Cold Light

by Jenn Ashworth

  The oooo sound didn’t echo – we were too much in the open for that – but it sounded hollow anyway, glancing over the ice and amplifying like we were at a pantomime. Chloe looked up and gave me the finger, for no reason at all, and then started stepping, half walking, half sliding, to the centre of the lake.

  ‘He just ran away,’ said Carl.

  ‘Chloe said we could come and check. To put my mind at rest. She’s nearly there now.’

  ‘Waste of fucking time,’ Carl said, and I thought he was getting to something – but I didn’t want it to be him to tell me, didn’t want it to be something he’d break to her: Listen – cocking his head towards me – I’ve had to let her in on it, don’t start on though, will you? No. It was not supposed to be like that.

  ‘Chloe doesn’t think it’s a waste of time,’ I said, and Carl laughed at me again and might have been about to say something else when Chloe interrupted us.

  ‘Oi!’ she shouted, sounding indignant. It was because we’d stopped looking at her. ‘I’m here!’ she said. ‘You two better not be talking about me!’

  She put her foot on top of the football and Carl stepped forward with his other foot until he was completely on the ice.

  So this was the way it was going to be. He was going to follow her out there.

  I stepped back onto the bank.

  ‘Come back in now,’ he said, trying to sound like someone’s dad.

  ‘It’s stuck right in,’ she said.

  ‘Can you see through?’ I imagined that out in the middle, where the water was clearer, it would have frozen into something like thick glass.

  Chloe stepped back and put her hands on her hips, drew her leg behind her and kicked the football. The ice broke, making a noise like snapped polystyrene. The football bobbed under the surface and popped back out. It rolled across the ice away from her and the leg she’d kicked with sank into the hole it had left.

  I suppose she must have screamed.

  Carl ran onto the ice as if he were sprinting across tarmac. I thought he might slip, but he didn’t. I put my hands back inside my pockets and felt for my mittens.

  He got there quickly. When he reached her, Chloe was sprawled awkwardly across the surface. She’d leaned forward – her right leg buried in the black water up to her thigh and her left bent and flat behind her on the ice. Her arms were stretched out as if she was reaching for the ball which had hit one of the branches and stopped rolling six inches short of her scrabbling fingertips.

  Carl grabbed hold of her left ankle. He was crouching behind her and pulling at her. It wasn’t doing any good. He was pulling her backwards, bringing the back of her thigh against the fragment of ice behind it. He would have done better to stand up and hold onto her hands, or try to slide her out frontward. I was watching them and wondering again if broken slabs of ice could cut a person. No, I decided at last, because a body’s heat would melt the edge and dull it.

  Carl was shouting something, and Chloe was screaming and flailing and kicking with her free leg. She wasn’t doing herself any good. Panicking so much that Carl had a job keeping hold of her ankle. He stood up, heaved her leg up with him and then leaned back. It must have felt like she was being folded in two. Carl wobbled, as if he was losing his balance. I thought he was going to do it. Then he wobbled again, and I realised it wasn’t him that was moving, it was the piece of ice he was standing on.

  He dropped her ankle and stepped back but the ice cracked again – a slab as big as a table tilting upwards under his feet and throwing him on top of her. I fluttered my fingers inside my pockets, feeling Carl’s lighter and the shiny side of the Polaroids. Something in the bottom snagged against my fingertips and under my nails. Something gritty, small and hard. It could have been bits of burned Donald left over from the sprinkling at the crematorium.

  Chloe went right down – I saw the top of her head as she bobbed up again between Carl’s arms. Her hair was wet and flat against her scalp. Carl’s head was submerged, perhaps knocking the ice, and his flailing elbow hit her chin and forced her head back. She screamed in a breath and it was as if they were fighting. They were both under and it was quiet and I waited until they didn’t come back up again. I put on my mittens and waited until the surface of the water was still again before I decided to go home.

  Chloe and Carl didn’t stay there long. The water might have frozen over their heads like a thin film in the dark to cover them up for a while, but in the morning the sun shone and up they came. Joggers and dog walkers emerged on the paths on cue to discover them, wet heads bobbing in the water like corks. It was Valentine’s Day, and the long-awaited thaw had begun, and I bet it was a right production to get them out and into their matching pair of ambulances.

  I was sleeping when they were found. I never saw any of it.

  I have imagined it. Hair plastered to their skulls. The blueness of their skin and fingernails. I had already imagined it for Wilson: transferring the details of the imagery to them was quick and involuntary.

  When Terry reported it on the news that afternoon, I was eating a Marmite sandwich and looking at the first Valentine’s Day card I had ever received. Anonymous, handmade, and sent in a jiffy bag along with a mix tape of songs I had never heard of. I was examining the writing, trying to picture what the scrawl on Shanks’s whiteboard in the classroom would look like if he was writing properly, in a card like this, with a pen.

  I knew the report was going to be about Chloe as soon as I saw Terry’s tie. He didn’t skip to his chair, or do a run and slide over the shiny floor of the studio, as he sometimes did. But he’d walked soberly to his seat before and the news had been no worse than another fuel shortage, or a local carpeting firm going bust, or one more assault with a broken bottle and a bike chain in a pub car park. As I say, it was the tie. What other than a death – a pair of deaths, although it was Chloe’s that was important, because she was the blonde – would have induced Terry to wear a black tie on Valentine’s Day when Ladbrokes had him down at five to one for the ‘kiss me quick, untie me slowly’ design that Woolworths had been carrying with him in mind since Burns Night?

  Barbara was in her bedroom. It didn’t matter how close to the television I sat: no one was going to stop me. The Marmite sandwich was my first and only meal that day – it was like I didn’t have a mother anymore. The Christmas tree was long gone, brown and bare and out in the garden, leaning against the back wall, but the odd needle from it was still caught in the carpet and something pricked the palm of the hand that I leaned on.

  They showed her school photograph, with her hair Frenchplaited and tiny sapphire studs in her ears. Taken at the end of the summer, while she still had a tan and before she started getting thin.

  I hardly listened to the bulletin. I could tell from the way his eyes were moving that Terry was reading from the autocue. He said polished, careful things like ‘local treasure’ and ‘tragic winter flower’ and ‘the heart-shattering sorrow of her parents, who will remember this season of love and romance with heavy hearts for as long as they both shall live’.

  They showed pictures of the school, and the car park outside the nature reserve, and the pond. It looked the same. You couldn’t see the hole in the ice – just the trees, and lots of cars, and blue and white tape stretched between the bench and the railings.

  Eventually, I realised what Terry was saying. Not only the words, but the implication of them. Chloe, apparently, had faded in front of her parents’ eyes after they had banned her from seeing Carl. Carl, who was not twenty-three, as we’d thought, but twenty-nine (and mourned by his mother who was in a wheelchair, and talked about how he always took her to the supermarket in his car, no matter what, and because of that, Terry made him out to be a hero), had given away a pair of expensive brown-envelope-coloured boots, and an almost new pair of jeans to a friend. And then he and Chloe had held hands and drank Cava and walked out onto the ice towards hypothermia, serious injury and certain death, because of their great and inordinate (w
hich is not a word you hear on the news very much) love for each other.

  A Valentine’s Day Suicide Pact. And the thing is, I thought, licking Marmite off my thumb and considering a banana for afters, that’s exactly the sort of overblown, influenced-by-television, schmaltzy gesture Chloe would make. The people who knew her were shocked, and they were sad, but they weren’t surprised.

  It was a special extended programme: they cut into Family Fortunes and Terry Best interviewed various experts – including Patsy the school nurse. She tipsily gave five helpful hints to the parents of teenage girls, which were displayed on the screen behind her in courier font as she spoke. She seemed to think Chloe had died of an eating disorder because she talked a lot about the importance of making sure young girls didn’t feel self-conscious about their developing breasts and mistake the natural swellings (she sketched a shape in the air in front of her sweater) for unwanted weight gain. That was never Chloe’s problem.

  I didn’t wonder about anything. I was waiting for something else to happen, something worse, or more important, but every time my mind skated forward to think about what it might be, a light went out and everything went dark and I couldn’t think about anything. The sensation was new and peculiar, but it has never quite left me.

  I stared and I watched my television and I didn’t say anything to anyone.

  It wasn’t long after that the interviews started. The photographs. The way they wanted me and Emma to tell them everything. I knew what they wanted to hear. We helped them make Chloe into who she is today.

  When the spring came in proper the headmaster got someone to bulldoze up the cement courtyard at the front of the school and filled it with the yellow Juliet roses. The town has never stunk like it did in the late spring of 1998. Loads of people planted them and although now, ten years later, they are a lot less fashionable, you can still smell them occasionally.

  In my dreams now it is always night and their soaked heads break the surface again and again. They want to float and my hands and arms are frozen with trying to push them back under.

  Chapter 30

  Emma and I are opening the drawers in the tallboy in my bedroom. She’s sitting on the carpet next to me. I can smell her trainers and see the pattern on her socks out of the corner of my eye as I jiggle the sticky bottom drawer open. The grain of the carpet digs into my palms as I lean towards her. I feel young, hunched down on the floor with her like this. We might have been better friends, Emma and me, if it hadn’t been for Chloe.

  ‘Let’s have it all out then,’ she says.

  The photographs of Chloe are tucked between folded jeans and sweatshirts and hiding under balls of socks and old scarves I’ve not worn in years. We lift out the clothes, throw them onto my bed or pile them on the floor, and excavate.

  Here’s one of Chloe’s mittens. Here’s a homework diary, filled with her round, squat handwriting. A pink pot of raspberryripple-scented lip balm. A dangling cubic zirconia pendant. I wasn’t as bad at stealing things as Emma and Chloe thought I was. Emma looks at the objects, gathering them in a pile between her crossed legs as I hand them to her. Eventually, I have to go and find her a shoebox.

  ‘There’s so much of it,’ she says.

  ‘She used to stay over a lot,’ I say. ‘She spent half the summer living at my house. The other half, I was with her. I bet there was loads of my stuff round at her place too.’

  I think of those lost objects. I try to count them, to list the spare socks and abandoned magazines. The notebooks and pens with moulded plastic tops in the shape of cats. I wonder if Amanda still has her things.

  ‘Come on,’ Emma says, and thrusts a pile of folded tee-shirts at me. ‘Put these up on your bed for the time being, we can put it all back after.’

  Here’s an envelope stuffed with newspaper clippings. I hitch my finger under the flap but Emma shakes her head and holds out her hand.

  ‘You’ve read it all already,’ she says.

  More. There’s the cord from her dressing gown. A stack of old tapes, a pair of headphones. I know I’m going to get to her mobile phone, but even as my hand brushes it and I see the cracked black plastic of the casing, I feel shocked. To Emma, it’s just a piece of broken equipment. It’s nothing. It’s not worth anything, not dangerous, not significant. I give it to her, my voice trapped inside it. It goes into the box.

  ‘There can’t be much more,’ she says.

  I give Emma a photograph of Chloe that I took for Carl and kept for myself. She stares at it without embarrassment.

  ‘His mother must have known,’ she says, looking at Chloe leaning over the bed in her underwear.

  ‘His wheelchair-bound mother, who Carl, despite having a full-time job, drove to the supermarket each and every Sunday without fail.’ I’m quoting Terry, but Emma doesn’t know that and glances at me with a strange expression on her face. She’s staring at the Polaroid. Chloe’s face is a faded oval – there is no definition to her features except for the bright slash of lipstick around her mouth.

  ‘She must have gone through his stuff. Found pictures like this. Chloe. Some of me. God knows who else.’

  ‘She’d have got rid of them,’ I say, and Emma nods.

  ‘That’s what you should have done. Chuck it all out. It’s disgusting.’ She tears the picture in half. ‘I don’t want anyone ever knowing about this,’ she says. ‘It’s bad enough having to think about it.’ She reaches out her hand and strokes the carpet beside her. It’s an unconscious movement and I wonder if she’s thinking about her dogs, about putting her hands into the coarse fur at the back of their necks.

  ‘I’d never say anything,’ I say quickly, ‘you can trust me on that. I’m your friend.’

  Emma snorts, but doesn’t answer and I remove the very last thing, something I found in a black school coat pocket, a coat that pretended to be a Christmas present, a long time ago. I hold it in my hands. It’s a tiny thing. Could have been a dangerous thing. A cigarette lighter with a woman in a bikini on it. When it was new, you flicked the lighter to ignite the flame and her bikini disappeared. A bit of a surprise. Something saucy and harmless. Now her skin has a greenish tinge and the gas in the chamber is long gone. I hold it between my palms for a second, feeling the cold of the metal top against the web of skin between my thumb and first finger.

  I remember this lighter.

  I remember.

  Emma takes it off me. ‘Was this Chloe’s?’ she asks, and frowns. She tests the wheel with her thumb a few times. There’s a scraping sound, but it doesn’t spark. The flint is gone. The feel of it in her hand reminds her, I think, that she wants to smoke, and she’s leaning forward, easing the green packet of tobacco out of her back pocket. The lighter is on the floor between us as she fiddles with matches and filters, runs the sliver of transparent paper along her tongue.

  ‘Here,’ she says, and hands me a cigarette. I light it from a match and we exhale together. My bedroom is tiny and soon the smoke is making a dusky halo around the bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, shrouded with its own ropy cobwebs of dust.

  ‘It doesn’t look like Chloe’s,’ she says. ‘Is it going in the box?’

  I know what she’s thinking. It isn’t pink. It isn’t fluffy. It doesn’t sparkle or smell like strawberries, it doesn’t glitter or glow in the dark. So it isn’t Chloe’s. A long minute passes before I speak.

  ‘It was Carl’s,’ I say, ‘and he got it off Wilson. Or Wilson lost it, and Carl picked it up. I don’t know exactly.’

  ‘Carl gave it you?’ she says carefully. ‘Like a present?’ She says present with a tilt to it, and I realise what she’s implying, what she’s offering up to me. I can talk if I want to. I can be her friend like this.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I found it in the woods.’

  I gesture half-heartedly at the television in the next room. We’ve left it on, and across the hallway and between two halfclosed doors, I can still hear Terry’s voice. He speaks into the silence, talking about human error and
regret and despite everything how he’d like to take the opportunity to recap his personal career highlights. Emma was right. He can’t get away without admitting he was wrong.

  ‘Those woods on the telly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Emma looks at the lighter, and looks at me. She’s calm. She picks it up, examines it again as she finishes the last of her cigarette.

  ‘She’s supposed to get naked, when you flick it,’ I say. Emma nods. ‘I’ve seen them before. Sell them everywhere. Pound shops, newsagents, pubs. Hundreds of them.’

  There’s no ashtray in here. No conveniently placed empty coffee mug or wine bottle. She flicks the ash into the shoebox and stubs out the cigarette in the lid.

  ‘It’s Wilson’s,’ I say, and Emma looks at me again – the same even, unreadable expression on her face.

  ‘I don’t want to know,’ she says. ‘I haven’t asked, have I?’ She opens her eyes wide and I can see she’s biting her bottom lip.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘It goes in the box too then?’ she says neutrally.

  ‘Yes, okay. Get rid of it.’

  She throws it in, and makes a show of pushing everything down flat and rearranging the papers and photographs so she can get the lid on tight.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ She is brisk and efficient now. She sounds like Barbara. I wonder about what’s left in that house – whether Barbara cleaned out my room as quickly as she emptied Donald’s. I think of my old things, and wonder who there is in the world to tuck them into drawers and keep them safe for me.

  ‘No, that’s it,’ I say. ‘I’ve nothing else.’

  ‘Good. Come on then, get up and get your coat on.’

  ‘What are we going to do with it?’

  ‘We’re going to chuck it out,’ Emma says, as if she expects me to challenge her.

  ‘I know a place,’ I say. ‘Do you have your car?’

  She nods.

  Outside, it’s getting light but the street is empty. I’ve been up this early before. The bread van should be arriving around now – the milk float, and the first bit of morning traffic. The early bus. But there’s nothing, and instead of a street full of darkened windows we can see the lights still on behind the closed curtains; people sitting up late, sitting up early – as long as it takes. The racks in front of the block of flats are still loaded with people’s bikes: no one’s leaving the house early for work this morning.