Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

I shrugged and lay still until I heard the front door open and close behind her.

Emma always carried her PE kit in a torn Morrisons bag with her name written on the plastic in black marker. The rest of us had special PE bags with the school badge on, or holdalls from a sports shop. Emma carried her carrier bag around without shame, as if she hadn’t noticed she was the only one who did it like that. She had it with her – that and a black violin case – when she came to see me later that week.

‘Sorry,’ she said. I’d thought it was Barbara and was shoving Donald’s journal down the side of my bed in case the sight of his handwriting upset her.

‘I thought you heard me call up the stairs. Your mum told me just to come up.’

‘It’s fine. Is Chloe with you?’ I looked over her shoulder but she was closing my bedroom door behind her. She shook her head.

‘Just me.’

She leaned the violin case against the wall and put the bag and her school rucksack down carefully before sitting down on my desk chair. All done very deliberately and slowly as if she was putting off the moment when she’d have to speak to me. I sat up properly and swung my legs out of the bed; I didn’t want to feel like a patient in a hospital.

‘We haven’t had a chance to talk,’ she said. She tucked her hands into the pleats of her school skirt – she was trembling.

‘About what? I’m all right,’ I said. ‘I’m coming back to school tomorrow.’

She leaned over and smiled at me and there were black clogged pores on her chin and nose. ‘They’d let you stay off for longer, if you wanted.’

‘I know. I’m bored though. I’ve got to go back sometime. There’s this science project.’

She smiled, as if she knew I was lying. I didn’t ask her about chromatography, or if she’d decided to abandon that and go in with Chloe on the nuts. I didn’t tell her about ice, and she didn’t ask me about Donald’s funeral or how I was feeling. There was nothing to say, and the silence was awkward. I didn’t rush in to speak – she had come to see me so she could sit there and come up with something to say. And if she didn’t, feeling bad about it was her own problem. Maybe she’d just pick up her case and go home again.

‘Chloe will be glad to have you back, I reckon,’ she said. ‘She’s not been well lately, did you know?’

I thought of that crack at the side of her mouth.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s her and Carl. It’s stressing her out that she’s been banned from seeing him. She probably thinks he’s going to get someone else to take her place.’

Emma looked at her hands and said nothing for a long time. I got the feeling she was on the brink of confiding something in me. But we’d never been on our own together before. We weren’t friends – we were Chloe’s friends. I hadn’t known she played the violin, I didn’t know the names of her brothers, what the inside of her house was like, whether she liked using body spray or just plain soap. And I’ve no doubt that I was as peripheral to her as she was to me – it was only Chloe we had in common, Chloe who brought us together and in many ways, kept us apart.

‘I felt bad after hearing about your dad. The things that me and Chloe said to you. It wasn’t on.’

That was not what she had come to say. I shrugged.

‘It doesn’t matter. Chloe can be like that sometimes, I’ve known her longer than you. Long enough to know when she means something, and when she’s just blowing off steam.’

Emma just fiddled with the pleats in her skirt. Her socks hadn’t been washed right – Barbara was very careful about washing only white things together, same as Amanda. Whoever did the washing at Emma’s house didn’t take the same kind of care, and her socks were the colour of old porridge. Most of the time she was careless about her hair. She never tried to sneak a bit of make-up on for school. She chewed the cuff of her school shirt when she was thinking. I could list the things I knew about her on one hand.

‘I’ve been friends with Chloe for ages,’ I said. ‘She tells me everything. She’s already been round to see me. We’ve talked it through.’

‘I just wondered if you wanted me to start meeting you on your way to school?’ she said quickly. ‘We can walk in together. I don’t mind setting off a bit earlier and coming to your house first. I get up early for gymnastics practice anyway.’

‘You want to walk to school with me?’ I said.

She twitched, as uncomfortable with this as I was.

‘If tomorrow’s your first day back, I’ll come in with you.’

I stared at her. She stared back. Brown eyes, expressionless and unreadable. She was checking up on me. She wanted to keep tabs on me? Chloe had told her to walk me in – make sure that I didn’t get upset and start opening my trap about Wilson, or Carl, or her, or any of the other things she didn’t know I knew? None of that made sense.

‘You heard, didn’t you?’ Emma said, by way of explanation. ‘I suppose you’ve had other things to think about the last couple of weeks.’

‘I knew there’d been another two.’

‘Both from our school – the baths and the playing fields. They’re getting extra teachers to stand along the route when we do cross-country now.’

‘Barbara’s always watching videos,’ I said. ‘We never have the news on.’

I don’t know if Emma understood or not, but she nodded. ‘He’s started again,’ she said. ‘It’s so close to us now.’ Her voice was strange. ‘You need to be careful. Very careful.’

The baths were attached to the school – they were our baths really, and our sports hall and tennis courts – but they were also open to the public and there was some sort of complicated timetable that dictated when the pool was available and when we got our lessons. It was so complicated and the barrier between the leisure centre and the school nothing more than a set of unmarked double doors so that half the time you’d be doing your swimming lessons with the spectators’ gallery full of people wrapped in towels, waiting impatiently for us to finish so they could get back in. I always found the idea of having a gallery up above the pool weird anyway – who’d want to spectate at a school swimming lesson?

‘I’ve lived this long,’ I said, and laughed.

‘Terry doesn’t think it’s the same person,’ Emma said. ‘He reckons the first ones were that Mong, and this is someone else. A copy-cat.’

I laughed. ‘Not that Mong,’ I said, and looked out of the window down into the garden which was bare and white-blue with frost. ‘Why does Terry think that?’

‘The girl by the playing fields – she was a Year Seven. He didn’t just get his cock out or have a feel of her,’ Emma said, ‘he tried to drag her off along that little path. She says there was a car parked at the end of it. He was going to try and take her away, she reckons.’

I shrugged.

‘And the other girl,’ she said quickly, ‘the one in the swimming baths…’ She paused and followed my gaze out of the window. ‘She’s still not talking. Not to the police, not to her parents, not to anyone. It’s a lot worse. An escalation of activity . Doesn’t matter who’s doing it. Doesn’t matter how long it takes for them to catch him. We’ve just got to stick together. Make sure nothing happens to us. He’s not finished yet. They’re the girls that got away.’

‘So Terry says.’

She sighed, suddenly annoyed with me. ‘I’m only trying to tell you for your own good,’ she said. ‘Even Shanks says it’s all gathering around our school – they think the pest is someone very local, he’s said we’ve all to get a partner to walk there and back with – and I didn’t know if you’d heard or not. Thought you might want to come with me.’