“It could have.”
“Anything you’d like to share?”
“I don’t know yet,” Dudley said and at once meant no.
“Okay, I realise it’s nearly time for your day job. Did you know you were one of the last people that ever met Shell Garridge?”
For moments that felt dangerously prolonged Dudley couldn’t speak. “How do you know that?” he eventually managed.
“You won’t have caught the news, then. Friday night her car ran into the Mersey and she drowned.”
Dudley had to reassure himself that nobody in the office would understand he was lying when he said “I didn’t know.”
“I can hear it’s a shock. It was to all of us. You’ve just seen someone as alive as that, you can’t believe she’s gone, am I right?”
“Something like that.”
“Now I don’t need to tell you we want to give her the best send-off we possibly can. I’m going to ask you a favour.”
“I don’t think I’ve got much to say about her.” The request was so unexpected that Dudley gave it more of a response than it deserved. “I don’t think I’ve got anything,” he amended.
“I wasn’t asking you to talk about her, though I’m sure if you find you’ve a couple of thoughts they’ll be welcome in the next few hours. No, the situation is we have the only column she wrote, and Patricia put together a solid piece about her. So we were going with all that when Patricia, well, I guess you know how thorough she is. She turned up a real scoop.”
Dudley supposed he couldn’t very well avoid enquiring “What?”
“A complete recording of one of her performances. Apparently some lady taped it for her daughter who couldn’t be there. Ideally we’d have liked to release it with our first issue, only the quality’s too amateur and we haven’t time to get it enhanced. We want to run a transcript in this issue and maybe give the tape away with number two.”
“I still don’t know what you want me to do,” Dudley complained as Mrs Wimbourne gave him a sharp glance on her way to unlock the door.
“All this extra material has thrown the makeup of the issue out of whack. Would you mind very much if we held your story over till the next one? It’s the only item that gives us the right space. We’ll run an extract that’ll make everyone eager to read it, and we’ll put your name on the cover next time and give you the lead spot.”
Mrs Wimbourne let Lionel in and frowned at Dudley. “So do you think you could make way for her?” Walt prompted in his ear.
Dudley might have found it easier to agree if Walt hadn’t phrased it like that. He had to clench a fist on the counter before he was able to say “If it’ll help you.”
“It does more than that, it saves us. I won’t forget what you’ve done for us today. I should tell you one more thing.”
Dudley saw Mrs Wimbourne bearing down on him with the guard behind her, a sight far too suggestive of an imminent arrest. “What else?” he blurted.
“The tape Patricia has is Shell’s very last performance. Which is perfect except I think she may include some stuff about you in there. Don’t worry, we’ll make certain nobody can tell it’s you.”
Mrs Wimbourne leaned over the glass of the booth. “Are you just about finished, Dudley?” she barely asked.
“Sounds like everyone’s after you today,” said Walt. “Okay, see you Friday at the launch. I’ll get the media to you there for sure. Stay well and creative.”
The next moment the phone was as dead as Shell. Dudley thrust it into his pocket as if it was a secret too shameful for him to acknowledge, and raised his eyes to the expanse of suited flesh that was cutting off his view and invading his nostrils with femaleness. “Everything under control now?” Mrs Wimbourne said.
He didn’t leap up. Even though she’d added to the pressures that had driven him to accede to Walt’s proposal, he didn’t grab her by the hair and lean all his weight on her head while he sawed her throat back and forth on the edge of the glass—not with so many witnesses. He took a breath, although it stank of perfume, and met her gaze. “Yes,” he said.
TWELVE
As she followed Dudley through the stout brick colonnade Kathy saw him cast more than one sidelong glance into the opaque waters of the Albert Dock. She knew instinctively that he was thinking of the girl who’d drowned. His sensitivity was yet another aspect of him she was proud of, even if it meant he would be embarrassed for anyone to learn he’d surrendered his appearance in the first issue of the magazine to make way for a tribute. Outside the Tate Gallery she pretended to be struck by a poster for an exhibition of images of violence—a face so outraged it appeared to have screamed away its gender—so that she could watch him walk ahead. In the pale grey summer suit she had insisted on buying him he looked at least as elegant as she imagined anyone would look. Nevertheless she winced at noticing that he hadn’t entirely unhobbled himself of a limp. She’d persuaded him to confirm that it was the result of the first fight he’d had with the girlfriend whom she was glad she’d never met and who had left him a parting gift of scratches on the back of his hand. Perhaps now that he was free of Trina he would meet a girl more worthy of him, particularly since he was mixing with people nearly as creative as himself.
She caught up with him outside Only Yoko’s. As he showed his ticket at the door of the Japanese bistro she couldn’t help saying “Here’s Dudley Smith.”
“Don’t care if he’s Jack the Ripper, love,” the guard said, “so long as he’s got an invite.”
When she stepped over the threshold she was engulfed by laughter. As long as it wasn’t about Dudley it didn’t matter. The elongated unexpectedly deep room was stuffed with conversation and crowded with people eating sushi from minimal tables or drinking beer from bottles or pouring one another sake from china decanters, all of which distracted her from immediately noticing that the place was savagely air-conditioned. As the chill settled on her unprotected back above the ankle-length black silk dress, the uproar and confusion produced Patricia Martingale in jeans and a T-shirt that bore a jovial mouth with a river for a tongue. “Dudley, I’m looking forward to hearing you read,” she had almost to shout. “Kathy, I’m sure you are too, or does he read to you at home?”
“I wish he would. Perhaps he will in future. It was my idea for him to read tonight so he won’t be overlooked.”
“I’m glad you thought of it,” Patricia said as a large suntanned man in expensive slacks and a T-shirt like hers dodged fast through the crowd. “Here’s the guy we were looking for,” he declared.
“And this is Kathy, Dudley’s mother.”
“Walt Davenport. Dudley, see where Vincent is? The media are there for you as well. Get yourself a drink on the way, and let me get one for the lady who set you off on your career.”
Kathy accepted a small china bowl as she watched Dudley sidle through the throng to join a young round-faced bespectacled man in the midst of a group of reporters with notebooks. “Will you excuse me if I try and hear?” she said and followed him.
The bespectacled man appeared to be doing most of the talking. As the crowd forced her to meander with frustrating sluggishness across the stone floor, the artificial chill and the heat of so much flesh played a game with her that neither won. She hadn’t reached the group when one reporter shouted “Shall we save it for the press conference? I’m not getting half of this with all the row.”
“Make sure you speak up for yourself then, Dudley.”
Kathy wouldn’t have called that for everyone to hear, but she might have taken him aside to encourage him if a man in an orange shirt and blue trousers hadn’t dashed at him like a footballer intent on a tackle. “Who’s living up to his name at last?” he bellowed. “I’m chuffed for you, son.”
Even when he swung to face the audience, displaying how his ears competed with Dudley’s for prominence, Kathy didn’t immediately believe what she was seeing, or perhaps she only wanted not to. Despite the sudden lull, he hardly moderated his voice to
proclaim “He’s my boy, everyone. I’m Dud’s dad.”
Kathy stared at his piebald reddish face crowned with grey skin, at the small eyes that didn’t bother to acknowledge her and that made his nose and mouth look squashed too wide by contrast, and wondered how she could ever have fallen in love with him. The question wasn’t solved by the way he veered towards their son, shouting “Give us a hug.” Instead of delivering one he pretended to punch him and then to be punched. “He got me,” he yelled, staggering backwards.
Dudley was visibly bemused, uncertain even of how to move. Kathy took a step towards him, which decoyed his father’s attention from him. “Is that Kath?” Monty seemed to be asking the entire gathering. “You’re looking spruce. I’ve not seen you in that rig before, have I?”
“You wouldn’t have. It’s less than fifteen years old.”
“Ooh, that was a low one. Call a copper. I’ve been assaulted.” Dudley’s father doubled over while he said this, then sprang up. “His mam wants you all to know I haven’t been around as much as I could have been, but I wouldn’t have missed this any more than she would.”
“Just most of his growing up,” Kathy said almost to herself.
“I wasn’t that out of the way, was I, Dud? I used to take you places till I went off touring. Anyway, I’m back where I belong now. I’m discovering me Scouseness.”
Kathy found the way his Liverpool accent thickened intermittently almost as unbearable as the sight of him beside their son, especially since Dudley seemed frozen by awkwardness. “Where are you telling everyone you belong?” she couldn’t resist enquiring.
“That’s up to him to say, isn’t it, Dud? Reckon I’ve got anything to do with where you are now?”
Dudley cleared his throat and mumbled in it, and tried again. “I expect you started me off writing.”
“That’s telling them. I’m part of you, so I never really went away,” his father said and turned wholly to his audience. “If anybody’s wondering who’s the bald sod that’s making all the racket, I’m Monty Smith the poet. Proud to be Scouse in verse,” he added in an increased accent and pounded his heart with a fist. “Pomes ought to be about how real people feel, not ponces prancing through the flowers and wetting themselves in lakes.”
In the midst of her resentment Kathy was dismayed to hear how he’d coarsened since they’d parted. She hoped some of the laughter and applause he’d provoked was ironic, as well as Walt’s shout across the bistro. “Maybe you ought to be writing for us. Do you have any of your poems with you?”
“Got some in me head. Here’s one to a credit card company.” Monty adopted a loosely pugilistic stance and recited
“Please debit me account
Wid de ’ole of de amount.
An’ why don’t all youse at de bank
Piss off an’ ’ave a wank.”
Kathy might have imagined that she’d failed to hear what was surrounding her with mirth if Dudley hadn’t hesitated before politeness made him join in. She was most disconcerted to observe Walt laughing with his head thrown back. She hadn’t thought how to win Dudley the general attention when a woman’s voice said “Shell used to love that one.”
“I’d rather hear that than be the cowboy poet. You know the one, the Poet Lariat,” Monty said, and once the response he’d waited for tailed off “Did you know Shell well, then?”
“As well as anybody did,” the dumpy grey-haired woman said from her corner. “I was her mother.”
“You still are, love. So long as anyone remembers her you are, and nobody here’s going to forget her. Saddest news I heard all year, that. A great Scouser cut off so very early in her career. She told the truth and made us laugh, and if that isn’t being what Scouse means I’m an Arab and I’ve just set off a bomb.” He dabbed his right eye hard enough to redden his cheek further and tug it out of shape, then appeared to control himself. “It was me privilege to work with Shell, and now it’s me privilege to be in the same room with her mam that gave her to us. It’s everyone’s privilege here tonight. I reckon you know how to let her know it is.”
Even when his father clapped to demonstrate, Dudley seemed uncertain about joining in. Didn’t he care for the way the interest of the audience had abandoned him? When bespectacled Vincent started to applaud, Dudley made it rather too plain that he was copying the gesture. “I should mention we’ve dedicated this issue to Shell,” Walt called.
“Don’t let me take over your show. It came from de ’eart, dough, everyt’ing I said. Just couldn’t stop meself.”
“I’m sure nobody would have wanted you to. I’d say that was a very excellent story,” Walt told the reporters, “our magazine bringing a father and son back together. And now here’s what we’ve all been waiting for.”
That was the kind of announcement Dudley warranted. Was he so modest that he didn’t understand it referred to him? Kathy was mutely exhorting either him or Walt to speak up when she heard a thud as if someone had fallen senseless, and then another thump. She whirled around to see two large parcels of magazines that a delivery-man had dropped just inside the bistro. “Don’t anyone leave without a free copy,” Walt urged and used a knife a waitress in a kimono handed him to cut the tape on both.
Dudley hurried over as Walt split the cellophane wrapping. He barely hesitated before placing a copy of the magazine in Dudley’s outstretched hand. “Where’s my part?” Dudley said at once.
“At the back. Next time you have the front, and that’s a promise.”
As Kathy joined them she just had time to glimpse the cover photograph, which depicted Liverpool at dawn with one metal Liver bird silhouetted against a gigantic sun, before Dudley flicked to the last page. It was indeed occupied by an extract from his story, headed by the legend COMING NEXT MONTH: GREAT SUSPENSE FICTION FROM COMPETITION WINNER DUDLEY SMITH. She would have enjoyed lingering over the accolade, but he was leafing backwards through the magazine. He stopped at a photograph.
It showed the bullet head and shoulders of the girl who had taken up the middle six pages—taken some of them away from Dudley, Kathy was a little ashamed to think. Nor was she happy that the headline—SOUNDING SHELL—was in print twice the size of the letters in Dudley’s caption. She had the impression that Shell was thrusting her face at the camera to challenge the audience not to share whatever joke had brought the implication of a smile to her lips. Did this explain why Dudley appeared to be confronting the photograph? Before Kathy knew if he was, he turned to the pages that reproduced a performance of Shell’s. His head shook rapidly as if to deny the lines he was scanning, and then it steadied and ducked towards the magazine. Whatever he was reading, it preoccupied him so much that the typescript of his story began to slither out of the manila envelope under his arm until Kathy rescued both. “You didn’t change it all,” he blurted.
“They better hadn’t have.”
That was Shell’s mother. Kathy understood neither remark, nor why he sent Mrs Garrett a look beyond dislike, nor Walt’s response to him. “We didn’t think anyone could figure out who it was.”
“May I have one?” Kathy asked.
“Sure,” said Walt, though after a hesitation she couldn’t mistake.
She had scarcely begun skimming the text of Shell’s final performance when the chill and the blur of conversations seemed to mass around her like soft but jagged ice. Half a page was filled with gibes at a civil servant who had been assaulted by the brother of one of his clients. Some of the comments were so outrageous she refused to admit them to her mind, but one word let too many others in: this dud, the dud. “Is this supposed to be you?” she wished she could delay saying.
Dudley glanced at the page and then at her with not much less dislike. “Maybe.”
As Monty accepted a copy of the magazine, she turned on him. “This is what being a Scouser’s about, is it?” she hissed. “This is what you call the truth.”
“Eh up, you’re spraying me.” He dabbed at his eyes, meaning to be comical. “I’m
calling what the what again?”
She beckoned him fiercely to read it outside. She was tapping one foot in frustrated nervous rage by the time he said “You reckon this is about Dud?”
“Stop calling him that. You’ve left him so unsure of himself he can’t even tell his own mother when he’s been involved in violence.”
“That’s never violence, two young fellers having an argy in the street. No wonder if he thought it wasn’t worth the breath.” Nevertheless Monty thrust his head into the bistro. “Come here a mo, son,” he shouted.
Dudley crushed the magazine in his hand with such fierceness that Kathy held her copy all the more protectively. She could understand his reluctance to ask “What?”
“Your mam says I’m not to call you Dud. It’s not really been buggering you up, has it?”
Dudley suppressed some emotion. “I don’t want to be called it any more.”
“Fair enough if that means we’ll be keeping in touch. Anything I can do to spread your rep, you know it’s done. And listen, don’t let what Shell said crawl up your nose. She was only taking off on an idea like she always did. You could be proud to be part of her act. Maybe you won’t need to be a slave of the state now you’re getting published.”
Kathy took this as an attack on her as well, but there were more important issues to confront. “Dudley, this incident she talked about, that’s why you’ve been having trouble walking.”
“Ouch,” Monty said with a sincere wince as their son mumbled “I’m fine.”
“If you say so. Only why did you tell me you’d had a fight with your girlfriend?”
“Because you kept on at me,” Dudley said with a look at his father she tried not to feel was disloyal.
“I thought you were trying to hide what she’d done because you didn’t want me to think badly of her. I don’t think you can say I kept on. I didn’t even mention it at first.” She was angriest to be taking time to impress this on his father before saying “It really was her that you had the fight with last weekend, though, wasn’t it?”
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