What They Do in the Dark Read online

  Amanda Coe’s scriptwriting credits include Shameless, Margot and award-winning teen drama series As If. In 2010 she was named in the Women in Film and Television 21st Anniversary Power List as one of its ten leading screenwriters.

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 9780748123568

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public

  domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely

  coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 Amanda Coe

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

  retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior

  permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  For Andrew

  Contents

  Copyright

  Lallie Paluza

  June, 1975

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  August, 1975

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  July, 1977

  Chapter 32

  There were terrors, too, of course, but they would have been terrors at any age. I distinguish here between terror and fear. From terror one escapes screaming, but fear has an odd seduction. Fear and the sense of sex are linked in secret conspiracy, but terror is a sickness like hate.

  GRAHAM GREENE, A Sort of Life

  The thing about fairy tales is that it’s not the spellbound who are free, it’s the disenchanted.

  JOHN LAHR, on The Wizard of Oz

  Lallie Paluza

  Child star with an uncanny gift for impersonation.

  The child star Eulalia ‘Lallie’ Paluza, who has died two days before her 35th birthday, never attained the profile of her stage school contemporaries Bonnie Langford or Lena Zavaroni. Only eight years old when she won the talent show New Faces in 1973, her career was effectively over by the time puberty struck at 13. A precociously pneumatic teenager, Lallie seemed ill at ease with the decision to make her play the nymphet in her LWT show Me Myself and Her. Having already endured a brief, fruitless foray to Hollywood, she subsided into a working life of pantos and summer seasons before retiring at the age of eighteen.

  Her talent was mimicry. Clive James wrote of her New Faces performance that she was ‘a phenomenon less entertaining than, frankly, eerie: like watching the product of some mad eugenicist let loose among the chromosomes of Shirley Temple and Mike Yarwood.’ Yet there was some evidence that this gift for mimicry was the tip of an iceberg-sized acting ability. Lallie made a memorable straight acting debut in the film That Summer, playing a child murder victim. Her portrayal of a troubled child semi-consciously manipulating the paedophile who ultimately kills her, played by Dirk Bogarde, stands out as a performance still remarkable for its unmannered complexity. But Lallie’s parents and management were unhappy with the tone of the piece. After cashing in on the short-lived interest from Hollywood, they threw her back into the world of light entertainment, Tommy Cooper impressions and all.

  Lallie was married twice: briefly, at eighteen, to actor Steven Garden, who she met in pantomime, and for four years to a property developer, Tim Brian, with whom she had a daughter. Her weight climbed during adulthood, and there were tabloid rumours of problems with drink and drugs. Yet Lallie remained adamant that being famous young hadn’t affected her life. ‘I was just a little show-off,’ she said in a 1993 interview, ‘and I loved the attention – every minute of it.’

  Lallie (Eulalia May) Paluza. Born April 13th, 1965, died April 11th, 2000.

  June, 1975

  IT’S NOT EXAGGERATING to say that Lallie Paluza’s show is the highlight of my week. Watching her is the perfect end to my perfect Saturdays, which begin with me going swimming with my best friend, Christina. After two hours of splashing and diving but not much actual swimming, we get dressed, shivering and exhausted. Then, hair dripping into the neck of our clothes, we each buy a hot chocolate from the machine at the baths. It’s impossible to get warm, so drinking the so-called hot chocolate, with its sweet, powdery bottom layer and topping of tepid purple foam, is the best we can do. We’re starving by the time we leave the baths, and each buy a bag of chips with bits from the first chip shop down the road, eating them as we walk.

  After that, fingers still greasy, it’s a trip to the newsagent, to spend the rest of our pocket money on comics and sweets. The choice of comics is always the same. I pretty much get them all, because I’m spoiled and get 80p a week. There’s the Beano, Whizzer and Chips, the Beezer if there’s a free gift, and my favourite, Tammy, now incorporating Jinty, which I used to buy separately. Comics often merge like this, mysteriously. When they do, the week after a surprising announcement, some of the stories you’ve faithfully followed for weeks fall by the wayside, for ever unfinished.

  Choosing sweets takes much longer than comics. Although the way we each spend the ten pence for assorted chews, drops and candies doesn’t really vary, it’s an important part of the ritual, the weighing-up of five milk drops for a penny against the jumbo lolly at two and a half p, the balance between pleasure and value. You want a lot in your bag, the little white paper bag which, within minutes, will have worn wrinkled and slightly grubby, its paper so thin that as soon as the newsagent drops a lolly in it, the stick pokes a hole. The main thing I have learned is that it’s never worth buying the chalky imitation chocolate in the penny selection. I’m pretty shrewd, and so is Christina, and if either of us turns out particularly to covet a gum or novelty shape the other has chosen, there’s the pleasure of swapsies as we each lay out our spoils on the carpet in her front room.

  We always go to Christina’s in the afternoon, since my mum and dad both work on a Saturday. Christina’s mum doesn’t mind us popping in and out. She spends most of the day asleep, either invisibly, upstairs, or stretched out on the settee with the gas fire on, even in summer. She works nights, which makes me a bit frightened of her. Her face always looks puffy when she wakes, and her Glaswegian accent means that Christina has to translate her into Yorkshire for me.

  Christina has a little sister, Elaine, who is enormously fat and spends most of the day in front of the telly, watching odd things like racing. We can’t persuade her outside very often. Once we cajoled her into Christina’s abandoned dolly pram which we had decided to use as a go-cart, and pushed her off on the slightly downhill alley at the back of Christina’s house. Elaine, her girth jammed into the tiny chassis, couldn’t move as the pram gathered speed, and she hit her head as it smashed into a brick wall. Christina’s mum was woken by the wailing and gave us both the same fierce talking to, despite my status as a guest. Christina and I were secretly a bit chuffed about this, since Elaine wasn’t badly hurt, and the incident enhanced the image we’re keen on as t
omboys and scamps. In the books and comics we read and telly we watch and occasional film we see, tomboys and scamps are the only admirable characters, apart from actual boys.

  On wet days we shut ourselves in the bathroom and make cosmetics from talcum powder, bubble bath and unused Christmas-present cologne. We anoint ourselves and Elaine with the resulting paste, which always turns out a disappointing grey in spite of its many pastel ingredients. Or we do gymnastics on the bed until injured or commanded to stop. After tea at Christina’s, prepared in zombie fashion by her newly wakened mum, I go home to my mum and dad, who are frying once-a-week steak and chips for their own tea, and establish myself, alone, on the settee. There, with the remaining sweets in their mangled bag, I watch It’s Lallie. The perfect end to a perfect day.

  It starts with the brassy theme music, sung by Lallie in a different outfit each week – usually some kind of sparkly catsuit. During the song she does some of her most famous impressions, with the help of glasses and hats – Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, Frank Spencer – and finishes by tap-dancing down a set of stairs, singing, ‘But most of all, I’ve gotta be me!’ The impressions aren’t my favourite part, since I don’t really know any of the people she’s pretending to be, although I can admire the quick way Lallie switches between voices and expressions. I prefer the sketches she does with her guest stars, which are take-offs of famous films, always ending with a song and dance. Most of all, though, I like the glue of the show. Each week, after the theme song, we come upon Lallie in her bedroom – a huge bedroom, stuffed with exotic toys and gadgets, part of the mansion she’s supposed to live in which we never see. She lives in this mansion alone, except for a comical butler called Marmaduke, who I adore. He is always trying to escape Lallie’s complicated practical jokes, which inevitably end in him wiping some form of cream cake from his face to the unsympathetic farting of a trombone. My dad has told me that Marmaduke is played by an actor who once played a policeman in a famous series.

  For me, Marmaduke and Lallie’s household lives on in my head long after the programme has finished. It is beyond exciting to see an eleven-year-old girl (Lallie is an important year older than me) on the telly, living a life free of adult interference. For the rest of the week I am Lallie, living in my mansion with my butler and having adventures stolen from Enid Blyton and the comics I read, decorated with bits of the lifestyle my parents’ newspapers call jet set. The stories meander, never reaching a conclusion or even a climax. It is the setting, the bright colours and glorious detail, that transfix me.

  I wish I looked more like Lallie. I’m pleased that we both have freckles, but her hair is wiry and dark, and mine straight and fair. At the very least I can dress like her, and have nagged my mum into buying me a pair of striped dungarees approximating a pair seen and admired on Lallie in a TV Times article. In the mansion scenes, she often sports a pair of polka-dot pyjamas, but I’m resigned to wearing brushed-nylon nighties from British Home Stores. I have mentioned pyjamas, but it seems there are none in the shops. I don’t want to harp on about them, as Mum calls it, because I couldn’t bear to be teased. Not about the pyjamas, but about Lallie.

  The fact is that Lallie, either as herself or as me, is the first thing I think about when I wake and the last thing to leave my head at night. She’s more vivid to me than anything else in my life – my parents, or school, or swimming with Christina. And that half an hour feeding on her image is the keenest pleasure of a day spent in pleasure. I’m a lucky girl.

  WHEN THE HOUSES on Adelaide Road were built, towards the end of the nineteenth century, they were destined for the newly wealthy, with spacious rooms designed for entertaining and cramped servants’ quarters for the staff who made entertaining possible. But after the Second World War, when there were no more servants and much less wealth, bright new suburbs were built away from the centre of town, and the middle classes, eager for the next best thing and poorer than they used to be, abandoned gloomy Victoriana for the all-mod-con estates.

  A few elderly householders, the legatees of the nineteenth-century doctors and solicitors, endured. As they died, the rest of the houses on Adelaide Road were sold off cheaply, to anyone who needed the space and couldn’t afford to object to rampant damp, ageing wiring and primitive plumbing. Developers divvied the buildings up into bedsits, handy both for the centre of town and the red-light district which was encroaching from the bottom of the road. A couple of unambitious brothels opened. Young couples who couldn’t afford the suburbs and were planning on a family ignored the signs of dereliction and spent weekends ripping out original marble fireplaces and oak panelling and replacing them with gas fires and Formica units. Guesthouses were established for the less successful kind of travelling salesmen. And the Brights lived there, among all this improvement and change, with no project other than existence at its most basic.

  The Bright household was a shifting population of rabble-rousing adults and their resiliently neglected children, some of whom had children of their own. The family had a dynastic reputation among social services and the local magistrates court; the Bright name denoted an unworthy expenditure of time, and further signified, at the least, violence and burglary and alcoholism. Bright children truanted and stole and were occasionally sent to Borstal, once Borstal was invented. The adults spent many nights in police cells, and longer periods in jail. The police were the one public body who had a sort of weary affection for the Brights; they could so reliably be traced as the repository of stolen goods or the participants in a bungled break-in. And although individual family members had their moments, there was a Bright attitude born of hopelessness which was the next best thing to affability. No police officer, forced to make an arrest, ever felt that a Bright took it personally.

  In the house on Adelaide Road, entertaining as conceived by the original architect had no place, although there were many visitors. Maureen Bright, known universally as Nan although she was only in her mid-forties, kept food on the table for the youngest, even if meals were irregular and usually from the chip shop. She preferred soft textures herself, as most of her teeth were in an agonizing state of decay. Nan was unique among her family in that she drank not to get drunk, but to ease the pain that lived and screamed in her mouth, day and night.

  Nan never left the house. This was a fact, not a problem. She gave Pauline or one of the other kids money to get chips or her cigarettes or something from the off-licence if she was flush, and stayed indoors. She wasn’t a maternal woman, but she was better than nothing, and Pauline, if anyone had bothered to ask her to choose, would have singled out Nan as her favourite relative apart from her mum. Joanne, Nan’s second daughter, divided her time between the house in Adelaide Road and longer periods away with various boyfriends, most of whom were pimps. Pauline knew these times as Joanne’s work, and it made her feel important on her mother’s behalf when they were mentioned.

  Pauline had never met her dad, but next to Nan she was fondest of her mum’s brother, Uncle Dave. His unreliability was exotic, as were his tattoos, a new one each time he arrived home from jail. Dave referred to his jail sentences with a mixture of pride at their harshness and formal indignation that he should be punished at all for the various crimes he claimed not to have committed, although he freely recounted his part in them as soon as a drink passed his lips. Uncle Dave called Pauline ‘our kid’, and had once given her a four-finger Kit Kat on her birthday. He had a son, Gary, who was a bit younger than Pauline. Gary’s mum had taken off years ago. Gary wasn’t right, couldn’t talk much and still pissed and shat himself like a baby. He didn’t go to school, and spent most of his days lolled in front of the telly. It was surprisingly difficult to make him cry. Despite his smallness, he was very strong in a fight, and there were plenty of those in the house.

  None of the Brights would have noticed if Pauline hadn’t gone to school, and so none of them noticed that she did in fact go more often than not. There wasn’t a report or a note that made it to any adult member of the family,
since Pauline had learned early on the pointlessness of handing these over to Nan, or of asking anyone for money for a special trip or the even more exotic demand for cookery ingredients. At these times she twagged off, then lay in wait for her classmates, ambushing them off the coach for their souvenir bookmarks and keyrings, or knocking their carefully balanced Tupperware boxes from their arms and grinding the clumsily assembled butterfly buns that spilled out into the pavement. In contrast to Gary, it was surprisingly easy to make her classmates cry.

  Pauline was quite often hungry, but it never occurred to her to eat the cookery-lesson buns and biscuits instead of vandalizing them. It was their food, and she wanted nothing to do with them. School dinners were another matter. They ate them, but dinners weren’t their food in the same way as the Tupperware buns. Occasionally a teacher would notice the way that Pauline stayed behind at dinnertime to finish every morsel available to her, gobbling gristly mouthfuls rejected by the other children. It was reassuring at such times to know that Pauline, along with the rest of the school’s underprivileged children (the preferred official term), received subsidized school meals.

  On Monday mornings everyone brought in their dinner-ticket money, except for those children such as Pauline, a few in each class, who were given their dinners free. The teacher dispensed the tickets, blue for the paying customers, pale yellow for the charity cases, from stiff rolls kept in separate recycled tobacco tins. The yellow tickets were always handed out last, with the names called out and ticked off on a special list. So Mrs Maclaren was surprised one Monday to look up and see Pauline offering her fifty pence and demanding a strip of legitimate blue tickets.

  ‘But you’re on the other list, Pauline,’ she reminded her, leaving the fifty-pence piece where Pauline had placed it, on the register. ‘You don’t have to pay.’