What They Do in the Dark (29 page)

‘Has Katrina seen the rushes?’ she asked. Desperate.

‘The what, pet?’ Katrina was drunk.

‘Any of the, er, you know, footage.’ Hugh ducked an admonitory glance at Quentin. ‘We thought it was best not to let Lallie see anything along the way. Makes you horribly self-conscious. It’s bad enough with older actors!’

But Katrina had other things on her mind. Her nails indented Quentin’s side.

‘Anything from the studio, pet?’ she asked. ‘About the
Princess
film, like?’

Quentin wasn’t drunk, but she wasn’t sober either. She was tired of running, that was the truth, bone-tired, like Hugh keeping up with his old man. Italy hadn’t solved anything. Removing herself from the equation still left a whole page of algebra.
This is why you should never try to do anything, Quentin, ever
. What did it matter, if Lallie had the meeting or didn’t have the meeting? Who was she kidding, thinking she could protect the kid from her mom’s ambition, in America or out of it? Wasn’t it even possible that America, and the brutality of the studio system, might even
dilute
Katrina?
Yeah, right, we’re actually doing you a favour, kid
. If she’d been at home, at an industry party in the Hills, with ice in the drinks and lines on the glass-topped table, maybe she’d have been able to summon a little backbone. But here, in this nowhere place (the wallpaper was furred, that had to be wrong, and Lallie’s dwarf double had her hand on Mike’s ass, which was probably also furred), who could blame her?
Get used to it, baby. Producers are phoneys. Hollywood is a cesspool. How d’you like them unsurprising apples
.

‘You must give me your travel details, we can fix something up before I go.’

I landed her for you, Clancy
.

Katrina’s nails spasmed into her back in delight. Hugh had shimmied away, mouthing ‘drink’. Lallie had caught him again on the way to the bar, she and her tutor attempting a conga. Seemed the tutor had the hots for Hugh as well. Form an orderly conga line, ladies.

‘Oh, she’ll be made up when I tell her,’ said Katrina, in that exaggerated way that made everything she said seem as fake as the stripes of blush on her cheek. ‘She’s been on at me about it non-stop! Not a wink of sleep for either of us, I tell you. I’ve aged ten years, me. Doesn’t show on her, mind.’

With a final pinch, she detached her nails. ‘Lallie, love! We’re going to America!’

The last thing Quentin was expecting to see was the unguarded confusion invading Lallie’s face.

‘But what about the other show, the comedy? You said Frank said—’

‘Never mind about that—’

Katrina shovelled Lallie close, wielding those claws to silence her. Hugh turned, curious.

‘Hollywood, here we come!’ Katrina crowed.

‘A toast,’ said Hugh, and nodded for more drinks.

‘You’ll be able to tell your dad when he arrives,’ said Quentin, amazed to find herself cheerleading. At the very least she’d been expecting to give Lallie what she wanted, however badly it turned out for her. Hugh was pissed too, which wasn’t so surprising. ‘He’ll be excited.’

‘Oh, he’s not coming tonight,’ said Katrina, reaching for a new glass. ‘He couldn’t get away. We’ll tell him on the phone, eh, pet? Maybe in the morning.’

Lallie’s face curdled into tears. She pulled away from her mother and ran for the door. It took Katrina a second or two of gin-delay to register what had happened. Then she ran after her. ‘Lallie!’

Hugh, fielding a surplus glass, grimaced.

‘She’ll be all right. She’s a trouper.’

Quentin took the drink. ‘It’s all they’ve talked about. The mom’s practically turned into a travel agent.’

‘I’m sure she’s thrilled. Just disappointed Daddy’s not coming for the party.’ He left a moment, clear-eyed. ‘And since you rather left them dangling, darling, I think Lallie had got it in her head that she was going to do something over here, closer to home. Closer to Dad. She talks to me, you know. Father figure.’

She was damned if she was going to take that one sitting down.

‘Weren’t you thinking of signing her up for something, Hugh?’

He warded her off with his glass. ‘I wouldn’t dream of treading on your toes.’

You’d cast him like a shot as the trusty family doctor, his hand in his pocket like that, the other with his drink but confident enough for a pipe, radiating wholesome energy. Not just as good as the real thing, but better. Quentin could feel herself weakening. Unchilled, the oily vodka entered your body intimately, formalde-hyde in a corpse. Then it opened up a little space, high in your skull behind your eyes. Hugh leaned close, that intimate, devastating invasion. If it had been a movie …

‘Although it does strike me as odd that you want her to go to America to film an English part in an English book. Why not shoot it here? Cheaper all round, for a start. I could handle it at this end. We’d be a team. Licence to print money.’

She was Wile E Coyote, pedalling the air before the fact that she’d run out of cliff caught up with her.

‘We’re both adults,’ he insisted.

She plummeted. ‘You know what? You are so fucking wrong about that.’

And she launched herself off, landing near Mike, who had been abandoned by the dwarf. When she saw Hugh again, towards the end of the night, he had gathered in both Lallie and Katrina. Lallie was back doing impressions, urged on by cast and crew. Personally, Quentin was truly beyond caring. Until next time, she wasn’t going to care about anything ever again.

I
T
’
S ALL
P
AULINE
’
S
idea. I can’t go home because I’ll get done. If there’s one thing that sends Mum mental, it’s me not looking after my clothes. Getting them dirty’s bad enough, and the dress is certainly dirty, but there’s the big hole I’ve torn under the arm as well because of Pauline. I can’t even blame Pauline either, because Mum’ll go even more mental if I say I’ve been playing with her. I feel sick just thinking about it. Ever since she’s been with Ian, Mum’s temper has been scarier. It’s always been scary, but now you can tell she likes staying angry, and it’s usually with me. And Ian always joins in as well, not angry but sad, because as far as he’s concerned I should be looking after my mother since she’s precious and I only get the one. The second time he said that to me, I nearly said that that might not be true as I seemed to have ended up with two dads, but Mum was in the room, and it would have been a guaranteed slap to the back of the legs. At least. Pointing out that the proper arrangement was her looking after me would also have earned me a slap, but that was true too. Ian’s mad on Mum being looked after, as though she’s fragile, like the sad clown with balloons at Nana’s I’m not allowed to get down from the mantelpiece. Maybe Mum seems like that to him because she’s so much thinner than his good lady. For saying that I’d probably have been killed.

But now I’m going to get done, properly done. Not just for the dress, but for staying out so long without permission. It’s later than teatime already, hours past it. On top of that, probably when Pauline and I were rolling around fighting on the Town Fields, I’ve managed to lose my library ticket. I can’t begin to imagine what lies in store: thinking about it, I reach the door and
Mum’s face, and my imagination faints. The later it gets, the more trouble I know I’m in. I want tomorrow to come, and for it all to be over, but it gets harder to think of going back with every minute that runs out of the day. I want to run away, but I don’t know where to. I know after the last time that Dad won’t let me run away to him but, just in case, we go down our old road to the house, and I make Pauline wait by the gate while I try ringing the bell. There’s no one there. It’s too late now for Dad still to be at work. He always comes straight home, usually for his tea and his wash and shave and telly. The bell rings on, into emptiness. It’s no good. There’s no one to help me.

‘I thought you said we’d get chips.’

Pauline and I walk round and round, and sit and eat chips and walk again, and nothing we think of makes it any better, until she suggests the launderette.

That’s what comes first. Why don’t we go in there and wash my dress, Pauline says, and I can recognize that’s a good idea. Some of the shops have closed, but the launderette stays open late, I’ve seen it from the bus on winter nights. But when we get there of course the 12p I’ve got left isn’t enough; to wash and dry the dress will take 30p. Pauline suggests we just wash it, which is 20p, and then I tell Mum I was walking underneath a window-cleaner’s ladder while he was emptying his bucket to explain why it’s wet. I know this isn’t going to work, and besides, we’re short even for the wash. Pauline doesn’t care. While I watch, terrified, she unclasps the purse left on one of the orange chairs by a lady who is distracted by wrestling her sopping sheets into the drier. It’s the same lady we’ve asked about the prices, which makes it worse, but Pauline palms the silver like she’s been given permission. A 10p and two fives – enough for the drier as well. She’d take more if she could, I can see, but I’m frowning furious disapproval, although I don’t dare say anything, because the lady will hear, and we’ll get caught, and I’ll be in as much trouble as Pauline.
We might even go to prison. I feel hot inside and out, with the desert air from the driers blowing over my skin and the sickly heat of my own fear deep within. It’s clear to me that Pauline will do anything bad, and that I’ll let her.

Next, we have to ask the woman we’ve stolen the money from for powder, because we can’t afford any. Pauline does this because she isn’t as shy as me, although I smile a lot, pleadingly. The lady gives us the powder, although she doesn’t return the smiles. Her unfriendliness makes me feel better about taking the money. We put the dress in the machine and wait, and I don’t even care that I’m sitting in the launderette in just my pants and vest for all the world to see. Well, not as much as everything else that’s bad about the day and the general run of days up to now. In the chair next to me, Pauline seems to be dozing, in that weird way she has. For the first time since we saw her on the Town Fields, I think of Lallie. I feel very far away from her. I don’t think ever in her life she’s had to sit in a launderette in her vest and pants, unless for some funny skit with Marmaduke that turned into a big song-and-dance routine. I don’t want to think about what Pauline has said Lallie does, what we fought about. I put it in the same place I put Mum’s angry face, and Ian and the suncream, and Dad’s absence, a sci-fi blank, like a pit someone gets thrown in through a door in
Doctor Who
. ‘For Sale’ is in there too, now. I prefer to think instead of my version of what Lallie’s doing now, a life on the set of the TV show, without parents, but looked after. The trick, like squinting with one eye and then the other so your focus hops between them, is to see her in my life, sleeping in a version of my bed, eating versions of my meals, wearing the clothes I’d prefer to be wearing, me, but better: me as Lallie. Telling myself about this usually comforts me, but now I can’t get it to stick, and I’m left sweating in my underwear, staring at Pauline. She has grey grooves under her sliding eyes, and grease from the chips we ate earlier slicks her chin. Her head jerks back brutally every time
she falls asleep, so that her hair shakes and releases its sour smell, but it doesn’t stop her nodding back off. I don’t want her to go to sleep and leave me on my own. I prod her awake.

‘Mam,’ she says, her eyes still roaming. Then she realizes who I am and kicks me sharply on the side of my leg. I kick her back, just to show her. She’s already crying, though; she started in her half-sleep.

‘What are you crying for?’ I ask her.

She tells me to eff-word off, although real tears clump her eyelashes. There’s no point in insisting. And anyway, I’m now thinking that my dress will still have the tear in it, leading, with my lateness – later than ever now – to my still getting done. I point this out to her. Pauline thinks, one knee up, contorting her hand to chew the fleshy bit at the bottom of her palm. Or I think she’s thinking, since she seems to have gone away again. At least she’s not falling asleep.

Just after we’ve put the dress into the drier, and I feel as though I’ve lived my whole life in the launderette, like I did in the airport when our flight was delayed in Spain, a girl and a woman come in to do their washing. The woman Pauline stole from has left, and for some time we’ve been alone except for the launderette manager, who is only a muffled stream of Radio Two from the room at the back. The mother and daughter are coloured, the woman with a baggy wool coat and a hat which have nothing to do with the weather. The girl is wearing a Brownie uniform, but it’s the cardigan slipping off her domed shoulders that I recognize first as belonging to Cynthia, my bullied charge at the school dinner table. There is something very different about her. It takes me some staring to realize it’s nothing to do with her change of outfit. It’s because she’s talking to her mum and her mum is talking back to her, and she’s smiling – not the appeasing, frightened smile she produces at school, but a real smile with a giggle bubbling from it. It’s as shocking as realizing teachers have first names.

Cynthia’s mum is neither young nor old in her strange clothes.
Like Cynthia, she wears cartoonishly thick glasses. I feel like a spy. The two of them, talking, laughing, unload their washing from the mum’s maroon wheeled shopper and a blue mesh bag. Cynthia is too busy and happy to notice us. Pauline is as interested as I am to begin with, then she goes back to chewing her hand. Once the washing is in the machine, Cynthia settles back in a chair at the end of our row (there are two rows of plastic chairs, back to back) and her mum hands her something from the shopper. It looks like a book. Then she gives her a yellow apple, which Cynthia puts on the chair next to her, and then, surprisingly, her mum turns and wheels the shopper off out of the launderette, leaving her alone. Cynthia swings her bare, calfless legs and sees us for the first time. She jerks her old familiar smile and caves her chest, as though we’ve already hit her. Just like that. My hello makes a point of being matter-of-fact and friendly, despite me being in my vest and pants. Very quickly, Cynthia ducks and picks up her book, which isn’t a book at all but something limp made of felt which she’s sewing. I stare at the absolutely straight white parting, like a perfect road, that divides her black hair into two stubby bunches. She doesn’t look up. Her fingers crest in and out, making stitches as her legs swing.