Soft City

by Jonathan Raban

  ‘BELT’ it said in the dictionary.

  ‘Blut,’ she said. ‘Beelet.’ But every time she said the word, it went as shapeless and rubbery as a lump of bubblegum in her mouth. ‘Lt!’ she stammered aloud on the pavement. ‘Lt! Lt! Lt! Lt! Lt!’

  A scented, waxy shopwalker peered at the word in her dictionary.

  ‘Accessories, third floor.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  He pointed at the signboard. The white letters bobbed in front of her eyes like a regatta. Accessories,’ he said. She wanted to cover her ears with her hands. He was going to shout.

  ‘Sorries?’

  ‘Ack; he said, ‘Ack-sess-sorries,’ and the last syllables blew out of his mouth with a loose explosive crump.

  She found the belt. It was lovely, dark, chocolatey.

  The salesgirl jabbered at her, her face a great bright lamp that swayed on its stalk above the till, fingers rapping on the glass counter beside the spike of impaled bills.

  Then they were fighting for the belt, the salesgirl jerking at its buckle, the foreign girl clinging to its soft tongue.

  ‘You don’t want it wrapped?’ the salesgirl was doing eye-semaphore with her colleague in Handbags.

  ‘I wear. I wear.’

  ‘You’ll need a receipt.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  Handbags signalled Screw the lot of them – Yanks, Frogs, You-name-its as she filled out a Diner’s Club cheque for a Nebraskan piston-ring heiress. Belts passed the foreign girl a paper slip with a frozen shrug, and spiked its duplicate on her prong.

  The belt lapped her, deep and comforting. Its buckle, a flaring silver sun, shone from the wide Vee of her groin. Suddenly private in the stew of the escalator, she touched the corrugations of the metal, felt the rough point of a sun’s ray. It left a milled white mark on her fingertip. Around her bags, umbrellas, small pale children, and the heavy smell of sandalwood, air-conditioning and cologne congealed with the murmur of the machine as it took them down towards the street. The crowd was whispering in her language. Alaxm mashook vilimbabo cosconzilim.

  She stayed in the north with the old lady and her Spainish. ‘Is rich?’ ‘One is moderately well to do,’ said the old lady, smoothing out the Telegraph gardening page, making the paper shriek. The lady’s husband, Mr Phillips, had done business with the girl’s father. ‘Flips,’ her father called him. ‘Tomflips.’ ‘Fill-ipz, say Fill-ipz,’ said the old lady.

  ‘Is hard to me, Mizflips. Feel-ipz.’

  ‘Good girl.’ And the old lady pegged the bell for the Spainish.

  When Mr Phillips died of an undetected cancer in a hotel room in West Berlin, the girl’s father got the translator at his firm to write a letter of condolence to the widow. He whom God requireth for his great harvest . . . He whom the thunderbolt shall strike down . . . the good die young . . . greatest happiness in the overworld of the immortal spirits . . . It was a fine letter, and had a rich black border. Everyone saw it before it was sent off, sprinkled on each corner with holy water that smeared a few words into indecipherable inky trails. The old lady wrote that she was much comforted in her bereavement, and the girl’s father, who loved dramatic gestures, and sometimes wept in his box at the opera, had despatched his daughter to London. The arrangements had been intricate, and had taken nearly a week of trips to embassies and tranquil, Madonnalike pauses before Polaroid cameras. She’d needed seven different visas. Jetl, her father’s private secretary, was sent with her, and filled in all the forms, leaving only the space for her signature. On the third day, in the incense-smelling, tapestry-hung vestibule of the Maranian embassy, he’d kissed her, and the twin oiled points of his beard had stung her neck like mosquitoes. Then she’d giggled and pulled away; he tasted of liquorice and menthol gum-refreshers. Now she daydreamed of Jetl and his purple cloak, of hiding, crooked in its folds with his ringed fingers winking in her hair . . . and of her father who called her his rabbit. A lovely, stupid rabbit. She liked him saying that, and cut his cigars for him with a penknife, and laid them in a neat row for him on the table of the morning-room. Eight delicately circumcised cigars, each showing a soft, damp tip of tobacco at its head.

  The Telegraph rattled. The Spainish had come in with letters on a tray. The girl did not like the Spainish. She had pale eyes flecked with blue like ovoids of gorgonzola, and her skin was as dark as funereal silk. She was a common Spainish. You could see she’d been left too long in the sun. The Spainish arranged a clutch of letters above Mrs Phillips’s plate of toast, paused, and insolently dipped a blue aerogramme to within three feet of the girl’s plate. She had to reach for it, the sleeve of her dress ruckling above the elbow, under the slow cheesy eye of the Spainish.

  The girl dropped her lids at the maid, waited, and raised them, expecting her to be gone. But she was still there, lolling, watching the blue aerogramme with the contemptuous sly greed of an alley cat.

  ‘Uxtl,’ said the girl. ‘You go.’ The Spainish didn’t move; just swung her head away towards the old lady.

  Mrs Phillips cracked her paper on its fold and stared for a moment at the foreign girl. ‘Thank you, Andresa,’ she said, and the Spainish, rolling her pupils up into her bronzed skull as she looked at the girl, left the room, the starched strings of her apron dancing on her rump.

  ‘I will tell the girl when to go, dear,’ said the old lady, with the exaggerated lip-movements that people use to talk to the deaf and the gaga.

  ‘Pardon?’

  But the old lady had begun to slit open her letters with an ivory rule.

  ‘Spainishes not good. Frenches good, Swedishes . . . no Spainish. Never. Thiefs.’

  The rule stopped in mid-slit above the jar of Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade. There was a silence, a thin, stringy asthmatic sigh, and the rule finished its slice, very slowly and deliberately.

  The girl took the rule from the table and opened her own letter. It was like a badly-managed rape. The paper tore in wrinkled jags around its seams, and the short letter, in her mother’s baby-round writing, fell in two pieces on her plate. She fitted them together, matching the top and bottom halves of a line of words.

  ‘May I have the knife, dear?’

  Mudji. The aerogramme had trapped a little of her dust: jasmine . . . the creamy colour of a full brocade dress . . . the taste, winy and sharp, of lipstick at the end of the evening when her parents came back in the Cadillac chauffeured by Jetl.

  Dezne. . . .

  ‘The paper-knife–’ The old lady reached for her; the girl thought she was after Mudji’s letter and whipped back in her chair, but the old lady only pulled the ivory rule from between her fingers.

  Dezne,

  Z pzlm y caroo dy szlimp fazlim! Chzta fxam poolmx ty fanzia occherinzo mo puci. Dizikaps cantonas libikazzi fik, lamacchozonni gembria oozot kyroks – saglio maschtaps dimikrave imbilbo, avele!!! Tescotta lasko ponvi encielda ombi. Dembo, demba . . . Piraxa chelui concosdat silba – ombilevi automobila casca cogenzi – oops!!!! Tomrava anhali disco Nancy Sinatra cali frenzo! Pocharta condifizzim poscamjat caselni intendlam flozm – Coogi jambi i posclui poribom ino hospringa!! Uxjo – onbozma – drivalgo comitzalna dig – Derimicso flom camriche goolap – floridabbo milesli Sv. Phillips caffervo sipsas!

  Lervoji micsam

  Mudjier

  XXXXXXXXXX

  Z.M. ‘Loodobi’ cor ‘Moxli’ phipso lervoji!!!

  Her mother had a wonderful sense of humour, everybody said so. She always made animals and children sound really comical, calling them by funny names and making them get up to all sorts of whimsical capers. She read her letter again and laughed aloud at the bit about Tescotta and Tomrava – how she wished she could have seen that, it would have been a scream. Her eyes began to bulge, bovine with self-pity.

  ‘Good letter, dear?’

  ‘Is humour. My mother. Makes to laughs of everythings.’

  ‘Oh, good. It’s so nice to get letters when one’s abroad, isn’t it? One simply hangs on the post—’

  But
the girl was hearing the Nancy Sinatra record, and seeing Tescotta and Tomrava, five and six, dancing to the wind-up gramophone in the patio under the shade of the pink flowering vine. She saw the dark knots of the branches, the jug of iced water on its stand, heard, beyond the crumbling stucco of the high wall, with its intrepid Alpine blossoms breaking from every cranny and loose brick, the regular lap-lap of the tideless sea.

  When she went to her room, the Spainish was there, folding back the coverlet. The girl, holding her letter, inched past the big, black-clad bottom of the maid. It didn’t shrink for her. The Spainish stayed bent over the bed as if the foreign girl didn’t exist. She walked stiffly, watching herself, to the dressing-table; things were not as they’d been before. The Spainish had been at her compact: she saw a dark smudge, a deeper furrow, in her foundation cream. The mirror, when she gazed in, held the imprint of a coarse Mediterranean face. The girl folded her letter into a tight, stamp-sized rectangle, and locked it into her trinket box with the key she kept on a chain around her neck.

  The Spainish slowly unbent. She put her finger and thumb over her nose as she tapped with her other hand on the pillow.

  ‘Phoo!’ she said, sniffing so that you could hear the mucus bubbling in her sinuses.

  ‘Uxtl! Uxd! Go! Spainish! Pig! Spainish pig!’

  She chased her, shouting, words in English and her own language breaking in her, painfully slowly, like airbubbles in oil. On the landing, the Spainish leaned on the banister, going ‘Phoo! Phoo!’, and holding her nose, and gibbering like a rhesus monkey. When she went down the stairs she was still snorting, full of herself; the girl hung in her doorway and cried, a quiet hiccuping that took her body and rattled it like an empty can on a paved court in a wind.

  But the Spainish hadn’t got to her relics. When she opened the narrow drawer beneath the mirror, they were as she’d left them: the opals and garnets, the bead string of polished seeds, the silver mandala – she kissed the delicately tooled and beaten juncture of its snake’s head and tail.

  ‘Ansalvo corzimla Anvilvi condilmo . . .’

  The Spainish would be a Catholic – Catlicis, gorgers of body and blood. The President had got rid of the Catlicis in his ordinance of 1968. They had put poison in the rivers and were, as the President said over the radio in a voice that rippled and throbbed like a harp, the swollen maggots of the economy – technicians, small shopkeepers, pay-clerks. After the edict, they huddled at the airport and on the dock side with bulging fibre suitcases that were patchworks of stamps and dockets. Catlicis. They smelled of garlic and rank velvet. They lived in shacks between clumps of bougainvillea, and bred prolifically, and were cruel to animals. On the day they left (a few had been hung and quartered in the villages, in what the Minister of Justice later called an outbreak of overenthusiasm) the air had tasted cleaner, the vine-blossom had gained in brilliance.

  Now she had the stink of the Catlico in her things. Everywhere she moved in the room, the spoor of the Spainish was there. Her phrase-books and guides were piled in a brisk tidy column; her silver Sweet Sixteen bag was squashed under the sidetable; her hairbrushes were arranged like the hands of a clock at ten to two, or two crossed knives. She heard the slippered shuffle of the Spainish’s feet along the landing. It stopped at her door. A rustle, the push of paper under the jamb, and the Spainish’s laugh, a mad giggle, like the song of a demented thrush. A folded note, blue, scented, was on the floor.

  In the old lady’s writing.

  Go to SOUTH KENSINGTON (Piccadilly Line)

  1. Victoria and Albert Museum. (Costumes, furniture, English portrait miniatures. Look out for NICHOLAS HILLIARD – very pretty.)

  2. Science Museum, across the road. Machines, telescopes, working models, etc. Interesting if you are mechanically minded.

  3. Natural History Museum. Birds, animals, some prehistoric. My favourite. You will find directions to all of these in the tube station. I hope you have an enjoyable day. Dinner will be at 7.30 SHARP.

  B.P.

  She found most of these words in her dictionary. She wondered why the old lady thought she had a brain like a machine; nobody had ever said anything like that to her before. In her country, no one had ever thought she was clever. It wasn’t polite for a girl to be clever, you got called ‘spectacle face’ and ‘broken reed shoulder’. But perhaps in England it was a sort of compliment. She scrutinised the phrase again. It was a little gauche, maybe, but probably not intentionally malicious.

  She sat down in front of the mirror. Was she changing? She stared, first at her chin, then tipped her forehead to the glass. She showed her cheeks in turn, wiping the skin over her cheekbones with her middle finger. Teeth . . . gums . . . the soft crannies where her nostrils folded back into her face. She found a fine spray of heat spots on her right cheek. She’d never had those before. It must be the air; greasy, mortal, London air that corroded the flesh as it bit into the brickwork and left the stucco stained with tongue-like tidemarks. She plucked her lashes, touched the rash of heat-spots with the loaded tip of a tiny brush like a painter putting in his final highlights, and watched her eyes turning in her head as she searched the reflection of the room in the glass. They looked like fish, like the black, glistening backs of trout hanging in the pool below the bridge at home. In the evenings, when the sun left the water, these trout would break the surface, twisting and diving, ringing the pool with splashes like giant raindrops. But her eyes were as distant, as shy, as subaqueous, as fish in the dead heat of summer. She could scatter them with a footfall.

  For good luck, she avoided the cracks between the paving stones, counting off her steps in units of seven. She burned her finger along the nape of bristles on someone’s close-pruned privet hedge. She ran down the escalator so fast that the posters on the side went into a liquid blur, their words skeetering like the pages of a thumbed book. Underground, she felt exhilarated, part of the secret circulation of the city. In a long porcelain tunnel, her shoes clicking with the crowd so that she couldn’t tell which footsteps were her own, a hippie was singing to a guitar, squatting over its empty case.

  ‘Love is just like a merry-go-round . . .’ But the lines of the song and the metallic chords of the guitar rolled round and round inside the porcelain tube until they had the melancholy, tuneless resonance of a distant wind-harp. Wuh-wuh wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-bil-a-bah. She liked it, and stopped, and dropped some shillings into the hippie’s guitar case. Thank-you-wuh-bil-a-bah. When the train came, driving a column of hot stale air before it that stung her face like a hair-dryer at full blast, she could still hear the hippie and his guitar, sad, vague, remote, over the rattle of the doors and the electric rumble of the stopped engine.

  Today, the names of the stations might as well have been in Cyrillic script. They stopped halfway in the carriage window, they held out no promises. She was more interested in a man in an electric blue suit who sat sucking the handle of his telescopic umbrella like a banana. Every so often, his eyes would travel swiftly from one end of the carriage to the other, return to centre, and drop over his umbrella as if he was saying prayers. Once he stared at the shining sun-buckle of her belt, and his big lips quivered, pouted, whispered something into the wet plastic handle. She covered her buckle with her A–Z.

  Once her father had taken her to the pithead of one of his mines. There’d been an explosion, and gangs of women in shawls muttered among the parked ambulances on the mauve asphalted hilltop. She had seen the wounded men winched up to the daylight in stretchers, had imagined how they must have seen that dim patch of sun growing and growing on their closed lids until it blinded them. Now it was as if she too was being cranked up a long dripping shaft, leaving the terrors and explosions of language behind. Out of words, out of reason, out of time, she came up and up on her stretcher, hearing the dull creak of the winch and the wordless muttering of the crowd in the sun up above.

  She was at a formica Sandwich Bar; her coffee cup was enormous, big as a burial urn. Men spoke to her, and she went yeh-yeh-yeh, cr
ooning to herself, gentling, not knowing what they said. The soft mush of identical green notes in her wallet thinned, as she scattered them on baubles. A wooden toy seen in a window, a little stick man with rubber joints and a perspex tube for a nose; a pair of sandals with cork soles awkward and thick as stilts; a thumb-size guardsman in a busby; a ticket for a competition; a deflated balloon; a matchbox full of tiny coloured bricks to make things with; a rippling, concertina string of postcard views of London; two paper stickers that said WHITEHALL and CARNABY STREET; a football scarf; a mock-brass alarm clock with a bright Union Jack on its face. Her Sweet Sixteen bag grew as lumpy with surprises as a Christmas stocking.

  She found she was on a plunging Big Dipper of feelings. One moment she was singing in her head at the amazing dazzle of sun over Brompton Oratory, a giant illuminated piece of master confectionery. The next, she imagined her body tossed and smashed in a red blur among the traffic of the Cromwell Road. Her body turned into a blown sheet of crepe paper, harmlessly dancing between the wheels of a column of taxis. She saw, on the back of a man’s neck, as he teetered on the pavement waiting to cross, an egg-shaped growth that looked as if it was wrapped in turkey skin. The growth swelled to the size of Brompton Oratory. She saw herself, dwarfed to the height of her guardsman, picking her way through its repulsive folds.

  At a corner chemist she bought a camera, grinning and pointing.

  ‘Yeh, yeh, yeh. Is that one.’

  The man put a film in for her. She scattered more banknotes, and snapped the man.