Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

‘No,’ I say, ‘that’s not right. You got a load of camera film and Chloe got some weird stuff – screws and bolts and nails and things. Carl had sent you out with a shopping list. He wanted the stuff for his darkroom. I wonder if he ever finished it?’

Emma frowns. ‘It wasn’t a proper darkroom. He nailed a load of scrap wood over the window in the back bedroom and put a red lightbulb in. Took the wallpaper off the walls and moved all the furniture out apart from the bed. I don’t think he knew what he was doing with that, not really. His mum would have gone mad if she’d seen it.’

‘How do you know?’

She shrugs. ‘He told me. Showed me up there one time. His mum never went upstairs. She was half deaf, in a wheelchair. No idea what was going on half the time, or pretended not to know.’

‘I never knew you went to his house,’ I say, and Emma shrugs again and asks me if there’s any more wine. We settle into the couch, watching each other as much as the television.

It’s funny, how me and Emma have stayed in touch. Or not, when you think about it. I haven’t kept up with anyone else from school, but Emma was the only other one who really knew Chloe. That’s not to say that she was as close to Chloe as I was, just that it makes sense that the two of us would stick together.

It happened without either of us planning it. I ran away from Barbara when I was sixteen. Wanted to get away – partly from her and partly from Terry’s researchers, who were still desperate to get us on the show for the inside scoop on Chloe. I didn’t get far. Felt like, in the end, I needed to stay put and keep an eye on things. Everyone was still so cut up over the loss of Chloe. It had been two years and nothing was normal. So I ran away but only got four miles across the City, talked to a youth worker, came to live in this flat, found a job at the shopping centre across the road, and settled.

I started going by ‘Laura’ again, changed my last name and didn’t speak to anyone.

Then one day, I saw Emma. I was twitching the hood of my duffel coat over my face, trying to get out of the wind and light a cigarette. I was half in and half out of the entrance to the flats when Emma walked right past me in a gale of perfume and chinking metal bangles and the clatter of knee-high boots. I could have touched her, easily. She was with two other girls and laughing her way through a story about a bouncer on the door of a nightclub who’d lifted her off her feet and twirled her around in the street with such force her skirt blew up, her knickers were on show and the taxi drivers on the rank had flashed their lights and beeped their horns.

She says now she never saw me, but I know that’s rot. Her eyes flicked over me. Her make-up was blurred. Dangling earrings in her ears and the three of them carrying around their own pocket of noise and the friendly fug of alcohol. I waited in the doorway until they passed by and turned a corner. I felt trembly and insubstantial: a bit of dry grass. I was shaking. I wanted to shake her. Why should she have all this – the friends, and the nightclub nights out, and the earrings and the perfume and the drunken laughing in the night – when it was not possible, would not ever be possible, for me to have those things? Friends. She had friends. For a while there, I saw how far the scales had tipped in her direction and I wanted to kill her. Put my hands on her skin and pull out her earrings and scream my secret into the whorl of her ear and kill her.

That night I started dreaming about Chloe. I hadn’t forgotten about her. In my dreams she skated and slid. They were always silent dreams – as if someone had muted the sound on a film – but I could see her laughing and watch her blue lips move, trace the shapes she made while she was shouting. They weren’t good dreams.

A year or two after I saw Emma outside the flats, she sent me a postcard. It was addressed to me by name – my old name and the block of flats. No number, but the postie knew me so it got to me safe. Of course he knew me – I’ve been here years, staying put in this damp box in the sky while everyone else moves on. He’s a good lad. He’s never let on, never asked me a question, never stared, never tipped off Terry’s researchers. I don’t know if it’s pity or professionalism, but either way I am grateful for it. The picture on the postcard was of the train station. Miniature daffodils and ivy in wooden planters on the platforms. No dirty pigeons. No drunks. No tramps. A sunny day.

After I’d read it, I’d stared at the picture until my clammy hands warped the card. The train waiting at the platform. Her handwriting. Postmark. Stamp – not the Queen’s head, but a robin perched on the handle of a spade, the spade driven into a hillock of earth. Wondering if it was significant. If she was trying to tell me something. And she was a liar too. A sly one, like Chloe. She hadn’t been so drunk she didn’t recognise me, not so drunk she didn’t notice the name of the block of flats where I lived.

Emma is much less stupid than she looks.

We drink together a fair bit these days. It isn’t exactly what you’d call social. We make trips to the park, to Debenhams. Take each other on guided tours over the topography of our memories.

‘Look,’ she’ll say, ‘here’s where me and Chloe first went and got our ears pierced.’

I’ll have to take her to HMV just to keep up and show her where I distracted the security by flashing my new bra at the cameras while Chloe ran out of the door with the second series of Dawson’s Creek up her jumper. Emma will watch patiently, and then take me to Boots and show me the exact brand of icywhite glitter that Chloe liked to stroke over her brow-bone on special occasions. Like New Year’s Eve.

She doesn’t come to the flat, but I meet her once or twice a month in a Thirties-themed cafe called Brucciani’s that we choose because it’s almost exactly half way between her place and mine. I have to get there first and order for us – if she looks through the windows and sees that I’m not there she’ll turn around and go home. We don’t talk much. I tend to sit opposite her, look at her dirty hair and dull eyes and try to guess what she is thinking. She looks different now.

I wonder about those other girls – her friends. The make-up and the boots and going-out clothes. Making friends with the bouncers. These days, she can’t hold down a real job and doesn’t even raise her eyes to the waitress when she is paying for her tea. I don’t know where her friends are now. I don’t know if she still likes a drink, a dance, a kebab on the way home. I don’t think there’s a boyfriend. Is she into girls? I think about the photographs I took of Chloe, wonder if she ever handed the camera to Emma. I try to picture them kissing, their mouths working wetly together. It doesn’t work. Emma hates to be touched – it’s like she’s bruised all over.

On our visits to Brucciani’s, we make attempts at small-talk like normal people do. Emma will ask about my job. I will ask after her family, who I don’t think she is in touch with anymore. It’s always a relief when the waitress comes with the tray of tea. There are a few minutes of distraction bestowed by the individual metal teapots, the condensation on the flick-up lid, the scald to the ball of the thumb as I pour and the tea slopping onto my saucer. I take those minutes gratefully and I mop the table with napkins more carefully than is necessary.

Most of the time we sit in silence. Often, we’ll give up and escape outdoors, past Winkley Square and back into the park. The fountain is still there, the rockery and the Japanese water garden and the folly at the top of the hill. We sit on one of the benches and more often than not, Emma will slip me a tenner and send me away to the off licence. She always pays because she won’t talk to strangers: it’s one of her phobias. It’s the reason she can’t get a job anyone would actually pay her for. Even I’m not that bad. I take the money and come back with a half bottle of vodka or a few cans inside my coat and we will sit there like that for most of the afternoon. Even in the rain: the damp won’t kill us. Sometimes we see other girls there doing the same as us, and we’ll shout over at them and offer them cigarettes and see if they’ll come and join us. Emma’s more confident when she’s pissed, more likely to nudge my shoulder with hers, tell me a joke, offer a secret. She’ll wipe the neck of the bottle on her sleeve and offer it to whoever is sitting on the next bench.