Soft

by Rupert Thomson

  At ten o’clock he dialled Ray’s mobile number. He could only hear Ray faintly through a cloud of static. Still, he didn’t waste any time in coming to the point.

  ‘You know what they want me to do, Ray?’

  Ray didn’t answer.

  ‘That job you got me, Ray, you know what they want me to do?’

  ‘They didn’t tell me.’

  ‘They want me to kill someone. Did you know that?’

  ‘I told you. They didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Well,’ Barker said, ‘now you know.’

  An image came to him suddenly, another fragment of the past. He had been standing outside a club a year ago, Ray on the pavement beside him wearing a shiny black jacket with the snarling head of a tiger on the back. ‘I heard you did one of the Scullys,’ Ray had said. Barker asked him where he’d got that from. Ray shrugged. ‘The word’s out.’ Barker pushed Ray up against the wall, knowing Ray could throw him ten feet whenever he felt like it. ‘I’ll tell you what the word is, Ray. The word is bullshit. You got that?’ Ray had nodded – OK, OK – but he obviously hadn’t believed what Barker was saying. Which meant he could be lying now.

  Why, though? Why would he lie?

  The static cleared and he could hear Ray breathing on the other end. He could hear a TV in the background too. They were both watching the same channel. It gave Barker a peculiar feeling. The feeling, just for a moment, of being everywhere at once. Like God.

  ‘You see, strange as it may fucking sound,’ he said, ‘I never killed anyone before. Not even by accident.’

  Ray began to talk. ‘Jesus, Barker, if I’d known what the job was, do you think I would’ve –’ and so on.

  After a while Barker just cut him off. ‘Got any ideas, Ray, for how to kill a girl?’

  Barker listened to Ray breathing, the TV in the background and, beyond that, the eerie hollow space inside a phone line.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think so.’ He lit a cigarette and bounced the smoke off the wall above the phone. ‘Tomorrow, Ray,’ he said, ‘tomorrow you should go down the Job Centre and ask them to take you on. They should stick you behind those fucking windows. Because you’ve got a real talent for finding people work, you know that? A real fucking talent. And something everybody knows, Ray, everybody knows, talent should not be fucking wasted. All right?’

  Barker slammed the phone down. From the quality of the silence that descended all around him he guessed he must have been shouting. Towards the end of the call, at least.

  He walked back into the lounge. On the table he saw the photograph of Glade Spencer. He picked it up and tore it into pieces. Dropped the pieces in the bin.

  Two

  Mountains in Paddington

  On the tube Glade fell asleep, as usual. She had worked six shifts that week, including a double shift the day before, so perhaps it was no wonder she was tired. When she first left art school she had waited tables at a café in Portobello Road, but then, six months later, she had got a job at a small but fashionable restaurant in Soho, and she had been there ever since. She liked the place as soon as she walked in; though it looked formal – the starched white tablecloths, the low lighting, the slightly malicious gleam of cutlery – it didn’t feel tense. The hours were longer, of course, and she had to travel further, but she earned good money, never less than two hundred pounds a week including tips – and anyway, what else would she have done?

  She woke as the tube was slowing down. Her head felt numb and foggy. Turning round, she peered out of the window. The line had climbed into the daylight, though the towering embankment walls and cantilevered walkways of the station made a gloom of it, an underworld of gravel, weeds and shadows. Paddington. Four stops to go. As the tube clattered on, she glimpsed a stretch of barren land to the north, beneath the blunt, pale pillars of the Westway. This was a place she often thought about – a kind of sacred ground.

  Four years before, on her nineteenth birthday, she had invited some people to her room on Shirland Road, which was where she lived at the time. They drank Lambrusco out of plastic glasses and then, at midnight, she opened the door to her wardrobe and reached inside. The rocket she drew from the darkness behind her clothes was almost as tall as she was, the blond stick slotting into a heavy blue cylinder that had a pointed scarlet top to it. It had cost eight pounds, and she had kept it hidden in the wardrobe since November.

  That night they walked down Shirland Road, talking and laughing and smoking cigarettes, three or four girls from art school, and Charlie Moore, who was Glade’s closest friend. The girls were wary of Charlie, she remembered, one of them whispering about his hair, how it looked like stuffing from a sofa, another wondering why he hardly ever spoke. Shirland Road opened into Warwick Avenue, Glade leading the way. Warwick Avenue – so wide and spacious suddenly, with that church at one end, like a ship, somehow; she always imagined sea in front of it instead of road. Sometimes she sat outside the pub and drank a half of cider or Guinness, and she watched the church sail right past her, white spray breaking over the high porch, soaking the dull brick walls. On that night, though, the moon was almost full and in the aluminium light the church looked as if it had been moored, it looked anchored, and they walked on, past the grand houses, shadows draped over the cream façades like black lace shawls. Something seemed to snatch at her when she stared in through those windows, their curtains tied back with silk cords and their lights switched on, the edges of amber lampshades intricate with tasselled fringes, and deeper into the rooms, gold mirrors over fireplaces, sofas, Chinese vases. Something seemed to snatch at her insides and twist. Then one of the girls touched her elbow, asked where they were going.

  ‘The mountain,’ she said.

  She ran over the main road and, climbing through a fence of corrugated iron and barbed wire, slid down a bank of grass and rubble on to the flat land behind Paddington Station. The noise down there surprised her. The rush of traffic from the Westway overhead, the strange mingled hiss and whine as trains leaving the station gathered speed. She stood at the foot of the mountain and looked up. Mud, as she had always thought. By now the others had caught up with her, Charlie at her shoulder, the corner of his mouth puckered, slightly crooked, perhaps because he had guessed what she had in mind. One of the girls had torn her skirt. She was laughing, her mouth stretched wide, her pale sixties lipstick almost phosphorescent in the half-light. Glade explained her plan. They had to climb the mountain, all of them. It was from there that she was going to let the firework off.

  At the top and panting, out of breath, she felt much closer to the sky, as though she could reach up and touch it, the mass of brown cloud that covered London, tawdry and crumpled as jumble-sale velvet. She could see a train stumbling like a drunk in the maze of tracks outside the station, only the windows visible, a murky row of yellow squares. Each square had faces in it, looking out, going home, and she thought of her father, who lived in a caravan in Lancashire, her father’s face in that single melancholy window, one yellow square in the darkness of a field. She bent down. Pushing her hair behind her shoulder, she worked the tail of the rocket into the mud until it stood up on its own. She asked if anyone had matches. Charlie handed her a battered Zippo lighter. She snapped the lid back, thumbed the flint and held the trembling flame against the touchpaper. For a moment nothing happened. Then it caught. At first it burned modestly, innocently, as if it was just ordinary paper and would soon falter, die out, crumble into harmless ash. The flame had an odd greenish halo, though. Somebody yelled at her. Get down.

  She crouched, arms round her knees. And suddenly it went. The noise reminded her of the moment when you take a plaster off a wound – a rasp, a tearing sound, a gasp ripped from the air. It burned a bright-orange line into the darkness, curving high into the soft, brown London sky, rising, always rising, and burst somewhere over Westbourne Grove, the explosion bouncing off the houses behind the station, off the Westway’s fluted buttresses, and then a spray of red and green and gold that
seemed half a city wide, rushing towards her, drawing her in.

  Her best birthday ever.

  The tube staggered, then stopped. Westbourne Park.

  You used to be able to see the mountain from Harrow Road if you were heading west, just after the timber yard and just before you dipped down into the underpass. You could see it from the tube too, if you were travelling on the Hammersmith & City Line, as she was now. It was about the height of a four-storey house, and the ground all round it had been levelled. A few bricks lay about, a few broken bottles. Weeds flourished at the foot of the mountain in the summer, those city weeds, bright-yellow flowers on coarse, grey-green stalks. In winter, when it rained, the steep flanks of the mountain glistened, and puddles hid the bricks and bottles at its base. She would never forget how beautiful and unlikely it had looked one February, when it seemed, for a few days, to imitate Mount Fuji, its perfect summit covered with a light dusting of snow.

  Four beige tower-blocks, a pub called The Pig and Whistle. Latimer Road at last. She rose from her seat, almost losing her balance as the tube lurched to a sudden standstill. A bored guard yawned on the platform, his teeth bared fiercely in the pale autumn sunlight. She stepped past him, the tube doors grinding shut behind her. Down one flight of spit-stained stairs and out on to the street. She stood still for a moment, taking in the cool grey air, the peaceful rush of traffic, a black man relaxing in a strangely buxom maroon armchair on the pavement outside the mini-cab office.

  Walking north, she remembered the night the mountain disappeared – or, rather, the night she noticed it had gone. One of her fellow waiters, Hector, had given her a lift home on his motor bike. As they turned left off Edgware Road and raced towards the roundabout, she realised they would have to pass the mountain and she prepared herself, as always, a smile held just inside her mouth. But when they leaned into the bend and she looked down, there was nothing there. She must have flinched, or perhaps she had even cried out, because Hector braked slightly, thinking there was something wrong. Shouting into the wind, she asked him if he could take a left at the lights, go round again. The second time they passed the place, she was struck by how normal it looked – more normal than it had ever looked before, in fact. The wasteground, the railway tracks. Part of a canal.

  Later that night, in her bedroom, she had opened her A-Z and studied the area of white space between Bishop’s Bridge Road and the blue-and-white stripe of the Westway. She could find no tiny triangle to indicate the presence of a mountain, no number to let you know how high it was. She sat back, thinking about the space and how its whiteness was a kind of lie. She thought of spies, and how they learn to empty their faces. The mountain was a secret the world refused to share with her. Soon it would become hard to believe it had ever existed. But these were the very things you had to cling to in the face of everything, the things that vanished without warning, without trace, as if they had never been.

  She passed the school and then turned right, into a street of red-brick houses. If people ever asked her where she lived, she always said Wormwood Scrubs (though Sally James, her flat-mate, claimed they lived in Ladbroke Grove). She liked the name. Also, she felt an affinity with that bleak area of grass and swings and men out walking dogs, the sky too big, somehow, with patches of white showing through the insipid greys and pale-blues, like an unfinished water-colour. She felt she understood it better than Ladbroke Grove, with its pink neon video boutiques and its fast cars shuddering with music.

  When she reached her house, she stopped by the gate and looked up at her bedroom, a small bay window on the first floor. A face stared down from the gap between the curtains. This was Giacometti, her cat. The name was supposed to be ironic: as a white, long-haired Persian, he had nothing in common with the stick figures Giacometti was famous for – though, curiously enough, beneath his soft exterior, there lurked a disposition that was both brittle and perverse.

  She unlocked the front door and, closing it behind her, climbed the stairs. She found Sally sitting in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette. A saucepan of water heated gently on the stove. The kettle stood beside it, steam still rising from the spout.

  ‘I had a shit day,’ Sally said.

  Glade poured hot water into a cup, dropped a herbal tea-bag into it and took it over to the table.

  ‘Shit,’ Sally said, ‘from start to finish.’ She sharpened the end of her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray. ‘Temping,’ she said. ‘I fucking hate it.’ She stared at Glade until Glade began to feel like something in a shop window. ‘You’re really lucky, you know that?’

  Glade reached up and trained one strand of her long hair behind her ear. Then she simply, and rather nervously, laughed.

  ‘I don’t know how you do it,’ Sally said. ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘Do what?’ Glade said.

  ‘I don’t know. The way everything works out for you. That job in the restaurant, for instance …’

  Glade waited.

  ‘And a boyfriend,’ Sally went on quickly, ‘in Miami.’ She smiled bitterly and shook her head.

  Glade looked down into her cup. She had been going out with Tom for two years – if you could say ‘going out with’ about somebody you hardly ever saw. It wasn’t Tom’s fault that he lived in America. He was American. But still. If you added up the amount of time they had actually spent together, what would it have come to? A month? Six weeks? She rolled the little paper tag on her tea-bag into a cylinder, rolled it until it was so tight that there was no air left in the middle, nothing you could see through.

  ‘He’s a lawyer, isn’t he?’ Sally said.

  Glade nodded. ‘I’m not sure what kind exactly.’

  ‘That’s what I mean, you see? You’re so vague, so wrapped up, in yourself. You don’t even try – and yet you end up with someone,’ and Sally paused, ‘someone like that …’

  The water had boiled. Sally sighed and, rising from the table, seemed to fling herself across the room. Glade was reminded of old war films: planes that had benches along the walls instead of seats, tense men with parachutes – and then that moment when they have to hurl themselves through an open doorway and there’s nothing there, just black sky, roaring air. She watched Sally drop four pieces of broccoli into the saucepan. During the last week Sally had started eating broccoli. On its own.

  ‘It must be wonderful, though,’ Sally said over her shoulder, ‘being flown out to Miami for the weekend.’ Her voice was softer now, more buttery. ‘I mean, being flown.’

  It didn’t seem particularly wonderful to Glade, it was just what happened. Sometimes Tom flew to London and they would stay in five-star hotels in the West End, or there was a place with a strange short name in Knightsbridge that he liked (and one weekend, when Sally was away, he had stayed at the flat; ‘slumming’, as he called it), but mostly, it was true, Tom flew her to Miami. He would ask his personal assistant to post the ticket to her or, if it was last-minute, which was often the case, she would pick the ticket up at the airport. If anything was wonderful, that was – walking up to the sales desk, TWA or Virgin or Pan-Am, and saying, ‘I’m Glade Spencer. There’s a ticket waiting for me.’ At the other end, in Florida, a man would be holding a placard with her name on it. He would take her case and lead her to a limousine parked outside (once – the first time – Tom had filled the back of the car with flowers), then drive her to Tom’s apartment in South Beach. They would go to restaurants and parties, houses with swimming-pools. She sat in the shade in charity-shop sunglasses and hats with crumpled brims, and American girls walked past in clothes that always looked too new, somehow, the way clothes in costume dramas look, and an unusual but not unpleasant sense of displacement would come over her, the feeling that the present was not the present at all, that it was actually a recreation of a period in history; she would feel artificial suddenly, self-conscious, as if she was acting. And there Tom would be, standing in the sunlight with a cocktail. She’s so London, isn’t she, he would say, and a peculiar half-proud,
half-mocking look would float on to his face. But it wasn’t often all this happened.

  Glade sipped her tea, which was almost cold. ‘We don’t see each other much,’ she said. ‘Hardly ever, really.’