What They Do in the Dark

THERE’S A ROW about the photographs of Ian’s good lady. I work it out, eventually, although at first I think it’s a row about me and my ‘behaviour’, as Mum calls it. I wake a few days after the upset over the trip to Butlin’s and the filming to the familiar sound of Mum’s anger jabbing against the more surprising rhythms of Ian’s response. I haven’t seen or heard him angry before, and he doesn’t sound angry now, not compared to Mum, who’s an expert. His tone (I can’t hear words at this point) is completely unlike my dad’s short bursts of defence. He sounds like an actor doing a big scene in Coronation Street.

‘If you really feel like that—’

‘Well, I bloody do!’

‘– then I may as well walk out of this door, turn right into Cantley Lane and stand in front of the next bus—’

‘Don’t be so bloody stupid!’

‘Well, that’s how I feel. There’d be nothing left for me, Suzanne, nothing at all … life was empty for me, you know that …’

I go into the bathroom and run the tap while I have a wee. I don’t want to hear any of it. I wash my face and brush my teeth at agonizing quarter speed, water running all the while, and by the time I venture down for breakfast, Mum’s smoking silently into the garden while Ian crunches toast, sad-eyed. We all ignore each other while we go through the morning routine, Mum’s leftover anger used up in the roughness with which she scrapes my hair into its bunches.

On the way to the bus stop she suddenly speaks.

‘You know Ian’s wife died of cancer.’

Cancer, I know, is as bad as swearing, its outcomes and diagnoses only ever mouthed in front of children. No wonder we aren’t allowed to speak of Ian’s good lady.

‘It was very sad. She was only forty-nine. I used to do her hair. Big lady.’

That’s all Mum seems to have to say, until we reach the end of our bus journey and are due to go our separate ways. She kisses me goodbye and flicks at my fringe in irritation.

‘You, er, we’ve decided that you can stay, for the wotsit. Filming thing. I’ll have a word with Christina’s mum. They shouldn’t be out of pocket, so … it’s very good of Ian – generous – I hope you’re grateful.’

I am. I say so, although my feeling is beyond words. This surge of ecstasy, the mystery of the argument between Ian and my mum, and the possible involvement of his good lady have somehow all come together into the change of heart I hadn’t thought possible. Wonderful Ian: I know my gratitude should be laid at his door, because I can still feel all Mum’s resistance to my devotion to Lallie, however carefully I protect her from its full force. And yet mysteriously she isn’t cross with me, or him, but rather his wife. Even in my relief and pleasure, I feel bad about her. It’s almost as though satisfying my dearest wish was what killed her.

I sit under this puzzling feeling all through our morning assembly, the last of the year, while Mr Scott gives out prizes and talks about holidays. When he mentions Lallie and the film, a lightning stab of glee shoots through me, followed, with a two-Mississippi delay, by a thunderclap of guilt. And then, an answer offers itself, in the form of Mr Scott’s sermon of the day. This, like most of his sermons, takes a recent incident to illuminate its message.

Mr Scott’s chest hair pokes through the buttons of his sports shirt, sparking gold in the sunlight to match the hair on his arms. The same light bounces from his aviator frames as he trenches back and forth at the front of the hall, and occasionally catches the face of his manly watch, itself once the subject of one of his lectures. I can’t now remember which moral quality it revealed, but I know that it is waterproof to a depth of several hundred metres and is the same kind worn by airline pilots.

‘Lallie Paluza,’ he says, making it count. My heart beats faster. What is he going to say about her? Surely nothing bad? What if he condemns her in some way and I’m forced to disagree, even to dislike him? I love Mr Scott.

‘A clever girl. A very clever girl, with lots of talents. Acting, singing, dancing …’

Actually, even I have to concede that Lallie’s dancing isn’t up to much. I’m up to Blue Riband in tap and modern and Grade Three in ballet and all round I’m better.

‘Now it looks as though she’s going to be a film star – like some of you.’

There’s a murmur of half-laughter, to show our appreciation.

‘But something you might not know about Miss Paluza—’ Mr Scott reaches the end of his walk and pauses before taking the return journey. I doubt very much that he’s going to tell me something I don’t already know. He reaches for the vaulting horse near the door where he’s stacked a pile of papers to do with the assembly and takes down a newspaper cutting. Nudging the nosepiece of his specs, he reads:

‘Ten-year-old entertainer Lallie Paluza gave a lift to children at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London during a recent visit. Leukaemia sufferer Abigail Vaughan, eight, pictured, is shown enjoying one of Lallie’s impressions during a party where the child star presented the hospital with a cheque for two hundred and fifty pounds raised for the hospital during her pantomime season.’

He turns the cutting to face us so that we can see the grainy picture of Lallie in close-up with a moon-faced little girl, both cocking their thumbs to the camera. This is old news: Lallie stopped doing panto – it was Aladdin this year – months ago, obviously. But I haven’t seen the article before – it must have come from another paper, not the Mirror, which is what we get, or used to get before we went to Ian’s. And they’ve got her age wrong.

‘Leukaemia is a kind of cancer of the blood, it’s very serious,’ Mr Scott tells us. ‘Cancer’ reaches out of the sentence and grabs me. ‘But there’s no doubt that getting a visit from someone famous must have given this young lady a lift, however poorly she was feeling, the way your granny or grandad or your auntie Betty get a lift when you pay them a visit. And you might be saying, “Ooh, I don’t want to go to Auntie Betty’s, her house smells funny and she always gives me sloppy kisses and she’s never got any chocolate biscuits,” but the point is, Auntie Betty loves seeing you – I don’t know why, looking at the lot of you, but she does, and that’s what’s important …’

I drift away. Auntie Betty makes regular appearances in Mr Scott’s assemblies, and enjoyable as I find her, today I’m more excited by the message. Lallie does good things. Lallie isn’t selfish. Perhaps there’s someone I could visit in order to be like her and set things right with Ian’s good lady? My nana, Mum’s mum, lives in St Helens, and Grandma and Grandad, my dad’s parents, always spend this part of the summer at their caravan in Filey. It’s encouraging then, when Mr Scott says that doing good things doesn’t have to mean visiting our relatives. It could mean helping our mum do the washing-up or our dad to wash the car or being nice to our little brother or sister. It could mean being friendly to someone we don’t particularly like, or noticing when someone in the street needs help, perhaps a little old lady needing help to cross a road, although that only seems to happen in the Beano …

After school I see her. Pauline Bright. I’m on my way to get an ice lolly from the newsagent nearest the school. When I catch sight of her, scuffing up grass at the edge of the Town Fields, I realize she hasn’t been at school for ages. I wonder if her absence has something to do with our trip to the launderette, which didn’t end well. It seems extremely clear what I have to do, given that I have twenty pence and lollies are ten. Although when I approach, proffering her the second Strawberry Mivvi, she does nothing to reach for it, just glares at me.

‘It’s for you,’ I say. ‘You eat it.’

As soon as I say that, I know it’s a mistake. Probably even Pauline has eaten an ice lolly before.

‘I don’t want it,’ she says, and walks off. I have to go after her. What am I going to do with two ice lollies? One will melt while I eat the first. I point this out. She tells me to eff-word off. Only then does it occur to me that she’s actually annoyed with me.

‘Are you being mardy about the launderette?’ I ask, panting after her. I’ve started my lolly and am having to lick it to stop it dripping down towards my elbow. ‘’Cos that was your fault. You said you were going to tell me about the other skeleton lady film.’

‘Shut up, Fatty.’

‘It’s true!’

I wasn’t going to run after her, but it seems unbearable that she might win. ‘Fatty’ is wounding as well. No one has ever called me Fatty before, although that doesn’t mean it might not be true.

‘Do you want to come to my house?’ I shout after her. She stops, amazed.

‘Yer what?’

I can scarcely believe the invitation myself. I’m desperate. At least I know that no one is home. I usually have tap on a Tuesday, but we’ve broken up after our exams. I can easily get rid of her before Mum gets back to cook tea, I tell myself, as we get on the bus (I have to fork out the extra two pence for Pauline). I watch the melted syrup from the lolly bleed a path through the grime on her hand. Maybe I could offer her a bath? Various scenes from Enid Blyton books involving gypsies come to mind. Tassie, in the Castle of Adventure. They gave her clothes, as well as a bath, and she turned out to be quite pretty, although they couldn’t get her to wear shoes; she’d preferred to wear them hung round her neck by the laces. Pauline’s shoes are surprisingly new and shiny, with stacked heels and gaps at the back where they’re too big for her. They delay her walk strangely as the extra bits catch up with her feet. This slows us down on the journey from the bus stop, and makes me nervous, as though Ian and Mum are going to get home and see us by the time we reach the house.

‘Hurry up!’

Pauline gapes.

‘It’s a dormer bungalow,’ I explain, pulling the chain holding the key from under my school dress.

Inside, it’s just as we left it that morning: mugs and plates in the sink, Mum’s lipstick-ringed cigarette butt splayed into a saucer on the worktop nearest the French window, Ian’s minty smell thick on the furniture. Now what? Now that I’ve brought Pauline here, what am I actually expecting us to do? I take her up to my room, largely bare of my toys, which were left at my real home. We hang about there, Pauline flicking her two-tone hair out of her eyes. She seems nervous, although unusually open to whatever I suggest. I don’t quite dare the bath.

‘You can see the rest of the house if you like.’

I give her the tour, using pride borrowed from Mum to point out the fixtures and fittings. The bathroom has a dimmer switch, which I demonstrate.

‘Is that your mum and dad?’

Pauline dawdles by a framed photograph in the hall by the bathroom, showing Ian’s good lady. She’s bent in, uniquely, to Ian, who is more commonly the invisible person behind the camera. They are at some kind of do, a posh one, Ian’s wife in a sparkly evening dress and Ian with a dickie bow.

‘No. He’s not my dad. That’s his wife. She’s not alive any more.’

Pauline ponders the photo.

‘I haven’t got a dad.’

She says this casually, as though staking common ground. Either, is what she means.

‘I’ve got a dad,’ I object. ‘We’re sort of here on holiday …’ And as I hear myself say it, its last trace of reality evaporates into the nonsense it is. Will I actually ever see Dad again? As I flail, Pauline squints at Ian’s wife. Iris.

‘Was she killed?’

I must look blank.

‘In an accident or owt?’ Pauline grins. ‘Or did he kill her?’

She staggers a few zombie steps towards me, evoking our playground game. Now here is a thing. Our best thing.

‘He says she got poorly, you know. With cancer. But …’

I pull a face, stagger a few steps myself.

‘What if he buried her under’t house?’

We both hurtle downstairs giggling, spooking each other, chasing, becoming Iris the skellington lady and Ian the murderer finally hounded into his own grave. Every photo around the house feeds the game, the noise and excitement growing to fill the awful space I’ve opened up around Dad.

‘Oh my God!’

I seize a picture from the living-room dresser, in which Iris sits astride a sad Spanish holiday donkey, holding a knife in a tooled leather sheath in the slack two-handed pose used by anglers for their catch. The very same knife, as I point out to Pauline, hangs on the wall above the photo. Tassels of blood-red cord dangle from its hilt, the raised patterning of the scabbard picked out in green and brighter red.

‘Oh my God, maybe that’s what he did it with and he’s like kept it!’

Pauline is already balanced on the arm of a dining chair, flailing for a tassel. To both of our surprise, as she tugs, the knife slithers from its sheath, making her lurch off balance. Falling, she catches her chin on the dresser’s edge, landing in the gap between that and the chair, still holding the knife above her. I would have howled, but Pauline just swears and stands up. I think of her in scraps, the way she piles into bigger kids without caring.

The blade is long and slightly curved, melodramatically bright. Pauline tests the tip against her finger.

‘Don’t!’ I warn.

To Pauline’s disgust and my relief, it leaves only an indentation. She points it at me, being Murderer Ian, threatening.

‘Don’t!’

The face she pulls is hideous, cartoonishly enraged and zombified. I scream. She chases me. Nothing bad happens. Even when she catches me and I trip and she kneels on my shoulders and hisses, ‘You’re dead!’ and I feel the blunt blade on my chest, I scream out of the hysterical assurance that no real harm can come to me, along with the terror that it might.

‘You’re nesh, you!’ she crows, sitting back, running the length of the knife uselessly against her palm. I wriggle out from under her.

‘You shouldn’t play with knives. It’s dangerous.’

I’m thinking of Ian’s good lady, running around the room with her head chopped off, like a chicken. And then, horribly, I hear the complicated give of the front door latch. Ian or Mum, I didn’t know which would be worse. Immediately careless of safety, I snatch the knife off Pauline.

‘I’ll get done!’

She’s better at danger than me. As I push the knife beneath the skirt at the bottom of the settee, she’s already making for the French doors out into the garden. It isn’t until she’s climbing over the fence, showing her knickers (which seemed to be men’s Y-fronts), that I realize there’s been no further noise since the latch had gone. Cautiously, I round the corner to the hall. No one is there. What if it was a burglar, who has gone upstairs? I creep back into the living room and retrieve the murder weapon. Then I sit, holding the knife pointed at the stairs for a lifelong minute or two. Nothing. Gradually, my pulse calms. There’s nobody in the house except me. Not Ian, not Mum, not a burglar, and not Pauline.

About an hour later, as Mum serves savoury pancakes, me facing Ian, and above him the knife on the wall (I replaced it earlier, teetering on the dining-room chair), it strikes me how lucky it was that Pauline had known immediately she needed to get out of the house, that me getting done would have been caused more by her presence than us being discovered mucking about with knives.

After tea, as I uncomplainingly dry the pots for Mum, she remarks on how quiet I am and begins to ask questions about school.

‘Someone tried to get into the house,’ I blurt.

She stops scrubbing the basket of the chip frier.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I heard the door go, I thought it was you back or Ian. It was someone trying to get in.’

‘Don’t be daft.’ But she’s worried, I can tell. She moves off, hands dripping, to talk to Ian, who is watching the news round the corner of the open-plan.

‘She says someone was trying to get into the house when she was back from school.’

After a slight delay, Ian appears with Mum.

‘What’s this about someone trying to get in?’

‘I heard the door go.’ This is, after all, the truth. I absolutely did. I must have done.

‘You mean you thought you heard someone using a key to get in?’

This hasn’t occurred to me, that the phantom would have had to have a key. I don’t like the way things are going. Why have I started this?

‘I don’t know.’

Ian hitches his trousers, angrily excited by the possibility, or by the possibility that I’m lying; I can’t tell which.

‘Were they rattling the door?’

‘A little bit,’ I concede. Now I think about it, there could have been rattling.

Ian marches off, Mum following, to have a look at the door, to see if there are signs of forcing the lock. What if there are? The prospect makes me queasy. They move outside, murmuring. The image of Ian’s headless wife comes to me again, her large body in one of the flowered dresses she wears in the photos lurching around the living room behind me, blood spurting from the neck. She gathers behind me, ready to pounce. I wheel from the sink and race into the garden, where Ian is crouched by a flowerbed.

‘See?’

Satisfied, he prods at the earth next to some trampled flowers. Mum has her arms folded. She isn’t eager to believe my story.

‘And here.’ He’s triumphant this time. Mum leans in to look. There is the clear indent of Pauline’s shoe in the soil near the fence.

‘Must have gone over the fence.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’ll have a word with next door. Might be worth letting the police know.’

Unexpectedly, Mum takes my hand and squeezes it, pulls me close for a sideways hug. She’s sorry for not believing me, I can tell, as well as annoyed in that way she has whenever she’s worried about me.

‘You can come to the salon after school and we’ll travel back together. I’m not having you on your own in the house. It’s only another week until you break up. Nothing to worry about, anyway.’

Anyway. After I’ve gone to bed I can hear them talking, still galvanized by the event I’ve provided for them. And the next morning, I notice that many of the photos of Ian’s good lady have been removed, but whether by Ian or by Mum, or why, I have no idea and don’t dare to ask. As with the Lallie audition and the cancellation of the holiday, I feel obscurely and guiltily involved. It isn’t something I want to pursue. And I definitely don’t want it to pursue me.