Soft

by Rupert Thomson

  Crossing the river, Charlton was quiet for a few moments. Then he turned to Barker. ‘What about you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘You got someone, have you?’ Charlton’s eyes flicked from the road to Barker’s face and back again.

  Barker didn’t answer.

  ‘You’re getting laid, though, right?’ Charlton chuckled. ‘I saw that picture you were looking at.’ He tried to reach into Barker’s jacket pocket, but Barker pushed his hand away. The Ford Sierra swerved. Someone in the next lane used their horn.

  Charlton leaned out of his window. ‘Wanker,’ he shouted. Back inside again, he said, ‘That girl, though, she was tasty.’ He gave Barker a sly look. ‘How do you do it, Barker? What’s the secret?’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Barker said, folding his arms.

  ‘Is that right?’ Charlton sent the car slithering into a roundabout, narrowly missing two men on bicycles. ‘Got to hand it to you, Barker. She can’t be more than, what, twenty-one?’

  As they drove northwards through the City’s dark, deserted streets, Charlton turned to him again. ‘I almost forgot. I’ve been asked to give you notice.’

  Barker turned slowly and looked at him. ‘Notice?’

  ‘On the flat.’

  Barker didn’t know what to say. His eyes moved beyond Charlton’s face to the buildings flowing in blurred shapes behind him.

  ‘I told you six months, remember? And they’re giving you two months to get out. Two months – that’s generous.’ Charlton sounded much less drunk all of a sudden.

  In that moment Barker knew he should have seen this whole thing coming. Only the week before, Charlton had called, asking him to supervise the installation of a video doorphone. At the time Barker had thought nothing of it. It was just a new security gadget; probably Charlton had got some kind of deal on the hardware. In retrospect, of course, he should have realised that it was being fitted with tenants in mind. A company let, most likely: the papers were full of stories about business people moving to new premises south of the river. Staring at Charlton’s pale lips, his jigsaw hair, Barker could have bludgeoned him to death right there, in the car. He had transformed that flat. He had cleaned it, painted it. He had made it his own. And now it was being taken from him. Every time he put something together, life dismantled it. He turned and stared out of the window. Nothing was his. Nothing ever had been. They were waiting at a set of traffic-lights. Across the pavement stood an office block built out of glass and marble. It seemed to Barker that the building was very far away, that the gap between the building and the place where he was sitting was unbridgeable. To his surprise, he found his anger had burned off. The tension that made it possible had snapped inside him. Like a clutch that no longer functions. You press it, expecting resistance, and your foot goes straight to the floor. You can’t change gear.

  ‘You’ve had a pretty good run,’ Charlton was telling him. ‘Seven months, it will have been, rent-free –’

  Barker couldn’t listen to any more. ‘Could you drop me here?’

  ‘Here?’ Charlton peered through the windscreen. ‘You sure?’

  He pulled over. Barker opened the door and stepped out. The city swirled around him like stirred liquid. A sudden smell of chips. He saw that they had stopped on Pentonville Road, about halfway up the hill. The cafés and arcades of King’s Cross lay to his right, five minutes’ walk away. King’s Cross. The Hammersmith & City line. All in all, it was strangely convenient. It might almost have been planned.

  Charlton shouted something about Monday week. But Barker didn’t listen, didn’t answer. As he watched the silver Sierra veer out into the traffic he thought of Jill. Standing on the pavement, he said her name out loud. Jill. He had thought of her often during the past few days. Jill in a black dress with white dots on it, climbing awkwardly out of a car. Jill huddled on the floor, her bra-strap showing. It was always Jill, never any of the others. She was like somebody who had died, but hadn’t gone. She had the eerie clarity, the presence, of a ghost who cannot rest. There was something that still needed to be done, and only he could do it. The responsibility was his.

  On reaching the railway station he took an escalator down into the tube. He passed the figures of the homeless, the jobless, placards fastened round their necks like bitter parodies of jewellery. That was him now. That was him. The tiled tunnels echoed with the sound of people hurrying. He had a sense of panic, desperation. Everything was closing in. He stood on the platform, tried to keep his mind empty. He stared at the map on the wall, counting the number of stops from King’s Cross to Latimer Road.

  He watched a girl in tight blue leggings walk over to the chocolate machine. When the coins had dropped, she reached into the slot at the bottom. Then turned away, looking for a train. He’d never gone for skinny women, but there was something about this one, something that forced him to look. She wore a leather coat with a fake-fur collar and calf-length boots with high square heels. Oddly enough, she was carrying a furled umbrella. Surely it had only rained a couple of times all summer? He had caught a glimpse of her outside the station, he realised, standing up against the railings. She had been talking to a black man, her face only inches from his, as if the two of them were planning a conspiracy. The man was probably a pimp, he thought. It was King’s Cross, after all. Where would she be going now? A cheap hotel room in West London? Some basement flat with net curtains on the windows and a coloured lightbulb hanging from the ceiling?

  The train pulled in. He waited until she chose a carriage, then he followed her. She sat down, crossed her legs. He watched her from where he was standing, by the glass barrier next to the doors. She adjusted her fringe in the makeshift mirror of the window opposite, then reached into her black suede bag and took out a chapstick, which she applied to her lips, running it backwards and forwards at least a dozen times, her head perfectly still, her face composed, expressionless. Her eyes were a pale grey-blue, the kind of colour that, on paint-sample charts, would probably be called ‘Cool Slate’ or ‘Dawn Surprise’. He wasn’t sure why he was noticing her in such great detail. Maybe it was because he had to identify a girl that afternoon. Maybe it was because he was carrying a physical description of that girl in his jacket pocket. How do you do it, Barker? What’s the secret? He let out a short laugh, scornful, scarcely audible.

  He left the tube at Latimer Road, half-hoping the girl in the blue leggings would get out too, but she stayed in her seat, touching her fringe again with nervous fingers. If it had been her photo in the envelope, would he have felt the same? Could he have followed her to some dark place? Could he have done what he’d been hired to do?

  Latimer Road. It wasn’t an area he had ever visited. The street outside the tube station looked bleak despite the sunshine, the shop windows caged in security grilles, litter scattered across the pavement. An old man shuffled towards him wearing brown flared trousers and a shirt that was open to the waist. A six-inch scar showed on his belly, the skin raised and livid. To the north Barker recognised the concrete pillars of the Westway. He moved in that direction. The roar of cars coming from above his head sounded angry but contained, like wasps trapped in a jar. He opened his A-Z and checked the route. Then he began to walk.

  Before too long he found himself in an area of two-storey red-brick houses. Pink and blue hydrangeas sprouted from the small front gardens. There was nobody about. A police car hesitated at a junction, and then moved on. Once, when Barker was in his early thirties, he had been stopped and searched on Union Street. They pulled a pair of scissors out of the back pocket of his jeans – his father’s scissors, as it happened – and held them up in front of him. ‘I’m a hairdresser,’ he said. ‘And I’m Julio Iglesias,’ said the policeman. The name meant nothing to Barker. ‘Julio Iglesias,’ the policeman said while his colleague sniggered in the background. ‘He’s a famous singer. Spanish. Had sex with three thousand women.’ Which meant they didn’t believe him, of course. Barker was ch
arged with possession of an offensive weapon, and forced to pay a fine. That Dodds bad luck again. Looking up, he saw a middle-aged woman standing on the pavement. She wore a floral dress, and she was holding a shopping basket made of straw. Her legs were very white. When he passed her, she looked in the opposite direction. The red-brick houses, the small-mindedness – the quiet. He felt as if he’d strayed into the suburbs. He could almost have been back in Plymouth.

  At last he stood outside Glade Spencer’s house. Red-brick, just like the rest. He’d been expecting something better. He didn’t know why that should be, why he should care. Somehow, though, the house seemed tawdry, less than she deserved. He knew that she lived on the first floor and that she shared the flat with a girl called Sally James. The bay window on the first floor was open, he noticed, though the curtains were closed. He wasn’t sure how to interpret this. Did it mean that somebody was in? He stared up at the window until his neck ached. In all that time no sound came from inside the room. He wiped the sweat from his forehead; the heat only seemed to add to the silence. Opening the gate, he walked up to the front door. He couldn’t see through the panes of frosted glass. Instead, he bent down and looked through the letter-box. It was cool in the house, several degrees cooler than outside. He could see into a narrow hallway – the walls off-white, the carpet a shabby turquoise. On the right there was a door, which was closed. The ground-floor flat. Directly in front of him he could see another door, half-open, and, beyond it, a flight of stairs. They must lead to the flat where Glade Spencer lived – and if the door was open, then presumably, yes, someone was home …

  He heard a cough. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a dog cock its leg against a tree. The man holding the dog’s lead was staring at him furtively. Suspiciously. He stared back. After all, there were any number of perfectly valid reasons why he might be peering into a house. Even so, he realised that, to most people passing by, he would look like somebody who was about to commit a crime. Yet there was nowhere to hide, no cover … Then he remembered the man who’d appeared outside his flat a few months back – Will Campbell’s father. Suppose he pretended to be trying to trace a friend. It was plausible; it happened all the time. He felt in his pocket, found a biro and an old tube ticket. On the back of the ticket he wrote his brother’s name, Gary, and, underneath it, the address of the house directly opposite. He crossed the road. The same privet hedge, the same black plastic dustbins. The same frosted-glass panels in the front door. He rang the bell and waited. Through the glass he watched a figure walk towards him from inside the house. The door opened on a security chain. An old woman squinted at him through the gap.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Gary in?’

  ‘Gary?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘No one called Gary here.’

  Barker looked at the ticket in his hand, then stepped backwards and studied the number on the door. ‘He told me his address over the phone. I wrote it down.’ He showed the woman his ticket.

  She took it from him, peered down at it. Her hand trembled slightly. Behind her the house seemed to sigh, its breath sour and damp. She shook her head and handed the ticket back. ‘You must’ve heard it wrong.’

  Barker stared out into the silent, sunlit road. Like Will Campbell’s father, he seemed disinclined to move.

  ‘You better try some other numbers,’ the woman said.

  Strange: she was feeding him lines, a strategy.

  He nodded. ‘Sorry to bother you.’

  She closed the door.

  He watched the shape of the woman shrink and wrinkle in the frosted glass. He could relax now. If the police questioned him, he knew what to say. He would show the officer his tube ticket, claim he was looking for a friend. He could even call on the old woman to vouch for him, if he needed to.

  After working as a bouncer for so many years, you’d think he would have been used to standing around. But you didn’t need patience when you worked for a club – at least, not that kind of patience; your time was filled. You had to read faces, make predictions. You had to be a clairvoyant of violence, seeing it before it actually began. And when it began you had to put an end to it. Outside a club, there was always something happening, or about to happen. Outside Glade Spencer’s house, the reverse was true. He stood on that street for three and a half hours, and they were probably the slowest three and a half hours of his life. Once, a movement in the bay window startled him, a glimpse of something white, but it was only a cat. He knew its name. Giacometti. If there was a cat in the house, he reasoned, then it seemed unlikely Glade Spencer could have gone away. Or, if she had, she wouldn’t be away for long. On the strength of the cat’s presence he waited for another hour.

  The cat stared at him with yellow eyes.

  Nothing happened.

  At last, he turned and walked off down the road. He had the distinct feeling that Glade would only appear after he had left. He took a deep breath, let it out in stages. It was a lovely evening, a wind blowing gently against his back. Every now and then he saw a cloud glide past the rooftops. A new energy flowed through him now he was moving. On St Mark’s Road he saw a taxi go by and caught a glimpse of blonde hair in the window. Was that her? He stood still, watched the taxi’s brake-lights flashing as it slowed for a roundabout. It took a right turn, into Chesterton Road. If it had been carrying Glade Spencer, surely it would have turned left.

  At Ladbroke Grove he bought a ticket to London Bridge. The tube journey was long and hypnotic, full of inexplicable delays. Opening his book, Barker read a passage about the war between Clovis, who was a famous Merovingian king, and Alaric, the King of the Goths. This took place in 507 AD. After killing Alaric in battle, Clovis wintered in Bordeaux. The following year he rode to Angoulême, a place he wanted to recapture. Because he had the Lord on his side, the walls of the city collapsed the moment he set eyes on them. Angoulême was his. Barker closed the book. If only things could be that easy. Or perhaps it was simply that he had no one on his side.

  It was after nine o’clock by the time he reached his flat. Once through the door, he leaned against the wall, the lights still off, the rooms in darkness. From the far end of the corridor came a pale glow, almost a phosphorescence, light from the city filtering through the window in the kitchen.

  Sunday night.

  Above the sound of people shouting in the distance, above the ghostly siren on Commercial Road and the high-altitude rumble of a plane, he could hear the voice of Charlton Williams. You’ve had a good run, after all.

  The next day Barker stood outside Glade Spencer’s house for almost five hours. The trees that lined her street had all been pruned – the foliage had been cut away; only stumps and swollen knuckles remained – and he could find no shade. He could feel the sunlight on his face, his neck, his arms. In films, the detective always has a car. He parks opposite the house, smokes endless cigarettes. In the morning he wakes up slumped behind the wheel, unshaven, bleary. Then, just as he’s yawning, the front door of the house opens and his quarry conveniently appears. Films. It occurred to Barker that he didn’t really have a plan. No chloroform. No rope or twine. No gun. He was waiting until he saw her and when that happened he would know. But he saw nobody. He noticed that someone had closed the bay window and opened the curtains, and the knowledge that such things could change sustained him through the dull, uncomfortable hours. Once, he peered through the letter-box, just for something to do. One door was open, the other closed. As before. When he put his ear to the gap and listened to the inside of the house, he could hear nothing – no radio or TV, no footsteps, no running water. Sometimes he took out his tube ticket and looked at it, sometimes he walked up the street a little way, trying to believe in the fiction he’d invented the previous day, but his heart wasn’t in it. He supposed that, by now, he must have aroused suspicion in the neighbourhood. He no longer cared. By three in the afternoon he could stand it no longer. His skin stung, as if it had been lightly brushed with nettles. The outside of his forearms
was pink, the inside white, reminding him of a barbecue at Jim’s a few years back, everyone too smashed, the sausages half-cooked. He decided to walk over to Portobello Road, which he had heard about, but never seen. After the hours he had spent in silence, on his own, the crowds of people were a surprise to him. Pushing through the crush, he saw stalls piled high with brooches, bathtaps, shoes. Rubbish, really. Junk. Before too long, he’d had enough. He wandered away from the market, into the narrow streets surrounding it. At last he reached Notting Hill Gate. With a huge sense of relief, he walked down a flight of steps into the cool, grimy atmosphere of the tube, following the sign that said District and Circle Line Eastbound.

  He stood close to the edge of the platform, the toes of his boots just touching the white line. The next train was due in seven minutes. Looking up, he noticed the panes of reinforced glass in the roof. Beyond the glass there was a tree, its foliage colourless and blurred. Every now and then, the wind pushed the branches down, pinning them against the glass. Yawning, he watched the branches sink down on to the roof, lift away, sink down again. There was something soothing about it – something familiar too, though he couldn’t think what that might be. It had nothing to do with the station itself. He had never been to Notting Hill before.

  Then, as he lowered his eyes, his breath caught in his throat. There, standing opposite him on the westbound platform, was the girl he had been looking for. He didn’t even have to take out the photograph. The flawless skin, the bright-blonde hair. It was her. She wore an ankle-length black skirt that clung to her hips and a shiny orange shirt, and she was carrying a leather bag. Though he knew her height, she was taller than he had imagined, with longer limbs. His heart bounced against his ribs. What should he do?