Kudos by Rachel Cusk

before but somehow, no matter how cold it had come out of the freezer of her heart, it always ended up turning to mush in her hands. The problem, she now saw, was that she had been trying to describe her husband and daughter using materials – her feelings – that no one else could see. The solid fact of the hamster made all the difference. She could describe them petting it and fawning over it while its imprisonment got increasingly on Linda’s nerves, and the way it solidified their bond so that Linda felt left out. What kind of love was this, that needed the love object domesticated and locked up? And if there was love being handed out, why wasn’t she getting any? It occurred to Linda that since their daughter had found a satisfactory companion in the hamster, her husband might have taken the opportunity to round that situation out by returning his attention to his wife, yet the opposite was the case: he could leave the child alone less than ever. Every time she went near the cage he would leap to his feet to join her, until Linda wondered whether he was actually jealous of the hamster and was only pretending to love it as a way of keeping hold of her. She wondered whether secretly he wanted to kill it, and since she’d realised in the meantime that she felt at best ambivalent about the possibility of himresuming an interest in herself, it became important to her to keep the hamster alive. Sometimes she felt sorry for the hamster as the unwitting victim of the mutual narcissism of human relationships: she had heard that if you put two hamsters in a cage together they would end up killing each other, so they were compelled to live alone. At night she was kept awake by the whirring sound of it running frenziedly on its wheel. In one version, her daughter comes to love the hamster so much that she sets it free. But in the final version it is Linda herself who frees it, opening the cage and shooing it out of the apartment while her daughter is at school. Worse still, she allows her daughter to think that she herself left the cage open by mistake that morning and that she is therefore to blame.
    â€˜It’s a good story,’ Linda said flatly. ‘My agent just sold it to the New Yorker .’
    Still, she wasn’t sure quite what she’d gained from her tour, unless it was weight from all the pasta she’d eaten. It had occurred to her that by calling her husband and putting an end to the feeling of being unmoored and adrift she may have missed the opportunity to understand something. She’d been reading a novel by Hermann Hesse, she said, where he describes something similar.
    â€˜The character is sitting by this river,’ she said, ‘just looking at the shapes the dark and light make on thewater, and at the weird shapes of what might be fish beneath the surface, there for a second and then gone again, and he realises that he’s looking at something he can’t describe and that no one could describe using language. And he sort of gets the feeling that what he can’t describe might be the true reality.’
    â€˜Hesse is completely unfashionable now,’ my publisher said with a dismissive flick of his hand. ‘It is almost an embarrassment to be seen reading him.’
    â€˜I guess that explains why everyone was giving me weird looks on the plane,’ Linda said. ‘I thought it was because I’d only put make-up on one half of my face. I got to the hotel and looked in the mirror and realised I’d only done one side. Probably the only person who didn’t realise was the woman sitting next to me,’ she said, ‘since she was looking at me sideways and never saw the other half to compare. In any case, she looked pretty strange herself. She told me she just came out of hospital after breaking nearly every bone in her body. She was a skier and she skied over a precipice in a snowstorm. She spent six months being reassembled. They built