Soft by Rupert Thomson

altered because she was no longer aware of the planes. Instead, she could see herself, a reflection in the dim mirror of the glass. Her long blonde hair, her ghostly skin. She noticed her right ear. It stuck out more than the left one, as though she was listening harder on that side ofher head. According to her father, she had slept on it when she was young.
    Her father.
    She wondered what it was like with just a radio for company and nobody except the farmer for at least a mile around. The darkness, the cold. The brown owls swooping through the field. She didn’t mind sleeping in the caravan, though sometimes the walls seemed a bit too thin. They offered no protection. In a caravan your dreams could frighten you.
    During the weekend she’d had a nightmare. She must have cried out because, when she opened her eyes, her father was standing above her in his pyjamas. He was holding a candle. Behind his back, his shadow pranced and capered, mocking him. If he turned round, she thought, it would have to stop.
    â€˜Are you all right?’ he said.
    She nodded. ‘It was just a dream.’
    He reached down, touched her hair. She could feel his hand shaking slightly, tremors underneath the skin, an earthquake taking place inside his body.
    â€˜I’m sorry I woke you.’
    â€˜You didn’t wake me. I was already awake.’ He took his hand away. ‘I miss her, Glade.’
    In the candle-light his face was all black hollows and odd polished places. He seemed to be gazing into the far corner of the caravan. Not seeing it, somehow. Not seeing anything. She didn’t know what to say to him. She’d never been much good at comforting people; when they cried in front of her, she usually just stared at them.
    â€˜It’s lovely that you’re here, though. It’s probably why I’m being like this.’
    â€˜I don’t mind,’ she said.
    He held her head against his chest for a moment and, just then, he smelled like her father again, not the stranger she had smelled an hour or two before.
    â€˜Oh Glade, what happened?’
    Her head against his chest. His heart beating fast.
    â€˜What happened?’
    The next day, when she said goodbye to him, he held her tight and spoke into her hair, making her promise to visit him again before too long. With her thin arms circling his waist and her head turned sideways, she seemed, from a distance, to be holding him together. She could see beech trees at the edge of the field, their branches webbed with mist. One bird called from somewhere behind her, its song thin and wistful in the morning air. She felt his reluctance to let her go.
    He waved as she walked away across the grass and he was still waving when she reached the five-bar gate at the bottom of the field – though, by then, his face had shrunk to almost nothing, becoming featureless and pale, the colour of a fruit or vegetable when it’s been peeled, when it has lost its skin.

Spaces
    That winter the weather stayed cold, the sky over London opaque and grey; the trees looked scratchy, a tangle of random pencil marks, like the pictures children bring home from school. March came, and nothing changed. If you had asked Glade what she had been doing, she would probably have shrugged and said, ‘Not much.’ She was still working at the restaurant – in fact, she was working harder than ever: Hector had broken his leg in a motor-bike accident, and she had agreed to cover for him. Once or twice, during those months, she dreamed about the mountain in Paddington, her dreams set in the past, among people she no longer knew. Then, on her birthday, Charlie Moore gave her an old black-and-white print of Mount Fuji. Things seemed to be accumulating, fitting together. Like evidence. For the first time in almost eighteen months she began to draw. The subject was always the same: the mountain, the wasteground. Some of her efforts were openly nostalgic, simple recreations of a