Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

He squeezed my hand, let go of it and stood up. Stared at me, smiling – although less at me than the wallpaper over my head.

‘Or the bushes in the park where you and that Chloe go,’ he said.

‘We don’t go in the bushes, Dad,’ I said.

‘You’ve not been out for a while,’ he said. ‘Is it the weather? Too cold for you?’

I shook my head.

‘Shall I get your mother to get you some new gloves?’

‘Chloe’s not been out.’

‘She’s recovered though, from her time in hospital?’

‘She’s out. It was nothing, really.’

‘You’ve been missing her, then?’ Donald said. ‘In your room after school. Sulking?’ he smiled, ‘trouble in paradise? Or is it a young man? Something else on your mind?’

I looked at him while I gathered up the cards and slotted them into the packet, making sure all the backs were facing the right way. I was surprised by how much he had noticed.

‘Chloe’s going to be hanging out with Emma from now on.’

‘And there’s no room for one more?’

I shook my head. ‘It goes like that sometimes, at our school. It doesn’t matter.’

‘Nothing your old dad can sort out for you?’

‘I doubt it,’ I said, imagining him turning up at Chloe’s house and sitting in the kitchen with Nathan and Amanda, using the reasonable voice Barbara put on when she was speaking to the water board or the doctor’s surgery.

‘Oh dear,’ he said. Without noticing, I’d dropped the cards and they’d scattered over the carpet. My hands were shaking. ‘What’s up? You hungry?’

My throat closed. I wanted to tell him, but it seemed easy and impossible at the same time, so I hovered and said nothing.

‘Things like this blow over,’ he said, ‘and before you know it, you’ll be back out gallivanting with your Chloe. And this Emma too. She can’t be that bad, can she, if Chloe likes her so much?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘But when you do go out, stay away from the park. Do your dad a favour, eh? Put his mind at rest and tell him you’ll stay away from the park, all dark places, until this,’ he gestured at the television, ‘is all cleared up.’

‘I thought he’d stopped?’

‘For the time being. But where there’s one, there’s another. Creeping about. There’s all sorts out there.’ Donald touched his mouth, swallowed as if it hurt him. He closed his eyes and put his finger in the air – his signal for me to be quiet. Then he laughed.

‘Remember your Uncle Ronald? True love, or whatever stands in for it, knows no bounds.’

‘You all right, Dad?’

‘Make them glow in the dark first,’ he said, and opened his eyes. He was wearing brown trousers and a brown and green shirt with a pattern on it – repeating diamonds between narrow stripes. It was his favourite shirt and it was threadbare to the point of transparency at his elbows.

‘Dad?’

‘You could do something to their genes,’ Donald said. ‘It wouldn’t hurt them – it would,’ he was pacing, ‘ prevent such a lot of—’ he caught himself and cut it short, as if he was about to say a dirty word. ‘Lola,’ he said, leaned over, grabbed my shoulders and smiled into my face, ‘it would keep you safe.’

I smelled fags then, powerfully, and Barbara was in the room, her hand on Donald’s elbow.

‘Put her down,’ she said briskly. His grip tightened and then relaxed. His smile faded. He rolled his eyes. We’ll humour her, he was saying, and didn’t need to speak the words out loud.

‘Donald? Donald? When did you last eat?’ she spoke loudly, as if he had trouble with his hearing, which he never did. ‘Come on, both of you. The plates have been on the table for five minutes now.’

She bustled him into the kitchen. I clung onto the edge of the couch as if the floor was moving, and trembled.

Chloe was back at school that same week. Paler, a little bluer around the temples, perhaps, but as she assured everyone ‘basically all right’.

Except she didn’t assure me of anything at all. I arrived at the art room to find Emma sitting in my spot. I should have anticipated it – I should have got myself ready and planned how I wanted to react when I saw the pair of them talking ‘confidentially’ about Chloe’s experiences in hospital; loud enough for everybody to hear.

When she saw me, Chloe blinked, touched Emma’s arm very gently with her first finger, and said, ‘There she is.’

Emma looked at me slowly. A lazy, only half-interested sneer. She was wearing a gold chain with a heart on it over the front of her school blouse. I recognised it as Chloe’s. She looked different too. Where Chloe was pale, the open pores on her nose showing, Emma had colour in her cheeks and her hair was sleeker and glossier than I’d ever seen it before. Her shoulders slumped less and she was smiling more. She was still buck-toothed, but somehow it didn’t look quite as bad as it had done a few weeks ago.

‘So she is,’ she said, and turned her head quickly. ‘Anyway.’

I actually went and sat with them. I pretended I didn’t know what was going on. Where else would I have sat? I pulled out the stool and felt a strange mixture of things. Cold stones in my stomach and the first real grief I’d ever experienced.

‘What’s she doing?’ Emma asked Chloe. She jerked her head and paused with an open homework diary resting on her palm. I wanted to tear out the pages and screw them into balls and shove them in her mouth. Her fringe shook every time she exhaled.

‘I sit here,’ I said, and shrugged. ‘I always sit here.’

The rest of the class was at my back, staring. I could hear them, the unknown and largely harmless bragging and racket of the boys and in between their deeper and more rumbling sounds, the high-pitched snarl and snap of the girls, gossiping, testing and comparing.

‘Come on,’ I said reasonably, and put my bag on the table, ‘there’s loads of room.’

I was going to ask Chloe how she was feeling. It was easy to get her to talk about herself. I might even have smiled – a sticky and fearful smile, forced and less grown up than I would have wanted. I’d have been Emma’s friend, and endured a threesome to avoid being thrown to the rest of the form like bloody chump from the back of a boat.

Chloe stretched her feet out under the table. Her shoes met my shins. It wasn’t a kick but more of a push that transferred the mud from the bottom of her shoes onto my socks. She yawned luxuriantly, the back of her hand over her mouth, and then leaned forward and draped herself over the pile of bags and coats on the table. Bizarrely, Emma looked at Chloe through that yawn with a kind of pride on her face. Like Chloe was a new baby or the best sort of clutch bag. There was sheer love in that look, and a kind of smug ownership too, that depended on me being there to see it. I saw myself sitting there, only last week, and understood in a terrible cringing flash of insight what people meant by the lessbefrens thing.

‘I don’t remember her sitting here before,’ Chloe said, and settled over the desk, using Emma’s bag as a kind of pillow. I could see the top of her head, her razor-sharp parting and the complication of a French plait so tight it was making her hair come out at the temples.

Emma put down the homework diary and rubbed Chloe’s back.

‘She’s still not well,’ she said, with sickly kindness, ‘probably shouldn’t be here at all, but she was desperate to get out and away from her mum.’ She licked her teeth behind her lips and stared glassily into the air between us, determined not to look at me. ‘They’ve decided she’s grounded for fucking months ,’ Emma said, as if to no one.