Second Place by Rachel Cusk (ebook smartphone .txt) 📕

told L, and he came over and with a little air of reproach asked me how I was, and I stood there in broad daylight and denounced him. I spoke as though some god of speech had taken possession of me on the pavement – I declaimed, the sentences falling from my mouth in great wreaths of significance. I reminded him that I, the mother of a young child, had come to him in distress, afraid that I might destroy myself, and he had done nothing, nothing to safeguard her or me, just doodled on a piece of paper and come up with the proof of my authority complex – as though I didn’t have proof enough from the suffering I was in! Partway through my speech the psychoanalyst raised his arms in a gesture of surrender: he had turned completely white, and looked suddenly frail and aged, and began stepping backwards away from me on the pavement with his arms still raised, until he was far enough to turn and run. The image of this running man, I said to L, with his arms raised in surrender, had remained with me as the representation of everything I had failed to reconcile myself to. For me, there was no escaping my physical body. But he could simply run away!

L was listening, with his bright eyes fixed on mine and his hand over his mouth.

‘How awfully cruel,’ he said, though because of his hand I couldn’t tell whether he was smiling or frowning, nor which of us he was accusing of cruelty.

We stood in silence for a while, and when L spoke again it was to resume the account of his childhood, so that it was as if my interruption were being politely set aside. I don’t think this was because L was incapable of taking an interest in other people – he had listened carefully to my story, I felt sure. But the game of empathy, whereby we egg one another on to show our wounds, was one he would not play. He had decided to explain himself to me, that was all, and it was up to me what I offered in return. I understood I was not the first person to have received this explanation – I could imagine L being interviewed in a gallery or on a stage, giving much the same account of himself. A person only speaks like that when they feel they have earned the right to. And I hadn’t, at least in his eyes – or not yet!

He began to tell me about a time in his childhood when his father had fallen ill, and he was sent away to live with an aunt and uncle for a time, to lessen the burden on his mother. This couple had no children of their own and were a rough and rambunctious pair of characters, he said, whose chief entertainment and motivation lay in each seeing the other meet with misfortune. He remembered watching his uncle howl with satisfaction and rub his hands together when his aunt burned herself on the oven; she would double over with laughter if he banged his head on the doorframe, and when they argued, chasing each other around the kitchen table with the poker or the frying pan, they could cheerfully draw blood. He wasn’t sure the concept of character, as illustrated by these two, even existed any more. They were rather like animals, and it made him wonder whether character itself was an animal quality that humans had become distanced from in the modern age. His uncle and aunt didn’t care especially about him, though they wouldn’t have hurt him, and neither did they have any idea how to comfort him in this difficult period of his father’s illness: he was expected to do his share of the hard physical work on top of his schoolwork, and indeed after a while they stopped sending him to school at all. He gradually came to realise that if his father died while he was staying at his uncle and aunt’s house, they would very likely merely shrug at the news and carry on. They might even fail to tell him, and he was desperate to return home before this event took place, so clearly could he imagine it. He did succeed in getting home, and by the time his father died he had forgotten about his uncle and aunt, but it came back to him later, this time he had spent among people for whom he had no particular significance, and the urgent need he had felt to return to where he could play his role in the story. It was a clearer glimpse of death than any of the bloodier sightings he had had of it so far. He had discovered that reality would occur whether he was there to see it or not.

The sun had risen up above us by now and we stood together and looked out at the marsh and the loveliness of the day, and I felt the rare peace of living entirely – however briefly – in that moment.

‘I hope we don’t get in the way,’ L said then. ‘I’d hate to spoil this for you.’

‘I don’t see why you would spoil it,’ I said, affronted again. How I wished he wouldn’t say such things!

‘It’s felt like my luck has run out, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Things have been awfully sordid these past months. But now I’m starting to wonder whether I even care. The wheel could turn again, but I have the feeling I’m going back in time, not forward. I feel lighter every day. It isn’t so bad, dispossession.’

I said that was a sensation only a man – and a man with no dependents – could enjoy. I managed not to add, Jeffers, that in addition it relied on the generosity of burdened people such as myself! But I might as well have said it, because he heard me anyway.

‘Don’t mistake my