Soft (34 page)

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.

‘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.