What They Do in the Dark (23 page)

‘I’m sorry.’

‘That’s better,’ says Mum.

I’m careful to help Mum with the washing-up after tea. When I’m scraping shepherd’s pie into the pedal bin (which I enjoy operating), I see Ian’s belt in there, too late to stop the slurry of mince and potato fouling its jazzy brightness. I had thought that the strangeness of our thank-you hug was in its comparison to Dad, but I realize now the missing sensation of that metal rectangle that always divides Ian’s top half from his bottom, digging into you when he squeezes.

‘Ian’s belt’s in the bin.’

‘Don’t be daft.’

Mum doesn’t even turn round from the sink.

‘It is!’

‘What belt?’

I point with the fork I’m holding. Mum turns round with rubber gloves aloft, like a surgeon in a medical programme. She peers. Then she calls to Ian round the open-plan.

‘What are you doing, chucking your belt out?’

‘It’s had it.’

‘If the buckle’s gone, I could get it stitched for you. It’s proper leather that.’

‘I’ve had it years, Suzanne. It’s gone.’

It doesn’t look old or broken, winking out from the mince. But Ian’s got a lot of money to spend, on himself as well as Mum and me. Not like Dad. You can’t spend the coins from the garage he gave me. When, at bedtime, I prise them from the album and heap them in a meagre pile on the pillow, it’s impossible not to know they’re actually plastic.

T
HE WALLPAPER DIDN’T
match the paint on the woodwork, on the skirting. Skirting – was that right? How did she know that? Did skirting even exist where she came from? Summoning rooms from all the houses she had lived in, Quentin saw walls that ended without interruption, at the floor. These walls were usually white, the floors, wood. Maybe it was a Brit thing, this skirting? And yet, she knew the term. Go figure.

The junction she now knew intimately went like this: bobbled brown carpet, edged up against said skirting, but not fitting with exact snugness; pink skirting, with a chip the size of a baby’s fingernail revealing the multi-coloured strata of previous paint jobs; wallpaper. That wallpaper, now that was a piece of work. Actually, several misaligned pieces of work. Brown, of course, but so much more. Crimson, white, beige, black. And all in flowers, vast Swinburnian blooms decadent with, well, Quentin was tempted to name it despair. Even with all the colours bleached by moonlight and street light, their busyness still hummed, like crickets in a box.

She went back to the skirting. Some time during the last long hours Quentin had made the acquaintance of two snail-trails of paint there, petrified in an unequal race to the floor. Their doomed inertia made her sad, and she enjoyed the sadness for a while. But then the drips led her to think of the man who had painted the skirting, who hadn’t bothered to wipe his brush of excess paint, and that expanded into thinking of all the useless human agency implied in the room, which made her agitated rather than sad, and from that she progressed to pondering the volume of
people who passed through, who slept in the bed, whose skin cells and stains were a sheet and a pillowcase away, and this freaked her out so much she had to turn on the lamp and get up.

How did Hugh sleep, if he took these things all the time? Oh, of course. One to make you bigger, one to make you small. He could have offered a Valium into the bargain. A true gentleman would have, wouldn’t he? Maybe he didn’t want to look too professional or something. Like a junkie. God, no.
‘Is there anything I can get you, darling?’
She slaked her dry mouth with the water from the bathroom tap, which tasted as though it had been wrung out from dirty cotton wool. Quintessence of dust. More frigging skin cells. She spat the mouthful into the sink.

Quentin doubted that Hugh’s little helpers exposed him to the horror of the skin cells and the failure – if they did, maybe whatever else he took cancelled that out. Unlike her, he was all action. ‘Pep pills’ he had called them. It was all her fault. She got back in bed and almost immediately got out again. It was rising six o’clock.

She dressed and left her room. The hotel’s skeleton staff was still running from the night shift. Quentin hadn’t been up this early before, so all the faces were unfamiliar. It was weird, seeing different people in the same burgundy uniform. The manager was no longer a plump middle-aged woman but a cadaverous bald man in his sixties. He had yellow skin and wore half-glasses to peer at his stale newspaper (did you save the newspaper all day if you worked the night shift?). As she came through the lobby, he nodded at her as though he knew her. Maybe they talked, him and his alter ego.

‘Early bird.’

Quentin pulled up. It was Katrina. She was sitting in one of the lobby armchairs, smoking herself awake. Make-up full but fractionally awry, as though the stencil had wobbled. Or maybe her face wasn’t quite up to it yet.

‘Catches the worm!’ Quentin heard herself say.

‘Early call,’ Katrina explained. ‘I like to leave Lallie till the last minute, but I need a bit of time to get myself ready.’

And now Quentin was cornered. Couldn’t she pretend she was on her way somewhere? Maybe, but then she’d end up completing a fake circuit by returning to her room, just her and the skirting for another couple of hours. Perhaps here, she could get away for a little. Perhaps she could be the good listener everyone assumed she was. And anyway, the car would be coming for Katrina and the kid really soon. How bad could it be?

‘We booked the tickets to America.’ Katrina’s inhalation was famished. She wasn’t going to help, then. ‘Madam’s so excited!’ The smoke dragoned out for an inch before she sucked it back into her nostrils. Quentin had never been able to do that. It looked cool
and
grown-up. ‘I’ve told her, nothing’s settled, they’re just having a look at you, hen – there’s probably a lot of American girls who’ve done a lot more and are a lot prettier they’ll be seeing and all.’

‘Maybe best to see it as a holiday,’ said Quentin. Katrina’s makeup spasmed.

‘Don’t they want her then?’

‘I mean, for Lallie. Take a little of the pressure off.’

‘Oh, she loves all that, don’t you worry.’ Katrina tapped the ashless cigarette on the ashtray rim, her gaze clamped on Quentin. ‘I mean, if she doesn’t stand a chance I’d never have booked – it’s a lot of money for us, like – but you mentioned the film and that.’

‘I’m sure it’ll all work out.’
Like it worked out when I fucked Hugh, who can go for ever, if that’s your thing, because his dick is numb with bennies or whatever quaint Brit phrase he prefers to use. Not my fault, right?

‘Is your – is Lallie’s father coming with you?’

‘Aye, for a week. He can’t get time off work, you see.’

Quentin caught Katrina’s curious look at her arms, which she
appeared to be scratching. She appeared to be embracing herself and scratching her arms so that red track marks appeared on her tan. She forced herself to stop.

‘To be honest,’ Katrina said, ‘even if he could get the time, I don’t think our Graham would come along for the audition and that. He finds it dead boring – feels like a spare part, he says.’

She rolled her eyes reflexively, the same way she did whenever she talked of Lallie feeling anything. What a bitch. Not an alpha bitch, which demanded at least some kind of energy or imagination, just your regular, cold Little League bitch. The world was full of these people, as cool and impermeable as a collection of vases. Standing together in arrangements, some sporting flowers so you thought life was there, but the flowers were cut and dead and didn’t have roots.
Like Hugh
.

Quentin recognized the come-down, or even its aftermath, the disconnect after all that directionless excitement.
Greetings, old pal
. He shouldn’t have given her two – what was he thinking, in fact, to have given her one, even?
In loco parentis
, didn’t that count for something? I mean, he didn’t know she’d chosen him to be her daddy, but still.

‘Do you want a cup of coffee?’

They’d brought Katrina an extra cup with her pot: the hotel only recognized the pot-of-coffee-for-two or the inadequate lone cup. She poured for Quentin.

‘It’s just, you said about the book so we thought – Frank said you’d had a word with him about it as well.’

Frank?

‘You know, her manager, bless him.’

Quentin kept her arms by her side and cranked herself up. It looked like there was nothing else for it, now the deed was very much done. ‘Absolutely. It’s a project we’re very excited about. And we’re very excited about Lallie. But it’s all about finding a good fit, and you can’t always tell that straightaway.’

That sounded OK, right? Any normal person would see the get-out clause right there. It wasn’t like she’d started something she couldn’t finish. And how was she to know that Katrina would be so hot to trot, would actually get off her ass and do something? OK, that she should have known.

‘I never thought – you don’t, do you? Your little girl a film star.’

Quentin ached to slap her, to leave a good red mark like the marks she’d left on her own arms. Scratching would be very satisfying, clawing down past that base and blush and powder, into the flesh. Into the dumb ambition, doing it damage. That would be mighty fine.

Talk of the devil.

‘Talk of the devil …’

Katrina stretched an arm to Lallie, who fitted herself into it, yawning.

‘What’s happened to your hair?’

It rose, wayward and unbrushed. Lallie palmed her eyes. ‘Couldn’t find the comb.’

Katrina squeezed her restraining hand to prompt Lallie into recognition of Quentin.

‘Morning.’

‘Hasn’t woken up yet.’

Lallie dawdled, while Katrina ordered a glass of milk from Count Dracula at the desk. Some of the day staff had started to arrive. A huge porter who had once come to look at Quentin’s shower (and he really had only looked, before announcing there was nothing wrong with it) hustled through the lobby, distributing fresh newspapers, whistling as he fanned them on tables. Watching Lallie watch him, Quentin saw that this was her moment: she could lay it out for the kid right now.
Get away from your mom, your life depends on it
.

Lallie picked up the nearest newspaper, one of the comic-book ones, which splashed on a hooker murder, or ‘call-girl slaying’, as
it quaintly preferred. Katrina batted the paper from her hand as she returned to the table. It was too late.

‘You don’t need to be reading that.’

‘Why not?’

‘You just don’t. It isn’t nice.’

Katrina returned it, expertly, to the display. ‘Here’s your milk.’

‘I told you, I don’t want any milk.’

But the kid took it, and cleared half the glass.

‘Feels sick otherwise,’ Katrina told Quentin. ‘Something to do with getting up so early, isn’t it, hen?’

Lallie staggered, imitating someone in an old movie pretending to be shot. She was back in the room – the hit of milk had revived her. Before Katrina could reach her with a napkin, she swiped away the moustache and wiggled her eyebrows at Quentin, giving her a momentary Groucho. Katrina had to content herself with evening up one side of her daughter’s T-shirt, which had caught in the waist of her jeans. Instead of pulling herself away, as Quentin had often seen her do, Lallie caught Katrina’s hand and kissed it, then laid it against her cheek, finding an exact fit. It was clearly a gesture almost as old as Lallie.

‘Always works, doesn’t it, hen, a little bit of milk?’

It wasn’t so simple, Quentin saw.
Mommy knows best
. Lallie hopped into her mother’s lap, huge against her, a hermit crab on the verge of outgrowing its shell. Katrina objected, while gathering the kid into her. Whatever that meant, Quentin really did have to make the
A Little Princess
call, later that same long day. Clancy was chasing her, and it was time for her to justify her existence. Heads you win, tails you’re fucked.
It won’t cut it, Quentin. You’ve got to do something
. Didn’t Hugh, now you mention it, have some stake in keeping the kid in the country? Some project he’d got brewing, with all that energy of his? ‘I’m not sure we’re going to let you take her away.’ That’s what he had said. Maybe that was a plan: she could make it all his fault, keep Lallie away from
Hollywood while looking like she had given her all to get her there. Yeah, because that was the kind of girl she was – always with the moral victory, whatever the personal cost.
Loser, loser, welcome to Loserville
…

Quentin finished her coffee and smiled her smile. Lallie had her thumb jammed in her mouth, back to parody. Katrina twitched her hand away.

‘Nutter.’

N
O ONE BOTHERED
with the papers at Adelaide Road, a world already chaotic enough with event and titillation. The TV was usually on, but the news came and went, so it wasn’t until coppers visited the house that anyone knew. Dave’s mate Black Baz had knocked off a lorry depot the previous night, and there was celebratory cider and weed: they’d given Gary some of the weed, and it had sent him a bit mental, in a hilarious way. Pauline herself had got the giggles, Nan had passed out. It was the closest they came to a party, although there wasn’t a record player, so they’d put the TV on top volume instead for atmosphere.