‘Chloe will be glad to have you back, I reckon,’ she said. ‘She’s not been well lately, did you know?’
I thought of that crack at the side of her mouth.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s her and Carl. It’s stressing her out that she’s been banned from seeing him. She probably thinks he’s going to get someone else to take her place.’
Emma looked at her hands and said nothing for a long time. I got the feeling she was on the brink of confiding something in me. But we’d never been on our own together before. We weren’t friends – we were Chloe’s friends. I hadn’t known she played the violin, I didn’t know the names of her brothers, what the inside of her house was like, whether she liked using body spray or just plain soap. And I’ve no doubt that I was as peripheral to her as she was to me – it was only Chloe we had in common, Chloe who brought us together and in many ways, kept us apart.
‘I felt bad after hearing about your dad. The things that me and Chloe said to you. It wasn’t on.’
That was not what she had come to say. I shrugged.
‘It doesn’t matter. Chloe can be like that sometimes, I’ve known her longer than you. Long enough to know when she means something, and when she’s just blowing off steam.’
Emma just fiddled with the pleats in her skirt. Her socks hadn’t been washed right – Barbara was very careful about washing only white things together, same as Amanda. Whoever did the washing at Emma’s house didn’t take the same kind of care, and her socks were the colour of old porridge. Most of the time she was careless about her hair. She never tried to sneak a bit of make-up on for school. She chewed the cuff of her school shirt when she was thinking. I could list the things I knew about her on one hand.
‘I’ve been friends with Chloe for ages,’ I said. ‘She tells me everything. She’s already been round to see me. We’ve talked it through.’
‘I just wondered if you wanted me to start meeting you on your way to school?’ she said quickly. ‘We can walk in together. I don’t mind setting off a bit earlier and coming to your house first. I get up early for gymnastics practice anyway.’
‘You want to walk to school with me?’ I said.
She twitched, as uncomfortable with this as I was.
‘If tomorrow’s your first day back, I’ll come in with you.’
I stared at her. She stared back. Brown eyes, expressionless and unreadable. She was checking up on me. She wanted to keep tabs on me? Chloe had told her to walk me in – make sure that I didn’t get upset and start opening my trap about Wilson, or Carl, or her, or any of the other things she didn’t know I knew? None of that made sense.
‘You heard, didn’t you?’ Emma said, by way of explanation. ‘I suppose you’ve had other things to think about the last couple of weeks.’
‘I knew there’d been another two.’
‘Both from our school – the baths and the playing fields. They’re getting extra teachers to stand along the route when we do cross-country now.’
‘Barbara’s always watching videos,’ I said. ‘We never have the news on.’
I don’t know if Emma understood or not, but she nodded. ‘He’s started again,’ she said. ‘It’s so close to us now.’ Her voice was strange. ‘You need to be careful. Very careful.’
The baths were attached to the school – they were our baths really, and our sports hall and tennis courts – but they were also open to the public and there was some sort of complicated timetable that dictated when the pool was available and when we got our lessons. It was so complicated and the barrier between the leisure centre and the school nothing more than a set of unmarked double doors so that half the time you’d be doing your swimming lessons with the spectators’ gallery full of people wrapped in towels, waiting impatiently for us to finish so they could get back in. I always found the idea of having a gallery up above the pool weird anyway – who’d want to spectate at a school swimming lesson?
‘I’ve lived this long,’ I said, and laughed.
‘Terry doesn’t think it’s the same person,’ Emma said. ‘He reckons the first ones were that Mong, and this is someone else. A copy-cat.’
I laughed. ‘Not that Mong,’ I said, and looked out of the window down into the garden which was bare and white-blue with frost. ‘Why does Terry think that?’
‘The girl by the playing fields – she was a Year Seven. He didn’t just get his cock out or have a feel of her,’ Emma said, ‘he tried to drag her off along that little path. She says there was a car parked at the end of it. He was going to try and take her away, she reckons.’
I shrugged.
‘And the other girl,’ she said quickly, ‘the one in the swimming baths…’ She paused and followed my gaze out of the window. ‘She’s still not talking. Not to the police, not to her parents, not to anyone. It’s a lot worse. An escalation of activity. Doesn’t matter who’s doing it. Doesn’t matter how long it takes for them to catch him. We’ve just got to stick together. Make sure nothing happens to us. He’s not finished yet. They’re the girls that got away.’
‘So Terry says.’
She sighed, suddenly annoyed with me. ‘I’m only trying to tell you for your own good,’ she said. ‘Even Shanks says it’s all gathering around our school – they think the pest is someone very local, he’s said we’ve all to get a partner to walk there and back with – and I didn’t know if you’d heard or not. Thought you might want to come with me.’
‘You think he’s going to jump out of the bushes at me at half eight on a Friday morning?’ I said, and remembered the things we said about the man in the Halloween mask. How harmless he was – how it was funny and pathetic and almost sweet in a way.
‘I can get us a packet of fags on the way. I know you’re probably feeling bad right now – what with, everything – but it might be all right. The two of us, walking in together.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. Donald’s money was rolled up in the toe of a sock, and shoved into a wellington boot at the back of my wardrobe. I wasn’t short of fags, not if I didn’t want to be.
‘It’s getting worse,’ Emma said again. She was pleading with me.
‘Did Shanks really say we had to come in pairs? Is it just our year, or the whole school, or what? Chloe never said anything. She lives nearer to me than you do.’
Emma lifted her hand and let it fall back onto her lap weakly, as if she was planning an argument and had decided to give up before starting.
‘I’m just saying, that’s all. You don’t have to.’ She looked away from me, pulled a piece of paper across my desk towards her and wrote something on it.
‘That’s my phone number,’ she said. ‘If you want someone to walk with, ring me up when you wake up and I’ll come over.’
‘I probably won’t,’ I said. ‘Don’t wait in or anything.’
Emma should have stood up then. Should have gathered her things and got ready to leave. She didn’t, but looked at me again as if she wanted her eyes to ask me something. Begging, almost.
‘Chloe will get Carl to take her,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you get him to pick you up as well?’
Emma shook her head slowly.
‘I’d better go,’ she said.
I heard her walking slowly down the stairs, the bump of her case as it knocked against the banister. Barbara did not get up, and Emma must have let herself out, closing our front door gently behind her.
I walked to school the next morning and the roads were as busy as usual and I felt safe and nothing happened. I was invincible because I was walking around inside my own bright, brittle halo of ice and because I knew the police weren’t going to come and get me, my thoughts were so far away from men in Halloween masks it was as if the pest didn’t exist.
Chloe got Nathan to drive her – I imagined her sat in the back with her head against the window, her kohled eyes taking it all in as they negotiated the rush hour traffic in silence. Nathan was the kind of dad who talked about himself at parents’ evenings, telling Shanks he
saw himself as ‘firm, but fair’. He’d have tried to talk to Chloe, get her to stop sulking and communicate with him. Share her problems. Her worries about boys, and pregnancy, and her GCSE options. And Chloe would have stared at the window, looking into the eyes of her own reflection and ignored him. I don’t know how Emma arrived, but she arrived late, her coat buttoned up wrong and sweat along her hairline. She had to squeeze in at the back because I was in my normal place, next to Chloe.
It was only later that I realised Emma wasn’t offering to do me a favour, wasn’t trying to check up on me, wasn’t on an errand from Chloe. She was scared, and she was desperate for someone to walk with her. I should have seen it. Her house was half a mile away from mine, and in the wrong direction. She didn’t have a Carl, and her dad didn’t have a car. She must have felt like a sitting duck.
Although Barbara didn’t make me go and I had to iron my uniform myself, I almost enjoyed the next few days at school. Home was strange, quieter than usual and in theory, pleasanter, because Barbara had given up getting me to do anything. I ate junk food in front of her, wore my hair loose for school, and let the jam and butter sit out of the fridge all day. I left the bathroom light on all night, just to test it, and she never said a word. I don’t think she even noticed. I carried on smoking in my room, stole her gin and left the bottle on my windowsill. This sudden freedom should have made things better but there was something else different about the house too, which I didn’t like. A breath-held feeling, a strung-out anticipation for Donald shuffling out of his room after a long sleep, or turning up late for tea. His magazines kept arriving and we pretended that we didn’t notice – left them lying in their plastic envelopes in the hallway until Barbara slipped on one. Then she threw the lot away.
I wanted to go to school, probably for the first time ever. There was none of that silence at school. No expecting someone to be there who wasn’t. And after the pats and the whispers and the first two days I was allowed to slot, more or less, into where I had been before except I wasn’t expected to go to assembly, or eat in the main dining room if I didn’t feel like it. I let Chloe sit in the empty form room with me while the others listened to the morning announcements and we waited for it to be over and school to start properly. I hated assembly, and didn’t mind missing it. Boring announcements about school sports fixtures and warnings that if we weren’t sensible the City really would put a curfew in place, whether we liked it or not. We had our whole-school assemblies in the sports hall – and we had to take our shoes off. I never remembered the special instructions because I always had to concentrate on sitting so that my feet weren’t lying flat on the floor. If that happened, when I stood up to file out with the rest of the row, I would leave behind a smudged wet imprint of feet on a floor the colour of blue toothpaste.
A death in the family gives you a few benefits. The people left behind become special in a way that they definitely weren’t before. And by her proximity to me, constantly clinging at my arm and frowning people’s attention and questions away from me (Would you like that? Do you think that’s what she wants to be reminded of?), Chloe got her own benefits too. She was grounded, probably forever, but Amanda would make an exception for me because I was her best friend and I needed her. And of course Chloe and I were alone together a lot. She hadn’t confided in me yet, but I was working on her and I felt we were moving in that direction. She was so solicitous she even came to my house again that week with her Polaroid camera and some of her special clothes.
‘Let me do your make-up,’ she said, and let a smile tug at the corners of her mouth. She’d brought her make-up bag with her. She was getting thinner. ‘I’ll do you a make-over and we can take some pictures. It’ll cheer you up.’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, making a show of being reluctant.
‘Come on,’ she was cheerful and brisk, ‘put some music on. Have a drink. It’ll be fun.’
She showed me a how-to guide for smoky eyes in Just Seventeen that she wanted to try. ‘I’ll do it on you, and you can do it to me,’ she said. ‘It’ll be like old times. Remember, we used to do this loads during the summer holidays?’
I let her put mascara on me even though she always ended up poking me in the eye with the wand.
‘Ta da!’ She winked at me, and spoke with her stupid American accent, ‘You look like a million dollars, baby!’
‘I feel stupid,’ I said, looking at myself in the little handmirror.
‘That’s crap. You look like a model,’ she said.
She gave me her basque to try on and made me lie on my stomach with my knees bent and my feet in the air. I felt her fingers on my skin as she adjusted the straps and hooks on the basque so that it fit me, and slid my glasses off my face. She folded them up and left them on my desk where I couldn’t reach them.
‘Put your tongue behind your teeth and think about something sexy,’ she said. She painted my mouth thick with lipstick that smelled like frying pans.
‘Chloe,’ I moaned, ‘I’m cold. I feel stupid.’
She laughed. ‘No pain, no gain.’
Chloe snapped handfuls of pictures, and I posed in the itchy red and black basque that Carl had bought her. My flesh came up in goosepimples and I tried to think about something sexy while the world, watery and formless without my glasses, shrank to the sound of her breath as she stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth and tried to work out the settings on the camera.
The photographs were okay. Chloe handed me my glasses so I could see them. She blew on them, and lined them up across my desk. I saw myself, looking pale and uncertain, posing with a cigarette, my lips pursed like Jessica Rabbit. I was better at taking them than she was, and most of them were washed-out and crooked-looking. Chloe seemed disappointed.
‘Carl’s got a proper camera,’ she said, and mimed twisting a lens, with one eye closed. ‘He develops them himself.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know.’
It wasn’t going to be long before she’d speak to me about what she and Carl had been doing in the woods that night. A person couldn’t walk around with that on their conscience forever. She’d need someone to talk to, and that person would be me, and then things would go back to the way they had been in the summer. I got as close as I could to her, prodded her gently when the conversation led in that direction, and waited.
‘You look terrific,’ she said, and hugged me.
Chloe let me keep most of the pictures.
It was our last week at school together.
Chapter 25
Barbara still padded about the house in her night-clothes. She kept odd hours, and often woke me up knocking ice cubes out of the plastic tray with a rolling pin. She dusted in the middle of the night and once I found her at three in the morning folding and refolding stacks of Donald’s shirts on the living room floor. She never put them away or got rid of them. Her behaviour was getting to be really creepy – no wonder Chloe wanted me to come to her house. And she’d decided it would do me good not to be in my bedroom. She said ‘a change of scene’. It sounded like a phrase she’d culled from Amanda, except the two of them were still at war.
I walked. The winter had not broken yet and the sky was white and the windows of the cars I passed were covered in frost. Someone had kicked a half-empty can of Fanta over in a bus stop and the orange trickle had solidified into a spike across the pavement. I stopped and stared at it a while, even though I wasn’t really interested. A poster pasted onto the bus shelter caught my eye. Not the one with Wilson’s face on it – a different, newer one, with a huge clip-art picture of an eye on it. The details underneath were for the next Community Action Group patrol. Men only, meeting at the train station at 9 p.m. to do a slow loop of the town centre. The eye was anatomically correct – the optical nerve still attached. It looked gruesome. ‘Watch Out!’
I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to sit on the peach settee and talk to Chloe’s mother: she always wanted me to call her ‘Amanda’ and chat about period pains
and boys and pimples, none of which I had much experience of, any interest in, or any inclination to discuss with her. But even less did I want to stay at home and watch Barbara fluttering the shirts through the air for one last refolding. The arms dangled and made me think of Guy Fawkes dummies.
I was an hour or two later than I said I would be. Amanda opened the door and hugged all the air out of me in an ouff (Sweetheart! Brave girl!) and then made me go around the back and take my shoes off in the kitchen (Just had the carpets done, my angel). When I got into the kitchen I saw all the nuts and tweezers laid out on the kitchen worktop waiting for me and Chloe to begin. The objects shone, like they were specifically trying to make me feel guilty.
Chloe was in the kitchen too. She talked to me ostentatiously, a long gabbled sentence about the weather, and snow, and needing to wash her hair, and how she thought I’d forgotten. Amanda stood to one side of her, watching, and moving her hands about in her cardigan pockets. When Amanda had taken the television out of her room, Chloe had upped the ante and stopped talking to her altogether. Chloe had told me that she was even refusing to eat in front of her parents so that they’d think they’d made her into an anorexic, feel guilty and relent.
It was working. She looked terrible. Her hair was so dull it looked sticky, and there was sleep in her eyes, yellow crusts along her eyelashes that reminded me of a sick dog Donald had found once, and insisted on keeping in the shed until it was better and could be ‘released into the wild’ to go back to foraging in bins. She was skinny too – as skinny as she’d ever wanted to be – which made her look sickly and pale and more ill than she’d looked when she’d been in hospital. She didn’t look pretty anymore, but I still didn’t want to cross the kitchen and stand next to her. Didn’t want my thigh next to hers for a comparison.
Cold Light Page 26