Soft (2 page)

‘Sandwich, sir?'

Barker blinked. There was a girl standing over him with a paper boat on her head. She had appeared from nowhere, like a magician's trick. He realised he must have been dozing.

‘What was that?' he murmured.

‘Would you like a sandwich?'

She was holding a red-and-white-striped cardboard tray and everything on it had been tightly wrapped in cellophane. You didn't want to touch anything in case you gave it a disease. He sat up slowly, rubbed his eyes.

‘Beer,' he said. ‘You got a beer?'

In the end the police had to release him. They realised they weren't going to get anywhere, not unless they beat a false confession out of him. While he was being questioned he noticed that they kept forgetting the name of the deceased. They kept calling him Kelly. They didn't care about Steve Scully any more than Barker did, but there were forms to be filled in, procedures that had to be observed. Once they had settled on death by misadventure, though, they had no further use for him.

Then the Scullys started.

First it was the bathroom window. An accident, apparently. Some kid with a ball. Barker had the window mended. But when he came home from work three nights later, the window was broken again.

‘Twice in one week,' said his neighbour, a jittery man in his fifties who lived alone. ‘That's bad luck, that is. That's terrible bad luck.'

They both knew luck had nothing to do with it. The old man was frightened, though. Two of the Scully brothers had been linked to what the paper called ‘incidents involving violence and intimidation', not just locally, but in the south-east too, in places as far away as London, Brighton and Oxford.

During the next month lit cigarettes were pushed through Barker's letter-box while he was sleeping. If he had bought rugs for the floor, as Jill had wanted, the flat would probably have gone up in flames – and there was no fire-escape. He would have burned to a crisp, the way Les Minty did (though Les only had himself to blame, smoking in bed like that;
firemen axed his front door down in the middle of the night, brought him out rolled up in his own hall carpet, already dead). Instead, Barker woke to find half a dozen shallow holes in the lino where it had melted. And, lying by the holes, the speckled, pale-brown butts. Embassy, Regal, Number 6. Scully brands.

Whenever Barker left the building, they would be standing on the concrete pathways, or under the thin starved trees that grew in the shadow of the tower-blocks. They were always there, in numbers, their skin the colour of marzipan in the watery sunshine, their eyes pinned all over him, like badges. They made sure he saw them, no mourning in those numb heads of theirs, just guilt, his guilt,
you did it, you killed our Steve
. That summer Barker had a job bouncing at a club on Union Street. Most of the time he was paired with Raymond Peacock. Ray wore wraparound sunglasses at night and never went anywhere without his mobile phone. Once, Barker saw Ray walking down Western Approach. A busy road, Western Approach: traffic-jams, pneumatic drills. ‘I can't hear you, mate,' Ray was shouting into his phone. ‘I can't hear you.' Prat. Still, they worked well enough together. He wasn't big, Ray, but he had studied martial arts. He could coil himself into a spring and, next thing you knew, the bloke who'd been calling him a cunt was lying flat on his back ten feet away, limbs moving slowly, like a fly that's just been swatted. Ray would straighten his collar, then take his mobile out and make another call. Three numbers this time. Ambulance. When Barker told Ray about the Scullys, Ray wanted to know where they lived. He'd torch the place, he said. Personal favour. As bouncers, they might have had an understanding, but Barker had never trusted Ray. Ray wasn't somebody who took sides, Ray sat on the fence and waited for the most exciting offer. In this case, the excuse to burn a building. He wouldn't be doing it for Barker, whatever he said. He'd be doing it for himself. Because he wanted to. Barker told Ray he wasn't needed. He
had to persuade Ray he could handle people like the Scullys on his own. ‘Sure, Barker.' Ray backed away with the raised hands of a man surrendering. ‘If that's the way you want to play it.'

One evening not long afterwards Barker walked in through the front door and saw Jill sitting on the floor in the lounge, her clothes ripped, scratches on her neck.

‘The Scullys,' he said, half to himself.

She sat with her head bent and her legs folded under her, and her shoulders shook in what was left of her favourite silk blouse. One bra-strap showed, pale-green, making her seem fragile, breakable.

‘It was the Scullys,' he said, ‘wasn't it.'

She wouldn't answer.

He moved to the window and stared out. Areas of concrete, areas of grass. You couldn't imagine anything had been there before the tower-blocks. You couldn't imagine all the trees. He had been reading about it in a book he had borrowed from the library. How England used to be. Just trees for miles. He turned back into the room, looked down at Jill. Her shoulderblades still shaking, her black hair drawn across her face.

The next day he found someone who had seen the whole thing. It was the Scully women who had done it. They'd set on Jill in the yard behind the building, four or five of them, like witches. Shouting
bitch
at her and
whore
and
tart
. And nobody helped, of course. Nobody ever does.

‘I'll sort it out,' he muttered.

But he could tell by the sound of his voice that he would do nothing of the kind. His anger had deserted him.

At night he felt the bed tremble slightly, as if a train was passing four floors down. He realised that Jill was crying. He faced away from her, pretending to be asleep. He focused on the gap between the curtains, which was wider at the bottom than the top. He stared at the gap until it became a long
straight road that crossed dark countryside, disappearing into a distance that seemed untroubled, inviting. During the day he stayed indoors. He watched TV for hours, the volume turned up loud, but all he could hear was the steady buzz of current pouring from the wall. One afternoon, while he was shaving, he noticed a new line on his face. It was deep but fine, like the cut from a razor or a blade of grass. It slanted from his left temple towards the bridge of his nose, then vanished half an inch above his eyebrow, fading abruptly, the way a river fades on a map. Time was spilling through his fingers. How could he stop that happening? In the evening Jill moved around behind him, a ghostly presence at the edge of his vision. Because she was trying to be quiet, she often knocked things over. They no longer talked; they were like two people who had become invisible to one another. Outside, the weather sulked, even though it was June. Clouds filled the sky. Chill air blew through the broken bathroom window, smelling of bacon-rinds and gravy.

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.'