Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

‘Does anyone know you called me?’ Carl said, and jerked his hand out to adjust the heating. He talked too loudly – almost shouting. That, and his elbow jabbing me as he twisted the dial made me jump and drop the folded paper. It dropped between my knees, down into the dark and I bent over to get it.

‘I want to show you,’ I said, and I was struggling and unfastening my seatbelt. ‘I want you to look at this. It’s that boy who we saw on Boxing Day.’

I straightened up and offered him the paper, still folded and warm from my back pocket, but he knocked my arm away as he turned the steering wheel to navigate a roundabout.

I didn’t think much of Carl but he was a grown-up, and yet somehow one of us too. He was moody and unpredictable and he said really horrible things to me sometimes, but when we’d all had a drink he’d put his arms around mine and Chloe’s shoulders and say we were ‘his girls’. Of all the people I knew, Carl was someone who knew what to do with a secret – especially one that might get you into trouble.

‘Who else did she tell?’ We stopped jerkily at a set of traffic lights. ‘Stop waving that paper about and answer me.’

He did shout then, and lift home or not, I put my hand on the door handle.

‘How would I know? You don’t have to be such an arsehole, Carl. You’re not my boyfriend.’

There were a few moments of silence, during which I cried a little. Carl didn’t reach out a hand and touch me, or pat my back or anything like that. He smiled. I could smell fags and something spicy on his breath or in his clothes. His face was pale and it looked blue in the dark.

It’s never properly dark, not in cities. The streetlamps and shop windows throw their light up into the air in a hundred thousand pinpricks that stain the night green and yellow.

The lights changed and we started moving again. He turned off the main road before he should have, and in a few minutes he’d parked under the arches of the bridge that goes over the Ribble.

‘I’ll take you home in a bit.’

He waited for me to stop crying and after a few minutes lit a cigarette, lit a second one from the glowing tip of the first, tapped my shoulder and made me take it.

‘Talk,’ he said, ‘slowly.’

I gulped at the smoke, burning my throat and swallowing back a cough so he wouldn’t laugh at me.

‘I’ve done something,’ I said, ‘I’ve done something terrible. I’ve got to go to the police. I’m going to get locked up.’

I was still finding it hard to get myself under control. I carried on sucking at the cigarette and the car slowly filled with smoke. Carl used his thumb and his first finger to rub his eyebrows.

‘For God’s sake. Show me your bit of paper, then,’ he said.

I wanted to go home. Even if it did mean getting a taxi and hoping it was Donald and not Barbara up to pay for it when I got back. But this was important. It was about Wilson, not me. I was going to do the right thing even if Carl did shout at me and behave like a prick – which was nothing unusual or surprising because he was always like that to me, and even worse to Chloe.

Carl had his hand out. The ends of his fingers were as wide as his knuckles and his nails were chewed short. I gave him the paper and didn’t talk, let him have some peace to look at it. Carl’s lips moved as he read and when he’d finished with it, he folded it up along its creases like it was a map.

‘I heard about that,’ he said. He put his hands on the steering wheel as if the car was moving and we were driving somewhere, flexing and unflexing his elbows. ‘It’s been on the telly.’

‘It’s that boy we met on Boxing Day,’ I said, ‘the one you chased away.’

I tried not to sound accusing, but it came out like that anyway.

‘No, it isn’t,’ Carl said, ‘it’s just some Mong. They all look like that.’

‘It’s him,’ I said, ‘he told me his name.’

‘I forgot you talked to him,’ Carl said. He didn’t say anything else for a long time.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I talked to him and we were chatting about the pond, and the ice – the frozen top. You know how at our school we all go out there, and skid across it and that?’

Carl didn’t reply. I caught myself chewing my hair, and I tucked it behind my ears and felt the soggy end of it stick to my cheek.

‘I told him to go out on the ice – just for a laugh. I thought he might like it. And then you chased him off – and he was probably scared – you said you were going to batter him, and so he ran right out onto the pond and,’ I gulped again, and Carl motioned for me to put the cigarette out in an empty Coke tin he was holding between his thighs, ‘he went through. His ball is there, right in the top of the ice. Frozen in. I saw it.’

For a long while, Carl didn’t say anything. I wondered what he was thinking. He might have been coming up with a plan.

‘What were you doing poking about in the bushes anyway? This time of night?’

I shrugged and Carl seemed to accept it. ‘I think we should go and explain,’ I said. ‘I think we should ring the number on the poster.’

‘We? Nah,’ he said, and laughed. He moved his face nearer to mine and I could see the wet of his eyeballs and the gleam of the gold chain he wore around his neck. I followed it with my eyes down to where it disappeared into his tee-shirt. Chloe told me that he never took it off, even when he was in the bath. Like she’d know.

‘But this is important,’ I said, and I heard myself in the dim hollow of the car, whining over the hum of the heater, even though when I formed the words in my mind I wanted them to sound reasonable.

‘Oh, I know it is,’ Carl said, and instead of moving back away from me he came in even closer until his arm was pressed against mine. He was holding onto the edge of my seat. The car was getting hotter and the warm air was hitting me in the face, blowing my fringe about, and I wanted to rub my eyes, which felt sticky, but I kept my hands still.

‘You’ve done a daft thing,’ he said, and I nodded, ‘but it isn’t like you meant it. Isn’t like you pushed him out there with your bare hands, is it? You never touched him.’

I started to tell him again about the football and what it meant, but Carl brushed my lips with fingers that smelled like fags and curry, and I stopped talking.

‘I know you’re not like Chloe,’ Carl said, and touched my hand. ‘She can be a bit… overdramatic. It’s her age. You’re much more sensible though.’

‘Sensible. Thanks. Great.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that. I mean,’ he paused, ‘you think things through before you dive in. You’re careful not to get yourself into a mess you won’t be able to talk your way out of.’ He smiled at me.

‘We need to tell them,’ I said, ‘because if they find out from someone else it’ll look like we were trying to hide something.’

‘No one saw us with him, so who’s going to tell?’ said Carl. ‘The way I see it, there’s no point involving ourselves if we don’t have to.’

‘But—’

‘It was dead. Everyone was tucked up in the house sleeping off their Chrimbo dinners.’

‘There were those guys near Asda. The vigilantes?’

Carl sighed with exaggerated patience. ‘So say someone did see us? Goes to the police, gives them our description? It’s a nogoer. You were at Chloe’s house. She was at your house. I was nowhere near. It’s all worked out, isn’t it?’

I nodded slowly.

‘But I’ve no way of proving it,’ Carl said easily, ‘and when I come to think of it – Chloe doesn’t either. And neither do you, if we’re going to split hairs,’ he smiled at me, ‘but even that doesn’t have to be a problem. Look. Say the police came around to your house tonight. Say you turned the corner and there they were, outside the house. You go in and there’s two of them sitting on your mother’s suite, and they’ve come that sudden she hasn’t even been able to clear your father away.’