What They Do in the Dark (31 page)

‘Sport?’ Hearing this, Pauline comes to have a look.

‘What did you have to do?’

‘I don’t know.’ She’s stupid to be so terrified of me. And she must know.

‘You’ve only got three, you must be able to remember.’ I make my voice like Mrs Bream’s. Cynthia twitches more obligingly.

‘Running,’ she admits.

‘Running?’

Pauline produces more laughter. I don’t blame Cynthia for not liking it, it’s getting on my nerves even though it’s not directed at me. Although the thought of Cynthia getting any kind of badge for running is ridiculous. It isn’t fair, either. Pauline twists the sleeve of the uniform, pretending to get a better look at the badge and pinching Cynthia’s arm as she does it.

‘Go on, show us then.’ She releases the sleeve. ‘Run.’

Cynthia’s head jerks between us, to check she’s understood. ‘She wants you to show her your running,’ I reassure her, still being Mrs Bream.

She’s careening and aimless, like a daddy-long-legs released from a jam-jar. Even by her standards, it’s rubbish. Her body’s still arched at one side where Pauline hit her, as though she has a stitch. Pauline gives her yards and yards of head start, then takes off after her and catches up in about two seconds flat. This time she aims the plank more, square between her shoulders. I’m expecting Cynthia to go down like she did before, weightlessly, uselessly, but there’s an odd moment as she and Pauline stagger forward together and then fall, Pauline more or less on top of her. This time Cynthia’s squeal is thin and high, and there’s no apology in it, only pain. It gets louder as Pauline wrestles herself away, and the struggle as she pulls her weapon free makes delayed sense of their dance to the ground: one of the old nails has stuck into Cynthia’s back, and it’s hurting her more as Pauline tries to pull the wood away.

After that she does what we say even if she isn’t up to much. We don’t need to hit her to get her into the pavilion. Pauline breaks more of the boards off and we climb through the low window, with a bit of contemptuous coaxing from Pauline because I’m
worried about the broken glass I can see framing the gap like shark’s teeth, its danger disguised by the ancient muck inside. Going in feels wrong and exciting. The air smells old and pissy. I think of Howard Carter and the tomb of Tutankhamun, with its curse. As I climb in, the dusty tunnel of light from the window illuminates something heaped on the floor, further back by a wall. It can only be clothes over a skeleton. I shriek. While I back up to the window, careless now of the hidden glass, Pauline strides up and kicks it. The body’s mound shifts, and I see it’s a torn badminton net, rolled around metal poles.

‘Give me heart attack!’

Cynthia plays no part in either the fear or the laughter. She cries on, huddling her wounds, snot and tears coating her chin. I’m sick of her now. I hate her now. It’s all too late. Because of her, I’m going to get done.

‘Shut up!’

I push her, forgetting it’ll make her fall. My hand comes away with blood on it, and I’m curious to see, in the light from the window gap, that it’s standard red. We’re all the same under the skin, as Mr Scott has told us. The blood is a smear, not drops, and to get rid of it I wipe my palm on Cynthia’s Brownie dress. As she lies there, a sudden hot stink makes me jump back, just in time to avoid the tide of wee spreading from under her thighs. I yelp with disgust, and Pauline laughs again. There are no words for what I feel, seeing Cynthia douse herself with her own urine. It isn’t something to watch. All I did was push her to shut her up.

‘Shurrup, pisspants.’ Pauline knees her in the face. She is more interested in the pavilion, though, than in Cynthia. She wanders off to explore the dim corner beyond the badminton net, where a door hangs askew. I don’t know what her plans are. I only know that coming to this place is the end of the world for me. Suncream. Lallie. For Sale. I want to close my eyes and never open them, but I try and I can still smell the sweet vinegary piss
stink, new and old. I wish Cynthia would stop crying. She’s got the worst cry ever, like a donkey or some other old animal, but it doesn’t sound real. It sounds like she’s trying to imitate a donkey, just to be annoying. A deliberate
ee
as she pulls in a breath and a long exhaled
aw
of involuntary distress.

‘Shut up!’

And this time, I mean to hurt her. I punch and kick, not aiming, just hurting. To get to what. To make her stop. To make everything stop. I do stop, in the end. She isn’t trying to kick or scratch or grab my hands. She’s balled in on herself, rigid, moving only with the impact of my hurting her. I haven’t got anywhere. I hate her more.

‘Pauline.’ She’s over in the corner, poking around in a cupboard with the wonky door. ‘Come and hold her.’

Because that’s what will make a difference. Being able to get to her. Pauline ambles over, striped with dust and carrying a half-strung badminton racquet. Between us, we uncurl Cynthia, pulling faces at the wee, so that Pauline can kneel by her head, pinning back her arms. We take off her glasses. Cynthia’s knees double up to protect her stomach but I’m much stronger than her and pull them down and sit on them so she can’t do that any more. I know what I’m going to do. I’ve got the knife, the one I got in Spain. I put it in my pocket this morning, along with the library ticket.

‘Get her fanny,’ urges Pauline.

‘You what?’

‘Sambos’ fannies are different. I’ve seen.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I’ve seen pictures. Have a look.’

I can see the sodden navy crutch of Cynthia’s knickers.

‘She’s wet herself.’

Pauline shifts, business-like, releasing Cynthia’s arms.

‘Take your pants off,’ she commands.

It seems that Cynthia has stopped being able to understand us,
even when we shout, so in the end Pauline gets hold of the sturdy waistband, loose around Cynthia’s narrow belly, and pulls. Gingerly I take the wet pants as they twist round her legs, leaving them to shackle her ankles as I push her knees apart to get a better look. Cynthia’s donkey sounds continue, softly. I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for. I’m not going to tell Pauline, but I’ve never taken a really good look at my own privates. Cynthia’s fanny is like a surprising pinkish ear hidden in the brown skin. I don’t want to get too close in case she does another wee.

‘Told yer,’ says Pauline. ‘Can you see the hole?’

Not really.

‘Oh yes!’ I exclaim.

Pauline arches over from where she’s holding Cynthia’s hands. She grins at me.

‘Dare you to touch it.’

I refuse, until she calls me nesh. I’ve got the Spanish knife in my hand now from my pocket, and I use the plastic bone handle to prod, glancingly. Pauline claims it doesn’t count. Cynthia has started to writhe like a hooked fish, so Pauline knees her head back against the concrete floor and she stops, wailing.

‘Go on, properly.’

I’m not nesh. It’s not disgusting anyway. But Pauline thinks it’s the most hilarious thing she’s ever seen, in that unhilarious way she’s keen on. She says I’m a lezzer because that’s what lezzers do, touch each other’s fannies. She says they lick fannies as well, and dares me to do that. I refuse. Then she starts saying ‘jam rags’. I tell her to shut up. I wave the knife. She dodges back but she doesn’t stop saying it. She swoops her badminton racquet like a sword, like we’re having a fight. She’s enjoying herself more than me, even though all her laughter is like hitting someone. It makes me frightened.

‘Eww, Grimsby docks!’ she says about my hands, which I don’t even understand, but has something to do with the smell from
touching Cynthia’s fanny. I wish I was brave enough to make her shut up.

‘You know you can put things up her. Where willies go. And jam rags.’

Pauline flourishes the racquet. Its handle is bound with faded black tape which has unravelled at the bottom, mummy-like.

‘Go on then,’ I say.

It isn’t me. It’s definitely her. I don’t even use the knife, except for when I cut the three Brownie badges off Cynthia’s dress. Pauline hasn’t even asked to borrow the knife, she just grabs, as usual. I grab it back and wipe it off on my own dress so I can cut off the badges. I don’t care about the state of my dress any more. Pauline says I’m mad for getting the badges, but I can tell she’s just jealous she hasn’t thought of it herself. It’s true I haven’t got a Brownie uniform of my own to sew them on to, but that doesn’t matter. You could unpick the stitching, done so carefully in green to match by Cynthia or her mum, but it’s too late now to bother. I saw at the thick nylon, leaving three ragged holes. After that there isn’t anything left to do. Pauline and I roll her in what we can unwind of the tangled badminton net, like a huge caught fish that’s stopped trying to flip itself back in the water. The last thing I see is Cynthia’s eye, alive and ordinary through the dirty grey mesh. At least I think it’s alive, but it’s almost too dark now to tell.

Before we climb back out into the world, I bring the heel of my Clarks sandals down on the glasses that have skidded near the window, one, two, so that the lenses are smashed. Of all the things we’ve done today, it’s the best.

N
OT LONG AFTER
they’d put the light out, the phone went in the office. The boys yapped him along the corridor after Lol had mumbled him out of bed. Frank had already been so deeply asleep that he didn’t even think to put his glasses on; his reach for the receiver was a fuzzy guess. For a second or two there was just breathing at the other end, delicate and young and distressed.

‘It’s me, Lallie.’

‘Lallie. What can I do for you, my love?’

The boys quivered. Frank sat. He didn’t feel too clever on his legs. The noises at the other end, hesitations and breaths and swallowings, suggested that he needed to draw it out of her. This wasn’t the time. He wasn’t up to it.

‘Sorry,’ she said in the end, and hung up. He fell asleep in the chair until Lol came to get him. Then he did one of his miserly pees and got back into bed. It wasn’t until the next morning, when he was loading his briefcase, that he saw he’d left the receiver off the cradle. He’d call her mother once he was in the office, sort everything out.

I
F THERE HAD
ever been an invitation to a screening, it didn’t reach her letterbox, so in the end Vera paid eighty new pence of her own money to see the film, a few days after Virginia Wade’s glorious Jubilee Wimbledon victory. There were very few other people in the cinema in Swiss Cottage, which was as it should be on the kind of bright day it was.
That Summer
wasn’t much of a title, in her opinion, but then no one was asking.

The crits had been tepid. Well,
The Stage
and
The Times
, which were the ones Vera didn’t have to go out of her way to read. Both had praised the girl, and Dirk, but
The Times
chap had pronounced Mike’s direction to be dated. It wasn’t the sort of thing she could tell, herself. It all seemed to trot along well enough, and they were right about the performances. There was the familiar shock of seeing herself not looking like herself, then wondering if this was in fact how she looked. Already two years younger than she was now, of course. Where did the time go, people said, and films showed you, ten times as large as life. Mind you, the two years showed most on the girl, whom Vera had caught a few times gurning away in a dreadful comedy programme on the box. Well, perhaps it wasn’t dreadful; she was unreliable about those sort of things. Never got it. Anyway, she had watched enough of the show to register the spots matted out by pancake and the new breasts. They’d even tried to give her a bit of glamour, which she would never have. Apart from adolescence, there was something different about her face, although it might have just been the strain of trying to make the script funny.

The girl in the film was something and someone else entirely.
In the film, Vera forgot who she was watching. She believed everything Lallie did, so that the girl you saw was an ignorant, cunning little pain in the arse, but transparently compelling. It was an awful waste, really. When she’d encountered Dougie at a crammed Christmas drinks party in Earls Court, he’d mooed about Lallie going to America, and the scandal of her getting kicked off a film for not being pretty enough, or for behaving unprofessionally, or for being caught pleasuring members of the crew. The third purely bilious and mainly alcoholic theory reminded Vera of the stand-in on their shoot – what was her name, Sue? Lou? – the lascivious 25-year-old midget. It would be an easy mistake to make, blaming Lallie for those escapades, always assuming she’d taken her stand-in across the pond with her. But really, what did she know? As for unprofessional behaviour, if you were giving them everything else they wanted, it meant sweet Fanny Adams. Plainness was a much more believable lapse. All the talent in the world didn’t make you a star, and stars had to shine. Of course, since Vera herself had come at it from the opposite angle, smouldering in her small way, she wasn’t about to deny you needed a bit of talent as well.

On screen, Dirk was gearing up to no good, and then there she was herself, hatchet-faced and disapproving. She’d not done badly for herself, considering. Only that morning, after a very lean period, she’d got a call-up for an episode of an awful action-spy-series thing. Apparently Hugh was one of the producers, bless him. She’d heard about him taking the telly shilling, and good luck to him really. It hadn’t come to anything with the other producer, the American girl. In fact, Dougie had sworn blind she’d had some sort of a fling with Mike, of all people, and got him on another film in the States. Anyway, as far as Hugh was concerned, it had obviously not done Vera any harm to be nice. Seeing the film was her little treat to herself, a celebration of employment. She could write it off on her tax, as well.