Cold Light

by Jenn Ashworth

  And then? Barbara thinks he overbalanced, or fell asleep in the boat which turned and tipped him out. She thinks he might have beached it somewhere and got out to wade over the flats in search of ‘those creatures of his’. That’s possible. I heard a whisper – something else they tried to keep from me – that when they brought him to the hospital he was barefoot. Perhaps Barbara was right and Donald was wading.

  When Barbara talked and poured coffee and lied to our visitors in the kitchen, I sat in the shed, smoking and watching them through the dirty, paperback-sized window. It wasn’t right, what she was saying. I was sure, even though I’d never know. I could see it.

  Say the reason he was barefoot was because he took off his shoes and socks to pull the boat through the mud on the shore at Morecambe and into the shallows. Yes, it was cold, but he’d have put up with numb feet before he’d have slathered clean socks and shoes with the grey slime sticking to his soles. Barbara was hot on that sort of thing.

  He’d have started the outboard, or perhaps just let himself drift on the water while he waited for it to get light. It was slow – cloudier than he’d expected. He might have cut the engine because he wanted the quiet, or wanted to get rid of the wake in the water that would have disturbed whatever it was he was looking for. He had the black and white disks with him, but knew even before he got out of the car that the water was too churned for that. I don’t think he minded so much. I don’t think he was interested in the light any longer. Not that kind of light. But he went out anyway – looking for something else, and expecting to be lucky.

  Say he let the boat drift and settled back in it, lying back as if the damp bottom was a mattress. Hands behind his head and face to the sky, listening to the noise of the water slapping the sides. Maybe he did fall asleep – the rocking, and being awake so early. Maybe not. There was the thermos, which he didn’t leave in the car, and a cold black ring of coffee on the counter top at home. Barbara had wiped it away and blamed me for it before she realised he was gone.

  I like the idea of him hunching over the lid of the thermos. Holding the cup between his knees and struggling to keep the flask steady with both hands so that he could pour. Burninghot black coffee so laden with sugar the liquid could hold no more – there’d be a film of it in the bottom of the plastic cup. The smell of it along with the sea, the rotting weed, the sticking mud. Very alert, after all that coffee. Not likely to make a mistake. And the weather that morning was dry – the wind was light. He would have been able to hear, very clearly, the plop and splash of a tail or a fin breaking the surface of the water and disappearing before he could turn his head.

  He looked around – scanned the mechanical rakes and pinsized figures back on the exposed sands to his left. The horizon was tilting and shifting like a cock-eyed spirit level as the boat rocked and almost too far away to see: the first shift of cocklers, getting ready before it was quite light. He was too far away to hear them shout to each other in their own language. The machines rumbled – they sounded like cars, not fish. Maybe he thought about the sound a seabird might make as it straightened its neck and hit the water, and while he thought he held himself perfectly still, moving only his eyes and waiting for it to re appear. He waited until he realised no bird could dive so deep and stay under so long. He’d have been excited. A mind full of milky blind eyes, softly glowing tentacles and the Sea Eye. He tipped away coffee and screwed the cup back onto the top of the thermos when he heard it again – a deliberate splash to his left followed by a nudge and a muffled knocking on the underside of the boat.

  Donald would not have been afraid.

  He stood up, reached for his net, the sea lurched and he went in.

  The facts are the facts, and there are few of them. However it happened, the earth sucked the tide and him back in that afternoon and a tug fished him out of the mouth of Heysham Port.

  It’s a frightening, ugly place to hang around. The sky, which even out of the City is still and flat and grey, is cut into by the massive metal shadows of the tankers and the jetties and the black and white lego-block building – all you can see of the power station. There are tubes and towers and filters that you don’t see and they are using gallons of sea-water to cool the waste, and sucking the water out of Morecambe Bay and filtering the sand and the fish and the weed out of it, and then forcing it through the turbine condensers and spitting it out again, into the bay, warm as a bath. You don’t hear a thing – the station works in its own bubble of silence, tucked between a golf course and a caravan park and a nature reserve and the people who work there won’t live there and the horns of the freight carriers boom across the water and can be heard over to the north if the air is still enough. You don’t see any of this happening – this frantic sucking and cooling and making. It’s quiet, where Donald was washed up, although the fishermen complain that fish caught in the out-flows from the power station are halfcooked because of the raised water temperature. I don’t think that can be true. It was a toss-up, you see, whether it was drowning or hypothermia that got Donald in the end. The water’s so shallow in the bay, you can walk across it, some days.

  And I was at school, standing outside the library with Chloe and Emma and fighting over his paperwork. Barbara had already noticed the car was gone and called the police. I think she knew what had happened before the police came because Craig had already rung and told us about the boat. He’d had his breakfast – eggs and HP Sauce – and he wanted to double-check with Donald before reporting the theft. Donald had a bad chest and so had never learned how to swim.

  All through that January, I was helping Donald with his application – rereading his drafts and advising him about grammar. They already had us practising our personal statements for our Record of Achievement with the careers advisor – one session a month each, to discuss our GCSE options and think about future careers. It was easy enough to translate the kind of tone and language I learned there into the reams of hand-written pages Donald referred to as his ‘accompanying documents’. I worked at night, in my room, until the thing was ready to be typed up. I think some of it got into my head. I had nightmares about being trapped in a deep-sea submersible, and drowning.

  Donald, who often wandered about on the landing at odd hours, heard me when I woke and sat on my bed once or twice to tell me about the snow that falls under the sea. He made it sound beautiful. I imagined standing on the sea bed watching it flutter; coloured flakes drifting downwards for miles and resting on the top of my head. Stroking the sides of the fish and collecting on the black backs of huge, slow-moving whales.

  Some things I can’t think about too much. Like the voices I’d heard on the landing one night – a deep, rumbling sobbing noise coming from Donald, and my mother’s voice travelling quite clearly from Donald’s room into my own.

  It must have woken me. That, or another nightmare. I remember hugging my knees in the dark, smelling the washing powder on the duvet.

  ‘Drink your Lemsip,’ she was saying, in a low, expressionless voice. ‘Sit in your chair and have this blanket. Here.’

  Barbara thought Lemsip cured everything from anxiety to measles, and she often used to tuck a sachet into my school bag when I wasn’t looking, just in case.

  ‘Did I make a mistake?’ I heard drawers being opened – paper being shuffled. Not a burglary. Donald was looking for something.

  ‘It’ll come out all right,’ Barbara soothed. ‘Back in your chair. Here, I’ve got this Lemsip for you. Take it now, the mug’s burning my hand.’

  ‘I didn’t make it up, did I, Barbara?’

  I felt bad for listening, but my door was ajar. If I got up to close it she’d have heard me and at that moment I would rather have thrown a brick through a stained glass window than draw attention to my presence in the house.

  ‘Sleep now,’ she said. ‘You didn’t dream it. It’s the best application they’re going to get.’

  There were low, protesting sounds from Donald – but halfhearted. The crisis had pass
ed. Different sounds now – the cupboard on the landing where we kept the towels and sheets being opened, and something being dragged out. I held my breath and tried not to move.

  ‘Sleep now,’ she said. ‘Sit in your chair and sleep for a while. I’ll stay in here with you tonight. Sleep in with you. Look, I’ve got the camp-bed. Drink your Lemsip. Close your eyes.’

  She was more his mother than mine. Always, always and especially when I needed her the most. I haven’t thought about this for a long time. Tenderness so raw it hurts to bring it back, I think – and something passing between my parents – Donald understanding, only for a moment, that there was no such thing as the Sea Eye, that he’d mistaken his wishes for facts, and coming undone about it. I heard Barbara tucking it all back in, so privately that words wouldn’t touch it.

  Chapter 22

  I heard Barbara coming unsteadily down the stairs, turned off the television, and waited. For a moment there was no sound but her slippers dragging on the stair treads and the fizz of the static escaping from the curved blank screen in the dark room. A shaft of light from the kitchen fell over the carpet and stopped at my feet. I could smell the booze on her before she got near me.

  ‘Mum?’

  She threw the pages at me from the doorway. They fluttered. Twice that week someone had thrown a bunch of paper at me. You flinch, even though you know it can’t hurt you, and it’s humiliating. I sat still and the sound of the pages fluttering and settling quickly died away. It reminded me of two things. One, the time Donald and I had been playing Crazy Eights in front of the news, and he’d tried to speak to me about Chloe, and I’d dropped the cards. Two, the final stage in The Crystal Maze, where the contestants have to dive about catching gold and silver pieces of paper as they blow about in the air under a giant plastic dome. They do it for prizes.

  ‘I told you not to encourage him,’ she said. Her voice was hoarse and each word melted into the next, like a bad VHS or a dream: she was drunk.

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said.

  She knelt on the carpet and started gathering the papers – the typed sheets and the pages torn from scrapbooks. She was clumsy, knocked the occasional table with her elbow and swore as the remote controls rained down on her.

  ‘He didn’t type all this up himself. You did it all. You took it away from him, typed it up, brought it back – told him he was in with a chance, how clever he was, how impressed those bloody biologists were going to be with him.’ She stumbled and lisped over ‘biologists’ and I didn’t laugh.

  One of the papers had landed face-up near my foot. She scrabbled for it. A perfect pencil and ink drawing of a bathyscaphe in cross-section. Copied from a Dorling Kindersley book I’d found in a charity shop and brought back for him.

  ‘I didn’t do—’

  ‘I don’t want to hear it, Laura. What did he promise you? Did he give you money? Tell you he’d put your name in the front of his first article? Mention you to the New Scientist?’

  She looked up at me. She wasn’t crying. Without mascara, her eyes looked bald and strange.

  ‘Half of this I’ve never even seen before –’

  ‘Don’t talk to me. Don’t say anything to me.’ She was kneeling on the carpet, her nightdress bunched against the back of her knees. ‘I know you. Mooning about in the bathroom. Staring into mirrors. You thought if he won, you’d get your face on the front of a magazine, didn’t you?’

  The light from the kitchen fell on her calves and I could see the blue and purple lumps of veins there and the discoloured skin she hid with American Tan popsocks and massaged with sunflower oil in the bath. She was lining up the remote controls on Donald’s side table, putting them in order and fitting them into the shapes they’d left in the dust.

  ‘I’ll help you,’ I said, and stood up.

  ‘Just get out of my sight.’

  I went up to Donald’s room slowly because I didn’t want to be on my own. Didn’t want to go to sleep. We’d both been having dreams, but Barbara was allowed to hose them down with a bottle of Gordon’s, and I wasn’t.

  The stairwell was dark. The door to his den didn’t creak ominously. There was no special atmosphere. No comforting sense of presence, or sudden rush of happy memories. It was an empty, half-cleared junk room that belonged to a dead person. The table was empty, the debris swept away into three cardboard boxes on the floor in front of it. The drawers were all open, and the contents stirred and disturbed. She’d taken away his blanket and started to pull down the pictures from the wall. The room stank of fags and her perfume. There was a stack of books and papers on the floor in front of the chair. She’d been sitting in it and reading them. I sat too, and picked up the top scrapbook from the pile.

  A lot of it was pasted-in printouts of papers I had typed up for him. Drafts of his application for the Sea Eye programme. Experiments he could do if only he had the money for the equipment. Long, digressive arguments for funding, for assistance, for advice. Theories about lights under the sea that were somehow connected to the nuclear power plant at Heysham Port.

  I turned the pages, stiff and sweet-smelling with flour and water paste, and carried on reading. I started to understand.

  He’d had an idea. According to one of the journals it had come to him while walking on Morecambe beach: either he’d seen something out there in the shallow grey water that had sparked the train of thought, or the boredom of pacing across the featureless, muddy sands had encouraged him to daydream. It was all there, scratched out in an erratic handwriting that was almost too familiar to read. Bioluminescence, and the commercial applications of engineering it into living things that didn’t have it naturally. Like privet bushes, or yoghurt, or teenage girls. So that’s where he went on those long afternoons when Barbara couldn’t find him. We’d never have believed he could have managed the trains.

  His dreams of being called an inventor and winning his place on the Sea Eye must have seemed so close to being fulfilled they were almost inevitable. Donald didn’t know, while he was making this list and scrawling draft after draft of his submission to the National Geographic, that the reward was already behind him – somewhere in the grey sucking mud of Morecambe Bay. That was the place the ideas had started coming, the place where he’d first imagined allotments filled with rows of lettuce glowing faintly blue whenever they needed water.

  He’d been researching the idea from several different angles at once: there were notes about fireflies; lists of glowing fungus; paragraphs on the luminous solution of frightened squid; and a pencil diagram of an angler fish’s lure. How to show them that he was serious – that he meant business? Business meant business and that meant money – he knew that much about the world and so the commercial applications were not the cake, but the icing on it – meant to sweeten the pill of what he really wanted to do, although when these ideas finally came to him, they’d come in a rush.

  He wrote about flashing pet mice for fairground prizes. Electricity-free glowing Christmas trees to save the planet, yoghurt that glowed in the fridge – either as a warning that it had spoiled, or to replace the traditional fridge light and so save energy. Saplings planted along the side of motorways that would also become street lights when the night fell and their cold, ghostly light became visible. Specially adapted clothing for potholers, search and rescue teams, and miners. Finally, he came to it – tried to smuggle his real idea in amongst the others.

  The painless tagging of men who wait in dark places and are apt to rape.

  This last was underlined, and cushioned between rustling newspaper clippings from the Evening Post counting and detailing the twelve occasions when the flasher had made himself known in the City that autumn and winter. In this part of his scrapbook the writing is erratic and tilted. He never asked me, but I would have had a hard time typing it up for him. In places his biro had run out of ink and he’d carried on anyway – not looking at the page, or not caring – just scratching the words into the paper with the dry metal nib of the pen.

&nbs
p; He thought he could protect women by making their predators glow in the dark. Barbara would never have let him join the vigilante group even if the other men would have welcomed him, which they wouldn’t. He was impotent, but in his own way, he was thinking of me.

  I let the scrapbook fall onto the floor.

  Barbara was right. He’d been doing all this for me.

  Because of me.

  You can kill a person without touching them.

  I sat there for a long time. Thinking about the way I had behaved – about how obsessed I had been with Chloe and then with Wilson – never realising the more serious things that were happening both at home and out in the world, the things that had been keeping Donald awake at night, and had finally propelled him out onto the water in a boat he didn’t know how to operate.

  There wasn’t a way to fix this, I realised. No going back, nothing as easy as returning a bottle of perfume and writing a contrite letter to the man in charge. I should have acted earlier. Should have sorted the problem out for myself instead of waiting in the house for someone – Chloe – to step in and do it for me. I was nearly fifteen, and it was time enough for me to be looking after myself. My mind travelled to that frozen pond and the football trapped in its surface like a flag – pointing out Wilson to anyone who might walk past and remember the CCTV image of him carrying it across the garage forecourt and put two and two together.

  I could, if I had the guts, go there right now and get rid of it. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be something.

  Even then, with the decision made, I didn’t act right away – but sat in Donald’s chair for longer, thinking over my plan and wondering how it had got to this. Eventually, I reached into the open drawer next to me, and rooted around at the back between the old gloves and my worn-out baby clothes. All his precious things.