What They Do in the Dark (32 page)

79.
EXT. HEXTHORPE FLATS LOCATION. DAY.

COLIN leads JUNE towards a derelict building, once a bomb site.

JUNE

It doesn’t look special to me.

COLIN

Well, you can’t always tell, can you, from the outside?

In front of Vera, to the right of the screen, was a pair of canoodling teenagers, very clearly not there for the film. The boy – it had taken her some time to establish that he was a boy – had pink cockatoo hair, shaved at the sides in that way she’d started to spot doing the rounds. Sitting behind him would have been as bad as being trapped behind a hat-wearer. The girl, on the other hand, judging from her silhouette, didn’t have any hair at all. They were odd, those youths that had bloomed in the heat, vivid and hostile, like troglodyte teddy boys. Their choice of nappy pins to adorn themselves baffled her: did they want to be babies? One she’d seen near Leicester Square had appeared to be wearing a Nazi armband, of all things.

The two in the cinema were keen for an audience. As soon as a jacketed fellow in the row behind them coughed reproval, they started acting up, the boy straddling the girl and extending his tongue, to which the girl responded ostentatiously, in a reptilian French kiss. It was annoying, but on the whole ignorable. Vera decided to ignore it.

The girl Lallie was playing walked her lonely way past the school. The scene forced the grimness of real events into Vera’s mind, although at the time she had made a point of not reading anything beyond the first few newspaper reports. Certainly nothing to do with the trial. They’d had to recut some of the school scenes, apparently, as both the children involved, the victim and the other one, had been extras, and there were sensitivities to be observed. Still,
justice had been done and there was enough in the papers every day to top it. There had been another girl as well, from a better home; what had happened to her? It was an awful, awful business. Better not to dwell. It certainly made you glad not to have children.

80.
INT. DERELICT HOUSE LOCATION. DAY.

JUNE is unafraid, defiant even.

JUNE

There’s nothing special about you.

COLIN

Shut up!

JUNE

Everyone knows about you, you know, you’re just a—

COLIN

I said shut up!!

The wrench is already in his hand. JUNE screams.

Watching June meet her fate, its framing tastefully askew, Vera realized that what had happened was almost certainly the reason for the delay in releasing the film. It pursued the story, a ghost at the edge of a mirror. When, in the final moments, the camera lingered on the empty desk and the dutifully innocent faces that flanked it, Vera’s tears of artistic empathy were amplified by a nearly enjoyable frisson of the real. All such a bloody waste, really. The time it took to make a film. It seemed like the be-all and end-all, and then it came to this. A July afternoon with ten people in the audience, two of them practically copulating.

She stayed long enough to catch her name, just to be sure. She always did. There it was, large as life, although not as large as some. She was the only one left to see it.