Cold Light

by Jenn Ashworth

  ‘I haven’t slept more than four hours a night in three weeks,’ she’d said, not quite proudly.

  She was making herself ill. She told me all this herself and so I thought most of these symptoms were just ploys, and ways of levering her parents into relenting. I didn’t think there was anything really wrong. Knowing what kinds of things she had on her mind, I should have.

  ‘They’re buying me things to get me to eat,’ she’d said gleefully, and shown me a new personal stereo.

  ‘Wow,’ I’d responded dutifully, ‘can I have your old one?’

  ‘I’ll leave you two girls to it, shall I?’ Amanda said, but didn’t move. She was like Emma, waiting to be asked to join in.

  ‘Lola,’ Chloe said, and turned her whole body towards me and away from her mother, ‘I’m going to take a quick shower. My hair is disgusting. Can you entertain yourself for fifteen minutes?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, the beginning of a sentence Chloe never heard the end of, because she’d already swished out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

  Amanda shook her head at the space in the air Chloe had left. She’d left the smell of her White Musk Christmas perfume hanging around behind her.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said weakly, and pushed the button on the kettle. I listened to the fizz of the element heating up.

  ‘I’m glad you and Chloe have started seeing a bit more of each other again,’ Amanda said, ‘but you mustn’t let it get to be a hassle for your mother.’

  ‘Barbara doesn’t mind,’ I said.

  Chloe’s footsteps banged over our heads. The shower started. She was always washing off her make-up and putting it back on again.

  ‘Yes, but all the sleepovers you’ve been having. You must let us return the favour. We’ve bought a camp-bed, so you can come whenever you like.’

  I registered all the sleepovers without letting it show on my face, and then Carl. And still keeping my mouth as still as I could manage, I wondered angrily if the camp-bed was a present to me to make up for Donald getting drowned. Chloe isn’t allowed to have her boyfriend anymore and she gets a personal stereo. Sony, and not the Alba shit that I’ve got. Donald drowns himself and I get a zed-bed.

  I felt the words bubbling in my throat and wanted to say them so I started chewing at my thumbnail to stop myself from talking.

  Amanda wasn’t filling up the gap in the conversation, just looking at me sympathetically.

  ‘It isn’t any trouble for Barbara,’ I said again. The anger evaporated quickly. I was sad. Despite everything, Chloe still wouldn’t tell me the truth. She’d probably already confided in Emma.

  Amanda poured the boiling water into a pink mug I knew was Chloe’s, then led me into the living room and made me sit in the recliner chair, tilted backwards so my feet were up. She perched on the edge of the settee across from me, and smiled, and stared, and nodded encouragingly whenever I put the mug to my mouth. I had to drink hot chocolate with marshmallows in it until Chloe had finished soaping her hair and scraping at her face.

  ‘We’ve made some ice for you,’ she said, and I looked at the brown drink inside the mug. Ice?

  ‘Chloe said you might want to do ice. She and Emma put the trays outside last night.’

  She pointed through the arch and I looked along her arm and into the conservatory, through the pointy leaves of some dangling white and green plants and out into the garden. They had filled old seed trays and roasting tins with water and left them to freeze outside overnight. The ice had swelled and the plastic trays were bowed out at the edges.

  I’d forgotten that I’d said that, about the ice, but Chloe had remembered and put the water out for me. That was a kind thing to do. I felt bad again, for being late and then silent.

  ‘I think,’ I said, struggling to push the recliner down to a proper sitting chair so I could get out of it, ‘I’ll go up to Chloe’s room now. She’s got some tapes of mine and I want to take them home with me.’

  Amanda looked at me for a long time. She still had her new Christmas earrings on, and blue mascara. I started to feel nervous. She looked like Chloe and her eyes were the same too: glinting at me as if she could guess what I was going to do next.

  ‘She’s not eating, you know,’ she said abruptly. ‘Not here, anyway.’

  I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I know you’re in the middle…’ She bit her lip ‘… of your own troubles.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said.

  ‘It’s this project. Calories. You know we’ve stopped her seeing that boy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s hard to tell. Revenge, or to get attention. Or something real. Does she worry?’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Her size. Weight. Does she think she needs to diet?’

  I shrugged. Chloe was always more interested in my diet than her own. Some things make your skin worse, she’d tell me, and watch approvingly while I scraped them off my plate and into the bin. Chloe ate whatever she liked. She had that kind of metabolism, she said. I wasn’t to feel bad about it. It was luck, genes, and nothing to do with either of us as real people, which to her, was the important thing.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Amanda stood up and started to rearrange the school pictures of Chloe on the mantelpiece. Four different kinds of school uniform and every picture in an expensive silver frame. You could run them together like a flickerbook and see her growing up before your eyes.

  ‘We’ve never had a teenage girl before, her father and me. People expect you to know how to be a parent by the time your child gets to be this age. But we don’t know. She’s up in her room with Emma for hours – in and out of the greenhouse – phone calls at odd hours. I’ve caught her sneaking out at night a few times. What about the times I haven’t caught her? She won’t let us meet this boy. I daren’t think what they get up to together. I had to throw out a pair of her jeans they were so filthy.’

  She stopped fiddling with the pictures and turned to face me. ‘Is there something I should know? It seems such an extreme reaction. It’s hard to know what’s normal.’

  ‘We’ve never spoken about it. Sorry.’

  Amanda smiled, and shook her head.

  ‘I shouldn’t be pestering you. Nathan told me to leave you alone. Don’t worry about it. You just have a nice afternoon,’ she waved her hands at me and her voice cracked, ‘go on and get your tapes.’

  Chloe’s room was full of eyes. We spent whole weekends sitting on her bedroom floor cutting pictures out of Smash Hits and pasting them to her walls. The shower was still going in the bathroom. I stepped onto the pink carpet and held my breath, listening for the shower water.

  Chloe had a special drawer. It was just the bottom drawer of her night-table. She told me that in Year Seven when she’d started wearing bras she’d kept them in there instead of her usual sock drawer. In Year Eight she’d used it to keep her fags in. Now it was full of clear zip-locked bags that were stuffed with condoms.

  She’d been to a Talkwize clinic in town where they handed them out, for free, no questions asked. Patsy – Dr Jamrag – had told her where to go and what to say. Chloe liked shiny new things. Liked having a special drawer, and accessories, and secrets. She must have got over the embarrassment and been ten times. I’d been with her once, and was embarrassed enough that I had to wait outside (You can’t come in, do you want them to think we’re lezzers?), counting the lumps of chewing gum on the pavement and watching the morning queue outside the pub across the road.

  I slid the drawer back and saw the bags. More occasions of sex than any one person would ever have in their life, probably. And underneath them, hardly hidden, the black block of a mobile phone. I picked it up, listened for the continued fizz of the shower water hitting enamel next door, and turned it on. There were holes in the plastic at the ear-piece. I covered them with my thumbs and felt the thing buzz against my hand. Remembered the day the police came to my house and the message that I left on her answering
service.

  It would have been better if they really had come to talk to me about Wilson.

  I touched the buttons, lifted it to my ear, listened. There I was. Pissed off and panicking and as good as admitting to something that she knew full well I hadn’t done. And she’d kept this message anyway. Nice insurance for her.

  I turned the phone back off again, put it in the drawer, closed it. Opened the drawer, took it out, stuffed it into the back pocket of my jeans and pulled my jumper down to cover the lump it made on my backside. The tapes I wanted were on Chloe’s desk, stacked up neatly. I picked them up and went downstairs, not bothering to close the door behind me.

  I could have just deleted the message and put the phone back into the drawer. Chloe wouldn’t have known, and if she did notice and guess that I had done it, she could hardly come to me and complain about it. I thought about those retching noises she made in the woods. But I stole her phone and I did it because I wanted her to know. I wanted her to notice it was missing and figure out for herself how and why I had taken it. I wanted her to feel scared and confused, like she’d been making me feel – and most of all, I wanted something solid in my pocket – something to hold and take home and look at when I was on my own and doubting that any of this could really be happening.

  The ice was stuck hard into the roasting tins and seed trays. Amanda had made Chloe dry her hair before we were allowed to go out, and then given me a tub of salt. I stared at it in my hand and wanted to laugh. The laughter felt like dry, hot stones at the back of my mouth where my tongue started. I tried to let it out, but it turned into a cough.

  ‘You didn’t think this through, did you?’ she said, poking at the trays with her shoe.

  I picked one of the seed trays up and flexed it as if it was an ice cube tray. Blocks of ice, curved at the top like corks where the water had overflowed the individual compartments for the soil, fell onto the lawn and bounced. None of them broke, and I crouched and touched them.

  ‘You have to write about your method,’ Chloe said. ‘You can’t fuck up on this. It isn’t possible. So long as you write about what you did, what you used, and what you thought was going to happen, you’ll get the marks, even if you end up blowing something up.’

  I had stacked the big ice cubes into a tower while she was talking to me. Then I started to pour salt on the top one. The salt wore a dint into it. The dint filled with water, then overflowed. The overflowing water solidified again on its way down. It made the tower less wobbly than it had been before.

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said, poking at it with my finger.

  ‘You have to write about how you’re going to apply it. You can’t just mess about.’ Chloe’s teeth were chattering. I thought about ways to apply it, this stupid tower of ice – this useless thing that I’d made and now had to explain and assign a value to. It made me think about Donald. I wanted to kick the ice tower over, to shatter the cubes into fragments. He did it all for me, and that wasn’t fair. I didn’t ask him to. It’s too much to put on another person’s shoulders – to expect me to be happy all the time just to keep Donald on an even keel. I leaned back and kicked the tower. It hurt my foot, right through the toe of my trainer. The blocks broke apart, flew through the air and plopped onto the grass.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ Chloe’s shoulders were shaking, even though she was more bundled up than I was. It was because she was so thin. ‘Don’t dick about,’ she said irritably. ‘I spent ages doing this.’

  The ice was harder to get out of the roasting tins because they wouldn’t bend like the plastic seed trays had. I put them upside down on the grass and stood on them with one foot. There was a sound, something between a snap and a squeak. When I pulled the metal tray away it was dented and the ice was in pieces.

  ‘I wonder if you can cut yourself on it,’ I said, looking at the hard edges and not wanting to touch. It looked like glass, bubbled and broken, but it wasn’t glass.

  ‘I’m fucking freezing,’ Chloe said, and we went in to burn her Brazil nuts.

  What should I say now? I didn’t talk to her enough? I talked to her too much? I couldn’t get her to listen to me and understand that things would be much better for us both if we’d have confided in each other?

  I was fourteen. She was my best friend.

  And now it is Emma who I am sitting up late at night with, in something that is nowhere near a companionable silence. I want to ask her if Chloe talked to her about the things that were on her mind – the things she did not tell her mother and would not tell me. I want to ask Emma if Chloe let her listen to the message on her phone – if they laughed over it, or discussed a plan of action. I want to tell Emma that I still talk to Chloe. That I toast her in the early hours. That now I have to try all the things she should have done first, and I have to do it on my own.

  I have a pink and white mug I bought for her three years ago and sometimes I bring it out of the cupboard and hold it between my hands like the stem of a posy.

  ‘Here,’ I say, offer it out to the dark and try to believe in ghosts. Nothing ever happens. Chloe isn’t here and Chloe has never left the City.

  Later, we were standing behind the greenhouse, hiding between the wall and the panes of cloudy glass. Smoking.

  ‘I know you’re still seeing Carl – don’t pretend like you aren’t.’

  Chloe turned her back to me quickly and shook her head so hard that her ponytail hit the sides of her neck.

  ‘I’m not,’ she said, in a strange, muffled voice. Usually, when she was lying, she liked you to know that she was lying. Not that there was a big secret to keep, but that something was going on and you just weren’t quite important enough to know about it. Or she’d withhold, to extend the pleasure of the questioning for as long as possible.

  ‘I don’t want anything to do with him,’ she said, and she sounded like she had something in her mouth.

  My hands had gone past cold from playing with the ice, and past sore, and into numb. The skin on my fingers felt like rubber – like it was nothing to do with me at all. As I was wondering what it would be like to have a whole body like that – even tongue and eyes, the warmth in my blood started to prickle back into them and they began to hurt. That seemed more important – that pain in my fingers – than the conversation I was trying to have with Chloe.

  ‘I know you have,’ I said. ‘You’re talking shite.’

  ‘What?’ Chloe blew her smoke at the iced panes of glass, melting a little circle. She watched the steam and smoke bounce off the surface and didn’t look at me. Her eyes were sly, slitty. I could see her eyelashes brushing her cheeks – clumped together with cheap mascara.

  ‘What do you know?’ she said, but when she turned and looked at me, her face was red.

  ‘You’ve been staying out all night with him,’ I said. ‘No, I haven’t,’ she said. It wasn’t lazy – usually she didn’t care if I believed her or not, and usually I didn’t bother so much. But this time she was shaking her head, and insisting.

  ‘I think you have. Out in his car at night. In the woods.’

  I exhaled a cloud of my own smoke. Didn’t try for a ring.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your mum thinks you’ve been sleeping at mine,’ I said, ‘keeping me company. Comforting me.’

  I could smell her. After her shower she’d put fresh perfume and make-up on, but got back into her old clothes. She smelled yeasty and musty – dirty knickers and airing cupboards and bathmats, with a choking cover-up of White Musk. It was so weird. Chloe was obsessive about outfits, and hygiene.

  ‘All right,’ Chloe said, and dug the cigarette into the gravel with her toe, burying it. ‘I’ve been staying out. So what?’

  I pulled the Polos out of my pocket. Only two left, both of them broken.

  ‘Have one of these,’ I said. ‘You can talk to me about anything.’

  She shook her head. ‘They’ll make me sick,’ she said. ‘I don’t care if she smells the smoke on me.’

&n
bsp; ‘I’m your best friend, aren’t I?’ I said, still holding out the mints.

  She smiled and took one just to please me, put it in her mouth and I could see the scale on her teeth and she sucked it hard, so her cheeks puckered and her eyes popped, like she was trying to make me laugh.

  ‘Best friends,’ she said, ‘but there’s nothing to tell.’

  ‘Where have you been going at night?’

  ‘Carl’s, of course,’ she said lightly.

  ‘You can’t have been,’ I said. ‘His mother. He’d never take you back to his house.’

  ‘His mother’s sick,’ Chloe said. ‘She doesn’t know what’s going on. Carl hammered a sheet of wood over the window in the box room and she never even noticed.’

  ‘The darkroom?’

  Chloe smiled. ‘Nearly finished. I’ve been helping him.’

  ‘In the middle of the night?’

  She shrugged, and smiled at me. ‘You’re going to get to see it soon. Come on,’ she said, ‘it’s too cold. Let’s go in.’

  Chloe and I crossed the garden without speaking, sucking on the mints and marching past the ice – the cracked edges and triangular shapes melting into lumps where I’d put the salt on them. We went into the kitchen. She stood at the counter and started sweeping nuts and pieces of burned paper into the bin.

  I tried again.

  ‘I want to go back to that pond,’ I said. ‘Carl’s going to have to take us in the car. I want to go and look again.’

  ‘Why?’ Chloe said, and shook her head. ‘It’s nothing to do with me. I didn’t do anything wrong. You’ve already been out there once.’

  Her voice was high and cracked. She carried on shaking her head, in a slow thoughtful arc, even after she’d finished speaking.

  ‘I want you to come with me. You’re supposed to be my best friend.’

  ‘No point,’ she said, more quietly.