What They Do in the Dark (7 page)

‘Just you and me,’ Mum elaborates.

‘Is Dad busy?’ I ask, eyeing my plate and wondering if Ian will mind if I lick it clean. I know Mum would, but if he thought it was OK, she might let it pass.

‘That’s right.’

Experimentally, I dab at the edge of the plate with my finger and transfer the film of syrup to my mouth.

‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

Mum’s arms are crossed on the table in front of her, each hand nursing the bare, fleshy top of the opposite arm. She sits very straight, as she always does.

‘Ian’s very kindly invited us to stay with him,’ she tells me.

‘Oh.’

It seems fine to me. I presume that Ian has a house in Spain, or is inviting us to stay in a hotel with him. It isn’t until the next day, when Mum nervously expands on the holiday arrangements, that I realize we’re having a holiday ten minutes up the road.

‘The good thing is, you’ll still be able to go to school,’ says Mum, busying herself with her mascara brush. I’m sitting on the bed, watching her through her dressing-table mirror. She puts on the amazed expression she uses for mascara application. ‘You can get the bus.’

I don’t consider it much of a holiday if I still have to go to school.

‘Has Ian got a swimming pool?’ I ask hopefully.

‘Don’t be so spoilt,’ snaps Mum, viciously rodding the mascara wand in and out of its pot, and we leave it at that. Dad gives me a five-pound note when we go, all packed up, and tells me that I can come home any time. It’s only then that I realize that something quite important is happening. I feel sorry for Dad, not coming with us, and I prolong our farewell hug to let him know. As usual he detaches himself first, as though he’s late and has to get a move on.

Ian’s house is in a posh part of town, Old Cantley. Cantley proper isn’t particularly posh, but Old Cantley is. It’s a detached house, Mum points out. I’m not sure what this means, but I know it’s desirable, as is the fact that it’s a dormer bungalow. This means it has stairs, although I always thought the whole point of a bungalow was that it didn’t. It’s quite a bit bigger than our house, and brand new. It has a particular smell, of Ian’s soap or aftershave, and the mints he sucks. Despite the sweating and the fatness, he always seems extremely clean, and his house looks very clean as well, which is bound to appeal to Mum.

‘Your room, modom,’ Ian says, when he takes us to the upstairs part. The single bed is pushed up against a large window with a deep sill, which is a bit like the bed arrangement in Lallie’s room in her TV show. I love it, and tell him so. He nips my nose between his finger and thumb with his soft, fat fingers, just for a second.

‘I like a woman who’s easily pleased,’ he grins, and Mum shoos a backhand his way, without really hitting him.

‘Cheeky bugger,’ she says, approvingly. Then they leave me to settle in while Ian takes Mum to show her her room. I breathe in the new smell that surrounds me. I like it, but it seems to collect in my stomach and turn hard, like a stone. Only when I leave the house, when I go to school on the bus and breathe in everything familiar, does the hardness dissolve. Then I remember about being in a different class, and it comes back.

F
RANK DENNY, OF
Frank Denny Management, never felt entirely comfortable out of range of a phone. Journeys by train were a torment to him. At least in the car you could take regular stops and make calls along the way (he kept a bag of change from the bank in the glove compartment for just this purpose). Not that he was a fan of motoring per se. He was a nervous driver – he always had too much on his mind to concentrate entirely safely – but he bit the bullet and decided to make the run up to Doncaster in the Rover. He needed to sort out the Lallie situation in person. Good as he was on the phone, and few were better, some problems were best resolved face to face.

‘When will you be back?’ Laurence asked him, faffing about with sandwiches for the journey, although Frank had told him he’d be stopping at motorway services, likely more than once.

‘Expect me when you see me, Lol,’ he’d told him. It might be an overnight, if he really needed to lay it on with a trowel and take the mother for dinner. Although he definitely needed to be back and rested by tomorrow lunchtime because he was booked to take out another client who needed as much time and attention as he was about to dedicate to Lallie. Being a good agent, as he always said, was like having a big family where every child was your favourite.

The traffic wasn’t too heavy up the M1, and past Watford Frank relaxed enough to concentrate on the situation as it stood. LWT were cutting up rough about another series, although the contract still had two years to run. Light Ents wanted to axe the show in favour of a couple of specials; ‘showcase’ was the word they
had used. Frank’s unusually hairy ears (he kept them trimmed) filtered euphemism with one hundred per cent efficiency; he knew the score. Lallie wasn’t getting the audiences they had imagined – Bruce and
The Generation Game
were just too strong. But it needn’t be the end of the world, as he and the Head of Light Ents had agreed. Frank was committed to emollience because he was in the process of finessing a tasty contract for another of his clients, a club comedian who was ripe for a TV breakthrough. LWT was dangling a cast-iron game-show format for him tantalizingly out of reach; the crucial distance was Lallie’s mum’s compliance in the conversion of Lallie’s contract from a series into two of these so-called showcases a year. As a bonus, they were willing to release the kid for film work and fit the timing of the shows around it.

Frank knew that LWT was a bit nervous about the current film. Disney was one thing, the dirty-mac-artsy-fartsy brigade was another. Still, he was very hopeful about a contract with one of the American studios, if not Disney itself. It wasn’t for nothing that he’d said to the mother, Katrina, when they’d been approached about the film, it could well be a springboard to greater things. And the director, whatshisname, couldn’t have been more enthusiastic when Lallie had read for him. (Now there was a man who could do with a hit.) Of course, hearing him on the phone raving about Lallie after the audition had come as no surprise to Frank. As he’d attested himself in more than one interview, the first time he’d seen Lallie, singing in a Tyne Tees TV rehearsal room, the hairs had stood up on the back of his neck (also kept trimmed). You just knew. A star was a star, aged eight or eighty-five.

But the American business, although highly promising after the letter that had landed on his desk yesterday, was also tricky. How old had Hayley Mills been when Disney got her for
Pollyanna
? Twelve? And she was pure blonde Anglo-Saxon peaches and cream. Lallie’s dad had some Mediterranean blood in
him from somewhere – hence the name – and puberty was bound to be around the corner. Not that Frank claimed to be an expert on these matters, far from it, thank God, but the costume department on the show had already moaned about how much she was growing during the last series. Maybe Katrina could fill him in more precisely about Lallie’s development, if that was the word he was looking for. The things he had to worry about. A grown man.

Making good time, Frank stopped at the Leicester services to stretch his legs and ring the office. He sorted Veronica out with the calls she could safely make, and made three himself, one of them quite tricky. He got to the set towards two, Lol’s sandwiches untouched on the passenger seat beside him. There was no excitement for Frank in visiting a set; he considered them the most boring places in the world. But, jaded by his unremitting professional routine of rich restaurant lunches, he had an unadmitted weakness for the blandness of catered food. He’d been looking forward to lunch all morning.

It didn’t disappoint. He sat on the bottom deck of the decommissioned double-decker being used as the location canteen and tucked into mince with instant mash and textureless cubes of mixed veg as Katrina smoked over him and drank tea. Lallie had been taken off for some fittings, so he didn’t have to beat around the bush.

‘A showcase,’ Katrina echoed, when he broached the LWT proposal. Her tone was neutral. So far, she was just looking for elucidation.

‘Think Morecambe and Wise, Stanley Baxter type of thing.’

‘You mean a Christmas show?’

‘Christmas, Easter, the big bank holidays – the idea is, Lallie’s a treat for the audience, not something served up to them every week.’

Katrina caught back the smoke she had begun to exhale, re-inhaled and blew it through her nostrils instead, a feat Frank knew to mean that she smelled a rat.

‘So she wouldn’t be on every week?’

‘No. Which, let’s face it, is going to be a relief all round, the way they scheduled the last season, poor kiddie.’

‘She was a bit knackered by the end,’ conceded Katrina.

‘Economies of scale,’ said Frank. Katrina seemed to like the phrase.

‘For the same money though,’ she clarified.

‘Money in the bank,’ he reassured her. ‘Plus –’ he leaned forward, pushing aside his cleaned plate, and dropped his voice – ‘thinking of the future, this is the perfect way for Lallie to make the transition into being an adult entertainer.’

‘She’s not twelve until next April, Frank.’

‘They’re not children long these days.’

Katrina stubbed her butt end into her cup, where it hissed against the dregs of her tea.

‘That’s true.’

Frank could see that the bulk of his work was done. He pulled his bowl of square jam sponge and glossy custard towards him.

‘How’s the filming going, anyway?’

Katrina shrugged. ‘Can’t tell. She’s enjoying it – you know what she’s like.’

‘Loves the work.’

‘That’s what she says to me. All the time. “I love it, Mam.” Always has done – well, you know.’

‘Born to it.’

‘That’s what I’ve always said – it’d be cruel to stop her. But the minute she tells me she’s not enjoying it …’

Katrina expanded her fingers into stars, denoting an explosion of finality. Frank nodded.

‘I mean, it’s not my idea of a good time, hanging round all day, bored as arseholes if you’ll excuse the language. But I’m not doing it for me, am I?’

Katrina had made good money in the clubs, singing, before
Lallie’s career had taken off. Frank had experienced many times the volubility of Katrina’s regret about this sacrifice. He wanted to conserve his stamina for the drive back.

‘I was talking,’ he diverted her, ‘to America. About the film. You know, the studio.’

Katrina’s eyes stopped their sightless journey over the view from the bus window and jumped to him.

‘They’re very interested in our girl. One of their people wants to come and see her for himself.’

‘A producer?’

‘An executive. You know, since they’re already putting money into this – I wouldn’t be surprised if they had something else lined up for her.’

Delivering this news was like plugging Katrina into a socket.

‘They want to visit the set?’

‘I’ll clear it with Mike. It shouldn’t be a problem.’

Katrina sighed. ‘Shame they don’t want us to go to America.’

Frank quelled a frisson of irritation.
What do I have to do for you people? What would be enough for you?

‘Well, fingers crossed, eh?

Judging the moment, he pulled out the revised LWT contracts from his briefcase and slid them over to Katrina. Then he took his Parker ballpoint from his breast pocket and primed it for her with his thumb.

‘Just there – unless you want to hang on to them and have a read. I’ve marked the changes.’

Scarcely glancing at the amended paragraphs, she hoisted the pen.

‘Did they mention what the project is?’

‘They like to play their cards close to their chest,’ he told her, with unfounded authority.

‘Who’s playing cards?’

Shit. It was Lallie, bouncing up the aisle.

‘There’s our girl,’ said Frank, offering himself for a kiss. Lallie gave him a professional peck on the cheek and said hello. Then, alerted by her mother’s animation, she asked what they were talking about.

‘They want you for a film in America, hen!’ crowed Katrina. Lallie yelped in excitement and bundled into her for a mutual clinch of celebration. Katrina squealed back at her, the two of them jiggling exultantly.

‘Steady on,’ said Frank. ‘They’re interested in seeing you, that’s all at this stage.’

But it was too late. He could see that the cat was out of the bag before it was even conclusively in. Why did she always have to whip the kid up? He and Lol didn’t treat the boys like that. They had even become accustomed to spelling out ‘walk’ in a sentence unless they were about to take them out, otherwise the frenzied excitement and subsequent whimpering disappointment were unbearable. Of course the boys were highly strung, like all Jack Russells, but then so was Lallie. Like he always said, she might be a kid but first and foremost she was an entertainer.

She hopped on to his knee, flourishing his Parker and tucking it back in his breast pocket.

‘Here, kid, have a cigar on me.’ It was – who was it? Bob Hope? How the hell did an eleven-year-old kid from Gateshead even know who Bob Hope was? Frank stretched to retrieve the contracts, dislodging Lallie from his lap. She was more of a weight on him than she had been, definitely, although she still looked skinny as a snake. Still, best for him to sort out this trip ASAP, considering. And at least he could count on the big cheese from the studio running to a chauffeur.