Kudos by Rachel Cusk

such as the arrival of a child might triangulate its parents. He went on to say that as far as this last point was concerned, his own case was more complicated, since through force of circumstances he had played Adam, as it were, to his mother’s Eve. He had never met his father, his having left the planet a few weeks before Hermann arrived on it: he had been worrying that he had failed to include this piece ofinformation in our conversation so far and was glad I had given him the opportunity to fit it in. As it happened he had often wondered whether he and his mother would be triangulated, and if so by whom. Unfortunately the only available role was that of serpent, he added, and he admitted that he had kept an eye open for the arrival of that disturbing presence. But to date his mother had not remarried, though she was very beautiful – that was merely an opinion, by the way – and when he had asked her what the probability was that she ever would, she had replied that such a step would require her to become two people, and that she would prefer just to remain one. His mother rarely spoke figuratively, because she knew it upset him, but he accepted that on this occasion she had decided on it as the lesser of two – if I would permit him to use the word again – evils. He believed she meant that her biological role as his mother would be incompatible with the role of wife to someone biologically unrelated, and this realisation had made him feel guilty, to the extent that he thought the best thing would be for him to leave the house immediately and find some means of destroying himself. But happily she had offered a clarification, which was that she was happy with things as they were.
    To return to the subject of the college’s award, he said, the name they had chosen for it was ‘Kudos’. AsI was probably aware, the Greek word ‘kudos’ was a singular noun that had become plural by a process of back formation: a kudo on its own had never actually existed, but in modern usage its collective meaning had been altered by the confusing presence of a plural suffix, so that ‘kudos’ therefore meant, literally, ‘prizes’, but in its original form it connoted the broader concept of recognition or acclaim, as well as being suggestive of something which might be falsely claimed by someone else. For instance, he had heard his mother complaining to someone on the phone the other day that the board of directors took the kudos for the festival’s success while she did all the work. In light of his mother’s remarks about male and female, the choice of this fabricated plural was quite interesting: the individual had been superseded by the collective, yet he believed that it still left the question of evil entirely open. Admittedly, despite extensive research, he had been unable to find anything to corroborate his mother’s use of the word in a context of misappropriation. Could prizes be given to the wrong person, without malintent coming into it?
    He hadn’t asked the college whether his award – perhaps he had forgotten to mention that he had won it, alongside his friend Jenka – was a kudo or a kudos, but he supposed the college wasn’t overly concerned with the grammatical perspective. It had been verypleasant to win: his mother had been extremely happy, though he had had to ask her not to become unnecessarily emotional.
    The others were dawdling along the waterfront and we stopped to wait for them to catch up. My phone rang and my older son’s number appeared on the screen.
    â€˜Guess what I’m doing right now,’ he said.
    Tell me, I said.
    â€˜Walking out through the school gates for the very last time,’ he said.
    Congratulations, I said.
    I asked him how the final exam had gone.
    â€˜Surprisingly well,’ he said. ‘In fact, I actually enjoyed it.’
    I might remember, he said, that he had spent a lot of time revising