Soft (8 page)

‘The mountain,' she said.

She ran over the main road and, climbing through a fence of corrugated iron and barbed wire, slid down a bank of grass and rubble on to the flat land behind Paddington Station. The noise down there surprised her. The rush of traffic
from the Westway overhead, the strange mingled hiss and whine as trains leaving the station gathered speed. She stood at the foot of the mountain and looked up. Mud, as she had always thought. By now the others had caught up with her, Charlie at her shoulder, the corner of his mouth puckered, slightly crooked, perhaps because he had guessed what she had in mind. One of the girls had torn her skirt. She was laughing, her mouth stretched wide, her pale sixties lipstick almost phosphorescent in the half-light. Glade explained her plan. They had to climb the mountain, all of them. It was from there that she was going to let the firework off.

At the top and panting, out of breath, she felt much closer to the sky, as though she could reach up and touch it, the mass of brown cloud that covered London, tawdry and crumpled as jumble-sale velvet. She could see a train stumbling like a drunk in the maze of tracks outside the station, only the windows visible, a murky row of yellow squares. Each square had faces in it, looking out, going home, and she thought of her father, who lived in a caravan in Lancashire, her father's face in that single melancholy window, one yellow square in the darkness of a field. She bent down. Pushing her hair behind her shoulder, she worked the tail of the rocket into the mud until it stood up on its own. She asked if anyone had matches. Charlie handed her a battered Zippo lighter. She snapped the lid back, thumbed the flint and held the trembling flame against the touchpaper. For a moment nothing happened. Then it caught. At first it burned modestly, innocently, as if it was just ordinary paper and would soon falter, die out, crumble into harmless ash. The flame had an odd greenish halo, though. Somebody yelled at her.
Get down
.

She crouched, arms round her knees. And suddenly it went. The noise reminded her of the moment when you take a plaster off a wound – a rasp, a tearing sound, a gasp ripped from the air. It burned a bright-orange line into the darkness, curving high into the soft, brown London sky, rising,
always rising, and burst somewhere over Westbourne Grove, the explosion bouncing off the houses behind the station, off the Westway's fluted buttresses, and then a spray of red and green and gold that seemed half a city wide, rushing towards her, drawing her in.

Her best birthday ever.

The tube staggered, then stopped. Westbourne Park.

You used to be able to see the mountain from Harrow Road if you were heading west, just after the timber yard and just before you dipped down into the underpass. You could see it from the tube too, if you were travelling on the Hammersmith & City Line, as she was now. It was about the height of a four-storey house, and the ground all round it had been levelled. A few bricks lay about, a few broken bottles. Weeds flourished at the foot of the mountain in the summer, those city weeds, bright-yellow flowers on coarse, grey-green stalks. In winter, when it rained, the steep flanks of the mountain glistened, and puddles hid the bricks and bottles at its base. She would never forget how beautiful and unlikely it had looked one February, when it seemed, for a few days, to imitate Mount Fuji, its perfect summit covered with a light dusting of snow.

Four beige tower-blocks, a pub called The Pig and Whistle. Latimer Road at last. She rose from her seat, almost losing her balance as the tube lurched to a sudden standstill. A bored guard yawned on the platform, his teeth bared fiercely in the pale autumn sunlight. She stepped past him, the tube doors grinding shut behind her. Down one flight of spit-stained stairs and out on to the street. She stood still for a moment, taking in the cool grey air, the peaceful rush of traffic, a black man relaxing in a strangely buxom maroon armchair on the pavement outside the mini-cab office.

Walking north, she remembered the night the mountain disappeared – or, rather, the night she noticed it had gone. One of her fellow waiters, Hector, had given her a lift home
on his motor bike. As they turned left off Edgware Road and raced towards the roundabout, she realised they would have to pass the mountain and she prepared herself, as always, a smile held just inside her mouth. But when they leaned into the bend and she looked down, there was nothing there. She must have flinched, or perhaps she had even cried out, because Hector braked slightly, thinking there was something wrong. Shouting into the wind, she asked him if he could take a left at the lights, go round again. The second time they passed the place, she was struck by how normal it looked – more normal than it had ever looked before, in fact. The wasteground, the railway tracks. Part of a canal.

Later that night, in her bedroom, she had opened her
A-Z
and studied the area of white space between Bishop's Bridge Road and the blue-and-white stripe of the Westway. She could find no tiny triangle to indicate the presence of a mountain, no number to let you know how high it was. She sat back, thinking about the space and how its whiteness was a kind of lie. She thought of spies, and how they learn to empty their faces. The mountain was a secret the world refused to share with her. Soon it would become hard to believe it had ever existed. But these were the very things you had to cling to in the face of everything, the things that vanished without warning, without trace, as if they had never been.

She passed the school and then turned right, into a street of red-brick houses. If people ever asked her where she lived, she always said Wormwood Scrubs (though Sally James, her flat-mate, claimed they lived in Ladbroke Grove). She liked the name. Also, she felt an affinity with that bleak area of grass and swings and men out walking dogs, the sky too big, somehow, with patches of white showing through the insipid greys and pale-blues, like an unfinished water-colour. She felt she understood it better than Ladbroke Grove, with its pink neon video boutiques and its fast cars shuddering with music.

When she reached her house, she stopped by the gate and looked up at her bedroom, a small bay window on the first floor. A face stared down from the gap between the curtains. This was Giacometti, her cat. The name was supposed to be ironic: as a white, long-haired Persian, he had nothing in common with the stick figures Giacometti was famous for – though, curiously enough, beneath his soft exterior, there lurked a disposition that was both brittle and perverse.

She unlocked the front door and, closing it behind her, climbed the stairs. She found Sally sitting in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette. A saucepan of water heated gently on the stove. The kettle stood beside it, steam still rising from the spout.

‘I had a shit day,' Sally said.

Glade poured hot water into a cup, dropped a herbal tea-bag into it and took it over to the table.

‘Shit,' Sally said, ‘from start to finish.' She sharpened the end of her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray. ‘Temping,' she said. ‘I fucking hate it.' She stared at Glade until Glade began to feel like something in a shop window. ‘You're really lucky, you know that?'

Glade reached up and trained one strand of her long hair behind her ear. Then she simply, and rather nervously, laughed.

‘I don't know how you do it,' Sally said. ‘I really don't.'

‘Do what?' Glade said.

‘I don't know. The way everything works out for you. That job in the restaurant, for instance …'

Glade waited.

‘And a boyfriend,' Sally went on quickly, ‘in Miami.' She smiled bitterly and shook her head.

Glade looked down into her cup. She had been going out with Tom for two years – if you could say ‘going out with' about somebody you hardly ever saw. It wasn't Tom's fault that he lived in America. He was American. But still. If you
added up the amount of time they had actually spent together, what would it have come to? A month? Six weeks? She rolled the little paper tag on her tea-bag into a cylinder, rolled it until it was so tight that there was no air left in the middle, nothing you could see through.

‘He's a lawyer, isn't he?' Sally said.

Glade nodded. ‘I'm not sure what kind exactly.'

‘That's what I mean, you see? You're so vague, so wrapped up, in yourself. You don't even try – and yet you end up with someone,' and Sally paused, ‘someone like that …'

The water had boiled. Sally sighed and, rising from the table, seemed to fling herself across the room. Glade was reminded of old war films: planes that had benches along the walls instead of seats, tense men with parachutes – and then that moment when they have to hurl themselves through an open doorway and there's nothing there, just black sky, roaring air. She watched Sally drop four pieces of broccoli into the saucepan. During the last week Sally had started eating broccoli. On its own.

‘It must be wonderful, though,' Sally said over her shoulder, ‘being flown out to Miami for the weekend.' Her voice was softer now, more buttery. ‘I mean,
being flown
.'

It didn't seem particularly wonderful to Glade, it was just what happened. Sometimes Tom flew to London and they would stay in five-star hotels in the West End, or there was a place with a strange short name in Knightsbridge that he liked (and one weekend, when Sally was away, he had stayed at the flat; ‘slumming', as he called it), but mostly, it was true, Tom flew her to Miami. He would ask his personal assistant to post the ticket to her or, if it was last-minute, which was often the case, she would pick the ticket up at the airport. If anything was wonderful, that was – walking up to the sales desk, TWA or Virgin or Pan-Am, and saying, ‘I'm Glade Spencer. There's a ticket waiting for me.' At the other end, in Florida, a man would be holding a placard with her name on it. He would take her case and lead her to a limousine parked outside (once – the
first time – Tom had filled the back of the car with flowers), then drive her to Tom's apartment in South Beach. They would go to restaurants and parties, houses with swimming-pools. She sat in the shade in charity-shop sunglasses and hats with crumpled brims, and American girls walked past in clothes that always looked too new, somehow, the way clothes in costume dramas look, and an unusual but not unpleasant sense of displacement would come over her, the feeling that the present was not the present at all, that it was actually a recreation of a period in history; she would feel artificial suddenly, self-conscious, as if she was acting. And there Tom would be, standing in the sunlight with a cocktail. She's so London, isn't she, he would say, and a peculiar half-proud, half-mocking look would float on to his face. But it wasn't often all this happened.

Glade sipped her tea, which was almost cold. ‘We don't see each other much,' she said. ‘Hardly ever, really.'

That was why she had bought Giacometti – for company. If she was out, he would wait at the window, his face expressionless and round, not unlike an owl's. At night he slept on her bed. Sometimes, when she woke in the dark, he would be sitting beside her, staring down, his yellow eyes unblinking, one of his paws resting in the palm of her hand.

‘It must be three months since I saw him.' Raising her head, she realised that, finally, she had said something that made Sally feel better.

Sally had been going out with someone, but only for the past two weeks. He had a complexion that reminded Glade of balsa wood. If you pressed his forehead, it would leave a dent. Or you could snap his ears off. Snap, snap. What was his name? Oh yes. Hugh. A word that looked odd if you wrote it down. Like a noise.
Hugh
.

She watched Sally lift the saucepan off the stove and take it over to the sink. As the broccoli tumbled clumsily into a colander, the phone began to ring.

‘Could you answer that?' Sally said. ‘It's probably for you, anyway.'

Glade walked out into the corridor and picked up the phone. For a moment the line sounded empty, dead. Then she heard a click.

‘Hello?' she said.

‘Glade? It's your dad.'

‘Do you want me to call you back?'

‘No, it's all right,' he said. ‘I've got some coins.'

He didn't ring often. It was difficult for him because he didn't have a phone of his own. If he wanted to call her, he had to walk to the nearest phone-box, which was one and a half miles down the road. Three miles there and back, and sometimes it was out of order. Glade always felt guilty when she heard his voice.

‘Are you still coming up to see me?' he said.

‘I'm going to try and come next weekend.'

‘On Friday?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘But I won't be there till late.'

‘Not too late?'

‘No.'

‘I'll cook.' His sudden enthusiasm touched her, saddened her. It took so little to excite him. She saw him standing in the dim light of the phone-box, his head bent, his shoulders hunched, and darkness all around him, darkness for miles.

Sally looked up from her empty plate when Glade walked back into the kitchen. ‘I'm going to a party tonight. You don't want to come, do you?'

Glade hesitated. ‘I think I'll stay here.'

‘It's all right for some,' Sally said.

That night Glade cried herself to sleep. She had built a fire in the grate, but it stubbornly refused to burn. The few small flames seemed unconvincing, leaping towards the chimney, then falling back, shrinking, dying out. Sometimes, while she was crying, she thought of Tom, though she didn't necessarily connect the one thing with the other.

The window of her father's caravan showed through the darkness, one block of blurred light at the far end of the field. Though Glade had promised she would not be late, it was already after nine o'clock. It had been raining for most of the day, the bus moving sluggishly along the motorway as if wading through tall grass. After Birmingham the clouds had thinned a little, and she had watched a patch of pale-blue appear – that pure washed colour you sometimes see in the sky after a downpour. Further north, though, the rain had come down again, whipping at the surface of the land until it seemed to cower. The journey had taken more than seven hours.