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

He gave a strange giggle, and pulled out the picture of Tony from behind the easel and leaned it up against the wall for me to see. It was a small canvas, but the figure was even smaller – he had made Tony tiny! He was shown full-length and in meticulous detail, like an old-fashioned miniature, all the way down to his shoes, so that he seemed both tragic and insignificant. It was merciless, Jeffers – he made him look like a toy soldier!

‘I imagine you yourself see him like Goya would,’ he said, ‘at arm’s reach. Or is it arm’s length?’

‘I’ve never seen Tony all at once,’ I said. ‘He’s too big.’

‘He didn’t give me enough time,’ he said brusquely, seeing my disappointment at the picture, just as I had intended he should. ‘He seemed to be very busy.’

There was a certain mockery in that remark, as though he were accusing Tony of aggrandising himself.

‘He only came because he thought I wanted him to,’ I said miserably.

‘I’m trying to find something in the figure, but perhaps it isn’t there,’ L said. ‘Some brokenness or incompleteness.’ He paused. ‘You know, I’ve never wanted to be whole or complete.’

He was studying the picture of Tony while he spoke, as though it represented this wholeness that he couldn’t or wouldn’t attain and was therefore, perversely, a failure. It was a completing that betrayed the ongoing fragmentation or mutation of his own personality.

‘Why not?’ I said.

‘I always imagined it was like being swallowed,’ he said.

‘Perhaps it’s you that does the swallowing,’ I replied.

‘I haven’t swallowed anything,’ he said calmly. ‘Just taken a few bites here and there. No, I don’t want to be completed. I prefer to try outrunning whatever’s after me. I prefer to stay out, like kids on a summer evening stay out, and won’t come in when they’re called. I don’t want to go in. But it means that all my memories are outside me.’

He began then to talk about his mother, who he said had died when he was somewhere in his forties. He had always found her physically loathsome, he said – she was forty herself when she had him, her fifth and last child. She was very fat and coarse, where his father was delicate and small. He remembered the feeling that his parents didn’t match, didn’t go together somehow. When his father was dying, L was often alone at his bedside, and he frequently noticed fresh bruises and other marks on his father’s skin that only his mother could have put there, since no one else visited the sickroom. He sometimes wondered whether his father had died just to get away from her, but he couldn’t believe that his father would have wanted to leave him there by himself. He realised later how much his father had tried to keep him out of his mother’s path, which is how L came to start drawing: while his father did the accounts or the yard work L was nearly always by his side, and it was something his father thought of to occupy him with.

His mother used to ask him to touch her: she complained that he never showed her any affection. He sensed she wanted him to serve her. He felt compassion for her, or at least pity, but when she asked him to rub her feet or knead her shoulders he was revolted by the physical reality of her. In this way she revealed to him what she wanted that no one would give her. He didn’t count – for her, he had no real existence. He had a memory of standing as a small child at the kitchen window, making paper-chain figures out of old newspaper with a big pair of scissors, his father elsewhere, his mother doing something at the stove. The discarded scraps of paper rained down on the floor like snow as he cut. He remembered the sound of her voice, calling him over to hug her. Occasionally she would summon him in this way, as though her own loneliness had suddenly become unbearable to her. She had been strangely moved by the sight of the figures when he unfurled them, all joined together by the hands. She kept asking him how he had done it; he realised then that he had made her credit him with a certain power, because she didn’t understand him.

‘I remember always being frightened that one day she would eat me,’ he said. ‘So I made things to show her, to take her mind off it.’

He learned to draw by studying animals and their anatomy. The slaughterhouse gave him unlimited material: the thing about dead animals was that they stayed still long enough for you to draw them. His father looked carefully at all his drawings and gave him advice.

‘I’ve often thought it’s fathers who make painters,’ he said, ‘while writers come from their mothers.’

I asked him why he thought that.

‘Mothers are such liars,’ he said. ‘Language is all they have. They fill you up with language if you let them.’

He had thought about taking up writing himself a few times over the years. He thought he might be able to make continuity that way, writing down the things he remembered and joining them together. But all that happened was that he realised how little he had remembered about any of it. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t enjoy remembering as much as he thought he would. He never saw any member of his family again, Jeffers, after his father died and he ran away from home. Occasionally he was casually adopted by other families for a period. These were generally positive experiences, and I suppose they taught him to value choice and desire over acceptance and fate. I realised, hearing him talk, that he was without any fibre of morality or duty, not out of any conscious decision but more in the way of lacking an elemental