What They Do in the Dark - By Amanda Coe Page 0,38

killed her.

I sit under this puzzling feeling all through our morning assembly, the last of the year, while Mr Scott gives out prizes and talks about holidays. When he mentions Lallie and the film, a lightning stab of glee shoots through me, followed, with a two-Mississippi delay, by a thunderclap of guilt. And then, an answer offers itself, in the form of Mr Scott’s sermon of the day. This, like most of his sermons, takes a recent incident to illuminate its message.

Mr Scott’s chest hair pokes through the buttons of his sports shirt, sparking gold in the sunlight to match the hair on his arms. The same light bounces from his aviator frames as he trenches back and forth at the front of the hall, and occasionally catches the face of his manly watch, itself once the subject of one of his lectures. I can’t now remember which moral quality it revealed, but I know that it is waterproof to a depth of several hundred metres and is the same kind worn by airline pilots.

‘Lallie Paluza,’ he says, making it count. My heart beats faster. What is he going to say about her? Surely nothing bad? What if he condemns her in some way and I’m forced to disagree, even to dislike him? I love Mr Scott.

‘A clever girl. A very clever girl, with lots of talents. Acting, singing, dancing …’

Actually, even I have to concede that Lallie’s dancing isn’t up to much. I’m up to Blue Riband in tap and modern and Grade Three in ballet and all round I’m better.

‘Now it looks as though she’s going to be a film star – like some of you.’

There’s a murmur of half-laughter, to show our appreciation.

‘But something you might not know about Miss Paluza—’ Mr Scott reaches the end of his walk and pauses before taking the return journey. I doubt very much that he’s going to tell me something I don’t already know. He reaches for the vaulting horse near the door where he’s stacked a pile of papers to do with the assembly and takes down a newspaper cutting. Nudging the nosepiece of his specs, he reads:

‘Ten-year-old entertainer Lallie Paluza gave a lift to children at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London during a recent visit. Leukaemia sufferer Abigail Vaughan, eight, pictured, is shown enjoying one of Lallie’s impressions during a party where the child star presented the hospital with a cheque for two hundred and fifty pounds raised for the hospital during her pantomime season.’

He turns the cutting to face us so that we can see the grainy picture of Lallie in close-up with a moon-faced little girl, both cocking their thumbs to the camera. This is old news: Lallie stopped doing panto – it was Aladdin this year – months ago, obviously. But I haven’t seen the article before – it must have come from another paper, not the Mirror, which is what we get, or used to get before we went to Ian’s. And they’ve got her age wrong.

‘Leukaemia is a kind of cancer of the blood, it’s very serious,’ Mr Scott tells us. ‘Cancer’ reaches out of the sentence and grabs me. ‘But there’s no doubt that getting a visit from someone famous must have given this young lady a lift, however poorly she was feeling, the way your granny or grandad or your auntie Betty get a lift when you pay them a visit. And you might be saying, “Ooh, I don’t want to go to Auntie Betty’s, her house smells funny and she always gives me sloppy kisses and she’s never got any chocolate biscuits,” but the point is, Auntie Betty loves seeing you – I don’t know why, looking at the lot of you, but she does, and that’s what’s important …’

I drift away. Auntie Betty makes regular appearances in Mr Scott’s assemblies, and enjoyable as I find her, today I’m more excited by the message. Lallie does good things. Lallie isn’t selfish. Perhaps there’s someone I could visit in order to be like her and set things right with Ian’s good lady? My nana, Mum’s mum, lives in St Helens, and Grandma and Grandad, my dad’s parents, always spend this part of the summer at their caravan in Filey. It’s encouraging then, when Mr Scott says that doing good things doesn’t have to mean visiting our relatives. It could mean helping our mum do the washing-up or our dad to wash the car or being nice to our little brother