‘No,’ I say, ‘that’s not right. You got a load of camera film and Chloe got some weird stuff – screws and bolts and nails and things. Carl had sent you out with a shopping list. He wanted the stuff for his darkroom. I wonder if he ever finished it?’
Emma frowns. ‘It wasn’t a proper darkroom. He nailed a load of scrap wood over the window in the back bedroom and put a red lightbulb in. Took the wallpaper off the walls and moved all the furniture out apart from the bed. I don’t think he knew what he was doing with that, not really. His mum would have gone mad if she’d seen it.’
‘How do you know?’
She shrugs. ‘He told me. Showed me up there one time. His mum never went upstairs. She was half deaf, in a wheelchair. No idea what was going on half the time, or pretended not to know.’
‘I never knew you went to his house,’ I say, and Emma shrugs again and asks me if there’s any more wine. We settle into the couch, watching each other as much as the television.
It’s funny, how me and Emma have stayed in touch. Or not, when you think about it. I haven’t kept up with anyone else from school, but Emma was the only other one who really knew Chloe. That’s not to say that she was as close to Chloe as I was, just that it makes sense that the two of us would stick together.
It happened without either of us planning it. I ran away from Barbara when I was sixteen. Wanted to get away – partly from her and partly from Terry’s researchers, who were still desperate to get us on the show for the inside scoop on Chloe. I didn’t get far. Felt like, in the end, I needed to stay put and keep an eye on things. Everyone was still so cut up over the loss of Chloe. It had been two years and nothing was normal. So I ran away but only got four miles across the City, talked to a youth worker, came to live in this flat, found a job at the shopping centre across the road, and settled.
I started going by ‘Laura’ again, changed my last name and didn’t speak to anyone.
Then one day, I saw Emma. I was twitching the hood of my duffel coat over my face, trying to get out of the wind and light a cigarette. I was half in and half out of the entrance to the flats when Emma walked right past me in a gale of perfume and chinking metal bangles and the clatter of knee-high boots. I could have touched her, easily. She was with two other girls and laughing her way through a story about a bouncer on the door of a nightclub who’d lifted her off her feet and twirled her around in the street with such force her skirt blew up, her knickers were on show and the taxi drivers on the rank had flashed their lights and beeped their horns.
She says now she never saw me, but I know that’s rot. Her eyes flicked over me. Her make-up was blurred. Dangling earrings in her ears and the three of them carrying around their own pocket of noise and the friendly fug of alcohol. I waited in the doorway until they passed by and turned a corner. I felt trembly and insubstantial: a bit of dry grass. I was shaking. I wanted to shake her. Why should she have all this – the friends, and the nightclub nights out, and the earrings and the perfume and the drunken laughing in the night – when it was not possible, would not ever be possible, for me to have those things? Friends. She had friends. For a while there, I saw how far the scales had tipped in her direction and I wanted to kill her. Put my hands on her skin and pull out her earrings and scream my secret into the whorl of her ear and kill her.
That night I started dreaming about Chloe. I hadn’t forgotten about her. In my dreams she skated and slid. They were always silent dreams – as if someone had muted the sound on a film – but I could see her laughing and watch her blue lips move, trace the shapes she made while she was shouting. They weren’t good dreams.
A year or two after I saw Emma outside the flats, she sent me a postcard. It was addressed to me by name – my old name and the block of flats. No number, but the postie knew me so it got to me safe. Of course he knew me – I’ve been here years, staying put in this damp box in the sky while everyone else moves on. He’s a good lad. He’s never let on, never asked me a question, never stared, never tipped off Terry’s researchers. I don’t know if it’s pity or professionalism, but either way I am grateful for it. The picture on the postcard was of the train station. Miniature daffodils and ivy in wooden planters on the platforms. No dirty pigeons. No drunks. No tramps. A sunny day.
After I’d read it, I’d stared at the picture until my clammy hands warped the card. The train waiting at the platform. Her handwriting. Postmark. Stamp – not the Queen’s head, but a robin perched on the handle of a spade, the spade driven into a hillock of earth. Wondering if it was significant. If she was trying to tell me something. And she was a liar too. A sly one, like Chloe. She hadn’t been so drunk she didn’t recognise me, not so drunk she didn’t notice the name of the block of flats where I lived.
Emma is much less stupid than she looks.
We drink together a fair bit these days. It isn’t exactly what you’d call social. We make trips to the park, to Debenhams. Take each other on guided tours over the topography of our memories.
‘Look,’ she’ll say, ‘here’s where me and Chloe first went and got our ears pierced.’
I’ll have to take her to HMV just to keep up and show her where I distracted the security by flashing my new bra at the cameras while Chloe ran out of the door with the second series of Dawson’s Creek up her jumper. Emma will watch patiently, and then take me to Boots and show me the exact brand of icywhite glitter that Chloe liked to stroke over her brow-bone on special occasions. Like New Year’s Eve.
She doesn’t come to the flat, but I meet her once or twice a month in a Thirties-themed cafe called Brucciani’s that we choose because it’s almost exactly half way between her place and mine. I have to get there first and order for us – if she looks through the windows and sees that I’m not there she’ll turn around and go home. We don’t talk much. I tend to sit opposite her, look at her dirty hair and dull eyes and try to guess what she is thinking. She looks different now.
I wonder about those other girls – her friends. The make-up and the boots and going-out clothes. Making friends with the bouncers. These days, she can’t hold down a real job and doesn’t even raise her eyes to the waitress when she is paying for her tea. I don’t know where her friends are now. I don’t know if she still likes a drink, a dance, a kebab on the way home. I don’t think there’s a boyfriend. Is she into girls? I think about the photographs I took of Chloe, wonder if she ever handed the camera to Emma. I try to picture them kissing, their mouths working wetly together. It doesn’t work. Emma hates to be touched – it’s like she’s bruised all over.
On our visits to Brucciani’s, we make attempts at small-talk like normal people do. Emma will ask about my job. I will ask after her family, who I don’t think she is in touch with anymore. It’s always a relief when the waitress comes with the tray of tea. There are a few minutes of distraction bestowed by the individual metal teapots, the condensation on the flick-up lid, the scald to the ball of the thumb as I pour and the tea slopping onto my saucer. I take those minutes gratefully and I mop the table with napkins more carefully than is necessary.
Most of the time we sit in silence. Often, we’ll give up and escape outdoors, past Winkley Square and back into the park. The fountain is still there, the rockery and the Japanese water garden and the folly at the top of the hill. We sit on one of the benches and more often than not, Emma will slip me a tenner and send me away to the off licence. She always pays because she won’t talk to strangers: it’s one of her phobias. It’s the reason she can’t get a job anyone would actually pay her for. Even I’m not that bad. I take the money and come back with a half bottle of vodka or a few cans inside my coat and we will sit there like that for most of the afternoon. Even in the rain: the damp won’t kill us. Sometimes we see other girls there doing the same as us, and we’ll shout over at them and offer them cigarettes and see if they’ll come and join us. Emma’s more confident when she’s pissed, more likely to nudge my shoulder with hers, tell me a joke, offer a secret. She’ll wipe the nec
k of the bottle on her sleeve and offer it to whoever is sitting on the next bench.
The other girls never want to come and sit with us. To them, we’re too old.
The last time we were due to meet – about a week ago – Emma never turned up. I waited until nearly closing time and the cafe was almost empty. In there the waitresses wear black dresses and white aprons – a caricature of a maid’s outfit that might sound erotic, but isn’t. The dresses are Teflon and spotted with margarine and dropped coffee. They glide between the tables, wiping and lifting chairs. I was far away, thinking about worms as long as freshwater trout, as long as skateboards, even, and the girl behind the counter shouted over to me – told me to order now if I wanted anything else because she was going to cash up the till. I shook my head. There were wet rings under her arms.
I was sweating too. Wondering what Emma was up to, why she hadn’t come. It was the anniversary coming up, I thought. The memory of it. The way flowers were starting to appear on the verges outside the school again, in the windows of the bank and post office. You couldn’t open a paper without Chloe’s face smiling out at you. Happy Valentine’s Day. The patron saint of lovers and dead schoolgirls. It was bound to make her twitchy. Erratic. Maybe she’d want to talk to someone. I ignored the waitress, who was tutting and slamming the till closed, and waited.
‘You never came, the last time,’ I say. ‘I sat there for ages.’
If you say you’re going to be somewhere, you should show up. No questions asked. Take me and Chloe – for all her faults, she never once let me down like that. What Chloe and I had was rare and special and it isn’t really fair to compare Emma to her in that way, but all the same, I am pissed off.
Emma’s eyes are glued to the screen and she has that look people get when they’re immersed in television – slack, absent, stupid.
‘I sat there like a lemon, waiting. I looked like a dick.’
‘There was an emergency at work,’ she said. ‘I needed to stay and help out.’
‘Emergency?’
I don’t believe her. Emma doesn’t ‘work’. She claims incapacity benefit for depression, anxiety attacks and phobias. She volunteers at a dogs’ home sixteen hours a week and because they can’t pay her they let her take her pick of the clothes people donate to sell in their charity shop.
Emma nods. ‘There was a holdall of puppies dumped around the back of the office. I only noticed it because one of them squeaked as I walked past. Would have walked right past otherwise. I got them out – newborn ones – and I had to wait until the on-call vet turned up.’ She turns to me, and suddenly smiles. ‘We only lost four of them.’
‘That’s good,’ I say. I want to ask her what they did with the dead ones, but I don’t.
Emma nods, turns back to the television and makes herself another roll-up.
‘I thought you were giving up?’
She pulls a face. ‘Too late for that. I started at school. Chloe used to give them to me. I’ll probably smoke forever. The earlier you start,’ she sucked at the tube hungrily, ‘the harder it is to stop. More than half my life now.’
‘Me too,’ I say. ‘I wonder how many other people she passed that habit on to?’
Emma turns her head and stares at me as if I’ve said something shocking and blasphemous. The branch of Nationwide on the high street kept a framed photograph of Chloe and an everfresh bunch of Juliet roses in the window for three years. No one is allowed to say anything bad about Chloe. Chloe was born beautiful, had no ugly duckling phase, and stayed beautiful. The world didn’t dirty her: Chloe would have got to thirty and still had her unmarked skin and fine, pale hair.
The thing is, Emma and I both know that if either of us had drowned ourselves the news wouldn’t have made page six. At fourteen, Emma was sullen and sallow and buck-toothed, but when she was with Chloe and me she laughed a lot and it wasn’t so noticeable. I wonder if she still likes children. I know she likes her job in the dogs’ home, feeding and cleaning the kennels. She told me in a rare moment of confiding that she stays longer than she needs to in order to wash the dogs and brush their coats because she thinks it increases their chances of being adopted. This, and what I remember about her from school, are the only things that I know about her.
Sometimes I am consumed with curiosity and I imagine myself following her home and looking through her bathroom window while she unwraps soap and pulls a comb through her hair. I picture her alone, in a bare and empty flat – but maybe that’s just because that’s how I live. The walls are white, the sink and toilet are white, she uses white soap and a rough white towel to take the dog smell off her angular, yellow body. I imagine her nipples: as small and dark as melanomas.
When I am feeling kinder, I imagine Emma with the dogs. I’ve been to the dogs’ home once before, with Donald. There’s a narrow walkway between rows of wire cages, concrete floors with channels, and glinting metal plugholes. The noise of the dogs barking and throwing themselves against the rattling wire panels and the stink of piss and fur and meat and Jeyes Fluid is nearly overwhelming. I try not to hate Emma, and I imagine the dogs falling quiet as she passes by them with a brush and a tartan blanket that smells of Persil. In this dream life I have made for her they lick her hands and she smiles and talks to them in the high-pitched, expressionless voice she was saving for her children.
Yes. I try not to hate her, and I give her cleanliness and solitude in her white flat, and I give her her dogs, but I don’t call on her and I don’t ask exactly where she lives. I don’t know what she thinks she knows about me and Chloe and I don’t want to know.
‘Well don’t stand me up next time,’ I say weakly, and Emma ignores me. She finishes her wine, holds her glass out to me and smiles, and I push the tap on the box and top it up for her. We stare at the television. The remote control lies between us, untouched.
‘This is just the regional news,’ Emma says. ‘I bet for the rest of the country things are going on as usual.’
I nod, and I can’t tell by the tone of her voice if she thinks this is a bad idea or not. The rest of the country is a vague, fuzzy place. It might not even exist.
Terry is talking about how they date long-buried bodies. There are tests they can do on the organisms of the bacteria on the remains. Any insects or larvae remaining. They know how fast certain materials are supposed to decay. There’s carbon-dating. It is not going to take all that long for people to start putting two and two together.
‘You think all this is going to outshine Chloe?’ Emma says scornfully and gestures towards the screen with her wine glass. ‘After all this time?’
‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘We’ll have to wait and see, I suppose.’
My words hang in the air. Emma turns her attention back to the screen. I feel the wine churning in my stomach. I do not want to wait and see. I want to press stop, but real life, as I am constantly reminded, does not work like that.
Something that often surprised people about Chloe: she loved her cars. She bought Top Gear as well as Just Seventeen, and she knew all the makes and models and engine sizes. Could have had a conversation with anyone about it and held her own, but most of her conversations were with me and Emma, who knew nothing and could only nod. But if she liked her cars, she liked the boys that drove them even more and what she liked best of all was the combination.
When we walked – from one of our houses to the shop for cigarettes and an attempt to buy booze, or from school to one of our houses, or aimlessly around the streets, in circles with arms linked like lovers or old ladies – sooner or later we would hear that sound. A car slowing to draw up beside us on the pavement, the passengers whooping and gesturing and the driver revving the engine as if the mechanical mess under the bonnet that worked the car was part of his body and the growling and pinking of the engine was a language.
She loved it. Even better if the windows were down and the music was booming into the street. Bare forearms hanging out, with palms slapping the outside of the door in a lazy rhy
thm. The boy driving – although he would have seemed like a man to us – jerked his head. Not an invitation, exactly. An appraisal. She’d been passed. All her parts in working order, and fit for a closer inspection some other time.
I can see her posture change – her head lifts and her chin juts, and her eyes dart about: looking, and not looking at the same time. Not wanting to appear too interested, although she jabs me with her elbow and giggles as we turn the corner, and sometimes, turns right around, puts one hand on a cocked hip, and, smiling that brilliant smile of hers, gives them the finger. It is a complicated dance I don’t know the steps for.
What about me? I probably just turned away from the road and walked a bit quicker. I wasn’t shy; I was scared. Donald and Barbara liked to draw my attention to all those stories in the news: young girls dragged into vans, into bushes, ambushed in quiet places, given something nasty to drink and then undressed. They made a nasty incident with a boy, an attack, an assault, a too-rough groping at a disco, sound like a rite of passage I should try to avoid, even though the avoidance of it would be futile: they’d all get me in the end. They would all get all of us in the end. It was a certainty.
Chloe wasn’t scared – whatever was going to happen was going to happen – and she was standing on the pavement grinning at cars and welcoming it with open arms. When I was on my own the cars didn’t come. When I was with Emma and not Chloe, the cars didn’t come. It was her. Her blonde head, which caught the sun, shone and drew the eye. Some smell she had on her. She was willing. There were rumours about her that she took no pains to dispel although I don’t think, despite her raised eyebrows and veiled references, she’d had much experience at all until a man in a mask approached her in the park.
Soon after that she started going with Carl, who had his own car, had a job, topped up the credit on our mobile phones, gave us cigarettes and bottles of orange-flavoured alcohol. Carried mints to freshen Chloe’s breath when she threw up from too many of the bottles. Was generous, sometimes sullen, tolerated me, sometimes Emma, and didn’t like us knowing that he’d quite like to be able to grow a proper moustache.
Cold Light Page 11