Cold Light

by Jenn Ashworth

  ‘Let me in,’ she’d said, and thrown herself through the front door as if she was being chased. I held the door open and looked over the hedge and along the street, but nothing moved except the bits of Evening Post and flyers about personal safety and self-defence classes blowing about on the pavement along with the drifts of leaves in the gutter.

  ‘We ran all the way,’ she said, panting. ‘I’m knackered.’

  Emma nodded at me seriously and hurried in after her. She’d never been in my house before. I shut the door. Chloe was leaning against the hall radiator with one hand resting on her chest. The ends of her fingernails were perfect crescents because she had a soft white pencil she used to colour in the undersides with. Emma went and stood next to her, then, after a minute’s thought, put her arm around Chloe’s shoulders.

  ‘What’s up with you two?’ I said.

  Emma knew better than to tell Chloe’s story for her and Chloe didn’t answer – couldn’t speak, at first. She waved a hand at me to wait while she caught her breath. Her eye-liner was smudged and there was a streak of dirt on the sleeve of her pale jacket.

  ‘Shh,’ she said, and pointed at the living room door. Barbara was in there with Donald watching Antiques Roadshow. It was an old one. Barbara had a stack of them she’d taped off the telly because they kept Donald calm when they were on, and sent him off on harmless missions to the attic once the programmes had finished.

  ‘Can we go in your room?’ Chloe said eventually.

  ‘All right.’

  The three of us traipsed up the stairs – Chloe first, leading the way, then Emma, then me, closing all the doors behind us. In my room, Chloe took the seat in front of my desk. Emma sat on the bed. She didn’t take her coat off. I hovered between them, and eventually leaned against the wall. It was an awkward place to be, having nowhere to sit in my own room. There were things lying around – open books and magazines, tapes without their cases, dirty clothes. Chloe was used to it, but with Emma there I realised the place looked shabby and uncared for. I was embarrassed about the peeling gloss on the windowsill, the broken chair fixed with brown tape and the tired anaglypta on the walls. Emma gathered the pages of a tattered copy of Sugar and laid it on my desk.

  ‘What is it?’ I said. I looked at Emma, who shook her head.

  ‘Let her tell you herself.’

  ‘Give me a minute,’ Chloe said, and I saw that she was pleased with herself: almost smiling and showing all the other signs that she was carrying a secret she couldn’t wait to be rid of. Something ‘confidential’ that she was desperate for me to ask her about.

  ‘I knew I was coming round to yours,’ she said, ‘so I decided to set off early and walk. I couldn’t remember if I was still grounded or not, and if I’d asked for a lift, or some money, it’d have reminded them. So I just came out the back way.’

  ‘What happened?’ I said.

  This was Chloe’s soap opera and I knew the part I was supposed to play. She fed me my lines and I cooperated, halfamused at the state of her, and more curious than I wanted to be.

  ‘Did they catch you?’

  ‘You won’t believe it,’ she said and laughed helplessly. Emma smiled mechanically. Her mouth was dark and tacky with lipstick.

  ‘Let me get a grip of myself.’

  It was a short walk between Chloe’s house and mine. I lived in a poky row of terraces in a warren of streets tucked into the north bank of the Ribble and quietly subsiding. Chloe lived on the south side of the river, at the top of the hill and around the corner from our school. Her house had a conservatory and a greenhouse. The road bridged the river and carried on in both directions – past Chloe’s house and out of the the City towards Southport, and past my house where it turned into Fishergate Hill and led you towards the train station, into town and the shopping centres. The walk might have taken her half an hour, but that day, Chloe said, she’d taken a detour that involved walking along the Ribble, over the tram bridge and through Avenham Park. She’d have come out of the park at the end of a long street about fifteen minutes’ walk from my house, and added an hour onto her journey.

  ‘Why did you take the long way round?’ I said. It was something we did sometimes – for fun, or to kill time – but not unless we really couldn’t think of anything else to do and hardly ever since the summer.

  ‘I wanted to smoke,’ Chloe replied. ‘I was hardly going to march down the hill with a fag hanging out of my mouth, was I?’

  ‘Long way to go for a fag,’ I said, and Chloe shrugged.

  ‘Walking’s good for you. You should try it next time you feel like a plate of chips, you porker.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  Chloe gave me the finger.

  Emma giggled and I realised she’d been drinking. I couldn’t smell booze on Chloe so they hadn’t been out together, which was something. I never had Emma down as the type to hang about the park with a bottle though. ‘It’s not that far,’ she chipped in, ‘not if you’re fit. I’ve walked that way loads of times.’

  I tried to stare at Emma coolly, keeping my eyes steady and without moving my mouth at all. She was wearing make-up – a lot of it – and I’d never seen her that way before. The thick mascara and brown eye-shadow made her look ill and bruised.

  ‘Not to my house, you haven’t,’ I said.

  Chloe broke in. ‘Pack it in, you two. I was walking along that big line of trees to the side of the river, you know the path that goes behind the bandstand, yeah? I was going along there, and I heard something crackle. I thought it was a bird or a squirrel or something. I took my headphones off,’ she was still wearing them around her neck, the wire snaking down under her cardigan to the black box at the waistband of her jeans, ‘and I carry on walking. I’m not scared or anything, it isn’t like it’s the middle of the night, right?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. Her eyes were bright and wet with amusement.

  ‘This guy steps out from the bushes,’ she laughed again, a strange, sobbing sound. ‘He didn’t jump out or shout or anything – just stepped out. If I hadn’t have heard the crackle first, and I only heard that because my tape was between tracks, I probably wouldn’t have noticed him. But I did notice him just step out. And you know what the first thing I noticed was?’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘He was wearing a mask –’ she paused, and leaned forward, ‘and that’s not even the worst thing.’

  I imagined the man in the cape from The Phantom of the Opera.

  ‘What sort of mask?’

  ‘Halloween,’ she waved her hands around her face, ‘bright green, flat head. Bolts. What did you say it was, Emma?’

  ‘Frankenstein,’ Emma said quietly.

  ‘Frankenstein’s Monster, actually. Frankenstein was the—’

  ‘Whatever he had a mask on. Every Spar in the City is selling them. Brown hair poking out the top. Jeans. Boots. Nothing special.’

  I was getting impatient.

  ‘You tell her this bit, Em,’ Chloe said. I looked at Emma, who cringed. Chloe tapped her knee gently, and I’ve been there – I know it’s her way of dishing out her commands.

  ‘Well,’ Emma started eventually. Maybe she was feeling shy because Chloe and I were staring at her so hard. ‘He came out from the bushes, wearing his mask, and Chloe stopped and stared at him – like you would, you know? And then he gets a bit closer to her and says, Trick or Treat? And Chloe, she says, are you not a bit old for that, still walking over to him because she’s convinced it’s someone that she knows.’

  ‘One of the Year Elevens,’ Chloe interrupted, ‘pissing about.’

  ‘Yes, but it wasn’t,’ Emma said. She didn’t look at me, and spoke too quickly, the words running into each other as the blush spread up the sides of her neck. ‘Because when she got right close to him, he opened the front of his jeans and showed her his cock.’

  Chloe leaned over her knees and sobbed with laughter. ‘Right out there,’ she said, ‘right in the park! It was just hanging out!’
>
  Emma nodded urgently, as if I was about to accuse the pair of them of making it up.

  ‘Just lying there, like he expected me to do something with it. Why do they do that? Do you know why they get cheap thrills from that? I mean, it wasn’t a big deal to me.’

  ‘What did it look like?’ I said.

  ‘Just like you’d expect,’ she said, ‘only bigger.’ She stood up. ‘It was massive!’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I told him,’ she said lightly, ‘it looked just like a cock, only smaller. Then I kicked a pile of leaves at him, and walked round the other way.’

  She winked, stagily.

  ‘Did you see this?’

  Emma was sitting on the bed, her hands pressed together and held between her knees. She jumped, as if she wasn’t expecting to be spoken to. When she looked at me she opened her eyes wide and I noticed her pupils – huge and glassy.

  ‘No,’ Chloe said quickly. ‘I ran into Emma afterwards.’

  ‘And was it – you know?’

  Chloe grinned. ‘Was it what?’

  ‘Erect?’ I was whispering.

  Chloe fell back over her knees and howled with laughter. ‘You perv!’ she squealed. Emma swayed slightly, and smiled a little too late.

  I moved towards the desk, hurt.

  ‘You should tell the police,’ I said. ‘It’s that pest, isn’t it?’

  ‘He didn’t try anything,’ Emma said. She had her hair up – something complicated with Kirby grips and half a tin of Elnett. When she moved her head, her fringe stayed flat and stiff over her forehead. What was she doing dressed up like that and wandering around the park on her own?

  ‘No, I’m not going to bother.’

  Chloe went and sat next to Emma. The divan rocked on its wheels. ‘He probably expected me to scream or something, but I didn’t. It was hilarious.’

  ‘What did he do? How did you get rid of him?’

  Chloe glanced at Emma. ‘He just went away, back into the bushes. I didn’t follow him. I put my earphones back in, and carried on walking. Prick.’

  ‘She was hardly going to chase after him, was she?’ Emma said.

  ‘Ask him for a second helping!’

  I looked at Chloe. ‘It was that pest.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘They’re appealing for any information. They said the smallest detail could be the key that unlocks the whole case.’

  Chloe laughed. ‘It was a pretty big detail.’

  ‘She didn’t really get a good look at him, not even what he was wearing,’ Emma said.

  ‘She could give a description anyway,’ I said to Emma.

  ‘What of? A mask? There’s been nothing about a mask in the newspapers. Terry hasn’t said anything about a mask,’ Chloe said.

  ‘Well that proves it,’ I said, ‘they do that all the time. Keep one detail back so that they can tell if someone calls in with a hoax. I’ve seen it on Crimestoppers. That’s how they’ll know you’re telling the truth. It’s too weird to make up.’

  ‘She doesn’t want to go to the police,’ Emma said, ‘she’s already told you that.’

  ‘This is my room, thanks, Emma,’ I said, ‘and I’m not forcing her to do anything, am I? Just saying that they’re trying to catch this weirdo. If you know something, and don’t say it, you can get yourself into trouble. Barbara says they progress from one thing to another. He’ll be dragging girls into cars if he’s not caught.’

  ‘No one’s saying anything,’ Chloe said. ‘If I tell my mother about this she’ll never let me out of the house again. None of us will get out this side of Christmas. Is that what you want?’

  ‘If they catch him, she’ll let you out. And if you did go to the police,’ I paused, just for effect, ‘Terry and Fiona would interview you. Fiona talked to that other girl, didn’t she? They had an actress do her voice but it was still her in the studio. You’re fifteen in March – you could go on the telly and get interviewed for real.’

  Chloe hesitated. I knew she was imagining herself ‘in make-up’, sitting in front of a mirror framed with lightbulbs. I think she might have changed her mind, except Emma said, ‘Then you’d have to tell your mum why you took the long way round –’ she smoked an imaginary cigarette, ‘where you got your fags from. How you find the money.’

  ‘She wouldn’t care about that,’ I said, but Chloe pursed her lips and shook her head. She’d made up her mind.

  ‘It’s not going to happen, Laura,’ Chloe said, ‘and we wouldn’t have come round here to tell you about it if we’d known you’d be such a granny.’

  ‘What did you tell me for then?’ I sat on the desk chair Chloe had vacated, and looked at the two of them together. Emma wasn’t pretty, not like Chloe, but they suited each other. Like negatives of each other, one brown, one blonde, in jeans, slouch socks and smudged make-up.

  ‘We thought you’d think it was a laugh,’ Chloe said.

  ‘It was funny,’ Emma said weakly.

  ‘See?’

  I looked away, felt humble and stupid and young.

  Chloe and Emma got their way, and instead of telling anyone else, we carried on telling the story to each other. I think it made Chloe feel special, and almost famous, and because she’d found Emma first and had told her while the whole incident was still fresh in her mind, that was the thing that had brought them together. She’d often rely on Emma to fill in the details, or elaborate on the shape of the mask or the exact intonation of the words the man had spoken.

  The story was theirs, really – I was just the person who they told it to. Just audience. Whenever there was another sighting of the pest, or something new about the case appeared in the local news, she’d look meaningfully at Emma and I would try to join in with their laughter but it never worked. Sometimes I thought if Emma would just mind her own business, Chloe would do the right thing and report the flasher to the police. That was ridiculous though. I’d yet to meet the person who could coax Chloe into doing anything she didn’t feel like doing.

  The next time the three of us went to the park she showed us the exact place where it had happened, as if she knew I didn’t quite believe her. Just where she said, on a track through an unkempt, almost wooded area of the park, and behind the bandstand where lots of hawthorn and holly had been planted to discourage people from sleeping or injecting there. She didn’t seem scared or upset, not on any of the occasions that we spoke about it, but she did once claim that she’d had a dream about the man – still in his mask and his light brown boots, crunching through the leaves and staring at her through the eyeholes.

  ‘Right here,’ she said, ‘that’s where he came out.’

  ‘Okay,’ I’d said, and she moved around me quickly, standing on the path with her hands on her hips.

  ‘And here’s where I was, just walking along like this.’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  Emma was nodding furiously.

  ‘And what were you doing in the park?’ I said to Emma. ‘Wandering around on your own. That’s not a good idea.’

  Emma looked away and Chloe rolled her eyes.

  ‘She was in a bush, stoned off her tits and fucking her boyfriend – what do you think she was doing?’ she said, and she laughed, and Emma laughed too, and the two of them were laughing so hard I thought it was a joke – that even the idea of Emma having a boyfriend when Chloe didn’t was hilarious – so I joined in with the laughing and didn’t ask her again.

  Apart from the dream, which she had mentioned more in the spirit of entertaining me than confiding a worry, Chloe didn’t seem interested in talking about it anymore. After her initial excitement and hysteria the whole incident seemed to be boring to her. The evening when she showed me where it had happened was the time that she took me to meet Carl, and soon after that whenever we were in the park he managed to turn up too, so at least she didn’t need to worry about strange men in the bushes creeping up and surprising her anymore.

  Chapter 11

  I sta
nd and look at Emma sitting on my couch and I wait for a second, as if she is going to say something else. Nothing. So I sit next to her. We watch the pictures change on the soundless television. Nothing new. The replay of the replay of the discovery: the mayor leaning back on his spade, the balloon floating upwards into the damp air.

  ‘Were you watching it when it happened?’ Emma says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure I didn’t miss anything? On my way over here? Do they know if it was a man or a woman? How old they were, even? Those things must be quick to find out.’

  I shake my head. ‘Nothing like that,’ I say.

  ‘Did you think about going down there for the groundbreaking?’

  The police have set up a cordon with yellow tape and uniformed officers. Terry is standing in front of it, gesticulating behind him at the comings and goings of the forensics people. They really do wear all-in-one suits made out of white carrier bags. I thought that only happened in films. Now and again, someone just out of the camera shot catches Terry’s eye and he nods, or frowns slightly. It’s busy there. There’s a crowd. The first lot turned up early, for Chloe’s memorial. Now it is dark and the body is being dug out of the clasp of soil, the ghouls have come out.

  ‘No,’ I say carefully, ‘did you?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I was scared someone would recognise me.’

  I remember something. ‘You know what I was thinking of tonight?’ I say. ‘That time you and me and Chloe went into town, nicking stuff, and Carl came to pick us up. Do you remember? It was freezing – the cars were slipping all over the roads but he insisted on driving us back.’

  Emma nods. ‘I remember,’ she says. ‘Chloe walked out with half a make-up counter up her jumper and all you managed to swipe was a handful of toffees out of the pick ’n’ mix.’