What They Do in the Dark - By Amanda Coe Page 0,24

nose.

‘Yuck. Have you been sick?’

‘Six times,’ exaggerated Pauline. ‘There were nowt to come up in the end.’

‘I got a bug one time we went to Spain,’ Gemma said, ‘and I was sick fourteen times in two days.’ She looked at Pauline’s pinafore. ‘You’ll get done for not wearing a blouse. It’s the rules.’

‘I ant got owt else.’

‘Anything.’

‘You what?’

‘You should say anything else.’

‘Do you know about launderettes?’

It turned out that Gemma did, and seemed flattered to be asked. She went quite often with her mum, she said, although now that they were in Ian’s house he had a washing machine so her mum didn’t need to go any more. Pauline recognized this as a boast, although its content was too obscure to impress her.

‘You’ll need lots of five-pence pieces. And powder,’ Gemma told her. ‘You can buy it there, but they charge a fortune for it.’

Pauline mused on this. ‘You’d better come with me.’

‘When?’

‘After school.’

‘I can’t. I’ve got ballet.’

‘Dinnertime then.’

‘We’re not allowed.’

‘They’ll only think you’ve gone home. We’ll be back for the register, it’s not like twagging.’

Pauline could see the impossibility of this in Gemma’s face.

‘You know the skellinton lady, I saw her in another film the other night,’ she lied. ‘She showed her tits and everything.’

‘She never.’

‘I’ll tell you about it later,’ she enticed, ‘if you come with me.’

‘We’ll get done.’

‘We won’t. If we do, I’ll say I made you. Please. Go on. Please. Then I’ll tell you about her.’

Gemma exhaled. ‘You really smell, you know.’

Pauline hadn’t mentioned anything to Gemma about the soiled bedspread, now waiting in a plastic bag among the lower branches of a leggy lilac bush in the Brights’ garden. So it took some persuading to get her back there before they set out again for the launderette. Gemma was very anxious, however much Pauline reassured her, that they’d miss the two o’clock register. Pauline was more anxious about being caught by Joanne retrieving the bedspread. This was unlikely, since Joanne rarely stirred before mid-afternoon. But she was very relieved once they were out of the garden and walking to the launderette a safe few streets away. Many five-pence pieces jingled in the pocket of the PE shorts she was now wearing, along with an overlarge aertex blouse similarly culled from lost property after an appalled Mrs Bream had intervened at morning assembly. Pauline had waged a campaign of terror during playtime, mindful of the fortune that Gemma had told her washing powder would cost. Throughout this, Gemma had ignored her and played two-ball with that Christina and her other snot-bag friends.

‘Why can’t your mum wash it?’ Gemma asked her as she watched Pauline lug the stinking bag with both hands and the help of a leg to boot it along.

‘She’s working,’ said Pauline. Gemma accepted this.

‘My mum works,’ she told her.

Coming on top of the warmth of the day, the heat of the launderette was nearly overwhelming. Pauline liked it, but Gemma, who had turned pinker during the walk, fanned her hands in front of her face in distress.

‘Let’s hurry up,’ she pleaded.

At their arrival, a woman with a fag in her mouth and a single fat curler at the front of her hair peeped out from a doorway at the back, but only stayed long enough to exhale her smoke before disappearing, uninterested. Gemma held out her clean, fleshy palm.

‘Give us some money and I’ll get the powder for you.’

Pauline crammed a mound of five-pences, tinny-smelling from her pocket, into Gemma’s hand, and watched her march with officious confidence to a metal box on the wall.

‘Put the cover in there,’ she commanded, nodding at a row of queasy-green washing machines with porthole doors, as she slotted coins into the box. By the time Pauline had crammed the bedspread into the machine nearest the door, Gemma was by her side carrying a thin plastic cup full of gritty soap powder. Nudging Pauline aside, she slammed the washing-machine door closed with her hip and tipped the powder into a little compartment that pulled out on a box at the top of the machine. The sequence of movements, and the forced seriousness with which she performed them, looked borrowed from someone else. Gemma sighed heavily and pushed her bunches back, flick flick, as though their weight was oppressing her shoulders, which they barely brushed.

‘You need twenty-five p more. That’s five five-pences.’

‘I know,’ said Pauline, but handed Gemma the coins obligingly enough. Gemma pulled out a metal arm concealed in the machine’s middle which accepted a row of