Rupert Thomson - Soft

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.