Free Soft by Rupert Thomson Page B

and Whistle. Latimer Road at last. She rose from her seat, almost losing her balance as the tube lurched to a sudden standstill. A bored guard yawned on the platform, his teeth bared fiercely in the pale autumn sunlight. She stepped past him, the tube doors grinding shut behind her. Down one flight of spit-stained stairs and out on to the street. She stood still for a moment, taking in the cool grey air, the peaceful rush of traffic, a black man relaxing in a strangely buxom maroon armchair on the pavement outside the mini-cab office.
    Walking north, she remembered the night the mountain disappeared – or, rather, the night she noticed it had gone. One of her fellow waiters, Hector, had given her a lift homeon his motor bike. As they turned left off Edgware Road and raced towards the roundabout, she realised they would have to pass the mountain and she prepared herself, as always, a smile held just inside her mouth. But when they leaned into the bend and she looked down, there was nothing there. She must have flinched, or perhaps she had even cried out, because Hector braked slightly, thinking there was something wrong. Shouting into the wind, she asked him if he could take a left at the lights, go round again. The second time they passed the place, she was struck by how normal it looked – more normal than it had ever looked before, in fact. The wasteground, the railway tracks. Part of a canal.
    Later that night, in her bedroom, she had opened her
A-Z
and studied the area of white space between Bishop’s Bridge Road and the blue-and-white stripe of the Westway. She could find no tiny triangle to indicate the presence of a mountain, no number to let you know how high it was. She sat back, thinking about the space and how its whiteness was a kind of lie. She thought of spies, and how they learn to empty their faces. The mountain was a secret the world refused to share with her. Soon it would become hard to believe it had ever existed. But these were the very things you had to cling to in the face of everything, the things that vanished without warning, without trace, as if they had never been.
    She passed the school and then turned right, into a street of red-brick houses. If people ever asked her where she lived, she always said Wormwood Scrubs (though Sally James, her flat-mate, claimed they lived in Ladbroke Grove). She liked the name. Also, she felt an affinity with that bleak area of grass and swings and men out walking dogs, the sky too big, somehow, with patches of white showing through the insipid greys and pale-blues, like an unfinished water-colour. She felt she understood it better than Ladbroke Grove, with its pink neon video boutiques and its fast cars shuddering with music.
    When she reached her house, she stopped by the gate and looked up at her bedroom, a small bay window on the first floor. A face stared down from the gap between the curtains. This was Giacometti, her cat. The name was supposed to be ironic: as a white, long-haired Persian, he had nothing in common with the stick figures Giacometti was famous for – though, curiously enough, beneath his soft exterior, there lurked a disposition that was both brittle and perverse.
    She unlocked the front door and, closing it behind her, climbed the stairs. She found Sally sitting in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette. A saucepan of water heated gently on the stove. The kettle stood beside it, steam still rising from the spout.
    â€˜I had a shit day,’ Sally said.
    Glade poured hot water into a cup, dropped a herbal tea-bag into it and took it over to the table.
    â€˜Shit,’ Sally said, ‘from start to finish.’ She sharpened the end of her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray. ‘Temping,’ she said. ‘I fucking hate it.’ She stared at Glade until Glade began to feel like something in a shop window. ‘You’re really lucky, you know that?’
    Glade reached up and trained one strand of her long hair