Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

And he hadn’t even been knocking her off!

I couldn’t even tell what was so good about Carl anyway. I felt the plastic lump of the mobile phone in my pocket and wanted to throw it away. That was him as well. Some plastic piece of shit from Chloe, as if I was meant to be grateful. And other things too, like lifts in the car, and CDs or videos or packets of fags sometimes. Just to get Chloe to let him poke her, and make sure I didn’t say anything to anyone because he was clearly too old for her.

And he wasn’t even good-looking, either. He had horrible greasy hair and the white shirts he had to wear for work were all grey at the collar, and he had spots on his neck, and even if he did have a car, it was a shit car. I tried to imagine him shagging Chloe in it. I couldn’t believe they’d gone back out on Boxing Day after they’d dropped me off. That made me feel something. I remembered the scary atmosphere in the car all the way home, which I’d thought was down to Wilson getting on Carl’s nerves but it wasn’t to do with Wilson, it was to do with me, who was in the way.

So what happened then? I was half way to the bus stop, walking fast because it was freezing and I’d lost my gloves. Probably the two of them went and parked round the back of some garage and did it with the engine in the car still running. I tried to think what Carl would have looked like with no clothes on.

I’d seen his chest before. Just once, when he was taking his work shirt off in the car and putting on a tee-shirt instead because he was going to take the two of us out for a burger. It was all white and thin, you could see the moles on his ribs and the fat brown lumps of his nipples. He probably didn’t take his clothes off completely when he did it with Chloe, it was too cold for that. I thought about the jutting-out bones of his hips, and the black semi-circles of dirt under his fingernails. I had a feeling. I can’t describe it. Like a trickle of warm water down my back and over the skin of my arms. I tried out the thought again: Carl, lifting his bum off the seat so he could flick his belt open. The feeling came again, but weaker this time.

I put my hood up, licked my cracked lips, and decided to think about how to get Chloe away from Carl, and make everything go back to normal, as good as it had been in the summer. There was still hope: after all, it was me who she’d confided in. She’d asked for my help – mine – not Carl’s, not even Emma’s. Even if there was more to the story than she was telling me, half a secret is better than no secret at all and this was her way of letting me know I was special to her, and that she needed me. And that was true even if her worry made her phrase it badly, made her moodier and more abrupt than she might have been otherwise.

When I got in to school for morning reg the first thing I noticed was how much more noise there was than usual. But I was in a good mood and didn’t catch any of the excited conversations taking place around me until later. I was feeling sparky and determined to sort Chloe out. I had an advert for the Brook Advisory Centre which I had torn out of my magazine and kept safe between the pages of my homework diary to show Chloe when we were on our own. The free phone number on the advert was printed in a friendly, loopy font that looked like handwriting, and when I’d rung it I’d found out the nearest clinic was in Manchester. Confidentiality Guaranteed . Chloe was going to be so pleased I’d worked out a way to solve her problem without involving anyone she didn’t want to know. It would really show her that I was her true friend and not Emma. And once we’d sorted out her problem, I could get to work on getting rid of Carl, just by pointing out that he was the one who had caused the trouble and she hadn’t trusted him to help her. She’d had to rely completely on me.

The room was an art room during the day when the classes were on but in the morning it was just a classroom with the paint and clay packed away in lockable cupboards. Rightly, they didn’t trust us and kept everything interesting locked up so that no one could mess about with it when we were supposed to be sitting still and answering our names on the register, listening to daily devotion and collecting passes for free school dinners (me) and detentions (Chloe). But that day everyone was out of their seats and I couldn’t see Chloe anywhere. They were all talking at once and I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I just caught the mood of it, which was excited and pleased and a bit nasty. It was the same kind of feeling there had been in the air when someone looked out of the wide windows in the side of the Geography block and saw two dogs mating on the football pitch – right there in the middle of the astro-turf. That had been bedlam although when I glanced through the paint- and spitspeckled window I didn’t see anything except seagulls in the yard swooping and pecking at crisp packets.

I walked very slowly towards the moving crowd of black blazers and blue pullovers. I walked and looked at the drawings of apples and lightbulbs and screwed-up pieces of newspaper stuck to the walls. I was hoping Shanks would come in and order us all into our seats before I reached the middle of the room.

‘Is it that pest?’ I asked no one in particular. ‘Has he started up again?’

No one answered, the knot of bodies was thick. School was all right as long as there were teachers around to keep everything reasonable. I stepped slowly, wondering if the pest had got one of us. It was possible. Two of the earliest victims had been pupils at the girls’ school round the corner. I imagined the man in the Halloween mask loitering in the woods where we ran for cross-country and felt a secret, shivery thrill. Then I heard someone say something about Chloe.

There was only one person sitting down and everyone else was gathered around her like they were waiting for her to sign an autograph. Emma. Emma was fast turning into the sort of girl who wears a black lacy bra under her white school shirt just so that when she takes off her jumper everyone can see it She was opening and closing her school bag as if there was something inside that was much more interesting than anything else.

‘I was going to go in the ambulance,’ she said, looking at her bag instead of anyone in particular, ‘but they didn’t know what was wrong with her. Could have been contagious.’

She turned her head and smiled beatifically in answer to a question that I didn’t hear.

‘My mum will probably drive me in to visit her after school, if she’s well enough to take visitors. I’ll tell her you said that, shall I? I’m going to organise a collection.’

I knew they were talking about Chloe – who else would have caused such interest? She could have had a hundred friends if she’d wanted them, but for some reason she preferred to have one at a time, and no one, not even me, could figure out why she’d picked me. Emma looked at me, and I expected some kind of special word, a privileged piece of information.

‘I’m here now,’ I wanted to say. ‘I can take charge.’

Emma smiled comfortably, flicked her coat over her knee, and said nothing.

She was a fucking liar – her mum wouldn’t be giving her a lift anywhere. Chloe had already let me in on the facts about that. Emma lived in Ashton with her dad and three older brothers – all crammed into a house with not enough bedrooms. She actually shared a bedroom with her seventeen-year-old brother, which was disgusting. Her mum got depressed and left them all when Emma was two. Now, according to Chloe, her dad had got religion and was all right with the boys, but didn’t know what to do with Emma – especially since she ‘started growing up and getting tits, you know?’ I’d seen Emma with her father once, walking between stalls at the school Spring Fayre. He never dared look at her – it was as if she was naked.