What They Do in the Dark

I GO TO see my dad the day I know Pauline is meeting Lallie. I walk out of the door, telling Mum and Ian that I’m going out to play, and keep walking all the way back to our real house. I don’t catch the bus. I want to feel the distance. Getting to our street, fear clenches that the house won’t be there, that I’m walking in a dream that is going to turn bad, but of course the house is itself, unchanged. Dad still lives there. If everything was normal, I would have approached from the backs and gone through the garden gate and in through the kitchen door, which is the one everyone uses, but because nothing can ever be the same again I take the longer route to the official street, with its parched gardens, and knock at the front door. There is a bell, but as far as I know it has never rung.

It’s Thursday afternoon, which is Dad’s half day from work. Sure enough, his face appears from behind the frosted glass of the porch, sleepy and wary. He is pleased to see me, I think, although there is the briefest moment of some large and unfamiliar emotion before he builds on his usual expression and ruffles my hair and one-handedly hugs me so that I tip into his tummy, almost non-existent after Ian’s.

‘What’s this in aid of then? Does your mum know you’re here?’

Since I don’t want to lie, I ignore the question.

‘Can I come in?’

Inside, the house is dark and cool and, even I can see, much more untidy than it ever was before. We go towards the kitchen. Everything is the same, and everything is different. When Dad sits down I see he is wearing his usual slippers, but no socks. His cigarette is burning in a saucer, a long worm of ash. There’s a nearly empty milk bottle next to his tea mug, with a sequence of slimy yellowish rings showing the bottle has been kept out of the fridge. A few old papers on the floor. A mangled packet of butter next to the empty metal dish, ordered by mum from a catalogue, whose scrape against the knife has always made him wince. I stay leaning into him as he inhales his cigarette, inhaling him. He hasn’t shaved, and the stubble is grizzled white and grey. I sandpaper my fingers against it in devotion. He almost laughs. Uneasy.

‘You haven’t run away, have you?’

I immediately wish that I had. It’s hard to speak, now. I burrow my face into his neck.

‘Eh, come on. You’ll start me off.’

I manage to breathe, but the end of each long breath produces a sob somewhere in my abdomen. We could stay like this for ever. Dad pats my back to warn that he’s going to move me away from him, but I refuse to take the cue. I burrow deeper, cling.

‘It’s not that bad, is it?’

I shake my head, furious with myself. I don’t want to be a baby.

‘Just, just wanted to see you.’

‘Do you want a drink of squash?’

Glad to be busy, he makes me a cup of lemon barley from the same bottle I was drinking at the beginning of the summer. As he runs the water to get it cold, I read the paper where it’s open on the table.

‘What’s a claw hammer?’ I ask, imagining an animal claw sprouting from the metal, shredding scalp and skin. Dad moves the paper away, on the pretext of giving me the squash. But it’s too late to stop me seeing the photo of the woman who’s been killed, staring emptily at the camera. She has striped hair and cruel eyebrows. You can always tell in photos that someone is dead. They go blurry.

‘You shouldn’t be reading that.’ He puts the paper on top of the dirty pots on the draining board.

‘What’s a vice girl?’ I ask.

‘Bloomin’ ’eck, Missis … a lady who isn’t very nice. How are you getting on at school then?’

‘We’ve finished. On Friday.’

‘Lucky you!’

He leans back against the sink, ankles crossed and hands spread behind him, clamping the Formica in a cowboyish way I recognize and didn’t know I missed till now. We’re not used to talking for its own sake.

‘I saw Lallie Paluza,’ I tell him.

‘Oh aye?’

His lack of interest isn’t sharp, like Mum’s.

‘She’s dead small.’

‘Did you get her autograph?’

I shake my head. He doesn’t get it. People who ask for autographs aren’t the same as people who become friends of famous people. If I asked her for an autograph, I’d always be rubbish, like a little sister but worse.

‘Ooh, reminds me …’

He uncrosses his ankles and goes out of the room, returning quickly with a book of some kind, which he hands to me.

‘They’re giving them away at the garage. You collect them.’

It’s not a book but an album full of empty discs that you put coins in. The coins are silver and look like money but have footballers on them, Leeds United. This is Dad’s team and mine. Although I’m not really interested in football, he and I have spent many Sunday afternoons with me on his knee watching matches, drowsy with roast beef and Yorkshire pud, while Mum does the washing-up. For his sake I have learned the names of some players, and the fact that there is a goalie and a centre forward. Billy Bremner is already in the album, and handsome Norman Hunter. I only recognize them from the names printed below, because their outlines are cartoonish and not nearly as good as the Queen’s on proper money.

‘They give you the wotsits when you get petrol. I’ve got some more in the car.’

‘Thanks.’

I want to cry again, but try not to for Dad’s sake. He never gives me things usually. Even Christmas presents, I know because Mum has told me, are her job.

‘Why don’t I get them, and I’ll run you back to your mum.’

He gets the little plastic bag out of the glove compartment as I sit in the passenger seat. I press the new trio of players one by one into their rightful places. The coins are oddly light.

‘You’re supposed to be going on holiday, aren’t you?’

I’m having a bit of trouble with Gary Sprake. There’s an extra bit around his rim and he keeps popping out of his circle.

‘We’re going to Spain.’

I don’t tell him about Butlin’s and the shame and sadness of my failed audition. I piggle away the spare bit and Gary Sprake goes in. Dad’s got a cigarette on the go, like he always does when he drives. It’s part of steering: the transfer of fag to mouth whenever he needs a full grip to go round corners, the squint against the wasted smoke. He tips ash when we stop at lights and I can feel him looking at me whenever he does it. That bit is new. He’s never looked at me before.

‘Will you get any more?’

‘Aye, they give you them when you get petrol. I’ll save them for you.’

There are six players left to get. It’ll be a reason to see him. Maybe there are more teams, even. I’ve always liked the purple and blue of West Ham’s shirts.

‘Thanks.’

I slide my eyes up to him. Everyone says I’ve got his eyes, even Mum. She used to like that. He’s got good eyes, Dad. There’s usually a joke sitting in them when he does really look at you.

‘Can I stay with you?’

He takes his fag back between his fingers on the wheel. In the car he smokes left-handed because of the ash tray, and it makes him awkward.

‘I don’t mean all the time, I mean instead of going on holiday. You wouldn’t have to do anything, I could get your tea and stuff when you’re at work.’

It’s heady and sudden. I see myself alone in the house, making it like it used to be. Arranging chocolate mini-rolls on plates, setting the table.

‘Ah, well, I don’t know about that, love. You’re best off with your mum.’

It’s just like the way he always slides away when you hug him. If I start crying now I’ll never ever stop. I hold the Leeds United album so tightly its corners dig into my palms.

These are the things I love about my dad. His cured tobacco smell; the delicate colours of the embossed sailor in its life-ring on his cigarette packet; the dip in his chest he says is there to hold the vinegar for his fish and chips; the way he says ‘Hello, Gemma Barlow’ whenever he sees me; the fact he has a wash and shave every night before nine o’clock telly starts; his orange summer shirt with the check; the sour lemon face he pulls, twitching one eye, if you forget to put the three sugars in his tea or even to stir them in enough.

Ian answers the door, not Mum. Dad pushes me forward. There’s an invisible balloon wall between Dad and Ian, and they can’t look at each other. I have to cross between them, through the balloons, to get to my new life. I’m dreading what Mum will say. Against Ian, Dad’s wiriness looks puny. He nods a goodbye to me and escapes back to the car.

Inside the house, feelings swirl around like the black marks on the weather map on telly. Mum is cross with me, but also excited. Ian isn’t cross, but he’s upset. They tell me off for going into town without saying anything, although I can’t see how it’s different from me taking the bus to school like I’ve been doing for weeks. I try to point this out, but it goes down badly. All sorts could happen, they say. Bad men. While they have a go at me, Mum’s weather front disentangles itself from Ian’s, and I see that she’s angry about me seeing Dad, and Ian’s more angry about the bad men. As soon as I’ve worked this out, they collide into something new:

‘It has to stop, Gemma, all this.’

All this what? I don’t say it. I’d get a slap.

‘Fighting at school, defying me—’

‘I’m not defying you!’

‘You see?’

Mum flips a what-did-I-tell-you look at Ian. Pretend helpless.

‘Your mother does everything for you, young lady. You should appreciate her more. You only get one mother, let me tell you that.’

Ian’s eyes, horribly, are soft with actual tears. Mum squeezes his hand.

‘You see? You’re upsetting Ian.’

She squeezes his hand again. ‘Anyway …’

And then they tell me. Next year, when school starts in September, I’ll be going to the private school, Hill House. Mum tells me it’s hundreds of pounds a term, and Ian will be paying for it because he loves me and thinks it’s important I get a good education, away from the rough children, children like Pauline Bright. Ian nods, tremendously.

There’s a uniform as well, which he’ll also be buying. It includes a hat and everything, like a girl in a comic. All my life I’ve seen those boys and girls, in their brown blazers with the yellow trim, like banana toffees, the boys in their caps and the girls in their brimmed hats. Matching brown macs if it’s raining, brown socks that never fall down, heavy shoes from before there was fashion. Hill House, Mum has whispered, and I’ve known those boys and girls are better than me because they’re more expensive. And now I’ll be one of them. I can’t work out if this is meant to be a punishment, in which case I’m not supposed to show my pleasure. At least I’m sure I’m expected to demonstrate gratitude. I cushion myself into Ian’s middle and squeeze, me who so recently was cuddling up to Dad’s sparseness. It feels odd.

‘Nothing’s too good for you and your mum,’ Ian says, still tearful.

The socks are brown too, with a cuff ringed in yellow. I wonder if you play all those games in books, hockey and lacrosse, instead of netball and rounders. I know that Lallie goes to a stage school when she’s not working, but I also know she has to wear a uniform nearly as splendid.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘That’s better,’ says Mum.

I’m careful to help Mum with the washing-up after tea. When I’m scraping shepherd’s pie into the pedal bin (which I enjoy operating), I see Ian’s belt in there, too late to stop the slurry of mince and potato fouling its jazzy brightness. I had thought that the strangeness of our thank-you hug was in its comparison to Dad, but I realize now the missing sensation of that metal rectangle that always divides Ian’s top half from his bottom, digging into you when he squeezes.

‘Ian’s belt’s in the bin.’

‘Don’t be daft.’

Mum doesn’t even turn round from the sink.

‘It is!’

‘What belt?’

I point with the fork I’m holding. Mum turns round with rubber gloves aloft, like a surgeon in a medical programme. She peers. Then she calls to Ian round the open-plan.

‘What are you doing, chucking your belt out?’

‘It’s had it.’

‘If the buckle’s gone, I could get it stitched for you. It’s proper leather that.’

‘I’ve had it years, Suzanne. It’s gone.’

It doesn’t look old or broken, winking out from the mince. But Ian’s got a lot of money to spend, on himself as well as Mum and me. Not like Dad. You can’t spend the coins from the garage he gave me. When, at bedtime, I prise them from the album and heap them in a meagre pile on the pillow, it’s impossible not to know they’re actually plastic.

THE WALLPAPER DIDN’T match the paint on the woodwork, on the skirting. Skirting – was that right? How did she know that? Did skirting even exist where she came from? Summoning rooms from all the houses she had lived in, Quentin saw walls that ended without interruption, at the floor. These walls were usually white, the floors, wood. Maybe it was a Brit thing, this skirting? And yet, she knew the term. Go figure.

The junction she now knew intimately went like this: bobbled brown carpet, edged up against said skirting, but not fitting with exact snugness; pink skirting, with a chip the size of a baby’s fingernail revealing the multi-coloured strata of previous paint jobs; wallpaper. That wallpaper, now that was a piece of work. Actually, several misaligned pieces of work. Brown, of course, but so much more. Crimson, white, beige, black. And all in flowers, vast Swinburnian blooms decadent with, well, Quentin was tempted to name it despair. Even with all the colours bleached by moonlight and street light, their busyness still hummed, like crickets in a box.

She went back to the skirting. Some time during the last long hours Quentin had made the acquaintance of two snail-trails of paint there, petrified in an unequal race to the floor. Their doomed inertia made her sad, and she enjoyed the sadness for a while. But then the drips led her to think of the man who had painted the skirting, who hadn’t bothered to wipe his brush of excess paint, and that expanded into thinking of all the useless human agency implied in the room, which made her agitated rather than sad, and from that she progressed to pondering the volume of people who passed through, who slept in the bed, whose skin cells and stains were a sheet and a pillowcase away, and this freaked her out so much she had to turn on the lamp and get up.

How did Hugh sleep, if he took these things all the time? Oh, of course. One to make you bigger, one to make you small. He could have offered a Valium into the bargain. A true gentleman would have, wouldn’t he? Maybe he didn’t want to look too professional or something. Like a junkie. God, no. ‘Is there anything I can get you, darling?’ She slaked her dry mouth with the water from the bathroom tap, which tasted as though it had been wrung out from dirty cotton wool. Quintessence of dust. More frigging skin cells. She spat the mouthful into the sink.

Quentin doubted that Hugh’s little helpers exposed him to the horror of the skin cells and the failure – if they did, maybe whatever else he took cancelled that out. Unlike her, he was all action. ‘Pep pills’ he had called them. It was all her fault. She got back in bed and almost immediately got out again. It was rising six o’clock.

She dressed and left her room. The hotel’s skeleton staff was still running from the night shift. Quentin hadn’t been up this early before, so all the faces were unfamiliar. It was weird, seeing different people in the same burgundy uniform. The manager was no longer a plump middle-aged woman but a cadaverous bald man in his sixties. He had yellow skin and wore half-glasses to peer at his stale newspaper (did you save the newspaper all day if you worked the night shift?). As she came through the lobby, he nodded at her as though he knew her. Maybe they talked, him and his alter ego.

‘Early bird.’

Quentin pulled up. It was Katrina. She was sitting in one of the lobby armchairs, smoking herself awake. Make-up full but fractionally awry, as though the stencil had wobbled. Or maybe her face wasn’t quite up to it yet.

‘Catches the worm!’ Quentin heard herself say.

‘Early call,’ Katrina explained. ‘I like to leave Lallie till the last minute, but I need a bit of time to get myself ready.’

And now Quentin was cornered. Couldn’t she pretend she was on her way somewhere? Maybe, but then she’d end up completing a fake circuit by returning to her room, just her and the skirting for another couple of hours. Perhaps here, she could get away for a little. Perhaps she could be the good listener everyone assumed she was. And anyway, the car would be coming for Katrina and the kid really soon. How bad could it be?

‘We booked the tickets to America.’ Katrina’s inhalation was famished. She wasn’t going to help, then. ‘Madam’s so excited!’ The smoke dragoned out for an inch before she sucked it back into her nostrils. Quentin had never been able to do that. It looked cool and grown-up. ‘I’ve told her, nothing’s settled, they’re just having a look at you, hen – there’s probably a lot of American girls who’ve done a lot more and are a lot prettier they’ll be seeing and all.’

‘Maybe best to see it as a holiday,’ said Quentin. Katrina’s makeup spasmed.

‘Don’t they want her then?’

‘I mean, for Lallie. Take a little of the pressure off.’

‘Oh, she loves all that, don’t you worry.’ Katrina tapped the ashless cigarette on the ashtray rim, her gaze clamped on Quentin. ‘I mean, if she doesn’t stand a chance I’d never have booked – it’s a lot of money for us, like – but you mentioned the film and that.’

‘I’m sure it’ll all work out.’ Like it worked out when I f*cked Hugh, who can go for ever, if that’s your thing, because his dick is numb with bennies or whatever quaint Brit phrase he prefers to use. Not my fault, right?

‘Is your – is Lallie’s father coming with you?’

‘Aye, for a week. He can’t get time off work, you see.’

Quentin caught Katrina’s curious look at her arms, which she appeared to be scratching. She appeared to be embracing herself and scratching her arms so that red track marks appeared on her tan. She forced herself to stop.

‘To be honest,’ Katrina said, ‘even if he could get the time, I don’t think our Graham would come along for the audition and that. He finds it dead boring – feels like a spare part, he says.’

She rolled her eyes reflexively, the same way she did whenever she talked of Lallie feeling anything. What a bitch. Not an alpha bitch, which demanded at least some kind of energy or imagination, just your regular, cold Little League bitch. The world was full of these people, as cool and impermeable as a collection of vases. Standing together in arrangements, some sporting flowers so you thought life was there, but the flowers were cut and dead and didn’t have roots. Like Hugh.

Quentin recognized the come-down, or even its aftermath, the disconnect after all that directionless excitement. Greetings, old pal. He shouldn’t have given her two – what was he thinking, in fact, to have given her one, even? In loco parentis, didn’t that count for something? I mean, he didn’t know she’d chosen him to be her daddy, but still.

‘Do you want a cup of coffee?’

They’d brought Katrina an extra cup with her pot: the hotel only recognized the pot-of-coffee-for-two or the inadequate lone cup. She poured for Quentin.

‘It’s just, you said about the book so we thought – Frank said you’d had a word with him about it as well.’

Frank?

‘You know, her manager, bless him.’

Quentin kept her arms by her side and cranked herself up. It looked like there was nothing else for it, now the deed was very much done. ‘Absolutely. It’s a project we’re very excited about. And we’re very excited about Lallie. But it’s all about finding a good fit, and you can’t always tell that straightaway.’

That sounded OK, right? Any normal person would see the get-out clause right there. It wasn’t like she’d started something she couldn’t finish. And how was she to know that Katrina would be so hot to trot, would actually get off her ass and do something? OK, that she should have known.

‘I never thought – you don’t, do you? Your little girl a film star.’

Quentin ached to slap her, to leave a good red mark like the marks she’d left on her own arms. Scratching would be very satisfying, clawing down past that base and blush and powder, into the flesh. Into the dumb ambition, doing it damage. That would be mighty fine.

Talk of the devil.

‘Talk of the devil …’

Katrina stretched an arm to Lallie, who fitted herself into it, yawning.

‘What’s happened to your hair?’

It rose, wayward and unbrushed. Lallie palmed her eyes. ‘Couldn’t find the comb.’

Katrina squeezed her restraining hand to prompt Lallie into recognition of Quentin.

‘Morning.’

‘Hasn’t woken up yet.’

Lallie dawdled, while Katrina ordered a glass of milk from Count Dracula at the desk. Some of the day staff had started to arrive. A huge porter who had once come to look at Quentin’s shower (and he really had only looked, before announcing there was nothing wrong with it) hustled through the lobby, distributing fresh newspapers, whistling as he fanned them on tables. Watching Lallie watch him, Quentin saw that this was her moment: she could lay it out for the kid right now. Get away from your mom, your life depends on it.

Lallie picked up the nearest newspaper, one of the comic-book ones, which splashed on a hooker murder, or ‘call-girl slaying’, as it quaintly preferred. Katrina batted the paper from her hand as she returned to the table. It was too late.

‘You don’t need to be reading that.’

‘Why not?’

‘You just don’t. It isn’t nice.’

Katrina returned it, expertly, to the display. ‘Here’s your milk.’

‘I told you, I don’t want any milk.’

But the kid took it, and cleared half the glass.

‘Feels sick otherwise,’ Katrina told Quentin. ‘Something to do with getting up so early, isn’t it, hen?’

Lallie staggered, imitating someone in an old movie pretending to be shot. She was back in the room – the hit of milk had revived her. Before Katrina could reach her with a napkin, she swiped away the moustache and wiggled her eyebrows at Quentin, giving her a momentary Groucho. Katrina had to content herself with evening up one side of her daughter’s T-shirt, which had caught in the waist of her jeans. Instead of pulling herself away, as Quentin had often seen her do, Lallie caught Katrina’s hand and kissed it, then laid it against her cheek, finding an exact fit. It was clearly a gesture almost as old as Lallie.

‘Always works, doesn’t it, hen, a little bit of milk?’

It wasn’t so simple, Quentin saw. Mommy knows best. Lallie hopped into her mother’s lap, huge against her, a hermit crab on the verge of outgrowing its shell. Katrina objected, while gathering the kid into her. Whatever that meant, Quentin really did have to make the A Little Princess call, later that same long day. Clancy was chasing her, and it was time for her to justify her existence. Heads you win, tails you’re f*cked. It won’t cut it, Quentin. You’ve got to do something. Didn’t Hugh, now you mention it, have some stake in keeping the kid in the country? Some project he’d got brewing, with all that energy of his? ‘I’m not sure we’re going to let you take her away.’ That’s what he had said. Maybe that was a plan: she could make it all his fault, keep Lallie away from Hollywood while looking like she had given her all to get her there. Yeah, because that was the kind of girl she was – always with the moral victory, whatever the personal cost. Loser, loser, welcome to Loserville …

Quentin finished her coffee and smiled her smile. Lallie had her thumb jammed in her mouth, back to parody. Katrina twitched her hand away.

‘Nutter.’