Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

‘Shanks said about what happened with your dad,’ she said, not looking at me. The words ran into each other because she was speaking too fast: trying to get it over with. ‘Sorry to hear about it.’

I was almost untouchable now – what would she dare to say to me today? Newly protected and a celebrity at school. I didn’t say anything and she opened her mouth again and carried on, ploughing through the silence with her babble.

‘Some of the girls talked about clubbing together to get you a card,’ Chloe said, ‘or making something. Maybe some flowers. We thought you might have had enough of flowers.’ She pulled her bag onto her knee and unzipped the top. ‘I got this for you. Sorry it’s been opened. I got it from home.’

She handed me a bottle wrapped in a carrier bag and I took it without looking at it and put it on my desk.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘You got any fags?’

She nodded.

‘Give them here then.’

I found my lighter and lit up, right in my room without opening the window, without even closing the door. I stood in front of her and blew the smoke upwards. She stared at me. I said nothing, but leaned over, opened the bottle and swigged from the neck. Vodka. I didn’t like it. It smelled like nail varnish remover but I drank it anyway.

‘Your mum’s going to go wild,’ Chloe said, admiringly.

‘No, she isn’t,’ I said, and it was the truth. ‘I do what I like now.’

Chloe looked around the room, staring at posters on the walls she’d seen lots of times before, and found something interesting in the folds of a blue and white towel hanging over the radiator. Was she wondering what else was different? I handed her the bottle and she took a sip.

‘Who was going to get me a card? Emma? I don’t think so.’

Chloe was looking at me funny. It was as if I’d been disfigured, had had something amputated. A deformity she was sorry about, but didn’t want to acknowledge. So her pity floated freely around her words, alighting on one or other of them and then taking off – clogging the air and attached to nothing she could mention. She handed the bottle back.

‘I brought you this as well,’ she said, and pulled out a piece of paper, crumpled from her coat pocket. I thought it was another poster of Wilson and I wouldn’t take it so she laid it on the bed between us.

‘Science projects. Due in by half term. I’m going to do the calorific value of different kinds of nuts,’ Chloe said. ‘Emma’s going to do that thing with the toilet paper and the felt-tip pens.’

‘Right,’ I said. I looked out of the window, still blowing smoke.

I admit, it was thrilling to be so uninterested in her and have her still here, chattering and trying to hit on a topic of conversation that might please me. So thrilling that it was hard to keep up the slow movements, the sighs, the slackness I could feel in my face.

‘Mrs Fenwick says not to worry. Says I can give it to you, but you don’t have to come up with anything yet. She was all right, actually. She said she’ll see you when you’re next in. No rush.’

‘What made you think about the nuts?’

Chloe looked confused, then laughed, then put her hands over her mouth in a dramatic way – as if there were a corpse or a sick person in the next room likely to be disturbed by her noise.

‘My dad told me,’ she said. ‘You set fire to them and work out how much they can heat up a pan of water. Do some sums about the weight.’ She flicked her hair. ‘He’s going to write it all out for me.’

That is how Chloe always came first or second in the class at everything. What her dad didn’t know, her mum had covered. I should probably have raided Donald’s journals and scrapbooks and done something about fish.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

Chloe had never spent so much time talking about her school work in all the time that I had known her. ‘I bet Mrs F. will have a list, if you can’t think—’

‘Ice,’ I said quickly, and turned on the bed and forced myself into her gaze.

I’ll swear down now that I don’t know where ice came from. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t something I had any particular interest in before then. It must have been the weather, and my near-constant thoughts about the frozen top of the duck pond in the nature reserve. Ice. As soon as I had said the word I imagined fragile sheets blooming over the windows, the ferny spines of snowflakes and skins of frost.

‘For global warming?’ she said.

I wanted to laugh. ‘Ice. It’s been on my mind a lot lately.’

She coughed, licked the crack at the corner of her mouth, and stared at the towel on the radiator again. She lit a cigarette uncertainly, glancing towards the door. I counted to twenty.

‘What have you come here for, anyway?’ I said.

Chloe forced her lips together, and glared at me.

‘My mum told me to,’ she said. ‘She didn’t know we’d broke friends.’

Broke friends, as if it was a glass vase on a wobbling coffee table, or a marriage.

‘Have you seen Carl?’

Chloe ducked her head. I could see red blotches start to appear on the side of her neck. She played with her cigarette, tapping her ash into the empty metal lid from the vodka bottle.

‘You know they’ve banned me.’

‘You’ve never done as you’re told before. They can’t stop you having a boyfriend, loads of girls do.’

‘He’s too old, according to them.’

‘Why did you tell them how old he was?’

‘They were grilling me in the hospital. Wanted to know where he lived, what school he went to, what his dad did for a living. Mum was going to invite him round for tea to get a good look at him. Dad was after burying him under the patio.’

I thought about that for a while. Relished it.

‘I should have kept my mouth shut,’ I said, testing. No point holding back now.

‘Maybe,’ Chloe said. The red on her neck had spread to her face. ‘Don’t upset yourself. With things the way they are –’ she didn’t want to say ‘because your dad killed himself because he was mental,’ but I could tell that was what she meant, ‘with things the way they are, it’s not that big a deal, is it?’

‘I thought you’d go mad,’ I said, ‘not being able to see him. Have you spoken to him?’

Chloe shook her head, lifted her hand to her mouth to start gnawing on the skin there, and then moved it away sharply – as if it smelled, or she’d only just remembered the crescent moons of filth under her fingernails.

‘No,’ Chloe said lightly.

‘I gave you money for your phone,’ I pressed. ‘What did you do with it?’

‘He’s not answering, all right?’ Chloe snapped. ‘I’m not hanging around with him anymore. Haven’t seen him in a fortnight, and don’t want to see him. Leave it, eh?’

She was her old self again, lying through her teeth and hissing at me, and in that second I felt a bit scared of her and wanted to do something to make her calm and pleased with me and that meant everything was normal again. I almost felt relieved.

‘Sorry. Sorry,’ she said, and pushed the bottle at me. ‘Have a drink. It’ll make you feel better.’

‘Will it?’

She nodded, and swigged deeply. ‘There’s a tablet Carl gets for me and Emma sometimes. I don’t know what it’s called. It makes you feel like your body’s gone to sleep. All your arms and legs get warm and limp. Your mind just floats away somewhere else. It’s lovely. I’ll ask Emma, see if she’s got any left to give to you. You’ll like it.’ She patted the piece of paper sitting on the bed between us. ‘And I’ll ask Schizo-Fenwick if we can work together on a project. Do the nuts with me. She’ll let you. You probably won’t have to do any tests for the rest of the term.’