The Temporary by Rachel Cusk Page B

expression either of independence or of neglect, depending on whether he’d left it tidy or not, and in the end he had begun to regard it merely as another cloistered annexe of himself, a space into which the stuffy chambers of his heart and head had gradually overspilled their contents and rendered indistinguishable. He had grown impatient with its inability to be transformed, beyond the small, angular puddle of letters which sometimes gathered bythe door and the staring red eye of the answering machine which could occasionally be found resuscitated and blinking with life when he returned, and although of course he was grateful that the glassy eyes of its windows hadn’t been smashed nor its contents ravished with violence, still, he wondered what it would look like afterwards.
    Two calling-cards from taxi companies lay on the hall carpet at his feet and he stepped over them as if demonstrating his indifference before an invisible audience. Halfway down the hall he turned back and went to pick them up, deciding instead to find them useful and perhaps pin them on the kitchen noticeboard. With this in mind he continued back down the hall, bypassing the sitting-room where the tawdry drama of the answering machine might or might not have been playing.
    The kitchen made a spectral tableau in the falling gloom of early evening, the rigid great-aunts of the chairs around the table, the fridge a tall, stern butler hovering in a corner, the face of the clock obscured to a halt by shadows. He switched on the light and felt immediately comforted by its generic familiarity, its resemblance to other kitchens he had seen. Putting the cards on the table, he opened the fridge and was rather pleased to see a bottle of beer in it, for a moment having no memory of actually buying one. Its further contents – margarine, milk, a yellow square of cheese sealed in plastic, something leafy on one of the lower shelves – reminded him of his trip late the night before to a mini-market two streets away, a dingy place in whose overcrowded aisles nothing ever seemed real or distinct enough to purchase, but where nevertheless he had gone in a sudden burst of life and bought the beer with the intention of its meeting him the next evening in precisely the manner it was now doing. The bottle had been lukewarm and dusty when he took it from the market shelf, but in the cold sunlight of the fridge had been transformedinto a green and frosted icon, which in turn elevated the items around it to a more appealing plane. He took the beer and, seeing the cards still lying on the table, picked them up and threw them into the bin.
    From the dreary distance of his shabby third-floor office on the Holloway Road, Ralph often looked forward to his three or four solitary evenings at home each week. The fact that, once he had fled the fabricated world of the office and felt the memory of himself begin patchily to return on his bus journey home, he no longer needed to be on his own, seemed continually to elude him in his social calculations. Sitting exposed at his desk he would crave isolation, unlimited draughts of time alone amongst his possessions, but the relief of escape drained him and he would vainly wait for the spring of selfhood which the rock of his daily round had seemed all day to be blocking to begin to flow. Instead, there was merely a resounding emptiness, which made him suspect during his long hours of loneliness that the alien exercise of doing work which did not suit him had forced him to change, moving him further and further from the mouth of his resources until he had become stranded and unable to find his way back. He would often read or listen to music as the night deepened outside, familiar habits which now, however, he would find himself asking for whom or what he did them. His points of reference had grown dim, his signposts muddied: sensations and ideas would arrive and then get lost, circulating around the junctions of his mind, unable to