Soft Read online

  Finally Jill left.

  He found her silk blouse on the kitchen floor when he came home one evening, the flimsy arms flung out, crooked, a detail from a crime scene. In the lounge, under the window, he saw the travel brochures she collected. Otherwise there was no trace of her – no shoes beneath the bed, no perfume on the bathroom shelf, no note. It wasn’t like her, not to leave a note. Gone shopping. Back soon. A circle above the i instead of a dot. Loops on p’s and k’s and h’s. He stood in the middle of the room and said her name out loud. Jill. Later, he sat in an armchair with some of her brochures, their pages slippery as fish. Every tour company you’d ever heard of, every destination you could imagine. She didn’t actually want to go anywhere, she’d always told him. She just liked looking at the pictures. He studied the blue skies and the white five-star hotels, thinking they might tell him what had happened, where he’d gone wrong. The longer he looked, the stranger the images became. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t see himself waist-deep in a turquoise swimming-pool, or eating lobster in a restaurant by candle-light. That sun-tanned skin, those air-brushed teeth … He had a sudden memory of Jill in the front of someone’s car, her body clumsy, voluptuous. She was wearing a black dress with small white dots on it and a pair of cheap black tights from Boots. You could see her legs through the nylon – her curved white calves, her knees slightly chapped and red. Almost five years he had been with her, five years of his life, and yet he didn’t feel a thing. He wondered why. Though he knew she would be over at her mother’s house he couldn’t bring himself to ring her. At night he slept with a length of metal pipe next to the bed in case the Scullys suddenly got brave.

  One Wednesday afternoon in August somebody knocked on Barker’s door. He took the length of pipe down the hall with him. When he opened up, his brother Jim was standing on the walkway.

  Jim looked at the pipe. ‘Expecting someone?’

  Barker didn’t answer.

  Jim walked past him, into the flat.

  Barker laid the pipe along the top of the coat-hooks and closed the door behind him. Jim was wearing a dark-blue suit, the pinstripes chalky, widely spaced. He had a footballer’s haircut, short at the sides, long and rumpled at the back, like a rug when it rucks up under the leg of a chair. A gold chain hung lazily around his left wrist. Jim sold second-hand cars in Exeter.

  Barker fetched him a cold beer from the fridge.

  ‘Cheers,’ Jim said.

  He sank down on the sofa. He had this way of sitting on a piece of furniture, knees apart, one arm stretched along the back, which made you think he owned it.

  ‘How’s business?’ Barker asked.

  Jim nodded. ‘Pretty good. What about you? Still bouncing?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Barker mentioned the name of the club.

  ‘I know the place.’ Jim was holding the can of beer away from his body, as if he was Tom Jones and the can was a microphone and he was about to hit a high note. He didn’t want it dripping on his suit, that was the reason. ‘You ought to come in with me,’ he said. ‘It’s good money.’

  Barker shook his head.

  ‘Ah well.’ For a while Jim stared at the floor. Then he said, ‘I hear you’ve got a problem.’

  ‘Nothing serious. They think I killed Steve Scully.’

  ‘Useless piece of shit. Always was.’ Jim coughed something gummy up into his mouth and held it there while he rose from the sofa and walked across the room. Once at the window he spat deftly through the gap. ‘Nice afternoon, thought I’d take a walk, what happens? Some fucking bird craps on my head.’ He turned to Barker, teeth showing. One of his jokes.

  Barker smiled faintly.

  Jim stayed by the window. ‘Steve Scully,’ he said. ‘He broke into that old lady’s place, broad daylight. Brained her while she was lying there in bed. And she was just getting over some fucking operation, cancer or something. Remember that?’

  ‘Yeah, I remember.’ They had run a picture of the woman in the Western Morning Herald. Two black eyes, fifteen or twenty stitches in her face. They’d used the words they always use: sickening, horrific.

  ‘You need any help,’ Jim said, ‘you let me know.’

  Barker nodded.

  ‘You coming down the pub Friday?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Barker said. ‘Might be working.’

  Jim put his beer on the mantelpiece, then shook the condensation off his fingers.

  Barker moved to the window. The city lay buried in a pale-blue haze. It clung to the tower-blocks, blurring their sharp edges. The hot weather had arrived at last. He leaned on the window-sill, looking out. ‘They say all the land used to be covered by trees.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Jim turned. ‘What they say that for?’

  That big brown building with the custard-coloured chimneys, he knew it was famous, but he couldn’t remember the name of it. He sat up straighter, brushing the crumbs off his lap. They crossed the Thames, the water sluggish in the sunlight. Steep walls smeared with slime dropped sheer to stretches of gleaming mud. The girl in the paper hat was collecting rubbish in a black bin-liner. It wouldn’t be long now.

  The passing weeks did nothing to soften the Scully family’s resolve. To people like the Scullys, time was salt: it aggravated every wound. Barker realised the vendetta could go on almost indefinitely; they seemed to have developed a taste for it. Strangely enough, he’d been noticing something similar at work. Old bouncers, that’s what happens. You get a reputation over the years and suddenly there’s some kid, nineteen or twenty, he’s heard about you. You’re hard, but he’s harder. It never stops.

  His shirt had stuck to his back. He leaned forwards, lifting it away from his skin so the sweat could dry. In the last few months he had begun to feel that the odds were stacked against him. So far he’d been lucky. But prison ran in the family, like wiry hair and heart disease. Sooner or later he’d be put away for something, even if he was innocent. Either that, or he’d get badly hurt. There had been a time when he would never have dreamed of backing down. All that pride, though, it had faded like the tattoo on his chest. Was it age did that?

  Some would say he was running. Well, let them say it.

  The coach pulled in under a high glass roof. Lines of people waited below, their eyes flicking left and right like tadpoles in a jar. He could feel the city air, the speed of it, much faster than the air down on the coast.

  Outside, the driver opened a flap in the side of the bus. He looked at Barker over his shoulder. ‘Can you see yours?’

  Barker pointed at two black canvas bags. The driver gripped the handles and, grunting, hauled the bags out on to the tarmac. Then he stood back, hands on hips. ‘Christ, mate, what you got in there?’

  Barker didn’t answer.

  ‘I know,’ the driver said. ‘You killed the bloke, but the body was too big. So you had to cut it in half.’

  Barker just looked at him. ‘You tell anyone,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to kill you too.’

  Drive Away Monkey

  The door of the pub creaked open under his hand, crashed shut behind him. He ordered a pint of bitter and drank a third of it, then he put his glass down and glanced around. Half a dozen suits, two girls in office skirts and blouses. A scattering of old men wearing hats. Not a bad place, though. The booths looked original, the name of the brewery elaborately carved into the panes of frosted-glass. Statues of women in togas hoisted opalescent globe-lights towards the dark-brown ceiling. A polished brass rail hugged the foot of the bar. His brother Gary would have approved. Gary used to deal in antiques.

  He asked the barman if Charlton Williams was around.

  The barman jerked his eyes and eyebrows in the direction of the window. ‘Over there.’

  From where he was standing, Barker could only see Charlton Williams’ back. Brown leather jacket, grey trousers. Cropped black hair. Barker moved across the pub towards him, pint in hand.

  ‘Charlton Williams?’

  The man who swung round was this side of forty, bu
t only just. He was going bald from the front, his hair receding at both temples, leaving a round piece that looked as if it might fit into a jigsaw. He reminded Barker of a wrestler who was always on TV on Saturdays in the late sixties.

  ‘The name’s Barker Dodds. I’m a friend of Ray’s. Ray Peacock. He said to find you here.’

  Charlton’s pouchy eyes narrowed. ‘You’re the bloke that needs a place to stay, right?’

  Barker nodded.

  ‘So where’s the luggage?’

  ‘Bus station. Victoria.’ Barker drained his pint.

  Charlton pointed at the glass. ‘Same again?’

  ‘Cheers.’

  Charlton Williams. According to Ray, Charlton had been named after the football club. People used to call him Athletic, which was a bit of a laugh, Ray said, because Charlton had never played sport in his life, not even darts. Charlton was drinking with Ronnie and Malcolm, two mates from the meat market in Smithfield. When they had emptied their glasses, Barker bought another round. It struck him that he had no idea what would happen next. The pub was where his knowledge ended. He was like someone who was about to go missing. A sense of freedom, limitless and exhilarating, suddenly invaded him. He smiled and nodded at the faces that surrounded him, as if they were in on it, as if they were the bearers of his secret.

  He breathed in slowly, feeling his lungs expand. The same smell the country over: spilled beer, cigarette smoke, crisps. His ex-wife Leslie used to work in a pub. The Phoenix. The first time he went in there he was drunk. She noticed him straight away, she told him later, but he couldn’t remember seeing her at all. Other things on his mind, she said with a knowing smile. She was used to that. Women came third with a lot of men, after booze and horses – or, sometimes, if the men did drugs, women weren’t even placed.

  Then he noticed her.

  A wet night in Stonehouse, rain blowing sideways through the streetlights. Still summer, though. His denim jacket soaked, he pushed through the pub’s double-doors. Stood at the bar and smoothed his hair back with both hands, fingers spread over his head, thumbs skimming the tops of his ears. A couple of musicians were setting up next to the Emergency Exit – one of those second-rate bands that tour the country playing other people’s songs. A scrawny man in cowboy boots and jeans was tuning a battered white guitar. Then he stepped forwards. Put his face close to the microphone. One-two. One-two. Sshh. Sshh. One-two … Nothing irritated Barker more. He sat on his tall red stool and scowled. A voice asked him if he was being served. He looked round. Freckles spattered the girl’s bare arms, and one side of her mouth seemed higher than the other when she smiled.

  ‘You new here?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why? Are you?’

  He liked that – the cheek of it. The nerve. He bought her a drink. A ginger ale. And that was what she tasted of when he kissed her, about an hour later, behind the old Pickford’s building on Millbay Road. Ginger ale. Once, she leaned back, away from him, and said, ‘You’re an ugly bastard, aren’t you.’ It was one of those things women say when they like you and they’re not sure why.

  She wouldn’t let him fuck her on the street, which was what he wanted, but she didn’t stop him pushing her T-shirt up and pulling down her bra so he could see her breasts shining in the raw white glare of the nearby car-park. When he reached under her skirt, though, she began to struggle.

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘When then?’

  ‘Tomorrow. My night off.’

  Steam flowered in the sky behind her; they must have been working late at the laundry that weekend. He walked her back, just one word in his head. Tomorrow. A terrace of brick houses, drainpipes chuckling with the last of the rain. Weeds growing sideways in the walls. And the pub’s double-doors half-open, dirty red carpet, dirty golden light, and from where he was standing, on the pavement, he could see the man with the cowboy boots and the white guitar, talking his way into a song: I’d do this for Dolly Parton, only she’s not here …

  At the end of the month Barker walked into Lou’s and had the barmaid’s name tattooed across his chest in big block capitals. LESLIE. Lou tried to warn him. Always a mistake, he said, to have a woman’s name tattooed across your chest. You want to get rid of it, you can’t. But Barker didn’t listen.

  ‘You coming or what?’

  He looked round. Charlton Williams was waiting by the door and, beyond him, in the gritty London sunshine, Ronnie and Malcolm were facing each other, pointing at a folded newspaper and nodding.

  From the window of his room in Charlton’s house Barker had a view of the entire estate. Built during the early seventies, the houses were neat boxes of white weatherboard and brick, their front gardens almost non-existent, their short, steep drives more than a match for the hand-brake on most cars. None of the streets followed straight lines. The thinking was, if a street dipped and twisted a bit, then it had character. Nature was just around the corner. You could almost believe you were living in the country.

  The Isle of Dogs.

  Each morning Barker would wake with an empty feeling in his stomach that had nothing to do with hunger and for a moment he would wonder where he was. The walls were smudged with strangers’ fingerprints. A fawn carpet curled against the skirting-board. Then he would see his bags. They lay on the floor under the window, zips gaping. Glimpses of his few possessions: the dull gleam of the weights, his bright-red bowling shirt, the edge of a history book. You’re lucky, he told himself, to have a place at all. He had Ray to thank for it. When Barker mentioned he was leaving, Ray said he would give his mate a call. They had served in the Army together. The Green Jackets. Five minutes on the mobile phone and it was fixed. Though grateful, Barker felt uneasy. He’d seen the look on Ray’s face. Somewhere deep down, below the skin, it said, You’re in my pocket now. You owe me one.

  He owed Charlton too, of course – a man he knew much less about. Charlton worked nights at the meat market, but he would never say exactly what he did and Barker chose not to ask. He had to be earning good money, though, because he slept in satin sheets and drove a brand-new Ford Sierra. A shame he didn’t spend some of it on a cleaning-lady. If Charlton had a woman over, he would always try and talk her into tidying the house. Otherwise the empty pizza-boxes piled up like red-and-white pagodas, and the fridge began to smell. Charlton had given Barker the spare room, telling him that he could stay as long as he wanted. Any friend of Ray’s, etc. etc. It turned out that Ray had saved Charlton’s life while they were in Northern Ireland – or so Charlton said three or four days after Barker moved in. Charlton had just finished work and he was sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of Bell’s while Barker fried some bacon.

  ‘I wouldn’t be here now,’ he said, swilling the whisky slowly round the inside of his glass. ‘You’ve seen Ray in action, right?’

  Barker broke two eggs into the fat and watched the white appear. ‘We were working in a club once,’ he said, ‘and three blokes wanted to get in. Navy, they were. Shit-faced. Ray told them no. They didn’t like that.’ Barker turned to Charlton, spatula in hand. ‘I never saw exactly how he did it, he moved that fast. But, next time I looked, two of the blokes were lying on the ground and the third was making a run for it.’

  Charlton nodded. ‘Grasp Sparrow By The Tail.’

  ‘You what?’ Barker said.

  ‘Drive Away Monkey.’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘Tai Chi.’ Charlton grinned. ‘Ray’s been doing it for years. We used to take the piss out of him.’ Charlton started waving his arms around in the air, slow-motion, his fingers splayed, like a hypnotist or a magician.

  ‘What’s the story with the sparrows?’ Barker said.

  ‘It’s one of the positions. The idea is, you’re always ready. Never caught off balance.’ Charlton finished his drink. ‘What’s Ray up to these days?’

  ‘This and that.’ Barker flipped the eggs so as to brown them on both sides. ‘He’s got kids now.’

  ‘Yeah?�
�

  ‘Two boys.’

  Charlton shook his head. ‘Fuck me,’ he said, and yawned.

  Though Barker had put two hundred and fifty miles between himself and Plymouth, he hadn’t shaken off its influence. During his second week as Charlton’s guest, he woke from a dream – or thought he woke – to see the Scullys outside his bedroom window. They looked cold, especially the girl, as if they had been standing on the road all night, their lips dark-mauve like the lips of people with heart conditions, their faces smooth, inscrutable. Two of the men stood on the green mound opposite the house, their arms folded, their feet apart, while the third leaned casually against a parked car. The girl shivered on the pavement, under a streetlamp, both hands tucked into her armpits. All four were staring up at him, their strange, wide-spaced eyes fastened on his window. At last the man who was leaning against the car lifted a hand into the air and Barker saw something dangling from his index finger, something that was flimsy, almost transparent. In his dream Barker peered closer. The man was holding a pair of knickers that belonged to Barker’s ex-wife, Leslie. The man swung the knickers on his finger, almost as if he was teasing a dog. All the Scullys were grinning now, and their grins told Barker everything.

  He lay on his back in the narrow bed and studied the pattern of smudges on the wall. Maybe he should have paid Leslie more attention – or maybe there was nothing he could have done. He remembered the smell of other people’s meals as he climbed the five flights of stairs to her tiny attic flat in Devonport. On summer evenings, during their first intoxicating days together, she would put James Last records on the stereo, then she’d strip down to her underwear and dance for him. Her breasts cupped and threatening to spill, her plump thighs curving towards that succulence above – he had never seen a woman who looked so good. He married her in September – he’d just turned twenty-four (she was twenty-seven) – and two months later he heard that she’d been seen with Gavin Stringer in the Garter Club on Union Street. He broke a pool cue on the side of Stringer’s head. That slowed him up a bit. By the time Christmas came, it was someone else – a fireman from Whitsand Bay. Barker tracked him down on a night of gale-force winds in January. The fireman’s hair kept flattening, the way grass does when a helicopter lands. Barker hit him in the stomach, feeling the organs jostle, rupture, split under his knuckles. Then he hit him in the face. Left him slumped on the pavement like a tramp or a drunk, one eyeball swinging against his cheek. ‘All this violence,’ and Leslie shook her head. ‘I just can’t deal with it.’ ‘But it’s because of you,’ he shouted. ‘It’s you.’ That wasn’t the whole truth, though, and they both knew it. The marriage lasted less than a year.