knew these times as Joanne’s work, and it made her feel important on her mother’s behalf when they were mentioned.
Pauline had never met her dad, but next to Nan she was fondest of her mum’s brother, Uncle Dave. His unreliability was exotic, as were his tattoos, a new one each time he arrived home from jail. Dave referred to his jail sentences with a mixture of pride at their harshness and formal indignation that he should be punished at all for the various crimes he claimed not to have committed, although he freely recounted his part in them as soon as a drink passed his lips. Uncle Dave called Pauline ‘our kid’, and had once given her a four-finger Kit Kat on her birthday. He had a son, Gary, who was a bit younger than Pauline. Gary’s mum had taken off years ago. Gary wasn’t right, couldn’t talk much and still pissed and shat himself like a baby. He didn’t go to school, and spent most of his days lolled in front of the telly. It was surprisingly difficult to make him cry. Despite his smallness, he was very strong in a fight, and there were plenty of those in the house.
None of the Brights would have noticed if Pauline hadn’t gone to school, and so none of them noticed that she did in fact go more often than not. There wasn’t a report or a note that made it to any adult member of the family, since Pauline had learned early on the pointlessness of handing these over to Nan, or of asking anyone for money for a special trip or the even more exotic demand for cookery ingredients. At these times she twagged off, then lay in wait for her classmates, ambushing them off the coach for their souvenir bookmarks and keyrings, or knocking their carefully balanced Tupperware boxes from their arms and grinding the clumsily assembled butterfly buns that spilled out into the pavement. In contrast to Gary, it was surprisingly easy to make her classmates cry.
Pauline was quite often hungry, but it never occurred to her to eat the cookery-lesson buns and biscuits instead of vandalizing them. It was their food, and she wanted nothing to do with them. School dinners were another matter. They ate them, but dinners weren’t their food in the same way as the Tupperware buns. Occasionally a teacher would notice the way that Pauline stayed behind at dinnertime to finish every morsel available to her, gobbling gristly mouthfuls rejected by the other children. It was reassuring at such times to know that Pauline, along with the rest of the school’s underprivileged children (the preferred official term), received subsidized school meals.
On Monday mornings everyone brought in their dinner-ticket money, except for those children such as Pauline, a few in each class, who were given their dinners free. The teacher dispensed the tickets, blue for the paying customers, pale yellow for the charity cases, from 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 side in her chaotically scrawled rough book, then copying it out in good for Mr Scott. No more was said about the dinner tickets,