Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

Broccoli turned his head and smiled.

‘You girls wouldn’t mind taking that outside, would you?’

‘Of course not, Mr Brocklehurst,’ Chloe said, and tucked the sheets under her arm. ‘Come on,’ she said, over her shoulder. Emma sniffed, and followed without looking at me.

I waited until I saw them through the glass doors, huddling over the pages and laughing. I followed too. The corridor outside the library was busy. The second meal sitting was over, and the day was too cold for anyone to want to go outside.

‘So,’ Chloe said.

‘I’m writing a story,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing.’

The trick, I thought, was to keep my hands in my pockets. Sit still, don’t lean in, don’t grab for it. Stand back, breathe casual. She only wants it because she thinks it’s important.

‘Really?’ Chloe said, got so close it looked like she was sniffing the pages. She turned them like a fan. ‘What about?’

‘Explorers.’

‘Bullshit,’ she said. ‘This is your dad’s, isn’t it?’

‘What?’ Emma said.

Chloe turned away from me. I saw the side of her face – her mouth opening and closing, a loop of hair curled around her ear. She had a mole on the side of her neck. I stared at it. I wanted to stab it with a pencil.

Emma screwed up her nose. Panhead. Panhead. ‘Her dad’s writing a story?’

Chloe licked her lips, took a breath, and spoke as loudly as she could without shouting.

‘No one’s supposed to know, but Lola’s grand— I mean, dad – he’s gone soft in the head. He’s got this junk room where her mum keeps him because he’s not safe to wander around the house on his own.’

Emma glanced at me. Are we going too far? she seemed to ask. It wasn’t funny anymore and Emma wasn’t cruel, not like Chloe. This was worse. This was pity, and the effort of understanding. Ah yes, she was thinking, that’s why you’re the way you are. That’s why you’re not one of us – always on the outside, left at home on New Year’s Eve, waiting outside the car on Boxing Day. Standing guard. Watching, waiting, following. It’s because of your dad. He’s soft. I should have known.

I couldn’t speak. It wasn’t true. Not even half true. There had been accidents with aspirin and disposable razors, but Chloe made it sound like we kept him chained to a bolt in the wall. More than the untruth of it, the betrayal took my breath away. I knew they weren’t like ordinary parents, of course I did. Things had been bad enough for me without Donald and the junk room and his writing being made public knowledge. It wasn’t a junk room, it was a den, and it had taken me a long time to let Chloe come and see me at my house.

‘Give me those back, Chloe,’ I said quietly. ‘There’s no need for it.’

Chloe hooted with laughter.

‘Come here, Em, have a look.’

Emma glanced at me again, almost reluctant but not quite, and leaned against Chloe, reading the papers over her shoulder. She giggled and started to read aloud.

‘ The humanitarian applications of this project, assuming we are able to locate and extract the bacteria behind the Heysham milky seas phenomenon –’ She stumbled over that word, but Chloe didn’t remark on it even though Emma was in set three for everything and me and Chloe were in set one, ‘ are vast and wide-ranging. We will ,’ she looked at me, frowning, ‘ be able to fund these aims with proper exploitation of the more commercial applications, but it should be remembered by all readers of this report that …’ She trailed off and looked at me.

‘What is this? Why’s he going on about Christmas trees and rapists? I don’t get it.’

‘There’s nothing to get, you chump,’ Chloe said, and elbowed Emma out of the way. ‘Her father’s a crackpot. And it’s catching. She’s probably made half of this up herself.’

‘Give them to me,’ I said quietly. I reached out my hand, and she knocked it away.

‘You’re a weird, frigid little bitch, aren’t you?’ she said. Emma was at her side again. ‘Sitting in here, typing all this up. You’re as bad as he is.’

‘He pays me,’ I said. ‘It’s just a job. Bit like you getting on your back for Carl every time you want a new album. You know?’

Chloe lurched forward and I thought she was going to hit me, but at the last moment she bit her bottom lip and turned away.

‘You don’t know anything about me and Carl.’

‘I know I’m not the one who’s frigid. Last time I saw him, he stuck his tongue down my throat. You not giving it up anymore, Chloe? Or is he just bored with you hanging off his arm all the time? Don’t suppose you’d know, would you, now mummy’s keeping you locked up at night.’

I expected her to hit me then, I really did. She clenched her fist and the papers crumpled. They’d have to be printed out again, I thought, but that was easy enough. No big deal.

Chloe glanced at Emma.

‘He did not make a move on you,’ Emma said. ‘You’re a liar. He didn’t.’

‘Why’s it your problem?’ I said. ‘What’s it to you that Chloe can’t keep a boyfriend?’

‘He didn’t,’ she said again. ‘Admit it.’

Chloe was quiet. I laughed, thinking, like an idiot, that I’d hit a nerve.

‘Yes, he did. Don’t worry though, I turned him down. Not interested, Chloe. You keep him if you’re so keen on him.’

Emma was frozen. Her face looked stiff and horrified.

‘Just leave it, Chloe, she’s not worth getting a detention over.’ She looped her arm through Chloe’s and tried to tug her away.

‘Go back home to your daddy,’ Chloe said. She narrowed her eyes to slits and threw the papers at me. They fluttered between us like birds. The bell rang for the end of lunch and the corridor quickly filled with people charging around getting their bags out of their lockers and hurrying to their next lesson. The typing got crushed under tens of pairs of feet.

Chloe stared at me, daring me to kneel and collect them, but I shrugged and walked away.

‘Carl’s nothing to do with you,’ she spat after me. ‘He’s ours .’

In all the photographs printed of her after her death Chloe was smiling, her hair pulled back tight, the collar of her school shirt stiff and blinding white. But sometimes I remember her the way she was that lunchtime – her hair falling out of her plait and hanging down by her ears – her lips pursed, one hand on her hip and a spot forming on her chin. That scowl. A look that could have curdled milk.

Tonight I remember the things that happened during that winter and it is like watching myself in a reconstruction. Some girl who isn’t quite real enough to be me stumbles through the corridors in a school that cannot have been so large and sits near a pair of girls that would never have been allowed to be so cruel. Our spats were probably comic and insignificant to Shanks, Brocklehurst and the others. No one noticed anything other than the ordinary ebb and shift of teenage girls’ friendships. That’s why they had all those inquiries afterwards: someone, they said, should have noticed something.

Sometimes I remember my thoughts so exactly it seems like I knew which moments would be significant, even before the significance of them became clear. Is that possible, do you think? Something happens – the event explodes like a firework and illuminates the memories before it, as well as after? Maybe. At the time I was preoccupied with my guilt and worry for Wilson and with Emma’s strange shouldering-in and taking Chloe away from me. I was angry with Chloe, as if what had happened to Wilson was her fault instead of mine. I’d always expected that as best friends we’d share each other’s secrets and go halves on all these burdens. And when I needed her most, she was acting like a person I didn’t even know.