Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation by Rachel Cusk Read Free Book Online Page A

creak with the unaccustomed warmth, sending the sound of footfalls around the house. They travel eerily up and down the stairs and across the ceilings overhead, as though there were someone in the room above who had crossed to the window to look out. The water mutters in the pipes; periodically the boiler ignites, choking and grumbling cholerically in the basement. One day it finally falls silent; the dishwasher breaks, the drains clog, the knobs of doors and cupboards come away unexpectedly in the hand. There is the sound of dripping water, and a dark stain spreads across the kitchen wall, the plaster bulging and flaking like afflicted skin. The children’s hamsters scuttle in their separate cages, oblivious. They can’t live together, for as a species
they are too irascible. They condemn themselves to solitude, immersed in their routines of sleeping and gnawing and burrowing. Sometimes they climb the bars at the sides of the cages and look out with inquisitive bead-bright eyes, as though, having issued from their self-absorption, they now expect something to happen. In a way they are too trusting, for no one notices their changes of circumstance. At night the high-pitched sound of them running on their separate wheels fills the dark silent house.
    A man comes to look at the spare room. He is pale and flaxen-haired, with small, almost colourless eyes and sharp little wolverine teeth. He has a tiny battered car he parks in the street outside. Every now and then he goes to the sitting-room window to check for traffic wardens. The room was advertised for rent in the local paper: the phone has rung and rung every day for a week. As soon as I replace the receiver it rings again; I go out and return to find the answering machine full, the red light blinking. Nearly all the calls are from men, men from everywhere and nowhere, men of all kinds: young men and old, foreign and local, gruff and loquacious, determined and indifferent, and all apparently untethered, alone, briefly circling the fixed point of my house while held at some unbreachable distance, like barren planets orbiting a star in the blackness of outer space. Sometimes there is interference on the line, crackling, the sound of windy mountaintops. I am calling about the room. I am calling to enquire about the room. Once or twice a woman has rung: she is looking for somewhere for herself and her boyfriend. She is part of a couple – do I have a problem with that? Her boyfriend works at the bar, the casino, the club down at the marina. Her boyfriend works nights: he likes to sleep during the day. She herself wants to do a course, in aromatherapy, nutrition, languages;
she’s thinking about asking at the university; she isn’t quite sure. She and her boyfriend are very relaxed. They are very chilled. They like relaxed, chilled people, people with no worries. They don’t like to get stressed. Do I have a problem with that? I’m sorry, I say. I live here with my children. It’s their home. I’m sorry.
    Then one afternoon a man rings sounding anxious and purposeful, as though he’s lost something but is certain to find it again at any moment. His voice suggests neither need nor imposition: this is the man who now stands in my house, looking anxiously and purposefully out of the window at his car. His name is Rupert. For three years he has been living on the other side of the city with his girlfriend, but the relationship has come to an end and he wants somewhere to stay short-term while he looks for a more permanent home. He works long hours for an energy supply company up in town; he needs somewhere to sleep, to hang his suits, to house his television – apparently it’s quite large. While he speaks he looks at me fixedly with his small pale eyes, but whenever I reply he looks shyly down and away to the side. With his fine, almost white hair and his downcast eyes he looks either innocent or guilty, I can’t tell.
    The clocks have gone forward and now the evenings