What They Do in the Dark Read Free Page A

stand holding hands with is a girl called Ella, whose hand is cool and grey and scaly. She can’t help it. I don’t say anything with either her or Pauline, but I pull the cuff of my school blouse over my hand so that the skin can’t touch. Pauline Bright’s hand is small and hot and filthy, with long, black-ringed nails. And the smell. Sometimes Pauline wants to hug up close to you, clamping your hand in both of hers, but sometimes she kicks and tells you to eff off. I’d rather she kicked. If she does, I tell Mrs Maclaren.
    ‘Miss, Pauline Bright’s kicking me, Miss.’
    ‘Pauline Bright, do you want me to send you to Mr Scott’s office?’
    Mr Scott is the Head, with the strap no one’s ever seen. I imagine something in lavishly tooled leather, like the saddles I saw for sale when we were on holiday in Spain, specially made and ordered by Mr Scott for the punishment of children as troublesome as Pauline Bright.
    Whatever I think of Pauline, I don’t ever tell Mrs Maclaren that she has compounded her crime by telling me to eff-word off. ‘Pauline said a rude word’ always begs the question of whether you yourself will be punished for repeating the word, which is desirable for maximum effect, but I’ve noticed that saying it at secondhand tends to produce a rebuke for telling tales. Everyone knows that grown-ups swear. You hear it all the time, in the things they watch on TV and switch over once you appear, in conversations on buses they hurry you past, from shouting drunks they drag you into traffic without looking to avoid. And they must know that we swear as well, although we pretend not to. I don’tswear, but I know all the words. Pauline Bright says them as well, all of them, even the worst ones. Arse. Git. Bloody. Bugger. Willy. Fanny. Bastard. Fuck. Cunt. Every so often, she throws in a new one.
    ‘Jam rags,’ she hisses at me, as I copy words down from the board into my narrow spelling book with the smooth, brick-red cover. My writing sits perfectly on the lines. Pauline carves out the words with her unsharpened pencil lead, tearing the paper; she’s lagging words and words behind me. ‘Ferocious,’ I write.
    ‘Jam rags,’ she repeats. ‘Your mam sticks jam rags up her.’ I ignore her, carefully erasing an imperfect ‘u’.
    ‘It’s to do with periods,’ Christina tells me when I mention it. She’s also in Mrs Maclaren’s class but we’re not allowed to sit together because we giggle too much.
    ‘Oh yeah, that,’ I say, quick to be blasé, although I don’t know much about periods. Something to do with ladies bleeding and boxes kept in the bathroom cupboard, something which will happen to me, and has already happened to a girl called Danuta in my class, who we stare at when we have PE because, apart from actual bosoms, which are surprising enough and in their way enviable, the poor thing has spidery black hair growing over her privates. She isn’t even ten yet. Jam rags. I like the sound of it. I adopt it as my own personal swear word, since it can’t be as bad as the really bad ones, and I’m keen on jam. At breakfast when Mum and Dad aren’t looking (not that Dad would mind) I prise out the strangely stiff strawberries from the pot of Hartleys and eat them off my knife.
    A few days after our spelling test, after school, Mum takes me on the bus to her work. This doesn’t happen often. I love visiting the salon and being made a fuss of by the other ladies who work there. I love watching the customers turn into someone else as their hair gets done. As Mum’s quick to tell everyone, I’ve never been any trouble when she’s had to take me into work. I sit withthe stack of
Woman
and
Woman’s Own
in the waiting area, enjoying the letters pages and the agony aunt and, particularly, the medical column. I also watch the comings and goings through reception. I feel very proud to see my own mum at the centre of this other world, with its unique climate, warm and chemically