Cold Light

by Jenn Ashworth

  It was freezing. More freezing there than it was even in the woods, because the wind was skating across the frozen lid of the water and making my hair fly about and slap my ears. I tucked it all into the back of my hood and walked on. There was a lump in the ice – a disturbance in the flat surface. I walked fast to get to it, squinting to see, and not wanting to look at the same time. My teeth were chattering. It was too cold to hang about here and it was too cold a fortnight ago, and he might have been a bit soft, but if he could have, he would have gone home, or got on a bus, or tried to find a cafe or something when he got cold, and before it got dark, even if Carl had really, really scared him.

  There used to be a wooden jetty thing poking out from the path and onto the water. There was a railing around it, to show it wasn’t for boats. It wasn’t for anything, except walking out over the water right into the middle of the pond. But people were using it for the banned things: feeding the ducks and fishing. And in the summer people used to jump off the end to go swimming. The water at the edge of the pond was too full of reeds and bread and floating carrier bags and pop bottles to wade through, but if you jumped off the edge of the wooden platform you got in where the water was clear. And they took it away – because of the fish and the bread and the jumping – the thinking being that it was only a matter of time before someone took a stupid dive and cracked their head open on the concrete bottom.

  Some of the posts were still there though, and they were sticking out of the top of the ice like trees that had been lopped off before the branches started. The lump in the ice was between the two poles furthest away from the edge. I got as close to where the ice started as I could without stepping on it, and looked. If I’d have been braver, I would have walked out on the ice, or stood on the flat tops of the old wooden poles and used them like stepping stones to get to the middle of the water. I wasn’t that brave. I just leaned forward, and squinted against the wind, and stared at it a bit until the shape resolved itself into an object.

  It was a football. Half a football, really. The other half was under the water, and the skin of the ice had frozen around it and locked it into place. My heart started to rattle. I remembered Wilson’s new Christmas football and I made myself think about the park-keeper or the nature warden or whatever he was called – the man who hauls the bike frames and shopping trolleys out of the pond with a rope, the man who takes the primary school kids around on the stoat and cowslip walks. He’ll have put it in there so he can pull it out later and leave an air hole for the fish. It would make sense to use a football rather than a ping-pong ball or a tennis ball, because this pond is much bigger than most people’s garden ponds – it’s a lake really – and would have more fish in it, and the fish would need more air, and so there would need to be a bigger hole.

  All true facts.

  And I heard my own voice, telling Wilson about ice skating on the lake. Recommending it, saying that what his parents didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. I could call up the picture as easy as anything – Wilson blundering through the woods while Carl called through the trees behind him. Crashing through the undergrowth, branches snapping and sounding like gunshot. He’d have been scared – wanting to get away fast. And when he came out between the trees and saw the pond in front of him, its surface as flat as a pavement, it would have made sense for him to dash right across it rather than wasting time following the path around it. The shortest distance between two parallel points.

  Carl was only chasing him, after all. It was me who’d told him it was safe to walk on the ice. My fault.

  I turned away from the lake and ran off in the opposite direction to the one I’d come in. I slipped on the frosty path, and lurched into the woods again, running through the dark with sticks hitting me in the face and leaves sparkling and sliding under the heels of my trainers.

  When I got onto the main road the cold air was burning my lungs and I pulled my phone out of my pocket and tried to call Chloe. The call went right through to the answer machine. She probably wasn’t allowed to have it with her in the hospital, or she’d turned it off and put it under her mattress because she didn’t want her parents to find it. I guessed at the time, checked a bus timetable and finally gave up and telephoned Carl.

  He answered right away. I could hear loud music, someone laughing.

  ‘Carl,’ I said, and I was still panting. Probably sounded to him like one of those dirty hoax callers.

  ‘What’s up?’ he said, in his funny, bored voice. ‘What are you calling me for, little girl?’

  I felt humiliated and angry. This whole adventure had been to get him into trouble and show Chloe how much better off she’d be without him. Instead, all I’d done was find out that I was probably responsible for something terrible happening myself. And Carl was the only one I could rely on to pick me up and tell me what to do.

  ‘Where are you? I need you to come and get me.’

  ‘I can’t hear what you’re saying. What is it?’

  His friends were with him. I could hear the sound of the car engine revving too, and imagined him doing handbrake turns in a supermarket car park, taking his hand off the wheel to make an opening and closing beak in the air. I swallowed, tried to think clearly.

  ‘Hurry up, I’ve got another call waiting.’ I heard him chewing on something, the sound of his mouth working against the handset. ‘Lola? What are you after?’

  ‘Chloe’s ill,’ I said at last, ‘she’s in hospital. You’ve got to come and meet me right now.’

  ‘What is it?’ he said, more seriously. The music faded.

  ‘I’m at Cuerden,’ I said. ‘Come right now. I need a lift.’

  ‘Cuerden? What are you doing there?’

  Carl sounded scared. The music in the background stopped abruptly.

  ‘Just come quick, will you? I’m fucking freezing.’

  I hung up, went and sat on the bench, and crossed my fingers. Chloe normally managed to get Carl to do what she wanted, so he must be quite stupid.

  He arrived fifteen minutes later and shoved the passenger side door open while he was still pulling into the kerb.

  ‘What’s up with Chloe?’ Carl said. ‘Has she done something to herself?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I was supposed to be meeting her tonight,’ he looked at his watch, ‘after her mum and dad go to sleep. Is Emma with you?’

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘Chloe’s in the hospital, she can’t meet you.’

  ‘What’s she done?’

  ‘She thought she might be pregnant, but it’s all right, she isn’t,’ I said.

  Carl shook his head, and laughed quietly. ‘Silly cow. She turned up at the hospital for that?’

  He pulled out and started to drive back towards the city centre.

  ‘It wasn’t that, nothing to do with that. It was something else,’ I said quickly. ‘I don’t know what exactly. An infection.’

  Carl didn’t say anything – as if Chloe being ill was my fault.

  ‘She’s going home tomorrow morning. It wasn’t anything serious.’

  I tried laughing but in the car it sounded really fake and it made me cringe. ‘You know what she’s like,’ I said, and swallowed hard.

  ‘Did she tell anyone about it? Did she tell anyone about me?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.

  Chloe was probably explaining all about Carl to Amanda and Nathan right now. Still, there was no need to tell him that. The lights on the dashboard were blinking green and red and I wanted to find out which ones belonged to the heater, but I didn’t dare. I pushed my feet against the bottom of the car. A crisp packet crackled loudly and I lifted my bum off the seat to get the poster out of my pocket to show to him.

  ‘Does anyone know you called me?’ Carl said, and jerked his hand out to adjust the heating. He talked too loudly – almost shouting. That, and his elbow jabbing me as he twisted the dial made me jump and drop the folded paper. It dropped between my knees, down into the dark and I bent over
to get it.

  ‘I want to show you,’ I said, and I was struggling and unfastening my seatbelt. ‘I want you to look at this. It’s that boy who we saw on Boxing Day.’

  I straightened up and offered him the paper, still folded and warm from my back pocket, but he knocked my arm away as he turned the steering wheel to navigate a roundabout.

  I didn’t think much of Carl but he was a grown-up, and yet somehow one of us too. He was moody and unpredictable and he said really horrible things to me sometimes, but when we’d all had a drink he’d put his arms around mine and Chloe’s shoulders and say we were ‘his girls’. Of all the people I knew, Carl was someone who knew what to do with a secret – especially one that might get you into trouble.

  ‘Who else did she tell?’ We stopped jerkily at a set of traffic lights. ‘Stop waving that paper about and answer me.’

  He did shout then, and lift home or not, I put my hand on the door handle.

  ‘How would I know? You don’t have to be such an arsehole, Carl. You’re not my boyfriend.’

  There were a few moments of silence, during which I cried a little. Carl didn’t reach out a hand and touch me, or pat my back or anything like that. He smiled. I could smell fags and something spicy on his breath or in his clothes. His face was pale and it looked blue in the dark.

  It’s never properly dark, not in cities. The streetlamps and shop windows throw their light up into the air in a hundred thousand pinpricks that stain the night green and yellow.

  The lights changed and we started moving again. He turned off the main road before he should have, and in a few minutes he’d parked under the arches of the bridge that goes over the Ribble.

  ‘I’ll take you home in a bit.’

  He waited for me to stop crying and after a few minutes lit a cigarette, lit a second one from the glowing tip of the first, tapped my shoulder and made me take it.

  ‘Talk,’ he said, ‘slowly.’

  I gulped at the smoke, burning my throat and swallowing back a cough so he wouldn’t laugh at me.

  ‘I’ve done something,’ I said, ‘I’ve done something terrible. I’ve got to go to the police. I’m going to get locked up.’

  I was still finding it hard to get myself under control. I carried on sucking at the cigarette and the car slowly filled with smoke. Carl used his thumb and his first finger to rub his eyebrows.

  ‘For God’s sake. Show me your bit of paper, then,’ he said.

  I wanted to go home. Even if it did mean getting a taxi and hoping it was Donald and not Barbara up to pay for it when I got back. But this was important. It was about Wilson, not me. I was going to do the right thing even if Carl did shout at me and behave like a prick – which was nothing unusual or surprising because he was always like that to me, and even worse to Chloe.

  Carl had his hand out. The ends of his fingers were as wide as his knuckles and his nails were chewed short. I gave him the paper and didn’t talk, let him have some peace to look at it. Carl’s lips moved as he read and when he’d finished with it, he folded it up along its creases like it was a map.

  ‘I heard about that,’ he said. He put his hands on the steering wheel as if the car was moving and we were driving somewhere, flexing and unflexing his elbows. ‘It’s been on the telly.’

  ‘It’s that boy we met on Boxing Day,’ I said, ‘the one you chased away.’

  I tried not to sound accusing, but it came out like that anyway.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Carl said, ‘it’s just some Mong. They all look like that.’

  ‘It’s him,’ I said, ‘he told me his name.’

  ‘I forgot you talked to him,’ Carl said. He didn’t say anything else for a long time.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I talked to him and we were chatting about the pond, and the ice – the frozen top. You know how at our school we all go out there, and skid across it and that?’

  Carl didn’t reply. I caught myself chewing my hair, and I tucked it behind my ears and felt the soggy end of it stick to my cheek.

  ‘I told him to go out on the ice – just for a laugh. I thought he might like it. And then you chased him off – and he was probably scared – you said you were going to batter him, and so he ran right out onto the pond and,’ I gulped again, and Carl motioned for me to put the cigarette out in an empty Coke tin he was holding between his thighs, ‘he went through. His ball is there, right in the top of the ice. Frozen in. I saw it.’

  For a long while, Carl didn’t say anything. I wondered what he was thinking. He might have been coming up with a plan.

  ‘What were you doing poking about in the bushes anyway? This time of night?’

  I shrugged and Carl seemed to accept it. ‘I think we should go and explain,’ I said. ‘I think we should ring the number on the poster.’

  ‘We? Nah,’ he said, and laughed. He moved his face nearer to mine and I could see the wet of his eyeballs and the gleam of the gold chain he wore around his neck. I followed it with my eyes down to where it disappeared into his tee-shirt. Chloe told me that he never took it off, even when he was in the bath. Like she’d know.

  ‘But this is important,’ I said, and I heard myself in the dim hollow of the car, whining over the hum of the heater, even though when I formed the words in my mind I wanted them to sound reasonable.

  ‘Oh, I know it is,’ Carl said, and instead of moving back away from me he came in even closer until his arm was pressed against mine. He was holding onto the edge of my seat. The car was getting hotter and the warm air was hitting me in the face, blowing my fringe about, and I wanted to rub my eyes, which felt sticky, but I kept my hands still.

  ‘You’ve done a daft thing,’ he said, and I nodded, ‘but it isn’t like you meant it. Isn’t like you pushed him out there with your bare hands, is it? You never touched him.’

  I started to tell him again about the football and what it meant, but Carl brushed my lips with fingers that smelled like fags and curry, and I stopped talking.

  ‘I know you’re not like Chloe,’ Carl said, and touched my hand. ‘She can be a bit… overdramatic. It’s her age. You’re much more sensible though.’

  ‘Sensible. Thanks. Great.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that. I mean,’ he paused, ‘you think things through before you dive in. You’re careful not to get yourself into a mess you won’t be able to talk your way out of.’ He smiled at me.

  ‘We need to tell them,’ I said, ‘because if they find out from someone else it’ll look like we were trying to hide something.’

  ‘No one saw us with him, so who’s going to tell?’ said Carl. ‘The way I see it, there’s no point involving ourselves if we don’t have to.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘It was dead. Everyone was tucked up in the house sleeping off their Chrimbo dinners.’

  ‘There were those guys near Asda. The vigilantes?’

  Carl sighed with exaggerated patience. ‘So say someone did see us? Goes to the police, gives them our description? It’s a nogoer. You were at Chloe’s house. She was at your house. I was nowhere near. It’s all worked out, isn’t it?’

  I nodded slowly.

  ‘But I’ve no way of proving it,’ Carl said easily, ‘and when I come to think of it – Chloe doesn’t either. And neither do you, if we’re going to split hairs,’ he smiled at me, ‘but even that doesn’t have to be a problem. Look. Say the police came around to your house tonight. Say you turned the corner and there they were, outside the house. You go in and there’s two of them sitting on your mother’s suite, and they’ve come that sudden she hasn’t even been able to clear your father away.’

  He stopped to let me picture it, and I did.

  ‘So you go in there, and they ask what you were up to on such and such a day. Where did you go? Who were you with? Who did you talk to? Normally, you might get away with saying that you can’t remember. But this is Boxing Day that they’re asking about. Everyone knows what they were up to on Boxing Day. You see what I mean?’
r />   ‘Yeah, but—’

  He interrupted me. ‘You can get your mum to swear you were in the house with her all day and all night. She’s got to say it straight out, without even looking at you. They’ll dig into it. She’ll have to be ready to name the television programmes you watched, tell them what you had for tea, what time you went to bed, whether you got up for a piss in the night. Do you think your mum would do that for you?’ He didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘Mine would,’ he said, ‘which is why I’m not worried.’

  The idea of Barbara lying to anyone at all (the truth hurts, does it?) was unimaginable: the police, even less. Barbara took cups of tea out to the traffic wardens checking the residents’ permits on our street. She wasn’t like Carl’s mum. She was respectable. What would Amanda say? Chloe always managed to get her own way. She’d think of something.

  ‘No one’s going to find out,’ Carl said, waving his hand lazily in an arc. ‘You don’t need to worry about that Mong. He’s not going to be telling anyone your name, is he? Not if you’re right about what’s happened.’ His hand flopped down onto my knee and perched there for a second before squeezing then moving on through the air. ‘About what you made happen.’

  ‘I thought you said it wasn’t my fault. That I never touched him?’

  ‘Don’t get worked up. Figure of speech,’ he paused, ‘but it wasn’t me telling him to go skating, was it?’

  I wound down the window, threw out the cigarette. Carl offered me another and I shook my head.