What They Do in the Dark - By Amanda Coe Page 0,19
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