What They Do in the Dark Read online

  ‘Please, Miss, my mum says she’ll give me the money from now on, Miss,’ maintained Pauline firmly. Mrs Maclaren couldn’t be bothered to argue, and handed over the blue tickets, although she recognized something fishy about this transaction. For several weeks Pauline produced her fifty pence on Monday morning, until she was caught by a teacher on playground duty, extorting exactly this sum from a terrified seven-year-old. A letter was sent home, and Pauline’s mum invited in to discuss the matter. Joanne had been in Leeds for months, and Nan wasn’t about to leave the house, even if she had been informed of the situation, which naturally she had not. Mr Scott, the headmaster, gave Pauline a talking-to, and demanded that she write an essay about why it was wrong for the strong to pick on the weak.

  Pauline disappeared from school for nearly two weeks, but when she reappeared, she wrote the essay, covering nearly a side in her chaotically scrawled rough book, then copying it out in good for Mr Scott. No more was said about the dinner tickets, although if Mrs Maclaren had bothered to liaise with any of the dinner ladies, she would have discovered that Pauline had continued to hand in blue tickets. She simply forced the next child in the queue, whether bigger or smaller, to swap a yellow ticket for a blue. It wasn’t the first crime she had committed, and it was one of the few that were undeniably victimless.

  PAULINE BRIGHT IS trouble. One of the ways you know she’s trouble is that grown-ups always call her by her full name. ‘Pauline Bright,’ Mrs Maclaren, our teacher, says, ‘stop that and come and sit next to Gemma.’ I am never Gemma Barlow, because I’m not trouble. Quite the opposite, in fact. According to my reports, Gemma is a joy to teach. Pauline Bright isn’t. Once Mrs Maclaren said after a test that she shouldn’t be called Pauline Bright, but Pauline Thick. Everyone laughed extra loud, because Mrs Maclaren doesn’t attempt many jokes, and Pauline got into more trouble because she walloped Neil Johnson who was sitting next to her, guffawing, and the impact she made on the bridge of his blue plastic National Health glasses marked his nose for days.

  Pauline Bright can fight. She punches and kicks like a boy. She doesn’t care about fighting boys either, or anyone bigger or older than her. Once when she was seven she went for a ten-year-old who had called her little brother a spaz, and knocked out one of his front teeth. He cried to a teacher, who sent Pauline to stand outside Mr Scott’s office. Everyone said Mr Scott used the strap on her, but she didn’t cry. It didn’t stop her either. Whenever they start shouting ‘scrap’ in the playground, there’s a good chance that the excited crowd is clotting around Pauline Bright, or one of her brothers and sisters.

  There are loads of Brights, but Pauline’s the eldest at junior school. The little one, the spaz one, used to wee on the floor in assemblies, and run around in circles in the hall, shouting, as teachers tried to catch him. Everyone says he got sent to a special school for retards. There’s another brother as well, and a sister with a patch over one eye. All of them smell. Pauline Bright smells, and when Mrs Maclaren sends her to sit next to me I try to breathe through my mouth. Dirty clothes. Dirty knickers. The worst is when we have to hold hands, which happens sometimes because we’re close in the alphabet, Barlow and Bright. The only other person I can’t stand holding hands with is a girl called Ella, whose hand is cool and grey and scaly. She can’t help it. I don’t say anything with either her or Pauline, but I pull the cuff of my school blouse over my hand so that the skin can’t touch. Pauline Bright’s hand is small and hot and filthy, with long, black-ringed nails. And the smell. Sometimes Pauline wants to hug up close to you, clamping your hand in both of hers, but sometimes she kicks and tells you to eff off. I’d rather she kicked. If she does, I tell Mrs Maclaren.

  ‘Miss, Pauline Bright’s kicking me, Miss.’

  ‘Pauline Bright, do you want me to send you to Mr Scott’s office?’

  Mr Scott is the Head, with the strap no one’s ever seen. I imagine something in lavishly tooled leather, like the saddles I saw for sale when we were on holiday in Spain, specially made and ordered by Mr Scott for the punishment of children as troublesome as Pauline Bright.

  Whatever I think of Pauline, I don’t ever tell Mrs Maclaren that she has compounded her crime by telling me to eff-word off. ‘Pauline said a rude word’ always begs the question of whether you yourself will be punished for repeating the word, which is desirable for maximum effect, but I’ve noticed that saying it at secondhand tends to produce a rebuke for telling tales. Everyone knows that grown-ups swear. You hear it all the time, in the things they watch on TV and switch over once you appear, in conversations on buses they hurry you past, from shouting drunks they drag you into traffic without looking to avoid. And they must know that we swear as well, although we pretend not to. I don’t swear, but I know all the words. Pauline Bright says them as well, all of them, even the worst ones. Arse. Git. Bloody. Bugger. Willy. Fanny. Bastard. Fuck. Cunt. Every so often, she throws in a new one.

  ‘Jam rags,’ she hisses at me, as I copy words down from the board into my narrow spelling book with the smooth, brick-red cover. My writing sits perfectly on the lines. Pauline carves out the words with her unsharpened pencil lead, tearing the paper; she’s lagging words and words behind me. ‘Ferocious,’ I write.

  ‘Jam rags,’ she repeats. ‘Your mam sticks jam rags up her.’ I ignore her, carefully erasing an imperfect ‘u’.

  ‘It’s to do with periods,’ Christina tells me when I mention it. She’s also in Mrs Maclaren’s class but we’re not allowed to sit together because we giggle too much.

  ‘Oh yeah, that,’ I say, quick to be blasé, although I don’t know much about periods. Something to do with ladies bleeding and boxes kept in the bathroom cupboard, something which will happen to me, and has already happened to a girl called Danuta in my class, who we stare at when we have PE because, apart from actual bosoms, which are surprising enough and in their way enviable, the poor thing has spidery black hair growing over her privates. She isn’t even ten yet. Jam rags. I like the sound of it. I adopt it as my own personal swear word, since it can’t be as bad as the really bad ones, and I’m keen on jam. At breakfast when Mum and Dad aren’t looking (not that Dad would mind) I prise out the strangely stiff strawberries from the pot of Hartleys and eat them off my knife.

  A few days after our spelling test, after school, Mum takes me on the bus to her work. This doesn’t happen often. I love visiting the salon and being made a fuss of by the other ladies who work there. I love watching the customers turn into someone else as their hair gets done. As Mum’s quick to tell everyone, I’ve never been any trouble when she’s had to take me into work. I sit with the stack of Woman and Woman’s Own in the waiting area, enjoying the letters pages and the agony aunt and, particularly, the medical column. I also watch the comings and goings through reception. I feel very proud to see my own mum at the centre of this other world, with its unique climate, warm and chemically perfumed.

  But that day, even on the bus the atmosphere is different. Mum’s dressed up and nervous, and she’s put orange make-up on her face which stops at her neck. On the way to the salon, she keeps accusing me of holding her up.

  ‘Gemma, leave that alone – you’re holding me up,’ she says, when I try to retrieve something interesting, possibly a badge, dropped by the bus stop.

  ‘Gemma, I’m not telling you again,’ when I have to stop and pull my socks back up to my knees. It’s no good just doing one, as I try to tell her, but she yanks me along without listening.

  I can see that her blouse is making her sweat, and the sweat is seeping darkly into the nylon beneath her arms. When we do reach the salon, it turns out that we’re not going to stay. Mum is there to meet someone from her work, a man called Ian, and we are going straight out again. I mourn the loss of the Woman’s Owns and their medical secrets. This is not going to be the day when I finally find out what a rupture is.

  ‘How about the Copper Kettle?’ suggests Ian, and I brighten at the prospect of pancakes. Mum explains that Ian does the accou
nts for her work, and that they need to sort out something important. I know accounts involve sums, but I’m not really listening because I’m trying to decide between the pancake with banana and the pancake with butterscotch sauce, both equally delicious. Ian suggests a combination of the two, and I enjoy the best of both worlds as he and Mum look at boring sheets of paper which they scribble on with biros.

  Ian does more talking than Mum. He’s quite old and fat with froggish eyes, and his breath smells of mints. I’ve taken to him immediately because of his pancake suggestion to the waitress. Mum is still on edge, although the patches under her arms have stopped spreading. She has a frothy coffee, although she never drinks coffee at home. As Ian talks she slides her fingers down her biro to the end, then upends it and starts again, over and over. Her nails are always long and painted. Today they’re a shiny brownish-pink.

  ‘Don’t do that, chick,’ she says when I slurp the end of my glass of limeade through the straw.

  ‘That’s the best bit, isn’t it?’ says Ian, winking. He’s having two toasted teacakes with his frothy coffee.

  ‘She’s old enough to know better,’ says Mum, pushing my fringe out of my eyes. She observes me professionally. ‘Time for a haircut.’

  Ian wants to order me a second limeade, but there isn’t time, because we have to be back for Dad’s tea.

  ‘Everything seems to be in order,’ says Ian, shuffling the papers into a pile. ‘We can do the rest next time.’

  ‘I’ll make sure about this one,’ says Mum, cocking her head over at me, as though I’m deaf, even though I’m sitting next to her. I know she’d rather have got a babysitter for me.

  Mum wants to get the bus home but Ian insists on taking us back in his car, which is big and also smells of mints. When he drops us off, Mum turns to me and demands, ‘What do you say for the pancakes?’ I say thank you, and Ian asks for a kiss, which I give him on his fat, minty cheek. I go to follow Mum out of the car, but the toe of my sandal catches against the door sill and I stumble to the pavement. Although I manage not to fall badly, an exclamation trips from me.

  ‘What did you say?’ Mum swivels on me, eyes locking into mine as she pulls me up.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  I whisper it. ‘Jam rags.’

  She pulls me to the house, gripping my arm hard, and slams the door as Ian drives away. My legs are smacked. According to Mum, at length to my dad over his tea, she’s never been so embarrassed in her life. What’s worse, she claims that Ian, who she suddenly calls Mr Haskell, was ‘disgusted’.

  I say sorry, keep saying it, but it makes no difference. She doesn’t look at me for the rest of the evening, and even when I go to kiss her goodnight, her own lips don’t reply.

  Of course I tell her where I’ve heard it; I’d tell her anything to make her look at me again. To my dread, Mum sends me into school on Monday with a note for Mrs Maclaren, who passes it on to Mr Scott for a full investigation. I am summoned to his office. There is no sign of the strap, although Mr Scott’s desk contains many promising drawers. I admire Mr Scott. He has wire-framed aviator glasses and rolls his checked shirts over muscled forearms woolly with gingerish hair. Once, during an assembly, he removed a wasp that was distracting us from his version of the Exodus from Egypt by pursuing it to a window pane where he crushed it, oblivious of stings, between finger and thumb.

  I can’t bear the thought of repeating the guilty words to him now that Mum has left me in no doubt of their weight. ‘Disgusting language’ is the phrase she’s used in her note, signed, as only her notes to school are, ‘S Barlow (Mrs)’. The nonchalant authority of that bracketed ‘Mrs’ sums up for me all Mum’s ease with the mysteries of life. While my ignorance has led me here, close to the strap. No threat is needed to get Pauline Bright’s name from me. As soon as I say it, Mr Scott’s face relaxes into a silent, mournful sigh. I am released, without swearing, and Pauline is sent for. The blame has passed to her, where it traditionally belongs.

  She gets me after school. I’m walking home, across the playing fields that divide the school from the subway under the main road, when she comes at me from nowhere and chops me to the ground. I taste dirt, and squeal. She manages to straddle me and uses my own laden bag to clout me across the head with full force.

  ‘I got fucking done ’cause of you, you little cow!’

  ‘I never!’ I wail into her face, then the bag wallops me again.

  I quickly feel dizzy, but also exhilarated. I’m quite a lot bigger than Pauline Bright. Although my arms are pinned, I wriggle enough to throw her off me and kick sightlessly in her direction. The fat crepe sole of my Clark’s school sandal gets her in the mouth. She runs off, howling, her hand dabbing at blood on her face. I’m bleeding as well. A sharp edge on the plastic piping decorating my school bag has caught me on the temple. My elbows and knees are indented and stained with the patterns and juices of the grass, and the collar of my blouse is torn where Pauline grabbed me by the tie. I feel important and scared.

  There are consequences to our fight. Pauline has a chip in her front tooth, caused by my wild kick. And Mum, appalled by the state of my clothes when I stagger home, keeps me off school until I am swapped into another class. There is another consequence, of course, less obvious. Pauline Bright and I are connected. We are certainly not friends, but we are on our way to something. And Pauline Bright is trouble.

  Call sheet: ‘That Summer’

  June 17th 1975.

  Director: Michael Keys

  DOP: Anthony Williams, BSC.

  First AD: Derek Powell.

  6.30 a.m. call.

  CAST: Dirk Bogarde [COLIN], Lallie Paluza

  [JUNE], Douglas Alton [MAN IN CAR], Vera Wyngate

  [WOMAN IN CAR].

  LOCATION: Hexthorpe Flats, Doncaster.

  34. EXT. SCRUBLAND. DAY.

  COLIN and JUNE fish in the pond. JUNE catches a fish, gets wet.

  35. EXT. SCRUBLAND. DAY.

  JUNE talks to a WOMAN passing by, who is suspicious. COLIN reassures her.

  36. EXT. SCRUBLAND. DAY.

  JUNE kisses COLIN goodbye.

  VERA ALWAYS HAD a bacon sandwich on location. She knew she shouldn’t, but the smell was irresistible, and there was bugger all else to do once you’d been in make-up, and getting up so early – five o’clock to be ready for the car that picked you up from the hotel – gave you an appetite. Anyway, she was resigned to doing character parts at her age, so an extra pound here or there didn’t much matter. If anything, it was all to the good. She wished, though, that the costume was a little more forgiving. The view of herself in the mirror of the make-up van was a depressing one, even allowing for the early call and the make-up girl’s intention of making her look as dowdy and nondescript as her few lines required. It didn’t help that the little girl, Lallie, was sitting in the chair next to her, eyes clear and brilliant, skin vividly freckled and unexhausted. She was a funny-looking kid really; not what you could call pretty, but if youth came in a bottle it’d sell out in five minutes. While a make-up girl methodically powdered her, Lallie kept breaking into a Jimmy Cagney impression. Vera was far from charmed by this. She doubted the child had ever seen Jimmy Cagney; what she was doing was an impression of an impression. It was all too early, anyway, for any kind of performance.

  ‘Do Dirk,’ she heard the make-up girl, Julie, urge, silencing the cries of ‘you dirty rat’.

  ‘Oh I couldn’t possibly,’ said the little girl, and then Vera really was amazed, because the child’s face captured perfectly the saucer-eyed, self-conscious melancholy of their leading man, along with the light regret of his voice. The make-up girls laughed.

  ‘Michael, dear boy, would it be possible to have a word?’ the child continued, and segued into the director, Mike, whose patrician drawl would be easy enough for anyone to take off, although not everyone would note so accurately the barest hint of a stammer in his intonation, the way he headed off certain words before th
ey could be formed into anything troublesome.

  ‘She’s like a little parrot, in’t she?’ said Julie, blotting Vera’s mouth with a tissue.

  ‘Ar, Jim lad,’ Lallie cawed. It was all too much, that degree of attention. Bound to ruin any child. Vera felt suddenly uneasy about talking to the make-up girl, in case Lallie was gathering material to ‘do’ her later.

  ‘Is that me finished, darling?’ she asked, and heard herself, camply over-theatrical. Once Julie had frowned and re-pencilled an eyebrow, Vera was glad to pluck off the tissues guarding her neck and go outside to the catering van for her bacon sandwich.

  She’d had better – the watery bacon made the bread go limp, even through the butter. Which wasn’t butter, of course, but sulphurously yellow marge. Still. Nice, with a strong cup of tea, and a ciggie. It was only the second day of location filming, and Vera’s first. Close to her last as well, bar her opening of a door to field a question from a policeman later in the week. Oh well, it was a job.

  There was no sign of Dirk, sequestered in a modest caravan, or of Mike, possibly sequestered with him, going over that day’s scenes. Vera could see the director of photography, Tony, already setting up his first shot by the pond, where she was due to stop and deliver her economically suspicious lines. Tony was a distinguished-looking man in his fifties with a leonine head of white hair; DOPs always seemed to have that same air of civilized self-containment about them, like little boys adept at Meccano, which they all very likely had been. You always knew their nails would be clean, an assumption certainly not to be made about directors.

  Vera and Tony had actually been an item on a film (which one – Summer Sins? And You Beside Me? Some lovey-dovey rubbish) in the mid-fifties; her an overripe Rank starlet and him a slightly younger focus puller. It was nothing but a nice memory to her: cheap spaghetti in Soho trattorias and polite sex back at her flat in yet-to-be swinging Chelsea. Tony in bed was, like Tony professionally, unintrusive and precise. She had an image of him bent over her muff, his hair, then ash blond, masking his face, his concentration touchingly absolute.