What They Do in the Dark

What They Do in the Dark - By Amanda Coe



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 tomboys 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.’

‘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. F*ck. 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 accounts 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 f*cking 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 they 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.

‘Hair in the gate?’ she liked to think she’d quipped, although she probably hadn’t, since he wasn’t a joky lay and she’d tried to be sensitive to things like that.

Of course it was traditional for leading ladies to fall in love with their cinematographers, possibly out of some sort of survival instinct, since the glow of mutual attraction ensured the best close-ups and the most flattering lighting. There was a story about an American star (Myrna Loy? Jean Arthur?) who had had her career ruined when she married, so spurning the DOP on whom she had always relied to give her a dewiness on screen that had deserted her in life. Maybe it was spite, or maybe he just saw her more clearly without the haze of sex and wanted to pass that revelation on to the audience. Either way she was over, playing the kind of roles Vera was now pleased to get, bitter mothers and nosy bystanders. Vera had never worked with DOPs good enough to make a difference to what she’d once had, apart from Tony. And there the timing had been wrong: him on the way up, and her on the way down.

Vera watched as Lallie left make-up and skipped along towards the cluster of lights. She wondered if Tony would still feel a frisson, with an eleven-year-old leading lady. After all, the kid hardly needed to look any younger; angles and keylights were an irrelevance. And in any case, tastes had changed. As far as Vera could see, glamour had become a word filthier than any of the ones now so fashionably bandied about on screen (not in this one though; apparently they were hoping for an ‘A’, Double ‘A’ at worst).

There was a harassed-looking woman following the girl, picking her way around the mud in inappropriate high-heeled boots. A chaperone: Vera recognized the style. Among the crew of any film involving kids, you could pick out the least maternal, hardest-faced woman, and that would be the chaperone. Then she saw that high-heels-and-no-knickers was actually making her stumbling way to the catering van, abandoning her charge.

‘Lallie! What d’you want?’ she shouted. Her voice wasn’t the standard nicotine bass Vera was expecting, but jarringly soft and girlish. She had another look. The chaperone’s make-up was heavier than any the actors were wearing – it included false eyelashes – and her nails, lacquered metallic brown, looked as though she could use them to open tins. But she was younger beneath all this get-up than Vera’s first sight of her had led her to believe.

‘Lallie!’ the woman called reproachfully. ‘I said what d’you want for your breakfast?’

‘Not hungry!’ shouted Lallie, uninterrupted in her nimble journey across the mud.

‘She’s never hungry,’ the woman confided breathily, almost whiningly, to Vera, rolling her black-fringed eyes. She had a gentle northern accent – Teesside, Vera guessed.

‘It is a bit early,’ Vera consoled, inhabiting her homely head-scarf guise.

‘Penguins, she’ll have,’ said the woman who had served Vera her sandwich with a Rothman’s (now smoked) parked in her mouth.

‘Oh aye, she’d live on them,’ breathed the chaperone.

‘Kids,’ Vera said, since the tone of the scene demanded it. There was a little silence after this. Vera saw Lallie reach the illuminated point where Tony conferred with his crew. She danced around them, inaudible at this distance, but no doubt treating them to another round of her impressions.

‘Do you ever get a bit of peace?’ she asked the chaperone, who had lit her own cigarette and was devouring it with a cup of the polystyrene tea.

‘This is it,’ the woman told her, hoisting her fag.

Vera’s elbow was cupped by the First AD, a nervous boy with chronically bad breath.

‘We’re ready for you now,’ he muttered, unconscious of his affliction. ‘Mike wants to do a run-through.’

‘With you in a tick, darling.’ Vera downed her tea and held out the cup for the canteen woman. Then she smiled a goodbye at the chaperone, who sighed, exhaling smoke, still watching the ever-moving Lallie.

‘Don’t know where she gets it from,’ she said. ‘She wears me out. Her dad tries to look after her a bit at the weekends, but he’s been working away.’

Not a chaperone then. Vera, accommodating this adjustment, tried to find some resemblance to the daughter in the mother. There wasn’t any, as far as she could see, even allowing for all the make-up. But she’d lay money Lallie could take off her mum a treat, clever little love.

SATURDAY NIGHT, AFTER a good Saturday. Swimming, chips, comics, Christina, and now Lallie. Tapping down the stairs in a blue-sequinned catsuit, pausing to gurn and exclaim ‘Shut that door!’ before reverting to herself and scuttling rhythmically to the bottom of the stairs for her I-gotta-be-me finale. A cola-bottle chew, dissolved to a sliver of flavour, sits on my tongue. The next part of the show will be Lallie and Marmaduke.

Mum opens the door to the lounge, bringing in the Saturday steak-and-chips smell with her.

‘Darling …’

I frown in irritation. Canned laughter accompanies the discovery of Marmaduke, in a frilled apron over his butler’s uniform, dusting Lallie’s stamp collection with a huge feather duster, stamp by stamp.

‘I wondered if you wanted to come to work with me next week after school?’

The formality of the suggestion would strike me as odd if I wasn’t intent on Lallie, who has sprung out of nowhere, telling Marmaduke to use a bit of elbow grease on the Penny Black, then grabbing the feather duster and doing a quick Ken Dodd. ‘How tickled I am,’ she splutters at him.

‘Only I thought it would be nice for you,’ Mum continues.

‘I’m watching this,’ I tell her, exasperated.

‘Don’t you be like that when I’m trying to talk to you, young lady.’

Now I’ve missed the next joke, and catch only the laughter. But I know better than to spark Mum’s irritation. She wouldn’t think twice about turning off the telly altogether, and has even taken a few steps towards the set, as though this is already in her mind.

‘Sorry,’ I say, hoping that this might be enough to get her out of the room again. But she sits next to me and cuddles up, with the delicious smells of the hair salon and the even-more-delicious cooked fat of her tea on top of that.

‘It’s OK, I know it’s your favourite.’

I feel a bit embarrassed. It’s not the same, watching Lallie with Mum there, even though it’s a particularly good show this week, with plenty of Marmaduke bits. He has to cook Lallie a special meal because she’s invited a boy round, called Algernon Smithington-Smythe, who wears a monocle and talks with an extremely posh accent. Marmaduke keeps getting everything wrong and ends up head first in a large meringue. My dad comes in at the end, saying ‘Load of rubbish,’ which he always says, and pretending that he’s going to turn over because he thinks the programme’s finished, which is also traditional. Mum then says what she always says, when Lallie’s doing a song from The Sound of Music, being Julie Andrews.

‘Not what you could call a pretty child, is she? Terrible nose.’

‘Talented, though,’ says Dad, and Mum’s ‘mmmmn’ of uncertain agreement suggests talent is no compensation for a lack of looks. I’m fairly sure that I’m prettier than Lallie. My nose is quite small.

Mum clears off to do the pots, later than usual. She doesn’t reappear for the police programme I’m allowed to watch before bed. After that’s over, I’m supposed to be sent upstairs, but a film starts without Dad saying anything. Once I realize he’s forgotten about me, I don’t dare speak or move in case it reminds him that I’m still up, particularly as the plastic stuff the settee’s made of squeaks a lot when you shift on it.

The hands on the clock above the gas fire creep steadily towards ten. Still no sign of Mum, still no order to go to bed. It’s a kind of torture, because although I’m very interested in the film, and know that it’s far too grown-up for me to be watching, there are a number of things I don’t understand. I’m dying to ask Dad to explain the plot for me, but can’t risk drawing attention to myself. A man and a lady in a dark, scary old house are looking for someone who’s missing – the lady’s sister? Why do they know she’s in the house?

The house looks a lot like Lallie’s mansion, although in Lallie’s show you only ever see her room and sometimes the dining room. There’s a scary old man who keeps telling the main man and lady to ‘leave this place’, but they don’t pay any attention. As they’re looking for the missing sister or whoever she is, the lady opens a door and sees someone in the other room. It’s another lady, probably the sister, but she has her back to the main lady, so you can only see her blonde hair and pretty dress. The main lady says ‘Judy?’ but the sister doesn’t say anything so she taps her on the shoulder, and the sister turns round suddenly and it’s not her face but a skull, grinning horribly, with a rat running out between her teeth. The lady on the television screams at the same time as me, but not as loud. Mum runs down the stairs and wants to know what the matter is. Dad looks confused and foggy – I realize he has been asleep in his chair and not watching the film at all. My heart is still punching hard from the shock. ‘This isn’t fit for her to be watching,’ says Mum, and packs me off to bed. Even though I get her to leave the landing light on, I don’t go to sleep for ages in case I see that empty-eyed skull in my dreams.

It troubles me for days, and I make all sorts of excuses about going to bed. One night I jerk awake and think I see the corpse hovering in the corner near the door, blonde hair billowing around it, then wake up properly with a scream thick and unscreamed in my throat. And this is how Pauline Bright draws me in. I’m playing two-ball with Christina and some other girls at morning playtime, and I see her chasing after a couple of the rough boys in our year, Neil Rigby and Darren Soper. Pauline spends a lot of playtimes on her own, but if she does play with anyone apart from her brother or sister, it’s with boys like them. Sometimes she tries to barge in on skipping or a game of two-ball with the girls, but when there’s enough of us we gang up and chase her away, telling her she smells. If she’s in the mood, she lets the boys snog her and touch her where they shouldn’t, but she always demands to touch their willies in return. Other times she just fights them, and she’s quite capable of making them run off crying to tell a teacher. Today she’s after Neil and Darren, her jaw thrust forward and eyes hideously crossed, legs spastic and arms outstretched; a monster.

‘So then she turns round and she’s like this, right –’ she shouts, ‘and she jumps out on you, but you can’t gerraway and she pulls you back in – there’s like a secret passage and she pulls you in through the cupboard and that’s where she keeps you and there’s all these other people she’s caught and she eats their flesh and that.’

Pauline catches Neil by the back of his jumper. He stretches it to the limit, arms wheeling, but can’t escape.

‘Some are just skellingtons,’ continues Pauline, still shouting. ‘That’s all that’s left of them and she’s even eaten your sister you were looking for, but then you escape—’

She lets Neil’s jumper go and he runs off round a corner. She staggers after him, pulling a fresh monster face. Christina fumbles the ball on a simple overarm against the wall – not even over-under – and it’s my turn. I have to concentrate on the game.

In the dinner queue I manoeuvre a place next to Pauline. It’s risky, given her threats to do me since our fight on the playing field, but I can’t resist.

‘Did you see that film on Saturday night?’ I ask her. I’m anxious, both in case she says no and in case she says yes. ‘The one in the mansion when the sister’s gone missing and the lady jumps out but she’s got a skeleton face?’

‘That weren’t the best bit,’ Pauline says, scornful. ‘The best bit, right, was right at the end when the bloke gets this knife right through him and you can see it pushing out of his back, like, and he’s all bleeding and it even comes out of his eyes.’

I think about this as the queue edges forward.

‘What about the skeleton woman?’ This is what I really need to know. If I know what happened to the skeleton woman, she might stop erupting into my dreams.

Pauline flicks a look at me. It’s quite difficult to see her eyes because she’s got a bushy fringe that straggles halfway down her face. Her hair is dark and heavy, and I can smell it from where I’m standing, part of the sour, alarming Pauline smell. She punches me on the arm, not hard, but enough to startle me.

‘Give us your dinner ticket,’ she says, matter-of-factly. I hand over the blue ticket and am surprised when she holds out a grubby yellow one in exchange. Only then do I want to object, since I’ve never had free dinners in my life, but we’re at the front of the line now, and Pauline has yet to tell me the ending of the film. I pocket the yellow ticket and hand over another blue one to the dinner lady in charge. I can always tell Mum I’ve lost one, although that isn’t like me, as she’s bound to remark.

I’m actually pleased when Pauline follows me to sit at my table, although I can’t continue our conversation immediately as I have to perform my duties as a table monitor. This involves doling out food to the other children at my table from the various tins that arrive from the kitchens. There aren’t enough teachers to go round, so well-behaved tables like ours have to make do with monitors.

Another girl, Cynthia, comes and sits next to Pauline. She’s a regular at my table, and she’s a disaster. She’s coloured – there aren’t that many coloured girls at our school – and she wears glasses so thick that her eyes are nearly lost behind them. Her shoulders, caving together for protection, are too narrow to hold up her bobbled grey cardigan, which bows around her arms like a shawl. She maintains a constant, gummy smile to stop being got at, but it never works. Most of the kids round the table call her nig-nog and blackie in a quietly taunting way that frightens me, the way anything frightens me when I know that grown-ups wouldn’t like it.

The main taunter is Rodney Wallace. He looks like a rat, with white hair and eyelashes and a perpetually reddened nose. He likes to kick Cynthia under the table, but not in a way that the teachers will notice. From meal to meal, when Cynthia gets up to go, I see the bruises, some purple on the shiny darkness of her legs, some older, yellowing. I don’t know what to do. Cynthia just smiles her blind smile and huddles her shoulders closer, trying to ignore Rodney’s swinging legs and the sambos and niggers that come her way.

Today, when Rodney approaches, Pauline is in his place.

‘I sit there,’ he dares to tell her.

‘F*ck off, knobber,’ spits Pauline, and Rodney retreats, muttering threats which he sensibly keeps below a level Pauline could hear. I’m glad he’s gone, although I’m breathing through my mouth so that the Pauline smell doesn’t offend me. I slide a few extra chips on to Cynthia’s plate. I always give her big portions, to make up for not protecting her.

‘Tell me about the film,’ I urge Pauline. ‘What happens to the skeleton lady?’

Pauline doesn’t know to keep her mouth closed when she eats. Through her mouthful of chewed chips I can see the uneven edge on her front tooth, the one caused by my kick.

‘It’s ace,’ she tells me, and a few bits of chip escape back on to the plate. ‘The other bloke, the one with the big nose—’

‘The professor,’ I encourage her.

‘He comes in after she’s stabbed the posh bloke, the skellington one, and they have a scrap and you think she’s going to win because she’s right strong and that but then he’s got this gun and he starts shooting her and all her bones go everywhere but bits of her keep running towards him and then he manages to get her right here –’ Pauline jabs at her chest – ‘and she’s dead but then for a second she goes like she was before she was a skellington, all like pretty, and he snogs her and then she’s a skellington and then she turns to dust and there’s just her dress left.’

We leave a little silence as I imagine the scene. It is deeply satisfying.

‘Why does he snog her?’ I ask, tying up loose ends.

‘They were supposed to get married, before she turned into a skellington.’

‘Skeleton,’ I correct her, ‘not skellington. Skelly ton.’

‘Skelly ton,’ muses Pauline. ‘It worran ace film.’

‘My mum and dad wanted to watch summat else so they turned over,’ I tell her, glossing over the fact that I’d already been sent to bed. I’m not allowed to say ‘summat’, but it’s easier talking like that to Pauline. Pauline stuffs most of a sausage into her mouth.

‘I can watch what I like, me,’ she says. ‘Rudie films, owt. Horror ones are the best though. Some of them get a bit rudie an’ all.’

This intrigues me.

‘Do you see them doing it?’ I ask.

‘All’t time,’ says Pauline airily. She scoops out the few squashed chips left in the serving tin with her hand.

‘You’re supposed to use the spoon,’ I admonish. ‘And I’m supposed to do it because I’m monitor.’ I demonstrate my power by using a serving fork to spear the last sausage, which I put on Cynthia-the-disaster’s plate. She smiles nervily at the sausage instead of me, bobbing her head as though it too might rear up and kick her.

‘What you give it to’t blackie for?’ asks Pauline, reaching across to retrieve the sausage. I bar the way with my arm, which is still holding the fork, but Pauline reaches over me, pushing me in the face.

‘If you take it, I’m telling,’ I warn her.

‘F*ck off, lezzie,’ spits Pauline. Lezzie is the worst insult we possess. I shoot my arm up in the air, thrusting so that my bum leaves my seat with the effort, panting to get the attention of Mrs Bream, who teaches the fourth years and is one table across.

‘Miss – Miss –’

Mrs Bream gets up and comes over.

‘Miss, Pauline Bright stole a sausage, Miss.’

Pauline is chewing furiously. Mrs Bream looks at her.

‘I never, Miss,’ Pauline protests, bits of sausage meat tumbling from her mouth.

‘And she called me a rude name, Miss.’

Sighing, Mrs Bream tells Pauline to come and sit next to her, guiding her softly by the arm as though she’s giving her a treat, which she is in a way, because beautiful Mrs Bream, with her perfect, bell-like pageboy and trendy dresses, is one of the most-loved teachers in the school. I feel stung, and even more so when Mrs Bream says, in the gentlest way possible, ‘You know, Gemma, it’s really best not to tell tales, lovey.’

Pauline’s smile is triumphant as she takes her place next to Mrs Bream. And maybe because of this small victory, or because of the bond of the film she’s ended for me, I let her play with me when we’re released into the playground. Christina objects, but I ignore her, and Pauline and I play the skeleton lady together until the bell rings.