Soft (12 page)

‘I don't want to eat,' she warned him. ‘I just want a glass of wine.'

‘We have wine. Please,' and he held the door for her, ‘come on in.' He looked into the empty restaurant. ‘Sit anywhere you want.'

Stepping past him, into the room, she was reminded of her own life: the quietness of it, a green neon sign that said, simply, SPACES. She sat at a table in the corner, her suitcase on the floor behind her chair. The plain brick walls had been decorated with posters of the Roman Forum and the Colosseum. Bottles snugly cupped in faded raffia hung from the ceiling. Every table had a red-and-white check cloth on it. You would never have imagined there was an airport right outside the door.

‘Would you like white wine,' the man said, ‘or red?'

She decided that she wanted red.

‘Would you like some music? I have records.' He brought out a selection – Mozart, Verdi, Bach.

She chose Verdi, because he was Italian.

As he was putting the record on, the man glanced over his shoulder. ‘You're sure you're not hungry? We have fresh linguine, with shrimp. It's very good.'

‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘I ate on the plane.'

‘How about a little bowl of gumbo? It's a speciality of New Orleans. I made it myself.' He saw her hesitate. ‘Just a taste. It's on the house.'

She smiled. ‘All right. Thank you.'

The man's name was Sidney and his wife was called Consuela. Consuela was much older than Sidney, forty-five at least. They could have been mother and son were it not for the fact that
they looked so unalike. Sidney was tall and spare, with that strange, close-fitting head of hair and those pale, haunted eyes. Consuela came from Puerto Rico. Short and thick-waisted, she had hair that was so black, it looked wet, and skin that had a sickly, olive tinge to it. Every now and then she would shuffle into the restaurant in a pair of pale-blue flip-flops and smile in a distant, abstract way, as if she was amused not by them but by something inside her head, a memory, perhaps, then she would step back through the curtain again, hidden by the strings of amber beads.

When Glade had finished her bowl of gumbo, Sidney joined her at the table and began to talk.

‘Last week Consuela was shot,' he said.

Glade stared at him, her glass halfway to her mouth.

Consuela had gone home at lunchtime to find a man in their apartment. The man shot her twice and then escaped. When Sidney discovered her, at five o'clock, she was lying on the bedroom floor, bleeding from wounds in her forearm and her shoulder.

‘She was lucky,' Sidney said.

Consuela appeared from behind the bead curtain. Sidney spoke to her in Spanish. He took her hand as she came and stood beside him, putting his other arm around her waist. She stood quite still, staring past him, at the floor. He was still looking at Glade.

‘I don't know what I'd do if I lost her.'

A minute passed. Then Consuela gently disengaged herself and moved away. The curtain clicked as she passed through it. Sidney got up to change the record. On his way back to the table he poured two glasses of a clear liquid, handing one to Glade. She watched him drain his glass in one. She sipped at hers. The drink had an unusual consistency. Like oil.

‘Two days later my car was stolen.' Sidney told her.

In broad daylight, from right outside his house. It was only an old car, a Dodge Dart, but it would cost him five hundred
bucks to get another one like it. Then, at the weekend, these guys who were on something, PCP or crack, he didn't know, they'd come into the restaurant, broken a chair, some plates, then they'd walked out without paying. There were three of them, big black guys with leather vests and chains around their necks. What was he supposed to do?

‘I can understand why you lock the door,' Glade said.

Sidney was watching the street again. ‘You just have to knock,' he said, ‘that's all.'

She looked at him curiously. The way he talked, it sounded as if he thought she'd be coming to the restaurant quite often.

‘We're moving apartments next week. Consuela, she can't sleep.' He looked at Glade, his eyes pale and unsteady in his face. ‘You should be careful here. Keep to the centre. Where are you staying?'

Suddenly she had a picture of Tom sitting on the roof of the Hotel Excelsior. The sun was sinking into the Mississippi. An empty chair stood beside him. Her chair. There was a quick flash of gold as he lifted his wrist to look at his watch.

‘What time is it?' she asked.

‘It's just after five.'

Glade put a hand over her mouth. ‘I must go.'

‘You have to be somewhere?'

‘Someone's waiting for me. I'm very late.' Glade stood up. ‘I'd better get a taxi.'

It took twenty-five minutes to reach the Hotel Excelsior and Glade wound the window down so the warm air blew into her face. Before she left the restaurant, she had parted the bead curtain to say goodbye to Consuela. The woman was sitting on a wooden chair, her hands resting on her knees. She wasn't doing anything, just staring. The walls in the kitchen had been painted pale-green, which gave the room a melancholy feeling. Outside, on the pavement, Glade looked back. Sidney was already fastening the bolts. She waved, but he didn't see her. There are people who seem to come alive
when you appear and die the moment you are gone. It's as if they're machines and you're electricity.

You just have to knock, that's all
.

She left her luggage with the man in reception and took a lift to the top floor. She saw Tom as soon as she stepped through the french windows on to the roof. He was sitting in a low deckchair, facing away from her. He seemed to be staring at the pool. He looked as though he hadn't moved for a long time. The water in the pool was motionless as well, a perfect surface. She didn't hesitate at all. It had worked, the alcohol.

‘Tom,' she said.

He didn't look up, not even when she was standing in front of him, her shadow masking the top half of his body.

‘The plane got in four hours ago,' he said. ‘Where the fuck have you been?'

He still hadn't taken his eyes off the pool.

She glanced at her hands, then looked away, into the sky. She smiled quickly. ‘This city,' she said. ‘It's gone crazy in the last six months.'

It wouldn't have been her choice to drink Margaritas, but Tom always drank tequila when he wanted to be drunk, and she went along with it. It was part of the price she had to pay for being what he called ‘flaky'. She knew she would probably be ill at some point, but that too was part of the price. They were sitting in a bar in the French Quarter, the dark wood doors open to the street, and if she looked past Tom's shoulder she could see bright neon signs, cars glinting as they glided past, the teeth of people laughing. She had been telling him about the mountain in Paddington. She thought it might intrigue him, change his mood. Watching him across the table as she talked, she couldn't tell whether she had been forgiven yet. At least they were out together, though. And he was looking at her now, the way he always did, his eyes moving restlessly
from one part of her face to another, as if he was trying to take in every detail, no matter how small, as if he was trying to learn her off by heart. She wondered if it had something to do with his work, this habit he had of cross-examining her face. Then, suddenly, he was leaning forwards, both forearms on the table. There was something he hadn't understood.

‘This mountain,' he said. ‘You can climb it, right?'

‘Yes.' She paused. ‘Well, not any more, actually. They took it away.'

‘They took it away?' Tom stared at her with his mouth open.

‘Yes.'

‘They took a mountain away? How could they do that?'

‘I don't know,' Glade said. ‘I always thought of it as a mountain, but I suppose it was just a hill, really.'

Tom was shaking his head. ‘I don't get it.'

She smiled downwards, into her Margarita. A funny colour for a drink. Almost grey. And that frosting round the rim of the glass. Like Christmas.

‘What's the joke?' Tom was grinning at her now, salt grains sticking to his upper lip. ‘Did I say something?'

She couldn't tell him what she was thinking, that she'd known he would react like that, exactly like that, so she just shrugged and smiled. In any case, she liked it when he floundered. She found his uncertainty attractive.

‘Fucking Glade,' he said, and shook his head again. He was still grinning, though.

He finished his drink, then told her the plan for the evening. They were going to visit a friend of his who lived ten minutes' drive away. He'd rented a car.

‘You're not too drunk?' she said. ‘I mean, we could always take a taxi.'

‘They all drink down here. It's a different culture.'

‘Oh.' He could make her feel so cautious, almost dull. She decided not to mention taxis again.

They collected the keys to the car from hotel reception and took a lift to the basement. She thought Tom might try and have sex with her on the way down – when he was thinking about sex, something seemed to go missing in his face – but they reached the car-park and he still hadn't touched her.

The rental car was a convertible, an ugly dark-red colour. She sank low in the seat, her head weightless, her vision slightly blurred; she could taste the drinks on her lips. The car trembled, roared. Tom scraped the wing on a concrete pillar while he was backing out, but he just laughed and said, ‘Insurance.'

They drove through narrow streets with the roof down. At first she felt she was on display. Then, abruptly, the feeling reversed itself, and she could stare. The noise astonished her. Music, voices, fights. Once, through a half-open door, she saw a woman dancing topless on a bright zinc counter, her bottom quivering above a row of drinks. The lighting in the clubs and bars had the sultry glow of charcoal-dusted gold, and when she sank still lower in her seat, feet on the dashboard, coloured neon poured over the curved glass of the windscreen as if it were a kind of liquid, and wrought-iron balconies hung above her head like eyelashes caked in black mascara.

She asked Tom where they were going.

‘Chestnut Street,' came the reply. ‘It's in the Garden District.'

The Garden District. She saw Sally standing at the kitchen window, planes slowly dropping through the wet grey London sky.
You don't know anything
.

‘What's the name of your friend?' she asked.

Tom turned to her. ‘What?'

They were driving fast now, along a road that reminded her of Airport Boulevard. The lights above their heads were yellow, but everything else, everything beyond them, glistened like a lake of oil.

She repeated the question, moving close to Tom so he could hear her. The wind blew her hair into her mouth, her eyes.

‘Sterling,' Tom shouted. ‘As in pounds.'

They passed a supermarket, then a pizza parlour. In a restaurant window she saw a sign that said HOT WINGS ARE BACK!. She wanted to know what it meant, but she didn't feel like shouting again and by the time they stopped on Chestnut Street she'd forgotten all about it.

She supposed she must have met Sterling that night. Afterwards, though, she couldn't remember him. Drawn deep into the house, she noticed mirrors, their silver exploding at the edges, her own face almost hidden in a garden of brown flowers, and then she found a veranda that was open to the darkness, all climbing plants and shadows, the wood rickety, the white paint flaking under her fingers. Something slowly came unhinged. The flight, the drinks, more drinks, the sights and sounds. She moved from room to room, the air resisting her. She was very tired, and yet she didn't want to sleep.

She was telling somebody about the clinic.

‘I don't know what happened. I was asleep for two days.'

The man said something she didn't catch. She thought she heard the word
princess
. No, she couldn't have. She felt she had to keep talking.

‘They paid me a hundred pounds,' she said. ‘I bought a dress with it.'

The man's eyes dropped below her chin.

‘No, not this dress.'

He had the habit of holding his glass on the palm of one hand and turning it with the fingers of his other hand. In the end, this was all she could see – the glass revolving on his palm. It made her feel dizzy. She asked him what his favourite drink was, hoping to distract him, but then she didn't wait for his reply.

‘Mine's Kwench!,' she said.

The glass revolving, and his face above it, crumpled. Like something that needed air in it. That needed blowing up.

‘It's a soft drink, but it's healthy. It's made with special ingredients …'

And then the man was gone – or maybe she just left, she couldn't tell. His face peeling away, high into the room, like a moth …

When she found Tom, it was much later, and he was lying lengthways on a sofa, smoking a joint. She was surprised to see him; she had forgotten where she was, who she'd come with. He offered her the joint and she said no. ‘Don't be boring,' he said. She shook her head. It was the wrong thing to say, but she took the joint anyway, drawing the smoke back over her tongue and down into her lungs, knowing she shouldn't, but knowing it from a distance, like someone in another country knowing something, too far away to make any difference. She seemed to be the only person standing up. The room was too big. It had too much furniture in it.

‘I was asleep for two days,' she said. ‘I had electrodes attached to me.' She smiled. ‘I think it did me good.'

She had to try not to think about the size of the room, or how much furniture there was.

‘They shaved a little piece of my head. Only a quarter of an inch.' She reached up with both hands and felt her hair. ‘It's here somewhere.'

‘Who's that?' she heard someone say.