What They Do in the Dark Read Free

stiff rolls kept in separate recycled tobacco tins. The yellow tickets were always handed out last, with the names called out and ticked off on a special list. So Mrs Maclaren was surprised one Monday to look up and see Pauline offering her fifty pence and demanding a strip of legitimate blue tickets.
    ‘But you’re on the other list, Pauline,’ she reminded her, leaving the fifty-pence piece where Pauline had placed it, on the register. ‘You don’t have to pay.’
    ‘Please, Miss, my mum says she’ll give me the money from now on, Miss,’ maintained Pauline firmly. Mrs Maclaren couldn’t be bothered to argue, and handed over the blue tickets, although she recognized something fishy about this transaction. For several weeks Pauline produced her fifty pence on Monday morning, until she was caught by a teacher on playground duty, extorting exactly this sum from a terrified seven-year-old. A letter was sent home, and Pauline’s mum invited in to discuss the matter. Joanne had been in Leeds for months, and Nan wasn’t about to leave the house, even if she had been informed of the situation, which naturally she had not. Mr Scott, the headmaster, gave Pauline a talking-to, and demanded that she write an essay about why it was wrong for the strong to pick on the weak.
    Pauline disappeared from school for nearly two weeks, but when she reappeared, she wrote the essay, covering nearly a sidein her chaotically scrawled rough book, then copying it out in good for Mr Scott. No more was said about the dinner tickets, although if Mrs Maclaren had bothered to liaise with any of the dinner ladies, she would have discovered that Pauline had continued to hand in blue tickets. She simply forced the next child in the queue, whether bigger or smaller, to swap a yellow ticket for a blue. It wasn’t the first crime she had committed, and it was one of the few that were undeniably victimless.

 
    P AULINE B RIGHT IS trouble. One of the ways you know she’s trouble is that grown-ups always call her by her full name. ‘Pauline Bright,’ Mrs Maclaren, our teacher, says, ‘stop that and come and sit next to Gemma.’ I am never Gemma Barlow, because I’m not trouble. Quite the opposite, in fact. According to my reports, Gemma is a joy to teach. Pauline Bright isn’t. Once Mrs Maclaren said after a test that she shouldn’t be called Pauline Bright, but Pauline Thick. Everyone laughed extra loud, because Mrs Maclaren doesn’t attempt many jokes, and Pauline got into more trouble because she walloped Neil Johnson who was sitting next to her, guffawing, and the impact she made on the bridge of his blue plastic National Health glasses marked his nose for days.
    Pauline Bright can fight. She punches and kicks like a boy. She doesn’t care about fighting boys either, or anyone bigger or older than her. Once when she was seven she went for a ten-year-old who had called her little brother a spaz, and knocked out one of his front teeth. He cried to a teacher, who sent Pauline to stand outside Mr Scott’s office. Everyone said Mr Scott used the strap on her, but she didn’t cry. It didn’t stop her either. Whenever they start shouting ‘scrap’ in the playground, there’s a good chance that the excited crowd is clotting around Pauline Bright, or one of her brothers and sisters.
    There are loads of Brights, but Pauline’s the eldest at junior school. The little one, the spaz one, used to wee on the floor in assemblies, and run around in circles in the hall, shouting, as teachers tried to catch him. Everyone says he got sent to a special school for retards. There’s another brother as well, and a sisterwith a patch over one eye. All of them smell. Pauline Bright smells, and when Mrs Maclaren sends her to sit next to me I try to breathe through my mouth. Dirty clothes. Dirty knickers. The worst is when we have to hold hands, which happens sometimes because we’re close in the alphabet, Barlow and Bright. The only other person I can’t