Soft

by Rupert Thomson

  He had no idea what she meant by that.

  She took a step forwards and her voice softened, as if he was slow in the head, or fragile. ‘Perhaps this is the wrong place to do it,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we should do it somewhere else.’

  She seemed to know exactly what he had in mind. All he had to do was agree with her. Could it really be that simple?

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘What do you think?’

  Super Saver

  ‘I think you’re right,’ Barker said. It was so long since he had spoken that he had to clear his throat. ‘I think we should do it somewhere else.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘It’s a long way.’

  ‘How will we get there?’

  ‘By train.’

  None of this disturbed her in the slightest. If anything, she appeared pleased. ‘Do I need to take anything with me?’

  ‘I don’t know. A jacket, maybe.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The ease of the exchange unnerved him. She didn’t seem to have any doubts, either about his identity or his intentions. Who did she think he was? This was a question he found himself trapped into not asking – but he thought that if he listened carefully enough, then perhaps she would supply him with the answer. He had so many questions, though, even at the most basic level. He wanted to ask about her hair. Why had she dyed it? And why orange, of all colours? He couldn’t risk that either. It would imply that he had seen her before, that he had some prior knowledge of her and, judging by what she’d already told him, this was the first time they had met.

  All of a sudden, her hand lifted to her mouth. ‘The kettle. I forgot.’ She ran out of the room. Before he could follow her, she ran back in again. ‘Would you like some tea?’

  He glanced at his watch. Twenty-past nine. Almost half an hour had passed since she opened the front door and he walked in. Time was beginning to speed up. He saw clock-hands spinning, a calendar shedding its pages like leaves in a gale.

  ‘Is there time?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there’s time.’

  He stood by the kitchen window while she rinsed two cups under the tap. He couldn’t help noticing the sticky patches on the table, the dust and rubbish on the floor. It surprised him that she lived in such squalor. He watched her open a box of tea-bags. She used one in each cup, dropping them in the sink when they had yielded their flavour.

  At one point she turned to him, steam from the kettle rising past her face. ‘I’m so glad you came,’ she said. ‘Charlie was really worried about you.’

  Charlie? He managed a smile. He still had no idea who he was supposed to be, but he thought that if he played along with her, then it would make the whole thing easier – easier than he could possibly have imagined. When she spoke to him, he held his tongue and tried to look as though she was only telling him what he already knew.

  She stood in front of her wardrobe, one hand on her hip, the other covering one corner of her mouth. The dull tingle of hangers on the rail, the sprawl of discarded clothes across her bed. She couldn’t decide what to wear. She was even slower than Jill, who often used to take an hour to dress if they were going out, and perhaps because of this odd, skewed sense of familiarity, a feeling of nostalgia, really, he didn’t try to hurry her. Instead, he sat on a chair with his back to the window and sipped his tea, which had long since cooled. He felt the sun reach into the room and touch his shoulder. Gradually, he found himself relaxing. So much so, in fact, that when she finally appeared in a black skirt and a denim jacket and told him she was ready, it caught him unawares and even, for a few brief moments, disappointed him.

  Yes, it was easy in the flat, and walking up the road, that was easy too, but as they entered the tube station, a change came over her. She began to mutter under her breath, and her words, when he could hear them, made no sense to him. On the platform he tried to talk to her, to calm her, but she seemed to be listening to something else. There was a buzzing in her ears, no, a fizzing, which she didn’t like at all. Further down the platform a guard’s head turned slowly in their direction, expressionless but inquisitive. Barker began to wish he’d thought of a taxi. What they needed now was to be hidden from the world, invisible.

  At Baker Street a middle-aged woman stepped into their carriage. She had a page-boy haircut, which heightened the bluntness of her features. Barker sensed trouble coming the moment he saw her. Some people, you just know. He watched her sit down opposite. Watched her eyes. How they drifted idly towards the two of them, then tightened into focus. She wasn’t frightened of his size or his tattoos or the scar on the bridge of his nose. In fact, she hardly seemed to notice. She just leaned over, concerned, and said, ‘Is something wrong?’

  Glade stared into the woman’s face, then she began to shake her head. ‘I don’t know what you’re saying,’ she murmured. ‘I can’t hear you.’

  The woman looked across at Barker. ‘Is she ill?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘Just leave us alone.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ The woman studied Glade again. ‘She looks as if she needs some help to me.’

  Barker lifted his eyes towards the roof. No corners, just curving metal. Cream-coloured. Shiny. In a loud voice, he said, ‘Maybe you’d like to mind your own fucking business, all right?’

  Several people shifted in their seats, but he knew they wouldn’t interfere. People don’t, in England.

  The woman sat back, her eyes fixed on some imaginary horizon, her lips bloodless, pinched. Barker nodded to himself. That was more like it. If only he’d been paid to get rid of her. Come to think of it, he probably would have done the job for nothing.

  At last they arrived at King’s Cross. He took Glade by the arm. ‘Our stop,’ he told her.

  She looked at him, narrowing her eyes, and then she nodded. It was a habit of hers, making him wonder if she might be short-sighted.

  As they left the carriage, Barker looked round, saw the woman watching them through the window. She would remember the encounter. She’d be able to say, ‘You know, I thought there was something strange about them.’ Only it would be too late by then. Yes, when she heard the news, she would remember. And then she’d probably blame herself. If only she had done something. There’d be guilt, huge guilt. But after what she’d put him through during the last ten minutes, Barker couldn’t pretend that he was sorry.

  Upstairs, in the station, he asked for two singles to Hull. The man at the ticket counter told him it would be cheaper to buy returns. Super Savers, he called them.

  ‘But I’m not sure when we’re coming back,’ Barker said.

  ‘Still cheaper. Even if you never come back.’ The man watched Barker patiently, waiting for him to understand.

  ‘Super Saver,’ Glade murmured at his shoulder. ‘I like the sound of that.’

  Barker looked down at her. She nodded, then drifted away from him, drawing glances from the people standing in the queue. Her height, her slenderness. Her bright-orange hair. He turned back to the man behind the counter.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Two Super Savers.’

  The tickets in his hand, he crossed the station concourse, stopping under the departures board. The train to Hull didn’t leave for another three-quarters of an hour. With Glade behaving the way she was, he thought it might be wise to delay boarding until the last minute. In the station, with all its freaks and misfits, all its strays, a girl muttering would be less likely to stand out.

  Then Glade was pulling on his sleeve. ‘Have you got any money?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got money,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Can I have some?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I’d like something to drink.’

  ‘I’ll buy you something.’

  She looked at him knowingly, half-smiling, as if he was trying to trick her and she had seen through it. ‘I’d better come too,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you.’ She led him into the newsagent’s and down to the back whe
re the soft drinks were kept. He watched her scan the cooler, her eyes jumping from one row of cans to the next.

  ‘That,’ she said, pointing.

  ‘Kwench!?’ He remembered noticing the same bright-orange cans lying on the floor in her kitchen.

  ‘Six of them,’ she said.

  ‘Six?’ He stared at her, over his shoulder.

  She nodded. ‘I’m thirsty.’

  He was looking into her face, which had an earnestness, a seriousness, that he had seen in children, and he realised, in that moment, that he would find it impossible to deny her anything.

  ‘Six,’ she repeated. In case he hadn’t heard her. In case he had forgotten.

  He reached into the cooler, took out six cans of Kwench! and carried them up to the till.

  ‘I hope that’ll be enough.’ She was staring anxiously at the cans. She seemed to be making some kind of calculation.

  ‘You drink all these,’ he said, ‘we’ll get you some more.’

  The cashier smiled at Glade indulgently. ‘Maybe you should buy the company.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Barker said.

  The cashier turned to him. ‘You know, like in the advert.’

  Barker had no idea what she was talking about.

  Taking his change, he steered Glade out of the shop. The murmuring of voices, the distant drone of a floor-polisher. For one disconcerting moment he felt that he could actually see the sounds mingling in the air above his head like birds. Glade stopped and slid one hand into the plastic bag that he had given her to carry. She took out a can of Kwench! and opened it, then stood still, drinking fast. Her eyes glazed over, her body strangely disconnected, in suspension. It was as if swallowing the fizzy orange liquid required every ounce of concentration she could muster.

  With twenty minutes still to go, he led her through the gate and out along the platform. They walked side by side, in no great hurry. He watched other passengers limp past with heavy cases, one shoulder higher than the other. Towards the front of the train he found an empty carriage. They sat at the far end, by the automatic door. There was no one opposite. Though Glade had quietened down since he had bought her those soft drinks, he had no way of knowing what she might do next. She had already started on her second can. She was drinking more slowly now and looking out of the window.

  ‘Is this Paddington?’ she asked.

  ‘No, it’s King’s Cross.’

  ‘Couldn’t we go from Paddington?’

  ‘The place we’re going to,’ he told her, ‘you can’t go from Paddington.’

  She stared out into the draughty, half-lit spaces of the station. One of her hands rested on the table, holding her new can of Kwench!. The other rose into the air from time to time and traced the outline of her right ear, a gesture he remembered from the day that he first saw her.

  ‘There used to be a mountain in Paddington,’ she said after a while. ‘I don’t know whether you ever noticed it …’

  He shook his head.

  ‘It’s another story you could have investigated,’ she said. ‘Another mystery …’ She sighed.

  He looked across at her, her face turned to the window, her eyes staring into space and, once again, he wondered what she could possibly have done to warrant the attentions of a person like Lambert. He saw Lambert sitting in that restaurant near Marble Arch, his hands folded on the pale-pink tablecloth, the spotlit shrubbery unnaturally green behind his head, and suddenly he felt grateful to have been chosen. Yes, chosen. In a curious way, it was a blessing – a relief. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been somebody else, and he had known a few of them. They weren’t people who should be allowed anywhere near her. His job, as he now saw it, was to keep them away. For good. There was a sense, then, in which you could say that he was protecting her. He glanced at his watch. In less than eleven hours Lambert would be arriving in Bermondsey with a Scotsman and a video camera. Barker leaned back in his seat. He’d be far away by then. They both would.

  Almost imperceptibly, the train began to glide out of the station. Thin sunlight filtered into the carriage. They passed signal boxes that were shedding paint, the flakes of white lying among the weeds and stones like brittle petals. They passed thickly braided electric cables, a workman with a spade balanced on his shoulder, a high brick wall the colour of a copper beech. Houses were visible against the sky. Their cream façades, their roofs of shiny, dark-grey tile. Parts of London he had never known, and couldn’t name …

  Glade shifted in her seat, her face close to the window, one hand closed in a fist against her cheek. ‘No,’ she said softly. ‘No mountains here.’ She lifted the can to her lips and drank. She hardly seemed to taste the stuff as it went down. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it was a long time ago.’

  The train picked up speed, beat out a rhythm.

  It was a long time ago. Empty cider bottles lined up along the skirting-board, unfurnished rooms, the music turned up loud. Ray had driven Barker to a house in Saltash. Over the Tamar Bridge, with alternating bars of light and shadow moving through the car. He could still see Ray in his black chinos and his red satin shirt with the ruffles down the front.

  ‘What kind of party is it? Fancy dress?’

  Ray stared at him. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you look like a Spanish waiter, Ray, that’s why.’

  ‘One of these days,’ Ray said, ‘you’re going to push me too far.’

  Barker shrugged and lit a cigarette.

  As a rule he didn’t go to parties – they were too much like being at work – and when he walked in through the front door that night and saw two girls in ra-ra skirts trying to tear each other’s hair out by the roots, he almost turned around and left.

  But Ray wouldn’t let him. ‘Give it five minutes, all right?’

  ‘What,’ Barker said, ‘the fight?’

  He found a beer and swallowed half of it, then climbed the stairs. On the first floor, outside the toilet, he ran into a DJ he knew. The DJ had some speed on him. Did Barker want a line? No, Barker didn’t.

  ‘Fries your brain,’ he said.

  The DJ put his index fingers to his head and made a sound with b’s and z’s in it, then grinned and walked away.

  Ten minutes later Barker looked through a half-open door and saw a woman dancing. It was dark in the room, one cheap lamp in the corner, forty-watt bulb, and some glow from the street, no curtains on the windows, there were never any curtains. He could still remember the song that was playing, an old Temptations number, vintage Temptations, before Eddie McKendrick left the group. The woman was dancing with a small man who swayed backwards and forwards like one of those bottom-heavy toys – it doesn’t matter how many times you push them over, or how hard, they always right themselves. Barker waited until she was facing him, then he called out to her.

  ‘Over here a moment.’

  The music had changed by now, it was Smokey Robinson, and though she was still dancing, she was looking across at him, trying to understand what he was saying.

  He waved at her. ‘Over here.’

  She bent down, put her mouth beside the short man’s ear, then she stepped away from him and walked over, her eyes lowered. She had looked good from a distance. She looked even better close-up, black hair to her shoulders, a wide mouth, her body ungainly and voluptuous. He thought he had seen her before – though he wasn’t about to use a tired line like that. Yes, on Herbert Street. She had been climbing out of a car parked halfway up the hill. There was something about her awkwardness that had excited him. In the bright sunshine, her black dress had looked almost shabby, as if it had been washed too many times, and the whiteness of her legs showed through her thin black tights. He put his drink down, glanced over her shoulder.

  ‘That bloke you’re dancing with,’ he said.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He’s too short.’

  She wasn’t sure what to think, whether to laugh or be insulted; her face remained perfectly balanced between the two possibilities, like a cat
walking along the top of a fence.

  ‘He’s not your husband, is he?’

  ‘I’m not married.’

  ‘Are you going out with him?’

  She shook her head. ‘He’s just a friend.’

  He paused for a moment, but then he saw that she was waiting for him to say something else.

  ‘You shouldn’t be dancing with a short bloke like that,’ he said, ‘not someone as good-looking as you. It doesn’t look right …’ She was keeping a straight face, as if he was giving her advice, but they both knew it was just talk. ‘I work in clubs,’ he went on. ‘I see people dancing all the time. I know what looks right.’

  One song finished, another began. She glanced at her friend, who was standing by the window with a drink, then, after a while, her eyes returned to Barker again, a smile below the surface, shining, like treasure seen through water.

  ‘You’re not short, though,’ she said, ‘are you?’

  Three weeks later she moved in with him. She worked in the day, at the local building society, and he worked on Union Street, six nights a week, so they didn’t see as much of each other as they would have liked. She would come home at six in the evening, half an hour before he had to leave. The moment she walked in, he would start undressing her – the crisp white blouse with the name-badge pinned to it, the knee-length sky-blue skirt. They would have sex just inside the front door, on a bed of autumn leaflets and junk mail. That same year she got pregnant. She wanted an abortion, though. She was only twenty-two, and she’d just got the first decent job of her life. She didn’t want to give it up, not yet. And, after all, she said, they weren’t exactly pressed for time, were they? He told her that he would find it hard to forget about the child – a remark that now seemed ominous, prophetic – but she wouldn’t change her mind and in the end, because he loved her, he agreed.

  He peered through the smeared window of the train. Fields flew past. Then a row of houses. Then more fields.

  He should never have agreed. No, never. If there had been a child, she wouldn’t have been able to leave so easily. If there had been a child, he wouldn’t have been able to let her go.