends down and there is his face, in front of hers, the lips puckered in a kiss-shape. Close up his face is complicated. His eyes have tiny paths in them, and there are little valleys all around his mouth and hairs like miniature trees, and the skin is bumpy, detailed, like the surface of the globe in Mrs Flack’s classroom. He kisses her. He lays his hand on the top of her head. She has to turn away from her knowledge of him. She takes a few steps and when she looks back he is smaller. She knows his shape but it is less complicated. He is standing on the pavement. He waves.

Mrs Flack has given out their French exercise books. Alexa turns the pages. She sees her own writing. She sees things she has coloured in. The colouring is a bright little memory; the writing is a message from herself. She loves her exercise books. She loves to see what she has done, what she is. But this book, the French book, gives her a slightly sad feeling. It is the words that are sad. She wrote them and yet they are strangers: they seem to bear some hostility towards the words she knows. They are like mistakes. They make the pictures unfriendly, like certain things in dreams.

She is sitting at a table with Katie. Usually she sits with Maisie or Francesca, but today she came in late from the playground and there was no empty chair except the one next to Katie. Mrs Flack is handing out worksheets now. She goes all around the classroom, sometimes far away, sometimes close. She has yellow hair and her body is made of balls and circles, like the man in the picture made completely of car tyres. Every part of her is completely round. Her face is bright with make-up. She has a nice smell, and when she is nearby Alexa can hear her clothes whispering and hushing, like there are tiny magic voices in the folds. It takes a long time for Mrs Flack to give out the worksheets. Alexa waits. Finally her turn comes. Mrs Flack’s hand with its painted fingernails appears before her eyes and places the worksheet on the table. Alexa twists round, smiles. She wants Mrs Flack to see how good she is, how patient.

‘Thank you,’ she says.

There is a picture of a girl on the worksheet, drawn with black lines, like a cut-out girl. She is wearing a hat, a triangle-shaped skirt, a pair of shoes. She is beautiful, in a way, in her incompleteness. There are black lines sticking out of her body like arrows. On the other side of the page there is a boy.

‘Look at him,’ Katie says next to her. She jabs her finger at the paper boy. ‘He looks gay.’

Mrs Flack is writing words with her marker on the board. They are meant to be attaching the words to the arrows. There are windows all along one wall of the classroom and for a moment Alexa stares out of them, at the day passing outside. Katie has snagged her attention. She drifts around it, the snag, like a balloon drifting on its string tether. She stares at the day, behind glass. Then she glances at Katie out of the corners of her eyes.

‘You aren’t meant to say that,’ she says.

‘Aren’t I?’

‘No,’ Alexa says. ‘Mr Simpson says you’re not.’

Alexa’s knowledge of Katie is awakening: she remembers that she has sat next to her before. Katie is like a story she has read and then forgotten, the details stored but not often revisited. Now she is unfolding again, her particular shape and atmosphere, her scuffed shoes, her lazy hair pegged back with a clip, her mouth that goes all the way across her face when she grins, her pale, insolent eyes.