What They Do in the Dark

PAULINE WAS SUPPOSED to fill in a form. In fact, her mum was supposed to fill in a form, but even if she hadn’t been in Leeds, Pauline couldn’t imagine approaching Joanne with the daunting sheaf of printed pages the hard-eyed woman had given her after she left the classroom. She’d tried to explain that her mum was away working, and they’d said in that case her dad would do. Dave was the closest in the house to a dad, but he’d just tell her to f*ck off if she went anywhere near him with a piece of paper. Anyway, Pauline knew better than to let him or anyone else in the house know about the film, let alone needing permission, even though she had half a mind herself to rip up the typed sheets and dump them before it all went wrong. But somehow she couldn’t. Instead, she kept the form in her bedroom, flat in a drawer, and checked on it from time to time, as though writing might have germinated on the pages in her absence.

Gemma wasn’t talking to her. The last day of school, she’d run away from her in the playground and told a teacher when Pauline tried to catch up. Pauline had got a keyring she’d swiped from a place in town that mended shoes and cut keys, a really good keyring with a rubbery stupid-faced doll on the end whose arms and legs you could twist into shapes, but Gemma refused to take it. It had occurred to Pauline that Gemma might be able to fill in the form, since she had far neater writing than Pauline could manage, and proper spelling. But it seemed impossible, now, to get her to do it.

The night before Pauline was supposed to turn up at school with the completed paperwork, she turned over the blank, grubbying pages and thought of money. What if she offered Gemma money, instead of things; lots of money? It was risky, but she steeled herself for it, knowing that Dave would knock seven bells out of her if he caught her going through his pockets (which she’d have to do while he slept or had passed out). She didn’t care, really. Since Joanne had gone, her life had been so lonely that getting knocked about a bit would be a welcome acknowledgement of her existence. She could always kick him back, and run.

But, as it turned out, she had a stroke of luck as she crept through the unusually quiet house in the very early morning. Nan, having got her sick money and her pills the previous day, was splayed comatose in her chair downstairs in the dark. Coins had dribbled from the beige post-office envelope she obliviously proffered in her slackened hand, but it was the folded five-pound note that Pauline pincered out and escaped with under the charnel-house miasma of Nan’s snoring breath. Leaving the house with the money, she doubted she’d even be blamed: anyone else passing through the living room would have taken the opportunity. Then she wavered, thinking of things she could actually buy instead of giving the five pounds to Gemma. The hair salon had taken hold in her imagination, and she thought of marching in there and making Gemma’s cow of a mother wash her hair and cut it because she was paying. It would be nice to have someone brush her hair, to make her look like everyone else.

It was too early for the shops to be open. Neither Gemma nor her mother would be at the salon yet, she realized, her stupid plan atomizing. So instead Pauline got on a bus and headed for Gemma’s house among the pale, suspicious shift workers. When she got there, she knocked on the door, straightforwardly. She didn’t care if Gemma’s mum answered; in fact, she was up for a fight. What she wasn’t expecting was Gemma’s dad or whoever he was, the fat man.

‘Can I see Gemma?’

Pauline didn’t, as a rule, look at people’s faces. In her experience there was seldom much to see there that was good, and at home eye contact often flared into violence. So as he stood in front of her, it was Ian’s belt that caught her memory, its sleek enamel buckle straining between his grey trousers and clean shirting, an uncommon executive rhombus in black, gilt and maroon. She remembered the look of it and her curiosity about how it came undone, with none of the usual belt-buckle mechanism visible. When they were down the alley by Wentworth Road, he had pressed it behind its display, and it had released, like a small conjuring trick. Remembering this, she darted a look upwards. There was nothing in his face she recognized – there was no exception to her habit of not looking at faces – but it was sweating and appalled. He recognized her, she could see. It had been difficult to get her hand down his trousers even with the belt and fly undone, he was so fat. That and the belt were the only things she remembered about him.

Without speaking he shut the door on her, not forcefully but firmly, as though there was logic to it. Not today, thank you. She knocked again and rang, but the door stayed shut. She could have stayed with her finger pressing the bell until someone came, but she knew Gemma’s mum would make real trouble, worse than refusing to let her see Gemma. It almost made her want to laugh, the way the bloke had shut the door on her, pretending she wasn’t there. Him and his magic belt.

So she went into town and spent the money. She bought herself two cheese rolls and a carton of orange and then, at a newsagent, a Mars bar and a copy of Tammy, although they’d have been easy enough to nick. The fact that she hadn’t made them feel more like presents to herself. After that she marched into a hair salon – not Gemma’s mum’s, she knew better than that, so she went to the staider one in Silver Street – with her just over four pounds and got them to transform her. She showed them the money, because she could see they wanted to tell her to get lost, and the receptionist, who was young but hard-faced, had to give way to an older woman they called a stylist, who called Pauline ‘love’ and took her away to wash her hair. She’d expected it to be ace, but the hair wash wasn’t, with her head strained backwards over a green sink with a dip in it for your neck, and the woman’s surprisingly sharp fingers agitating her scalp. But after, as the stylist combed out her hair in front of the mirror, it was ace. She said she could put a rinse in, to get all of her hair back to its same colour, and Pauline agreed without understanding what she meant to do. The stuff smelt sharp but didn’t sting like peroxide, and it was strange to see the lightness so readily stained out as the woman soused her head from the large bottle, like she was putting vinegar on a bag of chips.

‘You’re too young to be mucking about with your hair,’ the woman admonished. ‘What did your mum say?’ Pauline shrugged. The stylist snipped, then blasted her with scorching air, and soon Pauline was done.

‘Don’t you look pretty,’ the woman announced, and the other hairdressers and a couple of old ladies they were processing all murmured varieties of agreement. Pauline knew she must have been transformed, because now they were prepared to look at her. She risked a glance into the mirror – she avoided looking into her own eyes just as much as other peoples’ – and caught an impression of her hair as a darkly shiny cap, so different and tended, she must now be a girl with a different life. The woman handed her a rigid plastic mask with a handle which she told Pauline to hold in front of her face as she dredged her with choking spray. Now, when Pauline shook her head, her hair stayed behind.

Progressing from the chair to the till, shedding clipped hair from the sickly pink cape that was untied and taken from her at the door, Pauline flinched from being looked at, despite the unfamiliar approval in the attention. She could feel the way the hairdresser was soaking it up, as though she’d done something fantastic. She paid the money, worrying it wouldn’t be enough, or that some other disaster might befall her, born of her ignor ance. But all was well.

‘See you, love,’ said the stylist, and squeezed Pauline’s shoulder. Pauline could feel tears starting, along with the strong impulse to shout at her to f*ck off, so she ran. Her hair didn’t move. She touched it, its alien surface. She wasn’t herself. But this was exhilarating now it was just her, instead of all those cows in the salon. She headed for the school, knowing she could brazen it out about the form, marvelling that she’d worried about it at all when she could just lie and say she’d lost it, the way she lied about everything else.

‘My little brother got hold of it and tore it like,’ she improvised, faced with the sharp-edged woman who had asked her a lot of questions at the audition. There was a different atmosphere at the school, lots of people hurrying around, vans parked transgressively in the playground with blokes manhandling metal poles and coils of wire out of them. She’d been found by accident as she hovered at the gates, paralysed by all the activity. A fat woman was herding a group of kids Pauline recognized from school, and added Pauline to them to be brought to Julia, which was the spiky one’s name.

‘We won’t be able to use you if we haven’t got permission from your mum and dad.’

‘They’re away.’

‘Both of them?’

‘Miss, me dad’s dead, Miss, and me mum’s away working.’

Julia sighed. ‘Who’s looking after you then?’

‘Me nan, Miss.’

Julia checked her watch, which looked full of gold. She reached for a new form and handed it to Pauline.

‘You’ll have to ask your nan to fill it in, darling.’

‘Miss, she can’t read, Miss.’

As she said it, it struck Pauline that this was probably true. Julia’s beringed hand hovered over the form in a stay of execution.

‘What did you say your name was?’

When she told her, Julia checked a list, which made her sigh again but also persist in taking up the form. Pauline’s name had, surprisingly, made a difference.

‘Well, we’ll fill in the form for you, and you can get your nan to sign her name or make her mark, OK?’

She further explained that making her mark meant putting a cross where her signature was supposed to be, then asked various questions whose answers she blocked out herself in neat capitals where the spaces appeared. Then she sent her away. Pauline couldn’t believe her luck. Julia had told her to be quick, but she knew she’d be suspicious if she came back in five minutes, so she took a long tour of the Town Fields before coming back with the cross she’d written herself with a ballpoint lifted from one of the chaotic classrooms. Julia scrutinized the piece of paper, and her, and Pauline could see in the rake of her eyes that she’d guessed what she’d done and decided not to care. The form went with a stack of other forms, and she was chivvied into a first-year classroom which had been taken over to do make-up.

When they were told this, Pauline was hopeful that she would be given proper make-up, like Joanne wore, with pencilled eyebrows and blackened eyes. But all they seemed to be doing was sponging some stuff on to the children’s faces which made them look more themselves.

‘Can I have some eyeshadow?’ she asked the woman who was doing her. The woman laughed, and said no.

As usual, none of the children spoke to her. It was boring in the classroom, and hot. They were provided with cups of overdiluted squash and biscuits in generous platefuls that disappeared in a scrum for the creams and chocolate ones, which Pauline dominated. She settled down with her Tammy, which she had been clutching rolled up all morning. She didn’t usually read comics; it had been seeing Gemma with one, that day Gemma’s mum had screamed at her to leave Gemma alone, that had made her decide to buy it. She flicked through the drawn pages, uncompelled. They all seemed to be stories that had started some time before, and Pauline found them confusing. There were girls in leotards and on skis, or falling out with each other at posh schools. The speech, from signs pointed from their mouths, took some getting used to as well. But she enjoyed the act of reading the comic, of being like Gemma, who loved them, who was recognizably like one of the black-and-white girls being sabotaged at a gymkhana. She turned the pages self-consciously.

‘F*ck off, blackie.’

Cynthia was huddling over her, trying to nick a read. Pauline pushed her in the face, skewing her glasses, and she immediately shrank away. Their chaperone, the fat woman from the playground, looked up sharply, but Pauline’s comic-holding gaze was irreproachable, and Cynthia, she knew, never complained. She didn’t even have the nous to move away from the range of Pauline’s casually swinging crossed leg, which repeatedly caught her on the thigh as Pauline continued the pretence of reading.

Still, it was a relief when they finally called them to the set. This word, ‘set’, was bandied about between the chaperone and the make-up women and the bloke who came to call them. Pauline had no idea what it meant, where they would be going, beyond the sense of a vast and glamorously alien arena. So she didn’t realize for some minutes after they were led up to the fourth-year classroom, noticeably altered but essentially familiar, that this was their final destination. This was the set.

‘Let’s be having you, ladies and gentlemen!’ said a spotty bloke with stinking breath.

He told them to sit at the desks, ranged differently from usual at one end of the classroom. The other end was cramped with people and equipment and huge, blinding lights. The bloke glanced beyond the glare to ask where they were wanted as he led them by the arm, one by one. Squinting, Pauline could see the man who had asked her loads of questions that time before. His eyes slid past her as he indicated a desk off to the right. The arrangement didn’t take long. But then there was a catch in the proceedings as the director (she remembered him being introduced as this) halted and conferred with stinky-breath bloke, who swiftly left the room. They all sat at their desks. At each place was an exercise book and a pencil. Pauline turned the pages of the book and was interested to see that it contained another child’s writing and drawings for the first few pages before it went blank. The writing was sinisterly neat and appeared to have been copied from a book about the solar system, although the drawings were of plants. Before she could investigate further, a harassed-looking woman with spare pencils stuck into her shaggy hair slammed her hand on the book and told her to leave it alone. Since she then returned to chalking numbers on the blackboard, Pauline assumed she was the teacher, although her manner was unusual. The bad-breath man came back through the door, looking fraught, and went to talk to the director, whose eyes swept Pauline and the other children.

‘Where is she then?’

Julia had come into the classroom. She also looked fraught. She was carrying a sheet of paper, which she consulted as she scrutinized their group, desk by desk, standing next to the director. Her thumb clamped a name as she locked on to Pauline.

‘Pauline Bright?’

‘Yes, Miss.’

There was a tiny power cut of relief between Julia, the director, and the man with bad breath. Julia walked up to her, followed by the men. Pauline assumed her meekest expression.

‘What’s happened to your hair?’ asked Julia. She sounded surprisingly gentle.

‘I had it done, Miss.’

Julia and the director exchanged looks, the director smiling with no amusement. He crouched down so that his head was slightly lower than Pauline’s. She expected him to speak, but he just contemplated her hair. Then he stood, abruptly.

‘That’s a shame.’ He said it to Julia, not her. She could tell that although she’d definitely done something wrong, Julia was going to be the one blamed. Pauline watched her anger tapping out of her wizened fingers and their rings, on to the desk.

‘It would have been a nice moment … I can live without it …’

‘Maybe hair can do something?’ Julia suggested. The three of them turned back to look at Pauline again. The director shook his head.

‘It’s worth a try, while you set up.’

‘Tony’s saying ten minutes,’ offered the bad-breath man, pleased to help.

‘OK then, if you tell them no more than ten.’

Julia led Pauline out of the room and downstairs towards the first-years, where she and the other children had had their disappointing make-up done. In front of one of the blinding frames of lightbulbs that had been set up, outlining mirrors, Pauline saw a policeman. She shrank back reflexively, but Julia chivvied her past him, on to the hair woman. She, as far as was possible given the spray glueing it together, pulled her fingers through Pauline’s fringe in a hopeless assessment.

‘What did you put on it before, lovie?’

Pauline didn’t know. She told them about her mum, and the bottle that stung. The hair woman told Julia she couldn’t do anything about the colour, not in ten minutes. But she would see what else she could do.

The woman led Pauline to the sink, which Pauline remembered from washing paint brushes in the first year, and soaked her head under the awkward taps. Then she towelled her off and clawed some stuff from a jar through her damp hair. Next, she inserted a couple of hair grips more or less where Pauline put them when she was taming her fringe, although now it had been cut it had to be scraped back painfully to fit under the clips. Finally, she went round the rest of Pauline’s ruined hair, back-combing it and ratting it with her fingers; when she got to the crown of her head she rolled the hair briskly under her palm so that it stood up, snarled and random.

‘Hedge backwards,’ she smiled at Pauline through the mirror. Pauline only allowed herself one look. Bar the colour, she was back to normal, but worse. Like a witch, or some kind of mad monster. Was that what she looked like? But when Julia offered her up back in the classroom, the director just grimaced and said, ‘Shame,’ and Pauline knew she was wrong, that she’d changed herself for the worse, and they still hadn’t been able to restore her to what he wanted. She was allowed to stay, but through the long, boring hours that followed she was in the background, like everyone else. She had no idea what they had intended for her, but the disappointment gathered in her like anger, which only found a mild release in shoving Cynthia so she came down hard among the desks and put her bottom teeth into her lip. Seeing the crew cluster round the sobbing girl, Pauline instantly regretted the attention she’d created for her. They took her away to first aid, and she came back with a plaster and a bottle of cola. Lucky bitch.

AS PENANCE, QUENTIN stood under the drooling shower and suffered. Mortification of the flesh. Oh man, was she mortified. She started to scour her arms and body with the midget bar of soap, but stopped when she caught herself visualizing the shot. Norman Bates was due through the shower curtain with a big old knife any minute. Come on, babe, you can do better. Shivering, she rubbed water out of her eyes. Shit. When would life take over and drive this damn thing for her?

She had some calls to take, at least, once the London offices opened. The LA operations didn’t open until mid-afternoon, although Quentin knew no one really gave a small damn for her field reports. Well, this time it would be different. This time she would almost certainly have something to say about the miserable idea of luring Lallie to Hollywood. Stepping out of the shower, her hungover brain careened in her skull no matter how tenderly she moved her head, a ball of pressure that flared into a sullen pain whenever it collided with its cave of bone. Who drank brandy? Not even cognac, an ascot-and-red-setter kind of enhancement of the mood, but the crap the hotel bar had to offer, which was called ‘Three Barrels’ – Hugh had joked about this, Ah, I see they serve Three Barrels – in needy double-snifters. To get out of it, so she wouldn’t notice herself.

Well, it had worked. Her memory after about the third barrel was impressionistic. There had been an interlude talking to herself in the washroom cubicle, informing herself that she was drunk, as the wallpaper revolved around her. Jump cuts. The alarming hotel carpet. Same carpet on the stairs. The small surprise of Hugh’s room, and the familiarity of foreplay. We’re on that train now. Circumcised, which she hadn’t expected, his cock as wholesome and substantial as the rest of him. The blow job, its counter-rhythm increasing hell for her spinning head, and the dawning of irritation about its longevity. OK, just come now, OK? She had persisted until she could feel herself about to gag. She’d made every move in her fellatio repertoire and apart from anything else was a little insulted that he was holding out on her. What was wrong with the guy? In the end, he caught her shoulders and pulled her away, benignly. She puked in his bathroom. An unforgettable evening of sensual delights, in three barrels.

She wasn’t clear how she had ended up back in her own room. Hugh must have done the gentlemanly thing, Jimmy Stewart-style, although she could find only one shoe by the bed. There are rules about that kind of thing. Quentin checked her memory: the rest was silence. She conjured a wishful image, almost as vivid as a memory, of sharing a bed with Hugh: the calm heat of his body, his pure, astringent smell. There would almost certainly be a really fine pair of pyjamas, navy, with a discreet lighter stripe and piping round the lapels. And now she’d never know. She sobbed a little, drily, as though the alcohol had leached all the moisture from her. And also because she was watching herself again, and it didn’t play.

She really couldn’t do this. Not on weak coffee and aspirin alone. And she didn’t even have those yet. That would have to be rectified. What she really wanted was an espresso and a joint, with a couple of Valium humming their magic beneath. And those other pills, the ones that cute but sadly married anaesthetist from LA General had introduced her to, rounding out the strings section for that full Mantovani chord of bogus well-being. The way we were …

Outside, beyond the door to her room, there was a sudden shuffling. Quentin recoiled. Hugh, come to reproach her. No, to upbraid her, to remonstrate with her: take your pick of stuffy, unsympathetic verbs. A newspaper appeared, sliding under the gap at the bottom of the door. Quentin’s panic subsided. Just the newspaper, then. It was one of those weird British tabloids – only Hugh contrived to get the London Times delivered to the hotel – and Quentin barely read it, although it was faithfully shoved under her door every morning. It had close, aggressive type, and girls bizarrely flashing their tits. Today, there was a strident headline: ‘Call Girl Attack’. Quentin didn’t want to know. She had her own worries. One of which, she remembered, when she had a pee and wiped herself, was that she probably had cancer. Cervical cancer, surely, despite a clear PAP test in the spring. She was diseased within. Rotten. It had to be working inside her, and one day a gust of wind would collapse her, like a termite mound. Maybe she could get hold of her gynaecologist and get a referral to a doctor here, just to check?

Quentin moved around the room, dressing, putting on makeup. She was supposed to be meeting with Mike and Hugh to talk about an extra location Mike felt he absolutely needed. She doubted she could make it out the door, let alone sit across a table from Hugh and hold the studio’s line on the budget. Not with the cancer and all. It wasn’t the sex, of course not – who hadn’t done things they were a little embarrassed about in their time? Quentin carefully applied some green eyeshadow, decided it looked trashy, and removed it. It was just the cancer. They’d all cut her some slack if they knew, although it might make Hugh feel a little weird to know he’d f*cked, however inconclusively, someone diseased. It would freak her out if she were him. The lipstick was more of a success. Colouring herself in often helped. She yelped when the phone by her bed rang, decided not to answer it, then on the fifth ring, did.

‘Hi, darling, we’re waiting for you downstairs. Everything OK?’

Hugh’s voice spread solidly over the words, like butter. There were several ways she could play this.

‘Small fashion problem. I’ll be right down.’

She seized the moment and stepped out the door, before she could think and stop herself. Her heart rate had gone up, but she was definitely breathing. She had learned not to wait for the elevator, so she set off down the stairs, and was alarmed to be hailed, a flight before the end, by Lallie’s mom, with Lallie in tow.

‘We’ve been looking for you!’

They were craning over the banister from a floor above. Quentin formed the impression of matching outfits. She continued to flee.

‘I’m running late – catch you later!’

And she was out into the lobby before Katrina could reach the end of her sentence – something about plane tickets. It was probably only a short-term escape, but if she could get going with Mike and Hugh, she might be able to fend off interruption.

They were sitting around one of the low tables near the door. Hugh looked perfect in a summer suit, Mike shifty, with his shirt unbuttoned too far. The door was propped open to circulate some air, admitting instead a block of apocalyptic light. Already, at barely nine o’clock (how late was she?), it was hot. The men rose as Quentin approached. Ordinarily, there would be social kisses, très European, but today Quentin sketched a wave and preemptively dropped into her chair, not even waiting for Hugh to pull it out for her with his customary flourish. Determined to emanate angular self-control, Quentin invoked Katharine Hepburn for a blithe couple of seconds before she crashed into The Philadelphia Story again. Shit. She reached for the coffee pot.

‘Allow me.’

Hugh got there first, and poured. She couldn’t tell if the fine manners were his retreat, because he was always like this, wasn’t he? Taking a leaf from Hugh’s book, she apologized graciously to Mike for being late. Hugh held up the cream jug, the bastard.

‘I take it black.’

‘Sorry to interrupt—’ It was Katrina and Lallie again. Hugh popped up from his chair, obliging Mike to follow. Quentin stayed put.

‘I was just saying, Quentin love, I need to have a word because I’m seeing the travel agent today, like. About flying over.’

Hugh and Mike were extremely and instantly curious. Quentin would happily have ploughed Katrina in her vampirically lipsticked kisser. Leave me alone, bitch.

‘The LA office will take care of that, you don’t need to worry.’

Quentin hadn’t, in fact, said anything to LA about Lallie and her mommy visiting. Her shrink, if she still had one (now there was a badly judged blow job for you), would say she was ambivalent on the matter. Genius, childhood, a mother thing: whatever it was, it was causing her a problem. But she was definitely going to fix that, right? Definitely going to talk to Clancy and tell him what she thought, even if it was two things at once. She’s perfect for the movie. We shouldn’t use her for the movie.

‘But we’re booking a holiday. Like you said.’

Had she said that? She must have done. Katrina looked to Lallie, a fake appeal not to upset the kid, who cooperated and looked concerned.

‘OK, well, you go right ahead with that, and I’ll talk to my office about the flights, OK? Just let me know the dates …’

‘It’s the twenty-third of September till the—’

‘We kind of have to get going on this, Katrina, could I catch you later?’

‘Why don’t I …’

Hugh intervened with his handsome notebook and silver pencil, transcribed dates. Take it away, Jeeves. Mike smirked at her, lying low. Quentin wondered why she disliked him so much, then glimpsed his exposed chest hair and was reminded. He flourished the extra script pages at her, which she took, concentrating on the yellow paper so that Katrina would get the message.

It was a bare half page. Lallie’s character, before she meets Dirk’s weirdo, is exploring a derelict house. After a few rooms she happens on a teenage couple having sex. The boy catches her watching, exchanges ‘a look’ with her, they continue. Quentin read it twice.

‘We have a fantastic location,’ Mike told her. ‘There’s an old bomb site near the place we were shooting the car scenes.’

‘Was this the writer, or you?’

‘I managed to squeeze it out myself – can’t you tell from the typos? No dialogue …’

‘See you then –’

Katrina was moving off, with Lallie. Quentin was gratified to see she looked tentative. She realized Katrina had never witnessed her doing anything really connected with her job before. She probably thought she was just some chick, like her, hanging around the set and making nice.

‘Bye, hon!’ Quentin smiled, prepared to be friendly now they were going.

The woman and girl dissolved into the sunshine. Hugh sat. Mike continued to talk.

‘I was just looking round it the other day when we wrapped, and it’s so perfect. It could be such a powerful scene because we know then exactly where she’s come from, that she’s alone, and her milieu isn’t innocent, and she’s curious …’

‘Half a day?’ Quentin asked, brutally.

‘At least half, I’d say.’

Mike started at Hugh’s intervention. Quentin could see he’d been expecting support.

‘If you’re going into every room,’ Hugh pointed out.

‘We’re not lighting it, except for the sex,’ said Michael.

Quentin ignored this. ‘You’ll still need a second unit, unless you really want to be in on the action,’ she said. ‘I mean the action action.’

She neither looked Hugh’s way nor blushed. Adults could casually refer to sex in conversations, particularly when in Europe.

‘I’d prefer to do it myself,’ said Mike. ‘We were talking about scheduling it in on Sunday.’

‘Aren’t there union rules about working on days off?’ Quentin asked. ‘Isn’t it called overtime?’

‘Double bubble,’ said Hugh, mysteriously. Then, to Mike, ‘You’ve got to think about Lallie as well, Mike – they take a dim view of her working on her days off.’

Mike slumped, sulking. Where his hectic shirt gaped, Quentin got an unwelcome view of flaccid pink man-nipple.

‘I just think it’s a scene we’re really going to miss when we get to the edit, if it’s all the big bad man taking the little girl. Katrina will turn a blind eye, you know what she’s like, especially if you bung her, I don’t know, fifty quid.’

Hitching his trouser legs to prevent creasing, Hugh leaned forward in his chair and steepled his fingers low between his open legs, as though cradling the large, fragile sphere of Mike’s ego. ‘I have a suggestion.’

He’d worked it all out: they could use the school. Mike began to object, but Hugh fended him off until he’d got to the end. The f*cking couple (necking and fondling perhaps, instead) could be the teacher (no extra actor fees) and another teacher used in a playground scene (non-speaking, a genuine bargain). They’d tag the scene on to the end of a day already in the schedule – no extra set-up, job done, time and money saved. Then, before Michael could voice his artistic objections, Hugh segued into his opinion that this would perhaps be a less conventional and more unexpected view of adult sexuality, compared with the humping teenagers, which he felt as though he’d seen – and he appealed to Quentin here – before. Oh, Christ, he was good. Why hadn’t he come? It was the least she could do.

‘I love what you’ve got here, Mike,’ said Quentin, with maximum sincerity. ‘This is just a way to build on it. Because what you gain with the teachers is the girl seeing kind of adult authority compromised by, uh, sexuality. The violation of a really crucial boundary. Which helps with the Dirk stuff, maybe.’

This took all of them by surprise. She appeared to be talking Mike’s language. Fluent artistic bullshit. Who knew?

‘Why would she see them,’ asked Mike, as a last resort. ‘In the school?’

‘She drops something, leaves something, goes back for it …’

Hugh suggested Mike sit with it until the end of the day, when extra pages would have to be issued. Quentin admired the provision of this small pit stop for Mike’s dignity. By now Mike’s driver was hovering in the dazzling doorway, ready to take him to the set, so they said their goodbyes. Alone, Quentin and Hugh sat back and exchanged smiles of professional complicity.

‘What a team,’ said Hugh.

Then Quentin had another thought. It came on her like nausea. Three barrels.

‘Wait up, hasn’t he railroaded us anyway? We’ll still have to pay overtime on that shooting day, even if it isn’t Sunday and a whole different set-up and all.’

‘Darling …’

Of course, what kind of schmuck was she? It was a set-up: Mike and Hugh waiting for her, the boys together. The pages were the pup they’d sold her so she’d jump at the second option, which was actually their first. She could imagine the conversation, Hugh’s languid assurances that he could play her, she was crazy about him, poor girl … Quentin’s father took over.

‘We don’t have room in the budget to go over, you know that, not even a couple hours. We’re really not going to move on that, Hugh, I mean the guys in the studio. No deal. It happens, it’s coming out of your pocket somewhere, OK? Or you can talk to the Wops and see if they’re feeling generous.’

He palmed that hair of his. Had he gone into detail with Mike? Mike would love the detail, she knew. F*cking shitty bastards. You put a guy’s cock in your mouth, he thinks he can put his cock in your mouth.

‘Oh, absolutely. Received and understood, darling. But as long as Mike sees it’s in the schedule, he’s happy, and we know that makes everyone else happy. When it comes to it, I very much suspect it’ll drop off the end of the day, don’t you?’

God knows, she wanted to believe him. He was another producer after all, one of her tribe, on her side, the side of restraint. If it was true, she could be herself again, maybe. She ventured a look straight at him. Right here, right now, Quentin knew she needed to take something for this goddamn hangover. He gave her the old Hugh smile, the one you could eat with a spoon. She couldn’t make any calls before she felt better, that was for sure.