Free The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk Page A

What is she doing here in this room, with its sinister flowers, with its white shutters the wind and darkness seem to be trying to prise open? Her own body, the unit of herself, so sealed and single: it is all she is, and yet she lives in it so little. Away from home, she is only this unit of flesh. What experience can she offer herself? What physical event will justify this form and bring it into knowledge? Alone, she eats a plate of fish and drinks a glass of cold yellow wine. The waiter is young, attentive, so formal that she becomes awkward and strange when he approaches. She has brought her notes down with her and she finds herself looking at them, looking at what she wrote down at the kitchen table last night in Montague Street, when she sat and thought of her trip, imagined the great inviting sea of the unknown and herself plunging bodily into it. Now she doesn’t know what it was she thought she would find here. She notices a stain on one of the pages: it is gravy, from last night’s chicken pie. She looks at other people talking, eating, in the fashionable room.
    Upstairs, she phones Thomas. He is distant-sounding, slightly curt. He doesn’t know that there is anything in her plight he ought to be moved by. And she can never explain it to him, for as a story it revolves around the disclosure of a desire for something that has no name and is itself nameless, that she could arrive at only by a path of negatives that would somewhere along the line have to pass through Thomas himself. But he doesn’t enquire. She is on a business trip, that’s all: he used to go on them himself. Afterwards did he complain of loneliness, of disenchantment? She thinks that perhaps he did. He complained about them as the conscript complains about the discomfort of his standard-issue boots. Perhaps he didn’t tell her everything either.
    She sits on the bed. She both wants and doesn’t want to go home. She remembers this feeling from childhood, when she would go to her room after some family dispute; and lying on her bed would experience the same division of desire, the same choice that now she sees was no choice at all, between returning downstairs and staying where she was. Downstairs was the ongoing story, plot-filled and relentless, of everything she knew; but in her room there was silence, daylight, an absence of structure. By stepping out of the story she had come upon the emptiness that lay all around it. It was so transparent and silent in that place: it seemed to presage the creation of something, though the moment of realisation never occurred. There was only solitude, beautiful but sterile, unpollinated. She never found anything there. In the end, she always went back.
    She goes to bed and is woken all night by the knocking shutters, and by the wind moaning across the Zuider Zee.

VIII
    What is art?
    It is the opposite of waste, of redundancy. Thomas goes through his cupboards and finds box after box of obsolete junk. Cables, computer parts, a whole case of grey plastic cartridges still sealed in their airtight transparent wrappers. The printer they were designed to fit no longer exists, and there is no other printer compatible with them. Yet they will last forever.
    It comes to him, the physical feeling of his London office, the big steel and perspex building with its wires and blinking screens and shrilling telephones, the bitter smell of plastic and electric light, the hushed grey spaces, the sealed windows muffling the world, the make-up smell of his secretary Samantha and her synthetic clothes, everyone so chemical-smelling and costumed, and the way people spoke, language itself made artificial, so that you found yourself looking at their teeth, their eyes, to remind yourself there was a human being in there. And most of all the feeling of being on board, of living in a never-resolving present, the feeling that all this artificiality could be sustained so long as it was never permitted to slip into the past. He