Cold Light

by Jenn Ashworth

  My limbs felt heavy – as if I was swimming through sand. Everything was slow and damp and cold. The air had thickened. The back of the drawer felt as if it was miles away, the wood dry and splintery under my scrabbling fingertips. Barbara hadn‘t found the margarine tub yet. I pulled it out, opened it and pocketed all the money that was in there. Didn’t count it, but there must have been close to four hundred pounds. Enough to get away quickly if I couldn’t manage to get rid of the football.

  I heard Barbara moving around downstairs, and an hour later, come past Donald’s den and go into her bedroom. I waited until the light under her door went out, holding the money in my hand and staring at the torn pictures on Donald’s walls and the cardboard boxes full of rubbish that Barbara had been sorting through. When I was sure she was asleep, I went downstairs, drank what was left in the bottle she’d abandoned on the coffee table, and grabbed my coat from the peg in the kitchen.

  I half turned towards the river and up the hill to go to Chloe’s house, but then I remembered it couldn’t be her anymore – that we weren’t friends in the way that we used to be. I was half drunk and knew only vaguely where Emma lived. In a house whose back garden backed steeply down onto the canal, and I only knew that because of the time she’d told me and Chloe about her brothers going out on a boat to fish out a large handbag they were sure was full of money, but actually contained a dead bloody cat and seven hairless slimy kittens.

  Boats. I had to walk fast, in any direction – just to tear my mind away from boats. I started running then, sloppily – banging into parked cars and hedges, until I came to the taxi rank. I jumped into a black cab and asked the driver to take me to Cuerden Valley Park.

  ‘What do you want to go there for at this time of night? And on your own?’

  That’s the thing about being young. People always think they can ask about things that are none of their business.

  ‘I’m meeting someone there,’ I said. ‘My older brother’s picking me up. It’s all right.’

  ‘You got money?’

  I pulled the roll of notes I’d taken from Donald’s margarine tub and showed them to him. ‘I can pay,’ I said.

  ‘Where did you get all that from?’ he said. I didn’t exhale, didn’t want him to smell the booze on me in case he got worried about me throwing up and made me get back out in the cold.

  ‘My dad gave it me,’ I said, and jutted my chin at him. Go on then, bloody ask me. Ask me, and I’ll tell you.

  The driver shrugged, started the engine and turned up the radio. Terry again – talking about a tree branch that had blown onto a primary school roof and destroyed the nesting site of a family of rare birds.

  ‘They’re going to put a curfew on for you young girls,’ he said, ‘keep you in at night.’

  ‘Really,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. In with your mums and dads – tucked up early. None of this White Lightning and Blue Bols on a park bench. No boyfriends,’ he laughed. ‘If you ask me, they should do it for the lads too. Everyone under eighteen can stay in after 8 p.m. whether they catch this nonce, or not.’

  I couldn’t see out of the windows because the driver had left the interior light on, all the better to stare at me in his rearview mirror. I felt drunk then, and tried to sit up straight and not breathe out of my mouth.

  Nonce. Not of normal criminal experience. Out of the ordinary. He was special, see, this flasher of ours. Like Terry’s bird family – a rare breed.

  ‘What time is it, please?’

  ‘Getting up to midnight. Funny time to be meeting your brother, that’s all I’m saying. You know?’

  I ignored him, and drummed my fingers on my knees. Worried about my brother waiting for me in the cold. Imagined him – pacing, hands in his pockets, a parka hood zipped almost over his face.

  The heat and the soft vanilla smell of the shampoo the cleaners must have used the last time someone threw up in the back made my eyelids droop. The low chatter of the radio murmured while the taxi chugged through almost empty streets and along familiar roads where we only stopped for the lights. I was almost asleep when the car drew up. I’d calmed down. Maybe sobered up a bit too.

  ‘I don’t see anyone,’ he said. ‘Shall I wait? Have to keep the meter running though. Still, not like you don’t have the cash.’ He nodded towards the bundle I was letting get hot and damp between my fists in my lap.

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Still, you want to put that away. Stick it in your back pocket, and zip your coat up. There’s all sorts out there.’

  ‘He’s stopped now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That nonce, the pest. He’s packed it in.’

  ‘Nothing like it. He’s back in action. Two in the past week. The swimming baths this time, and another one at the back of the playing fields.’ He named my own school, and I shuddered. ‘It’s getting worse. Younger. And the last one, outside the school – he tried to pull her into a car. Wearing a mask, apparently. Where have you been? It’s all over the news.’

  I marvelled about how cut off from everything Barbara and I had become in our grief. She’d lost interest in Terry and Donald hadn’t been there to insist on the news. It had been easy enough to slip into our own twilight realm of late-night films and long lie-ins. Barbara watched Donald’s videos until she fell asleep. The real world had retreated to the other side of the alwaysdrawn curtains.

  ‘That’s thirteen now, isn’t it?’

  ‘Fourteen. That we know about. I reckon some of them’ll be too scared to tell their parents. Don’t want anyone to know. Ashamed, too pissed to remember, or shouldn’t have been out in the first place. I’m reckoning it’s closer to twenty.’

  I thought about this for a moment. Wondered about what it meant. If it was Wilson who was doing it, then he was still alive, still out there somewhere. And if it was someone else – most likely Video Man, or someone like him, then why had he stopped for a while? No one believed the joke about the cold weather, not really. Twenty of us.

  ‘All right then, I’ll be careful.’

  ‘There’s police patrolling everywhere. Make sure you don’t breathe out as you walk past them, not unless you want a free ride home.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Your brother not waiting?’ He tapped the meter.

  ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘I know where he’ll be.’ I poked the money through the hole in the plastic divider that separated him from me. He looked at it, at the meter and then claimed not to have change for a twenty.

  ‘Keep it. Keep it.’

  I slammed the door.

  The cold hit me like a hammer. The wind made it even worse. It was aggressive – that cold – hard not to take personally. I shook and held my teeth together as I ran because I knew if I let them chatter I wouldn’t be able to stop. Dark. The trees just black shapes against a black sky. No stars. Half way across the car park I turned, but the taxi had already gone. Nothing. It was so silent. Nothing to distract me, so in my mind I went through the argument I’d had with Barbara again – thought about Donald – paced and cried, thought about Chloe, and Wilson – and then got myself together and headed into the woods.

  I didn’t see Carl’s car until I’d passed it. It was at the very edge of the car park, tucked under overhanging trees – two wheels up on the verge. In the darkest corner, where the lights from the main road couldn’t reach. At least getting angry helped me to stay warm. I spun on my heels, marched over and banged at the windows with my fists. Imagined them in there, pawing at each other underneath Carl’s filthy work coat.

  Dogging.

  The car was still. I leaned forward and cupped my hands around my eyes. Empty. And nothing in the back except for a roll of plastic bin-liners and Chloe’s school bag. The footwells clear of rubbish. I thought about picking up a rock and trying to break into the car. I picked one up from the verge – felt its small heft against my palm – the biggest I could find and just the size of an egg. I could sma
sh the window. No keys, so no way to drive it away, even if I could, but the noise would be satisfying and I saw myself sitting in there, huddled under the tartan blanket until they came back.

  ‘Hello, Chloe, hello, Carl,’ I’d say. Just the right amount of emphasis. They’d look furtive and a bit ashamed of themselves. I’d have the upper hand. Still, no way of telling how long it would be before they came back.

  And back from where? What were they doing?

  I let the stone fall and headed along a groove in the soil – more of a track than a path – that led between the trees. I had cried so much over the past few days that the cold along the rims of my swollen eyelids was almost soothing. My fingers were numb. I went quietly, following the track as it curved around tree roots and trying not to step on too many twigs. I could see almost nothing.

  It would have been easy enough to turn around and flag down another taxi, but as soon as I left the car park I felt my choices dwindling. All I could do was follow Wilson’s path into the dark down towards the water. Deeper into the woods and at an angle, circling the pond, where Wilson had decided to try out ice skating because of how much fun I’d told him it was going to be.

  I nearly walked right into them. Would have done, except Chloe retched suddenly and Carl hissed at her to shut up. Tiny noises, but I recognised them, and stopped. Heavy breathing, and little retching sounds again. I thought he was making her give him a blow-job. On a night like this? I squinted through the dark and the trees and didn’t see anything except the pale moving shape of her coat with the fluffy collar. I kept still as anything, stayed leaning against a tree, trying to hide myself, and listened.

  ‘Move it,’ Carl said, not whispering, but very quiet. His voice sounded odd, and I realised it was his ordinary voice I was hearing – not the one that he used to talk to Chloe and me with, which was slowed down, drawly, pretend-deep and ridiculous.

  ‘I can’t, it’s heavy. My hands hurt.’

  ‘Shut up your moaning, you silly little bitch. Get on with it.’

  They were both out of breath.

  ‘I can’t go any faster than what I’m doing,’ Chloe whispered – and even when she was talking so quietly, I could tell she’d been crying and would be tearing up again soon.

  I listened, out of puff but rationing my breath so they wouldn’t hear me panting. There was a crushed Coke can next to my foot – the hole at the top stuffed with leaves and the red and silver pattern on the side almost faded away. I stared at it while I heard them whispering to each other. Time went along. Every minute or so, Chloe would cry out – a little, half-strangled noise of disgust and fear.

  It wasn’t a blow-job. They could have stayed in the car for that. Couldn’t imagine them fucking outside and not bringing the blanket. And anyway, why would you? I didn’t know that much about it, but I knew it was freezing. No, not a blow-job then, and the shapes through the trees were bending and moving but apart and not together. I heard the scrape of metal against rock. I knew then. It wasn’t a shock. Twice, he stopped and moved over to her to hit her on the back as she vomited.

  ‘For God’s sake, Chloe.’

  I felt suddenly calm. Calmer than I’d felt in three weeks. And very far away. The ideas that had been upsetting me so much – about Donald, or Wilson, about Chloe and Emma and the way things were at school, my anger at Barbara – all melted away and I had only one, flint-hard thought left.

  I’d have lied for her. I knew it – I’d have come with Carl and done this job for her, and I’d have kept it to myself forever. No trouble. Taking my turn feeling the smooth wood of the spade handle slide across my palms. Working with Carl in silence – no flinching, no whinging, no throwing up behind a tree. Working – proper work, in the dead silence of the woods, nothing but our breath to keep time. I’m stronger than I look.

  How long would it take? How long had they been there? I thought about the icy ground and the rock-hard soil, the noise of the spade sounding like it was hitting concrete. Chloe was no help – I could hear her whimpering. She wasn’t cut out for this kind of work. Wasn’t calm enough. I could have done it. I would have done it for her.

  Think of it – me, pale and bruised with dirty hair, working with Carl, sweating through the cold. And then back to her house.

  Dropped off at the end of her street, and coming up to her bedroom through the back door. She’d be waiting – looking between her bedroom curtains, the night-light glowing softly. Her pink flannel pyjamas and rabbit-ear slippers. Smelling like Body Shop White Musk and the vanilla Shake n’ Vac her mum put on the carpet. When I came in, she’d take off my shoes and socks and the rest of my clothes, and sit me in the bath with the Christmas bath pearls, and wash my hair, and take the soil out from under my fingernails and rub hand-cream into the sore places on my palms. Her hands on my skin. I’d wear one of her nightdresses and she’d let me sleep in her bed. No one would ever know – not our parents, not Emma – not anyone.

  I would have done all that.

  I took a deep breath and backed through the twigs and branches as quietly as I could until I got far enough to think they couldn’t hear me and set off running. Tripped, once or twice. Rotting logs – an old bike frame half buried in leaves and dead brambles. Ran over a mattress and didn’t realise what it was until the ground went spongy and the wetness bubbled up from the ticking and soaked through the canvas sides of my trainers.

  I got onto the main road – the warm glow of the orange streetlamps, the red and yellow illuminated signs at the petrol station. The thrum of the irregular night-time traffic. I stuck my hand out to get a lift – my thumb out, the way they do in films. I think it only really works in America.

  I would have lied for her, and she never even asked me to.

  Poor Wilson. He wasn’t ever going home.

  I tried to imagine what had happened. Had Carl pushed him over and made him hit his head on a rock or fallen tree? Had he, frustrated at being outrun by a Mong, thrown something at him and hurt him that way? Perhaps Wilson had tripped in the leaves and Carl had caught up with him and let himself get carried away with kicking and punching. Maybe Carl hadn’t hurt him that much. He could have just stamped on his leg and made it impossible for Wilson to get out of the woods. It was so cold at night.

  I’d never know what had really happened. But Carl knew. And while he might have lied to Chloe, might have wanted her to believe it was more of an accident than it was, she knew that one way or another Carl was responsible and not me. The both of them had betrayed me. I hadn’t done anything to hurt Wilson, hadn’t even teased him when it would have been easy to. And because it made things more comfortable for Carl, they’d both let me think that it was my fault.

  That night I walked along the grass verge by the main road, I waited for ages on a roundabout for someone to stop and give me a lift. No one did and it was nearly five in the morning before I used my key in the back door and crept through the kitchen into the house. Barbara had got up in the night and was sleeping on the settee, an empty glass in her hand. Her mouth was open as if she was shouting at me even in her dreams. I could have got on the phone without waking her, and reported Carl right away. You can do it anonymously but how could I have put the police on to Carl without admitting that I was there too? And Chloe?

  I didn’t have any doubt in my mind that if Carl ended up in a police station, he’d be quick to tell them I’d been there and blame it all on me. Chloe would do whatever he told her to, she was so under his thumb. It was hopeless, unless I could somehow get her to talk to me, get her on my side and then make plans for both of us to approach the police together. With Carl locked up, things would get back to normal. And then we’d have our own secret.

  I smiled. It could work. We could cry. We could say he forced us to keep quiet, to dig a hole, to say nothing about him. Chloe could convince anyone of anything. I could tell the truth and still get myself into trouble. She could lie and we’d both get away with murder. I should have been worried, should have cri
ed about Wilson, maybe, but that night I slept soundly because I’d already decided what I was going to do.

  Now I leave Emma on the couch and walk over to the window. Look out briefly at a whole street full of lighted windows. It’s past three in the morning and we are all awake and watching these news broadcasts. Is it just this city? Glued to the glass box, and believing exactly what Terry is telling us.

  Emma moves slightly in her seat and the sofa creaks. I turn to look at her and realise she is watching me. She’s still wearing her green jacket with the badges – every time she makes herself a roll-up she puts the lighter and the tobacco pouch back in her inside pocket as if she doesn’t trust me not to steal from her, or wants to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

  We’ve never, ever been friends, Emma and me. We were both drawn towards Chloe’s light, and exploded outwards along the same trajectory when she burned out. Ten years I’ve been keeping an eye on Emma, trying to figure out which of Chloe’s secrets she’s carrying and which I’ve been left to nurture on my own. And it’s taken me this long to realise she’s been keeping an eye on me too. Watching me for something. What can she have done? What does she think I could possibly have on her?

  Today and every day for the past decade our whole city has sat over its collective picture album and made up its memories of Chloe. Who am I, I am coming to realise, to presume that I’ve not been doing exactly the same thing – or that my version of Chloe is any more accurate than theirs?

  Chapter 23

  I didn’t have to wait long. She came to me after school with the dirt still under her fingernails and a red crack at the corner of her mouth, as if her smile was slowly widening.

  I opened the front door without thinking about my rank breath or the state of my hair, stood on the step, and waited for her to say something. She’d caught me still in my nightgown and relishing the tail end of my first proper hangover. She stared at me as long as she could manage, and then picked at something on the cuff of her jacket. There was old eye-liner caked in the corner of her eyes like black snot.