Soft (16 page)

‘What do they call him, Neil?'

‘Really Cunning.'

‘Sounds like an understatement,' Jimmy said.

Neil nodded grimly.

Jimmy had to pretend to be scared, so as not to stand out, so as to blend. Deep down, though, he couldn't help but see the arrival of Raleigh Connor as a stroke of luck. In the three and a half years since leaving university, Jimmy had, to use
his own words, done all right. Within a week of graduation, for instance, he had won a place on the prestigious Proctor & Gamble Marketing Course, and no sooner had he completed the course than he was taken on as Brand Manager by a leading manufacturer of biscuits and snacks. Then, just over a year ago, he had been headhunted by ECSC UK. It was a good job with exciting prospects, and he was earning more money than any of his friends, but there were days when a sense of unreality descended, as if he hadn't, as yet, made much of an impression, as if he didn't quite exist, somehow. During the summer months this phantom insecurity had taken on a human form. Twenty years older than Jimmy, Tony Ruddle wore colourful bow-ties and lived somewhere in Middlesex. According to McAlpine, he had been influential in the seventies. For some reason, Ruddle had taken an instant dislike to Jimmy – which was unfortunate because he was one of three Marketing Managers to whom Jimmy was expected to report. In August Jimmy's contract had been reviewed by the board. At ECSC, an employee's performance was rated on a scale of 1-5, each number having an adjective attached to it. Jimmy had received a 4, and the adjective that went with 4 was ‘superior', but whenever he stood in the lift with Tony Ruddle he felt like a 2: he felt ‘incomplete'. Ruddle just didn't like him. And because the feeling was personal, a kind of chemical reaction, Jimmy could do nothing about it. Connor represented a whole new challenge, however, and what was more, he had been brought in over Ruddle's head (to Ruddle's evident disgust). Maybe Ruddle could be sidestepped, overlooked. Maybe he could even be removed from the equation altogether. Jimmy realised that he had identified an opportunity. His only concern was how best to exploit it to his own advantage.

Jimmy was just mixing his first vodka-and-tonic of the evening when the doorbell rang. Zane, he thought. It was Friday night, and Zane had told him there were some parties that were probably worth going to – one in a photographic studio, another in a warehouse in King's Cross. He buzzed Zane in, then reached for the ice-cubes and began to mix a second drink. He was down in the basement, a large square space that doubled as a kitchen and a dining-area. The only window in the room looked at a blank white wall draped in filthy cobwebs and a pair of outdoor cupboards that might once have hidden dustbins. If you peered upwards through the smeared glass you could just see the spear-like iron railings that separated the front of the house from the street. Jimmy had painted the walls a kind of burgundy colour. The furniture had been kept to a minimum: one long oak table, eight straight-backed chairs with leather seats, black wrought-iron light-fittings and candlesticks. The effect was medieval – or, as Zane himself had once put it, ‘dungeonesque'.

Zane sat down at the table, pushed one hand through his messy black hair. He had been away, three weeks in South-East Asia, and his face and arms were tanned. He looked garish, artificial. Like those silk flowers you see in restaurants sometimes.

Jimmy handed Zane a vodka. ‘Good holiday?'

‘Great.' Zane reached into his pocket and pulled out a bag
full of grass, a lighter and some skins. ‘You still working on that orange drink? What's it called? Squelch?'

Jimmy laughed. ‘It's Kwench!. K-W-E.'

‘Whatever. How's it going?'

‘I can't say. It's confidential.'

Zane nodded.

‘We've got a new boss,' Jimmy said. ‘He's from Chicago.'

While Zane rolled a joint, Jimmy told him about Raleigh Connor and the rumours that had been circulating.

‘He used to be special-operations man for this multi-national soft-drinks company. During the seventies something happened at one of their bottling plants in South America. Two workers drowned in syrup, and everyone walked out in protest. It was the safety regulations. They didn't have any. Anyway, so Connor flew down there to sort things out. Three days later, back to full production.'

Zane lit the joint. ‘Drowned in syrup?'

‘The syrup they make the drink out of. They fell into a giant vat and drowned.'

‘Jesus.'

‘They made ten thousand litres out of that syrup, apparently. Sold it all. Didn't bother telling anyone two men had died in it.' Jimmy paused, thinking. ‘That's thirty-three thousand cans.'

Zane offered Jimmy the joint. He dragged on it twice, then handed it back.

‘So this American,' Zane said, ‘what's he like?'

‘I don't know,' Jimmy said. ‘I haven't really talked to him.'

He had followed Connor down a corridor one morning and he remembered Connor's movements, how they seemed to be made up of parts of circles rather than straight lines, his head pushed forwards, his shoulders rounded – the shambling, almost disconsolate walk of a wrestler who's just lost a fight. He remembered the slow, indulgent smile he received when he caught up with Connor at the lift and introduced himself.

‘It's strange.' Jimmy shifted in his chair. ‘He looks sort of – kind.'

Zane watched the red glow at the end of his joint.

‘No one seems to know what he's doing here,' Jimmy went on. ‘They're all scared they're going to be fired. Walking round like they're in the middle of a minefield or something.'

‘Not you, though.' Zane smiled lazily.

Jimmy smiled back.

‘I almost forgot.' Zane dipped a hand into his jacket pocket. ‘I brought you a present.'

He slid a cellophane bag across the table. The size of a crisp packet, it had the words ROBOT JELLY printed on the front in futuristic, brightly coloured capital letters. Inside the bag were sweets. Like jellybabies, only robot-shaped.

‘It's from Bali,' Zane said.

But Jimmy hardly heard him because he had just remembered something else. On his way home that evening, on the Northern Line, he had sat opposite two secretaries. They had looked flushed, almost windswept, as if they had been walking in the countryside in winter. They must have had a few drinks together in a wine bar after work. He could imagine the blackboard on the street outside, the names of cocktails scrawled in coloured chalk. He could imagine the bright-orange fin-shapes of the tortilla chips in their terracotta bowls. Both girls wore slightly transparent white blouses and carried copies of the
Evening Standard
. Classic Oxford Street, they were. Cannon fodder for the office blocks. Shoot fifty down and another fifty would spring up in their place. He doubted he would have noticed them at all if he hadn't heard one of them say
spaceship
. She had dark hair, and she was wearing deep red lipstick, which was fashionable that autumn, and as she leaned forwards, enthusiastic suddenly, a delicate gold chain slid past the top button on her blouse and trembled in the air below her throat, as if divining something. After listening for a few moments, he realised she was using the word
spaceship
to describe the
packaging of a new beauty product. She was telling her friend that it was better than anything she'd come across before. You should try it, she was saying. And her friend probably would try it, Jimmy thought, because she had been told about it by somebody she knew. There was nothing interesting or unusual about their conversation. It was the kind of conversation people had all the time.
That was the whole point.

He tore the cellophane packet open and peered inside. That man he'd seen a month ago, with the Maltesers, the secretaries on the tube … and now this so-called ROBOT JELLY. An idea was beginning to take shape. In some quite physical sense, he felt he was being nudged. Or prompted. He looked up. Zane was staring at him, a cigarette halfway to his lips.

‘It's all right,' Zane said. ‘You don't have to eat them.'

When Jimmy woke up the next morning, he saw eight gnomes standing on a patch of Astroturf outside his bedroom window. Eyes half-closed, head pounding, he counted them again. Yes, eight. His upstairs neighbour, Mrs Fandle, must have bought a new one. Jimmy lived in what estate agents call ‘a ground-floor-and-basement maisonette'. If you stood in his bedroom, which was at the back of the house, and looked through the window, you had a view of the terrace belonging to the flat above – but your eyes were on a level with the floor, with the Astroturf itself. In the summer Jimmy would sometimes wake to see a deckchair just a few feet from his head, the stripy fabric straining under the weight of Mrs Fandle's body, her bare legs white and veined and monumental. Luckily it was October now, and the temperature had plummeted. He only had the gnomes to deal with – though, seen from below, they could seem imposing, sinister, like highway sculpture in America. Once, not long after moving in, he dreamed the gnomes had taken over. In his dream, of course, they'd multiplied. He found them in the hall, on the sofa, halfway up the stairs. One was lying on his back under the grill, like someone in a
tanning centre. When he opened the fridge, two of them were standing on the inside of the door, the place where you keep juice and milk. They were everywhere he looked. It had been a kind of nightmare.

Dehydrated but incapable of moving, he dozed on, imagining the cold tap running, ice-cubes jingling in frosted pints of water. Waking again, he reached for the glass beside the bed. Though he could see that it was empty, he brought it to his mouth and tipped it almost upside-down, thinking he might find one drop of precious liquid at the bottom. But no, nothing: he must have drained it during the night. His head ached terribly – a soft, dull thudding; he saw bags of sand being dumped one after another on to a road. On top of that, there was an unpleasant padded feeling, a kind of claustrophobia. He felt as if his brain had been packed in cotton wool. As if it was about to be sent somewhere by post. FRAGILE stencilled on the front in red. THIS SIDE UP. He put his feet on the floor. Sat still for a moment, forearms on his knees, head lowered. Probably he shouldn't have taken the Temazepam, not after all that vodka and champagne. And probably the E hadn't helped. Parties.

He struggled to his feet and walked unsteadily out of the bedroom and down the half-flight of stairs into his living-room. Thinking he might like some air, he slid the picture-window open. The smell of lavender drifted in from the small, walled garden. He was almost sick. Turning away from the window, he passed through a narrow doorway to his right. He stood at the wash-basin in the bathroom, staring at his image in the mirror, the whites of his eyes gelatinous, like the transparent parts of eggs. His face slid off the mirror as he opened the medicine cabinet. He scoured the shelves, hands moving clumsily. There was a choice. Solpadeine, Paracodol and one dog-eared box of something left over from a holiday in Thailand. He chose the Paracodol. Down in the kitchen he opened the fridge and lifted out a can of Kwench!. American import, still unavailable in the UK. Swallowing two pills, he drank the contents of the
can, then climbed the stairs back to the bathroom and took a shower.

Later, when the pounding in his head had faded, he sat in the living-room, a cup of coffee on his lap. Saturday TV flickered mutely in the corner of the room. Outside, in the garden, the bleak sunshine silvered half a tree-trunk, one narrow strip of grass. He found the packet of sweets Zane had given him and emptied it on to the table. The robots were the curious, translucent red of human skin three layers down. Something Connor had said in a meeting the day before came back to him.
The objective of advertising is to change the behaviour of the consumer so they purchase more of the product
. Connor had been stating the obvious, of course, but it was strange, wasn't it, how things could suddenly become obscure when they were put into words. The more Jimmy thought about it, the more the sentence seemed to gather meanings. He began to arrange the robots in fighting formation. Unusual smell, they had. Like certain kinds of plastic. Like toys. What Connor had said, though. The words that almost swaggered in the middle of that simple sentence.
Change the behaviour
. The dark-haired secretary on the tube, the small red figures lined up on the table. There was a connection there, a hint. An opportunity. Jimmy sat back, staring at the wall. Outside, the sunlight faded and the room darkened in an instant, as if a cloth had been thrown over the house. The route his thoughts were taking now was unpremeditated, shocking, but he felt he was seeing with absolute clarity. Maybe it would be impossible to implement. And yet, if he could do it. If it could be done …

He snatched up his keys and his ECSC ID, and left the flat. On his way up Mornington Terrace he passed a house with four motor bikes and an overturned dustbin in its front garden: Hendrix's ‘Voodoo Chile' churned and howled from an open window on the second floor. He walked on. The clicking of a train as it slid lazily into Euston or King's Cross, the same
sound as someone running down a flight of stairs: two clicks, a gap, two clicks, a gap … He reached his car, an MG Midget, almost twenty-two years old. He didn't usually give names to things. In this case, however, with a number-plate like YYY 296, he hadn't been able to resist. Delilah started fourth time, as always. Jimmy turned left, over the railway, and followed the northern edge of Regent's Park. At Paddington, he joined the Westway, that casual, delicious curve of motorway that led to the White City exit. The closest thing London had to a piece of race-track. It was here that he'd once got up to 93 m.p.h. in Marco's Triumph Herald. Where was Marco, anyway? He hadn't heard from him for days. He reached the office in twenty minutes and parked on a single yellow line. Bob stood on the pavement outside the building, rocking gently on his heels, his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets.