What They Do in the Dark (9 page)

‘Why can’t your mum wash it?’ Gemma asked her as she watched Pauline lug the stinking bag with both hands and the help of a leg to boot it along.

‘She’s working,’ said Pauline. Gemma accepted this.

‘My mum works,’ she told her.

Coming on top of the warmth of the day, the heat of the launderette was nearly overwhelming. Pauline liked it, but Gemma, who had turned pinker during the walk, fanned her hands in front of her face in distress.

‘Let’s hurry up,’ she pleaded.

At their arrival, a woman with a fag in her mouth and a single fat curler at the front of her hair peeped out from a doorway at the back, but only stayed long enough to exhale her smoke before disappearing, uninterested. Gemma held out her clean, fleshy palm.

‘Give us some money and I’ll get the powder for you.’

Pauline crammed a mound of five-pences, tinny-smelling from her pocket, into Gemma’s hand, and watched her march with officious confidence to a metal box on the wall.

‘Put the cover in there,’ she commanded, nodding at a row of queasy-green washing machines with porthole doors, as she slotted coins into the box. By the time Pauline had crammed the bedspread into the machine nearest the door, Gemma was by her side carrying a thin plastic cup full of gritty soap powder. Nudging Pauline aside, she slammed the washing-machine door closed with her hip and tipped the powder into a little compartment that pulled out on a box at the top of the machine. The sequence of movements, and the forced seriousness with which she performed them, looked borrowed from someone else. Gemma sighed heavily and pushed her bunches back, flick flick, as though their weight was oppressing her shoulders, which they barely brushed.

‘You need twenty-five p more. That’s five five-pences.’

‘I know,’ said Pauline, but handed Gemma the coins obligingly enough. Gemma pulled out a metal arm concealed in the machine’s middle which accepted a row of neatly placed coins, them rammed it viciously into its housing and pulled it back, empty. The machine gurgled into life. Pauline regretted allowing Gemma to perform this final, satisfying operation, but it was too late now. Next time she’d know.

‘There,’ said Gemma. There was a row of orange plastic chairs for them to sit on. They sat and watched the soapy waves breaking against the porthole.

‘Go on then,’ Gemma prompted. ‘You can tell me now. About the film with the skeleton lady in.’

Pauline slumped in her chair, chewing a bit of her fringe. She felt dreamy and warm.

‘Can’t be bothered.’

‘You said—’

‘I told you, I don’t feel like it, right?’

Gemma peeled her back away from her chair, rigid with outrage.

‘You said you’d tell me. You promised.’

‘I didn’t say when, did I? And I didn’t promise, any road.’

‘You’re a liar.’

‘No I’m not, you are.’

Gemma stood. ‘You are a liar and if you don’t tell me, I’m telling. I’m telling Mrs Bream you left the school without permission.’

Indignation had pinked her face a shade deeper. Pausing to hoist her white socks over the plump crowns of her knees, she made for the door.

‘You can’t,’ Pauline called after her. ‘You’ll get done and all.’

Panicked by this observation, Gemma stopped.

‘If you tell, I’ll tell,’ Pauline promised.

‘They’ll think you made me. I’ll tell them.’

‘An’ I’ll tell them you showed me what to do.’

Pauline could see tears filling Gemma’s eyes like the water rising in the washing machine. She turned and ran off, away down the street. Pauline didn’t care particularly, she was too tired. She hoisted her legs onto the row of chairs and curled up, falling asleep to the churning rhythm of the water.

I
AN DOESN’T LIKE
Mum smoking in the house so she has to go out into the garden with her mug of tea in the morning, before she leaves for work. He and I sit at the table in the dining room eating our breakfast, while she stands in an open slice of the sliding French door, smoking out into the garden and talking back to us. This is new to me in all sorts of ways. Mum and Dad and I have never talked in the mornings, and Dad’s a smoker as well so I’m used to waking up over my toast while they smoke over me, silently. This new, sociable way of breakfasting is quite nice, although both Mum and I have less time than we used to because of the bus journey. We walk to the bus stop together then take separate buses into our different bits of town, while Ian drives the opposite way to his office in Bawtry. Mum and I chat as much as always, although I never ask her the two questions which weight my stomach: when are we going back to Dad, and what happened to Ian’s wife.

Of the two, the Dad question is the more urgent and frightening, while the one about Ian’s wife is pure curiosity and so becoming unbearable. Her photo is everywhere in his house. Tanned, she squints into the sun on foreign holidays, inclines her head towards Ian as they stand holding hands more palely on the front lawn, and, wearing something sequinned, raises a glass of wine at a party. She looks the same in all of them, round-faced and fat and placid. She looks very like Ian. In fact, the reason that I know not to ask any more about her is that when we first moved in I asked him, looking at one of the photographs, if the lady was his sister.

‘Now, Gemma.’

It was as though a door had flown open which Mum hurried to shut before anything blew in from outside. But it was too late. Ian’s mild, bulbous brown eyes had already welled with tears.

‘That’s my good lady,’ he said, with a sigh. Mum started talking about spotty Trish getting engaged, and that was that. Now I know better than to ask. Ian’s wife died. I wonder if she died in the house, and that spooks me at night, although I realize she’s unlikely to have died in my bedroom. One night I have a dream where she turns into a fat version of the skeleton lady with a rat running through her skull teeth. It’s then, stumbling from my room, crying and terrified, that I discover that Mum doesn’t sleep in the other spare room, but with Ian in his bed. It’s a surprise like a small, cheap firework, amazing for less than a second. I’m not stupid. And I’m pretty sure I know the answer to my question about Dad, which is why I don’t ask it.

It’s nearly time for school to end, and there’s talk of Mum and Ian and me going on another holiday, a proper one this time. Although with the hot weather, staying at his house has felt like being in another country, with everything in it tasting and smelling entirely different.

‘What do you fancy, señorita,’ says Ian one teatime, holding out a fan of holiday catalogues like a giant pack of cards ready for a trick. ‘Minorca, Majorca, Marbella?’

Mum giggles and chooses one.

‘When are we going?’

‘Not for a couple of weeks,’ says Mum. ‘Why do you care?’

I’ve already told them. It’s the single most exciting piece of news I’ve personally ever received in my life, and they’ve already forgotten about it.

‘Lallie,’ I say. ‘You know.’

‘Lallie.’ She rolls her eyes at Ian. ‘Oh, don’t worry, we know better than that. You and your Lallie.’

Her words spark a warning against my feelings. This is why I
don’t talk much about Lallie to her, particularly when Ian’s around; she’ll just make fun of me. But I had to tell them this, what Mr Scott announced at assembly after his account of the parable of the talents, which was gripping enough in its own way. In case we can’t be relied on to convey the astonishing information accurately, we’ve also been entrusted with a letter to take home, giving the dates when Lallie and the rest of the film people will be using the school, and when we can sign up for the film people to see us in case they want us to be in the film. I’ve read it so many times I know it off by heart.

‘July the third they’re having the auditions.’ Auditions. It’s a word familiar to me only from
Ballet Shoes
, and here I am sending it out of my mouth as casually as my own name. ‘So we’ll need to be here.’

‘I know.’

‘Then July the fourteenth to fifteenth they’ll be in the school, from eight a.m. to ten p.m.’

‘I’ll put it on the calendar,’ Ian promises. He takes these things more seriously than Mum does, or seems to.

‘Bit late for kids, ten o’clock,’ Mum observes.

When she says things like that, I’m worried she’s not going to let me go to the audition at all, and I ask her about it so much that she snaps at me to stop mithering. Which means all evening I have to resist the urge to talk about it, not because I think she needs to be reminded any more, but simply because I want to. I long to talk about Lallie, about the audition and the film and how my life might be transformed for ever at the beginning of July. Instead I have to sit through
Sale of the Century
and a boring war film while Mum smokes outside during the adverts, and Ian eats chocolate Brazils from a noisy bag perched on the arm of his chair. The sucking sounds he makes are slightly disgusting, and although he offers me the bag, I decline. I don’t like Brazil nuts, anyway, they remind me of toes. I retreat into my meandering
private fantasy where Lallie and I become great friends and live in her house with Marmaduke the butler. The starting point for this dream is now fixed as our meeting at the school. At the audition.

On Saturday, when Christina and I get back to her house from swimming, her mum is stretched out on the settee in the living room watching the wrestling with Elaine, who’s eating crisps. Christina’s mum rears her head from the settee and fires a question at Christina in Glaswegian.

‘Mum’s saying she’s going to ask your mum about coming to Butlin’s with us.’

This is surprising, as well as exciting. But I can’t see Mum and Ian wanting to go to Butlin’s.

‘I think we’re going to Spain.’

Christina’s mum starts talking to me. She always calls me hen. I work out that the invitation is for me alone. This is much better, and makes the offer more likely to be accepted by my mum. Both Christina and I are very excited by the prospect of going on holiday together, and her dad, when he comes in at teatime, tells us off for excessive giggling. As ever, the attempt at stopping spurs us to new and more hysterical heights.

When we see each other at school on Monday, Christina again describes the pleasures to come: the bunkbeds we’ll share in the chalet, taking turns to sleep on the top one, the expanse of the pool and the unbelievable fun of its wave machine, the hilarity of the redcoats, particularly a boy one called Denny, who looks a bit like David Essex. Unexpectedly, Mum proves enthusiastic about me going, and by the unseen machinery of adult life communicates this to Christina’s mum. It’s all arranged. My excitement about this and about meeting Lallie finally dissolves the anxiety I’ve had about our failure to return to Dad, and for the first time since our holiday to Old Cantley I lose the stone in my stomach. Although Pauline Bright still lurks around me at playtimes, since
the launderette I’ve ignored her, and even skeletons can’t tempt me.

A fortnight before school breaks up, I get in one afternoon to find my bed covered with new clothes, neatly arranged into outfits like the ones for the cut-out Bunty on the back page of my comic: two sets of shorts and T-shirts, with matching socks below, a blue spotted bikini and matching hat, a sundress and sandals. To the right of the sundress, just where my hand would be, is a clear plastic handbag with a bright orange handle. Through a zipped compartment on its side stares a little doll with matching orange hair. From the door, Mum peeps in to see my reaction.

‘To look nice for your holiday,’ she says, as I cuddle up to her in a bliss of gratitude. ‘You should thank Ian – he bought them for you.’

Ian’s still out at work, so I hang on to her.

‘Lucky girl,’ says Mum.

‘I know. I can’t believe it, Mum. School, then the auditions, then Butlin’s.’

Although I know Mum likes it when I’m grateful for gifts, my delight is real. But as I coil into her, I’m met with tension. I pull back, already dreading something. Mum’s eyes slide.

‘I thought you knew, Gems …’

And she tells me. The Butlin’s holiday clashes with the audition at the school, since the only week Christina’s dad can get off work is the week before we officially break up. Going on the holiday will mean missing the whole thing. I’m submerged in sudden despair, as complete as the sea closing over my head.

‘Why didn’t you say?’ I can hardly speak for tears.

‘I thought you knew.’

That’s all she’ll say to me, although of course in the obscurity of the arrangements, no one has explicitly mentioned dates to me, or acknowledged the importance of the days I’ve ringed on Ian’s kitchen calendar in purple felt-tip. I howl, I sob. I don’t
accuse or rage, although I know somewhere that Mum has seized on Christina’s mum’s offer as a way of punishing me for my love of Lallie. Her attempts to calm me down evaporate when I start clawing the new clothes to the floor in a blind desire to hurl myself on to the bed. I feel the sting as the flat of her hand catches my calves.

‘Un-grate-ful – little – beggar!’

She punctuates each syllable with a slap, and I scream in outrage. It doesn’t hurt, but the world is reduced to my snot and my tears and my difficulty in breathing through the sobs in a way it hasn’t been for years. I press my fists into my eye sockets and give myself over to the stars exploding behind my eyes.