by Amanda Coe
‘Hair in the gate?’ she liked to think she’d quipped, although she probably hadn’t, since he wasn’t a joky lay and she’d tried to be sensitive to things like that.
Of course it was traditional for leading ladies to fall in love with their cinematographers, possibly out of some sort of survival instinct, since the glow of mutual attraction ensured the best close-ups and the most flattering lighting. There was a story about an American star (Myrna Loy? Jean Arthur?) who had had her career ruined when she married, so spurning the DOP on whom she had always relied to give her a dewiness on screen that had deserted her in life. Maybe it was spite, or maybe he just saw her more clearly without the haze of sex and wanted to pass that revelation on to the audience. Either way she was over, playing the kind of roles Vera was now pleased to get, bitter mothers and nosy bystanders. Vera had never worked with DOPs good enough to make a difference to what she’d once had, apart from Tony. And there the timing had been wrong: him on the way up, and her on the way down.
Vera watched as Lallie left make-up and skipped along towards the cluster of lights. She wondered if Tony would still feel a frisson, with an eleven-year-old leading lady. After all, the kid hardly needed to look any younger; angles and keylights were an irrelevance. And in any case, tastes had changed. As far as Vera could see, glamour had become a word filthier than any of the ones now so fashionably bandied about on screen (not in this one though; apparently they were hoping for an ‘A’, Double ‘A’ at worst).
There was a harassed-looking woman following the girl, picking her way around the mud in inappropriate high-heeled boots. A chaperone: Vera recognized the style. Among the crew of any film involving kids, you could pick out the least maternal, hardest-faced woman, and that would be the chaperone. Then she saw that high-heels-and-no-knickers was actually making her stumbling way to the catering van, abandoning her charge.
‘Lallie! What d’you want?’ she shouted. Her voice wasn’t the standard nicotine bass Vera was expecting, but jarringly soft and girlish. She had another look. The chaperone’s make-up was heavier than any the actors were wearing – it included false eyelashes – and her nails, lacquered metallic brown, looked as though she could use them to open tins. But she was younger beneath all this get-up than Vera’s first sight of her had led her to believe.
‘Lallie!’ the woman called reproachfully. ‘I said what d’you want for your breakfast?’
‘Not hungry!’ shouted Lallie, uninterrupted in her nimble journey across the mud.
‘She’s never hungry,’ the woman confided breathily, almost whiningly, to Vera, rolling her black-fringed eyes. She had a gentle northern accent – Teesside, Vera guessed.
‘It is a bit early,’ Vera consoled, inhabiting her homely head-scarf guise.
‘Penguins, she’ll have,’ said the woman who had served Vera her sandwich with a Rothman’s (now smoked) parked in her mouth.
‘Oh aye, she’d live on them,’ breathed the chaperone.
‘Kids,’ Vera said, since the tone of the scene demanded it. There was a little silence after this. Vera saw Lallie reach the illuminated point where Tony conferred with his crew. She danced around them, inaudible at this distance, but no doubt treating them to another round of her impressions.
‘Do you ever get a bit of peace?’ she asked the chaperone, who had lit her own cigarette and was devouring it with a cup of the polystyrene tea.
‘This is it,’ the woman told her, hoisting her fag.
Vera’s elbow was cupped by the First AD, a nervous boy with chronically bad breath.
‘We’re ready for you now,’ he muttered, unconscious of his affliction. ‘Mike wants to do a run-through.’
‘With you in a tick, darling.’ Vera downed her tea and held out the cup for the canteen woman. Then she smiled a goodbye at the chaperone, who sighed, exhaling smoke, still watching the ever-moving Lallie.
‘Don’t know where she gets it from,’ she said. ‘She wears me out. Her dad tries to look after her a bit at the weekends, but he’s been working away.’
Not a chaperone then. Vera, accommodating this adjustment, tried to find some resemblance to the daughter in the mother. There wasn’t any, as far as she could see, even allowing for all the make-up. But she’d lay money Lallie could take off her mum a treat, clever little love.
SATURDAY NIGHT, AFTER a good Saturday. Swimming, chips, comics, Christina, and now Lallie. Tapping down the stairs in a blue-sequinned catsuit, pausing to gurn and exclaim ‘Shut that door!’ before reverting to herself and scuttling rhythmically to the bottom of the stairs for her I-gotta-be-me finale. A cola-bottle chew, dissolved to a sliver of flavour, sits on my tongue. The next part of the show will be Lallie and Marmaduke.
Mum opens the door to the lounge, bringing in the Saturday steak-and-chips smell with her.
‘Darling …’
I frown in irritation. Canned laughter accompanies the discovery of Marmaduke, in a frilled apron over his butler’s uniform, dusting Lallie’s stamp collection with a huge feather duster, stamp by stamp.
‘I wondered if you wanted to come to work with me next week after school?’
The formality of the suggestion would strike me as odd if I wasn’t intent on Lallie, who has sprung out of nowhere, telling Marmaduke to use a bit of elbow grease on the Penny Black, then grabbing the feather duster and doing a quick Ken Dodd. ‘How tickled I am,’ she splutters at him.
‘Only I thought it would be nice for you,’ Mum continues.
‘I’m watching this,’ I tell her, exasperated.
‘Don’t you be like that when I’m trying to talk to you, young lady.’
Now I’ve missed the next joke, and catch only the laughter. But I know better than to spark Mum’s irritation. She wouldn’t think twice about turning off the telly altogether, and has even taken a few steps towards the set, as though this is already in her mind.
‘Sorry,’ I say, hoping that this might be enough to get her out of the room again. But she sits next to me and cuddles up, with the delicious smells of the hair salon and the even-more-delicious cooked fat of her tea on top of that.
‘It’s OK, I know it’s your favourite.’
I feel a bit embarrassed. It’s not the same, watching Lallie with Mum there, even though it’s a particularly good show this week, with plenty of Marmaduke bits. He has to cook Lallie a special meal because she’s invited a boy round, called Algernon Smithington-Smythe, who wears a monocle and talks with an extremely posh accent. Marmaduke keeps getting everything wrong and ends up head first in a large meringue. My dad comes in at the end, saying ‘Load of rubbish,’ which he always says, and pretending that he’s going to turn over because he thinks the programme’s finished, which is also traditional. Mum then says what she always says, when Lallie’s doing a song from The Sound of Music, being Julie Andrews.
‘Not what you could call a pretty child, is she? Terrible nose.’
‘Talented, though,’ says Dad, and Mum’s ‘mmmmn’ of uncertain agreement suggests talent is no compensation for a lack of looks. I’m fairly sure that I’m prettier than Lallie. My nose is quite small.
Mum clears off to do the pots, later than usual. She doesn’t reappear for the police programme I’m allowed to watch before bed. After that’s over, I’m supposed to be sent upstairs, but a film starts without Dad saying anything. Once I realize he’s forgotten about me, I don’t dare speak or move in case it reminds him that I’m still up, particularly as the plastic stuff the settee’s made of squeaks a lot when you shift on it.
The hands on the clock above the gas fire creep steadily towards ten. Still no sign of Mum, still no order to go to bed. It’s a kind of torture, because although I’m very interested in the film, and know that it’s far too grown-up for me to be watching, there are a number of things I don’t understand. I’m dying to ask Dad to explain the plot for me, but can’t risk drawing attention to myself. A man and a lady in a dark, scary old house are looking for someone who’s missing – the l
ady’s sister? Why do they know she’s in the house?
The house looks a lot like Lallie’s mansion, although in Lallie’s show you only ever see her room and sometimes the dining room. There’s a scary old man who keeps telling the main man and lady to ‘leave this place’, but they don’t pay any attention. As they’re looking for the missing sister or whoever she is, the lady opens a door and sees someone in the other room. It’s another lady, probably the sister, but she has her back to the main lady, so you can only see her blonde hair and pretty dress. The main lady says ‘Judy?’ but the sister doesn’t say anything so she taps her on the shoulder, and the sister turns round suddenly and it’s not her face but a skull, grinning horribly, with a rat running out between her teeth. The lady on the television screams at the same time as me, but not as loud. Mum runs down the stairs and wants to know what the matter is. Dad looks confused and foggy – I realize he has been asleep in his chair and not watching the film at all. My heart is still punching hard from the shock. ‘This isn’t fit for her to be watching,’ says Mum, and packs me off to bed. Even though I get her to leave the landing light on, I don’t go to sleep for ages in case I see that empty-eyed skull in my dreams.
It troubles me for days, and I make all sorts of excuses about going to bed. One night I jerk awake and think I see the corpse hovering in the corner near the door, blonde hair billowing around it, then wake up properly with a scream thick and unscreamed in my throat. And this is how Pauline Bright draws me in. I’m playing two-ball with Christina and some other girls at morning playtime, and I see her chasing after a couple of the rough boys in our year, Neil Rigby and Darren Soper. Pauline spends a lot of playtimes on her own, but if she does play with anyone apart from her brother or sister, it’s with boys like them. Sometimes she tries to barge in on skipping or a game of two-ball with the girls, but when there’s enough of us we gang up and chase her away, telling her she smells. If she’s in the mood, she lets the boys snog her and touch her where they shouldn’t, but she always demands to touch their willies in return. Other times she just fights them, and she’s quite capable of making them run off crying to tell a teacher. Today she’s after Neil and Darren, her jaw thrust forward and eyes hideously crossed, legs spastic and arms outstretched; a monster.
‘So then she turns round and she’s like this, right –’ she shouts, ‘and she jumps out on you, but you can’t gerraway and she pulls you back in – there’s like a secret passage and she pulls you in through the cupboard and that’s where she keeps you and there’s all these other people she’s caught and she eats their flesh and that.’
Pauline catches Neil by the back of his jumper. He stretches it to the limit, arms wheeling, but can’t escape.
‘Some are just skellingtons,’ continues Pauline, still shouting. ‘That’s all that’s left of them and she’s even eaten your sister you were looking for, but then you escape—’
She lets Neil’s jumper go and he runs off round a corner. She staggers after him, pulling a fresh monster face. Christina fumbles the ball on a simple overarm against the wall – not even over-under – and it’s my turn. I have to concentrate on the game.
In the dinner queue I manoeuvre a place next to Pauline. It’s risky, given her threats to do me since our fight on the playing field, but I can’t resist.
‘Did you see that film on Saturday night?’ I ask her. I’m anxious, both in case she says no and in case she says yes. ‘The one in the mansion when the sister’s gone missing and the lady jumps out but she’s got a skeleton face?’
‘That weren’t the best bit,’ Pauline says, scornful. ‘The best bit, right, was right at the end when the bloke gets this knife right through him and you can see it pushing out of his back, like, and he’s all bleeding and it even comes out of his eyes.’
I think about this as the queue edges forward.
‘What about the skeleton woman?’ This is what I really need to know. If I know what happened to the skeleton woman, she might stop erupting into my dreams.
Pauline flicks a look at me. It’s quite difficult to see her eyes because she’s got a bushy fringe that straggles halfway down her face. Her hair is dark and heavy, and I can smell it from where I’m standing, part of the sour, alarming Pauline smell. She punches me on the arm, not hard, but enough to startle me.
‘Give us your dinner ticket,’ she says, matter-of-factly. I hand over the blue ticket and am surprised when she holds out a grubby yellow one in exchange. Only then do I want to object, since I’ve never had free dinners in my life, but we’re at the front of the line now, and Pauline has yet to tell me the ending of the film. I pocket the yellow ticket and hand over another blue one to the dinner lady in charge. I can always tell Mum I’ve lost one, although that isn’t like me, as she’s bound to remark.
I’m actually pleased when Pauline follows me to sit at my table, although I can’t continue our conversation immediately as I have to perform my duties as a table monitor. This involves doling out food to the other children at my table from the various tins that arrive from the kitchens. There aren’t enough teachers to go round, so well-behaved tables like ours have to make do with monitors.
Another girl, Cynthia, comes and sits next to Pauline. She’s a regular at my table, and she’s a disaster. She’s coloured – there aren’t that many coloured girls at our school – and she wears glasses so thick that her eyes are nearly lost behind them. Her shoulders, caving together for protection, are too narrow to hold up her bobbled grey cardigan, which bows around her arms like a shawl. She maintains a constant, gummy smile to stop being got at, but it never works. Most of the kids round the table call her nig-nog and blackie in a quietly taunting way that frightens me, the way anything frightens me when I know that grown-ups wouldn’t like it.
The main taunter is Rodney Wallace. He looks like a rat, with white hair and eyelashes and a perpetually reddened nose. He likes to kick Cynthia under the table, but not in a way that the teachers will notice. From meal to meal, when Cynthia gets up to go, I see the bruises, some purple on the shiny darkness of her legs, some older, yellowing. I don’t know what to do. Cynthia just smiles her blind smile and huddles her shoulders closer, trying to ignore Rodney’s swinging legs and the sambos and niggers that come her way.
Today, when Rodney approaches, Pauline is in his place.
‘I sit there,’ he dares to tell her.
‘Fuck off, knobber,’ spits Pauline, and Rodney retreats, muttering threats which he sensibly keeps below a level Pauline could hear. I’m glad he’s gone, although I’m breathing through my mouth so that the Pauline smell doesn’t offend me. I slide a few extra chips on to Cynthia’s plate. I always give her big portions, to make up for not protecting her.
‘Tell me about the film,’ I urge Pauline. ‘What happens to the skeleton lady?’
Pauline doesn’t know to keep her mouth closed when she eats. Through her mouthful of chewed chips I can see the uneven edge on her front tooth, the one caused by my kick.
‘It’s ace,’ she tells me, and a few bits of chip escape back on to the plate. ‘The other bloke, the one with the big nose—’
‘The professor,’ I encourage her.
‘He comes in after she’s stabbed the posh bloke, the skellington one, and they have a scrap and you think she’s going to win because she’s right strong and that but then he’s got this gun and he starts shooting her and all her bones go everywhere but bits of her keep running towards him and then he manages to get her right here –’ Pauline jabs at her chest – ‘and she’s dead but then for a second she goes like she was before she was a skellington, all like pretty, and he snogs her and then she’s a skellington and then she turns to dust and there’s just her dress left.’
We leave a little silence as I imagine the scene. It is deeply satisfying.
‘Why does he snog her?’ I ask, tying up loose ends.
‘They were supposed to get married, before she turned into a skellington.’
‘Skeleton,’
I correct her, ‘not skellington. Skelly ton.’
‘Skelly ton,’ muses Pauline. ‘It worran ace film.’
‘My mum and dad wanted to watch summat else so they turned over,’ I tell her, glossing over the fact that I’d already been sent to bed. I’m not allowed to say ‘summat’, but it’s easier talking like that to Pauline. Pauline stuffs most of a sausage into her mouth.
‘I can watch what I like, me,’ she says. ‘Rudie films, owt. Horror ones are the best though. Some of them get a bit rudie an’ all.’
This intrigues me.
‘Do you see them doing it?’ I ask.
‘All’t time,’ says Pauline airily. She scoops out the few squashed chips left in the serving tin with her hand.
‘You’re supposed to use the spoon,’ I admonish. ‘And I’m supposed to do it because I’m monitor.’ I demonstrate my power by using a serving fork to spear the last sausage, which I put on Cynthia-the-disaster’s plate. She smiles nervily at the sausage instead of me, bobbing her head as though it too might rear up and kick her.
‘What you give it to’t blackie for?’ asks Pauline, reaching across to retrieve the sausage. I bar the way with my arm, which is still holding the fork, but Pauline reaches over me, pushing me in the face.
‘If you take it, I’m telling,’ I warn her.
‘Fuck off, lezzie,’ spits Pauline. Lezzie is the worst insult we possess. I shoot my arm up in the air, thrusting so that my bum leaves my seat with the effort, panting to get the attention of Mrs Bream, who teaches the fourth years and is one table across.
‘Miss – Miss –’