Soft

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘Not famous for its flamenco, Lancashire,’ he said at last.

  Then, shivering a little, they both went back inside.

  From the table by the kitchen window Glade watched planes sliding diagonally across the London sky. At night you could easily believe they were just arrangements of lights, optical effects. It seemed strange to think there were hundreds of people up there.

  Her raspberry tea stood at her elbow, going cold.

  After a while she realised that her focus must have altered because she was no longer aware of the planes. Instead, she could see herself, a reflection in the dim mirror of the glass. Her long blonde hair, her ghostly skin. She noticed her right ear. It stuck out more than the left one, as though she was listening harder on that side of her head. According to her father, she had slept on it when she was young.

  Her father.

  She wondered what it was like with just a radio for company and nobody except the farmer for at least a mile around. The darkness, the cold. The brown owls swooping through the field. She didn’t mind sleeping in the caravan, though sometimes the walls seemed a bit too thin. They offered no protection. In a caravan your dreams could frighten you.

  During the weekend she’d had a nightmare. She must have cried out because, when she opened her eyes, her father was standing above her in his pyjamas. He was holding a candle. Behind his back, his shadow pranced and capered, mocking him. If he turned round, she thought, it would have to stop.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘It was just a dream.’

  He reached down, touched her hair. She could feel his hand shaking slightly, tremors underneath the skin, an earthquake taking place inside his body.

  ‘I’m sorry I woke you.’

  ‘You didn’t wake me. I was already awake.’ He took his hand away. ‘I miss her, Glade.’

  In the candle-light his face was all black hollows and odd polished places. He seemed to be gazing into the far corner of the caravan. Not seeing it, somehow. Not seeing anything. She didn’t know what to say to him. She’d never been much good at comforting people; when they cried in front of her, she usually just stared at them.

  ‘It’s lovely that you’re here, though. It’s probably why I’m being like this.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

  He held her head against his chest for a moment and, just then, he smelled like her father again, not the stranger she had smelled an hour or two before.

  ‘Oh Glade, what happened?’

  Her head against his chest. His heart beating fast.

  ‘What happened?’

  The next day, when she said goodbye to him, he held her tight and spoke into her hair, making her promise to visit him again before too long. With her thin arms circling his waist and her head turned sideways, she seemed, from a distance, to be holding him together. She could see beech trees at the edge of the field, their branches webbed with mist. One bird called from somewhere behind her, its song thin and wistful in the morning air. She felt his reluctance to let her go.

  He waved as she walked away across the grass and he was still waving when she reached the five-bar gate at the bottom of the field – though, by then, his face had shrunk to almost nothing, becoming featureless and pale, the colour of a fruit or vegetable when it’s been peeled, when it has lost its skin.

  Spaces

  That winter the weather stayed cold, the sky over London opaque and grey; the trees looked scratchy, a tangle of random pencil marks, like the pictures children bring home from school. March came, and nothing changed. If you had asked Glade what she had been doing, she would probably have shrugged and said, ‘Not much.’ She was still working at the restaurant – in fact, she was working harder than ever: Hector had broken his leg in a motor-bike accident, and she had agreed to cover for him. Once or twice, during those months, she dreamed about the mountain in Paddington, her dreams set in the past, among people she no longer knew. Then, on her birthday, Charlie Moore gave her an old black-and-white print of Mount Fuji. Things seemed to be accumulating, fitting together. Like evidence. For the first time in almost eighteen months she began to draw. The subject was always the same: the mountain, the wasteground. Some of her efforts were openly nostalgic, simple recreations of a reality that had once delighted her. Others were less emotional, more abstract – compositions that depended on the careful balancing of triangles and straight lines. In the afternoons, during the gap between shifts, you could often find her sitting in a café on Old Compton Street with her head bent over a sketch-book. When she got home at two or three in the morning she would carry on, sometimes until dawn, her red curtains closed against the daylight. The drawings didn’t satisfy her, though. She felt there was something missing. She didn’t know quite what it was.

  One night in early April she was woken by the sound of the phone ringing in the corridor outside her room. The fire she had lit earlier had burned low. In the window she could see pale clouds floating past the rooftops of the houses opposite. She looked at the clock. 2:05. Only one person she knew would call this late. Three thousand miles away, in Miami, Tom would have just returned from work. Her heart seemed to drop inside her body and then bounce. She remembered the first time she met him, on the steps of Santa Maria della Salute, in Venice. The same feeling then. He had asked if she could take his photograph. His hands as he explained the workings of the camera. His voice. An hour later, on a vaporetto, he put an arm around her waist and kissed her. He wanted her to fly to Istanbul with him, but she was on a college field trip, studying Renaissance art, and she couldn’t just abandon it. She had such beautiful skin, he told her. Like the whiteness you find when you cut a strawberry in half. Like that special whiteness at the centre …

  Out in the corridor the phone was still ringing. She pushed the bedclothes to one side and put her bare feet on the floor. Her throat tightened. It was always the same with Tom. When she first answered the phone, she hardly knew what to say; though she loved him, he felt like a stranger to her. ‘Jesus, Glade,’ he would say, ‘your voice is so fucking small.’ But he would talk, he was good at talking, and gradually it came back to her: the shape of his head, the smell of his skin. He would be lounging on a sofa, the top two buttons of his shirt undone, his tie askew. He’d be drinking bourbon (sometimes she could hear the ice-cubes shifting in his glass). She could see the apartment, with its windows open, a thin cane of sunlight leaning against the wall, as if some elegant old man was visiting. Outside, the ocean had a metallic finish to it, less like water than the paintwork on a car, and the palm trees showed black against the soft mauve glow of the sky. She found pockets of memory inside her, which she could reach into, and then her voice grew in size and she could tell him about her life and make him laugh. They would talk for an hour, often more, even though it was night where she was, and she was sitting on the floor, no lights on, her back against the cold wall of the corridor. She could never bring the phone-calls to an end; when something only happens rarely, you have to make it last. But the beginning, that was always difficult for her.

  This time he said he couldn’t talk for long. He told her that he had been invited to a wedding in New Orleans, and that he wanted her to come. It was at the end of the month. Would she be free?

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think so.’

  She smiled, thinking of the difference in the way they lived. His life resembled a car-park that was full, and people drove round and round it, looking for a place. Her life, you could park almost anywhere. Sitting in the dark, she saw vast areas of empty asphalt stretching away in all directions. The white lines that would usually separate one car from the next seemed hopelessly optimistic, comical, even cruel, and above the entrance, in green neon, you could always see the same word: SPACES.

  But Tom was saying something about five hundred people, and she realised she hadn’t been listening; she’d been too busy imagining his life, and how it must say FULL outside, in red.

  ‘You got something
to wear, Glade?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘One of those crazy dresses.’ He laughed. ‘You’re sure? You don’t want me to wire you some money?’

  ‘No. I’ll be all right.’

  After she had put the phone down, she stayed sitting on the floor and shook her head. ‘Damn,’ she whispered. Now she thought about it, she was pretty sure she didn’t have a dress she could wear to the wedding – and she didn’t have the money to buy one either: all the bills had come that month and Sally, who was broke, had asked Glade to pay her share for her. A wedding. In New Orleans. She walked back into her bedroom and turned on the light. Her eyes hurt in the sudden yellow glare. Opening her wardrobe, she began to look through her clothes. After five minutes she stood back.

  Stupid, stupid.

  But he was always so fast on the phone, his life happening at a different speed to hers. She thought of the photograph she had taken of him, standing on the steps of that white church in Venice. When he showed her the picture some weeks later, she was struck by how confident he looked, how easy. It was hard to believe that the person behind the camera was not a close friend of his, or a lover – and yet, at that point, they had known each other for less than a minute. He seemed ahead of where he should be, even then; he seemed to be operating on a different time-scale, somehow.

  She closed the wardrobe and switched off the light. The darkness was printed with the shapes and colours of dresses that were no use to her. She crossed the floorboards and climbed back into bed. The sheets were still warm. She lay down, but her mind wouldn’t rest. In the distance she heard a man shouting and felt he was doing it on her behalf, his bellowing strangely monotonous, with gaps in it, like some kind of Morse code signalling despair.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ she said out loud.

  Her white cat stretched and settled against her hip.

  That weekend Charlie came to stay. He appeared at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon with six cans of lager in his hand and a copy of the Evening Standard wedged under his arm. He had grown his hair since Glade last saw him and it hung in a thick plait down the centre of his back, exactly where his spine would be. He was wearing a grey-blue RAF greatcoat and a pair of motor-cycle boots. When she hugged him, she could smell mothballs and tobacco and the raw spring air. Upstairs, in her bedroom, she had lit a fire to welcome him. While she stooped to add another log, he told her about the London plague pits, whose sites he’d been visiting. The breadth of Charlie’s knowledge seldom failed to astonish her. You could ask him about Karl Marx or phone-tapping, any subject at all, and he would talk for fifteen minutes, his voice even, almost monotonous, a roll-up in his slightly shaky hand. Though Glade would listen carefully to what he said, she didn’t often remember much about it afterwards. Still, it was a comfort to know these things could be understood.

  She didn’t usually drink beer. That afternoon, though, its metallic flavour suited her; she thought it tasted as if it had come from somewhere deep below the surface of the earth, as if it had been mined rather than brewed. By seven o’clock they had run out. They decided to go to the off-licence on North Pole Road and buy some more. On the way she mentioned that Tom had called. Charlie liked listening to stories about Tom. His favourite was the one about her ear. Once, in a bar in San Francisco, Tom had leaned across the table and said, quite seriously, ‘You know, Glade, you could get that ear fixed.’ The first time she told Charlie the story, he didn’t say anything, which unnerved her. Turning the right side of her head towards him, she had lifted her hair and showed him her sticking-out right ear. ‘Do you think I should get it fixed, Charlie?’ By then he was laughing, though, and opening his tin of Old Holborn so he could roll himself a cigarette. In any case, it wasn’t the kind of question he would think of answering.

  As they walked back to the flat, carrying a new six-pack of lager and three bags of crisps, Glade explained her predicament: a wedding in New Orleans, no money for a dress.

  ‘Didn’t he offer to buy you one?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Yes. But I told him I had something.’ She saw the look on Charlie’s face. ‘Well, I thought I had.’

  ‘You can’t ring him back, I suppose.’

  ‘No.’

  Charlie didn’t speak again until they reached her front door.

  ‘You know,’ he said slowly, ‘I saw something in the paper that might interest you …’

  Upstairs he showed her an advertisement, no more than two inches square. EARN £100, it said. Underneath, in smaller letters, it gave a phone number. One hundred pounds, she thought. It was the right amount. She would be able to buy a dress, maybe even a pair of shoes as well.

  She looked at Charlie. ‘What would I have to do?’

  He shrugged. ‘Could be anything.’ He reached for the phone and dialled the number, but nobody answered.

  On Monday Glade took Charlie’s paper into the restaurant with her. She waited until she had finished setting up, then she called the number again, using the pay-phone near the toilets. The first three times she dialled, the number was engaged, but she kept trying. At last a man’s voice answered.

  ‘I’m calling about the advert,’ she began.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘This money,’ and she paused, ‘what am I supposed to do for it?’

  Like so much of what she said, it came out wrong and yet the man didn’t laugh at her. Instead, he explained that he was a member of a medical foundation which was attached to the university. At present they were researching sleep staging – polysomnography, to be precise. They were advertising for subjects who might be willing to participate in their research.

  ‘I see,’ Glade said uncertainly. ‘And what does it involve?’

  The man told her she would be required to spend two nights at a clinic in North London. While she was sleeping, she’d be monitored.

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Think of it like this,’ and the man sounded as if he was smiling, ‘we’ll be paying you to sleep.’

  Glade stared at the advertisement until it began to vibrate, slide sideways off the page.

  ‘We’re starting a new programme on Wednesday,’ the man went on. ‘You could come in then. Or Friday, if that’s more convenient. What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a waitress,’ Glade said.

  ‘May I take your name?’

  ‘Glade Spencer.’

  Still holding the receiver to her ear, she turned and stared back down the corridor. The restaurant’s double-doors stood open to the street. The sunlight that shone into the building reflected off the polished floor and almost blinded her. She watched two people walking in. They looked insubstantial, weightless, like pieces of burnt paper. They didn’t appear to have feet.

  We’ll be paying you to sleep.

  She could think of nothing better.

  When Glade returned from work that afternoon, she found a letter on the door-mat in the hall. It was from her mother. She bent down and picked it up, handling the envelope much as her father would have done, she realised, turning it over in her fingers, trying to discover what its purpose was, what it meant. ‘Glade Spencer,’ she murmured. ‘Inglaterra.’ With its loops and dashes, her mother’s handwriting seemed to convey both generosity and carelessness.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, Glade opened the envelope. One neatly folded sheet of mauve paper. She unfolded it and began to read. Glade, darling, I know I should have written before now, but I’ve been so busy with the new apartment. Gerry says – Glade lifted her head and stared out of the window. Whenever she received a letter from her mother, she always felt as if she had opened someone else’s mail. Though she could see her own name on the envelope, its contents never seemed to be addressed to her. But she read on. Her mother talked about whitewash and seafood. About Gerry’s friends, who all had swimming-pools. About the heat. She seemed to expect Glade to understand, to enthuse with her – to agree. She might as well have been speaking a foreign language. I don’t blame them, do you? The sun
shine, the maracas …

  That evening Glade built another fire, even though the weather was warmer and the trees outside her bedroom window were beginning to release their blossom; the winter had lasted so long that she had forgotten spring might be a possibility. At half-past six Charlie rang, to thank her for the weekend. She described what had happened when she called the number in the paper, then she asked him what he knew about sleep research. He began to tell her about sleep laboratories, somnolence, electrodes –

  She interrupted him. ‘Electrodes?’

  He laughed. ‘You won’t even know they’re there. They’re like bits of sticking-plaster with wires attached to them. Or sometimes they use physiological glue. They monitor your brainwaves. Your eye-muscle movement as well.’

  She shuddered slightly. ‘It won’t do me any harm, then?’

  ‘I can’t see how. And it’s a hundred quid, remember.’

  ‘That’s what the man I spoke to said.’ She poked a piece of wood deeper into the fire. ‘So you think I can do it?’

  ‘Why not?’ Charlie said. ‘It’s a dress.’

  She felt much better for having talked to Charlie. He seemed to bring clarity to situations that she found confusing. You needed people like that – people who would tell you that everything was all right, that you weren’t mad.

  Or if you were, then they’d look after you.

  The front door slammed; her bedroom windows rattled in their frames. She turned round, looked out into the corridor. She saw the back of Sally’s head rise into view. At the top of the stairs Sally stopped and kicked off both her shoes. One of them flew in strange slow-motion through the air, glancing off the wall, which it marked with a precise black tick, as if to prove that it had been there. Sally vanished into the bathroom. The sudden, vicious crash of water on enamel.

  Glade moved cautiously out of her room and down the corridor. ‘Sally?’ As she reached the doorway to the bathroom, Sally brushed past her, trailing steam. Glade followed her into the kitchen. ‘Sally, would you do me a favour?’