Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

There’s chaos. The doves are flapping at the wire of the boxes they are stacked in. I don’t know if it’s because they can smell something too, or because the people around them are suddenly moving, jostling each other away from the little hole, talking too loudly. The camera doesn’t wobble, but pans away from the crowd, focuses on the still black water of the pond.

That’s what you get if you want to do these things live. Unforeseen events. Things are falling apart. Things have been falling apart long before the mayor cracked open the ground and unleashed a smell that had Terry’s weather girl vomiting into the bushes.

Terry apologises for the interruption and promises they’re getting a van out to the scene post haste but for the time being he’s going to have to hand back to the studio.

‘We will be back and when we are, we’ll tell you exactly what’s going on here,’ he says. He rakes a hand through his dishevelled hair, twitches his tie and hands back to Fiona, who is waiting on her couch, legs neatly crossed at the ankle and pressed together at the knee. She’s wearing an expensive camel-coloured two-piece suit with patent leather black shoes. Fiona wants Terry’s job. Beautiful.

‘That’s our Terry. Calm in a crisis, a consummate professional,’ she says, and the man practically bows. Fiona simpers. ‘First at the scene again. I think we’ll be in for a long one tonight, won’t we, Terry?’ The link is cut before he can reply and Fiona is left nodding at thin air and the programme’s logo on the screen behind her sofa.

‘We’ll be back,’ she says, ‘after this,’ and the adverts are as harried, jangling and garish as they usually are.

I let my eyes move to the window and sniff the air, which smells of crisps and fags, and the damp washing on the cold radiator. I don’t need to examine the screen. I can watch it again, whenever I like. It’ll be on YouTube before morning. I make a coffee, walk back to my couch slowly. There’ll be time to decide how I feel about this later.

Terry was totally cool – though that’s no surprise. He was in his element, because if Terry had an element it would be unexplained deaths, or euphemistically reported rapes. Fiona was right: he’s always first on the scene or the screen, bursting with bad news. She’s been hovering around, waiting for his job for years, but he’s the award winner. He’s the one we remember telling us about the pest that stalked the parks here ten years ago – the publicity and his campaign, even his tacit endorsement of the vigilante groups that sprang up, are supposed to have had more to do with the attacks ending than the efforts of the police, who could never give us a name. Not officially.

Terry Best. Famous for a cool head and a pink shirt. Various ties, often seasonal. But always, always the pink shirt. Sometimes his fans send him in different coloured shirts for Christmas and urge him to ring the changes, but he is never seen wearing anything but pink. He might only have one shirt, or five hundred that are all the same. Woolworths sell pink shirts and they did a special promotion for them in the window with a big poster of Terry. It didn’t say it in so many words but it strongly suggested that Terry Best bought his shirts from Woolworths. The management of The City Today complained and told them to take it down.

There’s a postcard you can buy in the bus station kiosk – him, with his thumbs up to the camera. The caption along the bottom, which is done in the same kind of glowing green writing as the Twin Peaks opening credits (although I don’t think many people will have noticed that) says: REAL MEN WEAR PINK. That’s never been banned, mainly because it isn’t advertising anything except for Terry himself.

Terry’s more of a fixture in some people’s lives than their families are because whatever happens, good or bad – he’s there. If you were expecting bad news, Terry would be the one you’d want to tell you. Most of the people who live in the City have a story about seeing him getting on a bus; complaining about the wait at the post office; carrying a rolled-up towel into the swimming baths. I’ve seen him once before myself, or at least I think it was him – suit jacket, pink shirt – hauling a heavylooking bin-bag from the back of his car, and dumping it on a verge by the side of the road. I mentioned it to my boss and she got breathless and asked me what was inside the bag. When I said I’d never checked, she refused to give me any overtime for a month.

He isn’t a regular at the shopping centre, but apparently he’s been in. Bobbed into Primark for two packets of navy blue socks. There’s a rumour that the manager wanted to give him the staff discount, messed up putting her card number into the till, and ended up just giving him the lot for free. She didn’t even ask for a signed picture to put near the revolving doors.

It is hard to explain to people who don’t live round here how important Terry is. Without ageing or changing his shirt, he has presented the local news bulletin every evening for twenty years which means he has been a part of most of the important things that have ever happened in this area. Every time the Ribble flooded. The time they tried to do a music festival in the park. That pub riot they had, and the ongoing debate about the multistorey car park on top of the bus station. He opens the new markets, welcomes in the Whitsun fair and turns on the Christmas lights every year. He presents the children’s book club certificates at the library, and he guest speaks at the AGM of the Real Ale Society.

I don’t expect the programme to return to its coverage of the memorial, but it does. Terry and his crew have shifted themselves, and sharpish. What started as jolly coverage of a foundation-laying ceremony quickly turns into breaking news and is piped into my room. The suddenly obscene decorated spade is hidden away; the mayor swaps his wellingtons for dress shoes, and Terry changes his tie. They reassemble in time for the police to arrive and erect their white tent over the place where the summerhouse was going to be.

This coverage will play all night. Chloe, upstaged at last. They haven’t named the body yet, but I know it is Wilson. I know.

Chloe had fine blonde hair that lay flat against her head and fell, limp and transparent, across her shoulders. The wallpaper in her mother’s front room was old-fashioned: green and brown and pink and livid with birds that looked like bright pressed flowers. The birds looked crushed and angry, their beaks squashed open.

Our plans went like this: Chloe would get a job at the perfume counter in Debenhams; I’d get a job in the cafe on the top floor, or failing that, Woolworths – who Chloe said would take anyone. We’d save up our money, and then we’d rent a flat. She’d progress to the make-up counter, or the VIP personal shopper’s lounge.

The flat would have a balcony because Chloe didn’t think it was hygienic to smoke inside, and I wanted to get a rabbit. We’d be good about paying the rent and the bills, but we’d spend the rest of our money on skirts and beads and blue bottles of alcohol in nightclubs. We’d have wallpaper like her mother’s but we were going to draw it ourselves so it’d be limited edition and worth a bundle. We’d have ashtrays made out of blue glass, and dreamcatchers in the windows. We were going to eat Arctic Roll whenever we felt like it, and watch Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic and Romeo and Juliet every night.

I never got a job at a cafe, and I never tried Woolworths. I clean the shopping centre. It’s my job to put out the yellow triangles before I mop: little slipping stick men to warn you of what you’ll get if you walk on wet floors. I use the motorised floor polisher with protectors jammed over my ears while the television screens mounted overhead show the shopping channel, the talk-shows, the consumer revenge panels. I don’t get paid much, but after all the shops in town went 24-hours there’s as much work as I want. There’s nothing else to do but work. It’s not Woolworths or a perfume counter, but I have my own trolley and I know my way round the service corridors even in the dark. I do all right.