What They Do in the Dark - By Amanda Coe Page 0,90
run away, but I don’t know where to. I know after the last time that Dad won’t let me run away to him but, just in case, we go down our old road to the house, and I make Pauline wait by the gate while I try ringing the bell. There’s no one there. It’s too late now for Dad still to be at work. He always comes straight home, usually for his tea and his wash and shave and telly. The bell rings on, into emptiness. It’s no good. There’s no one to help me.
‘I thought you said we’d get chips.’
Pauline and I walk round and round, and sit and eat chips and walk again, and nothing we think of makes it any better, until she suggests the launderette.
That’s what comes first. Why don’t we go in there and wash my dress, Pauline says, and I can recognize that’s a good idea. Some of the shops have closed, but the launderette stays open late, I’ve seen it from the bus on winter nights. But when we get there of course the 12p I’ve got left isn’t enough; to wash and dry the dress will take 30p. Pauline suggests we just wash it, which is 20p, and then I tell Mum I was walking underneath a window-cleaner’s ladder while he was emptying his bucket to explain why it’s wet. I know this isn’t going to work, and besides, we’re short even for the wash. Pauline doesn’t care. While I watch, terrified, she unclasps the purse left on one of the orange chairs by a lady who is distracted by wrestling her sopping sheets into the drier. It’s the same lady we’ve asked about the prices, which makes it worse, but Pauline palms the silver like she’s been given permission. A 10p and two fives – enough for the drier as well. She’d take more if she could, I can see, but I’m frowning furious disapproval, although I don’t dare say anything, because the lady will hear, and we’ll get caught, and I’ll be in as much trouble as Pauline. We might even go to prison. I feel hot inside and out, with the desert air from the driers blowing over my skin and the sickly heat of my own fear deep within. It’s clear to me that Pauline will do anything bad, and that I’ll let her.
Next, we have to ask the woman we’ve stolen the money from for powder, because we can’t afford any. Pauline does this because she isn’t as shy as me, although I smile a lot, pleadingly. The lady gives us the powder, although she doesn’t return the smiles. Her unfriendliness makes me feel better about taking the money. We put the dress in the machine and wait, and I don’t even care that I’m sitting in the launderette in just my pants and vest for all the world to see. Well, not as much as everything else that’s bad about the day and the general run of days up to now. In the chair next to me, Pauline seems to be dozing, in that weird way she has. For the first time since we saw her on the Town Fields, I think of Lallie. I feel very far away from her. I don’t think ever in her life she’s had to sit in a launderette in her vest and pants, unless for some funny skit with Marmaduke that turned into a big song-and-dance routine. I don’t want to think about what Pauline has said Lallie does, what we fought about. I put it in the same place I put Mum’s angry face, and Ian and the suncream, and Dad’s absence, a sci-fi blank, like a pit someone gets thrown in through a door in Doctor Who. ‘For Sale’ is in there too, now. I prefer to think instead of my version of what Lallie’s doing now, a life on the set of the TV show, without parents, but looked after. The trick, like squinting with one eye and then the other so your focus hops between them, is to see her in my life, sleeping in a version of my bed, eating versions of my meals, wearing the clothes I’d prefer to be wearing, me, but better: me as Lallie. Telling myself about this usually comforts me, but now I can’t get it to stick, and I’m left sweating in my underwear, staring at Pauline. She has grey grooves under her sliding eyes, and grease