Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

Barbara came in then, round lumps of hail in her hair, which was clipped up in some kind of roll on the back of her head. I got up quick, and gestured towards Donald and the lumps of cheese.

‘I just remembered, I forgot to empty the bin in my bedroom. There’s some paper in it. Some orange peel and stuff. I’d better go and take it out?’

Barbara looked at Donald and made her mouth go thin, like a letter box. She nodded at me quickly.

‘Put your coat on when you go outside, it’s evil out there. And hang it up in the hall over the radiator when you get back in. And make sure you latch the gate properly after you. I don’t want it banging to and fro half the night.’

I ran out of the living room like there was nothing in the world I wanted to do more than empty my bin. It wasn’t really a lie. I did go upstairs and empty the paper and orange peel into a carrier bag. And I knotted the bag at the top and stood on one leg on the kitchen lino to pull my trainers on through the laces that I never, never untied unless Barbara was watching. Barbara, who probably wished I had never been born.

And then I took the green bottle from the side and poured half of what was in there into a mug and took the mug and the bag out of the back door, through the hail and the wind and the black, and into the garden shed.

The shed was going to be pitch black too, and freezing, maybe a bit scary, but I had the cigarette lighter and I waved it about a bit until I had the courage to close the door behind me. It wasn’t so bad. There was a set of folding chairs in there for the summer, and one was already unfolded. It must be another one of Donald’s secret hiding places. And the chair was sitting in front of the little, book-sized pane of dusty glass in the side of the shed. I could sit in it and see the lit window of the kitchen and the green bottle on the worktop and my latest school report stuck to the fridge with a magnet in the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle. And the kitchen door was open so I could see the flicker of the television and the very edge of the couch, with Barbara’s hand and wrist lying on the arm of it, her nails painted a funny kind of brown.

This is as crap as Christmas, I thought, as I flicked the lighter. I imagined the whole world blowing up: a mushroom cloud the size of a planet, and everything dead in the time it took for me to tap the tiny wheel against the flint with my thumb. The light from the wobbling flame turned the window into a mirror and the house, the bottle, the couch and Barbara’s arm disappeared. The noise of the hail on the corrugated roof of the shed was amazingly loud and comforting.

I laughed then, because Crap As Christmas sounded funny, and I said it out loud and laughed again because it was even funnier the second time around. The next time anyone asked me my opinion of anything at all, I decided I was going to say, ‘What, that’s as crap as Christmas.’

My cigarette was lit and I let the lighter go out, then I was in the dark with the hail sounding like someone throwing stones at the window, and I thought about Emma, out in the thick of it and having to cadge a lift home, or even pay for a taxi and wait for it in the freezing cold because Chloe had buggered off with Carl somewhere. And Carl and Chloe, parked under a bridge in the dark, his hands inside her clothes and the pair of them panting and pawing at each other, filling the car with their hot breath until bang! the battery on the car goes dead, or the heater packs in – and it being too dark for her to get her jeans back on properly before the AA man comes to rescue them. Ha.

These were nice thoughts. I took a sip of the clear stuff in my mug. Because it was so, so cold and because I didn’t really like the taste I drank it quick. Then I flicked the lighter again, holding it downwards so I could see what was lying about. I was looking for something to put the dog-end in. I was hoping for a glass jar with a hard circle of paint in the bottom, a tin lid, or even the lip of a rusting trowel. I swept the lighter through the air in slow arcs.

‘Typical.’ I hardly ever talk to myself. I swore. ‘So hypocritical.’

There were about twenty cigarette ends on the floor, a big flattened heap of them, and they’d been under my feet the whole time. One was stuck to the side of my trainer and I had to stamp my foot to get it off me. I dropped my own cig on the floor along with the rest of them, some faded, some fresh, all kissed on the orange edge of the filter with a ring of brown lipstick.

The world was getting whiter and whiter. It was the kind of white you can feel even before you get out of bed and look out of the window because of the cold, bright quality of the light coming in between the curtains. It was the Saturday before the start of school and I’d still not heard anything from Chloe.

Barbara turned off her vacuum cleaner to listen to another news broadcast about the unusually cold weather. Apart from the aftermath of a New Year’s Eve street brawl which had started when one of the patrolling vigilante groups had noticed an old man pissing against the window of Tammy Girl and taken it the wrong way, there had been nothing new to report. It was January. It was freezing. Frosty. A bit of the river had frozen over. Big deal.

Donald had been in a strange, restless mood that morning. Barbara had given him a toilet roll and sent him wandering about the house mopping the condensation from the inside of the windows. He dabbed with wads of toilet paper that left fibres sticking to the glass and the mess agitated him even more so now he was busy rubbing at the glass with the cuffs of his shirt. Yet even he was caught by the afternoon broadcast and had drifted towards the front room to watch it with us.

Terry, wearing what looked like a ladies’ mink coat and matching hat, stood on the old tram bridge over the Ribble and talked about climate change and global warming as the camera zoomed in on the lacy frill of ice working its way across the river from either bank. Baffled ducks skated along the rim and plopped into freezing, fast-flowing water that was brown and opaque. Things protruded from the water: trolleys, old bikes and prams, dented traffic cones wearing wreaths of twigs and slime. On the far bank, a mattress had been wedged against the bare earth by a broken wheelie bin, half filled with mud. The top part of the mattress bent forward, as if bowing to its invisible audience. In the morning broadcast Terry had said this was the coldest winter on record for eighty years, but now his researchers had revised the figure to eighty-four, and there were pictures of yellow trucks moving slowly along the emptied ring road, spewing salt and grit behind them.

‘But it’s not all doom and gloom,’ Terry said, and grinned.

Barbara leaned on the vacuum cleaner and wound the lead around her hand, catching it expertly on her elbow in a series of swift, jerky movements that never caused her to take her eyes off the screen.

‘He’s had his teeth fixed again, hasn’t he, Lola? A polish, at the very least. What do you think?’

I was draped over an armchair pretending not to be interested although secretly I was hoping for the school pipes to go, for the holidays to be extended and for school to be cancelled – indefinitely.

‘Indeed, the young ladies of our city will be most pleased with an unexpected side effect of this cold snap,’ Terry said.

Barbara leaned forward.

‘The spate of unpleasant incidents that has been plaguing our city’s parks, gardens, train stations and other remote places,’ he went on cheerfully, ‘seems to have dried up. As we reported, there was an attack on Christmas Eve when a man accosted a fifteen-year-old girl outside the city train station on her way to visit her grandmother, exposing himself to her before attempting to assault her. The man has still not been identified,’ Terry twitched camply at his hat and grimaced, ‘and the girl’s name has not been released to us at this time.’