by Amanda Coe
‘I’m off to the launderette tomorrow,’ she told Nan. It was the only time anything got washed, when Joanne came home. She held up the bottle she’d got from the shops.
‘Stay still,’ she commanded. Pauline tried, but when Joanne opened the bottle and poured the stuff on to her hair, the smell made her eyes water and her throat burn. Joanne told her not to be such a baby, and used the comb to spread the liquid through her hair. It made the skin on her scalp burn and then sting like the worst nettle patch in the world, but she had to wait half an hour until Joanne bent her over the kitchen sink and rubbed shampoo into her hair, careless of whether it went into her eyes. Pauline finally couldn’t help crying at the varieties of pain she was suffering, which Joanne found hilarious.
‘Great big bloody baby,’ she laughed, and poured another mug full of scalding water over Pauline’s head. Pauline pushed her tongue against her teeth to stop herself shouting out, knowing that Joanne’s amusement could quickly turn to impatience, which led to other sorts of pain. Finally, Joanne stopped rinsing, and attacked Pauline’s head with the towel, scrubbing her hair dry. The friction was agony on her sensitized scalp, but by now all the different pains had blended into one prevailing hurt, so universal that it almost didn’t matter.
‘How d’you think I get looking the way I do, eh?’ asked Joanne, as Pauline snivelled in misery.
Joanne’s hair was deep orange, with a white streak at the front. Her skin glowed against it, very pale. Pauline found her mam almost unbearably beautiful. Her eyes were huge, and so dark that they looked as black as her eyelashes, spiked with mascara. Joanne had got rid of her own eyebrows and pencilled brown arcs high on her forehead. The lipstick on her thin mouth was pearly pale, as though she’d been kept in a freezer. She looked very different without her make-up, Pauline knew, lost and unemphatic. But she rarely took it off, preferring to apply each day’s brows and eyes and lips over the smudged version from the previous day.
‘You’re growing up,’ Joanne warned her, retrieving a long-handled pink comb from her handbag. ‘It’s time you started thinking about looking proper and that. You can’t always wait for me to look after you.’
There was a strip of dusty orange hairs woven along the bottom of the comb’s teeth, a few of which had broken off. Pauline braced herself not to flinch as Joanne began to comb her snarled mat of wet hair, but in contrast to her previous assault, she was surprisingly gentle. This was what it was like with her mam. You never knew when there was going to be a good time, or a bad. Now, suddenly, it was good. Pauline sat on the floor with her head poking up between Joanne’s round knees, letting her comb her hair free of its knots as Joanne sang along to the radio she had brought home with her. Her singing was heartfelt and tuneful, and she knew the words to all the latest songs. She even gave Pauline a packet of smoky bacon crisps, which she crunched quiet ly so as not to disturb the singing or the mood, while Joanne combed and combed, long after the last knot had disappeared and the raging of Pauline’s scalp had muted into an almost pleasurable throbbing. The bulb in the kitchen shone down on them, sparing them from the night, just her and her mam, for what seemed like hours.
‘See,’ Joanne said when she’d finished. ‘That’s more like it.’
THE LAST PART of school before the summer holidays is awful. Because of Mum having me moved to a different class I don’t know anyone properly, and no one can be bothered to make friends with me so soon before we break up. At least at playtime I can find my old friends and play my old games, but Pauline Bright hovers at the edges of skipping and two-ball, tempting me into a bout of skeletons. Her hair is now a horrible greenish-white that reminds me of fresh snot, with a stripe of black at the roots. The teachers were shocked when she turned up like this and tried to send her home, but she claimed that her mum had mixed the bleach bottle up with the shampoo, that it had all been an accident. She came back the next day with her hair in a ratty snot-and-black ponytail (rubber band, which I’m not allowed; I’m only allowed proper bobbles, because uncovered elastic breaks your hair) and told them that her mam had said there was nothing she could do until it had all grown out.
Whenever Pauline opens her mouth, the ragged angle of her front tooth gnaws into my conscience. Some days I succumb, and play skeletons. It’s the sort of game I gave up playing when I was at least eight, and I feel slightly ashamed of myself, as well as wary of Christina’s contempt. Fortunately she does violin and choir two dinnertimes a week. And the game with Pauline doesn’t make us friends, however much we play it.
My mind is on other things. Mum takes me into work, as she’d suggested during her interruption of my perfect Saturday night. She pretends it’s because my fringe needs cutting, but usually she whips the scissors out at home and gives me a deft, brutal trim. This time though, she gets one of the juniors (spotty Trish) to wash my hair at the basin like a customer, and puts rollers in after the trim, and sits me under one of the driers which makes me feel, not entirely enjoyably, like an astronaut. By the time she combs out my hair, saying how much better I look, even using a bit of spray, everyone else has left. And then Ian the accountant turns up; Mr Haskell. He’s sweating in the heat even though his shirt has short sleeves. I have never, in fact, seen so much sweat on a person’s face. Something to do with his fatness, I conclude.
‘Hot enough for you?’ he asks us both, accepting my mum’s wordless greeting of a lilac salon towel and drying off his face with it. He hands the towel back to her, also without speaking, then beams at me.
‘Who’s this dollybird?’ he asks. ‘A famous model?’ I blush happily, and oblige when Mum wonders if I’m going to give Mr Haskell a kiss. I blush again when I remember the jam rags. But he seems unconcerned.
We return to the Copper Kettle, where Ian once more orders my dream pancake combination. ‘Your usual, madam,’ he says. I’m perfecting a method of eating it, where I swirl each disc of banana in a pool of butterscotch, before using it as a template to cut out a corresponding disc of pancake with the blade of my knife, skewering the resulting forkful and eating it. The concentration demanded by this process obliterates the surrounding adult conversation, although I noticed when I sat down that Mum was unequipped with a biro this time, and that while Ian has a pile of papers with him, they remain on the seat beside him. I’m chasing the last drops of sauce with the final absorbent morsel of pancake when Mum asks me a question.
‘So, Gems, what do you think about us having a holiday?’
I swallow the last of the pancake, nodding. We always have a holiday, usually abroad. I’ve been to Spain more times than anyone in my former class (I don’t know anyone well enough in my current one to ask them about holidays). I’d most like to go to Butlin’s, like Christina; she’s told me there are lots of competitions there which I’m hopeful of winning, talent contests that I think might lead to meeting Lallie and being in her show. But I know better than to say so, because I know that going to Spain is better, and that being better is what Mum’s best at. We always have new clothes for our holidays. Only Dad wears shirts from his non-holiday life, but even he puts on hats and aftershave.
‘Just you and me,’ Mum elaborates.
‘Is Dad busy?’ I ask, eyeing my plate and wondering if Ian will mind if I lick it clean. I know Mum would, but if he thought it was OK, she might let it pass.
‘That’s right.’
Experimentally, I dab at the edge of the plate with my finger and transfer the film of syrup to my mouth.
‘Where are we going?’ I ask.
Mum’s arms are crossed on the table in front of her, each hand nursing the bare, fleshy top of the opposite arm. She sits very straight, as she always does.
‘Ian’s very kindly invited us to stay with him,’ she tells me.
‘Oh.’
It seems fine to me. I presume that Ian has a house in Spain, or is inviting us to stay in a hotel with him. It isn’t until the next day, when Mum nervously expands on the holiday arrangements, that I realize we’re
having a holiday ten minutes up the road.
‘The good thing is, you’ll still be able to go to school,’ says Mum, busying herself with her mascara brush. I’m sitting on the bed, watching her through her dressing-table mirror. She puts on the amazed expression she uses for mascara application. ‘You can get the bus.’
I don’t consider it much of a holiday if I still have to go to school.
‘Has Ian got a swimming pool?’ I ask hopefully.
‘Don’t be so spoilt,’ snaps Mum, viciously rodding the mascara wand in and out of its pot, and we leave it at that. Dad gives me a five-pound note when we go, all packed up, and tells me that I can come home any time. It’s only then that I realize that something quite important is happening. I feel sorry for Dad, not coming with us, and I prolong our farewell hug to let him know. As usual he detaches himself first, as though he’s late and has to get a move on.
Ian’s house is in a posh part of town, Old Cantley. Cantley proper isn’t particularly posh, but Old Cantley is. It’s a detached house, Mum points out. I’m not sure what this means, but I know it’s desirable, as is the fact that it’s a dormer bungalow. This means it has stairs, although I always thought the whole point of a bungalow was that it didn’t. It’s quite a bit bigger than our house, and brand new. It has a particular smell, of Ian’s soap or aftershave, and the mints he sucks. Despite the sweating and the fatness, he always seems extremely clean, and his house looks very clean as well, which is bound to appeal to Mum.
‘Your room, modom,’ Ian says, when he takes us to the upstairs part. The single bed is pushed up against a large window with a deep sill, which is a bit like the bed arrangement in Lallie’s room in her TV show. I love it, and tell him so. He nips my nose between his finger and thumb with his soft, fat fingers, just for a second.
‘I like a woman who’s easily pleased,’ he grins, and Mum shoos a backhand his way, without really hitting him.
‘Cheeky bugger,’ she says, approvingly. Then they leave me to settle in while Ian takes Mum to show her her room. I breathe in the new smell that surrounds me. I like it, but it seems to collect in my stomach and turn hard, like a stone. Only when I leave the house, when I go to school on the bus and breathe in everything familiar, does the hardness dissolve. Then I remember about being in a different class, and it comes back.
FRANK DENNY, OF Frank Denny Management, never felt entirely comfortable out of range of a phone. Journeys by train were a torment to him. At least in the car you could take regular stops and make calls along the way (he kept a bag of change from the bank in the glove compartment for just this purpose). Not that he was a fan of motoring per se. He was a nervous driver – he always had too much on his mind to concentrate entirely safely – but he bit the bullet and decided to make the run up to Doncaster in the Rover. He needed to sort out the Lallie situation in person. Good as he was on the phone, and few were better, some problems were best resolved face to face.
‘When will you be back?’ Laurence asked him, faffing about with sandwiches for the journey, although Frank had told him he’d be stopping at motorway services, likely more than once.
‘Expect me when you see me, Lol,’ he’d told him. It might be an overnight, if he really needed to lay it on with a trowel and take the mother for dinner. Although he definitely needed to be back and rested by tomorrow lunchtime because he was booked to take out another client who needed as much time and attention as he was about to dedicate to Lallie. Being a good agent, as he always said, was like having a big family where every child was your favourite.
The traffic wasn’t too heavy up the M1, and past Watford Frank relaxed enough to concentrate on the situation as it stood. LWT were cutting up rough about another series, although the contract still had two years to run. Light Ents wanted to axe the show in favour of a couple of specials; ‘showcase’ was the word they had used. Frank’s unusually hairy ears (he kept them trimmed) filtered euphemism with one hundred per cent efficiency; he knew the score. Lallie wasn’t getting the audiences they had imagined – Bruce and The Generation Game were just too strong. But it needn’t be the end of the world, as he and the Head of Light Ents had agreed. Frank was committed to emollience because he was in the process of finessing a tasty contract for another of his clients, a club comedian who was ripe for a TV breakthrough. LWT was dangling a cast-iron game-show format for him tantalizingly out of reach; the crucial distance was Lallie’s mum’s compliance in the conversion of Lallie’s contract from a series into two of these so-called showcases a year. As a bonus, they were willing to release the kid for film work and fit the timing of the shows around it.
Frank knew that LWT was a bit nervous about the current film. Disney was one thing, the dirty-mac-artsy-fartsy brigade was another. Still, he was very hopeful about a contract with one of the American studios, if not Disney itself. It wasn’t for nothing that he’d said to the mother, Katrina, when they’d been approached about the film, it could well be a springboard to greater things. And the director, whatshisname, couldn’t have been more enthusiastic when Lallie had read for him. (Now there was a man who could do with a hit.) Of course, hearing him on the phone raving about Lallie after the audition had come as no surprise to Frank. As he’d attested himself in more than one interview, the first time he’d seen Lallie, singing in a Tyne Tees TV rehearsal room, the hairs had stood up on the back of his neck (also kept trimmed). You just knew. A star was a star, aged eight or eighty-five.
But the American business, although highly promising after the letter that had landed on his desk yesterday, was also tricky. How old had Hayley Mills been when Disney got her for Pollyanna? Twelve? And she was pure blonde Anglo-Saxon peaches and cream. Lallie’s dad had some Mediterranean blood in him from somewhere – hence the name – and puberty was bound to be around the corner. Not that Frank claimed to be an expert on these matters, far from it, thank God, but the costume department on the show had already moaned about how much she was growing during the last series. Maybe Katrina could fill him in more precisely about Lallie’s development, if that was the word he was looking for. The things he had to worry about. A grown man.
Making good time, Frank stopped at the Leicester services to stretch his legs and ring the office. He sorted Veronica out with the calls she could safely make, and made three himself, one of them quite tricky. He got to the set towards two, Lol’s sandwiches untouched on the passenger seat beside him. There was no excitement for Frank in visiting a set; he considered them the most boring places in the world. But, jaded by his unremitting professional routine of rich restaurant lunches, he had an unadmitted weakness for the blandness of catered food. He’d been looking forward to lunch all morning.
It didn’t disappoint. He sat on the bottom deck of the decommissioned double-decker being used as the location canteen and tucked into mince with instant mash and textureless cubes of mixed veg as Katrina smoked over him and drank tea. Lallie had been taken off for some fittings, so he didn’t have to beat around the bush.
‘A showcase,’ Katrina echoed, when he broached the LWT proposal. Her tone was neutral. So far, she was just looking for elucidation.
‘Think Morecambe and Wise, Stanley Baxter type of thing.’
‘You mean a Christmas show?’
‘Christmas, Easter, the big bank holidays – the idea is, Lallie’s a treat for the audience, not something served up to them every week.’
Katrina caught back the smoke she had begun to exhale, re-inhaled and blew it through her nostrils instead, a feat Frank knew to mean that she smelled a rat.
‘So she wouldn’t be on every week?’
‘No. Which, let’s face it, is going to be a relief all round, the way they scheduled the last season, poor kiddie.’
‘She was a bit knackered by the end,’ conceded Katrina.
‘Economies of scale,’ said Frank. Katrina seemed to like the phrase.
‘For the same money though,’ she clarified.
‘Money in the bank,’ he reassu
red her. ‘Plus –’ he leaned forward, pushing aside his cleaned plate, and dropped his voice – ‘thinking of the future, this is the perfect way for Lallie to make the transition into being an adult entertainer.’
‘She’s not twelve until next April, Frank.’
‘They’re not children long these days.’
Katrina stubbed her butt end into her cup, where it hissed against the dregs of her tea.
‘That’s true.’
Frank could see that the bulk of his work was done. He pulled his bowl of square jam sponge and glossy custard towards him.
‘How’s the filming going, anyway?’
Katrina shrugged. ‘Can’t tell. She’s enjoying it – you know what she’s like.’
‘Loves the work.’
‘That’s what she says to me. All the time. “I love it, Mam.” Always has done – well, you know.’
‘Born to it.’
‘That’s what I’ve always said – it’d be cruel to stop her. But the minute she tells me she’s not enjoying it …’
Katrina expanded her fingers into stars, denoting an explosion of finality. Frank nodded.
‘I mean, it’s not my idea of a good time, hanging round all day, bored as arseholes if you’ll excuse the language. But I’m not doing it for me, am I?’
Katrina had made good money in the clubs, singing, before Lallie’s career had taken off. Frank had experienced many times the volubility of Katrina’s regret about this sacrifice. He wanted to conserve his stamina for the drive back.
‘I was talking,’ he diverted her, ‘to America. About the film. You know, the studio.’
Katrina’s eyes stopped their sightless journey over the view from the bus window and jumped to him.
‘They’re very interested in our girl. One of their people wants to come and see her for himself.’
‘A producer?’
‘An executive. You know, since they’re already putting money into this – I wouldn’t be surprised if they had something else lined up for her.’