Rupert Thomson - Soft

‘Any problems?’ Charlton said.

‘You might need a couple of new doors.’

Charlton laughed for longer than was necessary. Relief could do that to people. So could fear. Barker held the phone away from his ear and thought he could see Charlton’s laughter bubbling out of the tiny holes. Then, suddenly, a plane went over and it seemed as though everything he could hear had just been buried in an avalanche.

The quality Barker appreciated most in Harold Higgs was the fact that he didn’t talk more than he needed to. It could have been the direct result of his speech impediment — a kind of self-consciousness, a deliberate attempt to limit the amount of embarrassment he caused — but somehow Barker doubted it; the barber’s sparing use of words seemed in character, along with his neatness and his punctuality. One morning, though, as clouds lowered over the rooftops and rain slanted across the window of the shop, Higgs started telling Barker about his years in the Air Force. He had served as a navigator in Lancaster bombers, he said. He had flown over Germany, more than twenty missions. His stammer, that was when it started.

Although he was interested, Barker didn’t understand why Higgs had suddenly decided to talk to him, and it was another half an hour before it became clear. That morning, as he walked to work, Higgs had been attacked by three white youths, and he was feeling furious and bitter and disappointed. After all, he said, and Barker could sense that he found it distasteful having to resort to a cliché, he’d probably done more for the country than they’d ever done, and yet, there they were, telling him that he was useless.

‘You’re not hurt?’ Barker said.

Higgs shook his head. ‘No.’

‘My father was in the Navy,’ Barker said. ‘Destroyers.’

He told Higgs a story his father had often told him when he was young. One night in 1942 — this was during the time of the convoys — Frank Dodds had been swept overboard by a freak wave. Only one man noticed, and that man had managed to raise the alarm. Frank Dodds survived.

‘It was December in the North Atlantic,’ Barker said. ‘You didn’t last long in that water.’

Higgs watched him from a chair by the window. Though it was dark in the shop, neither of the two men had bothered to turn the lights on. From outside, the place probably looked closed.

‘I’m going to tell you something,’ Barker said, surprising himself a little with the announcement, ‘something I don’t tell many people. It’s about my name.’

‘I w-wondered about that.’

‘But you never said anything. Some people, they think they’re clever. They like to crack jokes.’

Higgs shrugged, as if jokes held little interest for him.

‘I was lucky,’ Barker said. ‘I could have been called Jocelyn.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s what my father always said whenever I gave him a hard time about my name. My two brothers, they’ve got ordinary names, but I was the oldest, I was named after the man who saved my father, the man who saw him fall into the water. Jocelyn Barker.’

Higgs scratched his white hair with one long finger. ‘I think your father m-made the right decision.’

Barker laughed at that, and Higgs laughed with him, and the rain fell steadily outside, a constant murmur under their conversation.

‘He was a hairdresser,’ Barker mentioned later.

‘Your father was a hairdresser?’

‘That’s how I learned.’

Higgs smiled to himself, as if Barker was only confirming something that he had known all along, or guessed, and then the bell above the door jangled and a man in a grey raincoat walked in, cursing the bloody weather and shaking the water off his clothes.

The days passed evenly, without excitement, without disaster. Barker would leave his flat at eight-thirty every morning, returning at six o’clock at night. Though he now lived further from the shop, he chose to walk to work. It took half an hour, but he felt it did him good. And besides, he had grown fond of the streets; he liked the way their names gave you clues as to their history, the fact that you could turn a corner and smell rope or cinnamon or tea. Most days, he crossed the river at the Tower. He noticed how the buildings seemed to crouch and huddle to the east of Tower Bridge, and how the sky seemed to widen, to expand. There was the sudden feeling of being close to an estuary, a foretaste of the sea. The sight of HMS Belfast moored against the south bank never failed to remind him of his father. He thought Frank Dodds would probably have stopped and leaned on the bridge and stared down at the battleship with a look of approval on his face; he would have told Barker what size shells the big guns fired, how many men were in the crew.

Only Charlton knew where Barker could be found. On spring evenings, just after sunset, Barker would often hear the silver Sierra pull up in the street below. Charlton would take him to Brick Lane where they would eat meat curry and drink beer out of stainless-steel beakers. Or sometimes they would drive to a pub in Bethnal Green. Otherwise, Barker lived on baked potatoes, toast and Hofmeister lager, which was cheap that year. Though he had bought paint wholesale from an ironmonger’s down the road and though he had almost no furniture — he kept his clothes in a filing-cabinet he’d found in a skip and slept on a bed Charlton had lent him — it had still cost him money to turn the flat into a place that was fit to live in, and there were times when he didn’t know how he was going to get by. Only thirty-five pounds remained of the eight hundred he’d arrived with, and he knew Higgs couldn’t afford to pay him any more than he was already paying. In general, Barker could look on his life with a certain satisfaction. It didn’t amount to much, of course, not by other people’s standards, but at least nobody was pushing lit cigarettes through his letter-box in the middle of the night.

Still, sometimes he felt strange, lying on a borrowed mattress in an empty building, thirty-eight years old. He had dismantled one life, and he had yet to construct another in its place. He did what he could with his limited resources. He knew it was temporary, though, a kind of quarantine, and there was a sense in which he was waiting for the health of his new existence to be recognised, but he couldn’t imagine how exactly that might happen, or when.

Not long after Barker moved in, a man appeared at his front door. The man was in his middle to late fifties and he wore a dark-green anorak and a scarf. He seemed anxious and ill-at-ease, constantly glancing over his left shoulder, as if he was expecting an ambush.

‘I’m looking for Will Campbell.’

Barker remembered the two girls, and the boy who’d stood behind them, not saying anything, a skinny white kid with dreadlocks and a ragged sweater.

‘There’s only me here,’ he said.

The man passed one hand over his forehead and up into his thinning hair. ‘Someone gave me this address.’ He studied the scrap of paper he was holding, then looked up at the building. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘this is the address.’

‘He must have moved.’

‘Oh.’ The man stood on the pavement, unsure what he should do but, at the same time, unwilling to leave. He had reached a dead end and if he left he would be forced to admit that to himself. While he stayed outside the building that matched the address he had been given, he could still feel that he stood on solid ground, that there was hope. ‘You don’t know where he went?’

‘No idea.’

‘I rang up, you see. About a month ago. I was told the phone had been disconnected. So I thought I’d come down …’

‘I live here now.’

‘Yes.’

‘Nothing I can do. Sorry.’