What They Do in the Dark (24 page)

It was
Playschool
when the coppers turned up. They’d been knocking and ringing for ages, but because of the noise they couldn’t make themselves heard, so the first anyone knew of their arrival was when they barged into the living room, where Gary was running round with no trousers trying to bite his own willy, like a puppy snapping at its tail, encouraged by laughter. Of course, everyone thought the coppers were there for the pot, or the noise, and Black Baz made a run up the stairs, but neither of the coppers went after him. There were two of them: Taylor and Reeves. Taylor was an old hand, they all knew him. Pauline had heard him say he spent more time at theirs than at home. Reeves was younger. He had recently come from Sheffield, and looked mardy. The first thing he did was turn off the TV, while Taylor advised Dave that if there were any ‘marijuana cigarettes’ in the room he’d better get rid of them while he was looking the other way. This took about five years: something strange had happened to time. Pauline felt as though she was zipped into a sleeping bag,
tucked up. She watched Taylor crouch to wake up Nan, his vast arse slowly raising the vents in his uniform tunic. It was hilarious. She knelt with her face on the settee cushions, laughing herself stupid.

It all took years and years, talking to Nan, getting through to her, showing her a Polaroid picture, waking her a bit more, having to shout. In the end they looked for Dave, who had gone off. Pauline was surprised, in a dull way, when he actually came back. He looked at the photo too, shook his head in automatic denial, then he looked at it again, properly.

‘Get our Pauline.’

Reeves didn’t seem to think this was a good idea, but Taylor decided the other way. They showed Pauline the photo while she was still laughing in bursts, like the end of hiccups. It took her a second or two to see what it was. Not a person or a place, but a shiny mass the babyshit colour of a Caramac bar. A bag, a handbag. The strap wiggled on the flat blue surface where the picture had been taken, light flaring off it in the top corner. Beneath it were ranged its innards: a pink tail comb with teeth missing, a purse, a lipstick without a top, a single key, but Pauline didn’t need to see them to know. The bag was enough.

‘It’s me mam’s.’

Before they took the Polaroid away, she saw the dark stain down one side of the plastic, ordinary as paint. They really wanted to talk to Nan now, and tried to send everyone out of the room but her and Dave. Pauline refused to go, but in the end pissface Reeves actually made her, pulling her out by the arm and blocking the door when she tried to get back, kicking and scratching, first at him, then at the scuffed paintwork. So that’s how she knew. They needed Nan to go to Leeds, but she never left the house and she wasn’t going to start now. Dave went instead. It was the first time he’d ever ridden in the front of a police car.

Pauline told Cheryl that Joanne was in hospital. Nan cried for
the rest of the day. Pauline ran off to the Town Fields and lay on the bare yellow grass for another five years, looking into the white sky. Eventually, she dozed. When she woke, the sleeping-bag feeling had worn off. There was almost no one else around on the Fields, bar a couple of dog walkers, and the space made her alone in the world. No one had told her anything, but she knew.

W
HEN WE GET
back from Spain, it looks like a burglar’s tried to break into the dormer bungalow. That’s what Ian and Mum think anyway, because there are marks on the door where someone’s tried to kick it in, they say, and the small window in the back kitchen is smashed, although the catch is still fastened. After Ian’s paced round the garden for a bit – the suitcases are still on the drive, where the taxi driver left them – he calls Mum, and they exclaim over something. ‘Disgusting’ is the word they agree on, and Mum looks like she might be sick. ‘Worse than an animal,’ Ian says. But I think, animals poo in gardens all the time and they don’t do it in a shoebox, do they? If you wanted to be like an animal, you’d just do your business there on a flowerbed, and if you wanted to be disgusting, you’d do it right in the middle of Ian’s lurid lawn. Using a shoebox you’ve found in the rubbish (it’s the one from my new holiday sandals) means you were trying to get to the toilet and didn’t manage it. Maybe even smashing the window, that was all you were trying to do. If you were Pauline Bright.

The dormer bungalow is stuffy with out-of-date air. We’ve been away two weeks, and it feels like our life in the hotel has become the real one and this is the holiday. When I go to my room, I’m shocked to find my nightie still puddled on the floor by the bed, next to the splayed copy of
Charlotte Sometimes
I’d been reading the night before we left. Everything else is different. Two weeks until I start at Hill House. The uniform to be bought. Downstairs, Ian and Mum are checking to see if anything’s been stolen, and Mum’s talking about ringing the police.

If you could tell. Suncream, and where it goes. The smell of it’s nice at first, then it gives you a headache in the heat.

‘They’ll just file a report. Paperwork,’ says Ian, discouragingly, from downstairs. Then I hear him tell Mum he’ll ring them after we’ve got ourselves settled. I wonder if I’ll get shouted at if I switch on the telly, and conclude that it’s probably wiser to stay in in my room for a little while, not exactly doing anything to help but not visibly relaxing in front of them while they empty suitcases and Mum loses herself in washing. I tip out the bag I’ve carried on to the plane, the one that Mum bought me for the Butlin’s holiday with Christina that didn’t happen. The thought of Lallie and the film twinges like a bad tooth I’ve learned to avoid. In the different holiday world, this has been surprisingly easy. I’ve preferred, in the heat and the newly built white façades of the hotel, to be a secret agent, like James Bond. The daughter of a diplomat, although I’m not entirely sure what a diplomat is, called Abigail. I go to a boarding school and have adventures. If Lallie was in a film like that, I’d go a million times. I’d spend all my pocket money on tickets, probably.

At the airport, I bought Christina a Spanish flamenco doll posing in a plastic tube to go with the special Spanish Pez of Hong Kong Phooey I got for her in a shop while we were out one day. I got one for myself, as well – Ian insisted on paying. Mum says he spoils me rotten, but he spoils her too. On holiday he bought her a gold necklace which sits splendidly between her newly brown bosoms. It’s real gold, worth hundreds of pounds, probably. Dad never buys her presents, except at Christmas. Last year he got her a hairdrier: one with a hood that inflates with air like the bottom of a hovercraft. She gave him a funny look when she unwrapped it and asked what she needed it for, since she always does her hair at the salon, and Dad said, well, this way she’d be able to dry her hair at home from now on.

I take out the other things I’ve been bought on holiday, scratchy
with the beach sand sugaring the bottom of the bag. There’s a bracelet woven out of tiny beads with my name worked into the pattern, a diddy replica of the wine skins Mum and Ian had squirted into their mouths one riotous night at the hotel – the waiter even did it to me, although I spat out the vinegary disgusting spurt of wine; a pair of castanets painted with dancers; and best of all, a knife. It’s basically a miniature version of the knife Pauline and I played with on the wall downstairs, the one Pauline and I joked Ian had used to kill his good lady. It has a curved blade and a handle that looks like it’s trying to be wood but Ian says is horn. It sits in a gaudy leather sheath draped with small red tassels I’m not that keen on and have tried to pull off. Unlike the knife downstairs, it’s properly sharp. I’ve produced a few small cuts on my hands, experimentally, and it can cut paper and even wood.

I can’t believe they’ve let me have a knife. I spotted it really early on in the souvenir shop but knew better than to ask. I didn’t even want the castanets, particularly, but I hoped a collection of Spanish things might hide the acquisition of the knife. It worked perfectly, probably because it was just Ian and me in the shop that time. Mum was lying down with a migraine from sunbathing too long. It was the suncream day. The night of the suncream day, actually. Night in Spain goes on for hours, it’s when everyone is up and about and going to shops and having drinks and ice cream and not sending their children to bed.

Suncream and where it goes.
Let me just do your back
.

In
Famous Five
, George has a penknife, and in the first book she’s ten like me. It’s useful in my work as a secret agent. Mum might not exactly know I’ve got a knife. I might not exactly have told her, because when we got back to the rooms, hers and Ian’s was pitch-black and she was asleep. My smaller dread at this was engulfed by relief that she wasn’t awake to force me to take the knife back to the shop. And in the end, Ian crept into their room anyway.

By the time Mum calls me down for beans on toast, all the
clothes have been sorted into piles for washing, and Ian’s spoken to the neighbours about burglars. No one else has had a break-in or seen anything funny.

‘It’s a rum do,’ says Mum. ‘What makes us so special?’

When I look up, Ian is looking at me. His eyes jump away when they see mine.

‘Maybe they’ve got wind of what you do,’ she suggests. ‘Working with money.’

Ian sweated all the time on holiday. I can see that clean sweat of his gathering now on his temples like condensation on a warm window, even though the kitchen isn’t actually hot.

‘It’s not like you keep money in the house.’ Mum forks her beans neatly back on to the toast. Now she looks at me. I know she’ll be able to conjure Pauline Bright’s name right out of my mouth. I think of all the things I’ve taken from Pauline, that she’s given me. Surely that will get me into bad, bad trouble? Some of them have been stolen, I bet, because she’s poor and can’t afford proper clothes, let alone presents. Taking things that have been stolen is practically like stealing yourself.

But Mum passes over me to Ian. A bigger look. I can see he’s not sure whether to talk in front of me.

‘Well, maybe it’s nothing to do with that.’ He mounds up the food on his plate, eats and chews. ‘Maybe it’s closer to home.’

Mum works this out. I don’t.

‘He wouldn’t.’

‘Wouldn’t he now?’

‘Course not!’ Mum quells some uncomfortable words, like burps, before she allows a few smaller sour ones out. ‘Wouldn’t have the get-up-and-go, for a start.’

‘Maybe you should give him a ring.’

They’re talking about Dad. Ian is talking about Dad as though he really is a burglar, as though he’s a baddie. But really, Ian’s taken Mum away from Dad, and that makes him the baddie. I’m living
with the baddies. And since I’m definitely a goodie, that must make me their prisoner.

Suncream.

I don’t hear Mum making a phone call to Dad, or even Ian ringing the police, because I fall asleep quickly from the travelling and the early start. But next morning, I wake up early and hear Ian getting ready for work and leaving without Mum getting up with him, which is unusual. I wonder if we’ll go out later to get the uniform. There’s only one shop in town that sells it, Cooper and Sons. I know its window but I’ve never been inside. Having the uniform will turn me into someone else, more like Abigail, or even Lallie. I think that will be better. But when I hear Mum’s getting-up noises after two and a half chapters of
Charlotte Sometimes
and join her in the kitchen and ask, she clatters pans and says we won’t be going to Cooper and Sons today.

‘Will we go on Saturday then?’

‘Gemma!’

That’s not nagging, asking about something twice. But her tone means I’m definitely not allowed to ask about it again. I spoon up cereal, and she does the pans with her back to me. It’s funny to see her washing up wearing the same kaftan thing she wore by the pool on holiday. Her legs are really brown.

‘Ian and I have had a long talk.’

I wait for ages for her to say something else, but she doesn’t. So as I take my milky bowl to the sink for her to wash, I ask if I can go to Christina’s today to play.

‘No!’

She says it as though I’m still nagging her about the uniform, as though asking to play at Christina’s is the thing I’ve chosen to push her over the edge of unbearable exasperation. I go upstairs and cry indignantly. I want to see Christina, I want to go back to the life I had before. I call myself a goodie but I’m a receiver of stolen goods (which is a fence, I’ve seen it on
Cannon
), and a betrayer of my dad.
Ian might go round and punch him if he thinks he’s a burglar. He might even call the police and get them to arrest him, and then I’ll have to tell them I know it’s Pauline, and why, and I’ll be the one the police will arrest once they know about the Kit Kat and the tights. There’s the guitar charm she gave me as well: I’ve got it in my jewellery box. She said it was from her mum but what if she was lying and she stole that too? She lies all the time. Lies and steals.

I get the charm out of my box with the drunkenly askew ballerina that used to spin, feeling frightened even at the sight of the miniature guitar, so brightly valuable. Mum’s still downstairs with the washing. I go into the bathroom and wrap the charm in loads of toilet paper and flush it down the loo, slightly surprised to see it go so easily. Flushing makes me think of the poo in the shoebox, and how Mum could have told Ian why she knew so certainly it could never have been Dad in the garden. Dad could never do a poo outside in a million years. He takes ages on the toilet, he had to have an operation when I was seven. It was for his piles, but he still has difficulties, as Mum calls them. You’d only do your business in a box if you knew it was going to be quick.