Cold Light

by Jenn Ashworth

  ‘You’ll have to tell Carl, then,’ I said quickly, being practical instead of touching her. ‘Get him to find out. There’s a tablet you can take. He might be able to get it for you. Maybe he’s got a friend who’s got a girlfriend who’s older than us. She can go to the doctor and say that she needs it. Then she can get it and give it to Carl. And he can give it to you. I’ve got some Christmas money left over if there’s a prescription charge. You can have it for that if you like.’

  ‘What if it’s loads?’

  ‘Carl can give it to you, can’t he? He should at least go halves with you?’

  Saying that made me think of one of the chat-up lines that the boys had been going round with. Not that someone had said it to me, but I had overheard boys saying it to Chloe.

  What happened was this: one of the boys would sit next to a girl and chat to her for a bit about other things. Like homework or music or someone else who they both knew. That was usually how it worked. Then when the other boys had edged closer so that they could hear, he would look at the girl quite seriously and say, ‘Feel like going halves on a bastard?’

  This was the boys’ version of ‘let’s be friends’ and they thought that it was the funniest thing anyone had ever said. It got to a point where people were saying it to each other about five or six times in every lesson and even the teachers had heard about it.

  ‘I can’t tell Carl. He’ll go mad.’

  I forgot to whisper.

  ‘Well it’s his fault, isn’t it? How can he go mad? Did he not make sure it was – you know – covered, or anything?’

  Chloe looked horrified.

  ‘You are such a perv!’ she said.

  ‘Well you have to do something about it,’ I said, ‘other than sit crying.’

  Chloe stood up. She reached behind me and opened the door.

  ‘Thanks for all your support,’ she said, emphatically biting down on the ‘t’. ‘Just leave me alone and I’ll deal with it myself. You tell anyone and I swear to God you’ll regret it.’

  I was speechless for a second or two. Couldn’t think of what to say, and didn’t know what I had said that was so wrong. Chloe’s hair-trigger temper shocked me even though I should have been used to it, and underneath it all I had the nagging feeling that there was something else going on that she wasn’t telling me about.

  Chloe was right out of the toilets and along the corridor before I could pick up my bag and get out of the cubicle. The girls under the mirror had gone. I washed my hands even though I hadn’t been, because I had touched the handle on the outside of the door and the bolt on the inside and the holder for the toilet roll and all of those places are crawling with germs.

  I didn’t see Chloe for the rest of the day. When afternoon registration was over we usually went to the neck of the corridor where the school turned into the leisure centre, and bought Skips and Kit-Kats and Coke from the vending machines in the atrium before taking our separate ways home. I waited there for her but not for very long. Our school wasn’t the sort of place where it was all right to hang around on your own for any length of time, especially for me. I knew Chloe had things on her mind, important things, but they weren’t any reason to fly off the handle when all I was doing was trying to help. It was all down to Carl, anyway. Obviously. That day was the first time I’d seen or heard from her since Boxing Day, and she hadn’t even asked me how I was, which, considering how she had been acting since she’d been letting Carl knock her off, was just rich.

  And he hadn’t even been knocking her off!

  I couldn’t even tell what was so good about Carl anyway. I felt the plastic lump of the mobile phone in my pocket and wanted to throw it away. That was him as well. Some plastic piece of shit from Chloe, as if I was meant to be grateful. And other things too, like lifts in the car, and CDs or videos or packets of fags sometimes. Just to get Chloe to let him poke her, and make sure I didn’t say anything to anyone because he was clearly too old for her.

  And he wasn’t even good-looking, either. He had horrible greasy hair and the white shirts he had to wear for work were all grey at the collar, and he had spots on his neck, and even if he did have a car, it was a shit car. I tried to imagine him shagging Chloe in it. I couldn’t believe they’d gone back out on Boxing Day after they’d dropped me off. That made me feel something. I remembered the scary atmosphere in the car all the way home, which I’d thought was down to Wilson getting on Carl’s nerves but it wasn’t to do with Wilson, it was to do with me, who was in the way.

  So what happened then? I was half way to the bus stop, walking fast because it was freezing and I’d lost my gloves. Probably the two of them went and parked round the back of some garage and did it with the engine in the car still running. I tried to think what Carl would have looked like with no clothes on.

  I’d seen his chest before. Just once, when he was taking his work shirt off in the car and putting on a tee-shirt instead because he was going to take the two of us out for a burger. It was all white and thin, you could see the moles on his ribs and the fat brown lumps of his nipples. He probably didn’t take his clothes off completely when he did it with Chloe, it was too cold for that. I thought about the jutting-out bones of his hips, and the black semi-circles of dirt under his fingernails. I had a feeling. I can’t describe it. Like a trickle of warm water down my back and over the skin of my arms. I tried out the thought again: Carl, lifting his bum off the seat so he could flick his belt open. The feeling came again, but weaker this time.

  I put my hood up, licked my cracked lips, and decided to think about how to get Chloe away from Carl, and make everything go back to normal, as good as it had been in the summer. There was still hope: after all, it was me who she’d confided in. She’d asked for my help – mine – not Carl’s, not even Emma’s. Even if there was more to the story than she was telling me, half a secret is better than no secret at all and this was her way of letting me know I was special to her, and that she needed me. And that was true even if her worry made her phrase it badly, made her moodier and more abrupt than she might have been otherwise.

  Chapter 13

  When I got in to school for morning reg the first thing I noticed was how much more noise there was than usual. But I was in a good mood and didn’t catch any of the excited conversations taking place around me until later. I was feeling sparky and determined to sort Chloe out. I had an advert for the Brook Advisory Centre which I had torn out of my magazine and kept safe between the pages of my homework diary to show Chloe when we were on our own. The free phone number on the advert was printed in a friendly, loopy font that looked like handwriting, and when I’d rung it I’d found out the nearest clinic was in Manchester. Confidentiality Guaranteed. Chloe was going to be so pleased I’d worked out a way to solve her problem without involving anyone she didn’t want to know. It would really show her that I was her true friend and not Emma. And once we’d sorted out her problem, I could get to work on getting rid of Carl, just by pointing out that he was the one who had caused the trouble and she hadn’t trusted him to help her. She’d had to rely completely on me.

  The room was an art room during the day when the classes were on but in the morning it was just a classroom with the paint and clay packed away in lockable cupboards. Rightly, they didn’t trust us and kept everything interesting locked up so that no one could mess about with it when we were supposed to be sitting still and answering our names on the register, listening to daily devotion and collecting passes for free school dinners (me) and detentions (Chloe). But that day everyone was out of their seats and I couldn’t see Chloe anywhere. They were all talking at once and I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I just caught the mood of it, which was excited and pleased and a bit nasty. It was the same kind of feeling there had been in the air when someone looked out of the wide windows in the side of the Geography block and saw two dogs mating on the football pitch – right there in the middle of the astro-turf. That had been bedlam although when I glanced through the p
aint- and spitspeckled window I didn’t see anything except seagulls in the yard swooping and pecking at crisp packets.

  I walked very slowly towards the moving crowd of black blazers and blue pullovers. I walked and looked at the drawings of apples and lightbulbs and screwed-up pieces of newspaper stuck to the walls. I was hoping Shanks would come in and order us all into our seats before I reached the middle of the room.

  ‘Is it that pest?’ I asked no one in particular. ‘Has he started up again?’

  No one answered, the knot of bodies was thick. School was all right as long as there were teachers around to keep everything reasonable. I stepped slowly, wondering if the pest had got one of us. It was possible. Two of the earliest victims had been pupils at the girls’ school round the corner. I imagined the man in the Halloween mask loitering in the woods where we ran for cross-country and felt a secret, shivery thrill. Then I heard someone say something about Chloe.

  There was only one person sitting down and everyone else was gathered around her like they were waiting for her to sign an autograph. Emma. Emma was fast turning into the sort of girl who wears a black lacy bra under her white school shirt just so that when she takes off her jumper everyone can see it She was opening and closing her school bag as if there was something inside that was much more interesting than anything else.

  ‘I was going to go in the ambulance,’ she said, looking at her bag instead of anyone in particular, ‘but they didn’t know what was wrong with her. Could have been contagious.’

  She turned her head and smiled beatifically in answer to a question that I didn’t hear.

  ‘My mum will probably drive me in to visit her after school, if she’s well enough to take visitors. I’ll tell her you said that, shall I? I’m going to organise a collection.’

  I knew they were talking about Chloe – who else would have caused such interest? She could have had a hundred friends if she’d wanted them, but for some reason she preferred to have one at a time, and no one, not even me, could figure out why she’d picked me. Emma looked at me, and I expected some kind of special word, a privileged piece of information.

  ‘I’m here now,’ I wanted to say. ‘I can take charge.’

  Emma smiled comfortably, flicked her coat over her knee, and said nothing.

  She was a fucking liar – her mum wouldn’t be giving her a lift anywhere. Chloe had already let me in on the facts about that. Emma lived in Ashton with her dad and three older brothers – all crammed into a house with not enough bedrooms. She actually shared a bedroom with her seventeen-year-old brother, which was disgusting. Her mum got depressed and left them all when Emma was two. Now, according to Chloe, her dad had got religion and was all right with the boys, but didn’t know what to do with Emma – especially since she ‘started growing up and getting tits, you know?’ I’d seen Emma with her father once, walking between stalls at the school Spring Fayre. He never dared look at her – it was as if she was naked.

  When Shanks came in to read the register he clapped his hands loudly. It made a good sound, a loud, hollow sound. Yesterday, the first day back, we’d had morning assembly so this was the first proper registration of the year and I’d not seen him in ages. He carried on clapping as he walked between the tables and to the front of the classroom, and by the time he was standing in front of his desk, leaning back on it and crossing his legs in front of him, everyone in the class was shuffling quietly to their seats and shoving their bags under the tables.

  He was all right, like that, Mr Shanks. If we’d known his first name we could probably have called him by it when none of the other teachers were around, and he wouldn’t have minded, but wouldn’t have made a big deal out of it either, like he was trying to be our ‘mate’. He was just natural. And also, he always made jokes, but the sort of jokes that it didn’t really matter if you laughed or not. You could just smile at those jokes, or nod a bit, and that was enough, it wasn’t awkward.

  ‘I suppose I can assume from the noise that you’ve all had quiet, God-fearing, homework-filled Christmas holidays and come in fresh as daisies, free from hangovers, and anxious to start work,’ he started.

  A few people who sat on the table along the back of the room groaned and said, ‘Whatever, sir,’ but he only smiled and clicked his fingers at them, making his hands into two little guns at the end of the click which he pointed at the back row, shot, and then blew the imaginary smoke away.

  ‘Chaps and Chapesses, let’s get coats in bags and the registration done before I let you loose on my unfortunate colleagues,’ he said, and reached for his book. There were more groans and shuffling as people reached for their coats, and then hush as he read out the names.

  The school had a ridiculous rule. No one was allowed to carry their coat around with them. There weren’t any cloakrooms so you had to get a locker which cost money for the year, or put it in your bag. And there weren’t enough lockers. My coat was damp because it had snowed that morning: needles of frost flying about in the thickened air and collecting where they fell on my face and my hands and all over the new coat. So the wet coat was going to smudge the writing in the books in my bag and that would be one thing. It was also going to smell like old curtains by the time I got home, and Barbara would be checking it because it was new, and she would notice, and that would be another thing.

  I struggled furiously with the coat and thought about Chloe being off school with a baby and her parents probably knowing everything by now and probably ringing up Barbara and Donald in the middle of the day – or even coming round to see them. They’d have long conversations about bad influences and Debenhams and things getting out of hand, and tell them that Chloe would be moving school again and it was probably best not to keep in touch.

  Barbara would nod and look sympathetic and thank them for taking the trouble, then she would go up the stairs and take all the magazines and posters and hairspray out of my bedroom. I could see it. At the very least I was going to be on my own at school all day, and then back home to get a bollocking about the coat and the books and Chloe. Fucking Emma. I sighed and turned the coat inside out so the wet bit wouldn’t touch my books, then rolled it up as tightly as I could. When I looked up, registration was over, everyone had gone, and Shanks was staring at me.

  ‘You’re working that coat into shreds,’ he observed. ‘Leave it in my office, if you’re so determined to follow the letter of the law.’

  ‘Thanks, sir.’

  We went to his office.

  ‘You’ve heard about Chloe, have you?’ Shanks said, and shook his head.

  I nodded. ‘Emma was—’

  ‘Emma’s her best friend, yes?’

  I didn’t dignify that with a response. ‘She’s gone to the hospital,’ Shanks said. ‘Not to worry though. It isn’t serious. I expect she’ll be back at school within the week.’

  ‘Sir, it’s nothing to do with a baby, is it?’ I asked, and bit my lip as soon as I’d spoken, hoping that he hadn’t heard me.

  Shanks didn’t say anything. He sat down, leaned back on the stool and busied himself rearranging the things on his desk. There were mugs and mugs of pens and pencils and paintbrushes, an ashtray, empty bottles of water and jointed wooden models for drawing and half-eaten apples and jars of elastic bands and all sorts. He pulled them backwards and forwards and didn’t look at me. Shanks was the only grown man I’d met since the attacks started who showed no fear at being alone with one of us girls. I remembered the security guard taking his hand off my shoulder like I was a bomb about to explode. Maybe that means Shanks is the pest. The thought of it sent a stream of bubbles rolling down my spine.

  ‘That’s a question, isn’t it?’ he said, and then stopped. I cringed, bit the inside of my cheeks, and waited.

  ‘No,’ he said finally, ‘it isn’t anything to do with a baby. Not hers or anyone else’s. No babies involved. Which, from the look of you, I can see is something of a relief.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and looked at his hands, not moving
the things about in his office anymore, but resting on his knees. There was paint right under his nails, and he hadn’t even started the lessons for the day yet. That must mean he never used a nailbrush, or he painted at home, even before breakfast.

  I imagined him dipping a paintbrush into the soft yolk of an egg and painting something on a slice of toast. I wondered if he had a wife, or a woman who he lived with. Even the friendly teachers were still a bit mysterious. They ended up knowing loads more about us then we did about them, which wasn’t really fair.

  ‘Perhaps, when you do go and see our Chloe,’ Shanks said carefully, ‘you could let her know, in your own inimitable way, with all the compassion and subtlety of your sex –’

  I blushed. I could not believe he had taken me into his back room and just said ‘sex’ to me like that. Chloe was going to have an absolute fit when I told her.

  ‘– that she can pop her head around the door when she comes back if she fancies a chat, about anything. Or perhaps one of the female teachers, if she’d prefer.’

  ‘Can I go?’ I stuttered, not waiting for him to nod before I left the room and hurried, still clutching the damp coat, with my open bag shedding paper and books onto the corridor, to my first class.

  There was supposed to be a bus after school at twenty past three which everyone crammed onto. For three years I had been walking slowly and catching the bus at three forty because it wasn’t as busy. The day Chloe collapsed outside the school gates and was taken away to hospital the first bus must have been delayed or cancelled because even at a quarter to four, the queue meandered out of the shelter and along the pavement. They were other people from school mainly, not friends, but familiar faces – elbowing each other into the path of oncoming traffic or kicking at crisp packets and dented pop cans.

  I’d noticed before that all the same kind of people caught the later bus. It probably wouldn’t be obvious to anyone else, but to us, it was clear what that meant. People who don’t want to be around other people, either waiting for the bus, or actually in the bus. Because we were together but we didn’t want to be together we respected each other’s silence and personal space and that was good. There was no pushing and cramming and spitting on other people’s coats. No girls with pelmet skirts, thigh-high socks, personal stereos and cigarette-smelling hair, crispy with hairspray. The later bus had a different atmosphere. Once everyone was on we sat quietly and had our seats all to ourselves. No one actually read but there was the feeling that we could if we wanted to.