Kudos by Rachel Cusk Page A

her out of these metal rods and pinned her together.’
    During the flight this woman had recounted the story of her accident, Linda went on, which happened in the Austrian Alps, where the woman was working as a ski guide. She had taken out a group, despite the factthat the forecast was bad, for this group were fanatical skiers and were determined to cover a famously dangerous stretch of off-piste terrain in what were unusually good powder conditions for the time of year. They had urged her to take them, against her better judgement, and she had had ample opportunity during her six months in hospital to consider the extent of their responsibility for what then happened, but in the end she had accepted that no amount of pressure could obscure the fact that the decision had been her own. In fact it was a miracle that none of them had gone over the edge with her, because they were all skiing too fast in their desire to get down before the storm trapped them there. Moments before the accident, the woman said she remembered feeling an extraordinary sense of her own power, and also of her freedom, despite the fact that she knew the mountain could rescind her freedom in an instant. Yet in those moments it suddenly seemed like a childlike game, an opportunity to take leave of reality, and when she went over the precipice and the mountain fell away beneath her, for an instant she almost believed that she could fly. What happened next had to be pieced together from other people’s accounts, since she didn’t remember it herself, but it seemed the group had not hesitated in continuing down the mountain without her, since they absolutely assumed she couldn’t havesurvived the fall and was dead. Two days later, she had walked into a mountain refuge and collapsed. No one understood how she had been able to walk with so many broken bones; it was an impossibility, yet she had undeniably done it.
    â€˜I asked her how she thought it had happened,’ Linda said, ‘and she said that she simply hadn’t known her bones were broken. She didn’t even feel any pain. When she said that,’ Linda said, ‘it suddenly felt like she was talking about me.’
    I asked her what she meant and she was silent for so long, slumped back in the booth with an impassive expression on her face, that it seemed she might not answer.
    â€˜I guess it reminded me of having a kid,’ she said finally. ‘You survive your own death,’ she added, ‘and then there’s nothing left to do except talk about it.’
    It was hard to explain, she went on, but her feelings of affinity with the metal woman did seem to stem from an experience that for her had likewise been a process of being broken and then reassembled into an indestructible, unnatural and possibly suicidal version of herself. Like she’d said, you survived your own death and there was nothing left to do but talk about it, to strangers on a plane or whoever would listen. Unless you set your heart on finding a new way to die, she said. Skiing over a precipice sounded okay, and she’d thought of payingsomeone to take her up in an aeroplane just to see if she could resist opening her parachute, but in the end writing was what generally kept her from going down that road. When she wrote she was neither in nor out of her body: she was just ignoring it.
    â€˜Like the family dog,’ she said. ‘You can treat that dog how you like. It’s never going to be free, if it even remembers what freedom is.’
    We sat looking at the wedding party on the other side of the room, where someone was making a speech while the bride and groom stood side by side smiling. Occasionally the bride would look down to smooth the front of her dress and whenever she looked up again there was an instant before her smile would reappear. We sat watching until a harried-looking girl wearing a festival t-shirt and carrying a clipboard came to the table to tell us the