Outline: A Novel by Rachel Cusk

Author:Rachel Cusk [Cusk, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780374712365
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-01-13T05:00:00+00:00

VI

It was a curious group – a mixed bag, as Ryan had put it. Watch out for the kid with the Demis Roussos hair and the bumfluff, he said, he simply won’t shut up.

The room was small and grey, but it had large windows overlooking Kolonaki Square, a concrete enclosure where people sat reading newspapers on benches in the shade of plane trees with graffitied concrete bases. The hot spaces were already deserted at ten o’clock in the morning. Pigeons advanced in their circling, tatty formations across the paving slabs with their heads down, pecking.

The students were discussing whether the windows should be open or shut, for the room was morbidly cold and no one had been able to work out how to turn down the air conditioning. There was also the question of whether the door should be open or closed, the lights on or off, and whether the computer, which was projecting a blank blue rectangle on to the wall and making a humming noise, would be needed or could be closed down. I had already noticed the boy Ryan mentioned, who had a great shock of black curly hair that flowed down over his shoulders, and a nascent moustache of slightly paler hair nestling on his upper lip. Of the others it was hard at first to get any sense at all. There seemed to be a roughly equal number of men and women, but no two of them shared any characteristic of age, dress or social type. They had taken their places around a large white Formica table that was really a number of smaller tables pushed together to form a square. There was an atmosphere of uncertainty, almost of unease, in the anonymous room. I reminded myself that these people wanted something from me; that though they didn’t know me, or one another, they had come here with the purpose of being recognised.

It was decided that the windows should be opened but the door shut, and the person nearest to each side got up to do so. Ryan’s boy observed that it did seem odd to be opening the windows to warm up a room, but that science had involved us in many such inversions of reality, some of which were more useful than others. We should accept occasionally being inconvenienced by our conveniences, he said, just as we had to tolerate flaws in our loved ones: nothing was ever perfect, he said. Many of his fellow Greeks, he continued, believed that air conditioning was severely deleterious to health, and there was now a nationwide movement to keep it switched off in offices and public buildings, a sort of back-to-nature idea which was itself perfectionism of a kind, though it meant that everybody got very hot; which, he concluded somewhat delightedly, could only result in air conditioning being invented all over again.

I took a piece of paper and a pen and drew the shape of the large square table at which we all sat. I

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