Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

He stopped to let me picture it, and I did.

‘So you go in there, and they ask what you were up to on such and such a day. Where did you go? Who were you with? Who did you talk to? Normally, you might get away with saying that you can’t remember. But this is Boxing Day that they’re asking about. Everyone knows what they were up to on Boxing Day. You see what I mean?’

‘Yeah, but—’

He interrupted me. ‘You can get your mum to swear you were in the house with her all day and all night. She’s got to say it straight out, without even looking at you. They’ll dig into it. She’ll have to be ready to name the television programmes you watched, tell them what you had for tea, what time you went to bed, whether you got up for a piss in the night. Do you think your mum would do that for you?’ He didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘Mine would,’ he said, ‘which is why I’m not worried.’

The idea of Barbara lying to anyone at all ( the truth hurts, does it? ) was unimaginable: the police, even less. Barbara took cups of tea out to the traffic wardens checking the residents’ permits on our street. She wasn’t like Carl’s mum. She was respectable. What would Amanda say? Chloe always managed to get her own way. She’d think of something.

‘No one’s going to find out,’ Carl said, waving his hand lazily in an arc. ‘You don’t need to worry about that Mong. He’s not going to be telling anyone your name, is he? Not if you’re right about what’s happened.’ His hand flopped down onto my knee and perched there for a second before squeezing then moving on through the air. ‘About what you made happen.’

‘I thought you said it wasn’t my fault. That I never touched him?’

‘Don’t get worked up. Figure of speech,’ he paused, ‘but it wasn’t me telling him to go skating, was it?’

I wound down the window, threw out the cigarette. Carl offered me another and I shook my head.

‘Who else have you told? How long have you been worrying about this?’

‘All day,’ I admitted. I didn’t tell him that less than three hours before I was trying to convince Chloe to call the police and have him taken away. Of course I didn’t. But the guilt was drifting off me like a smell.

‘Chloe’s been – under the weather, out of action – this isn’t the sort of thing you’d tell your parents about, so,’ his hand bumped my knee again, ‘it probably seems more important than it actually is, because you’ve been thinking about it so much with no one to talk to. Did you know twenty people go missing every day?’

I shook my head and tried to imagine them – twenty people out of assembly disappearing – just popping out of existence and leaving nothing behind but gaps in the crowd. Soon, I thought, there weren’t going to be any people left.

‘Most of them come back,’ Carl said. ‘They don’t bother putting it on the news. If they did, they wouldn’t have time for anything else. If you’re wrong about what happened, and this Wilson does turn up after a few days, then you’ve not got nothing to worry about. We didn’t do anything. Just a bit of banter. Nothing nasty in it, was there?’

I wasn’t listening then. I was looking at his hand on the edge of his seat, creeping towards my knee. I was noticing the way he had loosened his seatbelt and edged so far towards me that the handbrake was jabbing into the side of his thigh.

I didn’t even know he liked me like that.

‘I’m not going to try and get one over on you,’ Carl said. ‘I think we both know you’re cleverer than Chloe gives you credit for. I don’t need to “handle” you like I have to with her. No hysterics.’

I felt pleased. My heart was beating in my throat and I didn’t think about what Carl had done to Chloe to make her hysterical. Carl drew a circle in the air in front of his ear, and I thought he was trying to say that I was mad.

‘You’ve let it build itself up in your mind. Talking to me was the right thing to do.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but—’

‘If you ring this number,’ the page appeared and he tapped on it before making it vanish again. His hands were big and clumsy but I could imagine him being able to work good magic tricks and make things disappear, ‘they’re going to ask you who you were with. Want to know how you got there. And then they’re going to want to know why I was taking you and Chloe out. And if they asked me, I might need to stick to what we started with, and say I’ve never heard of you, and I was never there.’

I finally realised what his problem was, and I blurted it out without thinking, ‘you’d get in trouble, about Chloe. Because she’s only—’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Carl said quickly and he shook his head at my not understanding. He laughed. ‘I’m not worried about that,’ he said loudly.

There was a chip in one of Carl’s teeth and he tapped his fingernail against it. It made a hollow sound and he blew the air out of his cheeks and changed the shape of his mouth to adjust the sound like his whole head was a drum he wanted to tune up and play. That’s why he’d be good at the magic tricks. I put my finger on it then, even though the feeling about him was one that I’d had all along. He fidgeted all the time. He was constantly tapping or drumming or folding up train tickets or picking at the plastic trim on the inside of his car. When people like that are given a coin or a pack of cards or even a pencil and paper, they start to work out ways to do magic – even if they do have clumsy hands, like Carl did.

I was thinking all this when Carl leaned over and kissed the side of my neck. It gave me a shock, and my arms flew out as if I was falling, or defending myself. I was embarrassed about that. He laughed softly and I felt his teeth against my skin. I hunched my shoulders and moved my head back and the triangle shapes of the whites of his eyes were grinning at me and then he did it again.

I wasn’t prepared for the feel of his tongue to come out and start poking at my teeth, up along my gum line and swirling around like I was a room he was trying to break into – my mouth the lock. While all this was going on, he’d started pressing his hands under my coat and against my jumper. He was tugging the material upwards and I felt how rough his hands were when the jumper gave way suddenly and he put his hands against my stomach and started to slide them upwards.

This is not something I like doing , I thought, and was pushed back into the seat. He was still kissing me. I could smell his saliva on the side of my neck and feel it drying on my face. I thought of the tiny bruises on Chloe’s neck and shot out my arm behind me for the car door handle.

When it clunked open the river-smelling wind forced it closed again right away but the noise was enough to get Carl to stop. He took his hands out of the front of my jumper and leaned back.

I was worried he might have been offended or embarrassed.

‘I’m – I should…’ I said, sounding even to myself like a tenyear-old.

‘Not into it then,’ he said, and laughed. His mouth was shiny. ‘You’re more interested in Chloe?’

I could feel how hot my face was and I was glad it was dark.

‘I’m going,’ I said, but didn’t sound as outraged as I felt. Carl didn’t try to stop me and he didn’t start the car engine and follow as I ran away under the bridge and through the park towards home.

The next day, I turned up at Chloe’s house after school. Nathan let me in and I was glad it was him answering the door and not her mother. Amanda would have made me hot chocolate and asked me to tell her more about Carl. She’d have hung around with me and Chloe, reading our magazines and sniffing our perfume samples and trying to join in with what we were talking about. Nathan only nodded and pointed with his thumb to the conservatory.