Soft (25 page)

She arrived outside the squat to find the front door open. From the top of the steps she could see through the house to the back garden, an upright rectangle of sunlight at the far end of a long, dark hall. Four or five people sprawled on the lawn with their shirts off, their bodies white, almost ghostly. She recognised Paul, who used to be a skinhead in Newcastle, but she didn't know any of the others. And Charlie was not among them. She thought he would probably be upstairs. He had two rooms on
the fourth floor, under the roof. She climbed slowly, one hand sliding along the cool, curved wood of the banister rail. She could smell plaster and damp, a smell that hadn't altered in the year since she'd last visited.

She opened the door to Charlie's living-room and stepped inside. He was sitting in an armchair by the window reading a book. He wore a collarless shirt, with the sleeves rolled to the elbow.

‘Glade.' He closed the book and stood up. ‘As you've probably noticed,' he said, ‘we've been invaded. I had to retreat indoors.' He smiled his peculiar, straight-lipped smile.

While he was downstairs, making tea, Glade looked around the room. The pale-blue walls were so cracked in some places that they reminded her of china that's been smashed and then glued back together. The floorboards had the bleached, grey colour of driftwood washed up on a beach. An oval mirror hung on a chain over the fireplace, and below it, on the mantelpiece, stood an invitation to a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, and a pair of green glass candlesticks that had once belonged to Charlie's grandmother. On the opposite wall, above his work-table, there was a large black-and-white photograph of a famous Austrian philosopher. Glade put her bag on the floor and settled on the camp-bed that doubled as a sofa. Outside, in the garden, she heard laughter. She imagined they were stoned. That was what usually happened when they sat in the garden in fine weather.

Charlie returned with a pot of tea, some biscuits and a can of beer. Once he was sitting in his armchair again, he asked her how things had gone in America.

‘Not too well,' she said.

‘Tom?'

She nodded.

‘It's all right,' Charlie said. ‘You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.'

So she talked about the wedding instead – the old man in the
linen suit, the creamy smell of the gardenias. Then, suddenly, she broke off.

‘I keep feeling strange,' she said.

Charlie's face didn't alter. ‘What kind of strange?'

She told him about being on the plane and ordering a drink which, at that point, she had never heard of, and how, later that day, a similar thing had happened in the house on Chestnut Street. She seemed to know all about something she didn't know anything about, if that made sense. She glanced at him. His face was lowered, and he was nodding. She told him that she sometimes saw orange. She didn't notice it exactly (though that happened too). She actually
saw
it –
when it wasn't there.
She told him that she'd mentioned it to Tom and that Tom thought she should see a psychiatrist.

‘It's all part of the same thing, you think?' Charlie said.

‘It feels like it.'

‘And you can't control it?'

She shook her head.

‘Have you told anyone?' he said. ‘Apart from Tom, I mean?'

‘No. Who else would I tell?'

He looked at his can of beer for a moment, then he lifted it to his lips and drank.

‘Do you think there's something wrong with me, Charlie?' She paused. ‘I think maybe there's something wrong with me.' It frightened her to think that she might have asked him a question he couldn't answer. She waited a moment, aware of her heart suddenly, how it shook her entire body, and then, cautiously, in a low voice, she said, ‘I've started making lists.'

‘Lists?' he said.

She reached sideways and down, into her bag, and pulled out a black notebook with a dark-red spine. It was a kind of diary, she told him, of all the orange things she saw. She gave him the first page to read. She could only remember
two of the entries:
Crunchie Wrapper, Heathrow
and
Man's Tie, Piccadilly Line.

‘It's just like a normal day,' Charlie said when he had reached the bottom of the page, ‘only you're telling it in orange.'

‘I know.' Glade hugged her knees as if she were cold. ‘You don't think I'm mad, then?' She didn't give Charlie time to answer; she was still too afraid of what he might say. ‘Tom would, if he saw it.'

‘Tom.' Charlie turned his attention back to the notebook.

While Charlie was reading, Glade leaned on the window-sill. She realised she would never be able to tell him what had happened in the car on Chestnut Street. It was the way he'd just said
Tom
– his voice impatient, almost contemptuous. Sometimes people needed protecting from what you knew.

When Charlie came to the end, he closed the notebook and stood up. She was expecting him to offer an opinion. Instead, he reached for his wallet. ‘We ought to go to the shops,' he said, ‘otherwise they'll be shut. Don't forget,' and he smiled, ‘this is Penge.'

Outside, it was still light, though the colour of the shadows had diluted, the black of midday fading to a kind of indigo. Most houses had their windows open. It would be a warm night. They passed a girl in a pink T-shirt who was swinging backwards and forwards on her garden gate.

‘Are you ravers?' she said as they walked by.

‘That's right.' Charlie grinned. ‘What about you?'

The girl slid down off the gate and hid behind a hedge.

When they returned to the squat, it was empty. They sat in the half-derelict, high-ceilinged kitchen and drank beer while the sausages they'd bought spat and sizzled under the grill. Someone had painted a large cow on the wall, and then drawn a big red line through it.

‘Paul's given up dairy products,' Charlie said.

He served the sausages on white china plates with mashed
potato and red cabbage out of a jar. They ate in the garden, by candle-light. After Charlie had finished, he opened his tin of Old Holborn and began to roll a cigarette. Glade lay back on the grass. The sky looked close enough to touch, but she knew that if she reached up with her hand, there would be nothing there.

‘You know that notebook of mine you read?' she said.

Charlie looked up.

‘Well,' she said, ‘there's more.'

In her bedroom she had a cardboard box marked ORANGE (MAY). Every time she left her flat, she took a small bag with her. If she saw something orange – a sweet-wrapper, a piece of plastic – she would pick it up and put it in the bag. When she got home, she would transfer what she had found into the box. It was an ongoing process. May would soon be over. In a few days' time she would be starting on her ORANGE (JUNE) collection.

Charlie was watching her carefully now.

‘All this is new,' she said. ‘The last couple of weeks.' She paused, pulling at a blade of grass. ‘Of course, the posters didn't help.'

‘What posters?'

‘You must have seen them,' she said. ‘They're everywhere.'

First there had been posters of orange exclamation marks. Then, a week or two later, the posters changed. Suddenly they said NCH! in bright-orange capitals. Just NCH!. It didn't make any sense. Finally, when she returned from New Orleans, the posters revealed the whole word: KWENCH!. Hadn't he noticed them? He nodded. Yes, he had. And he must have seen the cans of Kwench! in every shop, she went on. Bright-orange cans, you couldn't miss them – at least, she couldn't. The word Kwench!, her obsession with the colour orange … She had felt all along that they were linked, but until the drink appeared, until she'd actually
heard
of it, she couldn't be sure. Now that
she was sure, though, she was plagued by new uncertainties. Sometimes it seemed that she knew even less than she had known before.

‘I get these urges,' she said. ‘This evening, for instance. In the off-licence. I almost bought a can of it. Did you notice?'

Charlie shook his head.

‘Well, it's true. And I don't even like the stuff.' She stared down at the grass, which was green, green, green. ‘I don't even like it,' she said again.

Charlie lay back, one hand behind his head, the other holding his roll-up to his lips. His cheeks hollowed as he inhaled. He blew smoke vertically into the slowly darkening sky.

‘So you think there's definitely a connection,' he said at last.

‘There must be.' She shrugged. ‘I don't really know.'

‘Suppose I investigate it for you …'

She looked at him hopefully, without really knowing what she was hoping for. Anything that would take the weight off her, perhaps. Even temporarily.

‘Listen,' Charlie said. ‘There's someone I know, he's a journalist. I could get him to look into it.' Charlie inhaled again, but his roll-up had gone out. ‘I'll tell him exactly what you told me, see what he thinks. He'll probably want to talk to you himself.' Charlie placed the roll-up on the lid of his Old Holborn tin. ‘In the meantime, don't tell anyone. About any of this.'

This was the way Charlie got sometimes, especially if he was talking about the government. His mouth would tense and straighten, his eyes would glitter between their lids.

‘Don't worry, Charlie,' she said, as if it was his secret she was keeping, not her own. ‘I won't tell a soul.'

Charlie opened a small plastic container that had once held tic tac mints and emptied the contents on to his palm. His fingers curled protectively around three white pills. ‘I thought we could do it this afternoon,' he said. ‘Just talk. Relax.'

Glade peered at the pills. ‘Is that ecstasy?'

Charlie nodded.

‘I've only done it once before,' she said.

‘Maybe you should start with a half.' He broke one of the pills in two and gave it to her.

She looked at him for a moment, grinned, then swallowed it, washing it down with a mouthful of slightly dusty water from the bedside table.

He had arrived on her doorstep at midday. When he appeared like that, without phoning first, without any warning, it usually meant that he thought she was in trouble, or needed looking after. But he would never refer to it directly.

They sat on the floor in her bedroom with the window open and the red silk curtains closed. Outside, in the street, a warm breeze was blowing and, every now and then, the curtains hollowed as they were drawn into the gap, which made her think of belly dancers. The only light in the room came from four white candles that stood in a cluster on the mantelpiece above the fireplace.

‘If anyone comes to the door,' she said, ‘I'm not going to answer it.'

Charlie agreed. ‘We're out.'

She lay back on a heap of cushions, her hands behind her head. She could hear the hedge moving below her window; it sounded like somebody flicking through the pages of a book. The curtains were the same colour as your eyelids when you shut your eyes and stare into the sun. She was noticing everything in detail – in part, she thought, because she was curious, on edge, waiting for the drug to take effect. The smell of cut grass drifted into the room.

Summer.

Suddenly she felt as if she was being lifted towards the ceiling, not straight upwards, but in a kind of slow curve. She looked at the floor. She hadn't moved.

‘I think it's starting,' she said.

Charlie looked up. ‘I can't feel anything.'

He opened his tin of Old Holborn and took out a packet of Rizlas. She watched him peel a single Rizla from the packet and begin to fill it with tobacco. She was glad the Rizlas were green. If they had been the orange type she would have had to put them in her ORANGE (JULY) box. She wondered how many ORANGE boxes she would do in her life. Say she lived to be eighty. How many boxes would there be by then? Her lips moved silently. About seven hundred. She looked round the room. It didn't seem as if seven hundred boxes would fit. She would have to move. And another thing. She'd have to start writing the year on the top of each box, otherwise she'd get them all mixed up.

She thought of her notebook. There was something she liked in it, something recent. She leaned forwards and pulled it out from under the bed. She showed Charlie her entry for the previous Thursday. Only one entry for the entire day.
Betty.

Charlie looked at her quizzically.

‘Betty's a new waitress at the restaurant,' Glade said. ‘She's got orange hair, masses of it. She's from New Zealand.' She paused. ‘I was working lunch that day and the sun
was shining through the window and every time I looked round, the only thing I could see was Betty's hair.' She paused again, remembering. ‘It was like watching a fire move round a room.'

Charlie was staring at his shoe, and his mouth had stretched into a wide smile.

‘The walls are changing shape,' she said.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘That happens.'

She stood up slowly, walked towards the door. Her legs felt solid, but artificial, as if they were made of the same thing all the way through. Some kind of plastic, perhaps. Or fibreglass. It seemed like an adventure, just to be moving. She opened the bedroom door and looked out into the corridor.

‘Long way to the kitchen,' she said.

She heard Charlie murmur, ‘You want me to go?'

‘Maybe.' Then she changed her mind. ‘No, it's all right.' The corridor seemed to slope downwards and then bend sharply to the right, though she knew that, in reality, it was both straight and level. At the end, where the kitchen should have been, everything was white and fuzzy, everything was glowing …

She left the room, walked halfway down the corridor. The gradient seemed steeper now, and she had to use the muscles in the front of her thighs to stop herself from breaking into a run. The white glow had intensified. She could have been a saint about to receive a vision: there was the same sense of suspended time, uncertain space. She thought she had better stay where she was – for a while, at least. She didn't think she could make it all the way to the kitchen. And besides, she could no longer remember what she was going there for.