Rupert Thomson - Soft

‘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.

‘That’s Glade.’

‘Everything’s gone orange,’ she said.

‘Why don’t you sit down, Glade?’

Somebody laughed.

‘Yeah, Glade. Have a seat.’

Glade, Glade, Glade . The sound of her name made the walls spin. The room dissolved into a kind of froth. Suddenly there was nothing she could think of without feeling ill.

She seemed to fall out of the room headfirst. As if the door was a hole in the ground. Her legs clattered down a flight of stairs. They had no strength in them, no bone.

Then she was in the car.

She leaned over the door, watching her sick land on the road. The sick kept shifting sideways, shifting sideways, but somehow it stayed in the same place too. Her hair was cold and wet with sweat. Her cheek rested against the back of her hand. Blurred fingers. She wanted it to stop. She couldn’t move.

She smelled the perfume on her wrist. That made her sick again. Straining, spitting, straining. Almost nothing coming out. She felt her dress being lifted from behind. Lifted over her head. Suddenly she couldn’t see. Somehow she struggled free, found air.

‘Tom?’

She tried to look round, but only caught a glimpse of him. He was kneeling on the seat behind her, his face contained, intent, the way people look when they’re alone. Trees above him, overhanging trees. Black and torn and flapping, like umbrellas in a wind blown inside out. That turning of her head. Her stomach rose towards her throat again, and she bent over the door, both hands on the outside handle, her face halfway to the road.

While she was being sick, she felt him pull her knickers down, into the backs of her knees. He worked himself into a position between her thighs, forcing them apart.

‘What are you doing?’ She wasn’t sure whether she had actually spoken. It might have been a thought.

Then he pushed into her.

She cried out because it wasn’t the usual place. She couldn’t give it her full attention, though. She was still vomiting on to the road.

Once, she noticed his hands. They were gripping the top of the door, the tendons stretched taut over the knuckles, like somebody afraid of falling. It was hard to bring her head up. He had pressed himself against her, pinned her so she could scarcely move, the top of the door cutting into her, just below her rib-cage. It was hard, at times, even to retch.

She didn’t know how long it took, only that her hair hung in her eyes and her mouth tasted sour and the trees still moved above her, great antique umbrellas broken by the wind, but she remembered hearing a kind of creaking coming from behind her, then a sigh, and she knew then that he had finished.