What They Do in the Dark - By Amanda Coe Page 0,40
and Ian with a dickie bow.
‘No. He’s not my dad. That’s his wife. She’s not alive any more.’
Pauline ponders the photo.
‘I haven’t got a dad.’
She says this casually, as though staking common ground. Either, is what she means.
‘I’ve got a dad,’ I object. ‘We’re sort of here on holiday …’ And as I hear myself say it, its last trace of reality evaporates into the nonsense it is. Will I actually ever see Dad again? As I flail, Pauline squints at Ian’s wife. Iris.
‘Was she killed?’
I must look blank.
‘In an accident or owt?’ Pauline grins. ‘Or did he kill her?’
She staggers a few zombie steps towards me, evoking our playground game. Now here is a thing. Our best thing.
‘He says she got poorly, you know. With cancer. But …’
I pull a face, stagger a few steps myself.
‘What if he buried her under’t house?’
We both hurtle downstairs giggling, spooking each other, chasing, becoming Iris the skellington lady and Ian the murderer finally hounded into his own grave. Every photo around the house feeds the game, the noise and excitement growing to fill the awful space I’ve opened up around Dad.
‘Oh my God!’
I seize a picture from the living-room dresser, in which Iris sits astride a sad Spanish holiday donkey, holding a knife in a tooled leather sheath in the slack two-handed pose used by anglers for their catch. The very same knife, as I point out to Pauline, hangs on the wall above the photo. Tassels of blood-red cord dangle from its hilt, the raised patterning of the scabbard picked out in green and brighter red.
‘Oh my God, maybe that’s what he did it with and he’s like kept it!’
Pauline is already balanced on the arm of a dining chair, flailing for a tassel. To both of our surprise, as she tugs, the knife slithers from its sheath, making her lurch off balance. Falling, she catches her chin on the dresser’s edge, landing in the gap between that and the chair, still holding the knife above her. I would have howled, but Pauline just swears and stands up. I think of her in scraps, the way she piles into bigger kids without caring.
The blade is long and slightly curved, melodramatically bright. Pauline tests the tip against her finger.
‘Don’t!’ I warn.
To Pauline’s disgust and my relief, it leaves only an indentation. She points it at me, being Murderer Ian, threatening.
‘Don’t!’
The face she pulls is hideous, cartoonishly enraged and zombified. I scream. She chases me. Nothing bad happens. Even when she catches me and I trip and she kneels on my shoulders and hisses, ‘You’re dead!’ and I feel the blunt blade on my chest, I scream out of the hysterical assurance that no real harm can come to me, along with the terror that it might.
‘You’re nesh, you!’ she crows, sitting back, running the length of the knife uselessly against her palm. I wriggle out from under her.
‘You shouldn’t play with knives. It’s dangerous.’
I’m thinking of Ian’s good lady, running around the room with her head chopped off, like a chicken. And then, horribly, I hear the complicated give of the front door latch. Ian or Mum, I didn’t know which would be worse. Immediately careless of safety, I snatch the knife off Pauline.
‘I’ll get done!’
She’s better at danger than me. As I push the knife beneath the skirt at the bottom of the settee, she’s already making for the French doors out into the garden. It isn’t until she’s climbing over the fence, showing her knickers (which seemed to be men’s Y-fronts), that I realize there’s been no further noise since the latch had gone. Cautiously, I round the corner to the hall. No one is there. What if it was a burglar, who has gone upstairs? I creep back into the living room and retrieve the murder weapon. Then I sit, holding the knife pointed at the stairs for a lifelong minute or two. Nothing. Gradually, my pulse calms. There’s nobody in the house except me. Not Ian, not Mum, not a burglar, and not Pauline.
About an hour later, as Mum serves savoury pancakes, me facing Ian, and above him the knife on the wall (I replaced it earlier, teetering on the dining-room chair), it strikes me how lucky it was that Pauline had known immediately she needed to get out of the house, that me getting done would have been caused more by her presence than us being discovered mucking about with knives.