Free The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk Page B

remembers the way reality itself was made unreal. The last thing Thomas did before he left was to restructure a firm of dog food manufacturers. Three or four weeks in, someone produced a tin of dog food in a meeting. Until that moment, dog food had been theoretical. Now here it was, actual. After all that artificiality the actual had been uncovered. Thomas realised it had been there all along. Dog food had been there all along. Dogs, friendly and filthy and mortal, had been there all along.
    He finds three tiny pairs of headsets, unopened, coiled in their little plastic sacks like embryos. They came with a mobile phone that has since been upgraded. The headsets don’t fit the new phone. Yet they will last forever.
    On the train, Thomas used to decide various things. He decided not to let himself fall asleep. He decided not to read newspapers. He decided to keep a diary. He decided to keep a sketchbook and make portraits of the other passengers. It was forty-five minutes each way, sometimes more. That was an hour and a half that he could reclaim from the wastage of every day. He wanted to sink an anchor down into that narrow channel of time. He wanted to stop himself drifting away.
    In the cupboard he finds the diary, three notebooks, the book of watermarked paper where he meant to do his drawings. The diary is completely blank. In the other one there are two pencil sketches that he doesn’t have any memory of making. For that reason they are slightly frightening. One of them is of a woman in glasses, with frazzled hair like a witch.
    The image comes to him of a black dome-shaped thing made of plastic that used to sit on the desk in his office. He has no idea what it was. He looked at it every day. It had a kind of fissure in its casing, a scratch four or so inches long that travelled to the left and then straight, with a kink at the end. It seems possible he will not forget this strange and pointless object. It will survive in his mind forever, unchanging. It will, in a sense, outlive him. His recollection of the scratch is so exact that it might be a scar on his own body. Yet the woman whose face he drew, and the act of drawing it, have disappeared.
    He finds a whole file full of instruction manuals for things that are broken or that he no longer owns. It is called progress, the replacing of one thing by another, the making of one thing meaningless by another. The meaningless things do not live, and nor do they die. Most of the people he knows think that progress is good.
    Often, he would arrive at the station to see his train all packed and ready, the doors sealed, would see it begin to pull away from the platform without him. He has never felt more individual, more distinct than in those moments. Yet it was only that he had stopped going forward. For a second, he became the past. What was strange was that there seemed to be more possibilities there. He remembers the way he would automatically think of going to New Zealand, or South America. Never once did this idea occur to him at any other time. Only there, when he’d missed his train, the urge to take flight for distant lands, as though it were something about himself he’d dropped long ago on the platform at Waterloo and stumbled over again every once in a while.
    Art, he thinks, is not progress.

IX
    Howard, fallen ill, lies and looks out of the window at the grey suburban midday. It is a view of bare forked trees against a blank, light-filled sky, of the gabled upper storey of number thirty-two. He never sees the world like this, in its weekday torpor. Mornings he is gone by eight o’clock and returns twelve hours later; he is always leaving or coming back, plunging in and out like a needle through the cloth. He does not ask how the cloth weaves itself, but here it is, knitting itself out of silence, out of stasis. Howard loves it, knitting itself round him like a cocoon. In this bedroom time has a certain thickness, an opacity: over the hours it seems to form a