“I’m sorry,” Dudley said and risked saying “You understand, though.”
“Why didn’t you bring her? Doesn’t she like what you’re doing?”
“She’s learning.”
“Just so you don’t expect me to. Still got me doubts about your kind of thing. Find your roots and maybe you’ll surprise yourself. I reckon I’ve got to be one of them.”
“Can we discuss it another time?”
“Itching to get back to her, are you? Let’s hope she sees to your itch. What’s her name?”
The thumping had left Dudley’s skull, but returned while he struggled to think. “Patsy,” he said as soon as it occurred to him.
“I’m eager to meet her. When’s that going to be?”
“Not now. Promise you won’t come now.”
“I will if you promise not to show me up again, and that means no way at all.”
“If you promise not to tell my mother Patsy’s here.”
“Fair enough, that’s the stuff men do for each other, except you’ve not promised yet.”
Monty had to be impressed with the eventual products of the weekend. “I swear I won’t let you down,” Dudley said.
“Then your secret’s safe with me. Have a good night and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, like you could.”
“Tomorrow as well.”
“Randy sod. Making up for lost time, eh? I won’t waste any more of it for you. I’ll call you when we’ve got another gig.”
“I’ll make sure I’m free,” Dudley said and meant it. He mustn’t double-book himself like this again; it drew too much attention to him. He thrust the mobile into his trousers pocket as he strode into the bathroom. “You can stop now,” he shouted, “he’s gone,” but Patsy the package persisted in clapping her bound feet against the sides of the bath. He would find a better noise for her to make—one he would relish more than she would. He was running to the kitchen for a box of matches when the phone started to vibrate against his hip.
Had Monty changed his mind? Dudley was tempted to let the phone ring until his father left a message for him to overhear, but his nerves couldn’t wait. He dodged into the front room to be farther from the thumping and poked the button. “Yes,” he snapped.
“It’s Vincent. Is this a bad time?”
“No, it’s quite a good one.”
“Does that mean you’re working or you aren’t?”
“I will be in a minute.”
“Well, great. I won’t keep you away from it. I just wanted to let you know I want to start shooting with Lorna and Colin tomorrow.”
Dudley felt belittled and excluded. “Where?”
“I thought we’d start with the most famous location. I’ve got them on the ferry on the way to Birkenhead.”
For an instant Dudley felt as if Vincent was stealing both Mr Killogram and his ideas, and then he saw how to reclaim them. “That’s my scene. I thought of that.”
“Well, that’s ace. We’ve got the same mind. I must be finding your wavelength.”
“You better had.”
“How was that again? I didn’t catch it. The only thing is, if you’ve written the scene I haven’t had it.”
“I’m about to.”
“Great, then you can email it to me.”
“I’ll do more than email it.”
“Terrific. If it turns out the dialogue needs work when the actors get to it you’ll be there to make the changes.”
Dudley saw no reason why this should be necessary. On the contrary, he would be there to ensure no changes were made. “When’s everyone meeting?”
“Ten sharp at the Pier Head. How soon can I look for the scene?”
“The moment I’ve finished it. I’m starting now,” Dudley vowed and rang off. Thumps resounded faintly through the house. He thought of the matches and the scissors, but he couldn’t spend time on that now. He dashed upstairs, shouting “You’ll have to wait” before hurrying into his room. When the racket eventually faded and died he was typing FERRY at the top of the screen. He was grateful for the impetus to write, and delighted that he’d regained control of Mr Killogram from Vincent, but frustrated as well. He seemed to have robbed himself of the chance to experiment with the package; once he’d delivered the script he would need to catch up on his sleep if he was to keep an eye on the filming. Then he bared his teeth as he typed MR KILLOGRAM. Even if they filmed all day, he would have all Sunday night. It would be something to look forward to when he came home.
THIRTY
Patricia lurched awake and at once was furious with having fallen asleep. It felt like giving in to Dudley—like being robbed of the last vestige of her sense of self. She was about to drum her bruised feet against the bath in sheer enraged frustration when she managed to regain enough calm to think. She ought to keep still while she discovered whether that was any use. Perhaps if she stayed on her side and facing towards the room, she could tell what he was doing. Perhaps if she didn’t strain at it she would be able to hear.
She had no idea how long she’d spent in attempting to distract him by thumping the sides of her prison. It had begun to feel like her only means of proving her own existence. Whenever she’d had to rest because her legs and feet were aching so much, she’d tried to think that she was lulling him to believe she had finished vexing him. More than once he’d dashed into the room to snarl or yell at her. His reaction daunted her, but what else could she do? If she stayed quiescent, might that persuade him that he could risk letting her go? Surely he had no other option in real life—surely he didn’t imagine they were in one of his stories. She tried to slow her breathing and relax her entire body so that all she would do was hear.
The last time she’d heard him yelling at her to shut up, his voice had been beside her, yet lower. He must indeed be sleeping on the floor to block her escape, but she had increasingly less sense that he was anywhere near. She couldn’t smell his aftershave. Did she dare to trust that and her instincts? Tentatively to start with, and then with mounting confidence, she thumped her heels against the side of the bath.
Suppose he was watching her across the room? Suppose he was grinning at her blindness and awaiting her efforts to climb out of her prison? Her eyes stung with fury and their inability to penetrate the taped blackness. If her intuition had betrayed her and he hadn’t left the house, she would make it impossible for him to pretend. She squirmed onto her back, flattening her hands underneath her, and pounded the sides of the bath with her feet until they throbbed. The racket came so close to hurting her deafened ears that she didn’t think anyone else in the building would be able to put up with it. She had to believe that he’d left her alone at last—of course, because of the film.
She began to inch into a sitting position. Why was she being so cautious? She thrust hard with her feet, and the back of her neck slid up the end of the bath. She had an image of poking her head out like a soldier revealing her position in a trench. But her head hadn’t risen above the edge when she was dealt a vicious blow on the scalp.
Her eyes streamed, her mouth struggled to gape and to produce more than a clogged groan. She fell into a crouch, loathing its defensiveness, and tried vainly to judge where the next blow might come from, though nothing she could do would avoid it. Her fingers writhed, unable to reach up and rub the injury. She could only wait for the pain to fade. Very gradually it dulled and shrank to leave her skull feeling softened and exposed. Her head began to tingle with a wincing anticipation of the next attack. She wasn’t going to keep it held low like a victim when she had no reason to believe that would save her. She straightened up in furious defiance, but at the same time she couldn’t help ducking. Only the gesture prevented her from banging her scalp as hard as the first time on the object overhead.
She wanted to believe it was the sink. She needed to discover how she could have collided with it twice. She kept her head down while the aggravated pain retreated into tenderness, and then she raised it inch by slow inch. When she encounte
red the object once more she distinguished how flat and horizontal it was, not curved and slanting like the underside of the sink. In any case, it was too low. It was no higher than the edge of the bath.
It wouldn’t let her sit up. She twisted on her side and shuffled effortfully down the bath and strove to raise herself with only her body for leverage. As her upper half wavered erect, the barrier was waiting to press her head down. She fell back, bruising her knuckles, and strained her feet up. The barrier was above them too. By dragging them along the edge and then performing the same exploration with her head at the opposite end she ascertained that the lid covered virtually the entire bath.
There was a gap over the taps, but it was hardly wide enough to push her bound feet through. The lid was as thick as the length of her feet. Surely that had to be an exaggeration, and she mustn’t let it daunt her. She lay on her side again and crawled awkwardly up her prison, then used its end to help her rise into a crouch. Once her shoulders and the back of her head were wedged against the lid she heaved with all her strength.
It didn’t stir. Though her spine was straining practically upright, and all the muscles that were left available to her were throbbing with the effort, she felt tethered by her useless arms, unable to apply the purchase that might have made all the difference. At last she subsided, and when her body finished trembling she tried again. She tried until she grew sick and dizzy with striving, and then she switched to lying on her back and planting her feet against the barrier. They were just as ineffectual. She thought she could have been labouring for hours to shift the lid before she finally lay inert, panting through her nose, her blindness flaring dull red in time with her pulse. The lid was utterly immovable, at any rate by anyone in her condition. She might as well be buried in a coffin under six feet of earth.
THIRTY-ONE
Dudley stepped into the sunlight and immediately wondered if he should rush down to the next train home. He had to remind himself yet again that the package was safe. It might have been able to dislodge both of the wardrobe doors he’d laid over the bath, but even he had struggled to wrestle the armchair up the stairs, never mind to heave it on top of the doors to sit with its back to the wall. Nor was there any reason for his mother to sneak home after she’d promised to stay away. Just because he couldn’t bolt the front and back doors as he had while he was in the house, that wasn’t an invitation to her or any other intruder. He was sure that at the very least she would phone him before daring to invade, and she wasn’t going to risk phoning when that might interrupt his work. He turned his back on the station and strode past the massive empty office buildings towards the Pier Head.
There was no sign of Vincent or the cast on the wide paved space. If they were late, couldn’t he phone Vincent and persuade him to delay filming until after the weekend? As he hurried down the concrete ramp he was hoping their absence would give him the excuse. He hadn’t reached the landing-stage when he was greeted by a shout of “Here’s the author.”
At least the enthusiast was Mr Killogram. Vincent was there as well, adjusting his glasses with the hand that held the script, and so was Lorna Major, looking as determined as she had when Mr Killogram had hemmed her in at her audition. As they crossed the grubby planks to Dudley he wondered what was wrong, and then he knew. “Where’s the camera?”
“The crew’s joining us at Birkenhead.” As Vincent found a bunch of pages to give him he said “We nearly had someone else with us.”
Dudley would have examined the pages more closely if the vagueness of the remark hadn’t made him unnecessarily nervous. “Who?”
“Just some reporter.” Vincent sent him a glassed-in blink and said “I didn’t think you’d want her along.”
“Why not?”
“Because of Patricia, I thought.”
Dudley’s tongue grew as dry as his armpits had turned marshy, and he had to force it to work. “What about her?”
“She’ll be here, won’t she? We don’t want too many press about when we’re all getting used to working together. I did tell this reporter she’ll be welcome later on.” Vincent dealt him another blink that tugged a small frown low on his forehead. “Will Patricia be here?”
Dudley’s question was too urgent for him to take time to consider. “Why are you asking me?”
“Me and Colin got the idea you two were palling up. My fault for taking things for granted. I’ll call and see if she can join us.”
As Vincent took out his mobile Dudley seemed to feel Patricia’s stir like an insect in his pocket with eagerness to answer. “Don’t bother,” he blurted.
Lorna Major’s smile was more wry than sympathetic. “Have you been jilted by your publicity person?”
Dudley almost rounded on her and said too much. “I said don’t bother,” he told Vincent. “She’s gone.”
A ferry wallowed towards them, rubbing its flank against the tyres that buffered the landing-stage. Vincent turned to it but didn’t close his mobile. “Gone where?”
“She got an offer of a job in London. She had to catch the next train or she’d have lost it. She didn’t even have time to tell her parents she was going.”
The gangplank thumped the landing-stage, and Dudley hurried to be first on the upper deck. He sat on an aggressively hot bench and read the script while Vincent left Walt a message. Mr Killogram had kept all the lines Dudley had emailed, including “Ever heard of Mr Killogram? . . . You don’t know me but you will . . . How would you like to help me do my research?” Dudley was beginning to regret not having made the girl know who he was—after all, he was a famous creation—but perhaps the audience needed to be introduced to him. Vincent had given the girl nearly as much to say as Mr Killogram, and Dudley might have protested on his behalf, except that Mr Killogram was more than capable of dominating the scene and her. That was enough reason for Dudley not to care about the sight of Bidston and its observatory sailing towards him, nor their crouching out of view beyond the ferry terminal at Birkenhead. “We’re up here,” Vincent shouted as the gangplank struck wood.
He was calling to far fewer people than Dudley was expecting. One bore a camera upstairs on her shoulder while her companion brought the recording equipment. “Joan and Red,” Vincent introduced.
The brawny sound engineer’s short pelt of red hair covered little more than her scalp. Dudley wasn’t going to let her turning out to be a girl on close acquaintance throw him. “Are you going to be able to make a proper film like this?”
“It’s how we do it,” Joan said, widening her eyes until a bead of moisture squeezed between two wrinkles on her high pale forehead. “We shoot fast and light. We’re independents.”
“We’re as good as your script for sure,” Red told him.
He didn’t like her tone, nor Vincent for saying “We’ll show him, won’t we? Let’s rehearse that single take.”
Dudley had an unsatisfactory sense that everyone knew more about this than he did. He watched the camera prowl towards Lorna at the rail and swing to discover Mr Killogram behind her. “Out for a blow?” Mr Killogram said.
The ferry was cruising towards Seacombe and the mouth of the river. “Out for anything that does me good,” Lorna said.
“Like talking to strange men on ferries?” said Mr Killogram.
“You don’t look that strange to me.”
“Maybe the strangest don’t.”
“Go on then, tell me how you’re strange.”
“Ever heard of Mr Killogram?”
Dudley almost clapped, not just at hearing his line but at how Mr Killogram spiced it with a hint of secret amusement and eagerness. “Can’t say I have,” Lorna said.
“Then you’ll be on your own soon,” Mr Killogram said and, to Dudley’s delight, addressed his next observation to the camera. “I’m going to be famous.”
“Says who?”
“You don’t know me but you will. I’m a writer.”
Dudley found Lorna’s smile almost insufferably patronising, and had to
tell himself that it couldn’t be aimed at him. “Have I heard of you?” she said.
“Just call me Mr K.”
“Just think, I’ll be able to tell my friends I met a writer.”
She wasn’t meant to say the line with such an undertone of irony, but of course she would never tell anyone. “How’d you like to help me research?” Mr Killogram said.
Though they weren’t Dudley’s precise words, Mr Killogram had given them more bite. “Depends what you’re asking,” Lorna said.
“Can you see where the propeller is?”
Dudley was reminded of Patricia—of how she had excited him by seeming to wish for her flesh to be minced—until Lorna said “At the back, I should think.”
“Can you look for me?”
“I wouldn’t know where. I don’t build boats, I’m a student.”
“What are you studying?”
“Law. There are too many criminals. I want to be on the right side.”
“You think you’ll win.”
“The good people have to try.”
Dudley couldn’t stand Vincent’s additions now that he heard them, and was on the edge of saying so when Mr Killogram said “Won’t you help me? I’ve hurt my back.”
“How did you do that?” Lorna said with little sympathy.
“Just sitting at my desk.”
“Maybe you should get out more,” Lorna said, then relented as Mr Killogram winced. “Does it really hurt?”
“Too much to bend.”
“All right, you can be my good deed for today,” she said and craned over the rail. “I can’t see.”
“You need to lean a little further. I’ve got you. That’s it. A little more. Not much further now. There.”
“And zoom in on Colin’s face. That’s great, Colin. Just a touch of a smirk,” Vincent said, and told Dudley “We’ll cut in flashbacks later, when Lorna’s been made up. Only a few frames at a time but they’ll get to the audience. What do you think so far?”
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