Secret Story (35 page)

She flattened her hands against it and took a breath that made her yearn to use her mouth too. She raised her knees and brought her feet under her and shoved with everything she had. Her dizziness reared up as she did. Had she spent the energy that would have lifted her all the way? Her legs wavered, her knees shook, and she leaned on her aching wrists to find a last trace of strength. Her hands gave her a shove, and she was on her feet but staggering sightlessly forward. She threw herself back, and the door bruised her shoulders. She mustn’t care about the pain. Once the darkness finished pitching and tossing she sidled to grasp the doorknob. But it was inches higher than her hands.

She could reach it—just. By balancing awkwardly on tiptoe she was able to capture it between her fingertips. Before she succeeded in twisting it her feet gave way, and she stumbled a pace into the darkness. She’d nearly turned it, she promised herself as she executed a clumsy hop to back up to the door. She strained high on her toes again and pressed her fingertips against the knob so fiercely that they stung. By leaning to her right she was able to move it. The door lurched towards her, tugged by her unhandy grasp, and struck the backs of her legs. She hopped forward an inch, clinging to the knob to bring the door with her. She was about to repeat the process when all the vigour seemed to drain out of her legs through her feet. Her balance collapsed, flinging her backwards, slamming the door.

It was only her first try. She could do it again. Indeed she could, but just the same repetitive performance time after time, slam after mocking slam. When she tried leaving the door open an inch and edging along it to widen the gap, it fell shut of itself even if she didn’t overbalance against it. She began to weep, cold
sticky trails that zigzagged between the tape and her cheeks. What else could she do except rehearse her grotesque jig with the door until her audience came home? Nothing else in the unseen room was even so close to giving her hope. Her actions had become virtually mindless—wrestle with the doorknob, stagger an inch or two, lose balance, stagger back—when she thought she heard another sound besides her own. However distant it seemed to her crippled ears, was the front doorbell ringing?

It was only when it rang a second time that she realised the chance she was missing. She began to slam the door as fast and as loud as she could. The bell rang again, and she prayed that whoever was outside was impatient with the racket Patricia was making—impatient enough to do something about it. Just the sense of being heard by someone was an agonising relief, so long as it led somewhere. “I’m up here,” Patricia tried to call out but couldn’t even mouth. “Let me out or get someone who can.”

Dudley was thinking of the most entertaining way to let the package realise he was home when he saw Brenda Staples outside his front door. She must be looking for his mother, unless she had understood at last that he was worth knowing. She couldn’t suspect anything, but he made to dodge between the houses while he thought of a suitably innocent greeting. Before he could, she noticed him. “Dudley,” she called like a teacher.

However insufferably she might behave, the package could pay extra on her behalf. Apparently she felt entitled to stand at his gate with her arms folded and require to be told “Where were you about to dash off to?”

“I forgot something.”

“It looked as if you didn’t want to face me.”

“I’ve got plenty to do, that’s all.” She was aggravating the rage
that the thought of the false Mr Killogram inflamed in him. “What do you want?” he said.

“No need to speak to me like that. I’m sure your mother wouldn’t like you to.” Having settled that on him, she said “Is someone working in your house?”

“I do. You know that. I’m a writer.”

“I mean real work. The kind a workman does.”

It didn’t matter what he said so long as it cleared the woman out of his path and sent her into her house. “There’s none of them. We don’t need anything.”

“Well, I’m sure somebody’s in there.”

“There isn’t,” Dudley said, and had the awful notion that Kathy had sneaked home. “Why are you saying there is?”

Brenda Staples lifted her head, and he thought her flat stare was all the answer she was prepared to dole out to him until he saw that the movement was indicating his house. “Perhaps you can explain that,” she said.

It was the package. It must be kicking the sides of the bath. As he willed the muffled thuds to give up so that he could persuade the woman that the noise had been somewhere other than his house, she took his silence for confusion. “Has someone broken in?” she said with at least a simulation of concern. “Shall I call the police?”

“No,” Dudley blurted and managed to laugh. “Why would we want them? You’d just be wasting their time.”

“Don’t try so hard to impress me with your manliness. It might be someone you can’t deal with. Half of them are on drugs.”

“I can.” The thudding was in his head now, which made him feel that it had escaped from the house. “It’s only something I left on.”

“Left on,” Brenda Staples said and gazed at him with incredulity not far short of contempt. “You’ll be telling me next you listen to that sort of thing when you write.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” He was unable to gauge whether the noise was growing louder or just pounding his perceptions raw. “Whatever helps me write is fine,” he came close to shouting.

“Well, it certainly won’t do for the rest of us. I’m sure your mother wouldn’t stand for it if she were here.”

“How do you she isn’t?” Dudley said in case that could help.

“I hope she would have answered the doorbell. I rang it for long enough. I presume she isn’t quite so shut into her own mind as some.” Brenda Staples weighed this down with her gaze before adding “Besides which she told me she would be away for the weekend. I take it that’s why you’ve been making such a din.”

He was barely able to pretend to be polite. “Why did she tell you?”

“Presumably so that I could keep an eye on the situation.”

“What?” His grin was almost too tight to let his words out. “Which?”

“Your house.” With a frown and a shake or at least a twitch of her head she commented “I’m amazed you call that sort of racket music at your age. I know some people who haven’t been brought up to know better drive around with it in their cars and inflict it on the rest of us, but it doesn’t belong in this neighbourhood.”

With an effort he produced a laugh to accompany the grin. “I don’t call it music.”

“Then what on earth is it supposed to be?”

He was about to blame the television when he realised she might have spied through the front window that it was switched off. “The computer,” he said the moment that the idea darted into his head.

“You’re saying it makes that noise when you’re using it? No wonder you write the sort of thing you do.”

“Of course it doesn’t,” he retorted, only to find that the noise was picking his thoughts apart. “It’s, it’s a, you know what I mean,
an alarm. An alarm programme. It’s to tell me when I forget to switch off the computer.”

“I suggest you do as you’re told, then. I’ll wait here till you have.”

She moved just enough to let him onto the path and turned to watch his progress. “You don’t need to do that,” he said through the gap he forced between his teeth.

“I mean to, though. And I’ll be listening out for any further disturbance.”

Surely the banging had grown louder only because he was closer to the house. He snatched out his keys and almost dropped them for realising what the noise was: the slamming of a door. He would have liked to believe a wind was responsible, but the evening was otherwise so calm that it might have been designed to draw attention to the sound. He fumbled the key into the lock and twisted it, and then being watched paralysed him. Hesitating would only aggravate the situation. He threw the door open and fled into the house.

The hall was deserted. The noise was upstairs, and he swung to confront Brenda Staples, who had taken at least one step after him. “Good night,” he said and slammed the door.

The sound was echoed from above. As he dashed upstairs the banging of the bathroom door seemed to become entangled with his footsteps. He seized the doorknob, which writhed like a dying insect. He flung the door away from him and stormed into the room.

The package staggered backwards, he hoped with fear as well as lack of balance. The backs of its legs struck the edge of the bath, and it sprawled into the clutter it had made. It finished up with its head and shoulders in the armchair, which was leaning in the corner by the taps and resting on the askew wardrobe doors. At least nothing appeared to be broken. The feeble struggles of the package to right itself filled him with an excited disgust
that he was eager to intensify. He was determined to exact some pleasure from the day, to compensate for the rest of it. The package hadn’t experienced real helplessness yet, and it would struggle a good deal more enthusiastically before he’d finished—and then, with a rush of frustration that peeled his lips back from his clenched teeth, he saw he had a problem. He couldn’t render the package too helpless. He couldn’t carry it where he meant to dispose of it, not now that Brenda Staples might be watching. It was going to have to walk.

At the moment it seemed incapable of standing up. Its disabled attempts enraged him. “Get away from there, you useless bitch,” he snarled. “Look at the mess you’ve made.” He grabbed it by the shoulders and hauled it across the room to the corner where the mirror ended. He propped the lump of a head against its own reflection and left the package there like a handcuffed suspect while he wrestled the armchair onto the landing and leaned the wardrobe doors against the banisters above the stairwell.

The package was straining to butt itself away from the wall. It didn’t know that it was resting against its reflection, and that made it seem as good as mindless. Whatever it had once been, he thought it was barely human now. Soon it wouldn’t be at all, but he had to fill the intervening hours somehow. “Back in your trough,” he said and took hold of the shoulders to return it to the bath.

It could hardly walk. Its shuffling didn’t match his speed as he propelled it across the room. That would be no use when he had to take it outside. “Get where you’re told,” he growled as he shoved the backs of the legs against the bath. As the package began to topple he let go, and it fell in with a thud.

He would have hoped that might have knocked more than the breath out of it for a while. It appeared to stun the package into keeping still, but not for long. The brown lump of a head rose towards him as the body wormed to sit against the end of
the bath. The lump retained just enough of its features to seem to be presenting him with an expression of blind defiance. Did the package imagine that by sitting up it could prevent him from covering it with the lid? That simply demonstrated how senseless it was. “Never mind looking like that. Remember what happened to her in the stories,” he warned it, only to realise that the package hadn’t read the ones about itself. At once he knew how they could spend the time until dark.

He wanted something to eat first. He would have liked some sleep as well. It was worse than unfair if the package had caught up on its sleep after he’d lain awake to ensure it stayed put. At least it wasn’t going to be eating ever again, and he grinned as he left the room stealthily enough for the package to believe he was still watching. He ran downstairs and hacked a chunk off a loaf from the refrigerator, then heaped a plate with it and a hunk of cheddar and a carton of the butter Kathy had given up trying to persuade him to change for margarine. He snatched a knife from the draining-board to butter with and almost forgot to bolt the front door against intruders in his haste to return to the bathroom.

As far as he could judge, the package hadn’t moved. He hoped it was afraid to. He stooped to bring his head close to the object it called one, and was pleased to see it jerk at his shout. “I’m back. You never knew I’d gone.” By the time he finished it had grown frustratingly calm or at any rate stiff. It wouldn’t be able to stay peaceful inside its wrappings once he’d had his snack. He sat on the lidded toilet and stood the carton of butter in the sink while he coated his bread thick. He took a bite followed by a mouthful of cheese. “Bet you don’t know what I’m doing now,” he said once swallowing let him.

Suppose it thought he was masturbating? He didn’t know whether to be amused by its mistake or angered by its presumption that it could cause him to do so. He turned on the cold tap and flung a handful of water at the package. As a stain darkened
on its bulging breasts it executed a satisfactory jump before it could control itself. “Wondering what that was?” he called. “I’ll bet you’ve had some of it spilled over you in your life.”

The notion put him off his food. He had to breathe hard and swallow harder to regain his appetite. The effort of keeping a mouthful down stoked his loathing and inflamed his thoughts. “Was that why you wanted me to hire that Mr Killogram?” he demanded. “Were you hoping he’d do it to you?”

The idea of her ruining the film for that reason made him wish the knife he was holding were sharper. He could use it to dig out an eye or both, but he would have to unwrap the package ahead of time. He needed to remember not to do anything that would hinder his getting rid of the package unnoticed, but he wanted an answer. “Do you know what I’m talking about? If you don’t you’d better show me.”

The package didn’t stir. Was it daring to defy him? “Move while you can,” he shouted. “Did you know that actor meant to spoil my film?”

The lump of a head tilted up. If it nodded, he’d draw some expression from it. In a moment it shook from side to side, just vigorously enough to convey its response. “I didn’t think so,” Dudley felt generous for saying. “Did you only want to help me? Don’t worry. You have.”

That deserved a reaction, but the lump betrayed none. The erased face could have been presenting him with mute indifference or even mocking him. Its secretiveness provoked him to say in a voice that made his teeth ache as much as his eyes “We know there’s only one real Mr Killogram, don’t we? Do you want to hear what he’s been doing over the weekend?”