by Amanda Coe
‘Pre-title. Haven’t got it yet, of course. Means we can just jump straight in.’
The little girl had almost reached the camera. Her hair snaked unkempt around her face, her clothes were slightly too small for her. Not, it was clear, a kid to whom anyone paid much care or attention. She palmed furious tears from her face, then swerved off to the left and disappeared behind the silhouette of Hugh’s profile. A second, then the girl’s face poked back into view, confronting the camera. Now she was grinning, although her cheeks were still streaked with tears. Lallie’s lips clearly formed the shape of ‘OK?’, before she was nuked by the flash of light at the end of the shot.
‘That was OK,’ said Quentin. There it was; a whole new world, right there. She watched two more takes, one marred by a lurch of the camera as it pursued Lallie across the barren grass.
‘It looks good,’ she told Hugh. It was the truth. And she felt good. It was fine, she could do this job. The movie was going to be more than fine, maybe. Her name on the credits. She basked in the moment as Bri threaded the next reel of film and Hugh leaned to stub out his thoroughly smoked cigarette in a crowded ashtray.
‘It’s going to be great,’ she told him.
Hugh arched into his seat and palmed back his lively brown hair. ‘I do hope so.’
‘But I guess every film’s a masterpiece in the dailies,’ she added, because it was something her dad used to tell her, along with ‘There are no rights or wrongs in this business, baby, only opinions’, and ‘Never put an actress in silk after thirty’. She didn’t believe it or anything. At this moment, noting the pristine band of shirt cuff which divided the flesh of Hugh’s hand from the pressed linen of his jacket, at this exact moment, she felt as though she’d flushed that paternal brand of cynicism away at LA airport, along with the Ludes and Valium. Yay for her.
IT HAD HAPPENED, finally, and like stifling heat breaking into a storm, the catastrophe brought a kind of relief. Pauline walked back into the house one afternoon while it was still her mam’s morning. She could see Joanne had just got up: although she was dressed as much as she ever got dressed in the day, her breath smelled, and her hair was matted with stale hairspray. This was a usual sight, as was the avidity with which Joanne sucked down the smoke from her fag. At least three mugs of tea and at least three fags to go with them – that was the minimum Joanne required to transform into something human. Shooting a look at her, Pauline deduced she was on her opener, and so to be avoided.
‘You got summat to say to me?’
Pauline swerved for the living-room door.
‘I said, you got summat to say to me, gyppo?’
‘No.’
Pauline edged around Joanne’s chair, palming a biscuit from the packet in front of Joanne. She dropped it as Joanne’s hand shot out from behind and grabbed her by the hair.
‘No?’
‘No, Mam.’
Pauline bent her knees and twisted back to lessen the strain on her scalp as Joanne wound the hank of hair tighter round her fingers.
‘Fucking let go!’ Pauline protested.
Joanne laughed. It wasn’t real laughter. ‘Happy Birthday, Mam,’ she whined, in loveless mimicry. Shit.
‘I forgot …’ Pauline panted. ‘Please, Mam …’
But instead of letting go, Joanne pulled all the harder. In a tearing burst of pain, the hair came away in her hand. Pauline screamed and lashed out. This gave Joanne an excuse to punch, her fist still clenched round the sundered clump of piebald hair.
‘Fucking stop it, will yer – please, Mam, I forgot – fucking – I forgot, Mam—’
Joanne only had the chance to land one blow with full contact before Pauline, agile with experience, squirmed under the table and rolled herself into a ball. Joanne had to be content with aiming a few ineffectual kicks before giving up. Seconds later, when Pauline finally dared open her eyes and uncurl a little, she saw Joanne’s pale legs, crossed implacably in front of the chair as she lit her second fag. A few inches away lay the remains of the pink wafer biscuit, pulverized during their scuffle. And she knew, blankly and intolerably, that there would be no more blows, because Joanne had passed into the state where Pauline was dead to her.
She had forgotten her mam’s birthday. It wasn’t surprising. No one reliably remembered hers, and for the last two or three years Joanne had been away working at this time of year. But that was the way it went. Joanne would hold this resentment a long time if Pauline couldn’t think of a way to redeem herself. Which she would, because she had to. Because nothing was worse than this.
Pauline hadn’t been to school for a while now. She disliked the laxness of the pre-holiday weeks, the playing of bingo and the sop of watching of ‘special films’ because everyone was waiting for the term to end. She had learned to ignore the alien chatter of the other kids about caravans and the seaside and going on planes, because the summer holidays were just an annual hole in her time, filled with aimlessness, sunny if she was lucky. This year, though, the chatter was even more animated, because it was fixed on the school being used in that film and the possibility of everyone becoming film stars. This was the real reason Pauline was staying away. When the notice had gone up for everyone to put their names on for the film people to see, she had joined the queue like everyone else. Mrs Bream had smiled and written her name, but Pauline had seen the look aimed from the back of the hall by Mrs Maclaren, thrown like a ball that Mrs Bream had refused to catch. Pauline knew what it meant. Gyppo. Pisspants. Pov. And to punish herself for that stupid lapse into expectation, she had stayed away and stayed away, until she could be sure it would all be over and there would be no chance of her hoping something special might happen to her.
Twagging school, at least she’d made herself some money. Shaking down kids in the playground was only a minor source of Pauline’s income. If Nan told her to piss off when she asked for money for the chip shop, or she’d decided to invest in a really desirable toy for herself, or once, exceptionally, for Cheryl (because she’d accidentally made her need to have stitches at the hospital when they were messing about on a wall with glass embedded in the top), Pauline went down to Wentworth Road.
It was an older girl, Dawn, who’d introduced her to it. Wentworth Road was the last rung in the ladder of streets surmounted by Adelaide Road. There had been two further roads, bombed during the war, fringed by a common that was now largely subsumed by a ring road built in the sixties. Wentworth Road itself had suffered an amputation in the bombing, and its abrupt truncation, skirted by the malnourished grassland of the bomb sites and the lethal boundary of roaring traffic, rendered it a real estate no-man’s-land. At the top of the road a depressed-looking newsagent limped on from year to year and at its bottom, a dead end, a similarly lacklustre trade in street prostitution managed to survive. The real pros operated nearer the top of the ladder; it was here, where they could literally go no further or no lower, that punters picked up junkies and kids.
Pauline couldn’t remember the face of the first man she’d wanked off, because she hadn’t looked. She had been frightened, not of being hurt, but of doing something wrong, the way she had been frightened when she walked into that launderette the first time. But Dawn had explained it all really well, although not that his spunk would go everywhere, like wee. After that surprise, she didn’t have to think about it much any more. Sometimes they wanted to put their hands in her knickers and rub there, and once a man had asked her to put his willy in her mouth, but she had said no, and he hadn’t insisted. It never took long, and she got pounds and 50p pieces. The men were usually, although not always, in cars, but she didn’t get in with them because she had listened well to the warnings at school about getting into cars with strange men. They might drive off with you and do all sorts. So instead Pauline took the men into one of the backs, the alleys that punctuated the ladder, which were either deserted or occupied by people engaged in similar activities. A lot of dogs crapped in the backs, so you had to be careful where you trod.
When this idea came to her, Pauline was in the woods, vainly searching for blackberries, which were still pale green and ined ible, phantoms of their future selves. Legs scratched from the brambles, she walked back into town, over Hexthorpe Flats, heading for the Arndale Centre. Her mam loved jewellery. She already wore a fair amount, real gold, as she always told Pauline during the good times, when she allowed Pauline to hang round her and take stock of it on her body. Small gold sleepers in her small white ears, whose inner whorls were sympathetically gilded with wax. A ring on her little finger made out of a real sovereign, and then on the next finger along a signet ring with her initials on it. On the other hand, a fat gold ring with three small stones embedded in the front: diamonds, her mam said. The ring was slightly too small and made the skin above it bulge uncomfortably, but Joanne never took it off, even to have a bath. Around her neck, two gold chains: one thin and slippery, one thicker and less alluring, the thick one with a pendant also engraved with her initials; on her left wrist, a charm bracelet. This was Pauline’s favourite. It was the crowning part of her ritual to tell the charms devoutly, like the beads of a rosary: a pair of dice, an old-fashioned car, a heart with a red stone at its centre and, best of all, a domed birdcage with a tiny canary and a door that actually opened. She thought she might buy her mam a new charm for the bracelet. Even the idea warmed the chill inside her.
Preoccupied by her plans for redemption, it wasn’t until a man shouted that Pauline realized she had walked into some unusual site of activity on the Flats, which, as their name suggested, usually had nothing, not even trees, to interrupt them. There were a lot of people milling around parked vans, and big lights on stands which made it look like a confusingly different and cooler time of day. Her first thought was that she had strayed on to a fairground being set up, even though it was the wrong time of year for fairs.
‘Oy!’
A skinny bloke in an anorak grabbed her T-shirt at the shoulder. Pauline smelled his breath before she broke into a run. No point hanging around to be blamed for something. Skimpy breaks of trees fringed the Flats, like the receding hair on a bald man. They never thickened into something more substantial, since you could always see the pale land behind them, but they were the only form of cover in sight and she bolted for them instinctively. Once she realized that the anorak man wasn’t going to follow her, Pauline began to enjoy the sensation of skittering through the sparse trees, heading for town with her plan. And just as she was leaving the last straggling line of birches, she glimpsed another girl, not running, but labouring under the weight of a man who had her pinned against one of the narrow tree trunks. It took Pauline’s legs a second to stop, and in that second she processed the various pieces of information her eyes had taken in in flight: the man wasn’t hurting the girl, as she’d immediately thought, but submitting to the piston movement of her small hand on his cock. Both of their heads were bowed to the effort, joined in the endeavour, although the man’s eyes were closed, and the girl’s wide open. The girl was a smear of dark hair and an orange T-shirt, the man was a massy length of green-and-white-striped shirt and jeans. The two of them vanished as Pauline resumed her run, so fast now that her breath began to tear the edge of her lungs. Pauline understood what she had seen, or thought she did, and there was no reason to linger.
The Arndale, opened five years before, was busy with civilized consumption. Pauline took a minute to wash the worst of the woods from her hands and face in the fountain that was the shopping centre’s focal point, its waters splashing against the legs of a monumental abstract Adam and Eve whose pinheads, streaked with verdigris, which Pauline assumed to be bird shit, reached almost to Boots on the second floor. There were coins flashing in the shallow green pool, silver as well as coppers, but Pauline ignored them and headed for the doors of H. Samuel. She had enough money, from the look of the window displays.
The lady who worked there was briskly unsuspicious. When Pauline told her what she was looking for, she laid out all the gold charms they had on the counter, taking them from velvet resting places under glass. Pauline recognized some of the charms Joanne already had, the heart and the birdcage. But there were others: a gold teddy bear whose legs swung when you flicked him, a teapot with a minute hinged lid, and a shining guitar. Pauline considered. She was drawn to the teddy bear, but concluded that her mam would prefer the guitar, given her love of music and her current dislike of all things related to Pauline. It cost four pounds eighty and the woman, without being asked, put the charm in a special box and wrapped it in H. Samuel paper tied with thin ribbon. Then she dropped the parcel into an H. Samuel bag, safe from Pauline’s fingerprints.
‘Fuck you been up to?’
Nan was shuffling around in the kitchen when Pauline got back, performing her version of tidying up, which meant sorting piles into larger piles, freeing up the decreasing space at ground level while creating skyscrapers of clutter.
‘Is Mam in?’
‘No. Mind that—’ Nan reached across Pauline to stave off the collapse of a cairn of tins. Pauline left her and went up to Joanne’s room. It was always Joanne’s room, even when she was away, and as such had more of a decor than any other room in the house. It was papered, Joanne had done it herself, in flock wallpaper stamped with a huge quasi-paisley pattern in choc olate, purple and crimson. There was one magazine-sized blank patch on the wall, high up above the wardrobe, where the paper had run out and it hadn’t been worth buying another roll. You might not notice it straight away, but once you did it was the first thing you looked at each time you entered.
The bed was made. This was unusual. The shiny mauve nylon cover had a see-through frill around it, as though it was trying to be a negligee. It had dulled from a mix-up in the wash. Devoutly, Pauline took her gift from its bag and placed the H. Samuel box on the pillow, superstitiously centring it not just on the pillow, but even within the middle stitched diamond of the bedspread covering the pillow’s summit. The formality of the offering looked pleasingly special, although it now occurred to Pauline that she should have bought a card, a birthday card. That’s what people did. She made another journey to the newsagent on Wentworth Road, and from their time-bleached selection chose the most expensive, adorned with a vintage car and a fishing rod, and returned to place it below the box.
Then she waited, settling herself cautiously beside the present and card. Only after she had slept, waking to synthetic heat radiating from the bedspread on to her sticky skin, did Pauline realize that it was all too late. Once again, Joanne had gone to Leeds, and she had been doomed to limbo.
THERE’S A ROW about the photographs of Ian’s good lady. I work it out, eventually, although at first I think it’s a row about me and my ‘behaviour’, as Mum calls it. I wake a few days after the upset over the trip to Butlin’s and the filming to the familiar sound of Mum’s anger jabbing against the more surprising rhythms of Ian’s response. I haven’t seen or heard him angry before, and he doesn’t sound angry now, not compared to Mum, who’s an expert. His tone (I can’t hear words at this point) is completely unlike my dad’s short bursts of defence. He sounds like an actor doing a big scene in Coronation Street.
‘If you really feel like that—’
‘Well, I bloody do!’
‘– then I may as well walk out of this door, turn right into Cantley Lane and stand in front of the next bus—’
‘Don’t be so bloody stupid!’
‘Well, that’s how I feel. There’d be nothing left for me, Suzanne, nothing at all … life was empty for me, you know that …’
I go
into the bathroom and run the tap while I have a wee. I don’t want to hear any of it. I wash my face and brush my teeth at agonizing quarter speed, water running all the while, and by the time I venture down for breakfast, Mum’s smoking silently into the garden while Ian crunches toast, sad-eyed. We all ignore each other while we go through the morning routine, Mum’s leftover anger used up in the roughness with which she scrapes my hair into its bunches.
On the way to the bus stop she suddenly speaks.
‘You know Ian’s wife died of cancer.’
Cancer, I know, is as bad as swearing, its outcomes and diagnoses only ever mouthed in front of children. No wonder we aren’t allowed to speak of Ian’s good lady.
‘It was very sad. She was only forty-nine. I used to do her hair. Big lady.’
That’s all Mum seems to have to say, until we reach the end of our bus journey and are due to go our separate ways. She kisses me goodbye and flicks at my fringe in irritation.
‘You, er, we’ve decided that you can stay, for the wotsit. Filming thing. I’ll have a word with Christina’s mum. They shouldn’t be out of pocket, so … it’s very good of Ian – generous – I hope you’re grateful.’
I am. I say so, although my feeling is beyond words. This surge of ecstasy, the mystery of the argument between Ian and my mum, and the possible involvement of his good lady have somehow all come together into the change of heart I hadn’t thought possible. Wonderful Ian: I know my gratitude should be laid at his door, because I can still feel all Mum’s resistance to my devotion to Lallie, however carefully I protect her from its full force. And yet mysteriously she isn’t cross with me, or him, but rather his wife. Even in my relief and pleasure, I feel bad about her. It’s almost as though satisfying my dearest wish was what killed her.
I sit under this puzzling feeling all through our morning assembly, the last of the year, while Mr Scott gives out prizes and talks about holidays. When he mentions Lallie and the film, a lightning stab of glee shoots through me, followed, with a two-Mississippi delay, by a thunderclap of guilt. And then, an answer offers itself, in the form of Mr Scott’s sermon of the day. This, like most of his sermons, takes a recent incident to illuminate its message.