What They Do in the Dark - By Amanda Coe Page 0,17
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