What They Do in the Dark (10 page)

‘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.

F
ROM 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 fuck 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 fucking 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.
Asshole
. She really, really wished she hadn’t fucked 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 fucked Danny, or, to get the hierarchy straight, Danny had fucked her. When actually, she owed the gig to her dad.
Calling Dr Freud …