Soft

by Rupert Thomson

  When Jimmy woke up the next morning, he saw eight gnomes standing on a patch of Astroturf outside his bedroom window. Eyes half-closed, head pounding, he counted them again. Yes, eight. His upstairs neighbour, Mrs Fandle, must have bought a new one. Jimmy lived in what estate agents call ‘a ground-floor-and-basement maisonette’. If you stood in his bedroom, which was at the back of the house, and looked through the window, you had a view of the terrace belonging to the flat above – but your eyes were on a level with the floor, with the Astroturf itself. In the summer Jimmy would sometimes wake to see a deckchair just a few feet from his head, the stripy fabric straining under the weight of Mrs Fandle’s body, her bare legs white and veined and monumental. Luckily it was October now, and the temperature had plummeted. He only had the gnomes to deal with – though, seen from below, they could seem imposing, sinister, like highway sculpture in America. Once, not long after moving in, he dreamed the gnomes had taken over. In his dream, of course, they’d multiplied. He found them in the hall, on the sofa, halfway up the stairs. One was lying on his back under the grill, like someone in a tanning centre. When he opened the fridge, two of them were standing on the inside of the door, the place where you keep juice and milk. They were everywhere he looked. It had been a kind of nightmare.

  Dehydrated but incapable of moving, he dozed on, imagining the cold tap running, ice-cubes jingling in frosted pints of water. Waking again, he reached for the glass beside the bed. Though he could see that it was empty, he brought it to his mouth and tipped it almost upside-down, thinking he might find one drop of precious liquid at the bottom. But no, nothing: he must have drained it during the night. His head ached terribly – a soft, dull thudding; he saw bags of sand being dumped one after another on to a road. On top of that, there was an unpleasant padded feeling, a kind of claustrophobia. He felt as if his brain had been packed in cotton wool. As if it was about to be sent somewhere by post. FRAGILE stencilled on the front in red. THIS SIDE UP. He put his feet on the floor. Sat still for a moment, forearms on his knees, head lowered. Probably he shouldn’t have taken the Temazepam, not after all that vodka and champagne. And probably the E hadn’t helped. Parties.

  He struggled to his feet and walked unsteadily out of the bedroom and down the half-flight of stairs into his living-room. Thinking he might like some air, he slid the picture-window open. The smell of lavender drifted in from the small, walled garden. He was almost sick. Turning away from the window, he passed through a narrow doorway to his right. He stood at the wash-basin in the bathroom, staring at his image in the mirror, the whites of his eyes gelatinous, like the transparent parts of eggs. His face slid off the mirror as he opened the medicine cabinet. He scoured the shelves, hands moving clumsily. There was a choice. Solpadeine, Paracodol and one dog-eared box of something left over from a holiday in Thailand. He chose the Paracodol. Down in the kitchen he opened the fridge and lifted out a can of Kwench!. American import, still unavailable in the UK. Swallowing two pills, he drank the contents of the can, then climbed the stairs back to the bathroom and took a shower.

  Later, when the pounding in his head had faded, he sat in the living-room, a cup of coffee on his lap. Saturday TV flickered mutely in the corner of the room. Outside, in the garden, the bleak sunshine silvered half a tree-trunk, one narrow strip of grass. He found the packet of sweets Zane had given him and emptied it on to the table. The robots were the curious, translucent red of human skin three layers down. Something Connor had said in a meeting the day before came back to him. The objective of advertising is to change the behaviour of the consumer so they purchase more of the product. Connor had been stating the obvious, of course, but it was strange, wasn’t it, how things could suddenly become obscure when they were put into words. The more Jimmy thought about it, the more the sentence seemed to gather meanings. He began to arrange the robots in fighting formation. Unusual smell, they had. Like certain kinds of plastic. Like toys. What Connor had said, though. The words that almost swaggered in the middle of that simple sentence. Change the behaviour. The dark-haired secretary on the tube, the small red figures lined up on the table. There was a connection there, a hint. An opportunity. Jimmy sat back, staring at the wall. Outside, the sunlight faded and the room darkened in an instant, as if a cloth had been thrown over the house. The route his thoughts were taking now was unpremeditated, shocking, but he felt he was seeing with absolute clarity. Maybe it would be impossible to implement. And yet, if he could do it. If it could be done …

  He snatched up his keys and his ECSC ID, and left the flat. On his way up Mornington Terrace he passed a house with four motor bikes and an overturned dustbin in its front garden: Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’ churned and howled from an open window on the second floor. He walked on. The clicking of a train as it slid lazily into Euston or King’s Cross, the same sound as someone running down a flight of stairs: two clicks, a gap, two clicks, a gap … He reached his car, an MG Midget, almost twenty-two years old. He didn’t usually give names to things. In this case, however, with a number-plate like YYY 296, he hadn’t been able to resist. Delilah started fourth time, as always. Jimmy turned left, over the railway, and followed the northern edge of Regent’s Park. At Paddington, he joined the Westway, that casual, delicious curve of motorway that led to the White City exit. The closest thing London had to a piece of race-track. It was here that he’d once got up to 93 m.p.h. in Marco’s Triumph Herald. Where was Marco, anyway? He hadn’t heard from him for days. He reached the office in twenty minutes and parked on a single yellow line. Bob stood on the pavement outside the building, rocking gently on his heels, his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets.

  ‘Not like you, coming in on a Saturday.’ Bob’s oblong head wobbled on his neck, a sure sign that a joke was on its way. ‘Haven’t you got nothing better to do?’

  ‘Did it last night, Bob,’ Jimmy said, and winked. He hadn’t, though. Hadn’t done it for about three weeks.

  Bob chuckled.

  Jimmy couldn’t resist telling Bob why he’d come in. ‘I’ve had an idea, you see.’

  ‘An idea, eh?’ Bob looked away into the sky, his face vague and peaceful, utterly unthreatened. I’ve just been to Venus would have elicited the same reaction. Venus, eh?

  For the next three hours Jimmy worked on his proposal. It would be a tactical document, he decided, since the budgetary implications of his plan were still unknown. Every now and then he left his desk and walked to the window. To the north the sky had darkened, blurred. Rain would be falling in Cricklewood, in Willesden Green. Once, while he was standing at the window, staring out, he heard a voice behind him call his name. He looked over his shoulder. Debbie Groil stood ten feet away, her arms folded across her breasts, as if she was feeling cold.

  Debbie worked in Communications. Earlier in the year, while they were attending a sales conference in Leeds, she had invited herself up to his room at one in the morning. He remembered how she lay across his bed, four buttons on her blouse undone, pretending to be drunk. Haven’t you got nothing better to do?

  ‘You were miles away,’ she said, smiling at him curiously.

  ‘Debbie. I didn’t know you worked weekends.’

  ‘Just a few things to clear up.’ Her smile became fatalistic. ‘Seems like we’re always clearing things up.’

  Jimmy nodded. Communications took responsibility for relations between the company and the media. Sometimes they were required to generate publicity, but, more often than not, they had to field awkward enquiries, or defuse potentially explosive situations, not lying exactly, but choosing their words carefully, choosing which truth to tell.

  ‘You don’t fancy a drink, I suppose?’ Debbie had taken a step forwards, her eyes filled with hopeful light.

  Jimmy gestured towards his desk. ‘I ought to finish up.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, sighing. ‘See you Monday then.’

  ‘See you, Debbie.’

  Sitting in front of his computer again, Jimmy read through what he had writ
ten so far. He wasn’t sure. He just wasn’t sure. Should he destroy the document right there and then, delete it all? But then, if something was truly ground-breaking, it could often appear excessive, couldn’t it? At the very least, it would be an indication of his commitment, his creativity. And he could always step away from it, back down. He could always say, ‘Well, it was never intended to be taken literally. It’s a blueprint, for heaven’s sake. A paradigm.’ He worked on for another half an hour, taking great care with his vocabulary. He used company language, making sure he incorporated all the appropriate action verbs. He wanted the document to read in such a way that even Tony Ruddle would be hard put to find fault with it.

  Later, when it was dark, he picked up the phone and called Simone. He had met up with her the previous night, at the party in King’s Cross. She had just returned from New York where one of her artists was showing – Simone worked for a gallery – and claimed not to have slept for days. Her cocaine-pale face, that shoulder-length red hair. It had been good to see her. Somehow, though, at two-thirty in the morning, they’d lost each other. And not long afterwards he’d walked out on to the street and caught a taxi home.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Simone, how are you?’

  ‘I just got up,’ she said, yawning.

  He glanced at his watch. Twenty-past five.

  ‘What happened to you last night?’ he said. ‘I couldn’t find you anywhere.’

  ‘Oh Jimmy. I looked for you all over. You disappeared.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Went to some club. Flamingo something.’ She laughed. ‘It was terrible.’

  Jimmy stared out into the darkness. ‘What are you doing tonight?’

  ‘I don’t know. Get a take-away maybe. Watch videos.’ Simone paused. ‘You want to come over?’

  Each Wednesday morning, at ten o’clock, the various members of the project team on Kwench! assembled in the boardroom on the fourteenth floor. Lasting an hour, the meeting acted as a forum in which you were encouraged to raise questions, voice opinions or recommend objectives for the week that lay ahead. On the third Wednesday in October, Connor took his place at the table for the first time. Dressed in a dark-blue blazer with gold buttons, and a pair of pale-grey trousers, he talked for forty-five minutes without a break. Once in a while, Ruddle nodded or murmured in agreement, but no one else dared intervene. At a quarter to eleven, as Connor delivered his closing remarks, his voice lowered, deepened, the boardroom table seeming to reverberate. He leaned forwards. His fingers joined at the tips, forming a temple on a level with his chin, and his eyes travelled slowly, almost hypnotically, from one face to the next. The sun glanced off the flat, gold surface of his signet ring.

  ‘Does anyone have any questions?’

  Seated some twenty feet away, Jimmy was thinking about the building, how it must have been designed to reflect company philosophy. Look at the way the sun streamed through that sheer glass wall. It had to be intentional, a metaphor. For bright ideas. Clarity of thought. Accountability.

  ‘Any comments?’

  Connor wanted input, but nobody was prepared to speak, not at this late stage. Nobody wanted to be noticed for the wrong reason.

  Jimmy realised he had no more than fifteen seconds before Connor’s eyes reached his own. What should he do? His heart swooped suddenly, then speeded up. Obviously you had to hold the great man’s gaze. You tried to look unflinching, purposeful. Maybe you even nodded, as if you’d thought about what he’d said and you agreed with it. Then what? Well, maybe nothing. Maybe that would be enough.

  Five seconds.

  ‘No?’

  He felt as if he had swallowed some of the new product and it had got trapped, a little pocket of effervescence fizzling inside his chest. He glanced at his hands, one placed calmly on the other. Was this the moment? Was it? When he looked up again he found that he was looking into Raleigh Connor’s eyes – which, naturally, were pale-blue. He found that he was talking.

  ‘I think, sir, that we should fire the agency.’

  In the silence that followed, Jimmy could hear the high-pitched scream of half a dozen brains.

  ‘Fire the agency?’ Easing back in his chair, one hand still resting on the table, the American seemed unruffled, almost amused. ‘And who would you replace it with?’

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  ‘We need an agency, surely. That’s the way this business functions.’ Jimmy could sense Connor’s mind working on a number of levels at once, like the police raiding a building.

  ‘At the moment, yes. But things are changing.’ Jimmy leaned closer. He couldn’t afford to lose the American, not now. ‘It’s not the agency as such, sir – though it’s true, they’ve not been performing well. It’s advertising as a whole. Advertising as we know it, anyway. It’s becoming redundant, superannuated. It’s had its day.’

  ‘I hadn’t realised.’ This was Tony Ruddle, the note of sarcasm unmistakable.

  Jimmy ignored him. ‘What we need,’ he said, still speaking to Connor, ‘is a completely fresh approach.’ He paused. ‘I’ve taken the liberty of preparing a document …’

  A smile flickered at the edges of Connor’s mouth. ‘I’d be happy to look at it.’ He glanced round the table. ‘Anything else?’

  That evening, as Jimmy stood in his kitchen mixing a drink, he started laughing quietly. He’d remembered something that had happened during the meeting, a moment he could see quite clearly, as if it had been photographed. After he had recommended that the agency be fired he had glanced across the table. Neil’s face. His face just then. It was the first time in his life that Jimmy had ever seen a jaw actually drop.

  Two days later, at lunchtime, Raleigh Connor’s secretary called Jimmy on his private extension and told him that Mr Connor would like to see him. Jimmy slipped his jacket on. His heart was beating solidly, heavily, and something had tightened in his throat.

  When he knocked on Connor’s door and walked in, Connor was on the phone. He was standing by the window, his free hand inserted into his blazer pocket. He had left his thumb on the outside, though, which gave him an incongruous, slightly rakish air. The same navy-blue blazer with gold buttons, the same dove-grey trousers. Possibly he had a wardrobe filled with clothes that were identical. He noticed Jimmy, motioned him towards a chair. Jimmy sat down. His proposal lay on the table in front of him. Someone had scrawled on it in bright-red ink. Would that be Connor’s handwriting?

  ‘Sure, that’s no problem,’ Connor was saying. ‘Sure, Bill.’ Finally he replaced the receiver and stared at it, rather as if the phone was a clockwork toy and he had just wound it up and now he was waiting for it to do something. Jimmy thought he should speak first.

  ‘You wanted to see me, sir.’

  Connor took a seat. Using both his hands, he adjusted the position of Jimmy’s proposal on the table, the way you might straighten a painting on a wall. Then he looked at Jimmy and shook his head.

  ‘You took one hell of a risk giving me this.’

  Now they were alone together, one on one, it felt as if the rumours about Connor must all be true. The tanned skin that covered his bald head was corrugated, tough, and his nails had the stubborn quality of horses’ hooves. The muscles in his jaw flexed and rippled, as if he was chewing a stick of gum, yet Jimmy had the feeling Connor’s mouth was empty. It was a tic – a clue: Connor was somebody who could chew more than he bit off.

  ‘Let me ask you something.’ Connor leaned over the table, his jacket tightening across the shoulders. ‘Do you believe in right and wrong?’

  Trick question? Jimmy couldn’t tell. Then he thought: The man’s American.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘And what, in your opinion, is the difference?’

  The blinds behind Connor’s head were playing games with Jimmy’s eyes. Jumping forwards, jumping back.

  ‘It’s hard to put into words –’

  ‘Exactly,’ Connor said.

  Tho
ugh Jimmy hadn’t even begun to answer the question, it seemed as if he had somehow boarded Connor’s train of thought.

  ‘There’s a grey area, isn’t there,’ Connor went on. ‘This document,’ and he touched it with his fingers, fingers that could well have killed, ‘it’s interesting. It’s very interesting.’

  Jimmy waited.

  ‘Seems to me that it occupies a grey area, though.’

  ‘That depends,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On the execution.’

  Connor’s gaze hadn’t wavered. Had he turned this same look on the North Koreans, the Vietcong?

  ‘Yes,’ Connor said at last. ‘I think so too.’

  And suddenly the atmosphere changed. Connor leaned back in his black leather chair, hands folded on his solar plexus. He seemed relaxed and genial, almost sleepy, as if he’d just eaten a fine lunch.

  ‘So tell me,’ he said. ‘How did you get the idea?’

  Jimmy said he wasn’t sure he could identify the source. There had been no sudden flash of inspiration – rather, the idea seemed to have developed gradually, in its own time, not allowing itself to be discovered exactly, but revealing itself, the way a Polaroid does; the man with the Maltesers, the secretary on the tube, the packet of sweets from Indonesia – they had all been stages in its growth. Then, about a week ago, his friend Marco had come to dinner, Marco with his shaved head shining in the candle-light … Marco happened to mention that, when he was a student, he had answered an ad in the paper that had been placed by a pharmaceutical company. They paid you a hundred pounds a week to participate in a drug trial. To Marco, this had sounded like a pretty good deal. In fact, he’d done it three times. That night, after Marco left, Jimmy had thought: Yes. Why not advertise? You could offer people cash, the going rate, and then, without them knowing, you could fill their heads with product images. Then out they’d go, quite happily, into the world …

  At the edge of his field of vision he saw Connor nodding.

  The word ‘subliminal’ was often misused, Jimmy explained. What people meant when they said ‘subliminal’ was actually ‘sub-rational’. But this idea of his, this really was subliminal: the subjects would be genuinely unaware of how they were being manipulated. You’d create a core of two thousand people whose brand loyalty would be unthinking, unquestioning – unconditional. During the course of their daily lives, they’d tell everyone they knew about your product – but in an entirely natural way. Just like the secretary on the tube.