Cold Light

by Jenn Ashworth

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said, ‘just need to phone work. Tell them when I’m next in.’

  ‘Buy me some pop while you’re out there,’ Chloe demanded. Amanda looked over her shoulder at Nathan as he left, counting the coins in his palm.

  ‘He won’t know what to get,’ she said weakly. ‘I’d better do it. Won’t be two ticks, girls,’ she said, her heels clacking on the hard floor as she hurried after him. ‘You’ll look after her, won’t you, sweet?’

  I didn’t get time to answer before she was gone.

  ‘No fucking way he’s ringing work,’ Chloe said bitterly. ‘Bet you any money he’s on the phone to that primary school teacher.’ Something occurred to her and she smiled. ‘I bet I’ve ruined his plans. He was supposed to be at a,’ she drew a heavy pair of quotation marks in the air, copying Terry, ‘health and safety presentation tonight.’

  ‘Chloe, that’s that man we saw on Boxing Day,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, be quiet,’ she said, shaking her head.

  ‘It is,’ I said. ‘I talked to him. He had a football. It was definitely him.’

  ‘So?’ She shrugged.

  ‘What if he’s dead? What if we were the last people to see him? Carl chased him off, didn’t he? You can’t let him—’

  ‘You heard what they said,’ she interrupted me. ‘He probably ran into those vigilante guys and got duffed up a bit. He’ll be too embarrassed to go home.’

  ‘Chloe…’

  ‘Not. My. Problem.’

  Was it possible? Could it be that Wilson really had run away from Carl straight into that group of men and got himself into trouble that way?

  I thought about them, standing around near the camper van in the Asda car park. They were cold, and lazy, and there to get their pictures taken and rant a bit to the journos, and then go home and get a pat on the back from their wives and girlfriends. I bet they’d spent more time on the sign on the side of the van than they had on the actual search. It wasn’t likely they’d actually find the flasher, not like Terry was saying.

  And if they did find someone, what would they do to him? Rough him up a bit, certainly, but kill him? These were adults Terry was talking about. A community action group he’d endorsed himself. It wasn’t possible. But I knew, one way or the other, Wilson had never made it out of those woods. And I knew, and the knowledge was sneaking into my gut like cold water, that it wasn’t the group of lazy vigilantes we’d seen in the Asda car park that day who were going to be held responsible – but that it was me, Chloe and Carl.

  ‘We shouldn’t have to take the blame for something Carl did,’ I said.

  Chloe turned her head and looked at me. ‘I never spoke to him. You were the one getting cosy with him. You were the one that went off into the woods with him.’

  ‘We were looking for his ball.’

  Chloe snorted.

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘He was talking about tits, and jailbait. Course it was like that.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. We’ve got to say. We saw him last. Carl scared the shit out of him. Look, I’ve got this poster.’ I pulled the hard triangle out of my pocket and started to unfold it but Chloe knocked it out of my hand.

  ‘Take that away,’ she said suddenly, ‘it’s nothing to do with us.’

  ‘If we went to the police now,’ I said, ‘you’d get to go on the television. We could say, if you like, that you talked to him last instead of me. Then they’d definitely want to interview you. You’d probably get to go on Terry’s show.’

  I remembered I’d tried this with her once before when I was trying to convince her to report the flasher. She hadn’t listened to me then, but it was worth a try. Everyone knew Chloe would love to go on the telly.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  Chloe continued to inspect the frayed ends of her hair.

  ‘Carl did something to him,’ I said. ‘I know he’s your boyfriend and it’s not your fault he’s done something daft, but you can’t let yourself be dragged down with him.’

  ‘Never mind about Carl,’ she said. She started playing with the charm bracelet on her wrist, twisting it around and around, as if she was giving herself a Chinese burn. Charm bracelet. A charmed life.

  ‘You just don’t want Nathan and Amanda to know about him,’ I said, and huffed, ‘that’s so selfish.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ Chloe said. She helped herself to another soft centre. Her eyelashes were sticky and she was chewing rapidly. ‘I told you he was a perv,’ she said, and started picking at the raw skin around her fingernails.

  ‘He wasn’t,’ I insisted.

  Chloe laughed and looked away from me. ‘They all are,’ she said, and shook her head as if the thoughts were cobwebs clinging to her hair.

  ‘He just liked chatting to people.’

  She shook her head again. ‘He should talk to people his own age,’ she said, and rubbed the back of her neck. ‘It’s weird. Chatting girls up.’

  There was something I wanted to say – a thought or a feeling that I couldn’t grab onto quick enough. For Wilson, Chloe and me and girls like us were just the right age – the same age that he felt he was. He’d have no more wanted anything to do with girls his own age than we would have wanted to socialise with our fathers’ friends. But the idea was foggy so I said nothing, and Chloe took it for agreement.

  ‘I bet he was watching me and Carl in the car,’ Chloe said, ‘probably having a wank behind a hedge the whole time. He took you off into the bushes, talked about your tits.’ She lifted her thumb to her lips and bit. I’ve seen her tear strips of skin away from the flesh with her teeth, and lick away the blood without flinching. She would never dream of biting her fingernails and spoiling her nail polish, but she chewed at her skin until her school books were covered with bloody fingerprints.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘no. I think we should say something. You’re just trying to keep Carl out of trouble. It wasn’t like that. He wasn’t like that.’

  Chloe turned in the bed quickly, and tucked her knees under her. I heard her joints cracking.

  ‘Shut up about Carl!’ she said, too loudly. The woman in the bed opposite her stared, put a finger over her mouth and shushed. Chloe smiled back until she had her full attention and then slowly mouthed the the f-word at her.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re so interested in defending him all of a sudden,’ she said. ‘Why would you even care? He’s nothing to us. Not unless something did go on in the woods… eh?’ She giggled, and carried on in a low, regular voice that it was impossible to interrupt or ignore. When Chloe gets onto something, she won’t let it go.

  ‘Are you that desperate for a boyfriend? I knew you were jealous, but I didn’t know it was that bad. Shanks not giving you the cheap thrills anymore? I saw you, peeping through the car window to see what me and Carl were up to. Did you tell him to take you into the woods and give you a fingering? Did you like it? Did you get a Mong to pop your cherry and now you’re feeling bad about it?’

  ‘All right, girls?’ We heard Amanda before we saw her, clicking along the corridor and complimenting the nurses on the Christmas decorations in the ward – ‘Very festive!’ Before she took her seat beside Chloe, she leaned over the television and changed the channel. Terry had gone out in a crescendo of theme tune and left Fiona listing the schools that were closed due to the bad weather. No one complained.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ Chloe said.

  ‘He had to go back to the office. Something there that needed dealing with.’ Amanda’s eyes were red and it embarrassed me to look at her. ‘He said he’d call by tomorrow morning, and he sent his love.’

  Chloe looked at me knowingly and laughed.

  ‘He said he’d leave me some money for some more magazines.’

  ‘Did he? Oh, I don’t think—’

  ‘Did you get my pop?’

  Chloe held her hand out, a little white paw. Amanda put a bottle of fizzy water into it.

  ‘That’ll have to do. You know the doctor says y
ou’ve to lay off it – stick to water until everything’s clear.’

  Chloe took a deep breath, was about to start – I could see it coming. And something came over me.

  ‘Oh,’ I said slowly, ‘a urinary tract infection.’ Amanda nodded.

  ‘Well, I bet that’s a weight off your mind,’ I said. ‘You were really scared, weren’t you?’ I turned my back on Chloe. ‘She thought she was going to get in all kinds of trouble.’

  My hands, still in my lap, were trembling. Too late to stop now though. Amanda was staring at me.

  ‘What do you mean, trouble? She wouldn’t get in trouble for getting ill,’ Amanda said.

  ‘She thought Carl might have given her something,’ I said brightly. I remembered the word on the inside of the toilet door, and heard Chloe’s teeth grinding.

  ‘Chlamydia. Unwanted pregnancy. Something like that. But an infection, well, that’s nothing, is it? Did she get it from Carl, or could she not narrow it down that much?’

  I stood up, pulled the collar of my jacket up against my neck and put my chair neatly at the end of the bed.

  ‘Who’s Carl?’ Amanda said, with a little less enthusiasm, and not looking at me. Chloe went red, and squirmed in the bed, but attached to that drip, she couldn’t go anywhere.

  ‘Some lad,’ I said, and edged away. ‘He’s all right. He’s got a really nice car.’

  ‘Car?’ Amanda said faintly. She reached up and pulled at one of her earrings. I’d forgotten to check, but I noticed them then, twirling under her fingers: black enamelled cats wearing red and white Santa hats and clutching mistletoe above their heads in the end of their tails. The berries on the mistletoe glittered. Glass, or cubic zirconia.

  What made me do that? I knew better than anyone else that the game was there to be played – there was no half-time, the rules were set in stone and no one ever, ever got a second chance.

  There were two full years of school before I met Chloe. Years when I was bumped and jostled. My bag thrown down the stairwells. The boys did that, and it wasn’t too bad. The girls would come up to me, concerned. Touch my arm gently, and smile. Tell me, in a hushed voice, that there was a spot of blood on the back of my skirt and did I know about it. Every day. Sometimes twice a day. You couldn’t ignore something like that. It was impossible not to put your hand up, ask to go to the toilet. Slide the bolt closed in the cubicle, pull everything down with trembling hands and check. Then the long slow trip back to the classroom – teachers asking me if I had a gastric condition amid girls’ laughter smothered only by the shining curtains of their hair. Always Maxi scrawled on in red felt-tip pen, and stuck to the back of my jumper by their adhesive wings.

  Two and a half years, then Chloe arrived in my form, transferred from another school.

  ‘It wasn’t meeting my needs,’ she’d said.

  She’d been kicked out. Was on her last chance. There was a spare chair next to me that no one else wanted to sit in. Because it was her first day she didn’t know she was supposed to sit somewhere else too. We became friends. Other girls liked her or were scared of her. They started to leave me alone.

  Chloe saved me. We had a special bond and she was ruining it, and it was all because of Carl. I thought about him and as I sat on the edge of Chloe’s hospital bed with that poster and the stupid Brook leaflet jabbing me through my pocket, Emma’s penguin dangling over my head, I snapped.

  ‘Where does this Carl live?’ Amanda was saying. I might as well have not been there, except Chloe wasn’t looking at her mother but leaning forward in the bed and shooting me a boiling look that made me want to leg it.

  ‘Forget it,’ Chloe said. ‘Just shut up.’

  ‘Chloe,’ Amanda wailed, ‘your father’ll have to hear about this. Just wait until he gets back from his meeting…’

  Chloe scrabbled at the sheets and it was only the tube attaching her to the drip that stopped her getting out of bed completely and coming for me. I ignored the feeling in my stomach, turned, and ran.

  Chapter 16

  When I got out of the hospital it was properly dark. I checked how much money I had left and decided to get to Cuerden on my own and retrace Wilson’s path through the woods myself. I knew it was far too dark to be out at night and I was going to have to switch buses at the station and it would take me ages and ages to get there and get home again. I knew that I was going to get a roasting when I got home, but compared to what I knew I had coming from Chloe, a grounding from Barbara was nothing. I was mad enough to feel invincible and I was determined that I was going to find something to implicate Carl in Wilson’s disappearance. It shouldn’t be too difficult, after all – we were there, weren’t we? That was the truth. And Carl chased him off into those woods. All I needed to find (I skipped through hazily remembered plots of Columbo in my mind as I paced in the bus shelter) was a dropped cigarette packet. A set of tyre tracks. Something, anything, to prove that he was there even if Chloe was stupid enough to stick up for him and say he wasn’t.

  When the 125 left the station it was empty. I sat at the back, lit a cigarette and tried to blow smoke rings at my reflection in the window. I thought about Wilson. It would not be nice if he was still there in the woods, if he fell down and hurt himself running away from Carl. I started to feel sick because I was thinking about Wilson lying in the wet plants and leaf-skeletons, lying from Boxing Day afternoon until now, even through New Year’s Eve: the night when there are parties everywhere, and fireworks in the sky, and drinking and party poppers and no one was supposed to be on their own. I imagined the creatures that would scuttle out from under the leaves and about his hurt hand hanging onto his new ball and the wrinkly, lookingafter hands, waiting for him at home for all this time. I think I might have been enjoying myself, in some horrible way, but I stopped myself as soon as I started trying to imagine his mother.

  Most people who run away and go missing are young girls. They were like me. No, they were like Chloe – they have older boyfriends and they go out at night too much. And then someone grabs them and takes them away in a van. Or they are young girls whose parents are too busy drinking and injecting themselves to notice that they haven’t been to school but have got on a train and gone to London. Don’t notice until their girl has been swallowed up into the grey of the pavements and the big buildings and the all-night clubs of the capital city, hundreds of miles away. I could do it, I thought. That idea, or the smoke, made me dizzy. That is what happens. They hardly put it on the news anymore. What does not happen, I decided, blowing smoke at the corner of the little window, is grown-up men vanishing. Even if they are a bit funny, like a Mong, like Wilson is, going out with their football and then never coming home. Especially at this time of year.

  I ran across the car park with my hood up in case anyone else was there. Didn’t stop to look at the stoat and the cowslip on the sign. To me, it felt safer in the woods than it was in the car park.

  When we were driving here on Boxing Day, Carl told Chloe that people go to this car park in their cars at night to have sex. And sometimes, he said, they leave the lights inside the car on and one of the back windows open so that people can stand about and watch and even put their hands through the window if they feel like it.

  ‘It’s called dogging,’ he said, and looked over his shoulder at me – he wanted to see if I’d heard and was blushing.

  Chloe laughed. ‘That’s so weird!’

  I nearly told Chloe he was just making it up and trying to put ideas in her head. He was obviously trying to acclimatise her for something he was planning on doing to her himself, but as usual, they were in the front so speaking to the backs of their heads would have been pointless. Before I could say anything he had turned the music up loud and revved the engine.

  That night there was a car in the car park but it was dark inside and I couldn’t see if anyone was in it. I ran past it anyway, leapt over a ridge in the soil, and was in the woods. The moonlight coming through the trees was bluish and faint. I couldn’t see my
legs because I was wearing jeans, but my white trainers flashed in and out in front of me as I stepped. When I stood still it was absolutely silent until my ears got used to the space and then I could hear cars somewhere far away. And when I moved, the crack of sticks and the rustle of frozen leaves was almost deafening. I tried to tiptoe, but that made it worse.

  It was stupid, being there. Stupid being in a dark place on my own at night, even though I had my house keys with me. The keys had a little metal ornament on them that was shaped like an upside-down tear-drop. When the attacks had first started, me and Chloe had scraped the edge of the tear-drop into a point against a wall. I held it in my hand inside my pocket and tested the point against my thumb. It didn’t hurt, but I thought if I needed to, I could take someone’s eye out with it.

  I saw nothing, and as I went on it got darker. The things in the undergrowth that caught my eye, that I thought might be something to do with Carl, turned out to be plastic carrier bags caught against twigs, a curved piece of green and yellow plastic, and hundreds and hundreds of crisp packets. An old chest freezer was there, along with a bike frame and an old buggy and a mattress that someone had tried to set fire to. It all smelled rank and catty, and as I knew these things weren’t evidence of anything I walked right past them to find the path and follow the steps downwards out of the trees and onto the cleared and gravelled walkway that goes around the pond.

  In the summer there are ducks and plants and things, and it is a nice place to come and walk about. There used to be loads of ducklings too, but someone got sick of their pet terrapins, released them into the water and, the story goes, every spring the terrapins swim about under the surface and snap the legs off the little birds swimming on the top. I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve never seen them.

  That night it was frozen solid, just like I’d told Wilson. Like everyone else, I’d made promises to Barbara and Donald that I would never, ever walk on the pond when it was frozen. All our parents made us swear down that we wouldn’t do it. Out of the trees it was a bit lighter and I could see stones and cans and big sticks lying on top of the ice. People do it all the time. Throw heavy things onto it as hard as they can. If it doesn’t break – if it doesn’t crack at all – then it is all right to walk on. Someone had even chucked a hub-cap out there. I could see the grooves where it had skidded across the top. I went around the outside carefully, not looking for anything anymore, but shivering and stamping my feet against the sparkle of frost growing on the path. The metal poles with the signs on had scales of ice on them and I remembered the boy who licked one of them to see if his tongue would stick, for a dare.