Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

Chloe sounded like my mother. She sounded like a teacher. She was deliberately trying to make me feel like a dick, for no reason. Just because she’d been taken out in the dark to have sex with some weird guy in the back seat of a car she thought she could take me into the toilet and get everyone to call me a lezzer and then talk down to me.

‘Well, I’m pleased for you,’ I said.

When I first thought Chloe was having sex I was sort of interested in it, not in a lezzer-type way, but just curious about knowing the facts and how much on a scale of one to ten it hurt, and whether it was embarrassing having to have no clothes on or whether you just kind of got carried away in the moment and didn’t mind. But then you’d still probably mind afterwards, when you’d settled down a bit, and then you’d have to put your clothes back on in front of someone else and not make a mess out of it and I was sort of curious about that too.

And I’d asked, and Chloe had made out like it was some big private secret and wouldn’t tell me, and it was all because the silly bitch didn’t even know because she hadn’t even done it yet.

‘Don’t be like that. I’m trying to tell you,’ Chloe said. ‘Something’s wrong. I went to the doctor’s and they had this leaflet in the waiting room. I only read the first page, then I was too scared to go in.’

Chloe sat down on the closed lid of the toilet and opened her bag and showed me it. It had been folded and unfolded and folded again and the paper was fraying in places. It was a leaflet about being pregnant.

‘It’s this bit, here.’

I read the part that Chloe pointed to. It said that for some women one of the very first signs of being pregnant is the need to pass urine very frequently. It said this is because the womb is growing downwards and pressing on the bladder. That might also cause backache.

‘Do you think that’s what it is? Are you peeing all the time?’ I turned the leaflet over. There was a picture of a woman standing sideways, cut in half with the bubble of her stomach turned into a diagram. Just like the picture of the woman with one foot up on the toilet on the instructions inside a Tampax box. A linedrawing of something half-evolved inside her womb. A hagfish, or a deep sea shrimp.

‘What else could it be? I’ve had to go, like, ten times a day. And it hurts all up my back as well.’

‘Maybe it’s something else.’

I tried to think of something else to suggest, but I couldn’t.

Chloe shook her head and held her hand out for the leaflet. She pulled a length of tissue paper from the roll and blew her nose on it noisily.

‘What has Carl said?’

‘I haven’t said anything to him.’

‘Well you should. If you are – it’s his fault, isn’t it? He can help you get it sorted out. Go to the doctor’s with you or something.’

‘I can’t go to the doctor.’

We had been whispering but Chloe said this out loud, forcefully. She shook her head a lot and her eyes filled up with tears.

‘I wasn’t even that into it,’ she said, ‘but he spent loads on me for Christmas.’ She put her arm out and at first I thought she wanted a hug, and I leaned back a bit, but something on her wrist rattled and I saw the gold bracelet with little charms on it, tinkling under the cuff of her school shirt. ‘See?’ she said, and the charms rattled until I nodded and she moved her arm down again.

I do not want to be hearing this, I thought. I do not want to have to go home and think about this and be responsible for not telling anyone. Still, who else was Chloe going to tell? I was just glad it wasn’t Emma. I imagined Chloe getting fatter and fatter, and having to give up school and probably getting killed, literally, by her parents when they found out. I thought about Donald and Barbara finding out. I thought about them banning me from going outside or watching television or listening to music or reading magazines until I was eighteen years old. I thought about them probably taking me to the doctor to make sure I was still sealed up down below and not infected or pregnant. Then I thought about going to the doctor and having to take my clothes off in front of someone and having someone shine a torch in my privates.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I see what you mean. And they’d probably tell your mum, wouldn’t they?’

Chloe put her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands. I could see the top of her head where her French plait started and the dark patches on her grey skirt where her tears were sliding off the bottom of her face and falling onto her clothes.

‘You’ll have to tell Carl, then,’ I said quickly, being practical instead of touching her. ‘Get him to find out. There’s a tablet you can take. He might be able to get it for you. Maybe he’s got a friend who’s got a girlfriend who’s older than us. She can go to the doctor and say that she needs it. Then she can get it and give it to Carl. And he can give it to you. I’ve got some Christmas money left over if there’s a prescription charge. You can have it for that if you like.’

‘What if it’s loads?’

‘Carl can give it to you, can’t he? He should at least go halves with you?’

Saying that made me think of one of the chat-up lines that the boys had been going round with. Not that someone had said it to me, but I had overheard boys saying it to Chloe.

What happened was this: one of the boys would sit next to a girl and chat to her for a bit about other things. Like homework or music or someone else who they both knew. That was usually how it worked. Then when the other boys had edged closer so that they could hear, he would look at the girl quite seriously and say, ‘Feel like going halves on a bastard?’

This was the boys’ version of ‘let’s be friends’ and they thought that it was the funniest thing anyone had ever said. It got to a point where people were saying it to each other about five or six times in every lesson and even the teachers had heard about it.

‘I can’t tell Carl. He’ll go mad.’

I forgot to whisper.

‘Well it’s his fault, isn’t it? How can he go mad? Did he not make sure it was – you know – covered, or anything?’

Chloe looked horrified.

‘You are such a perv!’ she said.

‘Well you have to do something about it,’ I said, ‘other than sit crying.’

Chloe stood up. She reached behind me and opened the door.

‘Thanks for all your support,’ she said, emphatically biting down on the ‘t’. ‘Just leave me alone and I’ll deal with it myself. You tell anyone and I swear to God you’ll regret it.’

I was speechless for a second or two. Couldn’t think of what to say, and didn’t know what I had said that was so wrong. Chloe’s hair-trigger temper shocked me even though I should have been used to it, and underneath it all I had the nagging feeling that there was something else going on that she wasn’t telling me about.

Chloe was right out of the toilets and along the corridor before I could pick up my bag and get out of the cubicle. The girls under the mirror had gone. I washed my hands even though I hadn’t been, because I had touched the handle on the outside of the door and the bolt on the inside and the holder for the toilet roll and all of those places are crawling with germs.

I didn’t see Chloe for the rest of the day. When afternoon registration was over we usually went to the neck of the corridor where the school turned into the leisure centre, and bought Skips and Kit-Kats and Coke from the vending machines in the atrium before taking our separate ways home. I waited there for her but not for very long. Our school wasn’t the sort of place where it was all right to hang around on your own for any length of time, especially for me. I knew Chloe had things on her mind, important things, but they weren’t any reason to fly off the handle when all I was doing was trying to help. It was all down to Carl, anyway. Obviously. That day was the first time I’d seen or heard from her since Boxing Day, and she hadn’t even asked me how I was, which, considering how she had been acting since she’d been letting Carl knock her off, was just rich.