Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

It was freezing. More freezing there than it was even in the woods, because the wind was skating across the frozen lid of the water and making my hair fly about and slap my ears. I tucked it all into the back of my hood and walked on. There was a lump in the ice – a disturbance in the flat surface. I walked fast to get to it, squinting to see, and not wanting to look at the same time. My teeth were chattering. It was too cold to hang about here and it was too cold a fortnight ago, and he might have been a bit soft, but if he could have, he would have gone home, or got on a bus, or tried to find a cafe or something when he got cold, and before it got dark, even if Carl had really, really scared him.

There used to be a wooden jetty thing poking out from the path and onto the water. There was a railing around it, to show it wasn’t for boats. It wasn’t for anything, except walking out over the water right into the middle of the pond. But people were using it for the banned things: feeding the ducks and fishing. And in the summer people used to jump off the end to go swimming. The water at the edge of the pond was too full of reeds and bread and floating carrier bags and pop bottles to wade through, but if you jumped off the edge of the wooden platform you got in where the water was clear. And they took it away – because of the fish and the bread and the jumping – the thinking being that it was only a matter of time before someone took a stupid dive and cracked their head open on the concrete bottom.

Some of the posts were still there though, and they were sticking out of the top of the ice like trees that had been lopped off before the branches started. The lump in the ice was between the two poles furthest away from the edge. I got as close to where the ice started as I could without stepping on it, and looked. If I’d have been braver, I would have walked out on the ice, or stood on the flat tops of the old wooden poles and used them like stepping stones to get to the middle of the water. I wasn’t that brave. I just leaned forward, and squinted against the wind, and stared at it a bit until the shape resolved itself into an object.

It was a football. Half a football, really. The other half was under the water, and the skin of the ice had frozen around it and locked it into place. My heart started to rattle. I remembered Wilson’s new Christmas football and I made myself think about the park-keeper or the nature warden or whatever he was called – the man who hauls the bike frames and shopping trolleys out of the pond with a rope, the man who takes the primary school kids around on the stoat and cowslip walks. He’ll have put it in there so he can pull it out later and leave an air hole for the fish. It would make sense to use a football rather than a ping-pong ball or a tennis ball, because this pond is much bigger than most people’s garden ponds – it’s a lake really – and would have more fish in it, and the fish would need more air, and so there would need to be a bigger hole.

All true facts.

And I heard my own voice, telling Wilson about ice skating on the lake. Recommending it, saying that what his parents didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. I could call up the picture as easy as anything – Wilson blundering through the woods while Carl called through the trees behind him. Crashing through the undergrowth, branches snapping and sounding like gunshot. He’d have been scared – wanting to get away fast. And when he came out between the trees and saw the pond in front of him, its surface as flat as a pavement, it would have made sense for him to dash right across it rather than wasting time following the path around it. The shortest distance between two parallel points.

Carl was only chasing him, after all. It was me who’d told him it was safe to walk on the ice. My fault.

I turned away from the lake and ran off in the opposite direction to the one I’d come in. I slipped on the frosty path, and lurched into the woods again, running through the dark with sticks hitting me in the face and leaves sparkling and sliding under the heels of my trainers.

When I got onto the main road the cold air was burning my lungs and I pulled my phone out of my pocket and tried to call Chloe. The call went right through to the answer machine. She probably wasn’t allowed to have it with her in the hospital, or she’d turned it off and put it under her mattress because she didn’t want her parents to find it. I guessed at the time, checked a bus timetable and finally gave up and telephoned Carl.

He answered right away. I could hear loud music, someone laughing.

‘Carl,’ I said, and I was still panting. Probably sounded to him like one of those dirty hoax callers.

‘What’s up?’ he said, in his funny, bored voice. ‘What are you calling me for, little girl?’

I felt humiliated and angry. This whole adventure had been to get him into trouble and show Chloe how much better off she’d be without him. Instead, all I’d done was find out that I was probably responsible for something terrible happening myself. And Carl was the only one I could rely on to pick me up and tell me what to do.

‘Where are you? I need you to come and get me.’

‘I can’t hear what you’re saying. What is it?’

His friends were with him. I could hear the sound of the car engine revving too, and imagined him doing handbrake turns in a supermarket car park, taking his hand off the wheel to make an opening and closing beak in the air. I swallowed, tried to think clearly.

‘Hurry up, I’ve got another call waiting.’ I heard him chewing on something, the sound of his mouth working against the handset. ‘Lola? What are you after?’

‘Chloe’s ill,’ I said at last, ‘she’s in hospital. You’ve got to come and meet me right now.’

‘What is it?’ he said, more seriously. The music faded.

‘I’m at Cuerden,’ I said. ‘Come right now. I need a lift.’

‘ Cuerden? What are you doing there ?’

Carl sounded scared. The music in the background stopped abruptly.

‘Just come quick, will you? I’m fucking freezing.’

I hung up, went and sat on the bench, and crossed my fingers. Chloe normally managed to get Carl to do what she wanted, so he must be quite stupid.

He arrived fifteen minutes later and shoved the passenger side door open while he was still pulling into the kerb.

‘What’s up with Chloe?’ Carl said. ‘Has she done something to herself?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I was supposed to be meeting her tonight,’ he looked at his watch, ‘after her mum and dad go to sleep. Is Emma with you?’

‘No!’ I said. ‘Chloe’s in the hospital, she can’t meet you.’

‘What’s she done?’

‘She thought she might be pregnant, but it’s all right, she isn’t,’ I said.

Carl shook his head, and laughed quietly. ‘Silly cow. She turned up at the hospital for that?’

He pulled out and started to drive back towards the city centre.

‘It wasn’t that, nothing to do with that. It was something else,’ I said quickly. ‘I don’t know what exactly. An infection.’

Carl didn’t say anything – as if Chloe being ill was my fault.

‘She’s going home tomorrow morning. It wasn’t anything serious.’

I tried laughing but in the car it sounded really fake and it made me cringe. ‘You know what she’s like,’ I said, and swallowed hard.

‘Did she tell anyone about it? Did she tell anyone about me?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.

Chloe was probably explaining all about Carl to Amanda and Nathan right now. Still, there was no need to tell him that. The lights on the dashboard were blinking green and red and I wanted to find out which ones belonged to the heater, but I didn’t dare. I pushed my feet against the bottom of the car. A crisp packet crackled loudly and I lifted my bum off the seat to get the poster out of my pocket to show to him.