Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

I started to pace away, remembered there were no buses, and stepped back. It must have looked like I was jumping, or running on the spot. Chloe was smoothing her eyebrows with her finger and didn’t notice me.

‘I should have brought Emma,’ she said lightly. Pretending to talk to herself – pretending she’d forgotten I was there. ‘Emma never moans like this. Emma’s glad when me and Carl decide to bring her out in the car for a bit.’

I stepped away and didn’t answer.

Bring you out! As if I was a dog, a big stupid kid like Wilson. It was me and her that were supposed to be going out. Out to the park, walk about and see if anyone else from school was there. It had been empty, but someone was bound to have turned up sooner or later. Once the parents had crashed out in front of the telly someone would have come along with some booze. It was almost guaranteed.

But no. After about ten minutes Chloe had got cold, decided it wasn’t safe – what with the flasher – and phoned Carl to come and get her. Which was, I realised belatedly, exactly what she had planned to do all along. I was just the audience.

‘You’ve turned into a right bitch since you’ve started seeing him, do you know that?’ I said.

‘You are jealous,’ she said mildly.

‘Of what?’

There was a moment or two of silence. Rows like this were becoming normal. It was nothing that wouldn’t blow over but it irritated me that it was always me who made the first move to reconcile and not Chloe. Like she knew she could do without me fine, for as long as it took. It was all down to Carl. The summer just gone; we’d spent more or less every day together. I’d sleep at her house, she’d sleep at mine – sometimes even in the same bed.

We watched the stage version of Bottom and videos of Carry on Emmannuelle and Barbarella . We ate with her parents, who I actually think really liked me, and thought because I was quiet I was possibly a good influence on Chloe, who they worried had a tendency to run wild and get out of hand. Then, late October or early November she’d started seeing him – and overnight she’d changed, and even started encouraging Emma, who’d been nothing but a hanger-on up until Carl had come on the scene. It was all getting away from me.

‘You’re a slag,’ I said.

Chloe didn’t look at me, didn’t look hurt. She rubbed a hand over the mark on her neck.

‘Give it a rest, will you?’ she said wearily. ‘You’re being really, really immature, you know that? Do you want to come to my party, or not?’

I opened my mouth and I was about to say more, to really go off on one, when I heard the crackle of someone running towards us through the woods. Chloe tucked her lip balm into her coat pocket and put her gloves on fastidiously. I remember the sticky, sickly smell of the grease she put on her mouth. Peach melba, or peach crush. Something thick and orange. We both turned to the hedge and waited.

When Carl came out he was panting slightly and his eyes were bright. I’d never seen anyone look like that before, not even in films. It was an ‘ideas’ expression. Something new, something shining, deep in his mind. He was wiping his boots on the grass as if he’d stepped in dog-dirt.

‘What did you do with him?’ Chloe asked. She went over and tried to put her arm through his. He shook his head and shrugged her away.

‘Get off pawing at me, will you?’

Carl wiped his mouth and hawked up snot, spat on the grass, wiped his mouth again. ‘He ran off. Quick little bastard. Can they all move like that?’

I shrugged, and Chloe tittered and tried to hold his hand.

‘You want to go back in the car?’ she said, and moved her face so those loops of hair fell over her eyes. Carl was taller than her – a lot taller. She looked up at him through her eyelashes.

‘Get in the car,’ he said, and pushed her so hard she had to run a few steps for her feet to catch up with her body. She nearly fell and I was about to say something. I took another look at Carl and thought better of it. Chloe didn’t say anything either, just carried on moving. She didn’t look back at him. Trotted over to the car and didn’t wait, like she usually did, for him to open the door for her.

‘In the back,’ he gestured with his thumb, ‘both of you. I’m taking you home.’

‘What’s the rush?’ Chloe said, once we were strapped in and on the move. ‘I thought we had plans?’

She drew out ‘plans’, just so that I wouldn’t miss the reference – wouldn’t be able to take my mind away from what she and Carl would be doing as soon as I was out of the way. We were on the road that circled the outside edge of the park – spooning the trees and the Asda superstore.

‘That’s the rush,’ Carl said, and slowed the car to a crawl. He tapped his knuckle against the window and we looked into the Asda car park.

The shutters were down and the lights were off in the supermarket, but there was a van in the car park – a beige- and oatmeal-coloured Bambi camper with a sheet draped over the side of it. On the sheet someone had painted something in red paint or thick marker, and there were several men with scarves wrapped around their faces standing around admiring it. One of them looked in our direction. Carl put his foot down and we were on our way back towards the City.

‘Who were they?’ I asked. I felt sick.

‘Group of lads getting together to go through the woods, bus station, places like that. Looking for this pest.’ Carl laughed, and looked at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘Think they can do a better job than the police – slipping about on the ice all tooled up with potato peelers and bike chains.’

‘They’re a vigilante group,’ Chloe said knowledgeably. ‘Someone asked my dad if he wanted to be in it. Fathers only. He said he wasn’t sure if it was mob mentality or grassroots action. My mum went to one of their meetings and said they were a load of council-dossers and doleys.’

‘Your dad not going in on it?’ Carl said, and I looked away from the mirror and shook my head.

‘There’s some tea in the fridge for you, Lo.’

The house was overwhelmingly hot after outside, and it smelled of turkey and pine needles and Donald’s feet. That special Sunday dinner and Christmas smell. I used to really like it.

‘I’m not hungry. I’m going to bed,’ I shouted from the doorway, trying to get up the stairs before they could come out of the living room and grill me.

‘Bed? Bed?’ Barbara managed to get to the bottom of the stairs before I could cross the upstairs landing and get into the bathroom. ‘You can’t go to bed. It’s barely four o’clock. Come and have some cheese and crackers and watch the film with your father.’

‘I’m really tired.’

Barbara stared up into the dim hollow of the upstairs landing. I couldn’t hear much from the living room, but I bet it was It’s a Wonderful Life they were watching. You could practically guarantee it.

‘Have you been drinking?’

‘No. No, I haven’t.’ She carried on staring. ‘I haven’t. Smell my breath if you want.’

‘And you’ve not had another falling out with that Chloe, have you?’ Barbara took a step and put her hand on the immaculate cream receiver of the hall telephone. ‘I was hoping you were going to start seeing a bit less of her. Shall I call her mother?’

‘I’m just tired. I’m going to have a sleep. I’ll be back down in a bit, right? I’ll watch the end of the film with you later.’

Even I could hear it: my voice, thin and pleading. It wasn’t a lie. I really was very tired – although there was something else to it too, the way that those men in the car park might have been wearing their scarves over their faces because it was cold, but there was another reason. I thought of them crashing through the undergrowth, shouting into the stillness of the woods, and shivered.