Secret Story (2 page)

“I keep telling you she’s not worth it. You should listen,” said the young man, but stood up.

At least he’d kept them talking and distracted them from doing worse to Greta. He stepped onto the deserted platform and hurried alongside the window. Greta’s captor brandished the knife in front of her to remind him. The young man hesitated, and she felt as if her nose and mouth were stuffed with charred paper. Then he pointed at the gang, stubbing both forefingers on the glass.

“Bastard!” the man with the knife screamed. The young man sprinted into the carriage, and all the gang jumped up. Greta was afraid for him till two railway policemen strode past the window to board the train. The tattooed man threw the door between the carriages open. As the gang fled, the young man caught the spitter by the scruff of the neck and threw him face down in his own leavings. “That’s it, wipe it up,” he said.

When the police chased the gang off the train and up an escalator he sat at the far end of the seat opposite Greta. He didn’t speak till the train moved off. “All right?” he said.

“Why, I shouldn’t think I’ve ever felt better in my life.”

“He didn’t cut you, I meant.”

Greta swept the pages that had been thrown into her lap onto the seat. “Oh no, I’m not hurt at all. Can’t you see?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t stop them ruining your book. It’s all over the place though, isn’t it?”

“It is now.” She pressed her legs together so that they wouldn’t shake when she stood up. “Here’s my stop,” she said.

“And mine.”

She stepped down on the platform at Moorfields and hurried to the escalator that was taller than a house. The young man walked up the escalator beside hers. Though it was stopped, he easily kept pace with her. Halfway up he said, “I called the police, you know.”

“Oh, did you?” Greta said as if he was a lying child. “How did you manage that on a mobile when we were in a tunnel?”

“I called before we went in.”

“There wasn’t anything to call about then,” she felt clever for saying.

“I saw them get on smoking and come along the train. I could see they were heading for you and what they were like. I tried to call again when we were underground to make sure the police were waiting, but as you say, the phone wouldn’t work. That’s why I stayed low when I did.”

“Well, if you really did all that, thank you.”

She was being polite—more than she felt he deserved. They were at the top of the escalators now. A broad low corridor as white as cowardice stretched ahead. It was empty except for the echoes of her footsteps and the young man’s alongside her. “Excuse me now,” she panted. “I’m late.”

“I don’t mind hurrying. I wouldn’t like to think you might end up in any more danger.”

Even to Greta her voice and its echoes sounded shrill. “I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself now, thank you.”

“Suppose you run into someone else like them?”

“At least they mightn’t insult me in every single way they could think of.”

“Is that meant to be me?”

“There’s nobody else here.”

“I thought the best idea was to pretend I was worse than them.”

“Why did you have to pretend?”

“To take their minds off you. It seemed to work.”

The passage ended at a bank of escalators half the height of the first one. The middle escalator was switched off. He climbed it as the stairs carried Greta upwards. “I just wanted to say—” he said.

Greta didn’t care. She clattered up the rising metal steps, but he took his two at a time and was less breathless than Greta at the top. On either side a short tiled passage led to the Northern Line. She dashed up the stairs between them, which led to the exit to the street at the far end of a broad white corridor the length of a football pitch. “Are you sure you’re all right?” the young man said.

She had to catch her breath. “I told you once.”

“I was saying I expect everything I said about you was wrong.”

“Most of it. Far too much.”

“I was trying to shock them. Except . . .”

She was walking as fast as she had breaths for, but she used one to ask, “What?”

“I’m guessing you haven’t got a boyfriend at the moment or you’d have threatened them with him.”

“Maybe.”

“Are you looking for one?”

“I don’t need to look.”

“I mean, do you think you might like one who’s shown he can take care of you?”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Don’t you think two can do it twice as well?”

They were at the corner of the passage. Beyond it was yet another deserted bank of escalators. “This isn’t the way,” she said. “I’ve gone wrong.”

As she turned back, he did. “What do you think?” he said.

Her question seemed to scratch the walls. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t think we should just part, do you? Not when we went through that together. Let me give you my number.”

“No thank you.”

“Or you can give me yours if you’d rather.”

“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.

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.