What They Do in the Dark (2 page)

A few elderly householders, the legatees of the nineteenth-century doctors and solicitors, endured. As they died, the rest of the houses on Adelaide Road were sold off cheaply, to anyone who needed the space and couldn’t afford to object to rampant damp, ageing wiring and primitive plumbing. Developers divvied the buildings up into bedsits, handy both for the centre of town and the red-light district which was encroaching from the bottom of the road. A couple of unambitious brothels opened. Young couples who couldn’t afford the suburbs and were planning on a family ignored the signs of dereliction and spent weekends ripping out original marble fireplaces and oak panelling and replacing them with gas fires and Formica units. Guesthouses were established for the less successful kind of travelling salesmen. And the Brights lived there, among all this improvement and change, with no project other than existence at its most basic.

The Bright household was a shifting population of rabble-rousing adults and their resiliently neglected children, some of whom had children of their own. The family had a dynastic
reputation among social services and the local magistrates court; the Bright name denoted an unworthy expenditure of time, and further signified, at the least, violence and burglary and alcoholism. Bright children truanted and stole and were occasionally sent to Borstal, once Borstal was invented. The adults spent many nights in police cells, and longer periods in jail. The police were the one public body who had a sort of weary affection for the Brights; they could so reliably be traced as the repository of stolen goods or the participants in a bungled break-in. And although individual family members had their moments, there was a Bright attitude born of hopelessness which was the next best thing to affability. No police officer, forced to make an arrest, ever felt that a Bright took it personally.

In the house on Adelaide Road, entertaining as conceived by the original architect had no place, although there were many visitors. Maureen Bright, known universally as Nan although she was only in her mid-forties, kept food on the table for the youngest, even if meals were irregular and usually from the chip shop. She preferred soft textures herself, as most of her teeth were in an agonizing state of decay. Nan was unique among her family in that she drank not to get drunk, but to ease the pain that lived and screamed in her mouth, day and night.

Nan never left the house. This was a fact, not a problem. She gave Pauline or one of the other kids money to get chips or her cigarettes or something from the off-licence if she was flush, and stayed indoors. She wasn’t a maternal woman, but she was better than nothing, and Pauline, if anyone had bothered to ask her to choose, would have singled out Nan as her favourite relative apart from her mum. Joanne, Nan’s second daughter, divided her time between the house in Adelaide Road and longer periods away with various boyfriends, most of whom were pimps. Pauline knew these times as Joanne’s work, and it made her feel important on her mother’s behalf when they were mentioned.

Pauline had never met her dad, but next to Nan she was fondest of her mum’s brother, Uncle Dave. His unreliability was exotic, as were his tattoos, a new one each time he arrived home from jail. Dave referred to his jail sentences with a mixture of pride at their harshness and formal indignation that he should be punished at all for the various crimes he claimed not to have committed, although he freely recounted his part in them as soon as a drink passed his lips. Uncle Dave called Pauline ‘our kid’, and had once given her a four-finger Kit Kat on her birthday. He had a son, Gary, who was a bit younger than Pauline. Gary’s mum had taken off years ago. Gary wasn’t right, couldn’t talk much and still pissed and shat himself like a baby. He didn’t go to school, and spent most of his days lolled in front of the telly. It was surprisingly difficult to make him cry. Despite his smallness, he was very strong in a fight, and there were plenty of those in the house.

None of the Brights would have noticed if Pauline hadn’t gone to school, and so none of them noticed that she did in fact go more often than not. There wasn’t a report or a note that made it to any adult member of the family, since Pauline had learned early on the pointlessness of handing these over to Nan, or of asking anyone for money for a special trip or the even more exotic demand for cookery ingredients. At these times she twagged off, then lay in wait for her classmates, ambushing them off the coach for their souvenir bookmarks and keyrings, or knocking their carefully balanced Tupperware boxes from their arms and grinding the clumsily assembled butterfly buns that spilled out into the pavement. In contrast to Gary, it was surprisingly easy to make her classmates cry.

Pauline was quite often hungry, but it never occurred to her to eat the cookery-lesson buns and biscuits instead of vandalizing them. It was their food, and she wanted nothing to do with them. School dinners were another matter. They ate them, but dinners weren’t their food in the same way as the Tupperware buns. Occasionally a
teacher would notice the way that Pauline stayed behind at dinnertime to finish every morsel available to her, gobbling gristly mouthfuls rejected by the other children. It was reassuring at such times to know that Pauline, along with the rest of the school’s underprivileged children (the preferred official term), received subsidized school meals.

On Monday mornings everyone brought in their dinner-ticket money, except for those children such as Pauline, a few in each class, who were given their dinners free. The teacher dispensed the tickets, blue for the paying customers, pale yellow for the charity cases, from stiff rolls kept in separate recycled tobacco tins. The yellow tickets were always handed out last, with the names called out and ticked off on a special list. So Mrs Maclaren was surprised one Monday to look up and see Pauline offering her fifty pence and demanding a strip of legitimate blue tickets.

‘But you’re on the other list, Pauline,’ she reminded her, leaving the fifty-pence piece where Pauline had placed it, on the register. ‘You don’t have to pay.’

‘Please, Miss, my mum says she’ll give me the money from now on, Miss,’ maintained Pauline firmly. Mrs Maclaren couldn’t be bothered to argue, and handed over the blue tickets, although she recognized something fishy about this transaction. For several weeks Pauline produced her fifty pence on Monday morning, until she was caught by a teacher on playground duty, extorting exactly this sum from a terrified seven-year-old. A letter was sent home, and Pauline’s mum invited in to discuss the matter. Joanne had been in Leeds for months, and Nan wasn’t about to leave the house, even if she had been informed of the situation, which naturally she had not. Mr Scott, the headmaster, gave Pauline a talking-to, and demanded that she write an essay about why it was wrong for the strong to pick on the weak.

Pauline disappeared from school for nearly two weeks, but when she reappeared, she wrote the essay, covering nearly a side
in her chaotically scrawled rough book, then copying it out in good for Mr Scott. No more was said about the dinner tickets, although if Mrs Maclaren had bothered to liaise with any of the dinner ladies, she would have discovered that Pauline had continued to hand in blue tickets. She simply forced the next child in the queue, whether bigger or smaller, to swap a yellow ticket for a blue. It wasn’t the first crime she had committed, and it was one of the few that were undeniably victimless.

P
AULINE
B
RIGHT
IS trouble. One of the ways you know she’s trouble is that grown-ups always call her by her full name. ‘Pauline Bright,’ Mrs Maclaren, our teacher, says, ‘stop that and come and sit next to Gemma.’ I am never Gemma Barlow, because I’m not trouble. Quite the opposite, in fact. According to my reports, Gemma is a joy to teach. Pauline Bright isn’t. Once Mrs Maclaren said after a test that she shouldn’t be called Pauline Bright, but Pauline Thick. Everyone laughed extra loud, because Mrs Maclaren doesn’t attempt many jokes, and Pauline got into more trouble because she walloped Neil Johnson who was sitting next to her, guffawing, and the impact she made on the bridge of his blue plastic National Health glasses marked his nose for days.

Pauline Bright can fight. She punches and kicks like a boy. She doesn’t care about fighting boys either, or anyone bigger or older than her. Once when she was seven she went for a ten-year-old who had called her little brother a spaz, and knocked out one of his front teeth. He cried to a teacher, who sent Pauline to stand outside Mr Scott’s office. Everyone said Mr Scott used the strap on her, but she didn’t cry. It didn’t stop her either. Whenever they start shouting ‘scrap’ in the playground, there’s a good chance that the excited crowd is clotting around Pauline Bright, or one of her brothers and sisters.

There are loads of Brights, but Pauline’s the eldest at junior school. The little one, the spaz one, used to wee on the floor in assemblies, and run around in circles in the hall, shouting, as teachers tried to catch him. Everyone says he got sent to a special school for retards. There’s another brother as well, and a sister
with a patch over one eye. All of them smell. Pauline Bright smells, and when Mrs Maclaren sends her to sit next to me I try to breathe through my mouth. Dirty clothes. Dirty knickers. The worst is when we have to hold hands, which happens sometimes because we’re close in the alphabet, Barlow and Bright. The only other person I can’t stand holding hands with is a girl called Ella, whose hand is cool and grey and scaly. She can’t help it. I don’t say anything with either her or Pauline, but I pull the cuff of my school blouse over my hand so that the skin can’t touch. Pauline Bright’s hand is small and hot and filthy, with long, black-ringed nails. And the smell. Sometimes Pauline wants to hug up close to you, clamping your hand in both of hers, but sometimes she kicks and tells you to eff off. I’d rather she kicked. If she does, I tell Mrs Maclaren.

‘Miss, Pauline Bright’s kicking me, Miss.’

‘Pauline Bright, do you want me to send you to Mr Scott’s office?’

Mr Scott is the Head, with the strap no one’s ever seen. I imagine something in lavishly tooled leather, like the saddles I saw for sale when we were on holiday in Spain, specially made and ordered by Mr Scott for the punishment of children as troublesome as Pauline Bright.

Whatever I think of Pauline, I don’t ever tell Mrs Maclaren that she has compounded her crime by telling me to eff-word off. ‘Pauline said a rude word’ always begs the question of whether you yourself will be punished for repeating the word, which is desirable for maximum effect, but I’ve noticed that saying it at secondhand tends to produce a rebuke for telling tales. Everyone knows that grown-ups swear. You hear it all the time, in the things they watch on TV and switch over once you appear, in conversations on buses they hurry you past, from shouting drunks they drag you into traffic without looking to avoid. And they must know that we swear as well, although we pretend not to. I don’t
swear, but I know all the words. Pauline Bright says them as well, all of them, even the worst ones. Arse. Git. Bloody. Bugger. Willy. Fanny. Bastard. Fuck. Cunt. Every so often, she throws in a new one.

‘Jam rags,’ she hisses at me, as I copy words down from the board into my narrow spelling book with the smooth, brick-red cover. My writing sits perfectly on the lines. Pauline carves out the words with her unsharpened pencil lead, tearing the paper; she’s lagging words and words behind me. ‘Ferocious,’ I write.

‘Jam rags,’ she repeats. ‘Your mam sticks jam rags up her.’ I ignore her, carefully erasing an imperfect ‘u’.

‘It’s to do with periods,’ Christina tells me when I mention it. She’s also in Mrs Maclaren’s class but we’re not allowed to sit together because we giggle too much.

‘Oh yeah, that,’ I say, quick to be blasé, although I don’t know much about periods. Something to do with ladies bleeding and boxes kept in the bathroom cupboard, something which will happen to me, and has already happened to a girl called Danuta in my class, who we stare at when we have PE because, apart from actual bosoms, which are surprising enough and in their way enviable, the poor thing has spidery black hair growing over her privates. She isn’t even ten yet. Jam rags. I like the sound of it. I adopt it as my own personal swear word, since it can’t be as bad as the really bad ones, and I’m keen on jam. At breakfast when Mum and Dad aren’t looking (not that Dad would mind) I prise out the strangely stiff strawberries from the pot of Hartleys and eat them off my knife.

A few days after our spelling test, after school, Mum takes me on the bus to her work. This doesn’t happen often. I love visiting the salon and being made a fuss of by the other ladies who work there. I love watching the customers turn into someone else as their hair gets done. As Mum’s quick to tell everyone, I’ve never been any trouble when she’s had to take me into work. I sit with
the stack of
Woman
and
Woman’s Own
in the waiting area, enjoying the letters pages and the agony aunt and, particularly, the medical column. I also watch the comings and goings through reception. I feel very proud to see my own mum at the centre of this other world, with its unique climate, warm and chemically perfumed.

But that day, even on the bus the atmosphere is different. Mum’s dressed up and nervous, and she’s put orange make-up on her face which stops at her neck. On the way to the salon, she keeps accusing me of holding her up.

‘Gemma, leave that alone – you’re holding me up,’ she says, when I try to retrieve something interesting, possibly a badge, dropped by the bus stop.

‘Gemma, I’m not telling you again,’ when I have to stop and pull my socks back up to my knees. It’s no good just doing one, as I try to tell her, but she yanks me along without listening.