Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

This was Chloe going into unfamiliar territory and turning the conversation away from herself. I ignored her.

‘Carl’s a letch,’ I said, remembering the spit, and the car, and having to run home on my own through the park. ‘He did try it on with me, when you were in the hospital. I wasn’t lying.’

I expected her to hit me, or shriek, or take fistfuls of my hair and shake me about like a damp shirt. She bowed her head.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I bet he did.’

This puzzled me. I paused, wondering what to ask her next.

‘He’s like that,’ she said carefully. She looked like she was about to say something else, but she bit her bottom lip to stop the words coming out.

‘Like what?’

‘Men are… different,’ she said, at last. ‘Especially older men.’ She moved her eyes away from me and started, I could tell, to quote Carl. ‘It’s the age difference. Maturity in a woman means understanding that a man – fully grown, not like the boys at school – needs more than one woman can give.’ I marvelled. Did she really swallow that? Or was that how it worked in real life? How would I know? I thought about Nathan two-timing Amanda and the way she hated it and put up with it all the same. Maybe.

‘Anyway, you didn’t do anything so it doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Let’s not talk about it anymore. It’s nothing, is it?’

This conversation was not working out the way I’d planned it. Yes, she was uncomfortable, and she seemed to be coming away from Carl at last – but no nearer to confiding in me. No nearer to coming back to the way things were before Emma and then Carl turned up in our lives and spoiled everything.

‘Don’t say anything more to Emma about it, will you?’

‘Why?’

She wouldn’t look at me again. I could have slapped her, but my head was swimming with the vodka.

‘Carl’s all right,’ she said, after a long pause. ‘He might just be a bit busy at work.’ Her hair fell over her eyes and she didn’t push it back. ‘He’s probably just upset that me and him are public now. He was always really worried about me getting into trouble with my parents. Protective.’

I snorted and it made an ugly sound. ‘Don’t be like that,’ she said. ‘I’ve come round, haven’t I? Trying to make it up to you?’

‘Only because your daddy brought you.’

Chloe flinched at that, and while I could see how addictive bullying might be, and why she had such a lot of fun doing it, I didn’t want to go on. I stubbed out my cigarette on the side of my desk and poked it into the vodka lid. I motioned for her to give me another fag.

‘I might come to your house at the weekend,’ I said. ‘I need to copy some of your maths off you.’

‘I’ll leave my book,’ she said eagerly.

‘No. I don’t feel like it now. I might come on Saturday. And I’ll decide by then what I want to do about this science thing. Whether I’ll come in with you on it or not.’

Chloe nodded. ‘All right then,’ she said, looking grateful.

I wanted to keep things like they were and hold her on probation until Saturday, but my advantage was wearing off. She leaned back on the bed and unzipped her coat, using the thin edge of the zip to probe underneath her thumbnail.

‘What’s your mum like?’ she said, less carefully now.

‘Didn’t you see her?’

Chloe opened her eyes wide and shook her head. She was lying.

‘Never mind,’ I said.

Donald had never been a large part of what we talked about and so long as we didn’t mention it he was less embarrassing now that he was dead than he had been when he was alive and shuffling along the upstairs landing in one slipper, or sucking on his inhaler while we were trying to eat our tea, or opening my bedroom door without knocking so that he could interrupt us and ask for scissors or glue or help with his typewriter.

When that happened Chloe would laugh at him openly and I was supposed to join in. Now I kept remembering Chloe’s stifled giggles and shaking shoulders, and Donald asking me privately if she was ‘quite all right’. I did join in, at the time, and he always hesitated and said ‘Sorry, girls,’ even if he wasn’t asking us for anything, but just telling us to come down for our tea. I think he was sorry, generally, that he was alive and forced to bother other people with the fact of it.

‘That boy,’ I said, ‘on Boxing Day.’

‘You are obsessed with that Mong.’ She didn’t exactly shout, but it was loud, and it came out in a rush.

‘Is that what Emma told you to say?’ I said.

Chloe stared at me. ‘What are you talking about Emma for?’

‘Why?’

‘What?’

‘Why didn’t you tell her we were the last people to see Wilson? If you and her are so tight all of a sudden?’

‘Oh, she’s –’ Chloe waved her hand. ‘She’s too keen. She’s a trier – you know? She really cares what I think of her. It’s a bit pathetic really.’

I nodded. I was fairly sure that Chloe would have described me like that to Emma too. She was a two-faced little cow when she wanted to be.

‘It’s just I keep thinking about that football I saw frozen into the ice. Keep imagining him chasing it through the woods and ending up under the water. Do you reckon he could swim?’

‘Don’t think about it,’ Chloe said. ‘You’re just making stuff up in your head. You’ve no idea what happened to him. No one does. He probably just ran away.’

‘You reckon?’

‘How many times have we got to talk about this? It’s boring. And you wonder why I’d rather hang out with Emma?’

‘It’s on my mind, all the time.’ I put my head on her shoulder. ‘I can’t sleep. I’m blaming myself, a bit. I just need to know what happened. To know it wasn’t my fault.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Chloe said mechanically. With my head on her shoulder, I could smell her sweat.

‘I don’t know that for sure. Barbara thinks that what happened with, well, you know. That was down to me. How do I know she’s not right about that too?’

I tried to cry, but I was empty.

‘What’s the matter?’ Chloe asked. She shuffled right up close to me until her knee was pressed against my leg.

‘Just sad,’ I said. ‘My head’s a mess.’

I did cry then, and it wasn’t all pretend, and she knew just what to do with me.

‘Poor baby,’ she said and squeezed my arm. Tears leaked out until they stopped. She kept squeezing. She probably thought I was going to start wailing or thrashing about. I imagined us in a painting, our heads close together, four white kneecaps and shiny polished shoes touching.

‘I’ve been horrible to you, haven’t I, and now this has happened. Your… misfortune .’

I nearly laughed, and the moment was gone. It wasn’t unusual for Chloe to talk as though she was starring in a period drama. She read Jane Eyre and for weeks afterwards, instead of asking me if I wanted to come out, she’d enquire if I fancied ‘taking a turn around the park’.

I looked at our knees and felt all jangly and hysterical and didn’t say anything. We listened to Barbara’s feet on the stairs and the sound of the toilet flushing. Silence while the cistern refilled.

‘Shall I put your hair up?’ she said. I think she was noticing how slowly the time was passing, unpunctuated by Donald’s interruptions.

‘No. I’m going to go to bed now.’

‘Now? But it’s—’

‘I’m tired.’ I flopped backwards onto the duvet and turned my face away from her.

‘Shall I go then? I’ll ring my dad and get him to come.’

Her voice was tiny. I’d never heard her talking to me like that before, only to Carl. A kind of begging voice.