Secret Story Read online

  “Thanks even less.”

  She was hurrying, but he was faster. “Let me just escort you,” he said, “till you get to wherever you’re going.”

  Greta turned with her hand on the banister of the stairs that led down to the Northern Line. “Look, I was pretending I was lost before. I’m going the wrong way now.”

  “Seems like you don’t know where you’re going.”

  “Anywhere you aren’t.”

  “No need to talk like that.”

  “What do you expect?”

  “Respect for a start. When a gentleman used to defend a lady’s honour he’d be sure of that, and a lot more.”

  “You really don’t understand at all, do you?” Greta said and started down.

  “I thought you weren’t going that way.”

  “I am if it gets rid of you.”

  She was at the bottom of the stairs when he followed her. “I’ll forget you said that. I honestly think it’s my duty to stay with you even if it isn’t appreciated. You never know what kind of maniac you might run into down here.”

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

  “I’ll come with you just the same.”

  “No. I can’t think of any shorter way to put it. No.”

  “Why not?”

  “If you don’t know by now you never will. I’ve been as polite as I’m going to be. If you don’t leave me alone I’ll be the one who calls the police.”

  “Shall I lend you my mobile? You know it won’t work.”

  “If you don’t go away I won’t need a phone to make myself heard.”

  “Are you going to hurt my ears again? As you said, there’s nobody else here. I think you’re playing.”

  “No, I’m not playing.”

  She spat the last word in his face. As he wiped it off, his eyes grew so wide they seemed to flatten too. “You’d really call the police? You think I’m as bad as those criminals on the train.”

  “I think maybe you got your wish. You wanted to be worse.”

  She felt a sudden wind in her hair and heard underground thunder. “Here’s a train. There’ll be someone on it,” she said and ran into the passage.

  The platform was empty. All at once it put her in mind of the life she was running towards, and she wondered what she was running away from. He knew so much about her—what might he know that she didn’t herself? It was too late for her to stop running. The fists that rammed her shoulders made sure of that. They flung her out of the passage, and she ran helplessly over the edge of the platform.

  The train rumbled out of the tunnel no more than the length of a carriage away. That seemed enormously far to Greta in the moment it gave her to think. She’d heard that people saw their entire lives in such an instant, but there was so little of hers. She saw the front of the train tilt as if the driver was putting his head to one side in surprise. She had time to regret having run away from a life she would never know. Then the train knocked that out of her, and she felt nothing at all.

  THREE

  Walt rested his upturned hands on their blurred impressions at the head of the long polished table, and the reflections moistened at once. “So who’s our winner?” he said.

  Valerie tried to fan the June heat away with her notepad. “I thought ‘Beating the Beatles’ was the best written.”

  “Frig the pretty writing. It’s nearly all in Manchester,” Shell objected, adding a line to the grid with which she was blackening a quarter of her notepad. “We’re meant to be the Mersey magazine.”

  “I was only thinking we could mention stories we liked that didn’t fit the rules.”

  “I know where I’d fit it. If he wants to write about how great the Manks are he should go and live with them.”

  Vincent finished writing BEATLES and followed it with a question mark almost too tentative to stand up. “I liked ‘A Child Composed of Celluloid’.”

  “You’d like anything about going to the pictures, you. I couldn’t be doing with that title. If he’d sat by anybody with a ciggy he’d have gone up in smoke.”

  “I just enjoyed reading about how there were dozens of what you’d call movie theatres, Walt, all over Liverpool and everyone saw every new film.”

  “I’m sure a lot of people will see yours, Vincent,” Valerie said. “That essay wasn’t fiction, though. Against the rules.”

  “What did anyone think of ‘The Cavern Mystery’?” Walt said.

  “Country house stuff stuck where it shouldn’t go,” said Shell. “Like one of them old murder books. My aunt in Scottie Road used to get four out of the library every week.”

  “So which story are you rooting for?”

  “I’d have ‘Foghorns on the Mersey’ if it was up to me.”

  “It’s up to all of us,” said Valerie, “but it wasn’t written by a Merseysider.”

  “It was like the stories my grandad used to tell about all the ships on the river. If I can’t vote for that I’ll shut up.”

  “No need to be defensive, Shell.”

  “I’ve no call to be, Vincent. Not like some that don’t want to sound Scouse.”

  “How we sound is part of what we are,” Walt intervened. “That’s a New Yorker on location talking.”

  “We’ve not heard from the editor’s daughter yet,” said Shell.

  “She does have a name like the rest of us,” Valerie murmured. “What was your favourite, Patricia?”

  Patricia was gazing across the Mersey rather than argue with Shell. Beyond the fourth-floor window of the converted warehouse a ferry swung its ample rear towards the landing-stage at Birkenhead. Above the ferry terminal the town ruddy with sunlit brick stretched along the riverbank and sprouted architecture—the town hall spire crowned with a green dome and a spike, the red tower of Hamilton Square Station, the riverside ziggurat containing a giant fan for the road tunnel. Behind all this an observatory squatted on Bidston Hill in front of a pastel horizon of Welsh mountains. The bare brick wall to the right of the window hid towns closer to the bay, not to mention those around the end of the peninsula, where Patricia lived. She suspected that Shell regarded her and her mother as no less foreign than Walt, but she wasn’t going to let this intimidate her. “ ‘Night Trains Don’t Take You Home’ stayed in my mind most,” she said.

  “Better pull the chain then, girl.”

  “It’s the one that got me thinking.”

  “What’s there to think about? If you want women being terrorised I can introduce you to plenty. We don’t want to read about it, specially not by a man.”

  “Gender isn’t in the rules,” Valerie pointed out.

  “It doesn’t matter who wrote it if it works, does it?” Patricia said. “It did for me.”

  “You’re joking or you’ve been at university too long. Spend some time in the real world and see if you still like that kind of porn. See if you like men reading it if you ever have a daughter.”

  Patricia almost blurted a retort that would have roused a memory she had successfully kept from her parents. She closed her fists to rub away a clammy prickling with her fingertips as she told Shell “I wasn’t joking. You’re our comedian.”

  “Vincent?” Walt said. “Any thoughts?”

  “It’s pretty lean and pacy. I wanted to find out what happened.”

  “I wanted to find out she chopped off his meat and two sprouts,” Shell said. “But she ends up wanting him. It’s like saying we want to be raped.”

  “I read the ending as ironic,” said Patricia. “Either Greta’s in shock or it’s the killer’s fantasy of what he’d like her to think.”

  “I mustn’t be clever enough. I just read what’s there, me.”

  “Can I table my opinion?” Walt said.

  “It’s your magazine,” said Shell.

  “Hey, I’m just the money man. I’m looking at my fellow judges.”

  “Tell us your judgement,” Valerie said.

  “I’d publish the story. It got everyone talking. We can use the word of
mouth. Bring readers in with a bit of controversy and they’ll stay to read whatever else we’re offering. But that’s only one man’s vote.”

  “It gets mine,” said Patricia.

  “I’ll support that,” Valerie said.

  “No point us drawing breath, Vincent,” said Shell.

  Patricia thought he was distancing himself from Shell by saying “I didn’t like him putting his name in. What was it, the prize-winning bestseller by Dudley Smith.”

  “There are a few amateur details I’d edit,” Valerie admitted. “I expect he won’t be too unhappy when it’s his first publication.”

  “Maybe it isn’t,” Shell said. “Then he’ll be disqualified.”

  “How’d you like to check that, Patricia,” Walt said, “and what else there is to know about him?”

  “You’re never giving her another job,” Shell said with what a newcomer might have assumed was sympathy for Patricia. “She’s already got night life and what’s on.”

  “I thought you might like to interview him, Patricia.”

  “Did you do many interviews at university?” Shell was apparently interested in learning.

  “She had to conduct quite a few on her journalism course,” Valerie said. “They earned her some of her best marks, not to embarrass you, Patricia.”

  “I’ll do anything I can for the magazine.” While she’d nominated the story, her mother would take any editorial blame. Patricia ought to find out what she could about the author. She drew a fat exclamation mark on her pad and inked a smiling face within the dot, only to realise that it looked as though a blade was hanging unsupported over it. “I’d like to meet Dudley Smith,” she said.

  FOUR

  Dudley was sure that she was pouting at him through the glass in the middle of the cubicle that enclosed them. “Just tell me how to sell myself,” she said.

  He ducked to the form that he was filling in on her behalf: seven O levels, three A levels, a middling degree in philosophy and history . . . “No, look at me,” she said.

  Though the June sunlight fell short of the counter full of half a dozen cubicles, the heat seemed to flare up around him. He levelled his gaze at her and saw a small pale pretty face rendered whiter by a mane of red hair, clothes that would have cost more than they should for the little they were, especially the sleeveless yellow top exposing inches of a freckled cleft. “What experience have you had?” he cleared his throat to ask.

  “Plenty. Just not the sort you can put in a box.”

  Dudley rested the tip of his ballpoint inside one. “Anything that will help us find you a job?”

  “It might. Promise you won’t blush.”

  He felt as if the heat had seized him by the cheeks. All his interview questions had fled into hiding. “Why should I?” he heard himself protest.

  “How would you fancy me as a table dancer?”

  The fan behind the cubicles creaked towards him, tousling his hair and plastering his damp shirt to his back. The glass showed his hair fluttering erect as the fan lingered on him, and he clenched his fists in order not to slap his scalp. “I don’t mean personally,” she said, tilting a pink and white smile up to him, “though you’d be welcome if you got me the work.”

  The heat in his face seemed to swell his lips tight shut. Could all this be a joke? If so, played by whom? He grew aware of Mrs Wimbourne’s voice as low as a priest’s in a confessional, Trevor’s weary baritone intoning every question on the form, Vera turning brisk whenever her client hesitated over an answer, Colette sounding even more sympathetic than Dudley had felt when he was as new to the job. None of them struck him as a likely culprit, and Morris was surely too busy having a breakdown at home, while Lionel seemed preoccupied with talking on a headset to his fellow security personnel in the shopping precinct. “I don’t suppose it would be a full-time job,” the girl was saying. “I could model as well. Same line of work.”

  Dudley licked his lips to prise them apart. “I’m sorry,” he said on his way to the truth. “We don’t deal with that kind of thing.”

  “What kind?”

  “I think you must know.”

  “I really don’t. Your job is finding people jobs, isn’t it? Why are you saying you can’t touch those?”

  “I’m not saying it. The government does.”

  “You’re the one talking to me. You tell me what kind.”

  “The s—” His hiss glistened on the window as he lowered his voice. “The sex trade,” he mumbled.

  “That’s what the girls do on the dock road. Are you calling me a prostitute?”

  Sometimes the cubicles reminded him of the kind prison visitors in films used, and never more so than now. “I didn’t say that,” he protested.

  “You looked it. I wouldn’t feel superior to anyone if I were you, not with your job.”

  “I’m sorry, I must ask you to keep your voice down.”

  “Why must you?” she said louder still. “So nobody knows what you’ve been calling me?”

  “Trouble, Dudley?”

  He didn’t need to hear Mrs Wimbourne’s question to know she had arrived behind him. He was trapped between her reflection, which looked flattened even broader than she was, and her cloying perfume that didn’t quite disguise the smell of the cigarettes she smoked outside during her breaks. “I came for a perfectly legal job,” the girl said, “and he’s making me feel like a whore.”

  Dudley’s face blazed afresh. “I didn’t use any such word.”

  “We both know what you meant. And you spat at me.”

  “That’s an absolute lie. I was trying to find this young lady a job she was qualified for.”

  “My friends from uni had to settle for nothing jobs,” the girl told Mrs Wimbourne, and shoved her chair away. “I want to make some real money while I’m young enough,” she said and lowered her gaze to Dudley. “I won’t be doing anything bad except in your grubby little mind. Maybe you need one of those to work in this grubby little place. You can do better.”

  The last remark was aimed only at Colette, who emitted the beginnings of a timid giggle. As the girl stalked past the rows of pale green bucket seats and out of the job centre, Mrs Wimbourne said “Nothing wrong with my office that I can see.”

  She’d left just enough room for Dudley to swivel his chair. “The public spend all day playing on the computers where my mother works,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to work where you can’t be private.”

  The fan fluttered Mrs Wimbourne’s dress and swept her perfume at him before he could hold his breath. When she frowned he thought she didn’t want to be reminded that her centre hadn’t been converted to the open plan, but she said “I didn’t care for your client’s attitude. I hope none of it rubbed off on you, Colette.”

  Colette giggled a nervous denial as Dudley turned to the form on the counter. “Mark it terminated by the client,” Mrs Wimbourne said and watched Lionel lock the door. “That’s another day dusted. Fetch your belongings and we can hop off to our burrows.”

  As they converged on the dull yellow three-seater staffroom that smelled of stagnant tea, Vera said “Dudley, were you making up to that rude woman? You’ve a nice girl right here, or am I being an interfering old bag, Colette?”

  Colette bit her plump lower lip and shook her head vaguely and made a joke of hiding her round chubby suntanned face behind her long black hair as she stooped to grab the white rabbit that was her rucksack. Trevor bowed and passed it to her, then smoothed the remnant of his greyish hair over his glistening scalp. “I think as long as we’re saying what we think you can both do better.”

  Vera rubbed her forehead under her short dyed auburn hair as if to erase all the wrinkles and rounded her mouth until it tugged her thin cheeks against the bones. “I think they make a lovely young couple,” she objected.

  “Not better than each other, better than this treadmill. When I was your age, Colette, or even Dudley’s I wanted adventure. Don’t get stuck here or you’ll end up like me and Vera wi
th nothing to look forward to but dying on a pension.”

  He ambled to the door to bow out Vera and Colette, and Dudley felt as if he might never escape the room that looked steeped in weak tea. The outer office had already grown stuffy now that the fan was still, but the instant he left the office behind he felt as if someone had thrown a pailful of sweat over him. A plastic bag from Woolworth’s up the sloping pedestrianised street lay exhausted outside Virgin, having failed to crawl to a pavement artist’s chalked seascape. Along the middle of the uneven pavement, the topmost branches of caged saplings fingered a breeze that stayed well out of Dudley’s reach, but he no longer felt trapped behind hot glass. Away from the job centre, he was himself.

  The world might have been a show staged for him. Beyond Blockbuster and the other shops on the ground floor of Mecca Bingo, boys in swimming trunks were too intent on fleeing from some mischief at Europa Pools to notice him. Inside Conway Park Station, which was tiled pale as an ice cream, a lift opened at both ends to him. Between two underground tunnels a train for New Brighton shed commuters to make room for him.

  The train snaked up into the sunlight at Birkenhead Park, stoking the interior and filling his nostrils with the hot dusty smell of the upholstered seats but leaving behind the harsh hollow roar of the tunnel. At Birkenhead North the nearest doors halted exactly opposite a passage too short to contain more than the ticket office. His mind seemed to own everything around him now: the two-storey terrace, hardly more than a wall with windows and doors in, that faced the station; the clash of a football against the wire mesh of a sports compound opposite a rudimentary supermarket; the frustrated smell of petrol fumes from cars backed up by roadworks at a five-way junction with a church in the middle; the overalled men and women hosing down soapy vehicles in a car wash or wiping them like beggars at traffic lights. Everything assured him how much more there was to him.

  Five minutes’ easy climb of a street smug with fat pairs of houses opposite the car wash brought him in sight of the disused observatory, its grey dome squatting like a torpid introverted turtle on the ridge of Bidston Hill. It sank away from his progress, and by the time he arrived at the road that almost followed a contour line, the bulk of the hill had been foreshortened into a slope crowded with foliage and tattered with butterflies. His house was one of a long row that stood together in pairs to challenge the vegetation across the road. He tramped past his mother’s rockery, where weeds flourished leaves above the flowers they were overcoming, and let himself in. “Kathy,” he called as the door lumbered inwards, “are you home?”