Secret Story

by Ramsey Campbell

  As all the women he’d heard arriving at the pub began to cheer and clap and stamp, he trudged up the slipway until his eyes were above the edge of the promenade. A cyclist without lights was pedalling desperately towards Seacombe, where there was still a ferry, but otherwise the road overlooked by the town hall and large lit houses on top of grassy slopes was deserted. Across a wide space occupied by benches and a few dripping streetlamps, the windows of the pub reminded him of glass cases in an aquarium. In the case that contained the bar he saw Shell leap to her feet and throw her peaked cap down like a challenge in front of the beer-pumps, exposing a scalp that looked raw and bald through the distortions of water. She wrapped the cord of a microphone around her wrist and began to strut back and forth, putting Dudley in mind of an outsize bath toy bobbing on a string. “Men,” she said.

  This brought a chorus of derision that sounded by no means entirely humorous. Dudley saw a figure behind the bar throw up his hands and use them to protect his head. No doubt the insecure blob of his face was amusingly defensive too. “No worries, no boos for your booze,” Shell told him. “Carry on pulling us pints and you’re safe. You won’t be pulling anyone tonight, though, so don’t go pulling anything else. Which reminds me, girls, I heard about a feller who got pulled in the street this week. A bit more than pulled, more like yanked and tied in a knot, that’s if he’d got enough to tie a knot in.”

  Dudley needn’t lurk beneath the promenade as if he had something to be ashamed of. Beyond the ramp an area the size of his bedroom was unlit, and in any case the rain would make him unrecognisable if not invisible from the pub. He stepped boldly onto the promenade, baring wet teeth at the additional downpour, as Shell finished waiting for the hoots of gleeful mirth to subside. “Pity it wasn’t us girls that gave him what he was asking for,” she said.

  Dudley glared at her prancing fluid shape and clenched his fists as he folded his arms, a gesture that seemed to squeeze a juice of rain out of him. “It was on our behalf, though,” Shell was saying. “What’s he like? He’s a civil servant, you know the breed. About as civil as a teenager having a row with her mam about staying out all night, and thinks everyone’s his servant, like we ought to touch our forelock and call him sir. Face like a rat sniffing in a bin. Dressed up in a suit and tie so nobody’ll notice him skulking off to a sex show to have it off with his fist. Wouldn’t you know he works in the jobs office.”

  The derisive uproar this provoked coincided with an especially sodden gust of rain in Dudley’s face. They were only jeering at his job, he thought, and it mightn’t be his much longer. He shook water off his face and blinked it out of his eyes, and was close to laughing aloud at how little Shell knew about him when she said “They think we’re a lower species ’cos we’ve got to crawl to them for jobs, don’t they? Here’s the worst. One girl went to him and when she’d finished telling him all the stuff they make us tell them so they can look at us like we shouldn’t have bothered getting out of bed, he treated her like she was a whore.”

  The pub erupted with hissing louder than the storm. The women were behaving as if they’d seen a villain. Dudley grinned until his mouth dripped, because they couldn’t see him. “I’m not saying I approve of the job she went for, like,” Shell said, “but it’s her choice how to use her body, right? The joke is it’s men like him that see women’s pay is so crap they’re better off selling themselves, and men like him that pay for them, and now it’s men like him are trying to make them ashamed of doing it as well. We all know why, don’t we? He’s scared of real women in case they mess up his fantasies about us. That’s the kind of joke that doesn’t make me laugh.”

  “Tell us about what happened to him,” a woman’s hoarse shout urged.

  “Seems her brother caught up with this dud in the street. Maybe he thought if the feller was going to think up sexy stuff about her it should hurt him to. The way I heard it, he twisted his tap till it needed a plumber. What’s funnier, the street was full of people and none of them did anything when the dud started squealing for help. Must have known he deserved it, or they thought he was busking. He’d have sounded like a lot of different singers. Here’s a what do you call them classical thingies, an alto. Here’s the soppy one, a soprano. Here’s a choirboy. Here’s a eunuch.”

  As Shell demonstrated by shrieking increasingly high, the ache from which the rain had distracted him renewed its attack on Dudley’s groin. “I told him I was here tonight,” Shell was saying. “He wouldn’t have got in, but he might have hung around outside to listen, only it’s pissing down so much that would have chased him off. He’ll be making up stories about shutting up women by doing them in.”

  He didn’t move as she pressed her face against the glass. He liked the way the rain on the window made her face look as if bits were being torn off to wriggle for his entertainment. “Here’s a bunch of women nobody’s going to shut up,” she thundered as she turned her back on him. “Women, we’re the real wild bunch, and men had better know it. Haul on your pump, lad, if you don’t want me ending up with no voice.”

  Dudley wished she had. He was more aware of the relentless downpour than of anything else she said. Male drivers raging on the roads, single fathers making fools of themselves by trying to raise daughters, solitary men embarrassed by washing their clothes in front of women in the laundrette: none of this involved him. She imagined she had dealt with him; she thought she’d turned him into a joke. He cupped his hands around his ache and kept crouching over it as though the rain was beating him down, when in fact he was adding every gibe she made about men to his fury, a hard cold lump at the centre of him. Even her abandoning the subject of him, and his having to sweep rain out of his ears in case she revived it, enraged him. What right did she and her cronies have to cast him out in the storm? What kind of man would cower behind the bar and reduce himself to acting as their accomplice? Dudley couldn’t tell if his eyes were blurred by pain or rage or water by the time she said “Well, girls, are we done with the wankers for another week?”

  As the cheers and stamping trailed off she released her wrist from the microphone cord and vanished into the depths of the tank that was the window. Almost at once the doorway to its left illuminated slanting parallels of rain. Neither of the women who ducked as they ran to a car was Shell. The headlamp beams swung towards Dudley but failed to locate him before the car crawled uphill to the main road. Nobody he didn’t want to see him would.

  For too soddenly long after that, however, nobody else emerged—just a hubbub that showed no sign of abating. It didn’t falter even when the barman hung a towel over the pumps. The gesture reminded Dudley that judges used to don a cap in the days when they were allowed to pronounce a death sentence. Very eventually it began to drive the women forth, and he liked the notion that each of them was bowing her head in deference to him, although they were unaware how close he was to them. He hoped Shell was waiting for the last of them to leave; he could imagine her ensuring that she had the final word. The pub sounded empty now, and all at once he was afraid he’d overlooked her leaving in the midst of a clump of her admirers. The door opened again, and two women he had never previously seen dashed out, screeching at the rain. Both their noise and their uselessness to him knotted his rage tighter and harder, and he almost missed seeing the door reopen before it had quite shut. “Anybody want a lift?” Shell called.

  Dudley’s mouth gaped in a silent protest that let rain gather on his tongue. As he swallowed so as not to cough, one woman shouted “We’re only round the corner, thanks.”

  Dudley watched them sprint uphill as Shell ran to the farthest car beside the streetlamps. The moment they disappeared around a corner, he followed her beyond the light of the lamps. She was poking at the door of the Viva with a key when he enquired from some yards away “Have I missed it? Is that Shell?”

  As she twisted her head towards him she used her free hand to yank the peak of her cap down, perhaps to fend off the rain. “You’re joking. You’re not, it�
�s Dud. I’ve been talking about you. I said I would.”

  “What were you saying?” he asked with his face in the dark.

  “What do you reckon? How you’re the hottest thing around.”

  Was the second part a question or a joke? She mumbled it as she shut herself in the car. Could she have said it to her audience once she’d given up the microphone? After all, it was no less than he deserved. He was making to enquire when she lowered the window an inch. “So what are you hanging round here for?” she hardly seemed interested in learning.

  “I wanted to hear what you said.”

  “I told you it was just for girls.” She aimed the peak of her cap at his streaming forehead while she peered through the slit at his face. “Don’t say you’ve been out here in this all the time I’ve been on.”

  “I couldn’t find you in time. I had to walk from home,” he needed her to believe. “There’s no bus from me to here.”

  Shell turned the key in the ignition, and the engine emitted a splutter that sounded like mirth. “Well, it doesn’t look like you can get any wetter. Maybe your mam will give you a rub with a towel when you get home. What are you waiting for?”

  “You were asking if anyone wanted a lift. Don’t you want the hottest thing around in your car?”

  For some moments she stared up at him, and he hid his eyes by clearing them of rain with a thumb and forefinger. “Christ, you’re so pathetic,” she said. “I’m going to the tunnel. If that way’s any use to you, get in.”

  As he opened the front passenger door he imagined the tunnel that led under the river to Liverpool, a long deserted passage with protracted stretches of lonely darkness between a very few lights. It was nothing like that and no use to him. He was lowering his renewed ache on the seat next to Shell when she cried “Jesus, don’t just sit like that. Put something over the seat. There’s some plastic in the back from when they fixed the car.”

  No doubt she didn’t want the upholstery soaked, but she was treating him as if he was diseased. Before he’d finished dragging the plastic sheet between the seats to drape it over his, his back felt naked to the rain. At last he was able to slam the door with a fierceness that earned a scowl from Shell. He risked leaning back, only to recoil from feeling his shirt squelch. He was about to hope aloud that there was nothing wrong with the car, which hadn’t moved, when Shell leaned forward to glower through the windscreen. “Here’s something else men have done to the world, this weather. I wanted to drive along the prom for a bit to see the lights over the water.”

  “You can’t drive along the promenade. Look, the sign says.”

  Shell turned her head as if it was hardly worth the effort to observe him. “God, and you want people to think you know about criminals,” she said. “I could introduce you to a few but you’d run away crapping your pants. You’re nothing but an office worker that’s scared of breaking any rules.”

  Dudley let her see his eyes and teeth glint in the dark. “I was trying to warn you. You wouldn’t want to drive along there alone with me.”

  “You what?” Shell almost choked with mirth or pretended she did. “Are you trying to be like that pathetic sod in your story?”

  “He isn’t pathetic at all. You’re too fond of calling people that.”

  “Only them that are. Am I supposed to be scared?”

  “You aren’t doing what I said you shouldn’t, anyway.” When this failed to provoke her he said “I expect it was a man who put the sign up.”

  “You won’t be sure of that much longer. We’re taking over everywhere.”

  “You’re doing what men say you have to now, though. You know we know best really. Women just need to do as they’re told.”

  When she glared at him he was afraid that he’d miscalculated and angered her so much that she would order him out of the car. The staff of the pub might be able to hear whatever happened. As he struggled not to take back anything he’d said, she faced the windscreen. “Watch this,” she invited, and sent the car screeching past the lamps towards the pub.

  The headlamp beams lit on the empty street that climbed to the main road, and then they swerved to find the promenade that led all the way to the mouth of the river. She jerked them high to show that the promenade was deserted except for swaying sheets of rain, and sped the car past the No Entry sign as if she was entering a race. “Scary enough for you yet, Dud?” she said.

  He took time to laugh before saying “About as much as a little girl having a tantrum.”

  She rammed the accelerator down and gave him a tight smile that widened in triumph. “You’re sweating cobs.”

  He finished wiping his forehead and showed her the back of his hand. “That’s rain. Can’t you tell the difference? You’re no more scary than any other woman driver.”

  “Aren’t I?” she cried with a vehemence that left reason behind. “Try this.”

  It was happening, he thought—in fact, she was improving on his plan. As the car swerved down the nearest slipway he saw how high the tide had mounted. It must have thrown Shell too, because she tramped on the brake so hard that the wheels on his side of the car skidded almost to the edge of the concrete. The vehicle shuddered to a halt halfway down the ramp. “How’s that then, Mr Frightening Writer?” Shell demanded. “Will that do you?”

  A wave caught the headlamp beams before flattening itself under the car, and Dudley thought he felt it tug at the front wheels. “You want to back up now while you can,” he said.

  He was just in time to turn her against putting the car in reverse. “Come ahead, tell me why I shouldn’t,” she said, hardly bothering to scoff.

  “You might be too scared to work it. You don’t want to be alone down here with me where nobody can see us.”

  Her hand darted from the gear lever to the handbrake, on which she hauled with all her strength, adding her right hand to drag it another ratchet higher. “Now you’ve got what you’ve been drooling for. Let’s find out who scares who.”

  “You can’t scare me. You don’t even make me laugh.”

  “Half of that back at you, Dud.”

  He stared into her face, which looked squashed into hiding by the cap she had yanked lower. “That doesn’t mean anything to me,” he said as rain clattered the windscreen wipers against the glass.

  “You’re never going to scare me. You’re even more pathetic when you try. You’re a joke, a crap one. You make me laugh ’cos that’s all I can do with creeps like you.”

  He let her wonder what was in his eyes before he spoke. “You’ve never met anyone like me.”

  “Christ, is that what your mam tells you? Maybe she thinks it and maybe she doesn’t, but it won’t fool the rest of us.”

  “Don’t you talk about my mother. She doesn’t know all about me.” That was far too defensive, and so he added “She’d be scared if she did.”

  “You’ve only got one line, have you, Dud? Do you try it on all the girls? No wonder you’re on your own. It won’t work with me either.”

  The corners of his mouth began to creep up. “But it does,” he said.

  “I’ve got to hear this. You’re an act all by yourself, you are. I could get you booked along with me if they mightn’t think you’re funnier than I am. Are you sure the girls you try it on don’t? Go on then, what do they do?”

  “Some of them scream. Some of them can’t.”

  Her lips twitched in disgust, putting him in mind of worms turned up from beneath the rock that was her cap. “Jesus, you’re really trying to convince yourself of all your garbage. Maybe you even have. You want to see somebody.”

  “I’m seeing you.”

  “Not for much longer,” Shell said, reaching for the handbrake.

  “You’re scared at last, then. You’re scared to hear about them.”

  “No, I’m bored of hearing you come out with so much bollocks.” Nevertheless she twisted her body, so far as he could distinguish it within its camouflage, towards him as though to issue an additional challen
ge. “You won’t give up till you’ve told me a bedtime story, will you? Let’s see if you can even do that. Your mam sent in the story, maybe she wrote it as well.”

  That almost goaded him to waste time denying it. “You should have known where it came from. I thought you were supposed to be from Liverpool.”

  “I’m Scouse and proud of it. I reckon you’re the kind that’s a Merseysider when it suits them, and I’ve no idea what you’re on about.”

  “Try and think back. Didn’t you ever hear about a girl that fell under a train at Moorfields?”

  “That’s just that crap story of yours again,” Shell said, and then she blinked hardness into her eyes. “Stick around, though. Didn’t something like that really happen now you mention it?”

  “Angela, her name was. I forget her last one. It was in the paper. On the radio as well.” Dudley’s thighs had begun to shiver with the rain that encased them. “I called her Greta in my story,” he said. “Close but not too close.”

  Shell thrust a hand into her trousers and snatched out a mobile phone. “Who are you calling?” Dudley said at once.

  “You’ll find out,” Shell assured him, then glowered at the unilluminated phone before shoving it back in her pocket. “Out of action when you need it, just like a man. You’re lucky, but you won’t be for long. I’ll be telling Walt tomorrow.”

  “What do you think you’ll be telling him?”

  “Oh, was that supposed to be the bit where the killer owns up because his victim’s helpless? Not this girl.” Shell left mockery behind to say “I’ll be telling him you turned some poor girl’s accident into your little piece of porn. I don’t think he’ll want it any more. Maybe I’ll give your mam a ring as well to let her know how sick you really are. What are you laughing at? I’m not joking.”