Kudos by Rachel Cusk Read Free Book Online Page B

is, and I completely forgot the fact that being with her sometimes makes me feel like I’m trapped in a room with a swarm of bees. I always fantasised about going on a writing retreat,’ she said, ‘and being able to sit in the evening and talk to other writers, rather than spending my time in our apartment arguing with my husband and daughter about stupid things. But now all I wanted was to be there again, despite the fact that I’d been counting the days until I could get away. One night I called them,’ she said, ‘and my husband answered the phone and he sounded just the tiniest bit surprised when I said it was me. We talked for a little while and then there was this silence and eventually he said, what can I do for you?’
    The publisher burst out laughing. ‘How romantic!’ he said.
    â€˜So I ask him what’s going on over there,’ Linda went on, ‘and he says, nothing, we’re just pootling along. My husband has the habit of using these cutesy English words,’ she added. ‘It’s kind of irritating.’
    â€˜So the man you were missing wasn’t him,’ the publisher said, with a satisfied air of deduction.
    â€˜I guess not,’ Linda said. ‘It kind of brought me to my senses. Suddenly I could see our apartment completely clearly. We were talking on the phone and I could see the stain on the carpet in the hall where one of the garbage bags once leaked and the kitchen where the cupboard doors are all crooked and the bathroom sink that has a crack the exact same shape as Nicaragua,’ she said. ‘I could even smell the drain smell that there always is in there. Things got better after that,’ she said, folding her arms and looking over at the wedding party across the bar. ‘I actually had a good time. I had second helpings of pasta every night,’ she added. ‘It was worth it to see the look on the countess’s face. And I admit some of the others turned out to be stimulating, as advertised.’
    Still, after two weeks she could see it was possible to have too much of a good thing. There was a man there, a novelist, who was going straight on to another residency in France, and then another one in Sweden after that: his whole life, as far as she could see, consisted of writerly sinecures and engagements, like awhole life of eating only dessert. She wasn’t sure it was healthy. But one evening she did get talking to a writer who told her that every day, when he sat down to write, he would think of an object that didn’t mean anything to him and would set himself the task of including it somewhere in that day’s work. She asked him for examples and he said that in the past few days he had chosen a lawnmower, a fancy wristwatch, a cello and a caged parrot. The cello was the only one that hadn’t worked, he said, because he had forgotten when he chose it that his parents had tried to make him learn the cello when he was a child. His mother loved the sound of the cello, but he was terrible at it. The wailing noise he made wasn’t what she’d had in mind at all and in the end he gave it up. ‘So the story he writes,’ Linda said, ‘is about some kid who’s a cello genius and it’s so exaggerated and unbelievable he has to throw it away. The point about these objects, he said, is that they’re meant to help him see things as they really are. Anyway,’ Linda said, ‘I said I would try it because I hadn’t written one word since I’d been there, and I ask him to give me something to start me off and he suggests a hamster. You know,’ she said, ‘the little furry thing in the cage.’
    It was true that a hamster meant nothing to her, she said, since they had a no-pets policy in their building, and what she felt straight away was the leverage thisrodent gave her in describing the human triangle at home. She’d tried to write about the family dynamic