Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

Chloe, who did not grow up to clean a shopping centre, or anything else, sits in my head while I stand on the escalator in the centre of the arcade, pressing a duster against the handrail on either side and walking slowly against the flow. Light bounces through the pointy glass atrium ceiling and I change escalators and she slides out a poster from the centre of her new Smash Hits . She is squeezing the staples closed with the flat edge of a scissor blade. All the posters: the walls of her bedroom jangling with eyes. Everything she owns has a face stuck to it. You can’t get away with coveting any of her things because most of the time her possessions stare back.

We had a perfect summer together – the last summer before Emma involved herself in our lives. And then summer turned into autumn and we went back to school and things started to change. I think of the times we went to Avenham Park and we are there and she is taking my arm. I feel the inside of her wrist against the crook of my elbow. We’re laughing, following the footpath around the edges of the rose-beds and kicking at empty conker cases. Someone has been here before us and collected everything and we find the conkers bobbing in the turned-off fountain, swelled with water. Their shiny skins are split. Lichen spreads over stone faces and we walk around and around until it gets dark. She slips a hand into my pocket. Later, I find a packet of cigarettes. I hide it under my mattress and learn how to smoke in the shed.

Or she is sitting next to me in class. We’re at the back, the eyes of the teacher on us. Something has been said. Maybe we’ve been passing notes again. There are always new boys to talk about. What we like changes, mysteriously, from one week to the next. A matter for constant discussion. There are lists. We compare ratings. We invent love lives for our teachers, as intricate as soap operas.

The eyes of the other girls are slick and curious and hostile. Emma is there, but ghostly. We aren’t paying attention to her yet. When someone bitches, Chloe sticks up her fingers and hurls pieces of broken pencil eraser. We write our names on the desks in Tipp-Ex, our initials intertwined like a monogram.

She is leaning into the mirror. The basin, toilet and bath aren’t white, they’re blue plastic in a shade called ‘aqua’ and it seems exotic. She is plucking hairs out of her eyebrows with a pair of tweezers. It hurts. She flinches away and her eyes water, but she is grinning.

‘Fuck me,’ she says. It’s still a new word for her. ‘The natural look is very hard work,’ she quotes into the glass, and laughs.

Because I am standing behind her I can see myself over her shoulder: a pale face surrounded by a frizzing halo of woolly brown hair. An expression that looks stupid but is just myopic. I am watching my own eyebrows. My face is chubby and whiter than hers. The brows are like someone has drawn a loaded paintbrush across my forehead. Chloe says I’m not delicate enough; there’s no arch. This is going to be a painstaking operation and I am waiting my turn. Chloe always tests the water for both of us. If she deems this desirable, I will follow on after.

‘We need to do something with that,’ she says, and spins around. I am caught in her stare, but it isn’t my eyebrows she’s looking at, it is my hair. The tweezers clatter into the sink and she twirls away. Eggs are broken into a bowl, beaten, poured onto my head. She wraps my head in clingfilm. Her fingernails dig into my scalp as she pats and rubs. She layers on more clingfilm, then hot, wet towels, then dry towels.

Slime that feels like snot and smells like nothing drips into my ears. My neck aches. We watch the clock. Twenty minutes, the magazine says, then I will have hair like Chloe’s. She starts to rinse me and the water she runs is too hot and the eggs scramble. When I have picked the last piece of egg out of my hair and poked it down the plughole she is still snorting and rolling and wiping her eyes on the bathmat.

I smile. She is my best friend.

She was special, even when she was alive – but not in the picture-perfect, pure and polished way people think of her now. Being dead has turned her into a final draft. She did things I’d have felt false and ridiculous even trying. She dried her hair upside down with the diffuser, tried scented panty liners, smeared Vaseline on her eyelids and said things like ‘T-zone’ and ‘accent colour’ and ‘handbag-must-have’. Once Carl arrived in our lives, she’d talk raucously about fingering and cumming and blowjobs, and I would listen – hot and horrified and compelled. She smelled like sweat and hairspray and cigarettes and I smelled like lavender ironing water and Vosene. I’m not sure why it mattered, but it did.

The process of making Chloe into a saint began in 1998.

A funeral wasn’t enough. First, they named a rose for her. For her, not after her, because there was already a Chloe rose: some other dead girl. They called it the Juliet, after an especially moving broadcast by Terry which we all remember, and which some of us taped to watch again later. So she wasn’t herself – she stood for something. And stood for it using someone else’s name and a four-hundred-year-old story that wasn’t even true. No one minded.

The teachers planted the Juliet roses in the brand-new school flower-beds and huddled in the corridors to talk about Chloe fading. No one did any real work for weeks. Lesson plans and homework, Bunsen burners and hockey sticks, protractors and rough-books – they are ordinary objects but in school, one down, us leftovers stared at them as if they were strange things and their continuing existence became an insult to her memory. We cleared them away and slunk between classrooms, whispering. Even some of the boys cried. The teachers turned up late, blue shadows under their eyes. They let us see them smoking in the car park, and pretended they’d noticed her getting thinner, the cracks in her lips and the fineness of her hair.

Second, there was an investigation. Ofsted, or the National Health. Back then that was the kind of thing they were supposed to be doing: even in a city like ours where we had Terry, and our own ways of dealing with things. Should someone have stepped in? Could they have made her speak to Patsy? Where was her doctor in all of this? Her form tutor? The head? That helped. Kept the interest going for months, with interim reports and preliminary findings and conclusive recommendations about food and teen mental health and drop-in advice centres ( Chloe House ) until she was famous.

And the thing is, I was famous too, because I’d been her best friend. And Emma. People wanted to talk to us. They were kind. There were that many pictures of us in the paper and on Terry’s show – and that’s why I don’t mind wearing my glasses now when before I used to leave them in the house and put up with things being blurred. I let my hair grow out and tuck it into big hats, like a Rasta, if I’m planning to go out anywhere busy during daylight hours. No one looks these days. I don’t have friends at work. When people talk to me, I tap the ear-protectors and shrug, and after a while they stop trying.

Third, there were the interviews. They asked all sorts. How we spent our time, what we did together, what Chloe thought about her future, her boyfriend, her weight, her parents, her GCSE options.

‘Did she have other friends that you might not have known about? Did she go out to pubs?’

I told them about her New Year’s Eve party. I told them about the wallpaper, and the perfume counter, and the flat, and Woolworths. I told them about the glass ashtrays, and her poster collection. Emma told them about her gentle nature, her shyness covered up by extroversion, her determination to come top of the class. She talked about how kind Chloe was to animals, and a collection of glass owls I didn’t know she owned. All of those things got into the newspapers. Every single time Emma came up with a fact, I provided one more and she ran out of things to say first, and at the end I was still holding Chloe’s secret in my mouth, like the time we put buttons under our tongues to make us sound posh when we made prank phone calls.