‘I don’t feel very well.’
It was Glade who had spoken. Her skin looked chilled and damp, as though a fever had taken hold of her. Cans of Kwench! rolled stupidly across the table, a hollow tinny sound each time they collided. He counted six of them, all empty.
‘You drank the lot?’
She nodded miserably. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
He took her through the automatic door and into the gap between the two carriages. He had to support her, otherwise she would have fallen. He could feel her rib-cage under her T-shirt; the curve of her right breast touched the back of his wrist through the thin fabric. This wasn’t something he could think about. He pushed her into a vacant toilet and closed the door behind her.
Standing by the window, he could hear her vomiting. It sounded like water being emptied out of a bucket. He watched the landscape rushing by with nothing in his mind. At last the door opened and she appeared, her lips a pale mauve, her orange hair matted, sticking to her forehead.
‘Feel better?’
‘A bit.’
He looked past her, into the toilet. She hadn’t flushed it. The stainless-steel bowl was full of frothy orange liquid. It looked no different to the way it would have looked if she’d just poured it out of a can. He stepped past her, pressed the flush button with his foot. The liquid vanished with a vicious roar.
Back in her seat, she started muttering again.
‘Glade?’
Her eyes flicked sideways, but she didn’t stop. The swaying of the train, the rolling of the cans.
‘Glade!’ He reached through the debris and gripped her by the wrist. She stared at his hand with its big chipped nails and its misshapen knuckles, then her eyes shifted to his forearm, which was tattooed with swords and flags and coiled snakes. At last she stared levelly into his eyes.
‘Look out of the window,’ he said.
She did as she was told.
‘What can you see?’
‘I don’t know,’ she murmured, narrowing her eyes. ‘Everything’s kind of … kind of orange …’
‘There’s nothing orange out there.’ He tightened his grip on her wrist. ‘Are you listening to me? There’s no orange there at all.’
‘No?’
‘There’s fields. Green fields.’
‘Fields.’ Her bottom lip quivered.
‘Jesus Christ.’ Despairing, he pushed one hand savagely into his hair. What did he think he was doing? This linking of himself with her, it was, just a fantasy, wishful thinking, as bright and hollow as the cans that were still rolling this way and that across the table.
‘I’m trying,’ she said. ‘I really am.’
He leaned forwards, thought for a while.
‘Where the fields are,’ he said, ‘there used to be trees. Can you imagine that?’
She turned to the window, her eyes wide, the lashes dark and wet.
‘That’s how it was,’ he said, ‘all trees. Oak, ash, thorn –’
‘When was that?’
‘Hundreds of years ago. The time of the Romans.’ He looked out. ‘One book I read, it said a squirrel could travel from one end of the country to the other without touching the ground once.’
‘Really?’
‘That’s how it was. Back then.’
‘It must have been nice.’
He turned to her again, and saw that she was crying.
‘Sometimes I see things,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if they’re there or not. Sometimes there are sounds. I don’t know why.’ The tears spilled down her face in fast, thin lines. ‘It’s like the drinks.’ With one trembling hand, she reached for an empty can. ‘I don’t want to drink it, I really don’t. It makes me ill.’
She was crying harder now. He sat opposite her, his hands resting on the table. He didn’t think he could touch her again. His wrist still remembered the weight of her breast. He could feel the place without even looking at it. Like a burn.
‘Glade,’ he said quietly, uselessly.
The crying shook her whole body.
‘Is everything all right?’
A conductor had appeared at Barker’s elbow. He was a man in his sixties, with veins glowing in his nose like tiny purple filaments. Barker saw that he was different to the woman on the tube. He wasn’t the interfering kind. He only wanted to know if he could help.
‘She’s just upset,’ Barker said. ‘She’ll be all right in a minute.’
‘In that case, perhaps I could see your tickets …’
The old man sounded tentative, almost apologetic, and Barker thought he knew why. For most of his life Barker had looked like someone who was travelling without a ticket. And if you asked him for it, he would swear at you. Or threaten you. Or maybe he’d take out a Stanley knife, start slashing seats. He handed the two Super Savers to the old man, who punched holes in them and handed them back.
‘Change at Doncaster,’ the old man said and, touching the peak of his hat, he moved on down the train.
When Barker stepped on to the platform at Hull two hours later, he thought he could smell the North Sea, a mixture of rotting kelp, crab claws, and discharge from the trawlers. A man in a donkey jacket was sweeping the floor of the station, his broom-strokes slow and regular, as if he was trying to hypnotise himself. Two porters stood outside an empty waiting-room, their uniforms ill-fitting, and shiny at the cuffs and elbows. A group of teenagers leaned against the soft-drinks machine, one chewing his thumbnail, another sucking hard on the last half-inch of a cigarette.
Barker took Glade by the arm and led her through the barrier and out towards the exit, following a sign that said TAXIS. As they passed a bank of pay-phones, Glade hung back.
‘I need to make a call,’ she said.
‘Not now,’ Barker said.
She looked at her watch. ‘I should ring the restaurant and tell them I’m not coming in. I should ring the hospital as well …’
‘What hospital?’
‘My father. He’s in hospital.’
Barker shook his head. ‘We haven’t got time.’
‘It won’t take long. I know what they’re going to say, anyway –’
‘So why bother?’ He hauled on her arm, but she was still resisting.
‘I’d like to talk to Charlie, then.’
‘Who’s Charlie?’
‘Charlie,’ she said. ‘He’s a friend of yours.’
Barker hesitated, but only for a second. ‘I told you. There’s no time.’ He hauled on her arm again. ‘Maybe later,’ he said, just to keep her quiet.
They had to wait in a queue for a taxi. The air in Hull was damp and sticky, and Barker felt a prickle of irritation. Every few seconds Glade glanced over her shoulder at the row of phones.
‘There would have been time,’ she murmured.
‘Those phones don’t take money,’ he said. ‘You need a card.’
She looked at him suspiciously.
‘Was that true,’ she said, ‘all that about the squirrels?’
She waited until a taxi had pulled up to the kerb, then she told him she was hungry. She had eaten nothing all day, she said, only two gherkins and a piece of chocolate. He looked at her hard to see if she was lying and decided she wasn’t. Actually, now he thought about it, it wasn’t such a bad idea. He could eat something himself – and certainly he could use a couple of beers. Also, if he went along with her in this, then maybe she’d forget about the phone.
In the taxi he leaned forwards and asked the driver to take them to a restaurant, somewhere quiet.
‘Everything’s quiet this time of day,’ the driver said.
Ten minutes later they stopped outside a restaurant that had a gloomy fudge-brown glass façade. The something Tandoori. It was cheap, the driver said, but it was good. Or so he’d heard.
Six-thirty was striking as they walked in. A dozen empty tables, their white cloths spotless, undisturbed. Barker stood inside the doorway, hesitating. He could hear the hum of the air-conditioning, the jaunty b
ubble of the fish-tank on the bar. Suddenly, from nowhere, an Indian man sprang eagerly towards him, eyes gleaming, and, just for a moment, Barker felt the urge to defend himself, to sweep the Indian aside with one effortless, poetic movement of his arm. In his mind he saw the man fly backwards through the air, land silently among the glittering cutlery and artificial flowers. Ray would have been proud.
‘Anywhere,’ Barker said, ‘right?’
‘Yes, sir.’
He ushered Glade towards a table in the corner. As soon as she was sitting down she opened her menu, her lips moving as she read through the list of dishes, her face stained green and purple by the coloured spotlights set into the ceiling. A waiter asked them what they’d like to drink. Barker ordered a pint of lager. Glade wanted Kwench!, but the waiter didn’t have any. She had to settle for water.
‘Don’t you ever drink?’ Barker asked her.
She thought about the question for a moment. ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘If I’m happy.’
Barker looked down at the tablecloth. It seemed he either knew too much or too little. Their conversation always faltered.
The waiter appeared with a pad and took their orders.
‘This is a nice place,’ Glade said, smiling up at him.
The waiter bowed.
She turned to Barker. ‘Thanks for bringing me.’
He could think of nothing to say. Instead, he watched the ugly, melancholy fish drift through the weeds inside their tank. A woman’s voice wailed from a speaker above his head. He supposed they called that singing. When he looked at Glade again, she had lifted the silk flower out of its cheap metal vase and was examining the petals.
‘I thought you were going to ask me questions,’ she said.
He tried to keep his face expressionless.
‘There must be things you want to know.’
‘Things I want to know,’ he repeated thoughtfully, and nodded.
She looked at him with a faint smile. ‘I suppose you don’t want to hurry it,’ she said. ‘You’ve probably got your own methods.’ She lowered her eyes, gazed at the flower she was holding. ‘Do you remember things in your head,’ she said, raising her eyes to his again, ‘or do you take notes?’
‘In my head,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘I haven’t seen you writing anything.’ She paused. ‘Unless you do it behind my back …’ and her smile widened, becoming mischievous, almost seductive. When she looked at him like that, he had to empty his mind of everything except the plan.
Their food came. Though she had told him she was hungry, she ate very little. She picked at her curry, searching through it with her fork, as if she was looking for something she had lost. When they had both finished, Barker asked the waiter to order a taxi. In less than five minutes a white car was pulling up outside. Barker paid the bill, then followed Glade out on to the pavement. He opened the door for her and watched her climb into the back. Once he was sitting beside her, he gave the driver the name of a pub.
‘That’s in Hessle, isn’t it,’ the driver said, ‘out near the bridge?’
Barker nodded. ‘I think that’s the one.’
He glanced at Glade, but she didn’t seem to be listening. She sat quietly beside him, examining her hands as the lights passed over them. For the first time he noticed that she wore no jewellery, not even a ring, and thought it odd, a girl who looked like her.
They drove through the city centre – bleak, dark streets that reminded him of his entire life. He saw chip shops, night-clubs. He saw girls standing in a chilly cluster outside a pub. Their snow-washed jeans, their blow-dried hair. He saw the spaces between streetlamps, between buildings, the places where fights started. He thought of the sounds that fists and bottles make. A police car glided by, white with an orange stripe along the side, like something from the fish-tank in that restaurant.
Then all the buildings disappeared, just strips of scrub grass at the edge of the road, hedges looming dimly. In the distance, high in the darkness, he could see a string of orange lights that signalled the presence of a bypass or a motorway …
They stopped in a yard that was deserted except for a few cars parked in a row against a low brick wall. Barker climbed out first, Glade waiting on the gravel while he paid. She was clutching her elbows and shivering a little. He could hear voices and laughter in the pub behind her. He could have done with another drink, but he just couldn’t risk it. No, they’d been to all the public places they were going to. His heart seemed to lurch against his ribs. He wetted his lips.
‘So we’re not going to the pub?’ Glade said.
He turned and stared at her. It wouldn’t have surprised him to find out she could read his mind. She had the kind of eyes psychics have. She had the same strangely vacant manner. Maybe that was why she’d been so calm when she saw him standing on the doorstep. Maybe she had seen him coming.
But suddenly she altered her approach. ‘I thought you told the driver we were going to the pub.’
‘And I thought you couldn’t hear anything,’ he said. ‘All that hissing in your ears.’
‘Fizzing.’ She scraped at the gravel with the edge of her boot. ‘It comes and goes.’
‘That’s convenient.’
‘So we’re not having a drink?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
He let his breath out fast in sheer exasperation and walked away from her, fists clenched. He could feel the veins pulsing on the backs of his hands. He let his head drop back, stared up into the sky. There was nothing there. No moon, no stars. No God. Just air, September air. The slightly bitter smell of leaves.
He faced the girl again.
‘Have you taken a look at yourself?’ he said.
Her eyes widened. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Maybe we could go,’ he said. ‘Maybe it wouldn’t be a problem, if you weren’t acting so fucking mad.’
‘I’m not mad.’
‘No?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Ask Charlie.’
Charlie again.
‘You know Charlie,’ she said. ‘He’s a friend of yours. He sent you.’ She looked over towards the pub. ‘Maybe they’ve got a phone in there. Maybe it takes coins.’
Thinking she might be mocking him, he felt a sudden anger flash through him. Like lightning, it lit up the dark places for a moment. He didn’t like what he saw. Slowly he walked back to where she stood. She didn’t flinch. Staring down into her face, he could find no trace of guile or deception. No trace of fear either. It didn’t mean she wasn’t guilty, of course. Perhaps it simply hadn’t crossed her mind that he could hurt her.
He took a step backwards and pushed his hands into his pockets. ‘We’re not going to the pub,’ he said, ‘and that’s the end of it.’
‘But I’m thirsty –’
‘So you want me to buy you six more cans and watch you throwing up again. Is that it?’
She was looking at the ground. The wind moved her hair against her cheek; in the darkness of the car-park it seemed to have regained its natural colour.
‘I am thirsty, though,’ she said in a quiet voice.
He took her firmly by the arm and led her away from the pub. This time she didn’t resist.
‘You’re supposed to be helping me,’ she said.
He chose not to speak. Though he wasn’t thirsty, his throat felt dry.
‘All these things I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘you’re supposed to be explaining them to me …’
She was staring straight ahead, her face pale and glowing.
‘And afterwards,’ she said, ‘everything will make sense. Everything will be all right.’ She turned to look at him. ‘That’s why you’re here.’
He had to stop listening to her.
They walked along an unlit road until they reached a dual carriageway. Streetlamps stretched away in a long, lazy curve. The tall grey poles had stooping necks like creatures from another world, the slightly oval lights arranged in pairs like eyes. An unearthl
y landscape. And in the distance, above the trees, he could see some red lights, six in all. He felt the skin tighten at the back of his neck.
The bridge.
Glade was muttering again, words that had no meaning for him. He asked her how she felt. She didn’t answer. He hadn’t really expected her to. There was a sense in which they were both now talking to themselves. He wondered if this hadn’t been true of them all along.
You never came for me. I thought you’d come.
His mind drifted back to Jill, as if she was its natural resting-place. She had always doubted him, feeling she loved him more than he loved her. He remembered one of the first times they slept together and how she had touched the tattoo on his chest, lightly, with just her fingertips. She must have meant a lot to you. From his point of view, the tattoo looked like a number – 317537 – and he thought there was something fitting about that: his feelings for Leslie had, for a while, at least, imprisoned him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing in those days. Had one too many drinks, got a tattoo.’ He shook his head. Jill lay back against the pillows. If he had said yes, she would have been upset. Saying no, though, that upset her too, of course. He had married Leslie and now, a few years later, she meant nothing. He had shown Jill a flaw in his character – a lack of constancy, almost a fickleness; he had shown her what he was incapable of. And anyway, she didn’t believe him. There are certain women who always think they’re less than the woman who came before, and you can’t tell them any different. It’s in the eye of the beholder. Like beauty, or anorexia.
The day Jill was taken into the clinic for her abortion, Barker had walked along the promenade that looks out over Plymouth Sound. The sea lay below him, sluggish, pale-green. The sky was heaped with clouds the colour of charcoal and lead. It had rained earlier and, once, just for a few seconds, a shaft of sunlight reached from beneath the clouds and turned the wet path into a sheet of gleaming metal. Looking westwards, Barker was almost blinded. Down on the seafront he noticed a car parked at an angle to the pavement. Two teenage boys sat inside, sharing a cigarette. Music thudded from the open window. Closer to him, on the promenade, a man stood beside a wooden bench, a pair of binoculars dangling on a leather strap around his neck. Then the clouds covered the sun again and the promenade was cold and windswept suddenly and Barker was alone. An old man with binoculars and him – and that was it. He remembered the feeling of walking, his feet on the path, his breath snatched by the wind, but he couldn’t remember a single thing that he had thought. Perhaps he had thought nothing.
Soft Page 27