What They Do in the Dark (6 page)

WOMAN

[to JUNE] Everything all right, love?

JUNE

I’m fine. Aren’t I, Dad?

COLIN registers surprise at her invention. The woman sees it.

JUNE

Me dad and me had come for a picnic but he was telling me off because I forgot to bring the sandwiches.

WOMAN

Can we give you a lift?

COLIN

You’re all right.

The car drives off. JUNE shoots COLIN a look.

The look that Lallie gave Derek’s forehead was complicit, seductive and yet terribly, painfully innocent. A flick of the eyes that lasted less than a second. She gets it, thought Vera. She gets the whole thing. Afterwards, she wondered if it really could have been as good as she thought. It was like the momentary triumph of seeing a goal scored at a football match, without the benefit of the action replay. She hoped the editor would see it too, but there were no guarantees. Maybe Mike would decide the look was too knowing, that it was too dangerous to give the story that weight, although the script hinted at it, that the child was that powerful, but ultimately, of course, tragically, only as powerful as a child can be.

Heading back to the caravans, Vera patted Lallie on the shoulder.

‘Good work there,’ she congratulated her. ‘Quite splendid.’

Lallie rolled her eyes and contorted her mouth into a quick Barbra Streisand. ‘Gee, ya really think so?’ she spat in loud, third-hand Brooklynese. Vera walked on ahead. She could admire the talent without admiring the owner. It was almost a given in this business. Just because the kid was a genius, it didn’t mean Vera had to like her.

T
HERE WAS NO
phone at the Brights’ house on Adelaide Road. In cases of particular, often criminal emergency, they used a call box at the end of the street. Letters were neither sent nor received. So there was no warning for Pauline whenever her mother reappeared after one of her mysterious periods of work. Joanne was usually exhausted, and slept for the first couple of days. But once she had revived, she changed the atmosphere of the house as no one else could. Her initial tiredness apart, she had none of the family lassitude, rather a large and angry energy that she dispensed on whoever caught her attention. Until her interest waned, this was very likely to be Pauline.

‘Look at the state of her, Mam,’ complained Joanne, sitting at the table with a fag and a handleless mug of something when Pauline came in from school. Joanne was one of the few people to call Nan anything other than Nan. ‘Come and give your mam a kiss then.’

Pauline trotted over and clamped Joanne in a strangling hug. She couldn’t get on her lap because it was occupied by Cheryl, Pauline’s little sister. Cheryl looked confused but happy. She babbled all the time anyway, as though she couldn’t stop herself talking, but her racket today indicated her pleasure at the reunion with their mother.

Pauline hadn’t seen Joanne for six months at least. It had been so long that she had begun to forget about the previous visit, but as soon as she spoke it was as though it had been days ago.

‘She looks like a fucking gyppo,’ Joanne complained to Nan. ‘Can’t you do summat about her hair?’

Nan sighed. ‘I’ve got enough on my plate without being a bloody hairdresser.’

‘What d’you think you look like, eh?’ Joanne shook Pauline lightly. Pauline said nothing. ‘D’you like looking like a fucking gyppo?’ Pauline still said nothing. Joanne delivered a stabbing tickle under her arms, meant for affection. ‘When I go to’t shop I’ll get some shampoo. Eh? Dirty little bastard you are. You’re that bloody ugly.’

Nan grumbled around the kitchen. The gas supply for the cooker had been disconnected long ago, and a Baby Belling ring with a frayed flex was balanced on top of it. Nan opened the oven, which was full of old newspapers.

‘You haven’t seen my tablets, have you, our Pauline?’

‘No, Nan,’ said Pauline dutifully. Nan took tranquillizers for her teeth. She got Pauline to renew the prescription for her down at the chemist whenever she ran out. Pauline took the tablets herself sometimes, since Nan never counted them. They made you feel better, although they gave you a headache the next day, and if you took more than one, which she had only tried the once, your legs didn’t work properly.

‘I’ll find them for you,’ Pauline offered, and escaped the kitchen.

‘Never lifts a bloody finger when you’re not around,’ she heard Nan say.

‘Thinks I don’t know what the little bugger’s like,’ Joanne retorted fondly.

Pauline found the tablets down by Nan’s rank special chair, which had a perfect imprint of the back of Nan’s head and Nan’s bum worn into it. Gary was in the room watching cartoons with Pauline’s little brother, Craig, as well as Uncle Dave, Uncle Alan, Uncle Dave’s current girlfriend, Sharon, Sharon’s baby, Christopher, and Sharon’s brother, Keith. Craig tried to start a fight for the pill bottle when she picked it up off the floor, just because she wanted it, but he let go after Pauline kicked him in the face.

Pauline was furtively relieved to find that Joanne had disappeared when she returned to the kitchen, sneaking a couple of tablets into her jumper pocket for herself before she handed them to Nan. Joanne had run out of Coke for her rum and gone for fresh supplies. That was just one of the many remarkable things about her: she always went to the shops herself, instead of sending the kids out like the rest of the family did. When Joanne got back, she’d bought a lot more than the Coke: cans of beer for the uncles and Keith, dandelion and burdock and Tizer for the kids, bags of crisps, a Swiss roll, fags, milk, a bottle of lime shampoo and another plastic bottle which she flourished at Pauline.

‘Get us a towel, gyppo!’ she shouted excitedly. Pauline found one on the floor in Uncle Dave’s room, frayed and stiff with stains. If she ever needed to dry herself she used the candlewick spread that was the only covering on her own bed, shared with Cheryl. But since the taps in the bathroom basin had stopped delivering water, there hadn’t been much need for this.

Back in the kitchen, Joanne made her sit on a chair and draped the towel round her shoulders, wrinkling her nose at the smell.

‘I’m off to the launderette tomorrow,’ she told Nan. It was the only time anything got washed, when Joanne came home. She held up the bottle she’d got from the shops.

‘Stay still,’ she commanded. Pauline tried, but when Joanne opened the bottle and poured the stuff on to her hair, the smell made her eyes water and her throat burn. Joanne told her not to be such a baby, and used the comb to spread the liquid through her hair. It made the skin on her scalp burn and then sting like the worst nettle patch in the world, but she had to wait half an hour until Joanne bent her over the kitchen sink and rubbed shampoo into her hair, careless of whether it went into her eyes. Pauline finally couldn’t help crying at the varieties of pain she was suffering, which Joanne found hilarious.

‘Great big bloody baby,’ she laughed, and poured another mug
full of scalding water over Pauline’s head. Pauline pushed her tongue against her teeth to stop herself shouting out, knowing that Joanne’s amusement could quickly turn to impatience, which led to other sorts of pain. Finally, Joanne stopped rinsing, and attacked Pauline’s head with the towel, scrubbing her hair dry. The friction was agony on her sensitized scalp, but by now all the different pains had blended into one prevailing hurt, so universal that it almost didn’t matter.

‘How d’you think I get looking the way I do, eh?’ asked Joanne, as Pauline snivelled in misery.

Joanne’s hair was deep orange, with a white streak at the front. Her skin glowed against it, very pale. Pauline found her mam almost unbearably beautiful. Her eyes were huge, and so dark that they looked as black as her eyelashes, spiked with mascara. Joanne had got rid of her own eyebrows and pencilled brown arcs high on her forehead. The lipstick on her thin mouth was pearly pale, as though she’d been kept in a freezer. She looked very different without her make-up, Pauline knew, lost and unemphatic. But she rarely took it off, preferring to apply each day’s brows and eyes and lips over the smudged version from the previous day.

‘You’re growing up,’ Joanne warned her, retrieving a long-handled pink comb from her handbag. ‘It’s time you started thinking about looking proper and that. You can’t always wait for me to look after you.’

There was a strip of dusty orange hairs woven along the bottom of the comb’s teeth, a few of which had broken off. Pauline braced herself not to flinch as Joanne began to comb her snarled mat of wet hair, but in contrast to her previous assault, she was surprisingly gentle. This was what it was like with her mam. You never knew when there was going to be a good time, or a bad. Now, suddenly, it was good. Pauline sat on the floor with her head poking up between Joanne’s round knees, letting her comb her hair free of its knots as Joanne sang along to the radio she had
brought home with her. Her singing was heartfelt and tuneful, and she knew the words to all the latest songs. She even gave Pauline a packet of smoky bacon crisps, which she crunched quiet ly so as not to disturb the singing or the mood, while Joanne combed and combed, long after the last knot had disappeared and the raging of Pauline’s scalp had muted into an almost pleasurable throbbing. The bulb in the kitchen shone down on them, sparing them from the night, just her and her mam, for what seemed like hours.

‘See,’ Joanne said when she’d finished. ‘That’s more like it.’

T
HE LAST PART
of school before the summer holidays is awful. Because of Mum having me moved to a different class I don’t know anyone properly, and no one can be bothered to make friends with me so soon before we break up. At least at playtime I can find my old friends and play my old games, but Pauline Bright hovers at the edges of skipping and two-ball, tempting me into a bout of skeletons. Her hair is now a horrible greenish-white that reminds me of fresh snot, with a stripe of black at the roots. The teachers were shocked when she turned up like this and tried to send her home, but she claimed that her mum had mixed the bleach bottle up with the shampoo, that it had all been an accident. She came back the next day with her hair in a ratty snot-and-black ponytail (rubber band, which I’m not allowed; I’m only allowed proper bobbles, because uncovered elastic breaks your hair) and told them that her mam had said there was nothing she could do until it had all grown out.

Whenever Pauline opens her mouth, the ragged angle of her front tooth gnaws into my conscience. Some days I succumb, and play skeletons. It’s the sort of game I gave up playing when I was at least eight, and I feel slightly ashamed of myself, as well as wary of Christina’s contempt. Fortunately she does violin and choir two dinnertimes a week. And the game with Pauline doesn’t make us friends, however much we play it.

My mind is on other things. Mum takes me into work, as she’d suggested during her interruption of my perfect Saturday night. She pretends it’s because my fringe needs cutting, but usually she whips the scissors out at home and gives me a deft,
brutal trim. This time though, she gets one of the juniors (spotty Trish) to wash my hair at the basin like a customer, and puts rollers in after the trim, and sits me under one of the driers which makes me feel, not entirely enjoyably, like an astronaut. By the time she combs out my hair, saying how much better I look, even using a bit of spray, everyone else has left. And then Ian the accountant turns up; Mr Haskell. He’s sweating in the heat even though his shirt has short sleeves. I have never, in fact, seen so much sweat on a person’s face. Something to do with his fatness, I conclude.

‘Hot enough for you?’ he asks us both, accepting my mum’s wordless greeting of a lilac salon towel and drying off his face with it. He hands the towel back to her, also without speaking, then beams at me.

‘Who’s this dollybird?’ he asks. ‘A famous model?’ I blush happily, and oblige when Mum wonders if I’m going to give Mr Haskell a kiss. I blush again when I remember the jam rags. But he seems unconcerned.

We return to the Copper Kettle, where Ian once more orders my dream pancake combination. ‘Your usual, madam,’ he says. I’m perfecting a method of eating it, where I swirl each disc of banana in a pool of butterscotch, before using it as a template to cut out a corresponding disc of pancake with the blade of my knife, skewering the resulting forkful and eating it. The concentration demanded by this process obliterates the surrounding adult conversation, although I noticed when I sat down that Mum was unequipped with a biro this time, and that while Ian has a pile of papers with him, they remain on the seat beside him. I’m chasing the last drops of sauce with the final absorbent morsel of pancake when Mum asks me a question.

‘So, Gems, what do you think about us having a holiday?’

I swallow the last of the pancake, nodding. We always have a holiday, usually abroad. I’ve been to Spain more times than anyone
in my former class (I don’t know anyone well enough in my current one to ask them about holidays). I’d most like to go to Butlin’s, like Christina; she’s told me there are lots of competitions there which I’m hopeful of winning, talent contests that I think might lead to meeting Lallie and being in her show. But I know better than to say so, because I know that going to Spain is better, and that being better is what Mum’s best at. We always have new clothes for our holidays. Only Dad wears shirts from his non-holiday life, but even he puts on hats and aftershave.