Soft

by Rupert Thomson

  He ran one finger across the top of the cistern, collecting the last few grains, and licked it, then he pulled the chain. His heart was jumping. Probably the cocaine had been cut with amphetamine. Unlocking the cubicle, he opened the door. Directly in front of him, no more than ten feet away and bending over a wash-basin, was Tony Ruddle. As Jimmy hesitated in the doorway, Ruddle looked up and saw him reflected in the mirror. Ruddle swung round, hands dripping.

  ‘Constipation?’ he said.

  Jimmy stared at him. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘It took such a long time,’ Ruddle said and, smiling unpleasantly, he moved towards the hand-drier on the wall and pressed the silver button.

  He must be drunk, Jimmy thought, as he walked over to a wash-basin and turned on the hot tap.

  ‘You enjoy yourself,’ Ruddle shouted over the roar of the machine. ‘Enjoy your fifteen minutes. Because that’s all you’re getting.’

  Had Ruddle guessed what he’d been up to? Surely not.

  ‘I’m watching you,’ Ruddle shouted. ‘You just remember that.’

  Jimmy pictured the miniature white envelope at the bottom of his pocket. 1903, he thought. The year they took the cocaine out of Coca-Cola. Almost a century ago. And that was probably the closest Ruddle would ever get to it. Suddenly he was grinning. Though he knew it wasn’t wise.

  The roar of the machine cut out and in the sudden hush Ruddle walked up behind him. He could feel the push of Ruddle’s breath. Its sour, brackish reek thrust past his shoulder, hung under his nose.

  ‘… and I’m going to be there when it does,’ Ruddle was saying. ‘Oh yes, I’m going to be there, don’t you worry.’

  Jimmy turned to look at him. ‘Does what?’

  Wrongfooted, Ruddle gaped.

  ‘I have to say,’ and, once again, Jimmy couldn’t keep the grin off his face, ‘that suit with that bow-tie, it’s fucking terrible.’

  Ruddle took another step forwards. Backing away, Jimmy felt the thick porcelain lip of the wash-basin press into the small of his back.

  ‘You think you’re clever,’ Ruddle hissed.

  Christ, the man was frightening close-up. Those teeth crammed inside his mouth like an untidy shelf of books. That breath …

  Ruddle stepped back, panting.

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ he muttered. ‘We’ll see.’

  Jimmy watched Ruddle lunge towards the toilet door, trousers slightly flared, hands flapping at hip-level. It must be that mid-life crisis people talk about, he thought. Ruddle ought to be careful. What happened if your blood pressure got too high? That was a stroke, wasn’t it?

  On his way back to the roof garden Jimmy took a wrong turning. He found himself in a kind of corridor or hallway, an artificial lemon fragrance in the air. The overhead lighting was discreet, indirect, but somehow he still felt exposed, as if Ruddle might, at any moment, spring foaming from a hidden alcove. He noticed a pink upholstered chair with slender golden arms. He sat down. Plants grew complacently around him in brass tubs. In the distance he could see three silver doors. A bank of lifts.

  As he sat there, not sure what to do next, a door opened halfway down the corridor and a girl appeared. She was looking over her shoulder; one of the straps on her backpack had twisted, and she was trying to straighten it. She had short blonde hair, which was still damp from the shower. She wore a loose cotton shirt and clinging lycra cycling shorts. Her legs were bare.

  ‘You were part of the exclamation mark,’ he said.

  She looked round. She had the coolness, the stillness, of a vision. She seemed familiar – or, at least, not unexpected – though he knew he had never met her before.

  He stood up, moved towards her. ‘When you made that word in the water,’ he said. ‘You were part of the exclamation mark, weren’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She laughed a little, lowering her eyes. ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it …’

  ‘Synchro?’

  ‘What?’ He didn’t follow.

  ‘That’s what we call it,’ she said. ‘It’s such a mouthful otherwise.’ Slightly self-conscious, she reached up and pushed her fingers through her hair. He noticed that it had a greenish tinge to it, the same colour as young corn.

  ‘I thought it was great,’ he said. ‘I really did.’ He saw her look beyond him, towards the lifts. ‘You’re not going, are you?’

  She smiled. ‘Well, yes …’

  ‘Do you think I could see you again?’ His boldness took him by surprise.

  She looked at him quickly, and seemed to hesitate.

  ‘Are you with anyone?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘kind of.’

  ‘So am I. Kind of.’ He saw a barren mountainside with wreckage scattered over it. Men picking gingerly through split suitcases and pieces of twisted metal. Bridget’s bedroom. ‘Well, not any more, actually,’ he said. ‘Are you in the phone-book?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So how will I find you?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘I train at Marshall Street Baths most evenings.’ She began to walk away from him, then stopped and looked over her shoulder. ‘Or sometimes it’s Seymour Place.’

  He watched her step through the silver doors and press the button for ground floor. As the doors closed over her, she was looking downwards, at her feet.

  He found the roof garden eventually, asking the housekeeper first, and then a waiter. When he walked out into the sunshine, most of the guests were staring up into the air. Bill Denman had just released one thousand orange balloons over the city, each one stamped with the Kwench! logo. Jimmy stood next to Richard Herring and watched the balloons shrink against the bright-blue sky. He wished he had been able to implement his traffic-light idea. He had wanted to jam all Central London’s traffic-lights on amber. Not for long. An hour or two would have been enough. Imagine the chaos! The publicity!

  ‘Jimmy,’ Richard said. ‘You having fun?’

  That night, on his way home, Jimmy tried to decide whether or not he was worried about Tony Ruddle. He didn’t think he was, not really. Not so long as he continued to be indispensable to Raleigh Connor. After all, what real leverage did Ruddle have? What strings could he pull? Jimmy could only see two options. Either Ruddle would have to try and turn Bill Denman against Connor – and Jimmy couldn’t imagine how Ruddle’s influence on the managing director would be stronger than Connor’s – or he would have to resort to blackmail. To blackmail someone, though, you need information, and Ruddle didn’t have any – at least, not yet (though he did appear to sense that he was being excluded from something, which might explain his rancour and frustration, that tantrum in the hotel toilet). Still, Jimmy thought it would do no harm to cover himself.

  The next morning Jimmy saw Connor in his office. He talked about the friction that existed between himself and Tony Ruddle. It seemed to be personal, he said, a matter of chemistry. There had been, and he paused, outbursts.

  Connor’s head lifted slowly, but he didn’t say anything. At times he could seem almost oriental. The half-moon eyelids. The use of silence.

  Jimmy waited.

  At last Connor spoke. ‘I believe Mr Ruddle’s having some kind of domestic problem. His wife.’

  ‘I see.’ Jimmy thought he’d probably said enough. ‘Well, I just wanted you to be aware of it,’ he added. ‘I didn’t want anything to jeopardise the project.’

  Connor nodded. ‘I appreciate that.’

  ‘As a matter of interest,’ Jimmy said, ‘how’s it going?’

  Connor’s veiled look cleared. He rose to his feet and began to pace up and down in front of the blinds, his arms behind his back, his left wrist enclosed in his right hand. ‘You know, James,’ he said, excited suddenly, ‘I hadn’t imagined the scale of it.’

  ‘The scale?’

  Connor said that Lambert had taken him to see the project at the beginning of the week.

  ‘What’s it like?’ Jimmy asked.

 
‘Peaceful.’ Connor smiled.

  He had watched subjects sleeping in their private cubicles, he said. It was a strange sight. Outside the ward a control room had been set up. The subjects were kept under strict medical surveillance. They were also monitored on video. Lambert had hired three assistants who worked round the clock, in shifts. Every night they processed between twenty and twenty-five people. That was, roughly speaking, one hundred and fifty people a week. Six hundred a month.

  ‘In mid-July,’ Connor said, ‘we hit two thousand.’

  ‘July? I thought it was a three-month programme.’

  ‘Since it seems to be running so smoothly,’ Connor said, ‘I can think of no reason why we shouldn’t extend it for another month.’ He stopped and looked at Jimmy levelly, from under his heavy eyelids. ‘Can you?’

  ‘Well, no.’ Jimmy thought for a moment. ‘Do you think I could see it too, sir?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid that –’

  ‘I’d be very interested,’ Jimmy said. ‘After all,’ he added gently, ‘it was my idea.’

  ‘I’m aware of that. But Lambert’s in charge up there and this is his directive. “No sightseeing tours” was how he put it.’

  No sightseeing tours. Jimmy could imagine Lambert using those exact words. He was disappointed, but not entirely surprised. His involvement in the project had never been one hundred per cent. There are things I’m keeping from you.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, brightening a little, ‘did you hear about the balloons?’

  Connor nodded.

  The day before, a dozen of the Kwench! balloons had been caught in a freak air current over Central London. Swooping down into Westminster, almost to ground level, they had bombarded Prince Charles as he arrived at the Abbey for a memorial service. The balloons had appeared on TV as the last item in the early evening news, the anchorman referring to Kwench! in passing as a ‘marketing phenomenon’. That morning the Mirror had published a photograph of Prince Charles looking startled as a Kwench! balloon bounced off his shoulder. Jimmy was thinking of having T-shirts printed. The national media had become involved, the Royal Family too. There was no doubt about it. Kwench! was well and truly launched.

  The Carbonated Brain

  On a humid evening halfway through June, Jimmy ran up the steps that led out of Piccadilly Circus tube. A man stood on the street-corner, selling Japanese-style paper fans; the heatwave was in its second week. Jimmy turned north, loosening his tie. Simone had invited him to an opening, and he was late, as usual. It had been a momentous day, though. Truly momentous. At a meeting of the project team that morning he had finally been able to demonstrate the impact Kwench! had had on the soft-drinks market in the six weeks since its launch. The Nielsen off-trade figures had come in, revealing widespread availability in supermarkets throughout the country. The on-trade figures were looking healthy too. Kwench! appeared to have cannibalised almost every sector of the market: the fruit carbonates, obviously, but also the lemonades, the juices, and even, to some extent, power brands like Coke and Pepsi. Sales were a staggering 24 per cent ahead of budget, a statistic that could only partly be explained by the hot weather. Jimmy’s personal contribution to this early success couldn’t be quantified, of course, but, then again, it couldn’t be underestimated either. Just recently, with Tony Ruddle still away on holiday – some kind of rest-cure, presumably – there had been talk of a re-shuffle. According to one rumour, Jimmy was being considered for a promotion in the autumn. As a member of Connor’s inner circle, as Connor’s protégé, in fact, he was beginning to feel that there was no limit to what he might achieve.

  Seven-thirty was striking as he arrived at the gallery, and it was so crowded that people had spilled out on to the pavement. Jimmy pushed through the glass doors and on into a huge white space where spotlights burned like miniature suns. Simone was deep in conversation with two men. One of them had eyes that seemed to float in their sockets, as if suspended in formaldehyde. Jimmy decided not to interrupt – at least, not for the time being. Instead, he moved towards the bar.

  He drank his first drink quickly, and was just reaching for a second when he noticed an old woman standing at his shoulder. Her eyebrows had been drawn on in brown, and she was smoking a cigarette in an extravagantly long tortoiseshell cigarette-holder. But it was her glasses that intrigued him most: with their dark-yellow lenses and their thick black frames, they looked as if they might have been made during the fifties, in a city like Istanbul or Tel Aviv.

  ‘I hope you don’t think I’m one of those people who wear sunglasses at night,’ she said when he complimented her on her appearance. ‘They’re for my eyesight. I have photophobia.’ She looked past him, into the room, and, drawing on her cigarette, let the smoke dribble from one corner of her mouth. ‘Ah, here’s my niece.’

  They were joined by a girl in her early twenties, wearing a sleeveless orange dress. Her hair was black, and hung in tangled ropes below her shoulders. The skin beneath her eyes looked shaded-in, as if she had not been sleeping well.

  ‘This wine,’ and she made a face, ‘it’s foul.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said the older woman, though she didn’t seem particularly disturbed by it.

  ‘I wish they had Kwench!.’ The girl turned to Jimmy. ‘It’s a new soft drink. You should try it.’

  Jimmy couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  ‘What,’ the girl said. Because he was staring at her, not saying anything.

  ‘Kwench!?’ the old woman said. ‘What’s Kwench!?’

  The girl began to explain Kwench! to her aunt. Jimmy was still staring at the girl. Could she really be one of his ambassadors? She was certainly saying the right things. But maybe that was just a coincidence; after all, the secretary on the tube would have sounded exactly the same. That orange dress, though – was that coincidental too?

  Touching him on the arm now, the girl told him she was getting through three or four cans of Kwench! a day. Her fridge was full of it. In fact, she said, and she began to laugh (a happy ambassador!), she was probably going to have to buy a bigger fridge. And she opened her eyes wide, signalling that things had got completely out of hand.

  He was laughing as well. He had never imagined that an ambassador could be funny. Earnest, yes. Remorseless. But not funny. This girl, though – she was like someone you might meet at a party, someone you might think of taking home …

  He watched her push her hair away from her face, as if she was walking in a forest and her hair was a stray branch or bramble that blocked her path. He noticed how her bracelet tumbled down her forearm towards the dark crease of her elbow –

  Imagine if he told her where he worked!

  All of a sudden he began to feel claustrophobic. The girl was still talking, talking, talking – and always about the same thing, the only thing she could think of. He received a vivid, flashed image of the inside of her head. Her brain appeared to have liquefied. Not only that, but it was carbonated too, each cell brimming with frenetic orange bubbles. He could almost hear it fizzing.

  The spotlights burned; the room blackened at the edges. Muttering an excuse, he turned and plunged into the crowd …

  He emerged at last and stood on the pavement, sweating. Cool air, car horns. The mingled scents of jasmine and fast food. He doubled over, retching. Nothing there. He slowly straightened up again. Lambert had been right to deny him access to the project. Obviously you could get too close.

  He leaned against an iron railing, let his head tilt backwards on his neck. A solitary pale-pink cloud floated in the sky above Hanover Square. It looked like something that had been mislaid, he thought, and the strange thing was, its owner hadn’t even realised.

  American For Disaster

  Sitting high above the swimming-pool on a wooden bench, Jimmy watched the officials walk up and down in their white outfits, name-tags dangling on frail silver chains around their necks. At the shallow end, the girls stood about in bathrobes, their faces serious and eager, their voices hu
shed. Instrumental music filtered at low volume through the sound system. Crystal Palace on a Saturday afternoon.

  During the last month and a half he must have phoned the baths at Marshall Street and Seymour Place on at least a dozen different occasions with enquiries about the synchronised swimming, but the training sessions always seemed to take place at midday, or in the early evening, and he rarely left the office before seven. Then, one lunchtime that week, he had tried a new approach. He called Marshall Street and asked if they had a girl training there, a girl with short blonde hair.

  ‘You mean Karen?’

  He took a chance. ‘Yes. That’s her.’

  ‘She’s just leaving.’

  ‘Could you put her on?’

  There was a jumble of sounds, a silence, then a voice said, ‘Karen here.’

  ‘My name’s Jimmy Lyle,’ he said. ‘I met you at the Kwench! party. In that hotel in Kensington.’ He paused, hoping he wasn’t talking to the wrong person. ‘You were part of the exclamation mark,’ he said, ‘remember?’

  ‘That was weeks ago,’ she said.

  His heart turned over. ‘I know.’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. Slow of me.’

  She laughed. ‘You weren’t slow the last time I saw you.’

  No, he thought. But there were reasons for that.

  ‘Are you doing anything this weekend?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve got a competition. At Crystal Palace.’

  ‘Maybe I could come along.’

  ‘It’d probably be boring for you.’

  He smiled. ‘Probably.’

  So far, though, he had no regrets. Leaning forwards, with his arms resting on the bench in front of him, he felt lulled by the atmosphere, almost drugged.