He laughed and laughed. I could hear her, a faint female echo shouting and laughing somewhere in the distances of the telephone.
*
I had a letter of my own. I found it on our bed one evening, resting lightly in an envelope on the cloud of the covers.
Downstairs Charlie and Hamish were cooking something. The rich smells came up into the white room. Charlie was staying for a week, maybe more. She picked her way over the rubble on the front steps as she came and went. She was on the shortlist for the teaching job at the university. She was sleeping in the room above ours and at night I could hear the creaking sounds she made as she moved around in bed. If she got the job I supposed she would move down here permanently, and though I doubted she would want to stay with us for ever I thought she could. I recognised in her presence something that spoke to my own weakness for transitoriness and dispossession. I thought that if only people lived the life that was in front of them everything would be all right. I didn’t think Rebecca could ever know how much it galled me to have become someone she thought she needed to get away from. The letter was written in pen, in large urgent scrawls and curlicues that left the paper pock-marked with indentations. It said:
Darling M,
The time has come for me to take my leave. You think that you don’t know it but you do.
I sat down on the bed and half-expected a wreath of its familiar scent to rise and lay itself over my shoulders, but all I could smell were the fumes from downstairs. I heard Charlie shrieking, ‘Quick, quick!’ and then raucous laughter.
Do you remember that lovely funny building near your old flat? The one that sat there and sat there with pigeons nesting in the roof and squatters moving in and out, and how we always talked about buying it and turning it into an art gallery or something — and then one day we saw a notice on the door that said ‘Change of Use’, and we realised someone else was doing what we’d said we would do and we felt sad, as if something had been stolen from us. That was before Hamish was born, and whenever I think about that building and wonder whether our life could have been different, I know that it couldn’t, because you can never be anything other than what you are.
You’ll laugh when you hear I’ve gone home, for now at least — but maybe you’ll be glad too. I’m sure you of all people would agree that I need to acknowledge the man who is my father, and to face my mother as a rival. A RIVAL!! Niven says that nurture for Ali is a threat to her femininity and I know he’s right. When I thought she was going to die, I realised how absent she was from my life as a nurturer. I needed HER to comfort ME! But she was the child too, she was the poor thing. I think she can only be happy with me when she’s giving me things, because then she can feel she’s got more. And the one thing she really has is HIM!! She plays the role of the child as a way of competing with me for his attention. As for HIM! I think it may take me my whole life to understand him — the way his charisma has afflicted me with the sense of my own betrayal. Michael, there was a time when I thought you could save me by possessing me, but now I know that can never be. Now I only want freedom. I want the freedom to be what you could never accept that I was.
I used to feel that you’d failed me, Michael, but now I think I can see you as the victim you really are. I think you have a very misconceived idea of morality. You seem to think that there’s a world of bad things and a world of good things whereas the truth is that there are only feelings. There is only emotion, and emotion is what you’re not good at, Michael. I think you have a lot of work to do on yourself. I don’t see your repression, your coldness, as being your fault. I think it has a LOT to do with your family and your fear of disapproval, your fear of really LIVING and your need to be close to dangerous people, to people who are dirty and vibrant and alive and who really FEEL. The problem is that you criminalise those people by trying to control them. That’s really your tragedy, Michael, as I see it.
As for Hamish — I know you will say that he should stay with you. I can give you that, Michaeclass="underline" I’ve decided to. Rick and Ali think I’ll change my mind but I won’t. I think you need Hamish; he’s a sort of mascot for you, isn’t he? I’ll say one thing for you, Michael, you’re a bloody good father. They thought you might want to find a house of your own, and I said I didn’t think you would. But you know I’ll be your most frequent visitor — I’ll be like your bad fairy godmother, appearing when you least expect it. I’ll come and sit at your kitchen table and take off my silly shoes and tell you all about everything that’s going on in my mad life. I like the thought of you both there in Nimrod Street. All safe and sound, like in a fairy tale.
Rebecca
I lay back on the softness of the bed and looked at the ceiling. Then I went downstairs to find Hamish.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rachel Cusk was born in 1967 and is the author of six novels: Saving Agnes, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Temporary, The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Lucky Ones, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award, In the Fold and Arlington Park, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. Her non-fiction book A Life’s Work was published to huge acclaim in 2001 and her memoir The Last Supper was published in 2009. Her latest novel is The Bradshaw Variations. In 2003 she was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young Novelists. She lives in Brighton.