Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

‘We ran a successful business,’ she beams, ‘always very busy.’

Terry bites his lip. You can see he’s getting worked up. ‘And Wilson, did he attempt to make any friends? Particularly with the very young women?’

I know what he’s getting at. The ex-hairdresser shakes her head. She’s wearing gold chains and they rattle over her chest.

‘No, never anything like that. He just cleaned the windows and the pavement sign for us. Never even asked him to, he just liked it. We did look into paying him properly, but we thought it might mess up his benefit, and we’d have had to take the tax and NI off him so it wouldn’t have been worth it, really.’

Terry grimaces in frustration and reels off the phone number scrolling along the bottom of the screen. Emma turns the tap on the box and refills her glass. She knocks back half of it straight away. The skin around her fingernails is cracked and brown with flakes of old blood. There’s a drop of wine on her thumb and when she notices it she sucks it off, and then starts chewing on her thumbnail. When she runs out of nail, she starts nibbling on the skin, tearing fine shreds of it away. It reminds me of Chloe. I hear her teeth click.

‘He’s still harping on about that flasher,’ Emma says. ‘It’s been years.’

‘He thinks he’s finally got his man,’ I say. ‘Terry always thought Wilson was the pest. He’s after an award. Services to young girls everywhere.’

Emma snorts. She’s recovered now. Can see the funny side. ‘ Servicing young girls everywhere, more like,’ she says. She stands up and walks out of the front room. I hear the bathroom door slam as if she is angry with me. As if this is all my fault. The water runs, and I wait, watching Terry who is so excited he’s practically hopping. The one that got away. The prolific flasher, whose attacks became more frequent until finally, when it seemed they were about to culminate in a rape or a murder, they stopped – and just as suddenly as Wilson disappeared. He’s never been able to prove it although he was never above taking credit for it, but tonight, you can tell, he thinks he will.

When Emma comes out from the bathroom there’s a picture of a chunky silver bracelet on the television screen. She looks at it, and does a double-take. I know what she’s thinking.

‘It’s not hers,’ I say quickly, ‘it’s Wilson’s. It’s something he wore all the time, apparently.’

Her face is red – she’s scrubbed with soap and rubbed herself hard with the rough bath towel, and her fringe is pushed back in wet and uneven clumps.

‘So they’re certain it’s him then. No mistakes?’

‘They’ll have to do the DNA, but it’s engraved with his name and phone number. It’s a medical thing. He had a heart condition. If he passed out in the street, the ambulance people know to look for it. There’s certain drugs you can’t give people with bad hearts. Something like that.’

I remember the way my mother used to embroider our telephone number onto the cuff of Donald’s shirts. Backstitch in pale yellow embroidery cotton. He’d rub his thumb along it whenever he felt nervous. It was so he could always ring home if he went out and got lost or anxious. So he’d always know there’d be someone he could talk to. I frown and drink more to get the memory to leave me.

Emma rubs her hands over her face, not interested now she knows for sure it can’t be one of the girls she worried about, and sits down. I look at her sideways and remember the time I saw her laughing with her friends outside my flat. The heels and earrings. She’s not the same person anymore. I ask her about it, but she shrugs.

‘I used to go out a lot. Drinking. Boyfriends. So what? I don’t like to do it anymore.’

‘Why not?’ I press her. ‘What changed?’

She picks at her hair, running her fingers through the wet ends. She could be almost pretty – if her face wasn’t so raw and puffy – her skin, like mine, grey and swollen with too many bottles of wine, too many cheap takeaways and late nights.

‘Too much effort,’ she says, after a long pause. ‘I’m not like that. Not really. I thought I’d feel better, a bit more normal, if I tried to get a boyfriend. Went out a bit.’

‘And did you?’ I say, curious as a tourist because it is something I have never done. I think I know what she is talking about. The not-feeling-normal. After Chloe died our photographs were on the news so much that our faces weren’t our own. People recognised us in the street and wanted to hug us or ask us questions. It was horrible.

She shakes her head. ‘I just felt like me – everything was the same, apart from it taking two hours to get dressed and you had to deal with all kinds of wankers in the morning. I felt like a tosser in some of those outfits I used to wear. And I looked like one too. Or a tranny.’ She shakes her head decisively. ‘I’d rather be on my own.’

She jams her lips together and I know I’ll get no more out of her. She’ll never tell me how much of the reclusive life she leads now is to do with her panic attacks and her fear of being looked at. I don’t know which is more pathetic – me sitting in my house all the time I’m not at work, or her trying her best to live the life Chloe might have had, and finding out, for certain, that she just wasn’t up to it.

After seeing Chloe and Emma outside the library that lunchtime I avoided the corridors and didn’t say a word to anyone else all day. I even skipped afternoon registration because I couldn’t stand seeing them as thick as that – egging each other on to wind me up.

It was because of Carl. Because he’d tried it on with me. Chloe might pretend like she didn’t care, and Emma might act like it was the most shocking thing that anyone had ever said – but the pair of them were jealous. Jealous. I walked home and started to wish I’d taken him up on his offer – just to show her. I imagined being the one he’d take back to the council house where he lived with his mother. Drinking tea with her, and then after she was safely asleep in her chair in front of the telly, being taken upstairs to inspect the new and finished darkroom. I wasn’t attracted to Carl, but even I could see the advantages of having a boyfriend who was older and had his own car. It wasn’t all school and walking about parks with him. I couldn’t imagine him farting into his hands and pretending to throw it at me, which is something the boys at school did a lot. His job wasn’t up to much, but he had projects that made him interesting – like the photography.

Then I remembered the kiss again, the feel of his saliva drying on my mouth as I ran away from the car. How could Chloe stand it? Was there something wrong with me because I didn’t like it? When I turned the corner onto my street I was dawdling, thinking about tea, hoping and not hoping that it was chips because of the things Chloe had said about the pimples on my forehead, and my school skirt, which was bunched around my waist and rubbing. I put my hand inside my coat and pulled the elasticated fabric away from my skin. When I was in the toilet that afternoon, I’d seen the red scrunch marks the waistband had left on my belly. They looked like the teeth of a zip, right around my middle. I was thinking about what it would be like if people really had zips around their middles. That was making me think of kangaroos, and wonder about situations where it would be useful to cut yourself in two halves. I frowned at my own stupid thoughts and pulled my fingers away from the damp skin of my waist. I saw the police car in front of my house. I stopped in the middle of the pavement then stepped quickly sideways. The dangling parts of the privet hedge bent against my shoulder and poked the side of my face.