by Amanda Coe
But, as it turned out, she had a stroke of luck as she crept through the unusually quiet house in the very early morning. Nan, having got her sick money and her pills the previous day, was splayed comatose in her chair downstairs in the dark. Coins had dribbled from the beige post-office envelope she obliviously proffered in her slackened hand, but it was the folded five-pound note that Pauline pincered out and escaped with under the charnel-house miasma of Nan’s snoring breath. Leaving the house with the money, she doubted she’d even be blamed: anyone else passing through the living room would have taken the opportunity. Then she wavered, thinking of things she could actually buy instead of giving the five pounds to Gemma. The hair salon had taken hold in her imagination, and she thought of marching in there and making Gemma’s cow of a mother wash her hair and cut it because she was paying. It would be nice to have someone brush her hair, to make her look like everyone else.
It was too early for the shops to be open. Neither Gemma nor her mother would be at the salon yet, she realized, her stupid plan atomizing. So instead Pauline got on a bus and headed for Gemma’s house among the pale, suspicious shift workers. When she got there, she knocked on the door, straightforwardly. She didn’t care if Gemma’s mum answered; in fact, she was up for a fight. What she wasn’t expecting was Gemma’s dad or whoever he was, the fat man.
‘Can I see Gemma?’
Pauline didn’t, as a rule, look at people’s faces. In her experience there was seldom much to see there that was good, and at home eye contact often flared into violence. So as he stood in front of her, it was Ian’s belt that caught her memory, its sleek enamel buckle straining between his grey trousers and clean shirting, an uncommon executive rhombus in black, gilt and maroon. She remembered the look of it and her curiosity about how it came undone, with none of the usual belt-buckle mechanism visible. When they were down the alley by Wentworth Road, he had pressed it behind its display, and it had released, like a small conjuring trick. Remembering this, she darted a look upwards. There was nothing in his face she recognized – there was no exception to her habit of not looking at faces – but it was sweating and appalled. He recognized her, she could see. It had been difficult to get her hand down his trousers even with the belt and fly undone, he was so fat. That and the belt were the only things she remembered about him.
Without speaking he shut the door on her, not forcefully but firmly, as though there was logic to it. Not today, thank you. She knocked again and rang, but the door stayed shut. She could have stayed with her finger pressing the bell until someone came, but she knew Gemma’s mum would make real trouble, worse than refusing to let her see Gemma. It almost made her want to laugh, the way the bloke had shut the door on her, pretending she wasn’t there. Him and his magic belt.
So she went into town and spent the money. She bought herself two cheese rolls and a carton of orange and then, at a newsagent, a Mars bar and a copy of Tammy, although they’d have been easy enough to nick. The fact that she hadn’t made them feel more like presents to herself. After that she marched into a hair salon – not Gemma’s mum’s, she knew better than that, so she went to the staider one in Silver Street – with her just over four pounds and got them to transform her. She showed them the money, because she could see they wanted to tell her to get lost, and the receptionist, who was young but hard-faced, had to give way to an older woman they called a stylist, who called Pauline ‘love’ and took her away to wash her hair. She’d expected it to be ace, but the hair wash wasn’t, with her head strained backwards over a green sink with a dip in it for your neck, and the woman’s surprisingly sharp fingers agitating her scalp. But after, as the stylist combed out her hair in front of the mirror, it was ace. She said she could put a rinse in, to get all of her hair back to its same colour, and Pauline agreed without understanding what she meant to do. The stuff smelt sharp but didn’t sting like peroxide, and it was strange to see the lightness so readily stained out as the woman soused her head from the large bottle, like she was putting vinegar on a bag of chips.
‘You’re too young to be mucking about with your hair,’ the woman admonished. ‘What did your mum say?’ Pauline shrugged. The stylist snipped, then blasted her with scorching air, and soon Pauline was done.
‘Don’t you look pretty,’ the woman announced, and the other hairdressers and a couple of old ladies they were processing all murmured varieties of agreement. Pauline knew she must have been transformed, because now they were prepared to look at her. She risked a glance into the mirror – she avoided looking into her own eyes just as much as other peoples’ – and caught an impression of her hair as a darkly shiny cap, so different and tended, she must now be a girl with a different life. The woman handed her a rigid plastic mask with a handle which she told Pauline to hold in front of her face as she dredged her with choking spray. Now, when Pauline shook her head, her hair stayed behind.
Progressing from the chair to the till, shedding clipped hair from the sickly pink cape that was untied and taken from her at the door, Pauline flinched from being looked at, despite the unfamiliar approval in the attention. She could feel the way the hairdresser was soaking it up, as though she’d done something fantastic. She paid the money, worrying it wouldn’t be enough, or that some other disaster might befall her, born of her ignor ance. But all was well.
‘See you, love,’ said the stylist, and squeezed Pauline’s shoulder. Pauline could feel tears starting, along with the strong impulse to shout at her to fuck off, so she ran. Her hair didn’t move. She touched it, its alien surface. She wasn’t herself. But this was exhilarating now it was just her, instead of all those cows in the salon. She headed for the school, knowing she could brazen it out about the form, marvelling that she’d worried about it at all when she could just lie and say she’d lost it, the way she lied about everything else.
‘My little brother got hold of it and tore it like,’ she improvised, faced with the sharp-edged woman who had asked her a lot of questions at the audition. There was a different atmosphere at the school, lots of people hurrying around, vans parked transgressively in the playground with blokes manhandling metal poles and coils of wire out of them. She’d been found by accident as she hovered at the gates, paralysed by all the activity. A fat woman was herding a group of kids Pauline recognized from school, and added Pauline to them to be brought to Julia, which was the spiky one’s name.
‘We won’t be able to use you if we haven’t got permission from your mum and dad.’
‘They’re away.’
‘Both of them?’
‘Miss, me dad’s dead, Miss, and me mum’s away working.’
Julia sighed. ‘Who’s looking after you then?’
‘Me nan, Miss.’
Julia checked her watch, which looked full of gold. She reached for a new form and handed it to Pauline.
‘You’ll have to ask your nan to fill it in, darling.’
‘Miss, she can’t read, Miss.’
As she said it, it struck Pauline that this was probably true. Julia’s beringed hand hovered over the form in a stay of execution.
‘What did you say your name was?’
When she told her, Julia checked a list, which made her sigh again but also persist in taking up the form. Pauline’s name had, surprisingly, made a difference.
‘Well, we’ll fill in the form for you, and you can get your nan to sign her name or make her mark, OK?’
She further explained that making her mark meant putting a cross where her signature was supposed to be, then asked various questions whose answers she blocked out herself in neat capitals where the spaces appeared. Then she sent her away. Pauline couldn’t believe her luck. Julia had told her to be quick, but she knew she’d be suspicious if she came back in five minutes, so she took a long tour of the Town Fields before coming back with the cross she’d written herself with a ballpoint lifted from one of the chaotic classrooms. Julia scrutinized the piece of paper, and her, and Pauline could see in the rake of her eyes that
she’d guessed what she’d done and decided not to care. The form went with a stack of other forms, and she was chivvied into a first-year classroom which had been taken over to do make-up.
When they were told this, Pauline was hopeful that she would be given proper make-up, like Joanne wore, with pencilled eyebrows and blackened eyes. But all they seemed to be doing was sponging some stuff on to the children’s faces which made them look more themselves.
‘Can I have some eyeshadow?’ she asked the woman who was doing her. The woman laughed, and said no.
As usual, none of the children spoke to her. It was boring in the classroom, and hot. They were provided with cups of overdiluted squash and biscuits in generous platefuls that disappeared in a scrum for the creams and chocolate ones, which Pauline dominated. She settled down with her Tammy, which she had been clutching rolled up all morning. She didn’t usually read comics; it had been seeing Gemma with one, that day Gemma’s mum had screamed at her to leave Gemma alone, that had made her decide to buy it. She flicked through the drawn pages, uncompelled. They all seemed to be stories that had started some time before, and Pauline found them confusing. There were girls in leotards and on skis, or falling out with each other at posh schools. The speech, from signs pointed from their mouths, took some getting used to as well. But she enjoyed the act of reading the comic, of being like Gemma, who loved them, who was recognizably like one of the black-and-white girls being sabotaged at a gymkhana. She turned the pages self-consciously.
‘Fuck off, blackie.’
Cynthia was huddling over her, trying to nick a read. Pauline pushed her in the face, skewing her glasses, and she immediately shrank away. Their chaperone, the fat woman from the playground, looked up sharply, but Pauline’s comic-holding gaze was irreproachable, and Cynthia, she knew, never complained. She didn’t even have the nous to move away from the range of Pauline’s casually swinging crossed leg, which repeatedly caught her on the thigh as Pauline continued the pretence of reading.
Still, it was a relief when they finally called them to the set. This word, ‘set’, was bandied about between the chaperone and the make-up women and the bloke who came to call them. Pauline had no idea what it meant, where they would be going, beyond the sense of a vast and glamorously alien arena. So she didn’t realize for some minutes after they were led up to the fourth-year classroom, noticeably altered but essentially familiar, that this was their final destination. This was the set.
‘Let’s be having you, ladies and gentlemen!’ said a spotty bloke with stinking breath.
He told them to sit at the desks, ranged differently from usual at one end of the classroom. The other end was cramped with people and equipment and huge, blinding lights. The bloke glanced beyond the glare to ask where they were wanted as he led them by the arm, one by one. Squinting, Pauline could see the man who had asked her loads of questions that time before. His eyes slid past her as he indicated a desk off to the right. The arrangement didn’t take long. But then there was a catch in the proceedings as the director (she remembered him being introduced as this) halted and conferred with stinky-breath bloke, who swiftly left the room. They all sat at their desks. At each place was an exercise book and a pencil. Pauline turned the pages of the book and was interested to see that it contained another child’s writing and drawings for the first few pages before it went blank. The writing was sinisterly neat and appeared to have been copied from a book about the solar system, although the drawings were of plants. Before she could investigate further, a harassed-looking woman with spare pencils stuck into her shaggy hair slammed her hand on the book and told her to leave it alone. Since she then returned to chalking numbers on the blackboard, Pauline assumed she was the teacher, although her manner was unusual. The bad-breath man came back through the door, looking fraught, and went to talk to the director, whose eyes swept Pauline and the other children.
‘Where is she then?’
Julia had come into the classroom. She also looked fraught. She was carrying a sheet of paper, which she consulted as she scrutinized their group, desk by desk, standing next to the director. Her thumb clamped a name as she locked on to Pauline.
‘Pauline Bright?’
‘Yes, Miss.’
There was a tiny power cut of relief between Julia, the director, and the man with bad breath. Julia walked up to her, followed by the men. Pauline assumed her meekest expression.
‘What’s happened to your hair?’ asked Julia. She sounded surprisingly gentle.
‘I had it done, Miss.’
Julia and the director exchanged looks, the director smiling with no amusement. He crouched down so that his head was slightly lower than Pauline’s. She expected him to speak, but he just contemplated her hair. Then he stood, abruptly.
‘That’s a shame.’ He said it to Julia, not her. She could tell that although she’d definitely done something wrong, Julia was going to be the one blamed. Pauline watched her anger tapping out of her wizened fingers and their rings, on to the desk.
‘It would have been a nice moment … I can live without it …’
‘Maybe hair can do something?’ Julia suggested. The three of them turned back to look at Pauline again. The director shook his head.
‘It’s worth a try, while you set up.’
‘Tony’s saying ten minutes,’ offered the bad-breath man, pleased to help.
‘OK then, if you tell them no more than ten.’
Julia led Pauline out of the room and downstairs towards the first-years, where she and the other children had had their disappointing make-up done. In front of one of the blinding frames of lightbulbs that had been set up, outlining mirrors, Pauline saw a policeman. She shrank back reflexively, but Julia chivvied her past him, on to the hair woman. She, as far as was possible given the spray glueing it together, pulled her fingers through Pauline’s fringe in a hopeless assessment.
‘What did you put on it before, lovie?’
Pauline didn’t know. She told them about her mum, and the bottle that stung. The hair woman told Julia she couldn’t do anything about the colour, not in ten minutes. But she would see what else she could do.
The woman led Pauline to the sink, which Pauline remembered from washing paint brushes in the first year, and soaked her head under the awkward taps. Then she towelled her off and clawed some stuff from a jar through her damp hair. Next, she inserted a couple of hair grips more or less where Pauline put them when she was taming her fringe, although now it had been cut it had to be scraped back painfully to fit under the clips. Finally, she went round the rest of Pauline’s ruined hair, back-combing it and ratting it with her fingers; when she got to the crown of her head she rolled the hair briskly under her palm so that it stood up, snarled and random.
‘Hedge backwards,’ she smiled at Pauline through the mirror. Pauline only allowed herself one look. Bar the colour, she was back to normal, but worse. Like a witch, or some kind of mad monster. Was that what she looked like? But when Julia offered her up back in the classroom, the director just grimaced and said, ‘Shame,’ and Pauline knew she was wrong, that she’d changed herself for the worse, and they still hadn’t been able to restore her to what he wanted. She was allowed to stay, but through the long, boring hours that followed she was in the background, like everyone else. She had no idea what they had intended for her, but the disappointment gathered in her like anger, which only found a mild release in shoving Cynthia so she came down hard among the desks and put her bottom teeth into her lip. Seeing the crew cluster round the sobbing girl, Pauline instantly regretted the attention she’d created for her. They took her away to first aid, and she came back with a plaster and a bottle of cola. Lucky bitch.
AS PENANCE, QUENTIN stood under the drooling shower and suffered. Mortification of the flesh. Oh man, was she mortified. She started to scour her arms and body with the midget bar of soap, but stopped when she caught herself visualizing the shot. Norman Bates was due through the shower curtain with a big old knife any minute
. Come on, babe, you can do better. Shivering, she rubbed water out of her eyes. Shit. When would life take over and drive this damn thing for her?
She had some calls to take, at least, once the London offices opened. The LA operations didn’t open until mid-afternoon, although Quentin knew no one really gave a small damn for her field reports. Well, this time it would be different. This time she would almost certainly have something to say about the miserable idea of luring Lallie to Hollywood. Stepping out of the shower, her hungover brain careened in her skull no matter how tenderly she moved her head, a ball of pressure that flared into a sullen pain whenever it collided with its cave of bone. Who drank brandy? Not even cognac, an ascot-and-red-setter kind of enhancement of the mood, but the crap the hotel bar had to offer, which was called ‘Three Barrels’ – Hugh had joked about this, Ah, I see they serve Three Barrels – in needy double-snifters. To get out of it, so she wouldn’t notice herself.
Well, it had worked. Her memory after about the third barrel was impressionistic. There had been an interlude talking to herself in the washroom cubicle, informing herself that she was drunk, as the wallpaper revolved around her. Jump cuts. The alarming hotel carpet. Same carpet on the stairs. The small surprise of Hugh’s room, and the familiarity of foreplay. We’re on that train now. Circumcised, which she hadn’t expected, his cock as wholesome and substantial as the rest of him. The blow job, its counter-rhythm increasing hell for her spinning head, and the dawning of irritation about its longevity. OK, just come now, OK? She had persisted until she could feel herself about to gag. She’d made every move in her fellatio repertoire and apart from anything else was a little insulted that he was holding out on her. What was wrong with the guy? In the end, he caught her shoulders and pulled her away, benignly. She puked in his bathroom. An unforgettable evening of sensual delights, in three barrels.
She wasn’t clear how she had ended up back in her own room. Hugh must have done the gentlemanly thing, Jimmy Stewart-style, although she could find only one shoe by the bed. There are rules about that kind of thing. Quentin checked her memory: the rest was silence. She conjured a wishful image, almost as vivid as a memory, of sharing a bed with Hugh: the calm heat of his body, his pure, astringent smell. There would almost certainly be a really fine pair of pyjamas, navy, with a discreet lighter stripe and piping round the lapels. And now she’d never know. She sobbed a little, drily, as though the alcohol had leached all the moisture from her. And also because she was watching herself again, and it didn’t play.