Cold Light

by Jenn Ashworth

  The security guard put his hand on my shoulder and not hers. It had happened before, but still, I never saw it coming. She told me once that I got caught and not her because I stood there looking ashamed of myself. I had a guilty-looking face, apparently: a magnet for suspicious shop assistants and men with brown shirts and walkie-talkies.

  I turned limply. You always had to go to an office or a staff room somewhere. He walked behind me and tried to hold onto my elbow.

  ‘I’m not going to run,’ I said, ‘but take your hands off me or I will go home and tell my dad you touched me.’

  He recoiled because I said it like Chloe had told me to – the emphasis is on the word ‘touched’.

  And then you leg it, she’d said, but I didn’t. I walked slightly in front of him, as if I was leading him. I only let him stand beside me when I was not sure which way I needed to go next. He tapped my shoulder but didn’t hold onto it.

  This was the same winter the City was plagued by an anonymous pervert who was cornering young girls in parks and bus stations and exposing himself to them. The news coverage about it was feverish. There were more police in the public places, and talk about a curfew. No man wanted to hear the word touched said about him by a fourteen-year-old. Chloe knew this.

  In the back room, I let him have my real name.

  ‘Where do you live?’

  I shrugged. ‘You can’t ask me anything without my dad here,’ I said and emptied out my pockets. A cigarette lighter and a packet of Polos.

  ‘That it? What about your coat?’

  ‘I’ve nothing,’ I said. ‘You can’t keep me.’

  I flicked open my jacket to show him there was nothing inside.

  ‘What about your friend? What’s her name?’ He had a notebook in front of him, but the pencil was on the desk, not in his hand. He looked hot and bored.

  Even in the back room the sound of ‘White Christmas’ on pan pipes floated in. There was a cold cup of coffee and an out-of-date copy of the Mirror on the desk in front of him. He looked at the newspaper longingly.

  I smiled. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘The blonde. The pretty one. You know who I mean. What’s her name?’

  ‘You really shouldn’t be conducting an interview with me without my parents here. Can I have your name? And what’s that number on your sleeve? That’d come in handy too, thanks.’

  I wrote the number down on the notepad using his pencil, then tore off a strip of paper and tucked it into my back pocket. He sighed.

  ‘Laura Webb. I’ll remember you. You at the Valley School?’

  I nodded. He must have seen the badge on my rucksack.

  ‘That means you must live round here. Walking distance. I’ll find out your address. Talk to your parents. They’ll tell me who your good-looking mate was.’

  ‘She never took anything,’ I said, ‘and I’ve got nothing either.’

  I scooped up the mints and the lighter, and walked out. I sauntered home, waiting for Chloe to pop out from somewhere, her pockets rattling with jewellery. By the time I got there the security guard had gone through the phone book and called Barbara to tell her that I was banned from our Debenhams and all other Debenhams in the entire chain – for life.

  I didn’t catch up with Chloe that afternoon. She’d seen me getting caught, I suppose, and bombed it home. It might seem heartless, but there was no point in both of us getting caught, and, as she’d probably say, it served me right for not being as observant as she was.

  When I got back home Barbara was waiting for me. She opened the door before I’d even gone up the path. Sometimes she hovered in the hallway and yanked the door inwards when my key was in the lock, but that day she pulled it back and stared at me while I was still fumbling with the gate. Her fringe was stuck to her forehead and she was wearing an apron with a recipe for Scotch Broth written down the front of it. We had a matching tea-towel and set of soup dishes.

  ‘Get inside, you,’ she said, and looked past me into the street as if there was going to be a van full of policemen parked outside and a man in a white overall unrolling crime-scene tape between the cherry tree and the gatepost. I wasn’t quick enough: she grabbed my shoulder and pulled me into the house.

  That was twice I’d been manhandled. Three times if you count the woman with the umbrella, which I did count, because she hadn’t apologised. I was made to turn out my pockets again. I’d expected this, and I’d tucked the cigarette lighter into the waist of my jeans, so I was all right.

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ I said.

  ‘They telephoned me just for fun then, did they?’ Barbara said quickly. ‘Was it that Chloe?’

  ‘Chloe went home.’

  Barbara sighed and leaned forward, her hands flat on the table.

  ‘What did you take? What is it that you need so much you’d steal it?’

  ‘Nothing. I didn’t take anything.’

  ‘I know we don’t have money, but—’

  ‘I didn’t take anything.’

  She sighed. Picked her hands up from the table and put them into the front of her apron. Waited a while before speaking.

  ‘If I didn’t seriously think you’d spoil yet another Christmas for your father,’ she said, ‘I’d tell him about this.’

  I didn’t say anything. By ‘yet another Christmas’ I think she meant the year before when I got the chickenpox. Because Donald and Barbara had never had it, I gave it to them too, and because Donald didn’t do much, his immune system was rubbish and he had to spend a week in bed and miss everything.

  She confiscated the Polo mints.

  Except for the sudden, unexpected freeze on Christmas Eve and a hailstorm during the night that settled and pretended to be snow, Christmas Day went as usual that year.

  I’d bought Donald a compendium of magic tricks. I’d got it months before from a remainder bookshop. I’d bought it too early. By Christmas he’d gone off magic and moved on to fish. Still, he pretended he liked it and sat with the box on his knees while we watched the Queen and waited for the turkey to be ready. I’d also saved up and bought Barbara a bottle of the perfume that Chloe’s mum always wore. She wouldn’t open the box and try it on and when Donald went to sleep she put it on top of the television.

  ‘That can stay up there until the shops open,’ she said.

  I stared at it and listened to Donald snoring from his chair. The box stared back. The lights on the Christmas tree were reflected in the silver foil writing on the box and the twinkling dragged my eye back to it no matter where in the room I looked. Barbara got tipsy.

  ‘You want me to swap it?’ I said. Hurt. Barbara shushed me. Pointed at Donald. ‘Charity shop,’ she said, slurring slightly. ‘I am,’ she poured another glass, ‘not comfortable receiving stolen goods.’

  ‘You can’t nick perfume,’ I whispered back. ‘They keep it locked up behind the counter. The boxes on the shelves are just for show.’

  ‘So you’ve been “scoping it out” then,’ Barbara said.

  ‘Everyone knows that,’ I said. ‘It’s like fags and razor blades. The dear, small things.’

  ‘Fags?’ she said, and changed the channel on the telly without asking. I couldn’t wait for it to be Boxing Day so I could go out on the park with Chloe and compare what we’d got.

  Chapter 4

  There are Debenhams department stores all over the world. They’ve got them in Israel, in Russia, in Australia. Years later I told Emma the story about me being banned from them and she laughed, but when I told her that I’d never actually been in a Debenhams since, ever, she insisted we leave the park where we’d been sitting sharing a bottle of cider on a bench in the Japanese water garden, and go into town. The very same Debenhams, and although I don’t think it occurred to her, I kept expecting to see Chloe hovering somewhere, one eye on the security cameras. Blonde girls caught my eye and I stared at them sniffing their wrists at the perfume counters and holding dresses against themselves in front of long
smudgeless mirrors. They were nothing like ghosts.

  Emma and I had a cup of coffee in the cafe at the top. It’s on a mezzanine, except everyone calls it the rotunda, and the chairs and tables are against glass panels so that you can look through and down at everyone inspecting the racks, picking things up and putting them down and queueing for changing rooms.

  Emma took the paper packets of sugar, tipped them into her saucer and slowly ate them, licking her finger and dabbing it at the grains until they were all gone.

  ‘Now it’s your turn,’ I said.

  ‘My turn for what?’

  ‘Tell me something about her that I don’t know. I told you about the shoplifting, didn’t I? You and her went out together. Without me. Tell me what you got up to.’

  Emma shook her head and told me I should take something. ‘Go down there and put something in your pocket. Some earrings. Sunglasses. Something little.’

  ‘No!’ I said. Louder than I’d meant to. ‘Tell me about Chloe. Do you really think she…’ I couldn’t look her in the eye. ‘… did what they said she did?’

  No one says suicide. It makes us all look bad. We say tragedy.

  ‘Go on,’ Emma said, and smiled into her cup. ‘Or are you too scared?’

  We’re grown up now and Chloe is still sitting with us, waiting to be impressed.

  ‘We’re too conspicuous to shoplift,’ I said.

  People were already staring. Two grown women acting like guilty schoolgirls. Laughing too loudly. Our coats were faded, stained, past their best. We might have smelled like cheap vodka and onions, or unwashed knickers and yesterday’s Stella Artois.

  ‘You already got blamed,’ she said. ‘You should get something out of it.’

  That’s the way her mind works. Emma likes to go on walks and let down people’s tyres or break off their wing mirrors as a kind of revenge because she thinks cars are killing the planet. She’s got a WWF badge and an embroidered rainbow on the lapel of her jacket. She’s got a car, but she makes up for it by only driving when she’s a bit pissed, covering the rust with Greenpeace stickers, and volunteering for things. She’s shy of people but she cares about plants and animals. She hates men and she’s angry at everything.

  ‘If I get pulled in for shoplifting, I’ll get the sack,’ I said.

  When I think about work, I hear the piped music, the squeak of squeegee against the glass lift doors. See green plastic plants sunk in a pot of what looks like brown baked beans, but is really just polystyrene painted to look like pebbles. It’s not much. It’s home.

  ‘I need my job.’

  Emma shrugged. She doesn’t have a job other than the kinds of volunteering that you can’t get sacked from, so it doesn’t matter to her.

  ‘Let’s go then,’ she said, and made a clucking noise under her breath as I squeezed past her to get out of my seat. She moved and her saucer tipped, sending grains of sugar pattering to the marble-effect floor. ‘We’ll find a pub.’

  It wasn’t as easy as that. We stopped again for another look in Women’s Accessories. That was where it had happened. She insisted it was time to face up to my past.

  ‘Look,’ she said, and plucked a red and white chiffon scarf from a basket on the counter, swished it through the air like a streamer, and then wound it around her hand. She was laughing, and someone passed between us and frowned. Emma’s got brown teeth because she smokes hundreds of roll-ups a day. She stinks. My hair, when it’s not folded into a knot and covered up with the crocheted hat, is a matted dark swirl of damp and sweatsmelling curls. We don’t do make-up. I’ve got acne scars and Emma’s always running with cold sores.

  We’re not the kind of girls we used to be.

  I watched Emma twirling but I never caught the moment when she made the streamer disappear, or how it got from her pocket to mine. Some sleight of hand. A knack, a magic trick. Chloe will have shown her it. A familiar spark of jealousy. How come Emma got to know that, and not me?

  Chapter 5

  A morning sometime in the winter before she died. The three of us went into town; it must have been before Christmas because the daft music was playing in all the shops and the tinsel in every window made my eyes ache. Town was so busy that I kept losing them – chasing them between racks of clothes and shoes that seemed to grow and divide and close in on me like a dream while my eyes itched with tears because I couldn’t help but feel the two of them were doing it on purpose, and really wanted me to go away.

  ‘Come on, Lola!’

  I followed them around the shopping centre – it was as if they had a list. Jessops, Superdrug, Wilkinson. Emma was wearing a cardigan that belonged to Chloe – a pale blue thing that crossed over at the front and tied at the waist with a ribbon. It was too delicate for her square, broad shoulders. She was taller than me and Chloe. I thought about how unfeminine that was and wondered if she’d stayed over at Chloe’s last night.

  ‘Are you coming, or not?’

  Carl was going to meet us in the multi-storey car park over the bus station. He was right at the top, and we went up to him in the lift. It smelled weird in there, like bleach and piss and the thin chicken soup you could buy in plastic cups from the vending machines in the bus station. The doors were painted orange and slid shut with a rickety clank that was not reassuring.

  ‘Are you sure he’s going to be there, Chloe?’ Emma said. ‘If I’m not home by three my dad’ll murder me.’

  Chloe smiled. ‘He’ll be there,’ she said. ‘He’s never let us down before, has he?’

  ‘He better not.’

  ‘Who cares about your dad anyway? I’m going to stay out all night.’

  ‘Your mum’ll have kittens if you do,’ I said. ‘You’ll never get let out at the weekend again.’

  ‘She sent me to stay with my grandma,’ Chloe said, ‘told me to telephone and make the arrangements myself.’

  ‘Why? Are they going away?’ Emma asked, and at the same time I thought about the empty house, the lockable drinks cabinet Chloe could get into with a Kirby grip, her father’s computer and her mother’s expensive, strictly-not-allowed-to-be-taken-outof-the-box, massaging foot spa.

  ‘Nah,’ Chloe said, and the lift moved upwards slowly, leaving my stomach behind it, ‘they’re having marital problems.’

  Emma frowned. ‘Are they going to split up?’

  ‘I doubt it. She’s found out about him and his fancy piece. She chucked the wedding teapot at him.’ She looked at us slyly, as if checking how we were going to react. I looked at Emma, who had drawn her face into a picture of mature concern. Panhead.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  Chloe laughed. ‘I think it’s disgusting, him shagging a primary school teacher. He should be past it, at his age. He’s got hair in his ears and he cuts his toenails in the bath and pokes the bits down the plughole. I’m going to go to her school and tell her that,’ she started pointing at the air in front of her, the tip of her finger stabbing in time with her words, ‘right in front of her class. Say he’s a dirty old man with sweat marks on his work shirts and he said “goodness gracious” when some prick ran into the back of us at the traffic lights. Then she won’t want to shag him,’ she clicked her tongue against her teeth and winked, ‘problem solved!’

  I giggled. Chloe was amazing. The thing was, something crazy like that was always a possibility with her.

  ‘How did your mum find out?’ Emma said.

  ‘Yeah, did she catch them at it? In your parents’ bed?’

  ‘Nothing like that.’ Chloe shook her head. ‘I heard him talking to her on the phone on the upstairs extension. Smooch-smoochy talk. He sounded like a right penis. He pissed me off so I told her myself.’

  Emma looked uncertain and as if she was about to tell Chloe what a bad idea that had been when the lift doors juddered open and Chloe darted through the doors first.

  ‘Come on, lardy-guts!’ she called.

  The car park was dim and windy and Carl had parked his car at the front. H
e was sitting on the curved concrete ledge looking out over the main road and the shops. He had dark hair three months away from its last cut and it fell shaggily over his ears and the collar of his jacket. When he turned, I noticed he’d got rid of the moustache and I smiled but I didn’t say anything.

  ‘All right, my girls!’ he said, grinned, and jumped down jauntily as we approached. Chloe and Emma, and then me, started to run, and the sound of our shoes bounced around the metal and concrete. A car came around the corner and had to brake hard to avoid Emma and Chloe. The driver beeped her horn and Chloe stuck out her tongue. Emma held onto the edge of her coat and pulled her back when she tried to run out in front of it again. She was always like that when Carl was around.

  ‘You been busy?’

  ‘It was packed, Carl, just like you said.’ Chloe was using the special, older voice she always put on to talk to him. Carl put his arm around her shoulders, brought her in to him and kissed the top of her head. Then he moved around his car and popped open the boot.

  ‘Stick it all in there then, will you?’

  Emma leaned over the boot, untied the blue cardigan and let several yellow and black boxes of camera film fall out. Chloe giggled, and held Emma’s coat while she took the cardigan off and gave it back to her.

  ‘There’s a knack to it,’ Emma explained. ‘You need to choose what you’re wearing better. That jumper’s no good. Too baggy. Everything’ll drop out the bottom.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, realising too late that this was some sort of competition.

  ‘Or you could do it like Chloe does,’ Emma went on.

  Chloe winked and took an elastic band off her wrist. Carl laughed as she pulled at the cuff of her jacket that had been tucked into it, and shook little boxes of screws and nails out of her sleeve.

  ‘You’re a genius,’ he said. ‘I’d never have thought of that. A real Bobby Dazzler!’

  Bobby Dazzler! That was the sort of thing dinner ladies, or your granny would say to you. Sometimes Carl spoke English like he didn’t understand it.

  ‘What do you want with those screws?’ I asked.