What They Do in the Dark - By Amanda Coe Page 0,11
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