Secret Story (30 page)

“I was going to tell her it’s turned out we don’t. Dudley’s too busy this weekend. Do say to your wife not to be sad. We all have to let our children be themselves,” Kathy said and received an unpersuaded mumble for her effort. Nevertheless she didn’t feel too piqued as she ended the call. The main thing was that Dudley would be in no danger from Patricia. Now Kathy had to occupy the day in making certain that she wasn’t tempted to disturb him.

A dull thud wakened Patricia. She felt it more than heard it, but it was her head. It had jerked up and bumped the end of the bath. She did her best to gasp through just her nose, and then she tried not to breathe or move. The ache in the back of her head faded as she listened. With her eyes still buried in the dark she felt as if she wasn’t quite awake. It was even harder to work her brain when she hadn’t believed she could fall asleep.

It was as quiet around her as sleeping without dreams. She might have thought she was dreaming if the tape hadn’t been so tight and hot and sticky on her face. Was she alone in the room? If he was working next door she would have heard the clatter of the keyboard, even through the wall and the tape. If he was sleeping next to the bath she mightn’t hear his breathing, but she would never be unaware of his presence. Perhaps his work had
taken him out of the house for some reason. She had to take the chance. She mightn’t have another.

She began to push herself up the bath with just her feet to make less noise, and then she thought she heard a sound that wasn’t her. It made her feel examined like an insect under a microscope. She couldn’t tell what it had been or even whether it was outside her head. When it wasn’t repeated she went back to worming her way up the bath. Even if she had only heard bones creaking in her skull, it forced her to move as slowly as a snail, and she felt as soft and vulnerable as one. She couldn’t tell if she was damp from the bath or with her own sweat. When the back of her neck slithered over the edge of the bath she raised her head and turned it, searching for the slightest sound.

The room was on her left. She poked at the bath with her fingers behind her to lift her top half forward and leaned over that side. She was convinced he wasn’t down there. She straightened up and swivelled her trapped face towards the room, searching blindly as a mole dug up and unable to see its captor for all the light around him. “So you can hear me after all,” he said.

His voice came from where she was facing. She must have sensed him without realising. Perhaps she’d been aware of the scent of aftershave that meant he had recently had his hands on a razor. She thought of pretending she hadn’t heard and continuing to move her head, but it had already betrayed her by wavering to a stop. “Can you talk?” he said. “Can you tell me how you feel?”

He must still value her as a collaborator. Mustn’t he let her go if she satisfied him? She strained to force words out, but she wasn’t sure if she was hearing them except in the hollow of her head. “Not like this,” she tried to say.

“Don’t bother if that’s the best you can do. You don’t even sound like a person.”

She lifted her face towards him and attempted to plead without using words. “Mmm,” she said. “Mmm.”

“Are you singing? You must be happy working with me.”

Did he want her to be? She was afraid of the opposite. She had to persuade him to unwrap her head, however uncomfortable that might be. “Mm
mm
,” she begged. “Mm
mm
.”

“Now you sound like a whining bitch. No use to me.”

As soon as her mouth was free she would scream for help with all the voice that had been gagged. If he made to cover her mouth she would bite through his hand. If he tried to knock her out again she would be too quick and wriggly for him. “Mmm,” she insisted. “Mmm.”

“Do you want me to unwrap my present?”

“Mmm.”

“I wouldn’t like it then, would I? It’d start making a fuss and getting me a bad name with the neighbours.”

Was he reading her thoughts? Was she so predictable? “Mmm,” she lied, shaking her head as hard as the tape around her throat would let her.

“Why else do you want unwrapping? It wouldn’t be to help me, would it?”

She put all her effort into nodding. “Mmm.”

“I don’t need to hear from you, I’ve decided. You won’t be feeling anything I can’t imagine. In fact I’m sure I can imagine better.”

She slumped against the bath as if he’d robbed her of any reason to exist, and then she managed to raise her head. “Mmm,” she struggled to tell him.

“Are you hungry? Is that what’s wrong with you now?”

He was reading her thoughts again, or that was what she wanted him to think. “Mmm,” she agreed.

“Had I better go and buy us both some dinner?”

She nodded so hard that the back of her head thumped the bath again, but she didn’t care. “Mmm.”

“I’d have a job to go shopping in the middle of the night.”

Was it really that time? “Mmm,” she said in case it mightn’t be.

“You want me to go out anyway, do you?”

She wasn’t sure how to answer that. “Mmm,” she said as appeasingly as she could.

“And then you’ll get out of there and do all the damage you can and make a row till someone comes to see.”

She felt as if he wasn’t just reading her thoughts but inventing them before she had them. “Mmm,” she contradicted him. “Mmm.”

“I’m getting bored now. I don’t think there’s anything else you can do for me. I think I’ve learned all there is to learn.”

She could hear in his voice what that might mean for her. She began to thrash about in the bath. “Mmm,” she protested so shrilly that the tape buzzed against her lips.

“I like that, though. You can do that for a bit. Nobody’s going to hear but me.”

Could she carry on inspiring him? Sooner or later she would run out of ways, if she hadn’t already exhausted her energy. All at once she stopped moving. At least that would show him that he couldn’t order her about. “Have you finished?” he said. “That wasn’t any use. Keep it up till it gives me an idea.”

She didn’t mean to give him another sound. She wished she didn’t have to let him hear her breathe. She stayed as still as a dummy in a window, even when he said, “That’s useless as well. Better try harder if you don’t want me to make you.”

What could he really do? He would have to let her go eventually, because people had seen her with him. In any case her parents must have called the police by now. She wondered what he thought he could offer her to persuade her not to betray him. Of course she would pretend to accept till she was out of his reach. She was trying to feel as still as her body when he said, “I know what I can do.”

It couldn’t be much, she told herself. He wasn’t Mr Killogram,
he was just a writer who’d made up the character. He wrote about things that had already happened. He didn’t do them. All the same, she was anxious to hear what he was planning, and so it was almost a relief when he spoke at last. “This should be fun,” he said. “You get a choice which way to go.”

Now that it was too late she realised the long silence could have meant he’d been out of the room. What might she have been able to do while he wasn’t watching? She wouldn’t have had time to manoeuvre herself out of the bath. She didn’t understand the choice he was offering her—not till she heard an electrical drone and felt water flooding under her.

She would either drown or be electrocuted. “Mmm!” she tried to scream. “Mmm!” She flung herself about inside her slippery prison. She couldn’t even snag the chain to unplug the bath; she would have had to lie flat and helpless in the water that was already spilling hotly over her legs. She was stiffening in dread of the electricity that would surge through it the moment he dropped the appliance in the bath when the drone was pressed against her ear. She recognised it as much from the heat as the sound. It was a hairdryer.

The tape around her face was no protection. She felt as if a red-hot needle was being thrust deeper and deeper into her head. She writhed desperately, but however she tried to escape, the heat followed her. All the same, she didn’t duck under the water that had risen higher than her outstretched legs. She only banged her blazing ear against the side of the bath. “That’s what dogs do,” he said and pressed the dryer against her left eye. When she felt her eyeball shrivel she buried her head underwater. It was the only choice she could make, and he helped her stick to it by planting a foot on her throat.

The Political Picket was a tall broad Victorian house on the brow of the ridge of Everton. Steps that led between spiked railings down to the pavement had been replaced by a concrete ramp. Kathy offered to help an old man in a wheelchair to mount it but was met with a grunt of refusal. As she waited for him to complete his task she gazed across downtown Liverpool to the river. Beyond it the sun was sinking towards the peninsula, perched on which she saw the observatory above her house. She let herself imagine that the sun was rising over Dudley and whatever effort he was making this weekend—even better, that it was the light of his creativity that was brightening the world. She turned to the ramp in the hope that he was inside the club, having finished his task.

The front door was wedged open. It was painted the same bright red as the large uncurtained windows to its left. Most of
the building was to that side of the expansive staircase, where all the ground-floor doors led into a single room that had once been several. As Kathy followed the man in the wheelchair through the nearest doorway he was greeted with a cheer that trailed off at her appearance. The room was close to full, largely of men past pension age. Those that weren’t clustered along the bar that occupied the rear wall were seated around tables that looked borrowed from more than one pub and a shabby café or two. The walls were draped with banners bearing legends such as
STOP THE WAR
and
MARCH FOR JOBS
, and further decorated with framed photographs of demonstrations, some dating from her childhood or earlier. She couldn’t locate Dudley, though that might be blamed to some extent on all the smoke. The group the man in the wheelchair had joined were making such a performance of welcoming him while they dragged their heavy padded stools over the bare boards to clear him a space that she didn’t notice Monty until he spoke in her ear. “You’ve not brought him, then.”

She could tell that he’d been drinking from his breath and the mottling that left only his shaved pate grey. “I wasn’t aware that I was expected to do so,” she said.

“You shouldn’t talk like that round here, Kath. You’ll have them thinking you’re a foreigner.” He waggled his eyebrows, which widened his eyes but still left them too small for his squashed nose and mouth. Once he’d done joking he said “Have you talked to him since you rang me?”

She might have pointed out that she hadn’t intended to phone him, especially since he seemed to mean the conversation to impress his cronies, several of whom were puffing in the background, either tobacco or just from shortness of breath. “I take it you’ve done as I asked,” she said. “You haven’t been troubling him.”

“I didn’t reckon he thought his old dad was much trouble. If you’re asking have I rang him, not yet.”

“Oh, Monty, don’t pretend you can’t speak properly.” Instead of this she murmured “Then kindly don’t. I’m sure you know he does what he says he’ll do.”

“I’ve not had much chance to find out for a while, have I?”

“You seem to think you can make up for lost time.” Kathy regretted having said this even before his eyes winced smaller. “Shall we try to get on with each other when everybody’s come to see him?” she suggested. “We don’t want to spoil his evening, do we?”

“Anybody’s going to perform tonight that wants to. Didn’t you read that?”

He was indicating a poster she’d assumed to be historic.
VARICOSE VERSES FROM PASSIONATE PENSIONERS. GUEST PRESENTER MONTY SMITH AND SON WILL READ TOO
.
“It doesn’t sound like much to interrupt his work for,” she objected.

“He’ll be hearing what real people think of him and his writing.”

“When will he be reading?”

“Second half.”

In that case it was even less urgent for Dudley to abandon whatever he was busy with at home. Rather than arouse another disagreement she said “I expect I should arm myself with a drink.”

“Nothing brings them back like being bought their booze, eh?” Monty said to nobody in particular and produced his wallet to hand her a fiver. “Keep that and treat him when he shows his face. Time I got the show started.”

She hadn’t expected to be bought the drink. She crumpled the note in her fist on the way to the bar. As she ordered a gin and tonic from the barman, who sported a grey pony-tail and whose arms looked lagged with tattoos, Monty took up a position at the far end of the room, pint in hand. “Settle down now, all youse, or youse’ll get no pomes,” he yelled, and before there was anything
like silence, began to bellow louder. “I can see lots of fellers that look like they’ve got pomes in them, and some judies too. Here’s your chance to show the establishment you’re still alive and they’d better take notice. What are you? Can’t hear you. What are you?”

While the room resounded with the answer Kathy found a seat. “Here you are, lovey,” a woman called, giving her a less than wholly toothy grin. Kathy took the other place at the small round rusty table as Monty announced “Here’s Pat McManus of Anfield to kick us off.”

“It’s one of me odious odes,” the wiry singleted pensioner said from an arthritic crouch. His poem proved to be addressed to a colostomy bag, and Kathy’s companion laughed so much that one of her front teeth shook. Kathy did her best at least to smile at the performers Monty introduced, oldsters who read verses about supplying urinary samples, or a ditty on losing the instructions to an old erector set, or a lay whose author had to spell the title aloud: “The National Hellth.” For contrast a musician played a harmonica for several more minutes than the number of notes he repeated while accompanying them with great ferocity on a drum strapped around his neck. At last Monty brought the first half of the proceedings to an end by declaiming a piece about taxes with the refrain “Give us back our bloody money then” and sidled over to Kathy through the crowd bound for the bar. “What’s he think he’s up to?” he demanded. “Keeping us in suspense?”