‘This is it,’ the woman told her, hoisting her fag.
Vera’s elbow was cupped by the First AD, a nervous boy with chronically bad breath.
‘We’re ready for you now,’ he muttered, unconscious of his affliction. ‘Mike wants to do a run-through.’
‘With you in a tick, darling.’ Vera downed her tea and held out the cup for the canteen woman. Then she smiled a goodbye at the chaperone, who sighed, exhaling smoke, still watching the ever-moving Lallie.
‘Don’t know where she gets it from,’ she said. ‘She wears me out. Her dad tries to look after her a bit at the weekends, but he’s been working away.’
Not a chaperone then. Vera, accommodating this adjustment, tried to find some resemblance to the daughter in the mother. There wasn’t any, as far as she could see, even allowing for all the make-up. But she’d lay money Lallie could take off her mum a treat, clever little love.
SATURDAY NIGHT, AFTER a good Saturday. Swimming, chips, comics, Christina, and now Lallie. Tapping down the stairs in a blue-sequinned catsuit, pausing to gurn and exclaim ‘Shut that door!’ before reverting to herself and scuttling rhythmically to the bottom of the stairs for her I-gotta-be-me finale. A cola-bottle chew, dissolved to a sliver of flavour, sits on my tongue. The next part of the show will be Lallie and Marmaduke.
Mum opens the door to the lounge, bringing in the Saturday steak-and-chips smell with her.
‘Darling …’
I frown in irritation. Canned laughter accompanies the discovery of Marmaduke, in a frilled apron over his butler’s uniform, dusting Lallie’s stamp collection with a huge feather duster, stamp by stamp.
‘I wondered if you wanted to come to work with me next week after school?’
The formality of the suggestion would strike me as odd if I wasn’t intent on Lallie, who has sprung out of nowhere, telling Marmaduke to use a bit of elbow grease on the Penny Black, then grabbing the feather duster and doing a quick Ken Dodd. ‘How tickled I am,’ she splutters at him.
‘Only I thought it would be nice for you,’ Mum continues.
‘I’m watching this,’ I tell her, exasperated.
‘Don’t you be like that when I’m trying to talk to you, young lady.’
Now I’ve missed the next joke, and catch only the laughter. But I know better than to spark Mum’s irritation. She wouldn’t think twice about turning off the telly altogether, and has even taken a few steps towards the set, as though this is already in her mind.
‘Sorry,’ I say, hoping that this might be enough to get her out of the room again. But she sits next to me and cuddles up, with the delicious smells of the hair salon and the even-more-delicious cooked fat of her tea on top of that.
‘It’s OK, I know it’s your favourite.’
I feel a bit embarrassed. It’s not the same, watching Lallie with Mum there, even though it’s a particularly good show this week, with plenty of Marmaduke bits. He has to cook Lallie a special meal because she’s invited a boy round, called Algernon Smithington-Smythe, who wears a monocle and talks with an extremely posh accent. Marmaduke keeps getting everything wrong and ends up head first in a large meringue. My dad comes in at the end, saying ‘Load of rubbish,’ which he always says, and pretending that he’s going to turn over because he thinks the programme’s finished, which is also traditional. Mum then says what she always says, when Lallie’s doing a song from The Sound of Music, being Julie Andrews.
‘Not what you could call a pretty child, is she? Terrible nose.’
‘Talented, though,’ says Dad, and Mum’s ‘mmmmn’ of uncertain agreement suggests talent is no compensation for a lack of looks. I’m fairly sure that I’m prettier than Lallie. My nose is quite small.
Mum clears off to do the pots, later than usual. She doesn’t reappear for the police programme I’m allowed to watch before bed. After that’s over, I’m supposed to be sent upstairs, but a film starts without Dad saying anything. Once I realize he’s forgotten about me, I don’t dare speak or move in case it reminds him that I’m still up, particularly as the plastic stuff the settee’s made of squeaks a lot when you shift on it.
The hands on the clock above the gas fire creep steadily towards ten. Still no sign of Mum, still no order to go to bed. It’s a kind of torture, because although I’m very interested in the film, and know that it’s far too grown-up for me