Soft

by Rupert Thomson

  That was why she had bought Giacometti – for company. If she was out, he would wait at the window, his face expressionless and round, not unlike an owl’s. At night he slept on her bed. Sometimes, when she woke in the dark, he would be sitting beside her, staring down, his yellow eyes unblinking, one of his paws resting in the palm of her hand.

  ‘It must be three months since I saw him.’ Raising her head, she realised that, finally, she had said something that made Sally feel better.

  Sally had been going out with someone, but only for the past two weeks. He had a complexion that reminded Glade of balsa wood. If you pressed his forehead, it would leave a dent. Or you could snap his ears off. Snap, snap. What was his name? Oh yes. Hugh. A word that looked odd if you wrote it down. Like a noise. Hugh.

  She watched Sally lift the saucepan off the stove and take it over to the sink. As the broccoli tumbled clumsily into a colander, the phone began to ring.

  ‘Could you answer that?’ Sally said. ‘It’s probably for you, anyway.’

  Glade walked out into the corridor and picked up the phone. For a moment the line sounded empty, dead. Then she heard a click.

  ‘Hello?’ she said.

  ‘Glade? It’s your dad.’

  ‘Do you want me to call you back?’

  ‘No, it’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some coins.’

  He didn’t ring often. It was difficult for him because he didn’t have a phone of his own. If he wanted to call her, he had to walk to the nearest phone-box, which was one and a half miles down the road. Three miles there and back, and sometimes it was out of order. Glade always felt guilty when she heard his voice.

  ‘Are you still coming up to see me?’ he said.

  ‘I’m going to try and come next weekend.’

  ‘On Friday?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I won’t be there till late.’

  ‘Not too late?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll cook.’ His sudden enthusiasm touched her, saddened her. It took so little to excite him. She saw him standing in the dim light of the phone-box, his head bent, his shoulders hunched, and darkness all around him, darkness for miles.

  Sally looked up from her empty plate when Glade walked back into the kitchen. ‘I’m going to a party tonight. You don’t want to come, do you?’

  Glade hesitated. ‘I think I’ll stay here.’

  ‘It’s all right for some,’ Sally said.

  That night Glade cried herself to sleep. She had built a fire in the grate, but it stubbornly refused to burn. The few small flames seemed unconvincing, leaping towards the chimney, then falling back, shrinking, dying out. Sometimes, while she was crying, she thought of Tom, though she didn’t necessarily connect the one thing with the other.

  Lancashire Flamenco

  The window of her father’s caravan showed through the darkness, one block of blurred light at the far end of the field. Though Glade had promised she would not be late, it was already after nine o’clock. It had been raining for most of the day, the bus moving sluggishly along the motorway as if wading through tall grass. After Birmingham the clouds had thinned a little, and she had watched a patch of pale-blue appear – that pure washed colour you sometimes see in the sky after a downpour. Further north, though, the rain had come down again, whipping at the surface of the land until it seemed to cower. The journey had taken more than seven hours.

  Walking in the dark without a torch, she had the feeling she was dropping through the air, a kind of vertigo. She felt she might crash through that yellow window, land on the frayed scrap of carpet in a sprinkling of glass. Standing still for a moment, she looked around. A raw night, no moon. She thought she could smell the smooth wooden handles of farm tools. Probably she was just imagining it. She walked on. The sodden ground winced and flinched beneath her feet. By the time she reached the caravan, her shoes were soaked.

  The door creaked open. Light spilled into the field.

  ‘Glade? Is that you?’

  Her father stood in the doorway, a stooping, uncertain shape, his white hair oddly lopsided. She supposed he must have slept on it, but from below he looked like a king whose crown was being worn askew and might, at any moment, slip right off his head. A wisp of steam lifted from the wooden spoon he was holding in one hand.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  They embraced awkwardly, Glade reaching up from the bottom step, her father bending down, their bodies forming a precarious arch.

  ‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘I’ve made a casserole.’ He stood back, looking gleeful, but sheepish too; he might have been confessing to a crime – something minor, though, like tearing up a parking ticket.

  Philip Spencer had gone strange. Everyone said so. It started when his wife – Glade’s mother – ran off with an estate agent, a man eleven years her junior. The change in her father was sudden and profound. The week after the divorce he bought a caravan, hitched it to the back of his saloon car and drove out of Norfolk, which was where the family had always lived, leaving the house empty and the bills unpaid. He did not return. Once, about three months later, he passed through London on his way to the South-West. Glade was staying with his sister that winter, in a quiet area near Parliament Hill. Though he ate dinner in the flat with them, he insisted on sleeping in his caravan, which he had parked on the street outside. That night he fell out of bed. When he stood up, half-asleep, not knowing where he was, it seemed to him that the floor was tilting. He thought he must be dreaming. In the morning, though, the floor still tilted. It turned out that somebody had slashed one of his tyres. It was the first of many adventures. For the next two years he travelled the length and breadth of the British Isles, always sleeping in his caravan, which he had christened the Titanic in honour of that night in London. He sent Glade postcards from Ben Nevis, Lake Coniston, Penzance. Then, halfway through her final year at art college, he called her from a phone-box somewhere in Lancashire. It’s time for me to put down roots, he told her. He had towed his caravan into a field and replaced the wheels with piles of bricks. He had sold his car. The man who owned the land, a farmer by the name of Babb, was only charging him a few pounds a week. His overheads were low – so low, in fact, that he could easily live off his pension. From now on, he would lead a simple life. Babb kept himself to himself, and so, her father said, would he.

  Glade pulled her shoes off and stood them by the door. She sat at the narrow formica table in the galley while her father peered down into his casserole and stirred it with the wooden spoon.

  ‘How long can you stay?’ he asked.

  ‘Only till Sunday. I’ve got a double shift on Monday.’

  He nodded. ‘This waitressing, are you enjoying it?’

  ‘Sort of, yes.’

  ‘It’s good you don’t commit yourself to anything just yet,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty of time for that.’ He stopped stirring and stared at the wall above the stove. ‘I learned the hard way.’

  She watched him for a moment, puzzled, but he chose not to elaborate. She looked around. Every object in the caravan seemed to be covered with a fine coating of dust; it was as if all the things he owned had furry skins, like peaches. She hadn’t visited since June, she realised, and it was now October.

  ‘Like a drink?’ Her father was standing in front of an open cupboard, looking at her sideways. ‘I’ve got some wine.’ He held it up. Valpolicella. ‘Not very good, I’m afraid.’ He put the wine on the table and reached into the cupboard again. A self-conscious, crafty look appeared on his face. ‘A drop of whisky?’ He showed her a bottle of Teacher’s.

  ‘I think I’ll have some wine,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘Some whisky for me.’

  He could only find one glass, which he gave to her. It had the word BLACKPOOL written on it in red block capitals and, above that, a picture of a tower etched in black.

  ‘Spent a week there once,’ he said mistily. ‘Nice people.’

  He poured an inch or two of whisky into a
blue-and-white hooped mug, then touched the mug against her glass and drank. When he put the mug down he sighed theatrically like someone in an advert or a film.

  ‘How was the journey?’

  ‘OK.’ Glade sipped her wine. It was cold and sour, and tasted of blackcurrant.

  ‘No trouble getting here?’

  ‘I caught a bus from the station. Then I hitched.’

  He thought about that, and then he nodded. He lifted the lid on the casserole again, the way somebody might light a cigarette – for something to do. Steam rose in a thick column, mushroomed against the roof.

  ‘There’s lamb in this,’ he said, and smiled at her.

  The smile was so quick, she almost missed it. He didn’t seem to know whether or not he should be smiling. Whether he had the right. Whether he should dare.

  When Glade travelled back to London on Sunday afternoon she had a hangover, her first in months. The headache seemed inflicted on her from the outside, as if someone had fastened a ring of wire round her left eye and was gradually tightening it. She had drunk whisky with her father the night before, whisky on top of wine. And now the oddly cushioned motion of the bus. It was overheated too; stale air lodged in her throat and would not shift. She slept for half an hour, but felt no better when she woke.

  Your mother wrote to me.

  Her father’s voice. Her mother, Janet, had written him a letter – from Spain, of all places. He showed Glade the envelope to prove it. ‘España,’ he said, and shook his head in a display of wonderment. Then he touched the stamps and said, ‘Pesetas.’ The estate agent owned a flat on the Costa del Sol, apparently, and they were thinking of living there all year round.

  ‘I don’t blame them, do you? The sunshine, the maracas …’

  Her father’s mouth gaped wide, and she could see the teeth perched high up in the dark like bats in a cave. His laughter had a strained, wild sound. It was the laughter of a man unused to company, a man who could no longer see himself in the mirror of another person’s face.

  ‘It’s castanets, isn’t it?’ she said.

  Her father thinking, his eyes lifting to the ceiling.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

  He handled the envelope the way a conjuror might handle a pack of cards, only in her father’s case she knew there was no point waiting for a trick. He just turned it and turned it, trying to see it from a new angle, hoping to learn more. He had the hapless, artificial grin of someone who’s been told a joke he doesn’t understand.

  ‘Sometimes I think it was the best thing. You know, her going.’ He placed the envelope on the table – deliberately, as if he’d been asked to put it down. He couldn’t stop looking at it, though. ‘Sometimes it surprises me that we were together in the first place.’

  He eyed her expectantly. Yes, he wanted her to say, I know what you mean. It always surprised me too. Instead, she looked past him, out of the window. Light from the caravan fell on part of the tall hedge that separated the farmer’s garden from his land. The leaves were small and glossy, the shape of fingernails. She could feel cold air reaching through a gap in the wall, pushing against her face.

  ‘España,’ her father said again, his eyes unnaturally bright, almost glittering, as if they had been given a coat of varnish.

  She didn’t understand why he seemed so excited.

  The bus swayed through the draughty darkness. Sunday evening. She leaned her forehead against the window, the glass shuddering, and faintly greasy. The lights of unknown houses, unknown towns. She thought of her father stretched out on his narrow bed, the curtains drawn, the field quiet and still. At least the caravan would be clean tonight. She’d spent most of Saturday with a damp cloth in her hand, wiping the fuzz of dust off everything she saw. She’d washed all the kitchen surfaces – the shelves, the cooker, the inside of the fridge. She’d swept the floor as well, pushing rolls of fluff out through the door and down into the field, where they lay looking odd, astonished, the way snow would look if you saw it in a library or on a plane. While she was cleaning, her father mended the table he’d broken the night before, his hands moving tenderly over the formica and the wood, as if they were bruised. He kneeled on the carpet with his tool-box, hair swirling on the crown of his head like a nest, an oblong plaster taped over one eyebrow. She liked being with him most when they both had something to do. Then he didn’t try so hard. She could talk if she felt like it. Or she could let her mind drift. There was none of the usual pressure on her to think of things to say. She imagined he’d be eating beans on toast for supper. A little whisky in his blue-and-white hooped mug. She hoped he found a radio programme to listen to – an opera, or a play. She hoped he didn’t feel too lonely.

  At Edgware Road she had to change from the Circle Line to the Hammersmith & City. Pale men stood on the platform in raincoats; one of them stared at her sideways, his eyes urgent, strangely shiny. She could smell ashes and burnt rubber. The clock on the wall said ten to nine. She didn’t think she’d ever felt so tired.

  The train came at last. She stepped into the nearest carriage and sat down. A black girl in wrinkled leather trousers was playing the guitar. Everyone ignored her, pretending to be fascinated by something high up or low down; the dread Glade saw on their faces seemed out of all proportion to the threat. She gave the girl a pound coin, which was more than she could afford, and the girl smiled at her in the gap between two lines of a song. When the girl left the tube at Ladbroke Grove, Glade followed her. Down the gritty steps and out into the street. The girl slung her guitar over her shoulder, then stepped on to the zebra crossing. Glade noticed how she lifted one hand at hip-level to thank the car that stopped for her. On the far side of the road, the girl glanced round. Saw Glade watching her. She gave Glade another smile, broader this time, quicker, and then walked on, taking a right turn into Cambridge Gardens.

  Glade turned left, away from Ladbroke Grove, the girl’s smile staying with her as she hurried home. When she unlocked the front door, though, a chill settled on her skin. She called Sally’s name. The word hung in the damp, slightly sticky air; for a moment she felt as if everybody in the world had disappeared except for her. She climbed the stairs, dropping her coat and backpack on the floor. In the bathroom she turned on the taps. While the bath was running, she looked for Giacometti. He was sprawled full-length on her white bed, his huge yellow eyes half-open, the one flaw in his camouflage.

  She undressed and wrapped a towel round her, then walked back down the corridor to the bathroom. She lay in the hot water for half an hour, not thinking of anything. By ten o’clock, she was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of raspberry tea. It was so quiet, she could hear the fridge change gear. If Sally had been in the room, she would have turned the radio on. Sally always said that silence was depressing.

  On Saturday night, when they had drunk half the whisky in the bottle, her father had put some music on. It was the first time he’d ever done anything like that, and Glade felt faintly uneasy. He must have noticed the look on her face because he said, ‘Saturday night,’ and then he grinned and lifted his arms away from his sides, his way of signalling that he couldn’t help it, there was nothing he could do.

  He bent close to his battered ghetto-blaster and pushed a tape into the slot. ‘Something new I found,’ he said. ‘Something to cheer us up.’

  She asked him what it was.

  ‘Flamenco.’

  He looked at her as if she ought to understand, as if this was something a father and daughter might be expected to have in common. She’d heard the word before, of course, but she had no idea what the music would sound like.

  Then it began. An acoustic guitar played very fast, a kind of frantic, rhythmic strumming that was difficult to listen to. She felt as if the inside of her head was made of knitted fabric and somebody with nimble fingers was trying to unravel it. She wondered what flamenco meant in Spanish.

  ‘Do you like it?’

  She twisted her face to one side. ‘Kind of.’
<
br />   ‘You can dance to it. Look.’

  And he started to dance. Her father. His arms up near his head. Like candlesticks, she thought. Or antlers. His fingers snapped and clicked in the air beside his ears. She stared at his feet as they stamped on the floor, stamped in time to the guitar.

  ‘If you were a proper audience,’ he panted, ‘if you were a flamenco audience, you’d be clapping now.’

  Clapping? She gazed at him anxiously, confused.

  Then he must have slipped on something or tripped over because he toppled sideways suddenly and his elbow caught the edge of the formica table, which splintered loudly, almost happily, and then detached itself from the side-wall of the caravan, bringing their dinner plates with it, the bottle of tomato ketchup, three small cactuses in plastic pots, the radio and a jam-jar bristling with pens. He sat on the floor, blood trickling crookedly from a cut just above his eyebrow.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘I’m all right. I’m all right.’ Eyes almost shut, he shook his head. ‘Those Spaniards,’ he said. ‘They must really get through the furniture.’

  That laugh again, high-pitched and wild.

  She put an arm round him and helped him struggle to his feet. She thought of deckchairs, how you have to arrange the pieces of wood and cloth in the right shape, otherwise they won’t stand up. Under the whisky her father had a strong vegetable smell. Like tins of soup when you first open them. Before they’re cooked.

  He leaned against the wall for a moment, gathering himself, then reached awkwardly into his pocket and pulled out a soiled handkerchief. Each time he dabbed at the blood, he held the handkerchief at arm’s length and studied it. Finally, when the bleeding had slowed down, he turned to her and said he thought a breath of air might do him good.

  Outside, they stood on rough clumps of grass and looked up into the sky. A dark night: the moon in hiding, stars masked by clouds that shifted in great pale slabs like fields of ice. The wind lifted Glade’s hair away from her neck, then let it fall back into place. Then lifted it again. After a while she glanced sideways at her father. He was still staring up into the sky, staring hard, as if he believed there was something there to be discovered or received. And, all the time, that Spanish music playing …