What They Do in the Dark

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

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

‘Now, Gemma.’

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

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

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

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

Mum giggles and chooses one.

‘When are we going?’

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

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

‘Lallie,’ I say. ‘You know.’

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

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

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

‘I know.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I think we’re going to Spain.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Lucky girl,’ says Mum.

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

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

‘I thought you knew, Gems …’

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

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

‘I thought you knew.’

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

‘Un-grate-ful – little – beggar!’

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

‘What’s all this in aid of?’

Ian stands at the door in his short-sleeved shirt, setting down his briefcase with a look of mild amazement. Mum and I both stop. There’s something shameful about him walking in on us, and much as I’m hating Mum, I don’t want Ian to see her rage.

‘She’s got herself in a state,’ says Mum, as though she’s suddenly on my side, the side of me not getting into a state. ‘About going away.’

‘Be– be– cause – because of Lal– Lallie,’ I heave. ‘I won’t be able to—’ And at the thought of what I won’t be able to do, I’m submerged by another wave of despair.

Above this, I don’t know what takes place between Ian and Mum. At some point they leave me, and eventually my crying abates to vacant shuddering breaths. A smell of lamb chops travels upstairs. Then Ian comes in, holding out a flannel he’s soaked with cold water.

‘Here.’

He sits down on the bed next to me, which doesn’t leave me much room. Folding the flannel in half to form a rectangle, he places it over my eyes. The flabby coolness of it is soothing, as is the dark it leaves me in. Ian’s minty smell gets in the way of the lamb chops, like sauce. He doesn’t try to say anything, but he doesn’t leave. Occasionally a tearful gasp overcomes me, as sudden and inescapable as a burp. The first time this happens, Ian lays his big heavy hand on my stomach, as a comfort. For some reason I can’t help thinking again about his wife, his good lady, and wondering why she died.

‘Teatime!’ It’s Mum from downstairs, louder and more ferocious than normal, which is what she’s trying to be.

‘Come on then.’

Ian lurches and shifts from the bed, pressing his hand down on my middle before he takes it away. There’s a gap between my skirt and blouse and he has to peel the part of his hand that has made contact with my skin painlessly away.

‘Sweaty.’

He means himself, not me. Then, trying to dry the sweat off, he briskly rubs his palm up and down the front of my knickers. It’s easy to do this because in writhing about while crying I’ve worked my skirt into a bulbous band that sits above my waist.

‘Sexy.’

He says it the way he calls me a dollybird. He’s commenting on my knickers, which are pale green with a faded purple fairy printed on the front, dipping her wand in a pond spangled with lilac stars. They’re my favourites. In the second that Ian’s hand moves up and down the fabric, my privates feel charged and wrong. Ian taps my thigh and twitches my skirt.

‘Come on then, or your mum’ll have our guts for garters.’

He takes the flannel from me and leaves it in the bathroom, over the basin. Then we go downstairs together, towards the table with its waiting symmetrical plates of lamb and mashed potato and carrots, his and mine with Mum’s safely in the middle. It’s not the right sort of food at all for such a hot day. But I eat it anyway, because I should be grateful to Mum for making it, and for the new clothes, and for everything she does for me every day of my life.

FROM THE MOMENT she arrived in the UK, Quentin realized she wasn’t going to be who anyone was expecting. Coming out of the arrivals gate at Heathrow, she quickly spotted the hapless guy with glasses and an overlarge chauffeur’s hat who was holding a sign that read ‘Quentin Montpellier’. The lettering was increasingly squished at the Montpellier end. When she approached him and introduced herself, he did a weak double-take.

‘Wasn’t expecting a lady,’ he said, and then dropped the sign to free up a hand. ‘Welcome to England.’

As the chauffeur dipped to pick up her luggage, Quentin caught him taking a peek down her top, which was low-cut. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Poor little guy, she thought, as she tended to on these occasions. It would have been hard to begrudge him on any score since Britain already seemed like such a cheerless place, even though the sun when they got out of the airport turned out to be shining as brightly as it had when she left California. Despite what everyone had warned her about the rain and the fog, it continued to shine throughout the long journey, which mainly took in the freeway. It had to be said, though, that the surprising weather didn’t help in any way.

‘Not the scenic route,’ said the driver, who had introduced himself as Len. ‘Hot enough for you?’

Quentin had, in fact, asked him if he could switch on the air-conditioning, which made him hoot with laughter. No air-conditioning in the car, he told her, and suggested she open the window instead.

‘Get a bit of a breeze going.’

Quentin had been to Europe before, and once to London. She realized she had to adjust. The head f*ck was everyone superficially talking the same language, albeit with the accent, which she’d never found as cute as everyone claimed. But it was still Europe.

She’d taken her last pill on the flight with a couple of double vodkas, and the residual buzz from this kept her dozing for the first hour or so through Len’s unextensive conversation. As the medication began to wear off, England and the freeway and Len looked even worse. The sunshine was like a strip light, exposing every flaw – and there were plenty to expose. The place looked like Poland. Not that she’d ever been to Poland. Oh shit. Quentin tried to guide her mind away from the decision she’d taken in the airport bathroom to ditch her holiday stash of Quaaludes and Valium. She needed a clear head. But there was clear and there was painfully clear, and she was erring on the side of pain right here already.

‘How much longer till we get there?’ she asked Len. He considered, allowing for traffic, and said it would be another hour and a half at least, maybe two. From the way he said it, Quentin knew that the first estimate was a lie, designed to console. She took out a script from her hand luggage and managed to concentrate for nearly thirty pages, making notes in the margin. After that it got so predictable she lost interest and resorted to the bad thing, wondering if she could get hold of anything once she was on set. Vague nouns weren’t a good sign. Thing, anything, stuff. Drugs. Crews always had drugs on them. Or maybe it would be different in Europe, more cultivated. Like what? Sipping absinthe from exquisitely engraved hip flasks perhaps, while exchanging bon mots. She’d sign up for that.

OK, stop, Quentin told herself. Consider your position. Your brand-new, box-fresh position. Vice-president, production. Not as good as it sounds, but it sounds pretty damn good. You can do this. She was pleased with herself for the pep talk. There was no point in being nervous, since she was the scary one. No one here knew her. To the people she was about to meet, she was the job. The job her father had actually made actual calls about actually to get for her.

‘My father’s family is from Scotland,’ she announced, leaning towards the back of Len’s head. ‘On my grandfather’s side. He was called Quentin Macphee Gordon.’

‘You lot always know where your families come from,’ said Len. ‘Yanks, I mean.’

And then, some seconds after this had closed the conversation down, he unexpectedly revived it.

‘Sounds French, Montwhatsit.’

‘My mom’s family is French Canadian, originally,’ Quentin explained, despite her resentment at proving his point. ‘I took Mom’s name when my parents divorced.’

Len had no answer to this. After nearly an hour more of their sporadic couplets, he announced that they would soon be there. Quentin gratefully hunched closer to the window. She had imagined, since they were travelling north, that the countryside would be rather like that in which her grandmother had been born. But there was still freeway, mainly, and a notable flatness. She’d been expecting moors. Didn’t moors go up and down like Heathcliff’s moods, hills and dales, mountains and valleys, et cetera, et cetera?

‘Are these the moors?’ she asked Len, just in case.

‘Nah, have to go further north for that, love,’ he told her, and she could tell her ignorance slotted right into his prejudices. Yanks.

The schedule she’d been sent ordered her to go straight out to the location. Quentin suggested that once Len had dropped her off, he could take the luggage on to her hotel in case she was late checking in. But she could see he was looking worried. Challenged, he explained that she’d been booked into a hotel in Manchester, a city apparently another couple of hours’ drive away across something – mountains? – called the Pennines. Quentin could imagine the way some PA back in the production office in LA had checked out a map and figured that the apparent distance to Manchester would be nothing in this bonsai country. But of course, being so tiny, two hours was a big distance, and apparently the freeway didn’t go everywhere.

If Len had been an American driver, he’d have got on to finding somewhere else for her to stay during his downtime when she was visiting the set. But the lost look of his eyes behind his fishbowl lenses told Quentin that any further prodding would produce a more despairing version of his already contagious anxiety. She forced herself to quell the instinct to worry about Len. Incredibly, it wasn’t her job.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she told him. ‘Just wait here, or whatever.’

The location looked even more like Poland. It was a school, and although it was a modern building, it seemed entirely without modern amenities. The many large windows, presumably intended to give the place a sense of space and light, were cramped with childish artworks and dulled with dirt, and looked out on to a brutally circumscribed area of concrete. Quentin felt a surge of dread. Confinement, limitation, despair. Bullshit, she tried to convince herself. This is chemical. My body thinks it’s four in the morning. Everyone’s low point. This building is the architectural equivalent of four in the morning. For all I know, the whole frickin’ country might be. I’m just passing through.

‘B– bleak little place, isn’t it? We were pleased. Mike Keys.’

The man poked his hand forward for her to shake it. Weaselly little guy. The director.

‘I must say I was expecting someone much older and not nearly so attractive,’ he told her, automatically checking out the non-cleavage. Incredible, really, that a movie director would be insensitive to sight lines, but every guy in the universe thought he had secret X-ray vision when it came to staring at tits.

‘Of course, the art director’s had a bit of a go,’ Weasel-teeth continued, as oblivious to Quentin’s lack of response as he apparently was to her power. Power, goddamn you. ‘It’s actually all rather sweet inside.’

Of course. They were making a movie. They wanted the school to look like this.

‘Interesting,’ said Quentin briskly. ‘This wasn’t the original location, right? You changed it.’

‘G– gosh, yes we did.’ Good. She could see his surprise that she was up to speed. Did he really think she’d flown thousands of miles to provide him with frankly disappointing T & A? ‘That was early days. The other place was a bit gothic – bit too obvious. I just felt it’d be more interesting to use somewhere modern and, you know, try to subvert it, make it sinister. We did send you photos.’

‘Yeah, I saw them. It looks great. Suitably creepy and depressing.’

‘But modern!’

Quentin registered Mike’s little anxiety about the modern thing. Probably his age. He was what, in his mid-thirties? So maybe worried that he was losing touch with the youth market. Nobody at the studio has any hopes for this movie as regards the youth market, honey. Or maybe, she realized, as Mike continued to yabber away fanatically about the world of the movie as he led her into the school, it’s an artistic thing. Europe, Quentin. This is an art movie. Guy’s a f*cking artist.

Inside, the hopeful array of kids’ pictures and projects, the world so trustingly and inaccurately represented in primary colours and cardboard and tissue paper, was enough to choke her up. Benign, not in the tumour sense, but like Santa. All love and optimism and related shit. Each painted coat peg was surmounted by a label with a child’s name (Judith, Darren, Rodney, Pauline) printed in clear black teacher’s script. As though this was the way life went, a place for everyone, and so clearly and democratically marked. Even the teacher’s writing on the name cards, striving for impersonal authority but betraying the compromised asymmetry of a human touch, raked at Quentin’s vitals. That falling short, the contamination of the real. Poor little kids. She couldn’t remember a time when sights like the wavering tail of the ‘y’ in Rodney didn’t give her a pain in the guts.

‘Let’s make a movie!’

She heard herself produce this exclamation as they reached a huddle of lights and cables in the corridor that was being set up for a shot. Her loud American voice aroused curiosity, which was presumably what she’d intended: to announce her arrival. Was this what the job was going to do to her? But she encountered a few friendly smiles among the response to her dumb-ass effusion, so maybe it was OK. Oh, God, she was tired. Check out the crew. That skinny guy adjusting a lamp had the promising look of a speed freak about him.

‘Bit of a nightmare with the lighting,’ Mike said, following her gaze but not her intention. He gestured to the lack of space. ‘But we can’t say you didn’t warn us.’

Quentin smiled professionally. Her predecessor, Danny Larson, had lobbied to build sets for the main interiors, including the school, but Mike and the English producer, Hugh, had insisted on shooting everything on location, with all the problems of cramping that entailed. As long as it looked OK and didn’t hold up the schedule, it wasn’t Quentin’s job to care. Danny had a thing about set-building because he’d majored in architecture – this was Quentin’s theory anyway – and he just loved fooling around with the models the designers sent him and arguing about dimensions and building methods to console himself for the loss of what he had concluded, age forty-two, would have been the nobler career choice. A*shole. She really, really wished she hadn’t f*cked him. Even with thousands of miles between them, it made Quentin feel bad to think about it, befouling the nest of her new job. Everyone would be saying she got the job because she’d f*cked Danny, or, to get the hierarchy straight, Danny had f*cked her. When actually, she owed the gig to her dad. Calling Dr Freud …

‘So …’ Snapping herself to attention, Quentin could see that Mike was itching to get back to work, to tweak some lights and confer with that silvery-haired cinematographer of his and then shout ‘Action’, presuming that was the word they used over here.

‘Is Hugh busy?’ she prompted. Mike looked shifty. There was absolutely no way he’d know about her and Danny Larson, right?

‘He is, I’m afraid – meant to say – got a batch of rushes up from the processors which are looking a bit wonky.’

‘Wonky.’

Quentin could see he thought she was challenging him, when she was just unfamiliar with the word.

‘Nothing serious. Just a slight colour problem – he’s sorting it out now.’

‘So maybe there’s someone who could take me to him …’

Mike hesitated. Right there, Quentin had had enough. With the journey and the lack of sleep, and maybe the craving for chemical alteration, she felt as though she’d already slipped into watching what they called rushes and she knew as dailies; repetitive, discontinuous interludes which needed an editor’s hand to splice them into the illusion of action with consequences that lead to another action. And so on, building to a climax. Instead of which she had the view of the shrunken English freeway, Len’s gnomic expressions of anti-American preju dice, the school, all spooling off into pointlessness like the black frames that ended a reel of film. Nothing. Nada.

‘Anything I can do, Mike?’

Gratefully, Quentin felt the arrival of organizing energy. It emanated from a small, wiry woman around her own age with bright eyes and too much make-up.

‘Oh, Katrina …’

She couldn’t readily place the woman in the crew, but Mike didn’t like her, that was for sure. Quentin offered her hand, just to yank his chain.

‘Quentin Montpellier.’

‘Ooh, American—’

‘That’s right!’

‘From the studio,’ Mike muttered grudgingly. Katrina’s eyes widened. See, a*shole, Quentin mentally addressed Mike. She can see it. Power.

‘And you are …’

‘Katrina. Lallie’s mummy.’

Ah. Lallie’s ambitious mommy. So Mike was pissed with her for muscling in, and who could blame him?

‘She’d love to meet you, hasn’t stopped talking about it – she’s mad about America, terrible—’

‘Well, I’d love to meet her too,’ Quentin reassured her, professionally. ‘Maybe Katrina could take me to see Hugh, Mike?’ she suggested. ‘I wouldn’t want to hold things up.’

And so she was borne off by Katrina, who enlisted Len to transport them to the hotel where Hugh was staying. This was presentable enough by Polish standards. Despite everyone in the cast and crew who wasn’t local being billeted there, they still had rooms for Quentin and Len, and Len was even galvanized by this happy outcome into dealing with the luggage without being asked. Katrina, calling the receptionist by name (no one wore name badges, Quentin noted, although they did have odd militaristic burgundy uniforms), eased their passage. She had talked a lot in the car, and Quentin was struggling to understand her, not just because of the accent, but also because Katrina seemed to assume a lot of prior knowledge on Quentin’s part, particularly of Lallie.

‘… course, we’ve been keeping our heads down with Mike, but he’s got a lot on his plate, hasn’t he? I wouldn’t like it, everyone “Mike Mike Mike” all the time, poor man doesn’t get a minute, but Hugh’s lovely – Uncle Hugh, Lallie calls him, which is funny because she’s got a real Uncle Hugh back home – a friend of Graham’s nan’s actually, I mean, not a proper uncle as such, but she calls him Uncle Hugh, and he’s nothing like this Hugh, but she says to me, “I’ve got two Uncle Hughs now, mam” …’

Katrina had unselfconsciously followed Quentin into her cramped room. It was really dusty, although since most of the people she’d seen since she arrived also appeared dusty, she was beginning to think this was a British thing. The receptionist had mentioned a shower, but Quentin, remembering her previous European trip, held no illusions about its prospects. This didn’t prevent her using it as her excuse to hustle Katrina out without causing offence.

‘Twelve hours on the plane … need to freshen up …’

Katrina obligingly made for the door. ‘Just give me a knock when you’re ready. Two two five. Then I’ll run you along to Hugh.’

‘That’s OK, Katrina – I’m sure I can find him myself.’

Quentin caught the fall of the woman’s face as she pulled the door after her. Thwarted ambition? Being the mother of a kid actor was all about that. Get close to the rep from the studio. Or was she hoping to buddy up with Quentin so that she could bitch some more about Mike? The garrison mentality of location shoots guaranteed relationships were as overcharged as they were overdiscussed. Or maybe, Quentin realized, the woman was just plain lonely. She was a mom. She spent her day hanging around a place where everyone else was incredibly busy and focused. That was it; the poor bitch probably just needed a friend. With that thought she felt guilty. And the guilt led to the other thoughts about what she might procure to bring about a more insulated state of mind. She took herself to the shower.

The unit uncertainly grouted to the tiling above the bath waited a couple of seconds before drooling lukewarm water from its rectangular head, tickling unsatisfactory pathways over parts of Quentin’s skin. Even so, when she got out, she had to admit she felt better.

Without swabbing herself with the thin hotel towel, Quentin lay on the bed. She goose-pimpled and cooled, bobbing in and out of consciousness the way, as a kid, she used to tread along the shallow end of their pool with her head almost submerged, alternating between the heat and chatter above the water and the soundless, cool isolation of the world beneath. At some point she must have drifted under completely because suddenly she jolted back into the room. A man was staring at her. She yelled. Instinctive pervert-response.

‘Good God – I’m so sorry.’

He erased himself with the closing door, and it wasn’t until she met him down in the lobby, twenty minutes later, that Quentin was entirely convinced that he didn’t belong to her dream.

‘Well, it’s one way to break the ice,’ said Hugh.

Urbane. Quentin had never before met a man to whom this word truly applied. Although appropriately and convincingly apologetic about their encounter (Katrina had told him where to find her, he’d knocked and, getting no answer, tried the door), he was also utterly unembarrassed. Not even a token peek down her cleavage, either, although let’s face it the sight of her from soup to nuts should have been recent enough.

‘Maybe some sort of producer’s prerogative? Droit de seigneur? Could try to convince you it was some quaint custom we have …’

Already, Quentin could tell that Hugh was the real deal. If she could have popped, snorted or smoked him, he could hardly have permeated her so instantly and so blissfully. He’s the man. He’s in charge. He can handle it all. He led her through the dingy hotel corridors like an astringent washcloth cutting through years of accumulated grime; she felt cleansed in his wake. Everything about him looked extraordinarily alert, even his skin. Although it was poreless and fresh, perfect, in fact, the perfection it emanated was the accomplishment of maturity rather than any residue of childishness. Still, it made him look wholesome, despite the urbanity, incorrupt. He was of that indeterminate middle age that turned women invisible but made men look as though they were wearing a good suit. Which, in fact, he was. She didn’t want to f*ck him, exactly. She sort of wanted to swim in him.

‘Sorry about the hike – but the lift’s due to be condemned,’ he told her as they took a flight of stairs at a light run, weightless in his case. ‘Except of course no one will bother to do it until there’s actually a disaster of some kind.’ He dipped back towards her, making some gesture. ‘So glad.’

Probably gay, she realized with pang. Although it was harder to tell with English guys. Already she was worrying about how she’d feel when they parted. She’d come down, she knew. She wanted to live in Hughland. For ever. She was even in love with his watch, an assertive Rolex which suggested that time would be kept, really kept, accurately and reliably. He’s chosen that. That’s the kind of man he is. Jesus, Quentin, get a grip.

They were on their way to watch dailies, as per the schedule, because this was her job. One of the larger rooms – the hotel didn’t run to a suite, as Hugh explained – had been cleared of its bed to make a viewing room. There was a projector on a chest of drawers and a decent-sized screen at the far end of the room, slightly askew on its tripod. The curtains were drawn. Another man, youngish, with a corpse pallor suggestive of the hours he spent in these shaded rooms, was threading film into the projector as they arrived. Hugh introduced him as Bri. He nodded, paying no attention to Quentin. She totally knew the type. Nothing personal, because a guy like him just didn’t do personal.

‘Do …’

Having tweaked the screen straight, Hugh waved to one of the armchairs placed in front of it, economically adapting the end of his gesture into an indication for Bri that he should start up the film. They both sat. The dry-leaf skittering of the reel feeding through the sprockets began, calming to an automatic whirr as the countdown flashed up on the screen, the numbers huge in the middle of their target-shaped cipher. 4, 3, 2, 1. There was no sound, of course. Hugh jabbed a cigarette into his mouth and lit up, first proffering Quentin the packet, which she declined. His chair was at a slight angle to hers, so that the definite edge of his profile teased her line of vision to the left. He inhaled as though the smoke was essential to the continuation of breathing.

‘Sorted out some of the earlier stuff for you to see …’

The screen flashed an apocalyptic white, then it began. A clapperboard, mutely snapping. This dipped from view, revealing muddled activity which dissipated into a suddenly empty frame. Now there was just an expanse of parched dun grass, surmounted by a flat grey stripe of sky. The shot held, second upon second, waiting in thick light like the view through a dirty window. A smudge appeared on the line of the horizon.

‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ remarked Quentin.

‘I think we’re calling it an hommage,’ Hugh told her.

The smudge grew, and resolved itself into the figure of a child. The kid. Lallie. Our heroine. She came erratically closer, running, then walking. Her distress was immediately readable, as was the fact that she was a child unwilling to accommodate her distress.

‘Titles here. Plenty of room.’ Hugh gestured to the space to the right of the approaching figure.

‘What about the fight with the mother?’

Hugh shot her an appreciative grin. See, Hugh, I’m on the ball, Hugh.

‘Pre-title. Haven’t got it yet, of course. Means we can just jump straight in.’

The little girl had almost reached the camera. Her hair snaked unkempt around her face, her clothes were slightly too small for her. Not, it was clear, a kid to whom anyone paid much care or attention. She palmed furious tears from her face, then swerved off to the left and disappeared behind the silhouette of Hugh’s profile. A second, then the girl’s face poked back into view, confronting the camera. Now she was grinning, although her cheeks were still streaked with tears. Lallie’s lips clearly formed the shape of ‘OK?’, before she was nuked by the flash of light at the end of the shot.

‘That was OK,’ said Quentin. There it was; a whole new world, right there. She watched two more takes, one marred by a lurch of the camera as it pursued Lallie across the barren grass.

‘It looks good,’ she told Hugh. It was the truth. And she felt good. It was fine, she could do this job. The movie was going to be more than fine, maybe. Her name on the credits. She basked in the moment as Bri threaded the next reel of film and Hugh leaned to stub out his thoroughly smoked cigarette in a crowded ashtray.

‘It’s going to be great,’ she told him.

Hugh arched into his seat and palmed back his lively brown hair. ‘I do hope so.’

‘But I guess every film’s a masterpiece in the dailies,’ she added, because it was something her dad used to tell her, along with ‘There are no rights or wrongs in this business, baby, only opinions’, and ‘Never put an actress in silk after thirty’. She didn’t believe it or anything. At this moment, noting the pristine band of shirt cuff which divided the flesh of Hugh’s hand from the pressed linen of his jacket, at this exact moment, she felt as though she’d flushed that paternal brand of cynicism away at LA airport, along with the Ludes and Valium. Yay for her.

IT HAD HAPPENED, finally, and like stifling heat breaking into a storm, the catastrophe brought a kind of relief. Pauline walked back into the house one afternoon while it was still her mam’s morning. She could see Joanne had just got up: although she was dressed as much as she ever got dressed in the day, her breath smelled, and her hair was matted with stale hairspray. This was a usual sight, as was the avidity with which Joanne sucked down the smoke from her fag. At least three mugs of tea and at least three fags to go with them – that was the minimum Joanne required to transform into something human. Shooting a look at her, Pauline deduced she was on her opener, and so to be avoided.

‘You got summat to say to me?’

Pauline swerved for the living-room door.

‘I said, you got summat to say to me, gyppo?’

‘No.’

Pauline edged around Joanne’s chair, palming a biscuit from the packet in front of Joanne. She dropped it as Joanne’s hand shot out from behind and grabbed her by the hair.

‘No?’

‘No, Mam.’

Pauline bent her knees and twisted back to lessen the strain on her scalp as Joanne wound the hank of hair tighter round her fingers.

‘F*cking let go!’ Pauline protested.

Joanne laughed. It wasn’t real laughter. ‘Happy Birthday, Mam,’ she whined, in loveless mimicry. Shit.

‘I forgot …’ Pauline panted. ‘Please, Mam …’

But instead of letting go, Joanne pulled all the harder. In a tearing burst of pain, the hair came away in her hand. Pauline screamed and lashed out. This gave Joanne an excuse to punch, her fist still clenched round the sundered clump of piebald hair.

‘F*cking stop it, will yer – please, Mam, I forgot – f*cking – I forgot, Mam—’

Joanne only had the chance to land one blow with full contact before Pauline, agile with experience, squirmed under the table and rolled herself into a ball. Joanne had to be content with aiming a few ineffectual kicks before giving up. Seconds later, when Pauline finally dared open her eyes and uncurl a little, she saw Joanne’s pale legs, crossed implacably in front of the chair as she lit her second fag. A few inches away lay the remains of the pink wafer biscuit, pulverized during their scuffle. And she knew, blankly and intolerably, that there would be no more blows, because Joanne had passed into the state where Pauline was dead to her.

She had forgotten her mam’s birthday. It wasn’t surprising. No one reliably remembered hers, and for the last two or three years Joanne had been away working at this time of year. But that was the way it went. Joanne would hold this resentment a long time if Pauline couldn’t think of a way to redeem herself. Which she would, because she had to. Because nothing was worse than this.

Pauline hadn’t been to school for a while now. She disliked the laxness of the pre-holiday weeks, the playing of bingo and the sop of watching of ‘special films’ because everyone was waiting for the term to end. She had learned to ignore the alien chatter of the other kids about caravans and the seaside and going on planes, because the summer holidays were just an annual hole in her time, filled with aimlessness, sunny if she was lucky. This year, though, the chatter was even more animated, because it was fixed on the school being used in that film and the possibility of everyone becoming film stars. This was the real reason Pauline was staying away. When the notice had gone up for everyone to put their names on for the film people to see, she had joined the queue like everyone else. Mrs Bream had smiled and written her name, but Pauline had seen the look aimed from the back of the hall by Mrs Maclaren, thrown like a ball that Mrs Bream had refused to catch. Pauline knew what it meant. Gyppo. Pisspants. Pov. And to punish herself for that stupid lapse into expectation, she had stayed away and stayed away, until she could be sure it would all be over and there would be no chance of her hoping something special might happen to her.

Twagging school, at least she’d made herself some money. Shaking down kids in the playground was only a minor source of Pauline’s income. If Nan told her to piss off when she asked for money for the chip shop, or she’d decided to invest in a really desirable toy for herself, or once, exceptionally, for Cheryl (because she’d accidentally made her need to have stitches at the hospital when they were messing about on a wall with glass embedded in the top), Pauline went down to Wentworth Road.

It was an older girl, Dawn, who’d introduced her to it. Wentworth Road was the last rung in the ladder of streets surmounted by Adelaide Road. There had been two further roads, bombed during the war, fringed by a common that was now largely subsumed by a ring road built in the sixties. Wentworth Road itself had suffered an amputation in the bombing, and its abrupt truncation, skirted by the malnourished grassland of the bomb sites and the lethal boundary of roaring traffic, rendered it a real estate no-man’s-land. At the top of the road a depressed-looking newsagent limped on from year to year and at its bottom, a dead end, a similarly lacklustre trade in street prostitution managed to survive. The real pros operated nearer the top of the ladder; it was here, where they could literally go no further or no lower, that punters picked up junkies and kids.

Pauline couldn’t remember the face of the first man she’d wanked off, because she hadn’t looked. She had been frightened, not of being hurt, but of doing something wrong, the way she had been frightened when she walked into that launderette the first time. But Dawn had explained it all really well, although not that his spunk would go everywhere, like wee. After that surprise, she didn’t have to think about it much any more. Sometimes they wanted to put their hands in her knickers and rub there, and once a man had asked her to put his willy in her mouth, but she had said no, and he hadn’t insisted. It never took long, and she got pounds and 50p pieces. The men were usually, although not always, in cars, but she didn’t get in with them because she had listened well to the warnings at school about getting into cars with strange men. They might drive off with you and do all sorts. So instead Pauline took the men into one of the backs, the alleys that punctuated the ladder, which were either deserted or occupied by people engaged in similar activities. A lot of dogs crapped in the backs, so you had to be careful where you trod.

She didn’t go down Wentworth Road much as a rule, but the boredom arising from her truancy and the impossibility of staying in the house to be erased by Joanne had led her to make nearly five pounds that week. It didn’t look like five pounds, because it was mostly coins, but Pauline had counted it assiduously and knew how much was there. Enough to buy Joanne something really special for her birthday. Enough to bring herself back to life.

When this idea came to her, Pauline was in the woods, vainly searching for blackberries, which were still pale green and ined ible, phantoms of their future selves. Legs scratched from the brambles, she walked back into town, over Hexthorpe Flats, heading for the Arndale Centre. Her mam loved jewellery. She already wore a fair amount, real gold, as she always told Pauline during the good times, when she allowed Pauline to hang round her and take stock of it on her body. Small gold sleepers in her small white ears, whose inner whorls were sympathetically gilded with wax. A ring on her little finger made out of a real sovereign, and then on the next finger along a signet ring with her initials on it. On the other hand, a fat gold ring with three small stones embedded in the front: diamonds, her mam said. The ring was slightly too small and made the skin above it bulge uncomfortably, but Joanne never took it off, even to have a bath. Around her neck, two gold chains: one thin and slippery, one thicker and less alluring, the thick one with a pendant also engraved with her initials; on her left wrist, a charm bracelet. This was Pauline’s favourite. It was the crowning part of her ritual to tell the charms devoutly, like the beads of a rosary: a pair of dice, an old-fashioned car, a heart with a red stone at its centre and, best of all, a domed birdcage with a tiny canary and a door that actually opened. She thought she might buy her mam a new charm for the bracelet. Even the idea warmed the chill inside her.

Preoccupied by her plans for redemption, it wasn’t until a man shouted that Pauline realized she had walked into some unusual site of activity on the Flats, which, as their name suggested, usually had nothing, not even trees, to interrupt them. There were a lot of people milling around parked vans, and big lights on stands which made it look like a confusingly different and cooler time of day. Her first thought was that she had strayed on to a fairground being set up, even though it was the wrong time of year for fairs.

‘Oy!’

A skinny bloke in an anorak grabbed her T-shirt at the shoulder. Pauline smelled his breath before she broke into a run. No point hanging around to be blamed for something. Skimpy breaks of trees fringed the Flats, like the receding hair on a bald man. They never thickened into something more substantial, since you could always see the pale land behind them, but they were the only form of cover in sight and she bolted for them instinctively. Once she realized that the anorak man wasn’t going to follow her, Pauline began to enjoy the sensation of skittering through the sparse trees, heading for town with her plan. And just as she was leaving the last straggling line of birches, she glimpsed another girl, not running, but labouring under the weight of a man who had her pinned against one of the narrow tree trunks. It took Pauline’s legs a second to stop, and in that second she processed the various pieces of information her eyes had taken in in flight: the man wasn’t hurting the girl, as she’d immediately thought, but submitting to the piston movement of her small hand on his cock. Both of their heads were bowed to the effort, joined in the endeavour, although the man’s eyes were closed, and the girl’s wide open. The girl was a smear of dark hair and an orange T-shirt, the man was a massy length of green-and-white-striped shirt and jeans. The two of them vanished as Pauline resumed her run, so fast now that her breath began to tear the edge of her lungs. Pauline understood what she had seen, or thought she did, and there was no reason to linger.

The Arndale, opened five years before, was busy with civilized consumption. Pauline took a minute to wash the worst of the woods from her hands and face in the fountain that was the shopping centre’s focal point, its waters splashing against the legs of a monumental abstract Adam and Eve whose pinheads, streaked with verdigris, which Pauline assumed to be bird shit, reached almost to Boots on the second floor. There were coins flashing in the shallow green pool, silver as well as coppers, but Pauline ignored them and headed for the doors of H. Samuel. She had enough money, from the look of the window displays.

The lady who worked there was briskly unsuspicious. When Pauline told her what she was looking for, she laid out all the gold charms they had on the counter, taking them from velvet resting places under glass. Pauline recognized some of the charms Joanne already had, the heart and the birdcage. But there were others: a gold teddy bear whose legs swung when you flicked him, a teapot with a minute hinged lid, and a shining guitar. Pauline considered. She was drawn to the teddy bear, but concluded that her mam would prefer the guitar, given her love of music and her current dislike of all things related to Pauline. It cost four pounds eighty and the woman, without being asked, put the charm in a special box and wrapped it in H. Samuel paper tied with thin ribbon. Then she dropped the parcel into an H. Samuel bag, safe from Pauline’s fingerprints.

‘F*ck you been up to?’

Nan was shuffling around in the kitchen when Pauline got back, performing her version of tidying up, which meant sorting piles into larger piles, freeing up the decreasing space at ground level while creating skyscrapers of clutter.

‘Is Mam in?’

‘No. Mind that—’ Nan reached across Pauline to stave off the collapse of a cairn of tins. Pauline left her and went up to Joanne’s room. It was always Joanne’s room, even when she was away, and as such had more of a decor than any other room in the house. It was papered, Joanne had done it herself, in flock wallpaper stamped with a huge quasi-paisley pattern in choc olate, purple and crimson. There was one magazine-sized blank patch on the wall, high up above the wardrobe, where the paper had run out and it hadn’t been worth buying another roll. You might not notice it straight away, but once you did it was the first thing you looked at each time you entered.

The bed was made. This was unusual. The shiny mauve nylon cover had a see-through frill around it, as though it was trying to be a negligee. It had dulled from a mix-up in the wash. Devoutly, Pauline took her gift from its bag and placed the H. Samuel box on the pillow, superstitiously centring it not just on the pillow, but even within the middle stitched diamond of the bedspread covering the pillow’s summit. The formality of the offering looked pleasingly special, although it now occurred to Pauline that she should have bought a card, a birthday card. That’s what people did. She made another journey to the newsagent on Wentworth Road, and from their time-bleached selection chose the most expensive, adorned with a vintage car and a fishing rod, and returned to place it below the box.

Then she waited, settling herself cautiously beside the present and card. Only after she had slept, waking to synthetic heat radiating from the bedspread on to her sticky skin, did Pauline realize that it was all too late. Once again, Joanne had gone to Leeds, and she had been doomed to limbo.