‘Is your mum here? Am I not allowed to come in now?’
‘She’s in,’ I said. ‘She’s watching the telly.’
‘Well, my dad said he’d pick me up in two hours, so… ?’
I turned around and went back into the house, leaving the door open behind me. It was petty, that, but at least she let me enjoy it and didn’t say anything as she fumbled the door closed and wiped her feet on the mat. I let her follow me up the stairs to my bedroom. I didn’t care if she looked through the hallway at Barbara sitting with her glass in front of the telly in the living room.
‘Shanks said about what happened with your dad,’ she said, not looking at me. The words ran into each other because she was speaking too fast: trying to get it over with. ‘Sorry to hear about it.’
I was almost untouchable now – what would she dare to say to me today? Newly protected and a celebrity at school. I didn’t say anything and she opened her mouth again and carried on, ploughing through the silence with her babble.
‘Some of the girls talked about clubbing together to get you a card,’ Chloe said, ‘or making something. Maybe some flowers. We thought you might have had enough of flowers.’ She pulled her bag onto her knee and unzipped the top. ‘I got this for you. Sorry it’s been opened. I got it from home.’
She handed me a bottle wrapped in a carrier bag and I took it without looking at it and put it on my desk.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘You got any fags?’
She nodded.
‘Give them here then.’
I found my lighter and lit up, right in my room without opening the window, without even closing the door. I stood in front of her and blew the smoke upwards. She stared at me. I said nothing, but leaned over, opened the bottle and swigged from the neck. Vodka. I didn’t like it. It smelled like nail varnish remover but I drank it anyway.
‘Your mum’s going to go wild,’ Chloe said, admiringly.
‘No, she isn’t,’ I said, and it was the truth. ‘I do what I like now.’
Chloe looked around the room, staring at posters on the walls she’d seen lots of times before, and found something interesting in the folds of a blue and white towel hanging over the radiator. Was she wondering what else was different? I handed her the bottle and she took a sip.
‘Who was going to get me a card? Emma? I don’t think so.’
Chloe was looking at me funny. It was as if I’d been disfigured, had had something amputated. A deformity she was sorry about, but didn’t want to acknowledge. So her pity floated freely around her words, alighting on one or other of them and then taking off – clogging the air and attached to nothing she could mention. She handed the bottle back.
‘I brought you this as well,’ she said, and pulled out a piece of paper, crumpled from her coat pocket. I thought it was another poster of Wilson and I wouldn’t take it so she laid it on the bed between us.
‘Science projects. Due in by half term. I’m going to do the calorific value of different kinds of nuts,’ Chloe said. ‘Emma’s going to do that thing with the toilet paper and the felt-tip pens.’
‘Right,’ I said. I looked out of the window, still blowing smoke.
I admit, it was thrilling to be so uninterested in her and have her still here, chattering and trying to hit on a topic of conversation that might please me. So thrilling that it was hard to keep up the slow movements, the sighs, the slackness I could feel in my face.
‘Mrs Fenwick says not to worry. Says I can give it to you, but you don’t have to come up with anything yet. She was all right, actually. She said she’ll see you when you’re next in. No rush.’
‘What made you think about the nuts?’
Chloe looked confused, then laughed, then put her hands over her mouth in a dramatic way – as if there were a corpse or a sick person in the next room likely to be disturbed by her noise.
‘My dad told me,’ she said. ‘You set fire to them and work out how much they can heat up a pan of water. Do some sums about the weight.’ She flicked her hair. ‘He’s going to write it all out for me.’
That is how Chloe always came first or second in the class at everything. What her dad didn’t know, her mum had covered. I should probably have raided Donald’s journals and scrapbooks and done something about fish.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
Chloe had never spent so much time talking about her school work in all the time that I had known her. ‘I bet Mrs F. will have a list, if you can’t think—’
‘Ice,’ I said quickly, and turned on the bed and forced myself into her gaze.
I’ll swear down now that I don’t know where ice came from. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t something I had any particular interest in before then. It must have been the weather, and my near-constant thoughts about the frozen top of the duck pond in the nature reserve. Ice. As soon as I had said the word I imagined fragile sheets blooming over the windows, the ferny spines of snowflakes and skins of frost.
‘For global warming?’ she said.
I wanted to laugh. ‘Ice. It’s been on my mind a lot lately.’
She coughed, licked the crack at the corner of her mouth, and stared at the towel on the radiator again. She lit a cigarette uncertainly, glancing towards the door. I counted to twenty.
‘What have you come here for, anyway?’ I said.
Chloe forced her lips together, and glared at me.
‘My mum told me to,’ she said. ‘She didn’t know we’d broke friends.’
Broke friends, as if it was a glass vase on a wobbling coffee table, or a marriage.
‘Have you seen Carl?’
Chloe ducked her head. I could see red blotches start to appear on the side of her neck. She played with her cigarette, tapping her ash into the empty metal lid from the vodka bottle.
‘You know they’ve banned me.’
‘You’ve never done as you’re told before. They can’t stop you having a boyfriend, loads of girls do.’
‘He’s too old, according to them.’
‘Why did you tell them how old he was?’
‘They were grilling me in the hospital. Wanted to know where he lived, what school he went to, what his dad did for a living. Mum was going to invite him round for tea to get a good look at him. Dad was after burying him under the patio.’
I thought about that for a while. Relished it.
‘I should have kept my mouth shut,’ I said, testing. No point holding back now.
‘Maybe,’ Chloe said. The red on her neck had spread to her face. ‘Don’t upset yourself. With things the way they are –’ she didn’t want to say ‘because your dad killed himself because he was mental,’ but I could tell that was what she meant, ‘with things the way they are, it’s not that big a deal, is it?’
‘I thought you’d go mad,’ I said, ‘not being able to see him. Have you spoken to him?’
Chloe shook her head, lifted her hand to her mouth to start gnawing on the skin there, and then moved it away sharply – as if it smelled, or she’d only just remembered the crescent moons of filth under her fingernails.
‘No,’ Chloe said lightly.
‘I gave you money for your phone,’ I pressed. ‘What did you do with it?’
‘He’s not answering, all right?’ Chloe snapped. ‘I’m not hanging around with him anymore. Haven’t seen him in a fortnight, and don’t want to see him. Leave it, eh?’
She was her old self again, lying through her teeth and hissing at me, and in that second I felt a bit scared of her and wanted to do something to make her calm and pleased with me and that meant everything was normal again. I almost felt relieved.
‘Sorry. Sorry,’ she said, and pushed the bottle at me. ‘Have a drink. It’ll make you feel better.’
‘Will it?’
She nodded, and swigged deeply. ‘There’s a tablet Carl gets for me and Emma sometimes. I don’t know what it’s called. It makes you feel like your body’s gone to sleep. All your arms and legs get warm and limp.
Your mind just floats away somewhere else. It’s lovely. I’ll ask Emma, see if she’s got any left to give to you. You’ll like it.’ She patted the piece of paper sitting on the bed between us. ‘And I’ll ask Schizo-Fenwick if we can work together on a project. Do the nuts with me. She’ll let you. You probably won’t have to do any tests for the rest of the term.’
This was Chloe going into unfamiliar territory and turning the conversation away from herself. I ignored her.
‘Carl’s a letch,’ I said, remembering the spit, and the car, and having to run home on my own through the park. ‘He did try it on with me, when you were in the hospital. I wasn’t lying.’
I expected her to hit me, or shriek, or take fistfuls of my hair and shake me about like a damp shirt. She bowed her head.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I bet he did.’
This puzzled me. I paused, wondering what to ask her next.
‘He’s like that,’ she said carefully. She looked like she was about to say something else, but she bit her bottom lip to stop the words coming out.
‘Like what?’
‘Men are… different,’ she said, at last. ‘Especially older men.’ She moved her eyes away from me and started, I could tell, to quote Carl. ‘It’s the age difference. Maturity in a woman means understanding that a man – fully grown, not like the boys at school – needs more than one woman can give.’ I marvelled. Did she really swallow that? Or was that how it worked in real life? How would I know? I thought about Nathan two-timing Amanda and the way she hated it and put up with it all the same. Maybe.
‘Anyway, you didn’t do anything so it doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Let’s not talk about it anymore. It’s nothing, is it?’
This conversation was not working out the way I’d planned it. Yes, she was uncomfortable, and she seemed to be coming away from Carl at last – but no nearer to confiding in me. No nearer to coming back to the way things were before Emma and then Carl turned up in our lives and spoiled everything.
‘Don’t say anything more to Emma about it, will you?’
‘Why?’
She wouldn’t look at me again. I could have slapped her, but my head was swimming with the vodka.
‘Carl’s all right,’ she said, after a long pause. ‘He might just be a bit busy at work.’ Her hair fell over her eyes and she didn’t push it back. ‘He’s probably just upset that me and him are public now. He was always really worried about me getting into trouble with my parents. Protective.’
I snorted and it made an ugly sound. ‘Don’t be like that,’ she said. ‘I’ve come round, haven’t I? Trying to make it up to you?’
‘Only because your daddy brought you.’
Chloe flinched at that, and while I could see how addictive bullying might be, and why she had such a lot of fun doing it, I didn’t want to go on. I stubbed out my cigarette on the side of my desk and poked it into the vodka lid. I motioned for her to give me another fag.
‘I might come to your house at the weekend,’ I said. ‘I need to copy some of your maths off you.’
‘I’ll leave my book,’ she said eagerly.
‘No. I don’t feel like it now. I might come on Saturday. And I’ll decide by then what I want to do about this science thing. Whether I’ll come in with you on it or not.’
Chloe nodded. ‘All right then,’ she said, looking grateful.
I wanted to keep things like they were and hold her on probation until Saturday, but my advantage was wearing off. She leaned back on the bed and unzipped her coat, using the thin edge of the zip to probe underneath her thumbnail.
‘What’s your mum like?’ she said, less carefully now.
‘Didn’t you see her?’
Chloe opened her eyes wide and shook her head. She was lying.
‘Never mind,’ I said.
Donald had never been a large part of what we talked about and so long as we didn’t mention it he was less embarrassing now that he was dead than he had been when he was alive and shuffling along the upstairs landing in one slipper, or sucking on his inhaler while we were trying to eat our tea, or opening my bedroom door without knocking so that he could interrupt us and ask for scissors or glue or help with his typewriter.
When that happened Chloe would laugh at him openly and I was supposed to join in. Now I kept remembering Chloe’s stifled giggles and shaking shoulders, and Donald asking me privately if she was ‘quite all right’. I did join in, at the time, and he always hesitated and said ‘Sorry, girls,’ even if he wasn’t asking us for anything, but just telling us to come down for our tea. I think he was sorry, generally, that he was alive and forced to bother other people with the fact of it.
‘That boy,’ I said, ‘on Boxing Day.’
‘You are obsessed with that Mong.’ She didn’t exactly shout, but it was loud, and it came out in a rush.
‘Is that what Emma told you to say?’ I said.
Chloe stared at me. ‘What are you talking about Emma for?’
‘Why?’
‘What?’
‘Why didn’t you tell her we were the last people to see Wilson? If you and her are so tight all of a sudden?’
‘Oh, she’s –’ Chloe waved her hand. ‘She’s too keen. She’s a trier – you know? She really cares what I think of her. It’s a bit pathetic really.’
I nodded. I was fairly sure that Chloe would have described me like that to Emma too. She was a two-faced little cow when she wanted to be.
‘It’s just I keep thinking about that football I saw frozen into the ice. Keep imagining him chasing it through the woods and ending up under the water. Do you reckon he could swim?’
‘Don’t think about it,’ Chloe said. ‘You’re just making stuff up in your head. You’ve no idea what happened to him. No one does. He probably just ran away.’
‘You reckon?’
‘How many times have we got to talk about this? It’s boring. And you wonder why I’d rather hang out with Emma?’
‘It’s on my mind, all the time.’ I put my head on her shoulder. ‘I can’t sleep. I’m blaming myself, a bit. I just need to know what happened. To know it wasn’t my fault.’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Chloe said mechanically. With my head on her shoulder, I could smell her sweat.
‘I don’t know that for sure. Barbara thinks that what happened with, well, you know. That was down to me. How do I know she’s not right about that too?’
I tried to cry, but I was empty.
‘What’s the matter?’ Chloe asked. She shuffled right up close to me until her knee was pressed against my leg.
‘Just sad,’ I said. ‘My head’s a mess.’
I did cry then, and it wasn’t all pretend, and she knew just what to do with me.
‘Poor baby,’ she said and squeezed my arm. Tears leaked out until they stopped. She kept squeezing. She probably thought I was going to start wailing or thrashing about. I imagined us in a painting, our heads close together, four white kneecaps and shiny polished shoes touching.
‘I’ve been horrible to you, haven’t I, and now this has happened. Your… misfortune.’
I nearly laughed, and the moment was gone. It wasn’t unusual for Chloe to talk as though she was starring in a period drama. She read Jane Eyre and for weeks afterwards, instead of asking me if I wanted to come out, she’d enquire if I fancied ‘taking a turn around the park’.
I looked at our knees and felt all jangly and hysterical and didn’t say anything. We listened to Barbara’s feet on the stairs and the sound of the toilet flushing. Silence while the cistern refilled.
‘Shall I put your hair up?’ she said. I think she was noticing how slowly the time was passing, unpunctuated by Donald’s interruptions.
‘No. I’m going to go to bed now.’
‘Now? But it’s—’
‘I’m tired.’ I flopped backwards onto the duvet and turned my face away from her.
‘Shall I go then? I’ll ring my dad and get him to come.’
H
er voice was tiny. I’d never heard her talking to me like that before, only to Carl. A kind of begging voice.
I shrugged and lay still until I heard the front door open and close behind her.
Chapter 24
Emma always carried her PE kit in a torn Morrisons bag with her name written on the plastic in black marker. The rest of us had special PE bags with the school badge on, or holdalls from a sports shop. Emma carried her carrier bag around without shame, as if she hadn’t noticed she was the only one who did it like that. She had it with her – that and a black violin case – when she came to see me later that week.
‘Sorry,’ she said. I’d thought it was Barbara and was shoving Donald’s journal down the side of my bed in case the sight of his handwriting upset her.
‘I thought you heard me call up the stairs. Your mum told me just to come up.’
‘It’s fine. Is Chloe with you?’ I looked over her shoulder but she was closing my bedroom door behind her. She shook her head.
‘Just me.’
She leaned the violin case against the wall and put the bag and her school rucksack down carefully before sitting down on my desk chair. All done very deliberately and slowly as if she was putting off the moment when she’d have to speak to me. I sat up properly and swung my legs out of the bed; I didn’t want to feel like a patient in a hospital.
‘We haven’t had a chance to talk,’ she said. She tucked her hands into the pleats of her school skirt – she was trembling.
‘About what? I’m all right,’ I said. ‘I’m coming back to school tomorrow.’
She leaned over and smiled at me and there were black clogged pores on her chin and nose. ‘They’d let you stay off for longer, if you wanted.’
‘I know. I’m bored though. I’ve got to go back sometime. There’s this science project.’
She smiled, as if she knew I was lying. I didn’t ask her about chromatography, or if she’d decided to abandon that and go in with Chloe on the nuts. I didn’t tell her about ice, and she didn’t ask me about Donald’s funeral or how I was feeling. There was nothing to say, and the silence was awkward. I didn’t rush in to speak – she had come to see me so she could sit there and come up with something to say. And if she didn’t, feeling bad about it was her own problem. Maybe she’d just pick up her case and go home again.
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