What They Do in the Dark (3 page)

I can see that her blouse is making her sweat, and the sweat is seeping darkly into the nylon beneath her arms. When we do reach the salon, it turns out that we’re not going to stay. Mum is there to meet someone from her work, a man called Ian, and we are going straight out again. I mourn the loss of the
Woman’s Own
s and their medical secrets. This is not going to be the day when I finally find out what a rupture is.

‘How about the Copper Kettle?’ suggests Ian, and I brighten at the prospect of pancakes. Mum explains that Ian does the accounts for her work, and that they need to sort out something important. I know accounts involve sums, but I’m not really listening because I’m trying to decide between the pancake with banana and the pancake with butterscotch sauce, both equally delicious. Ian suggests a combination of the two, and I enjoy the best of both worlds as he and Mum look at boring sheets of paper which they scribble on with biros.

Ian does more talking than Mum. He’s quite old and fat with
froggish eyes, and his breath smells of mints. I’ve taken to him immediately because of his pancake suggestion to the waitress. Mum is still on edge, although the patches under her arms have stopped spreading. She has a frothy coffee, although she never drinks coffee at home. As Ian talks she slides her fingers down her biro to the end, then upends it and starts again, over and over. Her nails are always long and painted. Today they’re a shiny brownish-pink.

‘Don’t do that, chick,’ she says when I slurp the end of my glass of limeade through the straw.

‘That’s the best bit, isn’t it?’ says Ian, winking. He’s having two toasted teacakes with his frothy coffee.

‘She’s old enough to know better,’ says Mum, pushing my fringe out of my eyes. She observes me professionally. ‘Time for a haircut.’

Ian wants to order me a second limeade, but there isn’t time, because we have to be back for Dad’s tea.

‘Everything seems to be in order,’ says Ian, shuffling the papers into a pile. ‘We can do the rest next time.’

‘I’ll make sure about this one,’ says Mum, cocking her head over at me, as though I’m deaf, even though I’m sitting next to her. I know she’d rather have got a babysitter for me.

Mum wants to get the bus home but Ian insists on taking us back in his car, which is big and also smells of mints. When he drops us off, Mum turns to me and demands, ‘What do you say for the pancakes?’ I say thank you, and Ian asks for a kiss, which I give him on his fat, minty cheek. I go to follow Mum out of the car, but the toe of my sandal catches against the door sill and I stumble to the pavement. Although I manage not to fall badly, an exclamation trips from me.

‘What did you say?’ Mum swivels on me, eyes locking into mine as she pulls me up.

‘Nothing.’

‘What did you say?’

I whisper it. ‘Jam rags.’

She pulls me to the house, gripping my arm hard, and slams the door as Ian drives away. My legs are smacked. According to Mum, at length to my dad over his tea, she’s never been so embarrassed in her life. What’s worse, she claims that Ian, who she suddenly calls Mr Haskell, was ‘disgusted’.

I say sorry, keep saying it, but it makes no difference. She doesn’t look at me for the rest of the evening, and even when I go to kiss her goodnight, her own lips don’t reply.

Of course I tell her where I’ve heard it; I’d tell her anything to make her look at me again. To my dread, Mum sends me into school on Monday with a note for Mrs Maclaren, who passes it on to Mr Scott for a full investigation. I am summoned to his office. There is no sign of the strap, although Mr Scott’s desk contains many promising drawers. I admire Mr Scott. He has wire-framed aviator glasses and rolls his checked shirts over muscled forearms woolly with gingerish hair. Once, during an assembly, he removed a wasp that was distracting us from his version of the Exodus from Egypt by pursuing it to a window pane where he crushed it, oblivious of stings, between finger and thumb.

I can’t bear the thought of repeating the guilty words to him now that Mum has left me in no doubt of their weight. ‘Disgusting language’ is the phrase she’s used in her note, signed, as only her notes to school are, ‘S Barlow (Mrs)’. The nonchalant authority of that bracketed ‘Mrs’ sums up for me all Mum’s ease with the mysteries of life. While my ignorance has led me here, close to the strap. No threat is needed to get Pauline Bright’s name from me. As soon as I say it, Mr Scott’s face relaxes into a silent, mournful sigh. I am released, without swearing, and Pauline is sent for. The blame has passed to her, where it traditionally belongs.

She gets me after school. I’m walking home, across the playing fields that divide the school from the subway under the main
road, when she comes at me from nowhere and chops me to the ground. I taste dirt, and squeal. She manages to straddle me and uses my own laden bag to clout me across the head with full force.

‘I got fucking done ’cause of you, you little cow!’

‘I never!’ I wail into her face, then the bag wallops me again.

I quickly feel dizzy, but also exhilarated. I’m quite a lot bigger than Pauline Bright. Although my arms are pinned, I wriggle enough to throw her off me and kick sightlessly in her direction. The fat crepe sole of my Clark’s school sandal gets her in the mouth. She runs off, howling, her hand dabbing at blood on her face. I’m bleeding as well. A sharp edge on the plastic piping decorating my school bag has caught me on the temple. My elbows and knees are indented and stained with the patterns and juices of the grass, and the collar of my blouse is torn where Pauline grabbed me by the tie. I feel important and scared.

There are consequences to our fight. Pauline has a chip in her front tooth, caused by my wild kick. And Mum, appalled by the state of my clothes when I stagger home, keeps me off school until I am swapped into another class. There is another consequence, of course, less obvious. Pauline Bright and I are connected. We are certainly not friends, but we are on our way to something. And Pauline Bright is trouble.

Call sheet: ‘That Summer’

June 17th 1975.

Director: Michael Keys

DOP: Anthony Williams, BSC.

First AD: Derek Powell.

6.30 a.m. call.

CAST: Dirk Bogarde [COLIN], Lallie Paluza

[JUNE], Douglas Alton [MAN IN CAR], Vera Wyngate

[WOMAN IN CAR].

LOCATION: Hexthorpe Flats, Doncaster.

34.
EXT. SCRUBLAND. DAY.

COLIN and JUNE fish in the pond. JUNE catches a fish, gets wet.

35.
EXT. SCRUBLAND. DAY.

JUNE talks to a WOMAN passing by, who is suspicious. COLIN reassures her.

36.
EXT. SCRUBLAND. DAY.

JUNE kisses COLIN goodbye.

V
ERA ALWAYS HAD
a bacon sandwich on location. She knew she shouldn’t, but the smell was irresistible, and there was bugger all else to do once you’d been in make-up, and getting up so early – five o’clock to be ready for the car that picked you up from the hotel – gave you an appetite. Anyway, she was resigned to doing character parts at her age, so an extra pound here or there didn’t much matter. If anything, it was all to the good. She wished,
though, that the costume was a little more forgiving. The view of herself in the mirror of the make-up van was a depressing one, even allowing for the early call and the make-up girl’s intention of making her look as dowdy and nondescript as her few lines required. It didn’t help that the little girl, Lallie, was sitting in the chair next to her, eyes clear and brilliant, skin vividly freckled and unexhausted. She was a funny-looking kid really; not what you could call pretty, but if youth came in a bottle it’d sell out in five minutes. While a make-up girl methodically powdered her, Lallie kept breaking into a Jimmy Cagney impression. Vera was far from charmed by this. She doubted the child had ever seen Jimmy Cagney; what she was doing was an impression of an impression. It was all too early, anyway, for any kind of performance.

‘Do Dirk,’ she heard the make-up girl, Julie, urge, silencing the cries of ‘you dirty rat’.

‘Oh I couldn’t possibly,’ said the little girl, and then Vera really was amazed, because the child’s face captured perfectly the saucer-eyed, self-conscious melancholy of their leading man, along with the light regret of his voice. The make-up girls laughed.

‘Michael, dear boy, would it be possible to have a word?’ the child continued, and segued into the director, Mike, whose patrician drawl would be easy enough for anyone to take off, although not everyone would note so accurately the barest hint of a stammer in his intonation, the way he headed off certain words before they could be formed into anything troublesome.

‘She’s like a little parrot, in’t she?’ said Julie, blotting Vera’s mouth with a tissue.

‘Ar, Jim lad,’ Lallie cawed. It was all too much, that degree of attention. Bound to ruin any child. Vera felt suddenly uneasy about talking to the make-up girl, in case Lallie was gathering material to ‘do’ her later.

‘Is that me finished, darling?’ she asked, and heard herself, camply over-theatrical. Once Julie had frowned and re-pencilled
an eyebrow, Vera was glad to pluck off the tissues guarding her neck and go outside to the catering van for her bacon sandwich.

She’d had better – the watery bacon made the bread go limp, even through the butter. Which wasn’t butter, of course, but sulphurously yellow marge. Still. Nice, with a strong cup of tea, and a ciggie. It was only the second day of location filming, and Vera’s first. Close to her last as well, bar her opening of a door to field a question from a policeman later in the week. Oh well, it was a job.

There was no sign of Dirk, sequestered in a modest caravan, or of Mike, possibly sequestered with him, going over that day’s scenes. Vera could see the director of photography, Tony, already setting up his first shot by the pond, where she was due to stop and deliver her economically suspicious lines. Tony was a distinguished-looking man in his fifties with a leonine head of white hair; DOPs always seemed to have that same air of civilized self-containment about them, like little boys adept at Meccano, which they all very likely had been. You always knew their nails would be clean, an assumption certainly not to be made about directors.

Vera and Tony had actually been an item on a film (which one –
Summer Sins
?
And You Beside Me
? Some lovey-dovey rubbish) in the mid-fifties; her an overripe Rank starlet and him a slightly younger focus puller. It was nothing but a nice memory to her: cheap spaghetti in Soho trattorias and polite sex back at her flat in yet-to-be swinging Chelsea. Tony in bed was, like Tony professionally, unintrusive and precise. She had an image of him bent over her muff, his hair, then ash blond, masking his face, his concentration touchingly absolute.

‘Hair in the gate?’ she liked to think she’d quipped, although she probably hadn’t, since he wasn’t a joky lay and she’d tried to be sensitive to things like that.

Of course it was traditional for leading ladies to fall in love with their cinematographers, possibly out of some sort of survival instinct, since the glow of mutual attraction ensured the
best close-ups and the most flattering lighting. There was a story about an American star (Myrna Loy? Jean Arthur?) who had had her career ruined when she married, so spurning the DOP on whom she had always relied to give her a dewiness on screen that had deserted her in life. Maybe it was spite, or maybe he just saw her more clearly without the haze of sex and wanted to pass that revelation on to the audience. Either way she was over, playing the kind of roles Vera was now pleased to get, bitter mothers and nosy bystanders. Vera had never worked with DOPs good enough to make a difference to what she’d once had, apart from Tony. And there the timing had been wrong: him on the way up, and her on the way down.

Vera watched as Lallie left make-up and skipped along towards the cluster of lights. She wondered if Tony would still feel a frisson, with an eleven-year-old leading lady. After all, the kid hardly needed to look any younger; angles and keylights were an irrelevance. And in any case, tastes had changed. As far as Vera could see, glamour had become a word filthier than any of the ones now so fashionably bandied about on screen (not in this one though; apparently they were hoping for an ‘A’, Double ‘A’ at worst).

There was a harassed-looking woman following the girl, picking her way around the mud in inappropriate high-heeled boots. A chaperone: Vera recognized the style. Among the crew of any film involving kids, you could pick out the least maternal, hardest-faced woman, and that would be the chaperone. Then she saw that high-heels-and-no-knickers was actually making her stumbling way to the catering van, abandoning her charge.

‘Lallie! What d’you want?’ she shouted. Her voice wasn’t the standard nicotine bass Vera was expecting, but jarringly soft and girlish. She had another look. The chaperone’s make-up was heavier than any the actors were wearing – it included false eyelashes – and her nails, lacquered metallic brown, looked as
though she could use them to open tins. But she was younger beneath all this get-up than Vera’s first sight of her had led her to believe.