Secret Story Read Online Free Page A

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 suddenlyanxious to put the confrontation behind him. He threw the quilt away and sprinted, penis wagging