Soft Read online

  Praise for Soft

  ‘A sophisticated storyteller and portrayer of character, who writes in rhythmic prose enriched with original imagery . . . a really talented writer’ Sunday Times

  ‘Soft is adroit about its London-ness, its language rich and barbed … the prose style – hallucinatory, sensual and gripping – is a dream’ Financial Times

  ‘Tough, funny and scary … Hypnotic and charming … Painterly, he sets words against one another so their meanings seem to pool and bleed, making something new’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘This exuberant, demonic novel, beautifully constructed in its writing, is as tightly constructed as a cat’s cradle. It exerts an almost hypnotic spell as it submits to the pure pleasures of plot, and is an undoubted triumph … excellent … gripping … it sticks in the mind like a hook’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘A literary thriller of dazzling velocity’ Publishers Weekly

  ‘A stone-cold blast, the kind of twisted thriller that will keep you turning the pages until four in the morning’ Details

  ‘Brilliant … a thrillingly contemporary twist on the institutionalised corruption theme ... Thomson’s characters are as deeply implicated in each other’s lives as in a novel by Dickens’ Independent

  ‘Thomson is a very craft writer … You feel as if you’re being pulled in by the ankles’ New York Times Book Review

  ‘Unsettlingly intelligent’ Sunday Times

  ‘Nigh on impossible to put down … original and gripping … With his sharp plot, concise dialogue and well-honed prose, Thomson comes across as an English Elmore Leonard … Funny, sad, compulsive, philosophical and laced with a Tarantino-esque brutality, few emotions are overlooked and scarcely a word wasted’ Yorkshire Post

  ‘A hilarious and scathing portrait of the big-business world’ Philadelphia Weekly

  ‘Positively riveting’ Kirkus Reviews

  SOFT

  RUPERT THOMSON

  FOR LIZ

  Contents

  One

  Video Rapide

  Drive Away Monkey

  Last Thing I Remember

  Thank You, Ray

  Two

  Mountains in Paddington

  Lancashire Flamenco

  Spaces

  Hot Wings are Back!

  Three

  The Executioner

  Robot Jelly

  Tact

  Synchro

  The Carbonated Brain

  American For Disaster

  Cheops

  Four

  Lists and Boxes

  White China

  The Colour of Real Life

  Perfect

  Five

  Minadew Brakes

  Update Yourself

  19 Hrs

  Super Saver

  Six

  Boom

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  One

  Video Rapide

  There was nobody to see him off, of course, why would there be, and now the rain was coming down. As he waited outside the coach station, a large drop landed on his forehead. It rounded the ridge of scar tissue on the bridge of his nose and rolled into the corner of his left eye where it collected for a moment, like a tear, before spilling down his cheek. Savagely, he reached up, brushed it away. He would never have thought of taking a bus to London, but Sandy Briggs, who worked in the local betting shop, had told him it was cheaper than a train, almost half the price, so here he was, standing on the sloping concrete with his bags. It all felt wrong, somehow. Just looking at the name on the side of the bus gave him an unsteady feeling. Suddenly he wanted to hit someone. Either that, or go to sleep.

  Inside, things got worse. There was a toilet in the back that smelled of disinfectant. There were TVs screwed into the roof. A girl slouched in the aisle with a tray of Cornish pasties and cold drinks. She wore a kind of air hostess’s uniform and plain black shoes with heels that needed mending. Pinned to her head was a stripy paper hat. You could have turned it upside-down and floated it across a pond. Video Rapide. He looked out of the window. Tourists in pale-pinks and pale-greens. Children screaming. The rain still falling, running into big square drains. It was warm, though. Sticky. He shifted inside his clothes, wishing he had worn less.

  As the bus moved out of the station, a voice crackled through the speaker system. He didn’t listen. He could hear the tyres on the wet road. The hiss of brakes at traffic-lights, like someone lifting weights. He stared down at the fish-and-chip shops, the red-brick churches boarded-up. The girls at street-corners, their bare legs the mottled pink-and-white of brawn. One of them, dark-haired, awkward, reminded him of Jill. When you’re lying in bed at night and somebody smashes a bottle in the alley below, it can sound delicate, almost musical, like sleigh-bells. Sometimes there’s a noise inside your body that is just like that. He heard it every time he thought of Jill.

  The bus gathered speed and the dark-haired girl was hidden by a bend. To the north the sky seemed to be clearing, a thin washed light streaming down into the fields. It wasn’t long before the red-brick buildings were gone, the grey rooftops were gone, and they were on the motorway, with nothing to look at, nothing to see, nothing to remind you of anything. Motorways were so empty, the land on either side withdrawn and featureless. If you spent your whole life on a motorway, he thought, you wouldn’t remember a thing.

  The Scully family had driven him out of Plymouth, that was the truth of it. They lived on the same estate as he did, a whole rabbit-hutch of them. They had wide flat spaces between their eyes, and their skin was the same colour as their teeth, a sickly blend of grey and yellow. The Scullys believed that he had killed their Steve. They had no proof, of course, though he was known to be the last person to have seen Steve Scully alive and, on that basis, the police had taken him in for questioning. Nine hours he had spent in the station, nine hours straight, telling the same story over and over.

  ‘He was drunk. Out of his skin.’

  Three policemen watched him from different parts of the interrogation room. It wasn’t the first time he’d been questioned in that room, but it was the first time he’d been innocent.

  ‘I didn’t lay a finger on him. It was him laying into me that did it.’

  ‘What,’ a policeman said, ‘self-defence?’

  Barker shook his head. Returning to the estate at one in the morning, he had found Steve Scully on the fourth-floor walkway that led to his flat.

  ‘You’d been drinking,’ one of the policemen said.

  ‘Yeah, I’d been drinking,’ Barker said, ‘but not like he’d been drinking. He was swaying all over the place, like one of those snakes when you play them music –’

  ‘Like one of those snakes,’ the policeman said.

  ‘I was tired,’ Barker said, ‘and Scully was in my way –’

  ‘So you pushed him,’ the policeman said.

  ‘And he fell off the balcony,’ said another.

  ‘And he died,’ said a third.

  ‘Murderer,’ the first policeman said. Quietly. As though he was talking in his sleep.

  Barker began again. You had to be so patient. You had to have the patience of Buddha, if that was what he was famous for: you had to sit there like you were fat and foreign and made of gold.

  Scully had been standing near the top of the stairwell, just beyond the rubbish chute. It occurred to Barker that Scully had been waiting for him, specifically for him, because the first thing Scully said was, ‘You don’t scare me, Dodds.’ He tried to edge past Scully, but Scully blocked the way. Stood with his legs apart, swaying from the waist up. ‘You don’t fucking scare me.’ His finger jabbing the air between them as each blurred, beer-tinted word came out.

  ‘Is that right?’ Barker leaned forwards until he was so cl
ose that it was hard to focus. He could smell the crisps on Scully’s breath. Beef and onion, he thought. Or it could have been sausage. He could see Scully’s attempt at a moustache, the hair straggling across his upper lip, thick in some places, thin in others, like the bar code on a pint of milk. ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I just looked in your brain and there was nothing there.’

  Scully took a swing at him. And missed. Barker was only inches away; it must have been a pretty wild swing. He watched the fist orbiting the sky above the courtyard. Then Scully staggered, lost his balance and fell backwards, over the balcony wall. Shoulders first, feet last. Like somebody doing the high jump. That new technique that came in during the seventies. What did they call it? The Fosbury Flop. But they were four floors up in a building on Ker Street and there was nothing soft to land on.

  ‘It only comes to here, the wall.’ Barker showed the policemen by placing the edge of one hand against his thigh. ‘Amazing it hasn’t happened more often.’

  The policemen exchanged a long slow look. Barker had seen the look before and knew what it meant. They thought he was lying. It was a pretty good lie, though – so good, in fact, that it had almost slipped past them. And they were impressed by that.

  Impressed. But not fooled.

  ‘You related to Ken?’ one of the policemen said.

  ‘No,’ another policeman said. ‘He hasn’t got the teeth.’

  The third policeman smiled. ‘He could have, if we weren’t careful.’

  Barker looked down, shook his head again. They had a routine going, like something you might see on TV. The only difference was, you couldn’t laugh.

  ‘It’s Dodd,’ he said at last.

  ‘Sorry?’ said one of the policemen.

  ‘The comedian,’ Barker said. ‘His name’s Dodd.’

  The policemen looked at each other again. ‘Sorry, mate,’ one of them said. ‘Don’t follow you.’

  ‘My name’s Dodds,’ Barker said. ‘There’s an s in it.’

  ‘There’s an s in it,’ one of the policemen said.

  ‘Smartarse,’ said another, gripping Barker by the hair and twisting. ‘There’s an s in that too.’

  From the window of the bus he watched the landscape passing, fields that weren’t really green, sky that wasn’t really blue. Everything watered down, washed out.

  England.

  There had been a moment when he found he was alone and all he remembered feeling was relief. At last, maybe, he could sleep. And then a sound from somewhere below. Not loud. Too far away to be loud. It could have been a person treading on a cardboard box. He walked to the parapet and peered over. Saw half a dozen cars parked in a diagonal row, their paintwork orange in the light from the streetlamp. They looked too still in that orange light. They seemed tense, as if they had muscles under that smooth, shiny skin. As if they might scatter suddenly. The way cockroaches do. Scully’s body lay in the gap between two vans. He wasn’t moving. Barker leaned on the low wall, staring down. There was no hurry. Nobody could fall that far and not be dead. You don’t scare me. Famous last words.

  The motorway slid past. They were in Wiltshire now. The video had started, but Barker didn’t even glance at it. Instead, he watched Steve Scully falling, though it wasn’t something he had ever seen. A widening of the space between the eyes. A spreading of the hands, as if for balance. Had Scully realised what was happening? Probably not. He’d been too drunk. The stupid sod hadn’t even known he was about to die. You stupid sod. That’s what Barker thought as he stared down into the yard that night. Then he went inside and called an ambulance.

  ‘Sandwich, sir?’

  Barker blinked. There was a girl standing over him with a paper boat on her head. She had appeared from nowhere, like a magician’s trick. He realised he must have been dozing.

  ‘What was that?’ he murmured.

  ‘Would you like a sandwich?’

  She was holding a red-and-white-striped cardboard tray and everything on it had been tightly wrapped in cellophane. You didn’t want to touch anything in case you gave it a disease. He sat up slowly, rubbed his eyes.

  ‘Beer,’ he said. ‘You got a beer?’

  In the end the police had to release him. They realised they weren’t going to get anywhere, not unless they beat a false confession out of him. While he was being questioned he noticed that they kept forgetting the name of the deceased. They kept calling him Kelly. They didn’t care about Steve Scully any more than Barker did, but there were forms to be filled in, procedures that had to be observed. Once they had settled on death by misadventure, though, they had no further use for him.

  Then the Scullys started.

  First it was the bathroom window. An accident, apparently. Some kid with a ball. Barker had the window mended. But when he came home from work three nights later, the window was broken again.

  ‘Twice in one week,’ said his neighbour, a jittery man in his fifties who lived alone. ‘That’s bad luck, that is. That’s terrible bad luck.’

  They both knew luck had nothing to do with it. The old man was frightened, though. Two of the Scully brothers had been linked to what the paper called ‘incidents involving violence and intimidation’, not just locally, but in the south-east too, in places as far away as London, Brighton and Oxford.

  During the next month lit cigarettes were pushed through Barker’s letter-box while he was sleeping. If he had bought rugs for the floor, as Jill had wanted, the flat would probably have gone up in flames – and there was no fire-escape. He would have burned to a crisp, the way Les Minty did (though Les only had himself to blame, smoking in bed like that; firemen axed his front door down in the middle of the night, brought him out rolled up in his own hall carpet, already dead). Instead, Barker woke to find half a dozen shallow holes in the lino where it had melted. And, lying by the holes, the speckled, pale-brown butts. Embassy, Regal, Number 6. Scully brands.

  Whenever Barker left the building, they would be standing on the concrete pathways, or under the thin starved trees that grew in the shadow of the tower-blocks. They were always there, in numbers, their skin the colour of marzipan in the watery sunshine, their eyes pinned all over him, like badges. They made sure he saw them, no mourning in those numb heads of theirs, just guilt, his guilt, you did it, you killed our Steve. That summer Barker had a job bouncing at a club on Union Street. Most of the time he was paired with Raymond Peacock. Ray wore wraparound sunglasses at night and never went anywhere without his mobile phone. Once, Barker saw Ray walking down Western Approach. A busy road, Western Approach: traffic-jams, pneumatic drills. ‘I can’t hear you, mate,’ Ray was shouting into his phone. ‘I can’t hear you.’ Prat. Still, they worked well enough together. He wasn’t big, Ray, but he had studied martial arts. He could coil himself into a spring and, next thing you knew, the bloke who’d been calling him a cunt was lying flat on his back ten feet away, limbs moving slowly, like a fly that’s just been swatted. Ray would straighten his collar, then take his mobile out and make another call. Three numbers this time. Ambulance. When Barker told Ray about the Scullys, Ray wanted to know where they lived. He’d torch the place, he said. Personal favour. As bouncers, they might have had an understanding, but Barker had never trusted Ray. Ray wasn’t somebody who took sides, Ray sat on the fence and waited for the most exciting offer. In this case, the excuse to burn a building. He wouldn’t be doing it for Barker, whatever he said. He’d be doing it for himself. Because he wanted to. Barker told Ray he wasn’t needed. He had to persuade Ray he could handle people like the Scullys on his own. ‘Sure, Barker.’ Ray backed away with the raised hands of a man surrendering. ‘If that’s the way you want to play it.’

  One evening not long afterwards Barker walked in through the front door and saw Jill sitting on the floor in the lounge, her clothes ripped, scratches on her neck.

  ‘The Scullys,’ he said, half to himself.

  She sat with her head bent and her legs folded under her, and her shoulders shook in what was left of
her favourite silk blouse. One bra-strap showed, pale-green, making her seem fragile, breakable.

  ‘It was the Scullys,’ he said, ‘wasn’t it.’

  She wouldn’t answer.

  He moved to the window and stared out. Areas of concrete, areas of grass. You couldn’t imagine anything had been there before the tower-blocks. You couldn’t imagine all the trees. He had been reading about it in a book he had borrowed from the library. How England used to be. Just trees for miles. He turned back into the room, looked down at Jill. Her shoulderblades still shaking, her black hair drawn across her face.

  The next day he found someone who had seen the whole thing. It was the Scully women who had done it. They’d set on Jill in the yard behind the building, four or five of them, like witches. Shouting bitch at her and whore and tart. And nobody helped, of course. Nobody ever does.

  ‘I’ll sort it out,’ he muttered.

  But he could tell by the sound of his voice that he would do nothing of the kind. His anger had deserted him.

  At night he felt the bed tremble slightly, as if a train was passing four floors down. He realised that Jill was crying. He faced away from her, pretending to be asleep. He focused on the gap between the curtains, which was wider at the bottom than the top. He stared at the gap until it became a long straight road that crossed dark countryside, disappearing into a distance that seemed untroubled, inviting. During the day he stayed indoors. He watched TV for hours, the volume turned up loud, but all he could hear was the steady buzz of current pouring from the wall. One afternoon, while he was shaving, he noticed a new line on his face. It was deep but fine, like the cut from a razor or a blade of grass. It slanted from his left temple towards the bridge of his nose, then vanished half an inch above his eyebrow, fading abruptly, the way a river fades on a map. Time was spilling through his fingers. How could he stop that happening? In the evening Jill moved around behind him, a ghostly presence at the edge of his vision. Because she was trying to be quiet, she often knocked things over. They no longer talked; they were like two people who had become invisible to one another. Outside, the weather sulked, even though it was June. Clouds filled the sky. Chill air blew through the broken bathroom window, smelling of bacon-rinds and gravy.