Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

He’d got serious towards the end – his voice slowed and dropped until he had the attention of almost everyone in the room.

‘But, sir, he’s packed it in,’ Danny let his voice slide up at the end as if he was asking a question. We all spoke like that.

‘When I say “caught”, I mean caught properly – not just taking a rest, not just having a bit of time off over Christmas or while it’s a bit nippy out – but locked up somewhere, answering to a cellmate who just happens to be two foot wider than he is, and someone’s doting dad. Do you hear me? Now’s not the time to start getting careless.’

I saw the back of everyone’s heads, nodding at him obediently.

‘Chloe,’ he said quickly, ‘get your head up off the desk and stop whispering. Emma? Turn this way please. Is there something about this you think doesn’t apply to you? You think you’re immune to what’s going on in this city? The last victim was fifteen – you’re not far off that now, are you? If he’s stopped, brilliant – you won’t catch me complaining. But a fortnight without an attack and some rumours about some poor boy who didn’t find his way home doesn’t mean you’re all safe. I don’t want to be called into the headmaster’s office one morning to be told one of you lot has been caught in the crossfire between Jack the Ripper and a vigilante mob – right? Think about it, and wash that make-up off your face before Mrs Grant sees you and decides to be less tolerant than me. One more detention this term, Chloe, and it’s a meeting with your parents.’

Emma was stiff and pale and horrified – probably because she wasn’t used to a telling off. Slowly, very slowly, Chloe lifted her head. Her face was red. She was shaking with laughter.

After the wreck of morning registration, I didn’t even attempt the dining hall. There was no chance I would be able to go in there, queue, pay, sit, eat and return my tray alone. My stomach squeaked and popped with hunger.

You’re chubby anyway, I thought briskly, and walked in the other direction towards the library and the bank of computers you were allowed to use for homework. I had Donald’s paperwork with me. Might as well try to type some of it up.

Despite everything, there was something soothing about the typing. Donald’s handwriting was always cramped and erratic – often smudged because he was left-handed. I didn’t find it difficult to read because I was used to it – I’d done jobs like this one for him before and it was how I knew how to type. Before Year Nine, when I’d finally been allowed to use the school computers for coursework, I’d used Barbara’s old Silver Reed – a portable with a slipping ampersand key and a matching plastic case the colour of a hearing aid – the one that Donald had ruined with a lump of lard. I remember I used to spray the ribbon with water from the plant sprayer and wind it back up again because I didn’t know you could buy replacements.

Sometimes what I found out during this typing was interesting, if not exactly useful. The Montgolfier brothers made a balloon, and tested it by offering convicted criminals a pardon if they survived a trip over the Channel. Or Wrigley’s chewing gum: the first product in the world to be sold with a barcode.

I sat at the computer furthest away from the door in a corner next to a mural of famous dead writers waving and wearing the school colours. The computer hummed and the monitor crackled with static as it loaded up. I took Donald’s exercise books out of my bag, fed my floppy disk into the front of the unit, and started to type.

The 27th of January, at the entrance of the vast Bay of Bengal… about seven o’clock in the evening, the Nautilus … was sailing in a sea of milk… Was it the effect of the lunar rays? No; for the moon… was still lying hidden under the horizon… The whole sky, though lit by the sidereal rays, seemed black by contrast with the whiteness of the waters.

‘It is called a milk sea,’ I explained…

‘But, sir… can you tell me what causes such an effect? for I suppose the water is not really turned into milk.’

‘No, my boy; and the whiteness which surprises you is caused only by the presence of myriads of infusoria, a sort of luminous little worm, gelatinous and without colour, of the thickness of a hair and whose length is not more than seventhousandths of an inch. These insects adhere to one another sometimes for several leagues.’

‘… and you need not try to compute the number of these infusoria. You will not be able, for… ships have floated on these milk seas for more than forty miles.’

Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

June 1854. South of Java. Aboard the American clipper Shooting Star . Captain Kingman reports:

The whole appearance of the ocean was like a plain covered with snow. There was scarce a cloud in the heavens, yet the sky… appeared as black as if a storm was raging. The scene was one of awful grandeur; the sea having turned to phosphorus, and the heavens being hung in blackness, and the stars going out, seemed to indicate that all nature was preparing for that last grand conflagration which we are taught to believe is to annihilate this material world.

The British Meteorological Office has established a Bio luminescence Database, which presently contains 235 reports of milky seas seen since 1915. Surely bioluminescent organisms must be the explanation for them? But most of these organisms simply flash briefly and are incapable of generating the strong, steady glow observed. Marine bacteria alone glow steadily. However, calculations show that unrealistic concentrations of bacteria would be needed to generate the observed light. Herring and Watson admit there is no acceptable explanation of the milky sea and yet urge observers of it to retain the water, spiked with bleach, for further study.

Here, Donald’s notes dissolved into fragments. I rearranged, trying to line his words up into coherent sentences. I may have distorted his meaning – I really don’t know.

Milky Seas Sightings in British Waters and Their Uses: a request for attention, funding and assistance with further research.

Do not want to hand this project over.

There are commercial as well as social and humanitarian applications to any possible findings that must be explored with all haste.

Letters to BMS and various university marine research departments (unanswered) enclosed for your records and perusal.

N. B. What kind of bleach?

Nearly forty minutes later I set the document to print and packed the folders and papers away in my bag. I went to the printer, which was on the side of the librarian’s desk at the front of the room. There was a red biscuit tin in the shape of a telephone box with a slit in the top for your money. Mr Brocklehurst (Broccoli, or Meat and One Veg) never looked up. As long as he heard money going into the tin he was happy enough with you taking your printouts. They were five pence each, but I shoved a handful of pennies through the slit, keeping my eyes on his bowed head. I was paying so much attention to him that I didn’t see Chloe and Emma, leaning on each other, grinning like leggy, white-socked vampires, and pulling the sheets out of the printer as they arrived.

‘What’s this?’ Chloe said, the bundle clutched tight between her fingers. She was creasing the pages – holding on tight and expecting me to grab for it.

‘Give me it,’ I said. Emma leaned over, put her head on Chloe’s shoulder and ran her fingers along a line of text.

‘ Despite my age and lack of swimming ability it is my fervent hope ,’ she read in the seal-like bark that we heard from the remedials who were forced to read out in class.

‘What the fuck is that?’ she asked.