What They Do in the Dark (26 page)

‘What about you?’ asked Vera. ‘Is there anybody … in London?’

Katrina was taking a cigarette out of her packet. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you? Who’d want me?’

‘You’re an attractive woman.’ Which she almost certainly would be, if she would just put down the foundation bottle.

‘When would I see a feller?’ asked Katrina, watching Lallie. She was checking her position with the continuity girl, whether she’d been holding the rounders bat in two hands up against her chest as she spoke or dangling it one-handed at the side. Oh, she was a pro, that one.

‘Aye, aye, it’s started,’ said Katrina, eyeing a knot of small girls with their mothers who jigged excitedly at the margins of the action, waiting for autographs. She liked the fans, Vera had noticed; another chance of a chat, perhaps. It was hard not to feel slightly insulted about one’s own listening efforts when she got up to go and talk to them. Katrina told them they’d been lucky to catch Lallie, it being the last day. Big party tonight, then back to London. Yes, lovely thank you. The Barrington. Spoiled us rotten. A real home away from home. All the time, Katrina was assessing when she could extract Lallie from the action and get her to sign the little girls’ bits of paper. She was hushed by Derek as they went for a take. The mums watched, rapt. As soon as ‘cut’ was shouted, Vera heard one of the women point at Dirk and ask, ‘Wasn’t he in those films?’

To Katrina’s annoyance, Mike was firm about going straight on without taking time for autographs.

‘This is the end of the story they’re doing then,’ said the Dirk woman, disappointed.

‘The end of the filming,’ Katrina corrected. ‘They do it all out of order. Does your head in!’

COLIN

June!

The children and TEACHER walk on.

COLIN

June! [HOPELESS] How do I know her name then, eh?

They did Lallie walking away first, so she could knock off for her tutor.

COLIN

June!

Dirk howled, which Mike didn’t go for. He asked for restraint, and the next time it was like a wounded old dog someone had trodden on in its sleep. The concentration moved on to the girl, and her walking away. Too fast. The fans, bored by all the stop-start, had wandered off.

COLIN

June!

She made more of a meal of it, this time. A little laugh with her friends, not too much.

COLIN

June! [HOPELESS] How do I know her name then, eh?

Lallie gave a look back, on the second cry, a taunt and a challenge. Take it down, Mike encouraged, maybe this time just stop and don’t
quite
turn. Keep rolling. Turn over. The pace was quickening. They had so much to do.

COLIN

June! [HOPELESS] How do I know her name then, eh?

Oh, and that worked perfectly, Vera could see. The decision not to turn, the contempt in that – I’m not even going to turn, you pathetic old bastard. Devastating, it would be, with Dirk’s anguish cut against it. So no wonder he’d do what he was going to, the scene they’d already got in the can. Come with me, little girl … They went one more time, for good luck, but she’d lay money that was the take they used.

Katrina had finally run out of chat. In any case, it was Vera’s turn now, once they’d cleared the shot of clutter. It had taken Mike’s fancy that Dirk/Colin might turn out of his last line to the teacher and there would be Vera/Woman watching him, some distance away, for a single (but Vera hoped quite long) conscience-lancing moment.

‘You see – that point of contact, it’d be nice, I think – you become the audience,’ Mike told her. His stammer hovered, almost landing on the ‘p’ in ‘point’. ’Tis all one, darling, she didn’t say. Put me wherever you like, tell me which face to pull. You’ve got me for the day and you’ve paid for me for the week. As Mike moved away from her, Tony winked, deadpan. Oh, she loved the man.

Derek came to get her into position, breathing his foulness upon her. Wide wide wide, Mike wanted, then bang in on her: the very last shot they had time for. Vera trotted up to the top of the field with Derek, he and Mike semaphoring back and forth to light on the exact place. Once there, Vera could see where Mike had got the idea from. The field formed a natural bowl with her
perched on the lip, near the road. As flies to wanton dirty old men and what have you. Derek plodded back and Vera started breathing through her nose again. Poor boy. When would anyone ever tell him?

Vera felt like the outfielder in a game of village cricket. Eventually, she would get the thumbs up and spring into life. But for now they were back crowded round Tony and the camera. Two little girls were passing her. They’d come down from the road, one an absolute urchin with fierce eyes and a thatch of odd dark hair, the other blonde. It was the blonde one who spoke, politely.

‘Excuse me, is Lallie Paluza down there?’

Vera told the girl that she had been but that now Lallie was in one of the trailers parked up by the road, ‘doing lessons’.

‘What kind of lessons?’

Vera explained about tutors, and missing school.

‘It’s the holidays,’ the dark one objected. ‘Ey, there she is!’

She back-handed her friend, pointing to Sue the stand-in, who was having a fag with some of the crew. She still had her wig on, ready for the wide shot. From the distance they were, it was genuinely hard to tell she wasn’t Lallie, although to Vera her demeanour seemed entirely adult. The blonde girl’s eyes were perfect saucers of shock and disapproval.

‘She’s smoking.’

They were already heading off. A funny pair; certainly not sisters, and hard to put them together as friends. They’d soon see for themselves it wasn’t Lallie, if they got close enough before they were chivvied away. Maybe the real thing would appear and make their day.

Vera stood, alone once more, waiting for the sign. When the camera came close enough, she would be all judgement and wisdom, but for now, it was enough just to stand, hands on hips. She watched Tony, the dip of his head, the command of his fingers. Maybe that was why she was alone in her old age: all the men
she had felt closest to loving were the ones who were absorbed by something else. She doubted that the men themselves knew this – either that she’d loved them, or the lack of threat her love posed to their greater concerns. Not that it mattered, in the end. Even if you did wear your heart on your sleeve, more often than not it all went to the bad. Like Quentin and Hugh, if she wasn’t mistaken. And look at the girl’s parents. Vera was sure the poor child would work out the lie of the land fairly soon, even if Katrina wasn’t telling her. That was, if she didn’t come across it in the papers first.

I
T HADN’T BEEN
Pauline’s idea to go and see the stupid fucking filming. She had been stood there, outside Gemma’s house, like so many days since she had found out about her mam, waiting to see her. She had worked out they must be away, which was why she had only been going off and on. But that morning, the curtains were open, and Gemma’s bike was out propped by the garage, so she knew they must be back. There was a sign, as well, on a post hammered into the lawn: ‘For Sale’. Pauline, excited by Gemma’s reappearance, didn’t consider the implications of this. There was no point ringing the doorbell, so she settled herself on the kerb a few houses off and waited. Sure enough, Gemma got sent out to the shop – the milkman must have forgotten to start delivering again. Pauline hid at the mouth of the alley and jumped out at her. Gemma screamed. Good job she wasn’t on the way back from getting the milk or she’d have smashed it. She tried to run off, but Pauline grabbed her arm.

‘Let go of me, you gyppo!’

Pauline knew she was much stronger than Gemma. She hung on till Gemma realized she was getting a Chinese burn from twisting so much.

‘I just want to talk to yer!’

‘What about?’

Gemma had stopped thrashing, but Pauline was now unsure what she wanted. ‘Just talking.’

Of course she wanted to tell her about her mam, of course she did, but if she told her, it would happen again.

‘Just wanted to, thought we could walk around or summat.’

Gemma told her that she had to go to the shop, but allowed Pauline to come, on the understanding that she’d wait outside, like a dog. But when she came out with two bottles of milk, she’d bought them both a chew with the change. She’d got brown from her holiday. As Gemma was unwrapping her chew, Pauline smeared her finger along the top of her bare arm, half wondering if the new colour would come off, like paint. Gemma flinched away theatrically, as though Pauline had hurt her.

‘What you doing?’

Heading back, Gemma warned her that she wasn’t allowed to come near the house or she’d get done, but she said she’d come back after she’d dropped off the milk, so Pauline hovered by the alley, watching her go in. The chew shocked a bad bit on one of Pauline’s teeth, and she switched it to the other side of her mouth. She was hungry, she realized. Being back at school would be worth it for the dinners.

The chew was just a splinter of sweetness by the time Gemma came out again. Pauline had started to wonder if Gemma had been stringing her along by saying she was coming back out, but finally there she was, carrying a cardigan her mum had made her bring out, she explained, and her library ticket so that she could go to the library and come straight back.

‘What’s that doing there?’

Waiting, Pauline had considered the ‘For Sale’ sign. Gemma stalked away, convulsed in exasperation. ‘Some sort of mistake or something, I don’t know. They came yesterday and put it up.’

‘Are you moving away then?’

‘I don’t know, do I? We don’t even live there, not really.’

‘Where do you live then?’

‘Shut up!’

They really did go to the library, to begin with, because Gemma said otherwise her mum would know, and she’d get done. Pauline had never been inside it before. She’d always assumed the red-brick
Edwardian building was some kind of church, another category of building closed to her. Inside, Pauline breathed in the respectable stink and closed her eyes while Gemma scanned the shelves. She prayed for her mam. She was actually praying for her to come back, something she’d never allowed herself to do while Joanne was still alive. The trick of the prayer was pretending that Joanne was still just in Leeds, and that prayer magic was being called on only to summon her quicker. That night, Pauline would get home, and there she’d be, drinks and food laid on, a trip to the launderette, calling her gyppo like Gemma did, charging the place with her danger.

You couldn’t spend much time with your eyes closed, which was why Pauline hadn’t been sleeping at night since it happened. The worst was when she saw a picture, more real than a dream, more like a film come to life there in her bedroom, but you knew if you touched it it would be solid: it was Joanne, but Joanne melded with the bag in the picture the police had shown them, flayed, boneless and terrible with blood. The blood was dark, like the stain she’d seen on the bag, but liquid and pouring. Even there in the library, her nodding at a table, it lurked. She snapped her head back. Gemma loomed, holding a couple of books, their dull covers loosely wrapped in protective plastic.

‘Come on then.’

She was so wholesomely like herself, Gemma, socks pulled up, books one on top of the other, fringe exact. Pauline had started to think that if you put your finger out you might poke a hole in people or tear them, but not Gemma, standing there with her cardigan folded over her forearm, her hair bobbles aligned. There was always a smell about her, clean, from her clothes. Suddenly, Pauline wanted to hit her with a hammer. She followed her out of the library.

They walked on to the Town Fields. Gemma was asking her about meeting Lallie when they’d done the filming at the school, and Pauline was telling her all sorts, because the thing she remembered
most was the drama of her own hair and what they’d done to it. Lallie or whatever she was called had come in near the end, after they’d already been in a class with an empty desk, where they had to look serious because she’d been killed in the story. After that they were having to be noisy and stuff with Lallie at the desk, nicking a pencil from the nig-nog’s table. She looked older than them, even in the same uniform (Pauline had been given a newish one for the day and had managed to walk off in it at the end without anyone stopping her). Lallie hadn’t bothered talking to them really, but Pauline invented a conversation which expanded to fit the many questions Gemma was then driven to ask about it, starting with what Lallie had been wearing (‘School uniform’ – ‘Did you see what she was wearing before?’ ‘Erm, yeah, sort of jeans and that’ – ‘Not dungarees?’ – ‘What’s them?’ – ‘You know, with a bib and braces’ – ‘Oh aye, them, with like flowers on’ – ‘What colour?’ – ‘Purple’) and progressing to her invitation to Pauline to go on holiday with her to America (‘She never!’ – ‘She did and all, they’ve got a swimming pool and she was supposed to be taking a friend but she got really poorly so she couldn’t come so she said I could come instead.’).