Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

Donald hadn’t been interested then – he was still on magic or hot air balloons. But this year, it had caught his eye and he was determined to impress them with his investigations and win a place as a research assistant. Barbara told him it was for PhD students and university professors and they didn’t mean people like him. She said there was more to being an assistant on a trip like that than typing up, making tea, and cleaning lenses.

‘You’ve not got the qualifications,’ she’d say.

If he was in a good mood Donald would just shrug at this. ‘So?’ he’d say, grinning. ‘So? Anyone that can read can find out what they need to do to conduct an investigation. I’ve trained myself,’ he tapped his head, ‘all up here. Whole world of it. Information’s free, isn’t it?’

Barbara would put the yellow magazines in the bin when he was sleeping. It didn’t work because I’d bring them back into the house for him.

I made a lot of effort to keep him off the subject when Chloe was around. I knew how it would sound and what him and his junk room and his felt-tip pens would look like to someone outside the family who didn’t know his phases.

‘ Blockbusters ’s on now,’ I’d say, or something like it. It was like rolling a ball for a dog – he’d chase it into the living room and Barbara would feed the video cassette into its slot and close the door on the theme tune and Chloe and I would have the kitchen, my bedroom – the house – to ourselves. When that didn’t work, there were the magazines – brought back in from the bin in the shed, pushed under his door. That’s what I did.

‘You’re getting it on the table, Dad,’ I said, under my breath.

I was aware of Barbara at my back, still slicing at the tomatoes, and the tension in the room – Donald was a soap bubble and we all needed to keep him away from the walls and the floor, just by blowing.

‘I reckon if I write it all out you could type it up for me, couldn’t you, love?’ He stopped colouring, and I moved the card-board closer to his pen and rubbed at the marks with the cuff of my jumper.

‘I can use the computer at school, I suppose,’ I said. ‘As long as it isn’t too long.’

‘I’m not sure yet. It depends what I find. I have some theories about the water-flows that are going to need a lot of backing up so they make sense to someone else. There are organisms there that should not be there. I’m not sure if it’s light, or temperature, or mineral deposits, or what. Need to get out there and do a spot of investigation.’ He twirled the disk. ‘That’s what the measuring is for. Science is precise measurement, and nothing more. Remember that one, for when you do your exams,’ he said, then pointed at me, smiled, and carried on, lost in the whirl of his own words.

I didn’t need to listen. Donald’s talking was disposable. I’d heard the speech about precise measurement many, many times before. The Sea Eye application had come out of nowhere, one of Donald’s fussy little projects, and there had been a lot of them. Most of the time they hadn’t amounted to much more than the hoarding of books and papers and magazine pictures pasted up on the walls of his room. But this one, this latest ‘spell’ had gone a bit further than the other ones I could remember. Sometimes I thought he really would find something out about the water at Morecambe – something new – and then I would help him write an article about it and then he would send the article to the scientist who was in charge of the Sea Eye and then he would be allowed to go too.

People discover new things all the time, so why not someone who is actually trying to? That would make Donald happy and everything would be normal. Not ‘back to normal’, because as long as I could remember I’d seen Donald being a bit weird, but it would get normal, and once it was, Barbara would loosen up a bit and I’d magically get on a bit better at school and everything would be easier than it was.

Barbara had her back to us; the knife nestled between her fingers like a pen.

‘Why your father thinks taking a friend’s wreck of a boat out through the quicksand into the rip-tides and whirlpools of Morecambe Bay, very possibly illegally, when he can barely swim, is totally beyond me,’ she said, without turning. She’d been holding it in for long enough, and couldn’t wait any longer.

‘You could come, Barbie, if you wanted to. I could do with a hand for the note-taking,’ he said. ‘Your mother’s got lovely handwriting.’

I snorted and Barbara’s shoulder blades moved together, although she didn’t make a sound. She could have been laughing or just coughing silently.

‘Think of it,’ Donald said, standing up and scraping his chair back. He waved his hands in the air. I thought he looked like Michael Aspel. ‘Think of the romance. The sand, the sea. Floating in the moonlight…’

‘… through a tide of untreated sewage,’ Barbara said, rolling her ‘r’s.

Donald shrugged.

‘Your mother’s no imagination, you know that? She knows it, of course – otherwise why pick a man of vision, like myself?’ He winked. There was a moment of silence. ‘And you know what I found out at the library today?’ He started paddling through the papers on the table, sticking his pale, sausagey fingers between the flaps of scuffed paper folders.

‘I’m wanting to set the table now, Donald.’

‘And I can do that for you in a while,’ he said. ‘Go back to your tomato-carving and hold your horses one minute, will you?’

She sighed, but didn’t say anything else.

He turned back to me.

‘Now, Lola, have a look at this. Two years’ more education on you than your father ever had, so here’s a little test for you. Tell me what you think’s going on here. We’ll have a battle. Your qualifications against my self-training. A pound for you, if you guess it right.’

He slapped the coin onto the table and I pulled the paper towards me. It was boring, having to stand in for Barbara like this.

The sheet of paper was a grainy photocopy of a picture in a magazine but at first I thought it was a copy of a painting. A dragon. The creature had teeth; milky, almost transparent teeth. They looked like they were made of cartilage, or ice. It was all mouth, with eyes like shrunken walnuts pressed into the sides of its head.

‘Another fish, Dad? You going to go and catch one of these?’

‘Not likely,’ he replied. ‘These live so far under the sea that they’d probably implode and turn into fish paste if we brought them up to the top.’

‘Really?’ I was interested, in spite of myself. He’d told me stories before. Fish that crawl along the bottom of the sea like worms, fish that make their own light, transparent, poisonous jellyfish the size of cars that fly about in groups as big as football stadiums.

I examined the picture, even though Barbara was crashing cutlery about. Partly it was because Donald had not been as enthusiastic as this about anything, not for months. Partly it was to make up for the bad Christmas present. I was scared that the shine on him would go out and he’d go back to staying in bed again if someone didn’t play along with him.

‘Oh I don’t know,’ Donald said, but he was still smiling, ‘I might have filled in the facts a little. Embellished, here and there. Why shouldn’t I? She’s a mythical-looking creature though, isn’t she?’

‘It’s a female one?’ I asked doubtfully. I leaned over and put my face closer to the picture, staring into its shadows. ‘How can you tell?’

Donald slapped his hands on the table. I jumped back. This was the other side of the coin: sudden outbursts and enthusiasm over nothing.

‘By God, she’s getting close! You’re costing me a fortune. Have a look. Make your guess.’