Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

She loved it. Even better if the windows were down and the music was booming into the street. Bare forearms hanging out, with palms slapping the outside of the door in a lazy rhythm. The boy driving – although he would have seemed like a man to us – jerked his head. Not an invitation, exactly. An appraisal. She’d been passed. All her parts in working order, and fit for a closer inspection some other time.

I can see her posture change – her head lifts and her chin juts, and her eyes dart about: looking, and not looking at the same time. Not wanting to appear too interested, although she jabs me with her elbow and giggles as we turn the corner, and sometimes, turns right around, puts one hand on a cocked hip, and, smiling that brilliant smile of hers, gives them the finger. It is a complicated dance I don’t know the steps for.

What about me? I probably just turned away from the road and walked a bit quicker. I wasn’t shy; I was scared. Donald and Barbara liked to draw my attention to all those stories in the news: young girls dragged into vans, into bushes, ambushed in quiet places, given something nasty to drink and then undressed. They made a nasty incident with a boy, an attack, an assault, a too-rough groping at a disco, sound like a rite of passage I should try to avoid, even though the avoidance of it would be futile: they’d all get me in the end. They would all get all of us in the end. It was a certainty.

Chloe wasn’t scared – whatever was going to happen was going to happen – and she was standing on the pavement grinning at cars and welcoming it with open arms. When I was on my own the cars didn’t come. When I was with Emma and not Chloe, the cars didn’t come. It was her. Her blonde head, which caught the sun, shone and drew the eye. Some smell she had on her. She was willing. There were rumours about her that she took no pains to dispel although I don’t think, despite her raised eyebrows and veiled references, she’d had much experience at all until a man in a mask approached her in the park.

Soon after that she started going with Carl, who had his own car, had a job, topped up the credit on our mobile phones, gave us cigarettes and bottles of orange-flavoured alcohol. Carried mints to freshen Chloe’s breath when she threw up from too many of the bottles. Was generous, sometimes sullen, tolerated me, sometimes Emma, and didn’t like us knowing that he’d quite like to be able to grow a proper moustache.

This is my secret: I still have Chloe’s mobile phone. For a long time I would dial the number to hear her voice on the answering service. I bet her mother did too. I used to think her answer machine message, and any messages people recorded for her, were trapped inside the phone itself, like letters inside a post box. That’s why I stole it from her. It wasn’t the phone I wanted, it was the messages.

But now I know that the recording service exists somewhere else, probably powered by a computer that lasts forever. I know you don’t, if you’re the police, even need the phone to listen to the messages people left for the person who owned it. So I am regularly amazed that no one checked it after she died. She flashed the phone about at school; everyone knew about it, but I suppose us girls were used to keeping things to ourselves and no one who was questioned about Chloe mentioned it.

Carl and I were the only people who rang her because we were the only people in the world who knew her number. Her message is more personal than most and directed at the two of us, in a fake American accent that I cringed to listen to, even at the time.

‘Lo, Carl – you know what to do. Keep it clean on the answer machine! Wait for the beep. Hit it!’

My voice is in there too, hoarse and panicked. I used to listen to my own frantic voice telling her to frigging ring me back – blurting out on record what I’d been trying to tell her in person for nearly a month.

I’d sit in my room and listen to it, and feel cold and blank inside, and listen to it again, again and again until the battery ran out – and I would wonder what she was playing at.

I went to sleep on New Year’s Eve that year with my mobile in my hand, in case she called to wish me happy New Year. Nothing. I didn’t hear from her until we were back at school. But just as I thought things had been ruined between us for good, she decided to confide in me again.

She strode up to me as we were filing out of morning registration.

‘All right?’

She always did have a fantastic smile. It worked on almost everyone.

‘All right, nothing,’ I said, and turned away. Started walking – as if the Geography block was the place I most wanted to be in the world.

‘What you ignoring me for?’ she said, and jogged along beside me. She pulled at my arm and I stopped. She turned on that smile again – full beam. She had her hair up in a high ponytail, and she shook her head, twitching it as she spoke. ‘Come on, don’t be like that.’

‘Where did you disappear to? What’s your problem?’ I didn’t want to mention the party. It sounded petty and needy.

‘You know what it’s like sometimes. My parents invited all the cousins round. We had family staying.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘for your party. I thought I was coming?’ I didn’t want to cry. ‘I waited up.’

I felt the tears coming anyway, and turned my head away so she wouldn’t see. She stepped to the side so she could maintain eye contact with me, and I started walking again.

‘What did I do? I didn’t do anything to you. Is it to do with Carl? Did you ask Emma instead?’

Chloe threw her arm around my shoulders and squeezed me.

‘Don’t be like that,’ she said, and laughed, ‘there’ll be loads of parties. You’re my best friend, I wasn’t blanking you.’

I sniffed.

‘Then what was it?’

I stared at her, waiting for an excuse that would make everything all right. If she’d been ill, or grounded, or her parents had found out about Carl and banned her from using the phone. Or if there’d been a death in the family, or if the marital problems had got worse and Nathan had left them both. Any of those things. I really badly needed it to be one of those things. Chloe stared back. She looked tired. Her make-up was lighter than usual and I could see little red patches on her cheeks under her eyes, like the start of eczema.

‘Well?’

She sighed. Squeezed me again. Put her head on my shoulder. I felt her hair prickle the side of my neck.

‘I need to talk to you.’ Her voice was muffled. ‘There’s something wrong with me.’

‘You’re telling me.’

I said it quickly, without thinking about it. Chloe opened her mouth, huffed, flicked her hair. She expected people to make allowances for her, and they did. Her father was terrified of her – put it all down to hormones and monthly cycles. Her mother thought she should have had a sibling and tolerated a lot because of that. School knew her history – the fact that this was the fourth high school she’d been to and the City would either have to keep her in it, or pay for another Education Welfare Officer and a Home Tutor.

‘I can’t believe you just said that to me. I cannot believe it.’ She was as incredulous as ever, and I was scared. Yes, she was being selfish and unreasonable and she probably had spent half of the Christmas holidays in the back of Carl’s car and the other half telling Emma about it, but she was talking to me now – and what if she never spoke to me again?

‘What’s up with you then? Tell me.’

‘I’m trying to tell you. I actually thought you were my friend?’ Chloe said.

She did look worried. Genuinely. It didn’t look like she was trying to be excused from cross-country and she didn’t look hungover, or pretending to be. She looked like she’d been crying. But I’d seen Chloe cry on command. She cried sometimes if Carl didn’t text her to check if she’d got home all right after she had been out with him. She cried when Amanda shouted at her. Still, it looked like she had been crying that morning and then had gone and got a piece of toilet roll and tried to fix her make-up. There were tiny pieces of damp tissue sticking to her eyelashes.