Free The Temporary by Rachel Cusk Page A

expense at a delicatessen opposite the Tube station. Even then, he remembered, Stephen had used to change his voice,adopting a colourful proletarian twang, like something out of an Ealing comedy, through which his precise vowels would protrude like limbs from an ill-fitting set of clothes. These days the contrast was less amusing, for the two had almost merged into a single all-purpose voice. When he telephoned Ralph, Stephen would often say things like ‘all right?’ instead of ‘hello’, or ‘see you later’ when Ralph wasn’t going to see him later at all.
    He reached his street, changing the bags to opposite hands. He had told Neil he was going to the doctor and had managed to get away early, something he had used to do frequently in the first, desperate months of his job. Eventually, though, things had changed, not at work but in his own acceptance of it: he had come to believe that there was nothing else, that this was the life that had been laid out for him, like a meal at a stranger’s house, and that if he didn’t like it he must change until he did, for there was nothing else.
    It was not quite dark yet, the sky watery and blue with the aftermath of the afternoon’s cold sun, but the air had grown thin and icy and Ralph was surprised to see children in T-shirts wheeling and chattering round the street on their bikes. They were a familiar motif of summer to him, but he hadn’t seen them over the past few months and they had changed, had strange, brutal haircuts and new versions of their faces.
    ‘Hello,’ he said none the less as he passed them.
    They looked round at him but didn’t reply, their compressed mouths bursting with suspicious humour. As he reached his flat and took out his keys he heard a volley of cries behind him.
    ‘’ Allo ! ’ Allo !’ they shouted in voices effete with vaudeville mimicry.
    He shut the door, hoping they wouldn’t be there by the time Francine arrived. He tried to imagine her in his road, a strange and beautiful fruit suddenly appearing on the barebranches of the sentinel winter trees which lined it. For a moment he felt faint at the prospect of the evening ahead, his responsibility for it, and almost decided there and then just to take her to a restaurant and be done with it. He put the bags of food on the kitchen table and sat down with his head in his hands. A thread of self-consciousness stole through him as he did so. He was the picture of despair, like somebody in a film. He laughed aloud at his own comedy. He would do exactly what he had set out to do: he had bought food and wine, had rendered the flat unrecognizable with order the night before, had even had his hair cut on the Holloway Road at lunch-time .
    ‘Get the doctor to do something about your hair, mate,’ Neil had said, folding over with his own hilarity, when Ralph had left for his fictitious appointment at four o’clock.
    He stood and went to look at himself in the hall mirror. The cut made his face appear rather beefy, giving it the exposed, foolish look of a passport photograph. He ruffled it a bit and saw a spray of dark filaments fall gently to his shoulders. He turned away from the mirror, his face itchy and hot. He had planned to do the cooking first and then get himself ready at the last minute. He had ruled out the temptation to make something elaborate: it wasn’t much of a temptation in any case, as his preliminary skim through his only cookery book – a strange fifteenth-birthday present from Lady Sparks, with garish photographs of prone crustaceans spewing lumpy substances from their backs – had informed him that he possessed neither the utensils nor the skills even the simplest dish demanded for its creation. He would make a risotto, something he had learned to do as a student; never properly, of course, merely approaching it by intuition and experiment, until finally he’d made it for a group of friends who’d called it risotto and said how much they’d liked it. This time,