Soft

by Rupert Thomson

  Jimmy had no idea, of course.

  A wide smile from Ruddle, which revealed his chaotic library of teeth. ‘I decided,’ he said, ‘to let you dig your own grave.’

  When Jimmy asked him what he meant by that, Ruddle wouldn’t answer. He just stood there, nodding and smiling, as if he was listening to a joke inside his head.

  Walking more quickly now, Jimmy turned right again, making his way back towards his flat. He no longer paid too much attention to what Ruddle said. It was just hot air, bile, spleen; it had no consequence, no meaning. All the same, it could unsettle you.

  Looking up, he saw a door open further down the street. Two people stepped out on to the pavement. They were in the middle of an argument. The man was balding, his skin-tight T-shirt highlighting a weightlifter’s chest. The woman was wearing sunglasses. With her low-cut scarlet dress, her muscular tanned legs and her frizzy hair, she had a Spanish look. The man strode on ahead, ignoring her. She kept shouting at him, though; you could almost see her words bouncing off the nape of his neck, his shoulderblades. Her breasts shook as she walked.

  A strange day altogether. Provocative, somehow. Incomplete. And yet the threats, such as they were, seemed empty, and the most important news was good.

  Later that night Jimmy lay on his sofa with the TV on and a vodka-and-tonic in his hand. He had just started watching the first American football game of the season, which he had videoed the week before, when the doorbell rang. For a moment he didn’t move. The bell rang again. He looked at his watch. Ten-forty-five. Marco, he thought. Or Zane. Sighing, he put his drink down and stood up.

  When he opened the front door, Karen Paley was standing on the pavement, her back half-turned. She had been about to leave.

  ‘Karen,’ he said.

  She stared at him, almost as if she didn’t know him. ‘Are you busy?’ she said.

  ‘No, I’m not busy.’

  In his living-room she stood by the window, looking out into the garden. He asked if he could get her anything. She shook her head. The whites of her eyes looked too white, somehow, as though she had been crying. It occurred to him that maybe she had told her husband, and there had been a fight. Behind her, the San Francisco 49ers were moving upfield. Elegant, remorseless.

  ‘I’m sorry to turn up like this,’ she said.

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘It’s just – something happened …’

  He sat on the arm of the sofa, looking up at her. The tempting top lip, the blonde hair tucked behind her ear. He waited.

  ‘I didn’t think anything of it at the time,’ she said. ‘But later – I don’t know …’

  ‘What happened?’ He reached for his vodka. On the TV he saw a wide receiver leap high into the floodlit air and fold a spinning ball into his chest.

  ‘There were dead people in the swimming-pool …’

  Still staring out into the darkness, Karen told him that when she arrived for training that morning, there were TV cameras on the steps outside the baths. She thought it was funny. So did the other girls. It seemed as if the TV people were there for them, as if they’d become famous overnight. So they played to the cameras, waving and blowing kisses … Later, she heard that a woman had hidden in the changing-rooms until the pool closed and then, sometime during the night, she had drowned her two small children, then she had drowned herself. The bodies had been found that morning.

  Karen turned to him with tears shining on her face. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all day,’ she said, ‘but this evening it got worse. Somehow, I didn’t want to be alone.’

  ‘Where’s your husband?’

  ‘In America somewhere. Houston, I think.’

  ‘He’s getting closer then.’

  She smiled through her tears. ‘You think I’m stupid.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe I should go.’ She looked round for the backpack she had brought with her.

  ‘Karen,’ he said, ‘it’s all right. You can stay.’

  She seemed restless, though, so he took her out and showed her the neighbourhood – the Hotel Splendide on the corner, the statue of Cobden on its scrubby patch of grass, the house where the bald man and the Spanish-looking woman lived. They stood on the railway bridge and listened to the trains. The red light on the Post Office Tower blinked in the distance. The sky was the colour of beer.

  ‘Our troubles are over,’ he said. He wanted to hear the words out loud, see how they sounded. He wanted to believe in them.

  Karen was looking at him oddly.

  ‘It’s just something someone said today.’ He took her hand. He could feel the knob of bone on the outside of her wrist. His little finger touched against it as they walked.

  Later, when they reached his flat, she had a bath. At one-thirty they went to bed, the flicker of a black-and-white movie on TV.

  ‘Do you mind just holding me?’ she said.

  He smiled. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Strange place you’ve got,’ she murmured.

  ‘Everyone says that.’

  ‘No, I like it.’

  Soon her breathing deepened and she was asleep. He looked down at her, what he could see of her – some green-blonde hair, one half-closed hand – and found himself remembering something Bridget had said to him a few months back. Why can’t you be nice to me? Why can’t you just be nice?

  *

  Journalists from many of the country’s leading newspapers and two of its TV stations attended the press conference that was held the following morning, but Raleigh Connor showed no signs of nervousness as he stepped up to the microphone. He began by mentioning a colleague of his who had worked in Washington for many years. If you want a friend in Washington, his colleague had told him, buy a dog. Connor waited until the laughter died away. In London it’s even worse, he went on. You bring your dog, they put it in quarantine for six months. This time laughter burst towards the ceiling like a shout. Standing at the side of the room with Neil Bowes, Jimmy saw that Connor already had his audience exactly where he wanted them. It was only in private that Connor slipped up, became human – even, sometimes, a figure of fun; in public he was seamless, infallible. At that moment Neil Bowes nudged Jimmy in the ribs. Jimmy realised he had not been listening.

  ‘… so it’s with great reluctance and considerable regret,’ Connor was saying, ‘that we, as a company, have accepted Tony Ruddle’s resignation. For almost eleven years now Tony has been …’

  So that was what Ruddle had been talking about the other day. Jimmy glanced at Neil, who raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Did you know?’ Jimmy whispered.

  Neil shook his head.

  ‘… and we’d like to take this opportunity to wish him well in his new life …’

  Before Jimmy could start speculating on the effect this might have on his career, Connor paused significantly. When he began again, his voice had dropped a register, acquired new gravity.

  ‘There have been certain rumours circulating in the industry during the past few weeks,’ he said, ‘certain allegations of impropriety and wrongdoing …’

  A hush descended on the room.

  ‘Obviously I don’t intend to dignify these allegations with any kind of response,’ Connor said, his eyes moving slowly along the rows of journalists. ‘The whole idea, as I understand it, is repugnant and unethical. The whole idea’s absurd, in fact. All I can say is, if the competition are resorting to this kind of mud-slinging, then they must be pretty worried …’

  One or two people chuckled.

  ‘All I can say is,’ and Connor smiled down, ‘we must be doing something right …’

  Doing something right, Jimmy thought. Good line.

  After his statement Connor took questions. The journalists were unusually benign; they seemed cowed by his performance, almost sycophantic. As Jimmy moved towards the back of the room, though, he noticed a young man rise up out of the audience. He was roughly Jimmy’s age. With his smoke-grey RAF greatcoat and his hair tied back in a
pony-tail, he looked more like a student than a member of the press.

  ‘At the back there,’ Connor said.

  ‘Where’s Glade Spencer?’ the student said.

  The room stirred like someone half-woken out of a deep sleep.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand the question,’ Connor said. ‘Perhaps I didn’t hear it correctly …’

  ‘You heard,’ the student muttered. But then he repeated the question, his voice louder now, a space between each word. ‘Where’s Glade Spencer?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Connor said. ‘I don’t know anyone by that name.’ He glanced towards the exit. Two security guards began to make their way along the edges of the room. One of them, Jimmy saw, was Bob.

  The student was brandishing a folded newspaper. ‘Glade Spencer is one of the innocent people your company exploited,’ he shouted. ‘You exploited her, and now she’s dead –’

  Taking an arm each, the two guards steered him towards the door. He was still shouting over his shoulder: a girl was dead, and ECSC UK were responsible. During the struggle he dropped his paper. Jimmy walked over and picked it up. In the background Connor was pointing out the dangers of rumour and gossip, how it brought ‘all kinds of people out of the woodwork’.

  Once outside the room, Jimmy studied the paper. It had been folded in half, then folded again, which meant the top-right quarter of page nine faced upwards. A small article under the heading News in brief had a square drawn round it in black felt-tip.

  Plunge couple mystery

  The bodies of a man and a young woman were found on the Lincolnshire coast yesterday. Barker Dodds, 38, and Glade Spencer, 23, were last seen in the vicinity of the Humber Bridge on Monday evening. Police are appealing to anyone who might have information on the couple to come forward.

  Jimmy had the curious feeling that this was something he already knew about – and yet the people’s names and the location meant nothing to him. Then he remembered Karen’s story of the night before – the bodies in the swimming-pool, the drownings …

  After scanning the article again, he shook the newspaper out and looked for a date. It was five days old.

  ‘What’ve you got there?’ Neil said.

  Jimmy showed Neil the paper. ‘That guy who was shouting, it belonged to him.’ He waited until Neil had read the article. ‘You think she was one of ours?’

  ‘One of ours?’ Neil gave him an acidic glance. ‘What was your name for them? Ambassadors?’ When Jimmy didn’t answer, Neil shrugged. ‘I’ll tell you what I think. I think this whole thing’s going to blow up in our faces.’ He paused. ‘Boom,’ he said, then walked away.

  Jimmy drove home slowly, thoughtfully, his jacket on the seat beside him, his shirtsleeves rolled. As he waited at a set of traffic-lights in Maida Vale he caught sight of a woman in a first-floor window, above a shop. She was leaning on the window-sill in a beige slip, the warm, gold light of early autumn colouring her hair, her shoulders. She looked like someone nothing bad could happen to. She looked immune. To his surprise, he found he envied her. For the last few hours he had had the sense that things were turning against him. He felt strangely unanchored. Adrift. His bones seemed to be floating inside his skin.

  That morning, after the press conference, he had walked up to Connor and congratulated him on his performance. Connor smiled stiffly, but said nothing; the ease and calmness that had always come so naturally to him suddenly appeared to require an effort. At one point Jimmy took a quick breath, thinking he might ask something, then he decided that the timing was inappropriate. But Connor had already noticed, of course.

  ‘You have a question, James?’

  Jimmy hesitated. ‘Glade Spencer …’

  ‘Yes?’ Connor was looking directly into Jimmy’s eyes.

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘Who was she?’ Connor said. ‘I honestly don’t know.’

  His gaze had no depth to it, only surface, and the surface was hard and shiny, like lacquer or enamel. In the end Jimmy had to look away, as if he was the guilty party. As if the responsibility was his.

  A horn sounded behind him.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he muttered.

  He let the clutch out fast and pulled away from the lights, leaving the woman leaning on her window-sill, not thinking anything, just breathing, dreaming.

  A Note on the Author

  RUPERT THOMSON is the author of eight highly acclaimed novels, of which Air and Fire and The Insult were shortlisted for the Writer’s Guild Fiction Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize respectively. His most recent novel, Death of a Murderer, was shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Novel Award. His memoir This Party's Got to Stop was published in 2010.

  By the Same Author

  Fiction

  Dreams of Leaving

  The Five Gates of Hell

  Air and Fire

  The Insult

  The Book of Revelation

  Divided Kingdom

  Death of a Murderer

  Non-fiction

  This Party’s Got to Stop

  First published 1998

  Copyright © 1998 by Rupert Thomson

  This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Line from ‘Hotel California’ by the Eagles:

  Words and music by Don Henley, Don Felder, Glenn Frey

  © 1976 Warner Bros Music Corp, USA, Warner/Chappell Music Ltd, London W6 8BS

  Reproduced by permission of International Music Publications Ltd

  The characters, companies and brand names in this novel are entirely fictitious and any similarity with real people, companies or products is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP

  eISBN: 978 1 4088 3321 6

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