Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

Two and a half years, then Chloe arrived in my form, transferred from another school.

‘It wasn’t meeting my needs,’ she’d said.

She’d been kicked out. Was on her last chance. There was a spare chair next to me that no one else wanted to sit in. Because it was her first day she didn’t know she was supposed to sit somewhere else too. We became friends. Other girls liked her or were scared of her. They started to leave me alone.

Chloe saved me. We had a special bond and she was ruining it, and it was all because of Carl. I thought about him and as I sat on the edge of Chloe’s hospital bed with that poster and the stupid Brook leaflet jabbing me through my pocket, Emma’s penguin dangling over my head, I snapped.

‘Where does this Carl live?’ Amanda was saying. I might as well have not been there, except Chloe wasn’t looking at her mother but leaning forward in the bed and shooting me a boiling look that made me want to leg it.

‘Forget it,’ Chloe said. ‘Just shut up.’

‘Chloe,’ Amanda wailed, ‘your father’ll have to hear about this. Just wait until he gets back from his meeting…’

Chloe scrabbled at the sheets and it was only the tube attaching her to the drip that stopped her getting out of bed completely and coming for me. I ignored the feeling in my stomach, turned, and ran.

When I got out of the hospital it was properly dark. I checked how much money I had left and decided to get to Cuerden on my own and retrace Wilson’s path through the woods myself. I knew it was far too dark to be out at night and I was going to have to switch buses at the station and it would take me ages and ages to get there and get home again. I knew that I was going to get a roasting when I got home, but compared to what I knew I had coming from Chloe, a grounding from Barbara was nothing. I was mad enough to feel invincible and I was determined that I was going to find something to implicate Carl in Wilson’s disappearance. It shouldn’t be too difficult, after all – we were there, weren’t we? That was the truth. And Carl chased him off into those woods. All I needed to find (I skipped through hazily remembered plots of Columbo in my mind as I paced in the bus shelter) was a dropped cigarette packet. A set of tyre tracks. Something, anything, to prove that he was there even if Chloe was stupid enough to stick up for him and say he wasn’t.

When the 125 left the station it was empty. I sat at the back, lit a cigarette and tried to blow smoke rings at my reflection in the window. I thought about Wilson. It would not be nice if he was still there in the woods, if he fell down and hurt himself running away from Carl. I started to feel sick because I was thinking about Wilson lying in the wet plants and leaf-skeletons, lying from Boxing Day afternoon until now, even through New Year’s Eve: the night when there are parties everywhere, and fireworks in the sky, and drinking and party poppers and no one was supposed to be on their own. I imagined the creatures that would scuttle out from under the leaves and about his hurt hand hanging onto his new ball and the wrinkly, lookingafter hands, waiting for him at home for all this time. I think I might have been enjoying myself, in some horrible way, but I stopped myself as soon as I started trying to imagine his mother.

Most people who run away and go missing are young girls. They were like me. No, they were like Chloe – they have older boyfriends and they go out at night too much. And then someone grabs them and takes them away in a van. Or they are young girls whose parents are too busy drinking and injecting themselves to notice that they haven’t been to school but have got on a train and gone to London. Don’t notice until their girl has been swallowed up into the grey of the pavements and the big buildings and the all-night clubs of the capital city, hundreds of miles away. I could do it, I thought. That idea, or the smoke, made me dizzy. That is what happens. They hardly put it on the news anymore. What does not happen, I decided, blowing smoke at the corner of the little window, is grown-up men vanishing. Even if they are a bit funny, like a Mong, like Wilson is, going out with their football and then never coming home. Especially at this time of year.

I ran across the car park with my hood up in case anyone else was there. Didn’t stop to look at the stoat and the cowslip on the sign. To me, it felt safer in the woods than it was in the car park.

When we were driving here on Boxing Day, Carl told Chloe that people go to this car park in their cars at night to have sex. And sometimes, he said, they leave the lights inside the car on and one of the back windows open so that people can stand about and watch and even put their hands through the window if they feel like it.

‘It’s called dogging,’ he said, and looked over his shoulder at me – he wanted to see if I’d heard and was blushing.

Chloe laughed. ‘That’s so weird!’

I nearly told Chloe he was just making it up and trying to put ideas in her head. He was obviously trying to acclimatise her for something he was planning on doing to her himself, but as usual, they were in the front so speaking to the backs of their heads would have been pointless. Before I could say anything he had turned the music up loud and revved the engine.

That night there was a car in the car park but it was dark inside and I couldn’t see if anyone was in it. I ran past it anyway, leapt over a ridge in the soil, and was in the woods. The moonlight coming through the trees was bluish and faint. I couldn’t see my legs because I was wearing jeans, but my white trainers flashed in and out in front of me as I stepped. When I stood still it was absolutely silent until my ears got used to the space and then I could hear cars somewhere far away. And when I moved, the crack of sticks and the rustle of frozen leaves was almost deafening. I tried to tiptoe, but that made it worse.

It was stupid, being there. Stupid being in a dark place on my own at night, even though I had my house keys with me. The keys had a little metal ornament on them that was shaped like an upside-down tear-drop. When the attacks had first started, me and Chloe had scraped the edge of the tear-drop into a point against a wall. I held it in my hand inside my pocket and tested the point against my thumb. It didn’t hurt, but I thought if I needed to, I could take someone’s eye out with it.

I saw nothing, and as I went on it got darker. The things in the undergrowth that caught my eye, that I thought might be something to do with Carl, turned out to be plastic carrier bags caught against twigs, a curved piece of green and yellow plastic, and hundreds and hundreds of crisp packets. An old chest freezer was there, along with a bike frame and an old buggy and a mattress that someone had tried to set fire to. It all smelled rank and catty, and as I knew these things weren’t evidence of anything I walked right past them to find the path and follow the steps downwards out of the trees and onto the cleared and gravelled walkway that goes around the pond.

In the summer there are ducks and plants and things, and it is a nice place to come and walk about. There used to be loads of ducklings too, but someone got sick of their pet terrapins, released them into the water and, the story goes, every spring the terrapins swim about under the surface and snap the legs off the little birds swimming on the top. I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve never seen them.

That night it was frozen solid, just like I’d told Wilson. Like everyone else, I’d made promises to Barbara and Donald that I would never, ever walk on the pond when it was frozen. All our parents made us swear down that we wouldn’t do it. Out of the trees it was a bit lighter and I could see stones and cans and big sticks lying on top of the ice. People do it all the time. Throw heavy things onto it as hard as they can. If it doesn’t break – if it doesn’t crack at all – then it is all right to walk on. Someone had even chucked a hub-cap out there. I could see the grooves where it had skidded across the top. I went around the outside carefully, not looking for anything anymore, but shivering and stamping my feet against the sparkle of frost growing on the path. The metal poles with the signs on had scales of ice on them and I remembered the boy who licked one of them to see if his tongue would stick, for a dare.