Authors: Ramsey Campbell
Dudley was sure that she was pouting at him through the glass in the middle of the cubicle that enclosed them. “Just tell me how to sell myself,” she said.
He ducked to the form that he was filling in on her behalf: seven O levels, three A levels, a middling degree in philosophy and history . . . “No, look at me,” she said.
Though the June sunlight fell short of the counter full of half a dozen cubicles, the heat seemed to flare up around him. He levelled his gaze at her and saw a small pale pretty face rendered whiter by a mane of red hair, clothes that would have cost more than they should for the little they were, especially the sleeveless yellow top exposing inches of a freckled cleft. “What experience have you had?” he cleared his throat to ask.
“Plenty. Just not the sort you can put in a box.”
Dudley rested the tip of his ballpoint inside one. “Anything that will help us find you a job?”
“It might. Promise you won’t blush.”
He felt as if the heat had seized him by the cheeks. All his interview questions had fled into hiding. “Why should I?” he heard himself protest.
“How would you fancy me as a table dancer?”
The fan behind the cubicles creaked towards him, tousling his hair and plastering his damp shirt to his back. The glass showed his hair fluttering erect as the fan lingered on him, and he clenched his fists in order not to slap his scalp. “I don’t mean personally,” she said, tilting a pink and white smile up to him, “though you’d be welcome if you got me the work.”
The heat in his face seemed to swell his lips tight shut. Could all this be a joke? If so, played by whom? He grew aware of Mrs Wimbourne’s voice as low as a priest’s in a confessional, Trevor’s weary baritone intoning every question on the form, Vera turning brisk whenever her client hesitated over an answer, Colette sounding even more sympathetic than Dudley had felt when he was as new to the job. None of them struck him as a likely culprit, and Morris was surely too busy having a breakdown at home, while Lionel seemed preoccupied with talking on a headset to his fellow security personnel in the shopping precinct. “I don’t suppose it would be a full-time job,” the girl was saying. “I could model as well. Same line of work.”
Dudley licked his lips to prise them apart. “I’m sorry,” he said on his way to the truth. “We don’t deal with that kind of thing.”
“What kind?”
“I think you must know.”
“I really don’t. Your job is finding people jobs, isn’t it? Why are you saying you can’t touch those?”
“I’m not saying it. The government does.”
“You’re the one talking to me. You tell me what kind.”
“The s—” His hiss glistened on the window as he lowered his voice. “The sex trade,” he mumbled.
“That’s what the girls do on the dock road. Are you calling me a prostitute?”
Sometimes the cubicles reminded him of the kind prison visitors in films used, and never more so than now. “I didn’t say that,” he protested.
“You looked it. I wouldn’t feel superior to anyone if I were you, not with your job.”
“I’m sorry, I must ask you to keep your voice down.”
“Why must you?” she said louder still. “So nobody knows what you’ve been calling me?”
“Trouble, Dudley?”
He didn’t need to hear Mrs Wimbourne’s question to know she had arrived behind him. He was trapped between her reflection, which looked flattened even broader than she was, and her cloying perfume that didn’t quite disguise the smell of the cigarettes she smoked outside during her breaks. “I came for a perfectly legal job,” the girl said, “and he’s making me feel like a whore.”
Dudley’s face blazed afresh. “I didn’t use any such word.”
“We both know what you meant. And you spat at me.”
“That’s an absolute lie. I was trying to find this young lady a job she was qualified for.”
“My friends from uni had to settle for nothing jobs,” the girl told Mrs Wimbourne, and shoved her chair away. “I want to make some real money while I’m young enough,” she said and lowered her gaze to Dudley. “I won’t be doing anything bad except in your grubby little mind. Maybe you need one of those to work in this grubby little place. You can do better.”
The last remark was aimed only at Colette, who emitted the
beginnings of a timid giggle. As the girl stalked past the rows of pale green bucket seats and out of the job centre, Mrs Wimbourne said “Nothing wrong with my office that I can see.”
She’d left just enough room for Dudley to swivel his chair. “The public spend all day playing on the computers where my mother works,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to work where you can’t be private.”
The fan fluttered Mrs Wimbourne’s dress and swept her perfume at him before he could hold his breath. When she frowned he thought she didn’t want to be reminded that her centre hadn’t been converted to the open plan, but she said “I didn’t care for your client’s attitude. I hope none of it rubbed off on you, Colette.”
Colette giggled a nervous denial as Dudley turned to the form on the counter. “Mark it terminated by the client,” Mrs Wimbourne said and watched Lionel lock the door. “That’s another day dusted. Fetch your belongings and we can hop off to our burrows.”
As they converged on the dull yellow three-seater staffroom that smelled of stagnant tea, Vera said “Dudley, were you making up to that rude woman? You’ve a nice girl right here, or am I being an interfering old bag, Colette?”
Colette bit her plump lower lip and shook her head vaguely and made a joke of hiding her round chubby suntanned face behind her long black hair as she stooped to grab the white rabbit that was her rucksack. Trevor bowed and passed it to her, then smoothed the remnant of his greyish hair over his glistening scalp. “I think as long as we’re saying what we think you can both do better.”
Vera rubbed her forehead under her short dyed auburn hair as if to erase all the wrinkles and rounded her mouth until it tugged her thin cheeks against the bones. “I think they make a lovely young couple,” she objected.
“Not better than each other, better than this treadmill. When I was your age, Colette, or even Dudley’s I wanted adventure. Don’t get stuck here or you’ll end up like me and Vera with nothing to look forward to but dying on a pension.”
He ambled to the door to bow out Vera and Colette, and Dudley felt as if he might never escape the room that looked steeped in weak tea. The outer office had already grown stuffy now that the fan was still, but the instant he left the office behind he felt as if someone had thrown a pailful of sweat over him. A plastic bag from Woolworth’s up the sloping pedestrianised street lay exhausted outside Virgin, having failed to crawl to a pavement artist’s chalked seascape. Along the middle of the uneven pavement, the topmost branches of caged saplings fingered a breeze that stayed well out of Dudley’s reach, but he no longer felt trapped behind hot glass. Away from the job centre, he was himself.
The world might have been a show staged for him. Beyond Blockbuster and the other shops on the ground floor of Mecca Bingo, boys in swimming trunks were too intent on fleeing from some mischief at Europa Pools to notice him. Inside Conway Park Station, which was tiled pale as an ice cream, a lift opened at both ends to him. Between two underground tunnels a train for New Brighton shed commuters to make room for him.
The train snaked up into the sunlight at Birkenhead Park, stoking the interior and filling his nostrils with the hot dusty smell of the upholstered seats but leaving behind the harsh hollow roar of the tunnel. At Birkenhead North the nearest doors halted exactly opposite a passage too short to contain more than the ticket office. His mind seemed to own everything around him now: the two-storey terrace, hardly more than a wall with windows and doors in, that faced the station; the clash of a football against the wire mesh of a sports compound opposite a rudimentary supermarket; the frustrated smell of petrol fumes from cars
backed up by roadworks at a five-way junction with a church in the middle; the overalled men and women hosing down soapy vehicles in a car wash or wiping them like beggars at traffic lights. Everything assured him how much more there was to him.
Five minutes’ easy climb of a street smug with fat pairs of houses opposite the car wash brought him in sight of the disused observatory, its grey dome squatting like a torpid introverted turtle on the ridge of Bidston Hill. It sank away from his progress, and by the time he arrived at the road that almost followed a contour line, the bulk of the hill had been foreshortened into a slope crowded with foliage and tattered with butterflies. His house was one of a long row that stood together in pairs to challenge the vegetation across the road. He tramped past his mother’s rockery, where weeds flourished leaves above the flowers they were overcoming, and let himself in. “Kathy,” he called as the door lumbered inwards, “are you home?”
More than the silence, the absence of any aroma of dinner told him that his mother wasn’t back from work. He marched along the hall, flinging doors wide. They irritated him by never quite fitting their frames since she’d had them stripped to tone in with the naked banisters and the pale pine hallstand. He kicked off his shoes on the way upstairs and collected them in one hand while he tugged off his socks with the other. He abandoned these on the stairs, but couldn’t remove his shirt until he’d dispensed with the jacket of his office suit. He dropped it on the desk chair that faced his bedroom window and the hillside beyond his computer, and dumped his trousers and the lasso of his quietly striped tie on top. He shied a wad composed of the shirt and his equally sodden underpants at the washing basket outside the bathroom and only just missed. He shut the door with one foot, and once his bare sole unstuck itself from the wood he hauled the sash of the window as high as it would strain, then fell on his back on the bed.
He gazed across his naked body at the room. The toy revolver his father had bought despite Kathy’s protests lay on the dressing-table, dwarfing plastic soldiers years older. Then came books he’d won at school, and sets of encyclopaedias from his parents, followed by true crime books he’d bought himself. The wall between the dressing-table and the bookshelves was still decorated with posters his friend Eamonn had given him. Kathy wrinkled her nose at all these images from horror films and at the gun whenever he let her glimpse his room. How would she react if she knew what else was there? He was smiling and grimacing and otherwise greeting his thoughts when he heard her arrive home.
“Oh, Dudley,” she complained over a muted slam of the front door. He guessed she’d found his socks, since her footsteps made an issue of how wearily she was ascending the stairs. She was almost on the landing when she called “Are you up here?”
“I was going to have a shower.”
“Go on then, and then we can talk.”
He could hear her nervousness even through the door. “What about?”
“Dudley, there’s something I haven’t been telling you. Let me go downstairs so you can have your shower and then we’ll talk about it.”
She knew, he thought, and all the heat deserted him. His hands jerked out to drag the quilt around him. He heard his mother hurry down the stairs, and willed her to carry on out of the house, beyond any possibility of the confrontation she was afraid of. What had he said or done to alert her? He couldn’t think of anything—couldn’t think. Perhaps if he stayed cocooned by the quilt the encounter would never take place, since she wouldn’t dare to venture into his room. If that made no sense, what did? Only that she was his mother and would have to keep his secret: hadn’t that been in her voice? He was suddenly
anxious to put the confrontation behind him. He threw the quilt away and sprinted, penis wagging like an admonitory finger, to the bathroom.
Kathy had tidied his clothes into the basket, surely a promising sign. He bolted the door and climbed into the bath. It was as large as she liked it, and for the first time it made him feel stunted to childishness. As the water that had been lying in wait in the shower found him, he began to shiver. Hot water followed it, and he could have imagined that the June heat had been transformed into a mass of needles to prick him. He did his best to rake the sweat off his body with it before challenging his own gaze in the mirror while he dried himself. Once he’d knotted the cord of his towelling robe he padded downstairs. He was ready for a fight, he tried to think, since he was robed like a boxer.
Kathy was washing breakfast dishes in the kitchen sink. She must have released her greying hair from whatever style she’d worn to work—however she’d looked when she’d waved him off that morning—because it was halfway down her back. She was in her civil service clothes, not the faded russet kaftan she so often wore at home. As she turned to him the sunlight caught the hint of a dark moustache that he sometimes thought was the badge of her ambition to contain all Dudley needed of a father. Her broad large-boned wide-eyed face, which was rather let down by a small flat knob of a chin, looked determined to be reasonable, as always. She rested a fingertip in the groove above her mouth as though holding the expression still before releasing her lips to ask “Which room shall we sit in? Would you like a drink?”
“I don’t want anything.” This sounded defensive, and he tried to rescind his mistake. “You wanted to talk,” he said close to accusingly, and pulled out a chair with a screech of pine on linoleum.
“I just don’t want you to be . . .” She recaptured her voice as she sat across the table from him, but only to say “Do you know when you really upset me?”
Until now, was she implying? The obliqueness of her approach turned his thoughts into hard spiky lumps that scraped the inside of his skull. “No idea,” he mumbled.
“Try and think. There’s a reason.”
“The first day I went to school.”
“And you kept running back to me in tears. You’re not still angry with me over that, are you? Remember I told you I felt the same on my first day. That wasn’t the time, though it was bad. I knew you had to get used to school. We couldn’t afford to have you taught at home even if you were ahead of the other children.”
He found her wistfulness even more suffocating than usual. As heat swarmed over him he realised she was still awaiting the answer to her question. “The first day I wanted to walk to school by myself.”