Soft Page 10

  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.

  She woke up. At first she couldn’t tell whether it was night or day; she had the feeling she might be trapped somewhere in between. She realised she was staring at a concrete pillar. She looked round. They were in the car-park under the hotel. The headlights were still on. Tom was asleep beside her, his head resting against the back of the seat. She sat still, like a person who’s just had an accident, trying to work out how she felt, if she was hurt. Both her knees were burned, and Tom’s stuff had trickled out of her, on to the back of her dress. Her hair had dried and stiffened. She had no knickers on. She didn’t feel too bad, though, considering, and it was cool in the car-park, with a smell of cement which she found soothing. It occurred to her that she was probably still drunk, and that her hangover hadn’t started yet – or perhaps, in being sick, she’d already rid her body of the poison. She reached across and turned the headlights off, and then sat back. She wondered if they were going to miss the wedding. Tom’s eyes opened, closed. Opened again. He asked her wh
at the time was. She had no way of telling; she didn’t wear a watch. He slowly lifted his right wrist and peered at it. Twenty to seven.

  ‘Ah Jesus,’ he muttered.

  She tried to remember the drive back to the hotel, but it was all a blank. She couldn’t even remember the car starting. She supposed it must have been late by the time they left. Three, at least. When she thought of the house on Chestnut Street, with its ancient flaking mirrors and its big dim rooms, it seemed as if she had spent a century there.

  ‘Who is Sterling?’ she asked.

  Tom had closed his eyes again, though she didn’t think he was asleep. Since he wasn’t going to answer, she answered for him.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she murmured, ‘just a friend.’

  She opened the car door and stepped out. She walked a few yards, the click of her shoes echoing against the wall to her left. Her legs didn’t feel too steady. She looked down at her knees. The burns were maroon, with slightly raised black edges. Rothko, she thought, and almost laughed out loud. Then she thought of the dress she had bought for the wedding, and how its skirt only came to halfway down her thighs (Tom liked to see her legs). She doubted whether she would be able to wear it now. She’d have to improvise.

  Tom was staring straight ahead, through the windscreen, one hand clutching the buckle of his seat-belt. His eyes looked as if they’d rusted solid in their sockets.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ he said.

  Slowly, he hauled himself out of the car and began to walk towards the lift. She followed him. He moved awkwardly, like someone with an injury. Looking back over her shoulder, she noticed that she’d forgotten to shut her door – though, with a convertible, she couldn’t really see what difference it would make.

  Upstairs, in the room, Tom took off everything except his boxer shorts and climbed into the bed. Almost as soon as he lay down, he was asleep, his face turned away from her, the shape of his body impersonal, anonymous. Standing by the TV, she watched him for a few minutes, listened to his breathing. Then she walked into the bathroom and closed the door.

  It was a spacious bathroom, with a pale-blue carpet, pale-blue walls. A mini-chandelier hung from the ceiling. Lots of mock-gold metalwork and dangling, pear-shaped glass. Against one wall stood a cane sofa heaped with cushions. Against another, a dressing-table, its mirror framed by naked bulbs. She sat on the edge of the bath and turned on the taps. There was no sound in the world she liked better than the sound of running water. She noticed a tall, thin window to the left of the dressing-table, its glass frosted and opaque. Curious, she reached across and opened it.

  She was high up, looking out over the city – a view of TV aerials, helicopters, hot polluted sky. The new day glittered and roared fifteen or twenty floors below. To her right, in the distance, she could see a bridge, its latticework of struts and girders arching into the haze. On top of many of the buildings there were rust-coloured huts with pointed roofs. They stood on stilts, and had no doors or windows. She supposed they must be something to do with the water system. Or air-conditioning. Between two glass buildings she could see the Mississippi, a dull blue-grey, the colour of the overcoat that Charlie always wore. Stepping away from the window, she moved back into the middle of the room, unbuttoned her dress and let it fall away. She stood in front of the dressing-table mirror, studying herself. With her two grazed knees, she looked like somebody who prayed too much. She wondered where her knickers were. On the floor of the car, maybe, beneath the glove compartment. Or outside Sterling’s house, on Chestnut Street.

  She lay in the hot water, her left hand on her belly. Her knees had stung at first, bringing tears to her eyes, but now she could hardly feel them at all; her limbs floated beneath the surface, weightless, almost numb. She was reminded of the two days she had spent in the sleep laboratory. On the first evening a nurse had fastened a yellow rubber tag around her wrist. Spencer, Glade, it said. 00153. ‘Your hospital number,’ the nurse informed her, smiling. Glade lay still, staring at the tag. She remembered feeling valuable, important. Safe.

  She had arrived at the clinic at four o’clock that afternoon. In reception she was handed several forms with the heading SLEEP STUDY ADMISSION FOR 48 HOURS. She had to give details of her medical history, including previous illnesses and current allergies. One of the forms was interested in what it refered to as ‘daytime somnolence’. The questions amused her. If she was ‘sitting and talking to someone’, for instance, how likely was she to fall asleep? She wanted to write ‘Depends who it is’ – but she had to answer seriously, on a scale of 0–3, 0 being ‘would never doze’, 3 being ‘high chance of dozing’. When she had completed all the forms, she was asked to sign a disclaimer, which freed the clinic of any liability. The document was a formality, the nurse assured her; the law required it. Still, it worried Glade for a moment, the sight of that dotted line. Then she remembered Charlie telling her no harm would come to her. She picked up the pen and, bending over the paper, wrote her name.

  Afterwards, she was shown into a room where her blood pressure, her pulse rate and her temperature were checked. Once that was over, she was taken to a ward that had been divided into cubicles, each cubicle with its curtains drawn, for privacy. All her anxiety lifted. It seemed like a kind of paradise to her, room after room of people sleeping at five in the afternoon. She had a single bed with a painted iron frame and a small clothes-locker that doubled as a bedside table. On the wall above the bed was an adjustable reading-lamp and a panel of power-points. Her window looked into a tall, grim courtyard, a kind of air-shaft. She could see rows of windows identical to hers and, higher up, stretched against the sky, a net to keep the pigeons out. She lay in bed and waited. At six o’clock she was given a meal on a tray, the food packed in silver containers with lids of white card, like an Indian take-away.

  After that, it was surprising how little she could remember.

  Once, she woke to see two men standing in the doorway to her cubicle, one with light-brown hair, about forty years old, the other older, completely bald. They seemed startled when she opened her eyes, almost frightened, the bald man stepping backwards, into the ward. They must be sleep researchers, she thought. She noticed there were wires attached to her, electrodes, just as Charlie had described. On the admission form, in the box marked ARRANGEMENTS FOR DISCHARGE, she had nominated Charlie Moore as her escort, if she should need one. Everything was taken care of. She sighed and closed her eyes and drifted back to sleep.

  When the two days came to an end, she found she didn’t want to go. She had slept through both nights with no trouble at all, through most of the intervening day as well. Sleeping was curiously addictive. You were part of the world, but not in it, and somehow that seemed just right. It seemed enough. She remembered that her muscles felt as if they’d spread out inside her body. They had the laziness of old elastic; she hardly had the strength to leave. But the nurse was firm with her. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘you don’t want to make a habit of it.’ Yes, I do, Glade thought. I do.

  Half an hour later, standing on a pavement in North London, she was astonished by the movement, the urgency – the sheer speed of things. That man with the belly, for instance, elbowing his way on to a bus. And what about that girl in the brown leather jacket? She was walking so fast and chewing gum so fiercely, you could almost believe that her mouth was the motor that was driving her along. Glade wanted to take each of them by the arm and ask them what was so important. Within a day or two, of course, this feeling faded and, out on the street, she probably looked no different to anybody else. She bought the dress she needed, and a pair of shoes to go with it. Her ticket arrived by Federal Express. Exactly one week after leaving the sleep laboratory, she was boarding a plane to New Orleans.

  She lay in the bath and tried to bring back something else from those two days, but nothing came to her. Outside, far below, she could hear cars’ horns, a tune played on a whistle, the stutter of a pneumatic drill …

  She woke suddenly, uncertain of
her whereabouts. The water was cold, but she was used to that. She often fell asleep in the bath. (Now why hadn’t that been one of the questions on the form? If you are in the bath, how likely are you to fall asleep? She would have given that a 3.) Looking down, she noticed her knees. Then she knew where she was. Then she knew.

  She climbed out of the bath and wrapped herself in a towel. A bad headache lurked nearby. She could feel it above her like a weight, suspended, but only by the flimsiest of threads. It could fall at any moment. She found her painkillers and swallowed two with water from the tap. As she passed the mirror she caught a glimpse of a tall, pale girl with smudges under her eyes and stringy hair. She walked to the window. The sun had lifted high into the sky, and the river had changed colour. She thought it must be about eleven.

  Opening the bathroom door, she peered out. Tom was still asleep. She dried herself and put on a clean T-shirt and a pair of knickers, then she crept across the room and, lifting the covers, slipped into the bed. After waiting for a few minutes, she eased towards him, fitting her body to his, until she could feel the shape of him against her, his shoulderblades, his bottom, the backs of his knees, even his heels. Breathing him in, the salt-water smell of him, she dropped into a deep sleep.

  She woke once. He was on the phone, his back to her.

  ‘When’s the wedding?’ she murmured.

  He didn’t appear to have heard.

  She lifted her head. ‘The wedding,’ she said. ‘Is it today?’

  He covered the receiver with one hand and looked at her over his shoulder ‘Tomorrow,’ he said.

  She settled back into the pillows, fell asleep again.

  When she woke up for the second time, it was almost dark and Tom had gone. She looked for a note, then shook her head, remembering. Tom never left notes. People who kill themselves, they leave notes. That was what he’d said once. Such a strange thing to come out with. Something like that would never have occurred to her. But now, every time she wrote a note, she thought of it. He’d told her something else that day, during the same conversation. ‘I don’t commit anything to paper unless it’s absolutely necessary.’ He paused and then he said, ‘I’m a lawyer.’ And it was true. He never did. He didn’t write letters. He’d never even sent her a postcard. If he wanted to contact her, he phoned – or his personal assistant phoned. She wasn’t even sure what his handwriting looked like. She’d only seen his signature, on credit-card slips. He was always signing those.