Secret Story by Ramsey Campbell

entertainment. “Here’s a bunch of women nobody’s going to shut up,” she thundered as she turned her back on him. “Women, we’re the real wild bunch, and men had better know it. Haul on your pump, lad, if you don’t want me ending up with no voice.”
    Dudley wished she had. He was more aware of the relentless downpour than of anything else she said. Male drivers raging onthe roads, single fathers making fools of themselves by trying to raise daughters, solitary men embarrassed by washing their clothes in front of women in the laundrette: none of this involved him. She imagined she had dealt with him; she thought she’d turned him into a joke. He cupped his hands around his ache and kept crouching over it as though the rain was beating him down, when in fact he was adding every gibe she made about men to his fury, a hard cold lump at the centre of him. Even her abandoning the subject of him, and his having to sweep rain out of his ears in case she revived it, enraged him. What right did she and her cronies have to cast him out in the storm? What kind of man would cower behind the bar and reduce himself to acting as their accomplice? Dudley couldn’t tell if his eyes were blurred by pain or rage or water by the time she said “Well, girls, are we done with the wankers for another week?”
    As the cheers and stamping trailed off she released her wrist from the microphone cord and vanished into the depths of the tank that was the window. Almost at once the doorway to its left illuminated slanting parallels of rain. Neither of the women who ducked as they ran to a car was Shell. The headlamp beams swung towards Dudley but failed to locate him before the car crawled uphill to the main road. Nobody he didn’t want to see him would.
    For too soddenly long after that, however, nobody else emerged—just a hubbub that showed no sign of abating. It didn’t falter even when the barman hung a towel over the pumps. The gesture reminded Dudley that judges used to don a cap in the days when they were allowed to pronounce a death sentence. Very eventually it began to drive the women forth, and he liked the notion that each of them was bowing her head in deference to him, although they were unaware how close he was to them. He hoped Shell was waiting for the last of them to leave; he could imagine her ensuring that she had the final word. The pubsounded empty now, and all at once he was afraid he’d overlooked her leaving in the midst of a clump of her admirers. The door opened again, and two women he had never previously seen dashed out, screeching at the rain. Both their noise and their uselessness to him knotted his rage tighter and harder, and he almost missed seeing the door reopen before it had quite shut. “Anybody want a lift?” Shell called.
    Dudley’s mouth gaped in a silent protest that let rain gather on his tongue. As he swallowed so as not to cough, one woman shouted “We’re only round the corner, thanks.”
    Dudley watched them sprint uphill as Shell ran to the farthest car beside the streetlamps. The moment they disappeared around a corner, he followed her beyond the light of the lamps. She was poking at the door of the Viva with a key when he enquired from some yards away “Have I missed it? Is that Shell?”
    As she twisted her head towards him she used her free hand to yank the peak of her cap down, perhaps to fend off the rain. “You’re joking. You’re not, it’s Dud. I’ve been talking about you. I said I would.”
    “What were you saying?” he asked with his face in the dark.
    “What do you reckon? How you’re the hottest thing around.”
    Was the second part a question or a joke? She mumbled it as she shut herself in the car. Could she have said it to her audience once she’d given up the microphone? After all, it was no less than he deserved. He was making to enquire when she lowered the window an inch. “So what are you hanging round here for?” she hardly seemed interested in