Cold Light

by Jenn Ashworth

  The assistant glanced at the box and shook her head.

  ‘There are health and safety—’

  ‘I see. Of course. I should have – Donald,’ she turned, ‘put your wallet away.’

  There was a moment when nobody spoke. The tinkling music in the shop seemed louder, but I could still hear Donald’s polyester trousers rustling as he tucked his wallet away.

  ‘Maybe,’ Barbara said, and I knew in that instant that she wouldn’t be defeated, ‘Lola could work here for a few Saturdays. To earn the money back.’

  I opened my mouth – this was Chloe’s ideal job – we already knew you had to be sixteen to work on the perfume counter and if I got this job some underhand way, she’d kill me – but Barbara held up her hand, her fingers poised delicately. Her nails were painted neatly but the skin on the back of her hand was slack.

  ‘Miss,’ she said, as if it was the assistant who had started to protest, and not me, ‘my daughter did something wrong. Of which she is ashamed. Deeply. As a family, we are ashamed. Deeply. We are not destitute. Not enough to steal something. So she can work for you, to pay off the debt and make it right.’

  ‘There are all sorts of considerations to take into account,’ the assistant said. ‘There’s an induction. A training programme. We have to interview her properly. Equality and Diversity. I’m afraid it doesn’t really work like…’

  Barbara was sagging. The handles on her handbag flopped forward.

  ‘How much was it then?’ she asked, her mouth tight.

  The assistant scanned the barcode and looked at the numbers on the till.

  ‘Nineteen pounds and ninety-nine pence,’ she said brightly. Barbara flinched and opened her purse, and the assistant asked if we wanted it gift-wrapped, and I said, ‘I only paid twelve for it. Eleven ninety-nine. Was there a sale?’ and Barbara told me to shut up, and the shop assistant said, ‘You paid already?’

  I wanted to laugh. I wanted to walk away, to shout at someone – Barbara, if I had the nerve, but Barbara was fumbling out a worn, carefully folded tenner and counting the coins onto the counter. She didn’t say anything, but her posture was loud enough: this is our food money, and watching her labouriously count was painful.

  ‘We’ll settle this with your company now,’ Barbara said, ‘and deal with the matter at home. Lola will apologise,’ she finished counting and pushed the heap of money across the glass with a flourish, ‘in writing.’

  There was some further talk about the address of head office, the correct title of the CEO, and a scrap of paper was scrawled on and passed over the counter. Barbara asked for assurances that the matter was closed now, that the police wouldn’t be involved in the light of my confession. The assistant muttered something in return but by this point I wasn’t listening.

  At some point during Barbara’s counting – between the click of the coins on the glass counter and Barbara’s snuffly, startinga-cold breathing – I had become aware of a difference in the quality of the air beside me. Nothing more than that. I looked, and Donald was gone. Barbara noticed just after I did and she left the coins scattered on the counter, looped the handbag over her elbow, and we ran.

  It wasn’t the first time Donald had disappeared. He used to vanish from the house once every few months – like a cat. Sometimes he came back after a few hours, bright and cheerful with a new magazine tucked under his arm – just like anyone else’s father. One time, he strolled through the front gate after a nine-hour absence with a Homer Simpson cap and a tin of Cherry Coke. Another time a neighbour called us at five in the morning to ask us if we knew that Donald had climbed over the bolted gates of the Gas Board car park and was now unable to get out. That was the thing. His vanishings were probably nothing, but they could have been anything – Donald brought with him the constant reminder that bad things could happen.

  Barbara and I left Boots and hurried through the shopping centre, looking through windows, checking behind displays of cut-price advent calendars and Christmas cards.

  Usually I enjoyed the symmetry and regularity of the way the building is designed: the smooth shine of the fake marble floors, the smoky glass of the lifts and doors, and the faintly chlorinated smell of the warm, recycled air. The architects, I think, wanted people to drift from floor to floor with no conception of the light or the weather outside, no worry about moving too far away from a public convenience, litter bin or water fountain. It made searching the place a slow, frustrating business though – full of false starts and back-tracking. The centre is built like a wheel on two floors – with a round central area that encircles an indoor fountain, artificial plants and a cafe. The shops are ranked along the spokes of the wheel and we tried to work through them methodically: John Lewis, Sweeten’s, Menzies, Bon Marché.

  The shops were busy with families out returning unwanted presents, spending their gift vouchers or examining the sales racks. We moved slowly, always peering around heads or jostling for space between bags and buggies and elbows. Whenever we reached the centre, I huddled into Barbara’s wake, hiding from the boys sitting around the edge of the fountain. They were leaning over in brand-new sports tops and trainers, close to the water – fishing out coins or blowing the paper skins off straws in a private competition.

  We rode the escalators upwards and waited outside the men’s on either side of the door like two stone lions. Barbara asked a man to go in and check the cubicles. We waited.

  ‘He was all right this morning, wasn’t he?’ I said.

  ‘Fine. Fine,’ said Barbara.

  The man we asked to help took ages. I thought about urinals, rows and rows of them lined up like seats in a white porcelain auditorium. And rows of men, too – standing with their hands in front of them, moving the weight from one foot to another, the way I sometimes saw them in the bus station alley, or down the back end of the park. The idea was dirty and exciting and my cheeks tingled and, without meaning to, I thought about Chloe and Carl.

  ‘We should check the library,’ I said. ‘He’ll have gone to the library; his research.’

  Barbara didn’t say anything, but rapped on the door with her knuckles and used a voice like Margaret Thatcher – pretend posh – to call through the crack. The sound echoed inside, rattling along the tiles with the smell of piss and yellow disinfectant. I peered over her shoulder but there was nothing to see except torn scraps of toilet paper sticking to puddles on the floor.

  ‘He’s been pestering me to take his books back,’ I said, ‘and I haven’t done it yet. I bet he’s worried about the fines. He’ll have gone in to see about it.’

  ‘You shouldn’t encourage him,’ Barbara said quickly, ‘it isn’t fair. His projects. All those books. The papers!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Encourage. It was a new idea. I had thought Barbara and I had a kind of agreement about this. She took charge of the practical things. Changed his bed in the middle of the night, checked on him during the day when things went too quiet. Took care of the bills and his razors, complaints from the neighbours about things he tried to build in the garden. His meals and prescriptions.

  I typed. I did research with him. I listened to his stories and sorted out library fines. Stuck pictures into scrapbooks. Taped things off the telly. I took it all very seriously, accepted token and sometimes not-so-token payments for my services, and it wasn’t my fault I liked my part of the deal better than Barbara liked hers. We were supposed to keep each other’s secrets, Barbara and I. I’d say nothing about the occasions when I’d come home from school and Donald would still be in his pyjamas, distressed and ravenous. Barbara would put on a video and close the door on him when Chloe came round. It was a deal.

  ‘I don’t encourage him,’ I said.

  ‘This report he’s writing. Three typewriter ribbons in a month. He tried to oil the thing with a lump of lard and I’ve had to send it to be repaired.’

  ‘I said I’d type it up for him at school. When we go back. I’ll do it for him at lunchtime, on the
computers.’

  ‘That isn’t the point,’ Barbara said. She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. A strand of hair fell over her face and she did nothing to tidy it away. ‘You’ve got to stop condoning him. Joining in. I know you think you’re helping, but you’re not. Do you understand?’

  She stood upright and looked at me. ‘Lola? You know it’s all in his mind, don’t you? This trip he thinks he’s going on. Making money out of his idea? Glow-in-the-dark shrubbery? You know it isn’t right, don’t you?’ She looked frightened.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘all right. He’s just making it up.’

  She sighed. ‘Not making it up. Your father isn’t a liar, Lola. He thinks it’s all perfectly reasonable. That’s why he’s taking so much time over it. It needs to be just right. But it isn’t—’ she cut herself off. ‘Let me put it this way. It would hurt him, very badly, not to be accepted onto this mission – not to get to talk to the scientists about his big idea, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘sure. He’d be gutted. That’s why I’ve been—’

  ‘No,’ Barbara said firmly. ‘That’s encouragement. If you care about him, you won’t be helping him to make it better – you’ll be distracting him from it. Getting him to think about other, more ordinary things. Saving him from the disappointment.’

  A man came out of the toilets then – the man who we’d asked to help us. He was drying his hands on the front of his jeans and looked surprised we were still there.

  ‘My husband?’ Barbara asked. The man shrugged and walked away without even looking at her properly.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, and tugged at the sleeve of my coat. ‘We can’t stop looking. He could be anywhere. We’ll talk more about this later.’

  We found Donald in WHSmith. Barbara saw him through the window and pulled me inside. He was crouching over a pool of spilled newspapers, the rack at an angle behind him. Donald murmured calmly as people stepped over the mess. He was struggling to put the pages in the right order and every page looked the same: pictures of the half-frozen river, the leafless, whitened trees, the bundled kids sliding down hills on metal tea-trays, reams and reams of closely printed columns about global warming.

  I saw his neat fingers shuffling over the pages and heard the whisper of the paper. His head was bent forward and the bald patch on his scalp was shiny and humiliating. Barbara pushed past me and knelt beside him to fold the papers, working slowly, saying nothing, bumping her shoulder against his.

  I hesitated on the mat in front of the automatic doors, feeling them slide close and bounce open behind me, the electronic sensor under my feet not sure what to do with a weight that hesitated so long.

  Are you staying or going?

  The draught at the back of my neck was icy.

  I was thinking about Chloe again – of course. I’d stopped imagining her and Emma at the New Year’s party now – the booze, the streamers, the late-night trip out in Carl’s car. Now I was thinking about when I’d see her next – how I was going to approach her. I’d almost decided to pretend I’d forgotten about her because I’d been whisked away to a last-minute party of my own. It would have been transparent and ridiculous. Chloe would have smirked and then let me tell my story as if she was doing me a favour. Emma would have openly laughed and passed me the packet of photographs – her and Chloe in party dresses, hair up, doing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Even worse if they walked past WHSmith and saw me kneeling on the carpet with my whole family, fumbling with newspapers while the shop assistants stared.

  The doors bumped closed, and then opened again behind my back. Barbara looked up.

  ‘Go home,’ she said quietly. ‘Go and peel the potatoes and we’ll be with you shortly.’

  I went.

  Chapter 9

  The buzzer sounds.

  It is a thrumming, crackling noise that I cannot stand. The casing on the intercom unit isn’t screwed down tight and the plastic rattles against the wall and the noise rattles around the flat and right into my teeth and skull. It’s horrible but I’ve never done anything to fix it because I don’t get people coming round that often.

  I turn away from the television and scramble towards the hallway. I pull my hair straight and brush Dorito crumbs off my jumper. My teeth will be grey and blue with wine, but tough.

  ‘Hello?’

  Emma’s voice crackles out of the box. ‘It’s me. Are you going to let me in?’

  I am reluctant to open the door but the buzzer sounds again, right next to my ear. I feel the noise before I hear it, throbbing along my jaw.

  ‘Emma?’

  ‘Come on. It’s cold out here. Open the door.’

  I imagine her, hunched in the lobby, whispering urgently into the box. Angry, no doubt, at me dithering.

  ‘Have you seen what happened?’ Her voice is nasal and echoing. ‘I’ve been watching for –’ I think I can hear her sigh, ‘for two hours. Caught it by accident, just as he started digging. I didn’t realise there was an anniversary coming up.’

  That is a lie, and we both know it.

  ‘I saw it,’ I say. ‘They’ve cancelled the nine o’clock film.’

  ‘Lola?’

  ‘I was going to watch it,’ I explain. I think of my evening routine. The film, the crisps, the wine. I can’t remember the last time I had someone in my flat.

  ‘Lola? I’m still standing here.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say at last. ‘I’m going to buzz you in now. Don’t come up in the lift – someone’s pissed in it.’

  The warning about the lift may or may not be true. It usually stinks, but I’m more concerned about giving myself a few extra minutes to tidy my flat than I am about Emma stepping in something unpleasant.

  I pause in front of the television with an armful of wet towels from the bathroom. It’s dark outside – darker still down by the pond where there are no streetlamps. Terry is pointing at the tent, saying something about dogs and evidence. He says ‘painstaking process’. I mute the sound, dump the towels in front of the washer and start grabbing dishes and taking them into the kitchenette. I run out of space in the sink and start to stack sticky bowls and mugs in the cupboard under it, next to the ranks of green glass bottles, saved for recycling. There’s a knock – hesitant and unfriendly. I lift the snib and stand back. Emma shuffles in smelling of alcohol and musty flannels.

  ‘Did you catch the bus?’ I say, stupidly.

  Emma shakes her head. ‘I waited, but it didn’t come.’

  ‘Is it that bad?’

  She moves past me and looks around at the sagging couch, the wine box, the stained carpet and bare walls. She paces, too wound up to sit down. There’s a browning umbrella plant and a row of videos on the windowsill. They’re covered in a fur of dust so thick it looks like mould. I watch her looking at my things.

  ‘I drove. Probably shouldn’t have,’ she lifts an imaginary glass, ‘but I got sick of waiting and the roads are empty anyway. Everyone glued to the box tonight, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Terry’s going to do an appeal. Witnesses, a phonein. The works.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ she says and then she sits down with one elbow on her knee and her forehead resting on her palm. ‘This is never going to stop, is it?’

  I shrug. ‘Not if he can help it.’

  ‘All this time, and he’s still—’ She breaks off, yanks her hand through her hair and looks up at me. ‘I didn’t want to stay at home in case his researchers started ringing for an interview again. I couldn’t stand it.’

  I look at her, and remember. The two years Terry tried to get us on the air and wouldn’t take no for an answer. As if the police weren’t enough, people wanted us to answer questions on Terry’s programme as well. Emma wasn’t like Chloe – she never wanted to be famous.

  ‘No one knows about me here. I’m Laura now, not Lola. They won’t ring.’

  She sighs, but it isn’t quite relief. ‘I hoped you’d say that.’

  We look at the television again: Terry’s
mouth moving soundlessly, the dark shapes of the trees against the sky and the phone-in number scrolling along the bottom of the screen. You don’t need to hear what he’s saying to catch his mood – the excitement in the way he holds his head to one side and draws shapes with his hands in the air.

  ‘Don’t they know who it is yet? Haven’t they said anything about that?’ She curls her fingers against her palms and rests her knuckles against her mouth as if she’s trying to cram her words back down her throat.

  I shake my head. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Fucking hell.’ Her voice is muffled by the sleeve of her coat. ‘Have you got anything in to drink?’

  ‘Coffee,’ I say, and she shakes her head. I nudge the box of wine on the floor in front of the sofa with my foot. ‘There’s that, but it’s shit. I’ll get you a glass.’

  ‘In other cities, people go out for romantic meals on Valentine’s Day. You’ve just got me,’ she says, and although there is humour in it, neither of us laughs.

  No one’s celebrated Valentine’s Day round here properly for years. For us, it’s the day we remember the couple who drowned themselves because they were forbidden from seeing each other. Women who didn’t know Chloe wear her picture in lockets around their necks and sigh, hoping they’ll be loved like that one day too.

  ‘Well, we can make do,’ I say. She raises her head as I hand her a glass and looks around her again.

  ‘Nice place,’ she says, mildly and without sarcasm.

  ‘It’s council,’ I say. ‘There’s a legal limit on how bad they can let it get.’

  ‘Not the lift, though,’ she says and looks at the television. ‘Do they know who it is yet?’ She glugs at the wine and doesn’t realise she’s repeating herself.

  Chapter 10

  Emma had always been at the Valley School with me, but I’d not paid much attention to her. I’d kept my head down generally, until Chloe had arrived at the end of Year Eight and made the girls who’d been picking on me find someone else to torture. But one day when I hadn’t been looking, she started to get closer and closer to Chloe and because Chloe was my best friend, I started to see more of her. It started in the October half term when Chloe turned up with Emma at my house. It was the first time I’d really spoken to Emma, and the first time I realised that Chloe did things without me being there, things that I didn’t know about.