What They Do in the Dark - By Amanda Coe Page 0,59

away working, and they’d said in that case her dad would do. Dave was the closest in the house to a dad, but he’d just tell her to fuck off if she went anywhere near him with a piece of paper. Anyway, Pauline knew better than to let him or anyone else in the house know about the film, let alone needing permission, even though she had half a mind herself to rip up the typed sheets and dump them before it all went wrong. But somehow she couldn’t. Instead, she kept the form in her bedroom, flat in a drawer, and checked on it from time to time, as though writing might have germinated on the pages in her absence.

Gemma wasn’t talking to her. The last day of school, she’d run away from her in the playground and told a teacher when Pauline tried to catch up. Pauline had got a keyring she’d swiped from a place in town that mended shoes and cut keys, a really good keyring with a rubbery stupid-faced doll on the end whose arms and legs you could twist into shapes, but Gemma refused to take it. It had occurred to Pauline that Gemma might be able to fill in the form, since she had far neater writing than Pauline could manage, and proper spelling. But it seemed impossible, now, to get her to do it.

The night before Pauline was supposed to turn up at school with the completed paperwork, she turned over the blank, grubbying pages and thought of money. What if she offered Gemma money, instead of things; lots of money? It was risky, but she steeled herself for it, knowing that Dave would knock seven bells out of her if he caught her going through his pockets (which she’d have to do while he slept or had passed out). She didn’t care, really. Since Joanne had gone, her life had been so lonely that getting knocked about a bit would be a welcome acknowledgement of her existence. She could always kick him back, and run.

But, as it turned out, she had a stroke of luck as she crept through the unusually quiet house in the very early morning. Nan, having got her sick money and her pills the previous day, was splayed comatose in her chair downstairs in the dark. Coins had dribbled from the beige post-office envelope she obliviously proffered in her slackened hand, but it was the folded five-pound note that Pauline pincered out and escaped with under the charnel-house miasma of Nan’s snoring breath. Leaving the house with the money, she doubted she’d even be blamed: anyone else passing through the living room would have taken the opportunity. Then she wavered, thinking of things she could actually buy instead of giving the five pounds to Gemma. The hair salon had taken hold in her imagination, and she thought of marching in there and making Gemma’s cow of a mother wash her hair and cut it because she was paying. It would be nice to have someone brush her hair, to make her look like everyone else.

It was too early for the shops to be open. Neither Gemma nor her mother would be at the salon yet, she realized, her stupid plan atomizing. So instead Pauline got on a bus and headed for Gemma’s house among the pale, suspicious shift workers. When she got there, she knocked on the door, straightforwardly. She didn’t care if Gemma’s mum answered; in fact, she was up for a fight. What she wasn’t expecting was Gemma’s dad or whoever he was, the fat man.

‘Can I see Gemma?’

Pauline didn’t, as a rule, look at people’s faces. In her experience there was seldom much to see there that was good, and at home eye contact often flared into violence. So as he stood in front of her, it was Ian’s belt that caught her memory, its sleek enamel buckle straining between his grey trousers and clean shirting, an uncommon executive rhombus in black, gilt and maroon. She remembered the look of it and her curiosity about how it came undone, with none of the usual belt-buckle mechanism visible. When they were down the alley by Wentworth Road, he had pressed it behind its display, and it had released, like a small conjuring trick. Remembering this, she darted a look upwards. There was nothing in his face she recognized – there was no exception to her habit of not looking at faces – but it was