Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

‘You help yourself, sweetheart. I know you like the pink ones, don’t you?’

I saw straight away there was no way I was going to be able to talk to Chloe on her own, and I folded the poster, which I’d been carrying in my hands the whole time, over and over into a triangle. When I couldn’t get it any smaller, I put it in my back pocket. I crushed the chocolate against the roof of my mouth with my tongue. It shattered and the greasy strawberry filling covered my teeth. It tasted like Calpol.

If it had been me in the bed, Chloe coming to visit and Donald and Barbara cluttering the place up, Chloe would have found a way out of it. She’d have shaken her head and pursed her lips – behaved like an adult – and shooed them off to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and (winking at Barbara), ‘Maybe a smoke?’ They’d have both gone, too, swept along by the force of whatever it was Chloe wanted. I imagined them blinking over coffee they didn’t like or want, wondering how they’d got there and what had made them buy it. I glanced at Amanda, arranging white flowers busily in a plastic water jug, and I didn’t even try.

‘You are funny,’ Chloe said, in her grown-up voice. ‘Come all the way here and don’t say anything?’

‘Don’t be ungrateful,’ Amanda said quickly. ‘Laura’s come on the bus on her own to come and see you.’

On my own. As if I was six years old and couldn’t be trusted with the change for my fare. During all my careful planning and the times I’d rehearsed what I was going to say while I waited for the bus to bring me here (it’s not your fault Carl did something daft – but you can’t let him drag you down with him) I hadn’t considered how I was going to approach things with Chloe’s mother looking over my shoulder. It was irritating.

‘So, are you all right?’ I said.

She looked all right. Her parents weren’t pissed off with her so she couldn’t be pregnant – or if she was, they didn’t know about it. The fact she was surrounded by doctors who’d probably take one look at her blonde hair and kohl-rimmed eyes and check for that kind of thing first of all meant that more likely than not, the whole thing had been a false alarm. Or she’d been lying. One or the other. But here she was in hospital all the same. What was wrong with her? I started to think she’d been pretending. Her hair was done nicely. She had pink lip balm on and her pyjamas looked brand new.

‘I’m fine,’ she said, and smiled at me broadly, ‘fine. A bit tired, but all right.’

There was a television on a cabinet at the end of the ward. Another repeat of The Crystal Maze was on and Nathan put the chart down and drifted over to watch it.

‘She collapsed right in front of the school, did you know?’ Amanda said, and put her hand on her chest. ‘I’ve been worrying myself sick. Her father nearly had a heart attack. A literal heart attack.’

I nodded. Of course I knew, or I wouldn’t be here, I wanted to say.

‘Emma helped her. Little angel. Went and got a coat to put under her head, ran to find a teacher. She would have come with you in the ambulance too, if she’d been allowed, wouldn’t she, Chloe?’

Chloe smirked. Amanda patted her leg absently.

‘She’s always had people around, wanting to help her,’ she said, ‘since she was a baby. It’s because you’re such a pretty little thing. People think you can’t shift for yourself.’

No one was listening to Amanda. I was trying to stare into Chloe’s head and invent telepathy using willpower alone. I raised my eyebrows at her and she smiled again, and shrugged slightly.

‘Thank God for Emma,’ Amanda murmured again, still patting Chloe’s feet. ‘Who knows what would have happened to you otherwise? Young girl, lying unconscious and vulnerable on the pavement. Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?’

I turned away in frustration and saw the blue light from the television bouncing off the shining dome of Nathan’s head.

‘I’m sure someone would have come along sooner or later,’ I said.

Even if it had been a perv – he wouldn’t have done to Chloe anything that she didn’t already do with Carl, so it didn’t matter, did it? Fucking Emma. Chloe was all right. She was having the time of her life.

‘What did the doctor say?’ I asked.

Chloe leaned back against her pillows, took her time choosing another chocolate, put her head on one side and sighed.

‘An infection,’ she said, ‘that got out of hand. I’m going home tomorrow.’

She waved her arm at me and I saw the thin white bandage on her wrist and the tube leading to a drip on a stand by the side of her bed.

‘It’s antibiotics,’ she said proudly, ‘double strength.’

Someone had hung a small stuffed penguin holding a heart from the top of the drip stand. The heart had blue and white swirly writing on it. Get Well Soon . Chloe followed my eye.

‘Emma brought that,’ she said. ‘Cute, isn’t it?’

‘She’s been already?’

She nodded. ‘Got a taxi over here straight from school. They weren’t going to let her in because she was too early for visiting hours, but she said she was my sister.’ Chloe laughed. ‘Cheeky cow.’

‘You don’t faint with infections,’ I said.

‘I had a fever,’ Chloe insisted, but without much energy. ‘God, look at my chart, why don’t you?’

‘It was in the waterworks, right up to the kidneys,’ Amanda whispered with impossible enthusiasm, ‘you know.’

I thought she meant Chloe had picked something up from drinking the water at school, which wouldn’t have surprised me. If you asked for water in the dining room you got it in a little polystyrene cup – we all encouraged each other to break the cups into fragments after we’d used them because it was a certainty that if they were thrown out whole, the dinner ladies would fish them out of the bin and reuse them.

Amanda nodded meaningfully towards Chloe’s thighs.

‘She means my bladder,’ Chloe said loudly, pointing her thumbs at her stomach, ‘kidneys, pee-hole – the lot. It was horrendous.’ She said ‘horrendous’ even louder than she’d said ‘pee-hole’, never taking her eyes off Amanda, and smiling when her mother flinched.

‘I just can’t understand why you didn’t get me to take you to the doctor when it first started,’ Amanda said, shook her head at Chloe, and stood up to fiddle with the cards again.

I felt the triangle of the poster poke me through my jeans pocket.

‘Don’t start,’ Chloe said. Amanda opened her mouth – was about, I think, to try some discipline, when Nathan stood up and, with his back still to us, motioned towards the television. The Crystal Maze had finished and the news had started.

‘Turn it up! See if they’ve caught that pest!’

Nathan obeyed the warbly voice from across the room, and turned the dial.

Terry appeared on time, waving to cameramen and production assistants as he strutted through the studio before sliding onto the couch and drumming the coffee table in time with the final chime of the theme music, as he always did. Fiona didn’t get a walk through – she was always sitting there on the couch waiting for him to arrive. He smiled. His face was pleasingly asymmetrical: one raised eyebrow, one dimple in his cheek. His hair parted on the side and black and matt and luxuriant – dense as an old fur coat.

‘That’s some tie,’ Amanda said breathily.

And it was. Not Santa or reindeer now Twelfth Night was over, but a snowman with black twigs for arms and lumps of coal for eyes and mouth. Terry was the sort of man that appealed to everyone’s mother.

‘Good evening,’ Terry said, ‘and welcome to The City Today at six o’clock.’ His tone was cordial enough, but his smile had faded, which always meant bad news.