Soft by Rupert Thomson Page B

listening; she’d been too busy imagining his life, and how it must say FULL outside, in red.
    â€˜You got something to wear, Glade?’
    â€˜I think so.’
    â€˜One of those crazy dresses.’ He laughed. ‘You’re sure? You don’t want me to wire you some money?’
    â€˜No. I’ll be all right.’
    After she had put the phone down, she stayed sitting on the floor and shook her head. ‘Damn,’ she whispered. Now she thought about it, she was pretty sure she didn’t have a dress she could wear to the wedding – and she didn’t have the money to buy one either: all the bills had come that monthand Sally, who was broke, had asked Glade to pay her share for her. A wedding. In New Orleans. She walked back into her bedroom and turned on the light. Her eyes hurt in the sudden yellow glare. Opening her wardrobe, she began to look through her clothes. After five minutes she stood back.
    Stupid, stupid.
    But he was always so fast on the phone, his life happening at a different speed to hers. She thought of the photograph she had taken of him, standing on the steps of that white church in Venice. When he showed her the picture some weeks later, she was struck by how confident he looked, how easy. It was hard to believe that the person behind the camera was not a close friend of his, or a lover – and yet, at that point, they had known each other for less than a minute. He seemed ahead of where he should be, even then; he seemed to be operating on a different time-scale, somehow.
    She closed the wardrobe and switched off the light. The darkness was printed with the shapes and colours of dresses that were no use to her. She crossed the floorboards and climbed back into bed. The sheets were still warm. She lay down, but her mind wouldn’t rest. In the distance she heard a man shouting and felt he was doing it on her behalf, his bellowing strangely monotonous, with gaps in it, like some kind of Morse code signalling despair.
    â€˜What am I going to do?’ she said out loud.
    Her white cat stretched and settled against her hip.
    That weekend Charlie came to stay. He appeared at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon with six cans of lager in his hand and a copy of the
Evening Standard
wedged under his arm. He had grown his hair since Glade last saw him and it hung in a thick plait down the centre of his back, exactly where his spine would be. He was wearing a grey-blue RAF greatcoat and a pair of motor-cycle boots. When she hugged him, she could smell mothballs and tobacco and the raw springair. Upstairs, in her bedroom, she had lit a fire to welcome him. While she stooped to add another log, he told her about the London plague pits, whose sites he’d been visiting. The breadth of Charlie’s knowledge seldom failed to astonish her. You could ask him about Karl Marx or phone-tapping, any subject at all, and he would talk for fifteen minutes, his voice even, almost monotonous, a roll-up in his slightly shaky hand. Though Glade would listen carefully to what he said, she didn’t often remember much about it afterwards. Still, it was a comfort to know these things could be understood.
    She didn’t usually drink beer. That afternoon, though, its metallic flavour suited her; she thought it tasted as if it had come from somewhere deep below the surface of the earth, as if it had been mined rather than brewed. By seven o’clock they had run out. They decided to go to the off-licence on North Pole Road and buy some more. On the way she mentioned that Tom had called. Charlie liked listening to stories about Tom. His favourite was the one about her ear. Once, in a bar in San Francisco, Tom had leaned across the table and said, quite seriously, ‘You know, Glade, you could get that ear fixed.’ The first time she told Charlie the story, he didn’t say anything, which unnerved her. Turning the right side of her head towards him, she had lifted her