Soft

by Rupert Thomson

  Yes, she was right to have ignored Tom’s calls. If she’d made a mistake at all, it was in telling Sally why. They were sitting at the kitchen table late one night, the window a black mirror revealing a second version of the room, bleaker, more ethereal. Sally had been complaining about the phone ringing, how it woke her, and Glade felt she owed her flat-mate an explanation. She began to tell Sally about the party in the house on Chestnut Street, and what had happened later, in the car … Sally couldn’t believe what she was hearing. If something like that had happened to her, she said, she would have called the police. She would have sued. Though Glade felt uneasy now, she continued with her story, ending with the conversation that had taken place at the wedding, under the cedar tree. Afterwards, Sally was silent for a moment, then she sighed and lit a cigarette. ‘Well, I always said you should ditch him.’

  Glade shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘After the way he treated you?’

  ‘I mean, I’m not sure if I ditched him,’ Glade said. ‘Maybe he ditched me.’ The word felt odd in her mouth, as if she had a different tongue. She ought to use her own words, she thought. Not other people’s.

  ‘Does it matter?’ Sally was saying. ‘As long as you get rid of him. For Christ’s sake, the man’s an animal.’ She paused, inhaled, tapped some ash into a saucer. Then she said it again: ‘He’s an animal.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Glade said slowly. ‘What if I love him?’

  She was thinking of the first night, when they left the bar on Decatur Street and called in at their hotel to collect the car. While they were in their room, she remembered the painting she had brought with her. She held it out in front of her, saying simply, ‘It’s a present.’ He had seemed perplexed at first, to be receiving something, but then he unwrapped it and carried it over to the tall lamp by the window. He looked at her, his mouth smiling, but his eyes and eyebrows puzzled, then he looked back at the painting again. He didn’t understand it, but he wanted to.

  ‘What is it?’ he said at last.

  She moved towards him. ‘What do you think it is?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He tilted the picture one way, then the other. ‘A pyramid?’

  She grinned. ‘You remember the mountain I told you about?’

  ‘This is it?’

  ‘Yes.’ She joined him by the window. It was strange how light the colours had seemed in London, and how dark they looked suddenly, in New Orleans. ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I like it.’ He hesitated. ‘Has it got a title?’

  ‘It’s on the back.’

  He turned the painting over. ‘Paddington.’ He nodded to himself, then turned uncertainly towards her, the blond hairs on his forearms crimson in the lamplight. ‘They took it away, though, right?’

  When she thought about loving Tom, trying to decide whether she did or didn’t, this was one of the moments that always came to mind.

  Sally stubbed her cigarette out. ‘Well, I’d ditch him if I were you.’ She yawned and then stood up. ‘I’m going to bed.’

  After Sally had left the room, Glade sat at the table, wishing she’d said nothing. She listened to the taps running, the toilet flushing, the door to Sally’s bedroom closing.

  She felt stupid, so stupid.

  That night she dreamed the mountain had returned, and she woke the next morning with a lightness inside her, believing for a few moments that it was true. It isn’t there, she told herself as she dressed for work. You just dreamed it, that’s all. Somehow, though, her heart was lifting against her ribs in anticipation. Somehow, she had to check.

  On her way to Paddington she tried not to think. Instead, she concentrated on the air in her lungs, the sun on her face, the paving-stones beneath her feet. As she crossed Portobello Road she saw a man juggling avocados. He winked at her. She walked on, through streets that smelled of exhaust-fumes, blossom and, once, deliciously, of toast.

  When she peered over the corrugated-iron fence, the mountain wasn’t there, of course, only the ground it had once stood on, and no shadow on that ground, no charmed circle of dark earth, not one trace or memory of its existence. She felt something inside her slip, give way. Why had she come? All she had done was prove she was without something she had loved; she had reminded herself of a lack, an absence. She heard her own voice, thin but defiant, in a garden several thousand miles away. Do you think we should just forget about it completely? As she stood on the narrow strip of pavement, hands gripping the top of the fence, her mouth began to crumple. It’s all right. I won’t make a fuss. Then the tears came. She didn’t think she’d ever cried so hard, the sounds wrenched out of her, her whole body shuddering. She lowered herself into a sitting position, her back against the corrugated iron, her forehead resting on her drawn-up knees. Cars rushed round the curve in front of her.

  When the crying stopped at last, and she looked up, the light seemed to have changed. She had no idea how long she had been sitting there. Twenty minutes? An hour? She stood up shakily. Wiped her eyes, her cheeks. She supposed she would be late for work. She thought of how she must look, her skin raw, her eyelids rimmed with red. What would she tell them at the restaurant?

  At that moment a white van accelerated round the bend, its headlights flashing as it came towards her. The man behind the wheel showed her his tongue, just the tip of it; she saw it flicker in and out between his lips. His face was pale and damp, like mushrooms after they’ve been peeled.

  She stared after the van, waiting until it had dipped down into the underpass, then she turned and walked in the opposite direction. For the next few minutes she walked faster than usual, past the timber yard, over the railway bridge and down into the station, using the back entrance, and it was only then, when she was under its high, curved roof, among the rushing people and the strange, burnt smell of trains, that she slowed down.

  The sorrow that washed over her that morning stayed with her. At work she pretended to have hayfever – she even took the medication, so as to lend her story authenticity – but, in private, she cried so much that her eyes swelled and her throat tasted of blood. Sometimes, on the good days, she painted pictures of the mountain. Each picture was bathed in the same fierce orange glare. She wasn’t sure it was such a great improvement – the landscape now looked apocalyptic, the train in the background on its way to some terrifying destination – but she didn’t seem to have any choice in the matter. Then, towards the end of May, Charlie Moore sent her a postcard. He wanted her to visit him the following weekend. She could think of nothing she would rather do. This was the sign of a true friend, she thought, that he could time something so perfectly without even realising.

  A Saturday, then. Just after two-thirty in the afternoon. The bus roared and staggered along the narrow, tangled streets of Camberwell. Outside, the heat pressed down out of a strangely dazzling grey sky. Everything she could see looked dusty: the buildings, the cars – even the grass. London could look like that in the summer, as though it needed wiping with a damp cloth. She imagined for a moment that the world was the size of a tennis ball, and that it was lying on a high shelf in her father’s caravan.

  From the bus-stop on the main road she had to walk a distance of about a mile to reach the squat where Charlie lived. A woman called from behind a fence, a boy on a bicycle turned circles in a drive. The stillness of the suburbs. She stopped on a bridge and, leaning on the parapet, stared at the railway tracks below. A polished silver stripe down the middle of each rail, the bright-brown of the rust on either side. Nettles massed on the embankments and, further up, a stand of buddleia grew tall against a freshly painted fence. She supposed she was waiting to see a train, but she stayed on the bridge for fifteen or twenty minutes, the sun breaking through the high cloud cover, and no train came. Perhaps, after all, the line was disused. So many were, in England. And suddenly she realised that this was the feeling she would like to pass on, to her children, if she ever had any, the feeling of standing on a bridge somewhere, the sun wa
rming the back of her head, her shoulders, and just the smell of buddleia, its blunt mauve flowers, the smell of rust and nettles too, and almost nothing moving. The feeling of being entirely in the present, with nothing to look back on, nothing to look forward to. A feeling of reprieve, a kind of grace. This feeling more than any other.

  She arrived outside the squat to find the front door open. From the top of the steps she could see through the house to the back garden, an upright rectangle of sunlight at the far end of a long, dark hall. Four or five people sprawled on the lawn with their shirts off, their bodies white, almost ghostly. She recognised Paul, who used to be a skinhead in Newcastle, but she didn’t know any of the others. And Charlie was not among them. She thought he would probably be upstairs. He had two rooms on the fourth floor, under the roof. She climbed slowly, one hand sliding along the cool, curved wood of the banister rail. She could smell plaster and damp, a smell that hadn’t altered in the year since she’d last visited.

  She opened the door to Charlie’s living-room and stepped inside. He was sitting in an armchair by the window reading a book. He wore a collarless shirt, with the sleeves rolled to the elbow.

  ‘Glade.’ He closed the book and stood up. ‘As you’ve probably noticed,’ he said, ‘we’ve been invaded. I had to retreat indoors.’ He smiled his peculiar, straight-lipped smile.

  While he was downstairs, making tea, Glade looked around the room. The pale-blue walls were so cracked in some places that they reminded her of china that’s been smashed and then glued back together. The floorboards had the bleached, grey colour of driftwood washed up on a beach. An oval mirror hung on a chain over the fireplace, and below it, on the mantelpiece, stood an invitation to a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, and a pair of green glass candlesticks that had once belonged to Charlie’s grandmother. On the opposite wall, above his work-table, there was a large black-and-white photograph of a famous Austrian philosopher. Glade put her bag on the floor and settled on the camp-bed that doubled as a sofa. Outside, in the garden, she heard laughter. She imagined they were stoned. That was what usually happened when they sat in the garden in fine weather.

  Charlie returned with a pot of tea, some biscuits and a can of beer. Once he was sitting in his armchair again, he asked her how things had gone in America.

  ‘Not too well,’ she said.

  ‘Tom?’

  She nodded.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Charlie said. ‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’

  So she talked about the wedding instead – the old man in the linen suit, the creamy smell of the gardenias. Then, suddenly, she broke off.

  ‘I keep feeling strange,’ she said.

  Charlie’s face didn’t alter. ‘What kind of strange?’

  She told him about being on the plane and ordering a drink which, at that point, she had never heard of, and how, later that day, a similar thing had happened in the house on Chestnut Street. She seemed to know all about something she didn’t know anything about, if that made sense. She glanced at him. His face was lowered, and he was nodding. She told him that she sometimes saw orange. She didn’t notice it exactly (though that happened too). She actually saw it – when it wasn’t there. She told him that she’d mentioned it to Tom and that Tom thought she should see a psychiatrist.

  ‘It’s all part of the same thing, you think?’ Charlie said.

  ‘It feels like it.’

  ‘And you can’t control it?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Have you told anyone?’ he said. ‘Apart from Tom, I mean?’

  ‘No. Who else would I tell?’

  He looked at his can of beer for a moment, then he lifted it to his lips and drank.

  ‘Do you think there’s something wrong with me, Charlie?’ She paused. ‘I think maybe there’s something wrong with me.’ It frightened her to think that she might have asked him a question he couldn’t answer. She waited a moment, aware of her heart suddenly, how it shook her entire body, and then, cautiously, in a low voice, she said, ‘I’ve started making lists.’

  ‘Lists?’ he said.

  She reached sideways and down, into her bag, and pulled out a black notebook with a dark-red spine. It was a kind of diary, she told him, of all the orange things she saw. She gave him the first page to read. She could only remember two of the entries: Crunchie Wrapper, Heathrow and Man’s Tie, Piccadilly Line.

  ‘It’s just like a normal day,’ Charlie said when he had reached the bottom of the page, ‘only you’re telling it in orange.’

  ‘I know.’ Glade hugged her knees as if she were cold. ‘You don’t think I’m mad, then?’ She didn’t give Charlie time to answer; she was still too afraid of what he might say. ‘Tom would, if he saw it.’

  ‘Tom.’ Charlie turned his attention back to the notebook.

  While Charlie was reading, Glade leaned on the window-sill. She realised she would never be able to tell him what had happened in the car on Chestnut Street. It was the way he’d just said Tom – his voice impatient, almost contemptuous. Sometimes people needed protecting from what you knew.

  When Charlie came to the end, he closed the notebook and stood up. She was expecting him to offer an opinion. Instead, he reached for his wallet. ‘We ought to go to the shops,’ he said, ‘otherwise they’ll be shut. Don’t forget,’ and he smiled, ‘this is Penge.’

  Outside, it was still light, though the colour of the shadows had diluted, the black of midday fading to a kind of indigo. Most houses had their windows open. It would be a warm night. They passed a girl in a pink T-shirt who was swinging backwards and forwards on her garden gate.

  ‘Are you ravers?’ she said as they walked by.

  ‘That’s right.’ Charlie grinned. ‘What about you?’

  The girl slid down off the gate and hid behind a hedge.

  When they returned to the squat, it was empty. They sat in the half-derelict, high-ceilinged kitchen and drank beer while the sausages they’d bought spat and sizzled under the grill. Someone had painted a large cow on the wall, and then drawn a big red line through it.

  ‘Paul’s given up dairy products,’ Charlie said.

  He served the sausages on white china plates with mashed potato and red cabbage out of a jar. They ate in the garden, by candle-light. After Charlie had finished, he opened his tin of Old Holborn and began to roll a cigarette. Glade lay back on the grass. The sky looked close enough to touch, but she knew that if she reached up with her hand, there would be nothing there.

  ‘You know that notebook of mine you read?’ she said.

  Charlie looked up.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘there’s more.’

  In her bedroom she had a cardboard box marked ORANGE (MAY). Every time she left her flat, she took a small bag with her. If she saw something orange – a sweet-wrapper, a piece of plastic – she would pick it up and put it in the bag. When she got home, she would transfer what she had found into the box. It was an ongoing process. May would soon be over. In a few days’ time she would be starting on her ORANGE (JUNE) collection.

  Charlie was watching her carefully now.

  ‘All this is new,’ she said. ‘The last couple of weeks.’ She paused, pulling at a blade of grass. ‘Of course, the posters didn’t help.’

  ‘What posters?’

  ‘You must have seen them,’ she said. ‘They’re everywhere.’

  First there had been posters of orange exclamation marks. Then, a week or two later, the posters changed. Suddenly they said NCH! in bright-orange capitals. Just NCH!. It didn’t make any sense. Finally, when she returned from New Orleans, the posters revealed the whole word: KWENCH!. Hadn’t he noticed them? He nodded. Yes, he had. And he must have seen the cans of Kwench! in every shop, she went on. Bright-orange cans, you couldn’t miss them – at least, she couldn’t. The word Kwench!, her obsession with the colour orange … She had felt all along that they were linked, but until the drink appeared, until she’d actually heard of it, she
couldn’t be sure. Now that she was sure, though, she was plagued by new uncertainties. Sometimes it seemed that she knew even less than she had known before.

  ‘I get these urges,’ she said. ‘This evening, for instance. In the off-licence. I almost bought a can of it. Did you notice?’

  Charlie shook his head.

  ‘Well, it’s true. And I don’t even like the stuff.’ She stared down at the grass, which was green, green, green. ‘I don’t even like it,’ she said again.

  Charlie lay back, one hand behind his head, the other holding his roll-up to his lips. His cheeks hollowed as he inhaled. He blew smoke vertically into the slowly darkening sky.

  ‘So you think there’s definitely a connection,’ he said at last.

  ‘There must be.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t really know.’

  ‘Suppose I investigate it for you …’

  She looked at him hopefully, without really knowing what she was hoping for. Anything that would take the weight off her, perhaps. Even temporarily.

  ‘Listen,’ Charlie said. ‘There’s someone I know, he’s a journalist. I could get him to look into it.’ Charlie inhaled again, but his roll-up had gone out. ‘I’ll tell him exactly what you told me, see what he thinks. He’ll probably want to talk to you himself.’ Charlie placed the roll-up on the lid of his Old Holborn tin. ‘In the meantime, don’t tell anyone. About any of this.’