What They Do in the Dark by Amanda Coe Read Free Book Online Page B

delivering water, there hadn’t been much need for this.
    Back in the kitchen, Joanne made her sit on a chair and draped the towel round her shoulders, wrinkling her nose at the smell.
    ‘I’m off to the launderette tomorrow,’ she told Nan. It was the only time anything got washed, when Joanne came home. She held up the bottle she’d got from the shops.
    ‘Stay still,’ she commanded. Pauline tried, but when Joanne opened the bottle and poured the stuff on to her hair, the smell made her eyes water and her throat burn. Joanne told her not to be such a baby, and used the comb to spread the liquid through her hair. It made the skin on her scalp burn and then sting like the worst nettle patch in the world, but she had to wait half an hour until Joanne bent her over the kitchen sink and rubbed shampoo into her hair, careless of whether it went into her eyes. Pauline finally couldn’t help crying at the varieties of pain she was suffering, which Joanne found hilarious.
    ‘Great big bloody baby,’ she laughed, and poured another mugfull of scalding water over Pauline’s head. Pauline pushed her tongue against her teeth to stop herself shouting out, knowing that Joanne’s amusement could quickly turn to impatience, which led to other sorts of pain. Finally, Joanne stopped rinsing, and attacked Pauline’s head with the towel, scrubbing her hair dry. The friction was agony on her sensitized scalp, but by now all the different pains had blended into one prevailing hurt, so universal that it almost didn’t matter.
    ‘How d’you think I get looking the way I do, eh?’ asked Joanne, as Pauline snivelled in misery.
    Joanne’s hair was deep orange, with a white streak at the front. Her skin glowed against it, very pale. Pauline found her mam almost unbearably beautiful. Her eyes were huge, and so dark that they looked as black as her eyelashes, spiked with mascara. Joanne had got rid of her own eyebrows and pencilled brown arcs high on her forehead. The lipstick on her thin mouth was pearly pale, as though she’d been kept in a freezer. She looked very different without her make-up, Pauline knew, lost and unemphatic. But she rarely took it off, preferring to apply each day’s brows and eyes and lips over the smudged version from the previous day.
    ‘You’re growing up,’ Joanne warned her, retrieving a long-handled pink comb from her handbag. ‘It’s time you started thinking about looking proper and that. You can’t always wait for me to look after you.’
    There was a strip of dusty orange hairs woven along the bottom of the comb’s teeth, a few of which had broken off. Pauline braced herself not to flinch as Joanne began to comb her snarled mat of wet hair, but in contrast to her previous assault, she was surprisingly gentle. This was what it was like with her mam. You never knew when there was going to be a good time, or a bad. Now, suddenly, it was good. Pauline sat on the floor with her head poking up between Joanne’s round knees, letting her comb her hair free of its knots as Joanne sang along to the radio she hadbrought home with her. Her singing was heartfelt and tuneful, and she knew the words to all the latest songs. She even gave Pauline a packet of smoky bacon crisps, which she crunched quiet ly so as not to disturb the singing or the mood, while Joanne combed and combed, long after the last knot had disappeared and the raging of Pauline’s scalp had muted into an almost pleasurable throbbing. The bulb in the kitchen shone down on them, sparing them from the night, just her and her mam, for what seemed like hours.
    ‘See,’ Joanne said when she’d finished. ‘That’s more like it.’

 
    T HE LAST PART of school before the summer holidays is awful. Because of Mum having me moved to a different class I don’t know anyone properly, and no one can be bothered to make friends with me so soon before we break up. At least at playtime I can find my old friends and play my old games, but Pauline