What They Do in the Dark

THE LAST PART of school before the summer holidays is awful. Because of Mum having me moved to a different class I don’t know anyone properly, and no one can be bothered to make friends with me so soon before we break up. At least at playtime I can find my old friends and play my old games, but Pauline Bright hovers at the edges of skipping and two-ball, tempting me into a bout of skeletons. Her hair is now a horrible greenish-white that reminds me of fresh snot, with a stripe of black at the roots. The teachers were shocked when she turned up like this and tried to send her home, but she claimed that her mum had mixed the bleach bottle up with the shampoo, that it had all been an accident. She came back the next day with her hair in a ratty snot-and-black ponytail (rubber band, which I’m not allowed; I’m only allowed proper bobbles, because uncovered elastic breaks your hair) and told them that her mam had said there was nothing she could do until it had all grown out.

Whenever Pauline opens her mouth, the ragged angle of her front tooth gnaws into my conscience. Some days I succumb, and play skeletons. It’s the sort of game I gave up playing when I was at least eight, and I feel slightly ashamed of myself, as well as wary of Christina’s contempt. Fortunately she does violin and choir two dinnertimes a week. And the game with Pauline doesn’t make us friends, however much we play it.

My mind is on other things. Mum takes me into work, as she’d suggested during her interruption of my perfect Saturday night. She pretends it’s because my fringe needs cutting, but usually she whips the scissors out at home and gives me a deft, brutal trim. This time though, she gets one of the juniors (spotty Trish) to wash my hair at the basin like a customer, and puts rollers in after the trim, and sits me under one of the driers which makes me feel, not entirely enjoyably, like an astronaut. By the time she combs out my hair, saying how much better I look, even using a bit of spray, everyone else has left. And then Ian the accountant turns up; Mr Haskell. He’s sweating in the heat even though his shirt has short sleeves. I have never, in fact, seen so much sweat on a person’s face. Something to do with his fatness, I conclude.

‘Hot enough for you?’ he asks us both, accepting my mum’s wordless greeting of a lilac salon towel and drying off his face with it. He hands the towel back to her, also without speaking, then beams at me.

‘Who’s this dollybird?’ he asks. ‘A famous model?’ I blush happily, and oblige when Mum wonders if I’m going to give Mr Haskell a kiss. I blush again when I remember the jam rags. But he seems unconcerned.

We return to the Copper Kettle, where Ian once more orders my dream pancake combination. ‘Your usual, madam,’ he says. I’m perfecting a method of eating it, where I swirl each disc of banana in a pool of butterscotch, before using it as a template to cut out a corresponding disc of pancake with the blade of my knife, skewering the resulting forkful and eating it. The concentration demanded by this process obliterates the surrounding adult conversation, although I noticed when I sat down that Mum was unequipped with a biro this time, and that while Ian has a pile of papers with him, they remain on the seat beside him. I’m chasing the last drops of sauce with the final absorbent morsel of pancake when Mum asks me a question.

‘So, Gems, what do you think about us having a holiday?’

I swallow the last of the pancake, nodding. We always have a holiday, usually abroad. I’ve been to Spain more times than anyone in my former class (I don’t know anyone well enough in my current one to ask them about holidays). I’d most like to go to Butlin’s, like Christina; she’s told me there are lots of competitions there which I’m hopeful of winning, talent contests that I think might lead to meeting Lallie and being in her show. But I know better than to say so, because I know that going to Spain is better, and that being better is what Mum’s best at. We always have new clothes for our holidays. Only Dad wears shirts from his non-holiday life, but even he puts on hats and aftershave.

‘Just you and me,’ Mum elaborates.

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

‘That’s right.’

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

‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

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

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

‘Oh.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You mean a Christmas show?’

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

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

‘So she wouldn’t be on every week?’

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

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

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

‘For the same money though,’ she clarified.

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

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

‘They’re not children long these days.’

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

‘That’s true.’

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

‘How’s the filming going, anyway?’

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

‘Loves the work.’

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

‘Born to it.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A producer?’

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

Delivering this news was like plugging Katrina into a socket.

‘They want to visit the set?’

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

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

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

‘Well, fingers crossed, eh?

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

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

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

‘Did they mention what the project is?’

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

‘Who’s playing cards?’

Shit. It was Lallie, bouncing up the aisle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

TO PAULINE, A cataclysmic outburst of rage from Joanne was as inevitable as her eventual departure from Adelaide Road. In fact, it was difficult not to regard one as contingent on the other. Pauline didn’t consider slapped legs and pulled hair and name-calling as part of this tally; the nature of her mam’s real anger actually rendered these casual tokens of attention puzzlingly desirable. Because when Joanne decided that Pauline was a miserable little cunt, unfit to be her daughter, she punished her by refusing to speak or even look at her. She wouldn’t have her in the same room, or say her name. Then, it was as though Joanne had killed her, and Pauline was left to float around the house like a ghost, a ghost that lacked even the small consolation of being scary.

It hadn’t happened yet. Pauline was adept at reading her mother’s moods and smelling her breath, and stayed out of the way if either seemed volatile. Craig and Cheryl were too little to have learned these lessons, but although a few bruises came their way as a consequence, Pauline knew that the larger reaches of Joanne’s anger were reserved for her.

‘Where’ve you been?’

‘School.’

‘School. Read this then.’

Joanne flourished a newspaper at her. Pauline took it. The Express. Someone must have been to visit her mum and left it.

‘Which bit d’you want me to read?’

‘I don’t care. Any.’

Pauline never got a chance to read out loud at school. It was always the others, even if she bothered to put her hand up. She started to read out a bit about a man who’d killed his wife with a tyre iron but Joanne lost interest after she realized that Pauline wasn’t going to make any mistakes.

‘What’s the time?’ she asked, chopping off Pauline’s flow of words like scissors.

‘Don’t know.’

There were no clocks in the house, and Joanne didn’t wear a watch. But Pauline could hear the Nationwide music from the telly.

‘I think it’s about six,’ she offered.

‘I’ve got to get ready,’ said Joanne, without making a move. She looked ready from the neck up, but her body was still in a bra and jeans. She lit a fag and slumped to smoke it so that her soft white torso stacked on top of itself and over her waistband. A row of lush purple bruises the shape of fingertips stood out on the flesh of her back.

‘You looking at?’

‘Nothing.’

Pauline drifted away, belatedly sensing danger. She’d been less alert to it than usual because she wasn’t feeling well. Her head was thick and her legs felt woolly, as though she’d taken too many of Nan’s pills. She’d felt sick all day as well, too sick to eat her school dinner. She staggered upstairs to her bed, which was empty of Cheryl. The candlewick bedspread had been washed, and there was a sheet. Joanne had been to the launderette. Pauline crawled beneath the covers, breathing the launderette smell and loving Joanne. When she woke hours later in the dark it was with a lurch of dread. Cheryl was in the bed with her, rolled next to her on the slack mattress, but Pauline was shivering with cold, despite the combined heat of her sister’s body and the summer air. She was about to be sick.

Their room was closest to the bathroom, and Pauline ran, but before she could reach the toilet a hideous gush of sour liquid erupted through her mouth, splashing up from the patchy lino and over her clothes. The awful taste in her mouth, a few shuddering breaths, then the next wave assailed her, interrupted convulsively by the next, and the next. It was everywhere. She was crying now as well as shivering, and she’d shat herself at the same time as being sick. She tried to be quiet. Not because she was worried about waking anyone else in the house – she could hear voices downstairs and there was never an hour when someone wasn’t awake and about their business – but because she didn’t want to draw anyone to the scene of her shame. There were no towels to clean up the mess, and the empty toilet roll, furred with dust, mocked her from where it had rolled to the foot of the washbasin. She’d have to get the bedspread.

Still sniffling with shock and self-pity, Pauline waddled shittily back to the bedroom, where Cheryl slept on, the bedspread kicked off her. Returning to the bathroom, she retched on the landing outside, but there was nothing left to come up. She wrestled with the cover, turning the one bath tap that worked feebly on it before giving up and stuffing as much of the bedspread as she could down the toilet to get it properly wet. After a few plunges she cast it, heavy with water, on to the mess on the floor and stamped up and down its length, swabbing hopelessly at the vomit.

It wasn’t that Nan or the others minded stink and shit and mess, it was what they lived in, although even they probably drew the line at this. But Joanne would mind, she was different from the others, and Pauline knew she would blame her. Especially since she’d been looking for something to blame her for. It made it worse that she’d been to the launderette, that Pauline was covering the newly pristine bedspread with puke.

‘What’s all this in aid of?’

In her panic, Pauline’s first thought was that Joanne was wearing a swimsuit. She’d never seen her in a swimsuit.

‘I was sick.’

As soon as she spoke she couldn’t stop herself crying, as though the tears came from the same place as the puke.

‘Don’t be cross wi’ me, Mam, I’m sorry. I was sick, I couldn’t help it, I’m sorry, Mam …’ On and on she wailed, unable to stop, as though she was Craig’s age and not ten.

‘State of you. You messed yourself and all?’

Pauline continued to cry, abject, as her mother left the room. After a few seconds her tears stuttered, uncertain of the outcome. Was she being left? This would be better than she dared to hope. She reapplied herself to shoving the bedspread back and forth with her toes, sweating with nausea and effort. Joanne reappeared, wearing her plastic leather coat open over the swimsuit, which Pauline now saw was some kind of underwear which pushed up her tits and crammed in her waist, and had bits dangling off for stockings, although Joanne’s white legs were bare. She was carrying a bucket full of water.

‘Take your clothes off then. Get in the bath.’

She wasn’t angry, as far as Pauline could tell. She had the face on she wore when she had a job in hand. Pauline gestured to the stuff in the bath, an assortment which included broken-down shoes, unstapled porno mags and an ancient, flexless bar heater.

‘Well, shift it then.’

Pauline complied as quickly as she could, not wanting to shatter this fragile interlude of grace. Joanne even helped her, finding the plug in the process. She put it in the plughole, commanded Pauline to get in, and poured in the bucket of cold water. Although she was still shivering, Pauline was grateful, after all the recent weirdness her body had visited on itself, for the normality of the water shocking her skin. Joanne went off to fetch another bucketful, as Pauline tried to wash off the sick and shit. It took four buckets altogether. Joanne chucked the last one over her as she stood in the bath, like a shower, she said. Then she brought a dry towel from somewhere and let her wrap herself in it. Throughout this, Pauline tasted the sick in her mouth and was terrified that she might vomit again. She knew how easy it would be to overtax the miracle of Joanne’s patience. But nothing happened.

Joanne followed her back to her room, told her to get back in bed with Cheryl. As Pauline climbed in she looked around.

‘Where’s the flipping blanket?’ she said.

She doesn’t know, Pauline realized. She didn’t recognize it, heaped in a corner of the bathroom floor, covered with sick and mess. And the dread came back to her, as sour as the taste of vomit.

‘I haven’t seen it,’ she lied.

‘I washed it,’ Joanne told her indignantly. ‘Put it back on the bed today.’

‘Sometimes our Craig takes stuff,’ said Pauline, faking more sleepiness than she felt. ‘It’s dead warm, any road.’

As soon as Joanne had gone and she was reassured by a few minutes of silence, Pauline was up again and back to the bathroom. She dragged the unrecognizable, stinking bedspread back and stuffed it under her bed. Anything was better than letting Joanne see what had happened. She’d be first out of the house in the morning, however ill she felt.

By the time the sun was up Pauline no longer felt particularly ill. What she did feel was starving, and she had to nick a bottle of milk from the nicely decorated house five doors down to stop the ache in her gut. After this, she distributed her soiled clothes among a few local dustbins. She’d realized on waking that she had to retain her school pinafore dress because there was nothing to replace it. But it was more badly stained than the water from the kitchen tap and a frantic rub could remedy, and she could smell herself even in the weakness of the early sunshine.

Pauline walked on to school, although it was at least an hour before lessons would be starting. To wash the bedspread, she needed money for the launderette. Scavenging about their house before she left had only unearthed a few coppers and two five-pence pieces. The one thing all Brights took care of when they had it was money. It wouldn’t be a problem to shake some down from the littler kids in the playground, she knew. But then, cost aside, she had no idea what happened once you were in a launderette. Pauline didn’t like new environments, where it was likely she’d be disapproved of, if permitted to enter at all. She knew better than to go into a launderette unarmed with any redeeming knowledge of its procedures. Ignorance would make her stink twice as badly as she already did.

Still groggy, she slumped against one of the school gateposts and dozed in the sunshine. When she woke the gates were open, and other kids were milling through, some accompanied by parents. Pauline could see in their faces how bad she looked and smelled. She glowered back at them, defying anyone to comment. Among the arrivals was that Gemma girl, not with her mum, although Pauline had seen her mum with her at school before, always pulling and plucking at Gemma as though she was making her out of plasticine. Seeing Gemma’s round blue eyes open rounder at the sight of her, Pauline shouted ‘F*ck off!’ before another thought struck. She hopped into the playground after Gemma before she could get herself into a group with her friends.

‘Hey.’

Pauline shoved her on the shoulder, making Gemma’s perfectly divided high bunches waggle like spaniel’s tails as she turned to address the blow.

‘Leave me alone, you,’ Gemma warned.

‘I’m not,’ said Pauline. ‘I need to ask you summat.’

Gemma stopped, wrinkling her small nose.

‘Yuck. Have you been sick?’

‘Six times,’ exaggerated Pauline. ‘There were nowt to come up in the end.’

‘I got a bug one time we went to Spain,’ Gemma said, ‘and I was sick fourteen times in two days.’ She looked at Pauline’s pinafore. ‘You’ll get done for not wearing a blouse. It’s the rules.’

‘I ant got owt else.’

‘Anything.’

‘You what?’

‘You should say anything else.’

‘Do you know about launderettes?’

It turned out that Gemma did, and seemed flattered to be asked. She went quite often with her mum, she said, although now that they were in Ian’s house he had a washing machine so her mum didn’t need to go any more. Pauline recognized this as a boast, although its content was too obscure to impress her.

‘You’ll need lots of five-pence pieces. And powder,’ Gemma told her. ‘You can buy it there, but they charge a fortune for it.’

Pauline mused on this. ‘You’d better come with me.’

‘When?’

‘After school.’

‘I can’t. I’ve got ballet.’

‘Dinnertime then.’

‘We’re not allowed.’

‘They’ll only think you’ve gone home. We’ll be back for the register, it’s not like twagging.’

Pauline could see the impossibility of this in Gemma’s face.

‘You know the skellinton lady, I saw her in another film the other night,’ she lied. ‘She showed her tits and everything.’

‘She never.’

‘I’ll tell you about it later,’ she enticed, ‘if you come with me.’

‘We’ll get done.’

‘We won’t. If we do, I’ll say I made you. Please. Go on. Please. Then I’ll tell you about her.’

Gemma exhaled. ‘You really smell, you know.’

Pauline hadn’t mentioned anything to Gemma about the soiled bedspread, now waiting in a plastic bag among the lower branches of a leggy lilac bush in the Brights’ garden. So it took some persuading to get her back there before they set out again for the launderette. Gemma was very anxious, however much Pauline reassured her, that they’d miss the two o’clock register. Pauline was more anxious about being caught by Joanne retrieving the bedspread. This was unlikely, since Joanne rarely stirred before mid-afternoon. But she was very relieved once they were out of the garden and walking to the launderette a safe few streets away. Many five-pence pieces jingled in the pocket of the PE shorts she was now wearing, along with an overlarge aertex blouse similarly culled from lost property after an appalled Mrs Bream had intervened at morning assembly. Pauline had waged a campaign of terror during playtime, mindful of the fortune that Gemma had told her washing powder would cost. Throughout this, Gemma had ignored her and played two-ball with that Christina and her other snot-bag friends.

‘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.