‘Have this,’ she said, ‘finish it off.’ Her eyes were narrow and hazy. I wondered if she’d taken one of Carl’s special tablets. The bottle was olive green and freezing. The ragged foil around the top scraped at the soft bit of my hand, under my thumb.
‘Come here, Carl,’ she said, ‘come and show Lola what you’ve got.’
Carl edged nearer to us and clumsily took the bottle out of my hand. He finished the two inches of liquid in the bottom and threw it high over our heads and into the bushes. The motion of transferring his weight from one foot to another made him stagger and he toppled into Chloe. She pushed her face against his chest and giggled. I listened for a smash but it never came.
‘Here,’ he said, and crooked his finger at me, ‘closer. I int going to bite you.’
I took a step or two forward and watched as he pulled a small handful of dog-eared Polaroids out of his inside pocket. I knew he carried a picture of Chloe around with him because she’d told me. But these weren’t Chloe. They were me.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said, almost formally. ‘Chloe showed me them.’
My face burned and I cringed away and stared at my feet.
‘Don’t be like that, Lola,’ she said, and put her arm around me. When she kissed my cheek I could smell her unwashed hair and the alcohol on her breath.
‘You look very nice,’ he said, and burped gently. ‘These aren’t professional quality, but you’ve really got something. Have you ever thought about taking it further?’
I looked up. He was rubbing his thumb along the bottom of the Polaroid, touching the place where my bare forearms were in the picture.
‘You’ve got a certain magic,’ he said. ‘It’s a special quality really – you see it now and again in the big budget movies. On the catwalks. An unassuming beauty. Not many girls look like this,’ he gestured at the picture and not at me, ‘and don’t know it.’
Chloe laughed. ‘He thinks you could be a model,’ she said. ‘It was the first thing he said when I showed him.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘You need a portfolio,’ Carl said. ‘Something a bit better than this.’ He shook the Polaroid as if he was waiting for it to be developed, and then put it back in his pocket. ‘You should think about it. I could do it for you, if you wanted.’ He shrugged. ‘Up to you, of course.’
‘The darkroom,’ I said.
Carl smiled, almost shyly. His front two teeth overlapped slightly and the crevice between them was stained dark with nicotine.
‘It’s all ready for you. Whenever you like.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, and shook my head. ‘Shouldn’t we just go on down to the pond? That’s what we’re here for.’
Carl laughed. ‘I’ll make you a deal,’ he said. ‘How about we get this done, put your mind at rest, and then I take you back to mine so you can have a look at the room? I’ve a set of professional lights in there, so I could take your picture and get it developed all in one. My mum’s out, your mum’s – well, not expecting you back soon. We could have all evening. Chloe would be there to do your make-up and make you feel comfy.’
I looked at her and she was nodding, eagerly. ‘We do it all the time, Lola, it’s a laugh, and you’ll look amazing.’
I bit my lip and wondered if Carl could have been telling the truth. An unassuming beauty? Was it possible? What did she show him for?
‘Maybe,’ I said. He rolled his eyes and put his hand back into his pocket.
‘You don’t trust me?’ he said. ‘Here. You keep them then. It was sneaky of Chloe to take them but she knows the sort of thing I like to see. You keep these and come back to the house later.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. Chloe smiled.
‘That’s my girl, come on then,’ Carl replied, and we started walking.
I don’t know what it cost Chloe to convince Carl to take us because I never asked her. Still, by the time we got there, all I remember thinking was that they were happy. They were almost giddy with a kind of frantic, forced excitement that seemed to belong to Christmas. I guessed they’d been drinking all afternoon.
We got to the edge of the pond. Carl and Chloe went first, I followed on slightly behind but near enough to hear them talk.
‘I left my gloves in your car,’ Chloe said. ‘Did you bring them out for me?’
Carl shook his head. ‘Must be at the house. You should have rung me.’
Chloe put her head on one side.
‘Where is your phone, anyway?’ he asked.
‘Look, we’re here now,’ I said, ‘and we’re not going to be long. I’ve got some mittens you can borrow. Chloe?’
I called after her, but in the time it took for me to pull my mittens out of my pockets they were already too far ahead, their faces turned towards each other so that for one second they looked like that optical illusion you see in books – two heads close on one minute, and a vase the next. You know the one I mean. I still remember it like that – their noses level, Chloe’s eyes pointed up at Carl. He pulled her face towards his and whispered something in her ear. She giggled.
‘It’s been ages, you sicko,’ she said, and swished her head away. They bumped each other’s shoulders as they walked on and Carl stuck out his foot and pretended he was going to trip her up.
‘Come on, dickhead,’ he said softly, and poked her in the side with his elbow. Chloe stopped, put her hands on her hips, and pursed her lips at him. It was as if they could talk like that: they had a secret they were sharing backwards and forwards through a code of breaths and eye movements.
Then we were at the pond. Others had walked around it before us and recently too – the grass between the path and the bank was frosty and pressed with footprints.
Chloe complained again about the cold.
‘Here we are, Lolly-Lola,’ she said. ‘What do you want us to look at?’
I didn’t answer. I was struggling behind, they’d already arrived and I was trotting through the leaves then – making the effort to catch them up without trying to look desperate or get sweaty.
‘I don’t see anything,’ Carl said. He was bored, his voice was hoarse.
‘Further out,’ I said, and lost the rest of what I was going to say in a coughing fit. Carl rolled his eyes.
‘She needs a fag. Give her a fag, Carl, don’t be tight.’
Carl flicked open the packet, jiggled it so one of the cigarettes jumped out at me.
‘You got a lighter?’
He pulled it out of his pocket without looking at it. Tossed it through the air. The metal part caught the light and shimmered slightly. I lit the cigarette with the lighter tucked into my palm, and Carl was walking towards Chloe when I turned to give it back to him so I put it away and didn’t see what he’d given to me until I got home and I looked for the Polaroids.
It gets to your throat more, when you smoke in the cold. Carl was coughing too. The white air came out of his mouth and I saw it in spumes either side of his head. I remembered being seven and saw myself blowing clouds of warm white air into the cold, pretending I was smoking with a broken twig.
‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘Can we get on with this?’
‘It’s right in the middle,’ I said. Carl stamped over the grass. ‘Over there.’
Donald told me that in wildlife documentaries the sound that penguins and polar bears make stepping into the snow isn’t real – they put it in afterwards with a sound man squeezing a rubber glove full of custard powder in time to the steps. You want a noise like that, in here. Not loads of custard powder, because it wasn’t deep white snow, but grey slush clogging the grass, with a crust of frost. Carl was at the edge of the water. Chloe followed him and if the ground hadn’t been frozen they both would have sunk into it because their feet were in the place where the grass turned into reeds.
‘I can see it,’ Chloe said, and I imagined her at the front of the class, arm waving – always first with the right answer. She grabbed Carl’s arm and turned him
towards her.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I see it. It’s a football. What are we supposed to do now?’
This last question was for me, but he didn’t bother turning his head to look at me and so I didn’t bother answering him. Chloe put her hand in his back pocket and squeezed.
‘Doesn’t prove anything, just looking,’ Chloe said, and I didn’t know who she was talking to. Suddenly I wanted to touch her. Nothing weird – just a hand on the padded sleeve of her coat, or my cheek against the fluff at her collar. She was with Carl, and miles away.
‘We could go out and look,’ I said. It was definitely me that said it. I’d been hoping Chloe would suggest it – she was the one who decided on the plans, on what was the best response to any problem. But I’d already decided, at home while I was brushing my teeth and staring at my fringe in the bathroom mirror, that if she wouldn’t, I was going to. And that was fine with me.
The ice was thick – bubbled and uneven in places where it had cracked and refrozen. Didn’t look like water. Didn’t look like ice. Put me in mind of the scorched plastic on the cowslip and stoat sign. Further out the surface was smoother. No reeds or plants to poke through it, just the six wooden stumps of the old platform. Someone had wanted to test the ice – there were branches and bottles, broken bricks and large stones – skidmarks where they’d been thrown and slid over the hard lid on the water. We stared. I imagined the Year Elevens, out here on weekends tossing stones and bottles, someone getting their nerve up to slide right out. It had been all right. No one had fallen so far. If Wilson had got this far he’d have been fine. I imagined him, dashing out onto the water and then stopping, delighted, as it held between his feet and Carl gave up the chase on the bank.
‘It’s a football,’ Carl said again, trying to turn away from the pond, but Chloe was still hanging onto his back pocket and wouldn’t let it go. ‘We’ve come, we’ve seen it, it’s a fucking football,’ he laughed, and Chloe pulled at his arm. ‘Well done, Laura, you were right. A footie.’
‘I bet we could see right through though,’ I said, but not to him, ‘like a window.’
Chloe looked at me over her shoulder, then let go of Carl’s arm and turned completely round. She smiled. I could see the back of his head, and Chloe standing in front of him, slightly to the left and facing me. I never imagined it was me she was smiling at. A private, knowing smile. She blinked a few times, and rubbed her chin against her shoulder.
‘Come on,’ she said to Carl, almost under her breath. ‘What difference does it make?’
‘We need to go out on the ice,’ I said, ‘and look through it.’
Chloe darted a look at me.
‘Not all of us,’ I said, and she frowned.
‘The lighter the better,’ I explained.
‘See if he’s down there? Looking up at us?’
She put her tongue under her bottom lip and crossed her eyes.
‘Delp ne! Delp ne!’ she said, and made her hands into fists banging at an invisible surface over her face. She’d made herself ugly and mumbly, and it was cruel and accurate and funny. I laughed breathlessly, and the air hurt my throat. Carl threw his cigarette into the grass and didn’t bother to stamp it out. I watched it as the thin coil of smoke drifted upwards and died away.
Carl looked at her, pulled the packet out of his pocket.
‘Fucking hell, Chloe,’ he said, like she’d been saying it about Donald, and right in front of me.
It could have been that Carl would have wanted to light his fag then. Patted his pockets, held out the flat of his palm to me for the lighter that wasn’t his. And I’d have pulled it out of my pocket, and he’d have seen my face as I looked at it. That could have been dangerous for me. There was a bit of luck due though. Something made a noise then – maybe a car backfiring far away or someone slamming a door closed – and Chloe jumped, strung tight and startled, and stepped backwards onto the ice.
‘Chlo—’ Carl threw his arms out towards her – it looked like he had lost his balance instead of her. The cigarette rolled away.
‘It’s solid, it’s fine,’ she said. She leaned forward – she was only one arm’s length away from Carl – and stamped one foot gently. Her fingers were touching the sleeve of his jacket. I wondered again, with more than a little admiration, what Chloe had promised to Carl to get him to bring us out here.
‘I’m going out,’ she said, and slid her feet backwards as if she was skating. ‘I’m the smallest. If someone’s going, it should be me.’
Carl reached out his hand. ‘Don’t be stupid. Get back over here.’
Chloe laughed and stuck out her tongue and pushed herself backwards.
‘Solid as anything!’ she said, and tried to balance on one foot.
It isn’t ‘tried’, not really. She didn’t fall, and she made it look like it was no trouble at all. She turned and slid gracefully, as easily as if she had been wearing blades instead of trainers.
‘I’ll go out and see if he’s there,’ Chloe said, as if she was talking about a friend waiting in the park for us. As if she was talking about someone who could, possibly, be there.
‘Go on then,’ I said, daring her out. I stared, and I wanted her to catch my eye but she didn’t. She was still smirking at Carl. Still moving, one foot to another, she reached up behind her head to pull the scrunchie out of her hair. She shook it all loose and it spread out in the air and then fell back along her shoulders. Like an advert for something. Shampoo. Vitamins. She pouted, thinking she was that sexy, and then she was moving, and Carl was nodding his head as if music was coming out of her pores, smiling back at her, dumb and slack-eyed, and she said, ‘It’s great!’ and moved faster, pushing her feet across the ice and swiping her hands through the air like she was swimming.
Even when she was quite far away from us she kept twisting and swishing her hair about and laughing.
‘Stupid cow,’ Carl said, but his eyes were stuck to her. I watched Carl, not Chloe. I noticed every time she wobbled, he flinched.
‘Get out to the middle,’ I said, and Carl took a step closer to the edge and took his hands out of his pockets but he didn’t say anything.
He could have stopped it. Either of them could have stopped it in a second. I wanted her to stop it. I wanted her to weigh up her options and realise that confiding in me about Wilson was her only and her best choice. All she needed to do was come clean and give me this secret she’d been keeping. I was her best friend. I was first. She could have trusted me with anything. All I was doing was encouraging her: I was making telling me an easier, more attractive option than not telling me. She knew she didn’t need to go out on the ice: there wasn’t any pressure. I didn’t push her; I didn’t lay a hand on her.
Chloe started to pick up speed, sliding on flat feet and making rings around the outside of the pond in a tightening spiral to the centre. The far side was in the shade of overhanging trees. When she passed underneath them all I could see of her was flashes of her white hands and trainers weaving through the air, as if disembodied. If it was me out there, I would have fallen. I would have twisted an ankle, or overbalanced and cracked the back of my head against the glassy surface or bruised my backside on a stick.
‘She thinks she’s in a film,’ I said, even though I knew Carl wasn’t listening. He jerked his shoulder and grunted slightly, hardly a response at all, and I was overcome with the urge to turn my back on Chloe. She only did these things when other people were watching. That’s what Emma was for. I wanted to tell Carl that if he was that worried about her, the quickest way to get Chloe off the ice would be for us both to turn around and go back and sit in the car.
Not that I was that desperate to go and sit in the car with Carl on my own either. Chloe could get scared first, then she would talk, then she would come in off the ice and be safe again.
She came nearer, out of the shadow and trying to spin around. The soles of her trainers were snagging on some groove or imperfection on the ice that I couldn’t see, an
d she was laughing at nothing, and using her left foot like a sweeper, to brush the ice smooth. I looked at her and saw Barbara, pushing the pile of the carpet backwards and forwards with the toe of her slipper, staring at nothing for hours until it went dark and there was nothing to stare at.
‘It’s stones,’ she called, and waved with both hands over her head as if me and Carl were hundreds of miles away. ‘Someone’s been chucking stones. There’s hundreds of them.’
‘Come off now,’ Carl said, but there was a smile in his voice still. He didn’t sound worried anymore, and took another step forward on to the very edge of the ice. His trainers were unlaced and darker at the toes where the blue canvas had been stained by the wet from the grass. I twiddled with the fastening of the Christmas present school coat and stepped forward too.
It was nothing to do with Carl. Chloe always did things first, I’d accepted that, but she accepted that she was testing the way, and that I would follow along shortly after. Carl didn’t have anything to do with it.
‘Where are your boots?’ I said, gently. ‘How come you aren’t wearing your boots?’
Carl looked at me. Didn’t say anything for a long while.
‘I didn’t want them anymore,’ he said, ‘they were dirty.’ I stared at him, and he laughed, ‘So what?’
‘Are you coming?’ Chloe called, and we both paused, me and her boyfriend Carl, one foot on the ice each and waiting. Chloe carried on knocking the stones away with the side of her foot. They were the grey, straight-edged chips – big gravel from the path and the car park. Industrial – it comes in sacks and someone had chucked handfuls of it out onto the ice. Probably someone we knew. Someone in our year at school, at least.
I put my hands either side of my mouth and made a trumpet.
‘Can you see anything yet?’
Carl looked at me when I shouted, and snorted, ‘Is that what we’re here for? Still?’
I ignored him, and shouted again. ‘It’s behind you!’
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