Soft Read online

  Trees rushed in the wind. Trees rushing.

  He shifted the sledgehammer from his right hand to his left. Knowles. Somehow, it surprised him that the memory was his, not someone else’s. Of course it was a long time ago, ten years at least – but still. He crossed the street and rang the top bell. Nobody answered. He rang again. At last a window screeched open on the third floor and a girl peered down. She asked him what he wanted. He gave her the bad news, showing her the piece of paper Charlton had handed him. She told him what he could do with his piece of paper, then she slammed the window shut with such force that fragments of white paint were shaken loose, came spinning through the air like snow. Barker stood back, took a breath. Then swung the sledgehammer at the door. The wood buckled almost instantly, splintering around the lock. One shoulder-charge and he was in. He climbed slowly to the third floor, his mind empty. He noticed the silence on the stairs, which was the silence of a Sunday morning.

  The inside door was even flimsier – a piece of simple plywood, one Yale lock. He knocked. Voices murmured on the other side, but no one came. He knocked again, waited a few seconds, then aimed the sledgehammer at the lock and swung it hard. After just two blows, the door was hanging off its hinges. That was the thing about squatters. They couldn’t afford decent security. He heard a movement behind him and looked over his shoulder. A woman in a pale-pink quilted house-coat had appeared on the stairs below him, her eyes wide with shock, her mouth tight, as if elasticated. A neighbour, presumably.

  ‘It’s all right, love,’ he said. ‘Bailiff.’

  When he shoved the door open, two girls were standing at the end of a corridor, their shoulders touching. The girl who’d sworn at him wore a long yellow T-shirt. It had a picture of Bob Marley on it. Her legs and feet were bare. The other girl had dyed her hair a dull green colour. He thought they must both be in their early twenties. A boy stood behind them, roughly the same age. They were all perfectly still, almost frozen, like a scene from that TV programme he used to watch as a child, what was it called, that’s right, The Magic Boomerang.

  ‘Get your stuff packed up,’ he said. ‘You’re moving out.’

  The girl with the green hair started screaming at him, but he had learned, during his years as a bouncer, to turn the volume down on other people’s noise. He was only aware of a girl with her mouth open, her throat and forehead reddening, the veins pushing against the thin skin of her neck. Her hands were clenched at hip-level, the inside of her wrists turned towards him. She wasn’t holding a weapon. He walked past her, into the kitchen. Opened the fridge. Yoghurt, orange juice, half a tin of baked beans. He picked up a carton of milk and sniffed at it. Seemed fresh enough.

  ‘Whose side are you on?’ said the girl in the T-shirt.

  Barker looked at her. ‘I used to listen to Bob Marley.’ He thought back to the early seventies. ‘“Crazy Baldheads”,’ he said, and laughed. He drained the carton of milk, crushed it and dropped it on the floor. Then glanced at his watch. Ten-forty-nine. ‘I’m going to be generous,’ he said. ‘I’m going to give you twenty minutes.’

  Two faces stared at him blankly from the kitchen doorway. The girl with the green hair was probably still screaming in the corridor. He cleared his throat. His mouth tasted sour. Squatters’ milk.

  ‘You hear what I said? Twenty minutes.’

  He opened the door to the small roof terrace and walked outside. A bleak day, mist softening the shapes of the trees. Not a bad view, though. His view now. Maybe he could buy one of those barbecue contraptions with spindly legs, the ones that look like spaceships. He could invite Charlton round for hamburgers. On summer evenings he could sit here with a cold beer, his feet propped on the railings, and look out over the backs of houses, the rows of narrow gardens. Standing with his hands in the pockets of his jacket and his feet apart, Barker began to sing ‘Hotel California’ under his breath. He had no idea why that particular song had come to mind – unless perhaps he’d heard it on the radio that morning while he was waiting for his saucepan of water to boil.

  On a dark desert highway

  Cool wind in your hair …

  He had to hum the rest because he couldn’t remember the words. When he walked back inside, the squatters were huddled by the front door, their possessions crammed into two black bin-liners. Who would have thought it would be so easy? Charlton had offered him the use of a Rottweiler that morning, but he’d said no, and all the way over he’d been regretting it. Because he’d had no idea of what he might be up against.

  He followed the squatters down the stairs, the words of the song coming back to him. Last thing I remember …

  From the doorstep he watched them drift disconsolately away, three figures dissolving into the mist at the end of the street. It seemed unlikely they’d be back.

  Upstairs again, on the third floor, he began to look around. In the two main rooms, the bedroom and the lounge, they’d left a lot of rubbish behind – silver take-away cartons, dirty clothing, cigarette butts, empty bottles. The ceiling in the kitchen looked as if it leaked, and the toilet wouldn’t flush at all. Otherwise, the flat was in reasonable condition. He took out the mobile Charlton had given him and dialled Charlton’s number. Standing in the middle of the room with the phone pressed to his ear, he had a flash of what it must be like to be Ray Peacock.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said when Charlton answered.

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘All right.’ Barker moved to the window, the floorboards wincing under his weight. He peered up into the sky. Grey. All grey.

  ‘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.’

  ‘He’s my son.’ Spaces seemed to open in the man’s face, between his features.

  Arms folded, Barker leaned against the door-frame. He was into overtime with this conversation, and yet he didn’t want to be more brutal than he had to be.

  ‘He was squatting here,’ the man said suddenly. ‘I didn’t approve, of course.’ He was staring at the pavement, frowning. ‘He had a girlfriend. Vicky …’ He looked at Barker hopefully. Barker shook his head.

  After the man had gone, Barker stood in his bedroom and stared out of the window. Rain fell lazily through the lamplight. He could still see Will Campbell, the way he had lurched up the street, a black bin-liner in one hand, the other clamped over a ghetto-blaster, which balanced, like a pet monkey, on his shoulder. He remembered how Will Campbell had thrown him a couple of V-signs – but only when a good distance had opened up between them, only when it was too late to make any difference. Shaking his head again, Barker walked into the lounge and sat down on a swivel chair he had taken from the old printer’s studio in the basement. In his mind he returned to Plymouth. Nineteen-eighty, eighty-one. Years after his marriage fell apart. One afternoon he happened to pass through Morice Town, which was where Leslie had grown up, and he suddenly remembered being told that she’d moved back into the area. He asked around on the estates. Eventually he found someone who had heard of her, who knew where she was living. A ground-floor flat in a drab four-storey block. He knocked on the door. His throat felt thick, and he could hardly swallow. What was he doing there? What did he want? Perhaps it was simply that no woman had replaced her in his life and sometimes, when he lay awake at night, he thought of how she used to dance for him, in that two-room flat she had in Devonport, in her red underwear.

  Her mother, Diane, opened the door. Diane had dyed her hair a dark cherry colour, and she wore a big pink T-shirt over a pair of black leggings. Somewhere behind her, inside the flat, Barker heard a baby crying.

  ‘How are you, love? Give us a kiss.’

  He leaned down, kissed her cheek. She smelled of deodorant and cigarettes. She had always been fond of him, Diane. She said he reminded her of her youngest brother, who had died in a car crash when he was seventeen. He stood outside her front door in the sunshine, answering her questions. It was a beautiful day – a blue sky and a fresh wind blowing from the west, the clothes on the communal washing-lines below them horizontal in the air.

  While they were talking, he noticed a pigeon moving awkwardly along a low brick wall. It was huge, this pigeon, almost the size of a pheasant, and it only had one leg. When he pointed it out to Diane, she slit her eyes against the sun and lit another cigarette.

  ‘Christ,’ she said. ‘Seen it all now.’

  They watched the pigeon in silence until it spread its wings and heaved itself into the air. Barker remembered being surprised that it could fly.

  ‘I suppose you’re looking for Le
slie,’ Diane said eventually.

  He nodded.

  ‘She’s down the pub. With Chris.’

  ‘Chris?’

  ‘Well,’ Diane said and then she sighed, ‘you know Leslie.’

  He walked to the pub, which stood on the crest of a small hill not far from Dockyard Station. With one hand on the door, though, he hesitated, thinking it would probably be a mistake to go inside. As he stepped back, passing the window, he saw Leslie through the glass, her back half-turned, her feet in a square of sunlight. She had a Human League haircut, which must have been the fashion then, and she was wearing a skirt that was too young for her. A man with shoulder-length black hair stood next to her. In his jeans and faded blue tartan shirt, he had the look of a builder. Chris. They were in the middle of an argument. Barker couldn’t make out what Leslie was saying, even though her voice was the louder of the two. He thought he heard the words two hundred quid and bastard. Turning away, he walked down the hill to Saltash Road and caught a bus back to the city centre. He could remember nothing else about that day.

  When Barker left his flat in the early evening, he half-expected to see Will Campbell’s father waiting outside the old warehouse, under the hoists, or on the corner by the corrugated-iron fence, but there was no sign of him. The rain had stopped. To the west, above the public gardens, a wall of cloud lifted high into the sky, glowing with an unearthly peach-coloured light. In medieval times, he thought, this would have heralded some terrible event – the murder of a king, for instance, or an outbreak of the plague. Death of one kind or another. He paused at the end of the street, wondering if the man in the dark-green anorak believed in omens. Then he turned left, making for the nearest phone-box, which was on Tooley Street.

  The sky faded as he walked and by the time he reached the phone-box it was almost dark. He put some coins on the shelf in front of him, then lifted the receiver and dialled his mother’s number. Bella Dodds lived in a tower-block in Mount Wise. He used to be able to see her bathroom window from the walkway outside his flat. She had moved in fifteen years ago, after Frank died, and nothing had changed since then, her two imitation-leather armchairs in the lounge, her collection of china Alsatians, and the wind howling and moaning, eight floors up. At this time of day she would be drinking tea with a dash of Captain Morgan in it, or else a glass of Bols. There’d be a plate of Digestive biscuits on the table. She’d always liked her biscuits.