Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

I’d bought Donald a compendium of magic tricks. I’d got it months before from a remainder bookshop. I’d bought it too early. By Christmas he’d gone off magic and moved on to fish. Still, he pretended he liked it and sat with the box on his knees while we watched the Queen and waited for the turkey to be ready. I’d also saved up and bought Barbara a bottle of the perfume that Chloe’s mum always wore. She wouldn’t open the box and try it on and when Donald went to sleep she put it on top of the television.

‘That can stay up there until the shops open,’ she said.

I stared at it and listened to Donald snoring from his chair. The box stared back. The lights on the Christmas tree were reflected in the silver foil writing on the box and the twinkling dragged my eye back to it no matter where in the room I looked. Barbara got tipsy.

‘You want me to swap it?’ I said. Hurt. Barbara shushed me. Pointed at Donald. ‘Charity shop,’ she said, slurring slightly. ‘I am,’ she poured another glass, ‘not comfortable receiving stolen goods.’

‘You can’t nick perfume,’ I whispered back. ‘They keep it locked up behind the counter. The boxes on the shelves are just for show.’

‘So you’ve been “scoping it out” then,’ Barbara said.

‘Everyone knows that,’ I said. ‘It’s like fags and razor blades. The dear, small things.’

‘Fags?’ she said, and changed the channel on the telly without asking. I couldn’t wait for it to be Boxing Day so I could go out on the park with Chloe and compare what we’d got.

There are Debenhams department stores all over the world. They’ve got them in Israel, in Russia, in Australia. Years later I told Emma the story about me being banned from them and she laughed, but when I told her that I’d never actually been in a Debenhams since, ever , she insisted we leave the park where we’d been sitting sharing a bottle of cider on a bench in the Japanese water garden, and go into town. The very same Debenhams, and although I don’t think it occurred to her, I kept expecting to see Chloe hovering somewhere, one eye on the security cameras. Blonde girls caught my eye and I stared at them sniffing their wrists at the perfume counters and holding dresses against themselves in front of long smudgeless mirrors. They were nothing like ghosts.

Emma and I had a cup of coffee in the cafe at the top. It’s on a mezzanine, except everyone calls it the rotunda, and the chairs and tables are against glass panels so that you can look through and down at everyone inspecting the racks, picking things up and putting them down and queueing for changing rooms.

Emma took the paper packets of sugar, tipped them into her saucer and slowly ate them, licking her finger and dabbing it at the grains until they were all gone.

‘Now it’s your turn,’ I said.

‘My turn for what?’

‘Tell me something about her that I don’t know. I told you about the shoplifting, didn’t I? You and her went out together. Without me. Tell me what you got up to.’

Emma shook her head and told me I should take something. ‘Go down there and put something in your pocket. Some earrings. Sunglasses. Something little.’

‘No!’ I said. Louder than I’d meant to. ‘Tell me about Chloe. Do you really think she…’ I couldn’t look her in the eye. ‘… did what they said she did?’

No one says suicide. It makes us all look bad. We say tragedy .

‘Go on,’ Emma said, and smiled into her cup. ‘Or are you too scared?’

We’re grown up now and Chloe is still sitting with us, waiting to be impressed.

‘We’re too conspicuous to shoplift,’ I said.

People were already staring. Two grown women acting like guilty schoolgirls. Laughing too loudly. Our coats were faded, stained, past their best. We might have smelled like cheap vodka and onions, or unwashed knickers and yesterday’s Stella Artois.

‘You already got blamed,’ she said. ‘You should get something out of it.’

That’s the way her mind works. Emma likes to go on walks and let down people’s tyres or break off their wing mirrors as a kind of revenge because she thinks cars are killing the planet. She’s got a WWF badge and an embroidered rainbow on the lapel of her jacket. She’s got a car, but she makes up for it by only driving when she’s a bit pissed, covering the rust with Greenpeace stickers, and volunteering for things. She’s shy of people but she cares about plants and animals. She hates men and she’s angry at everything.

‘If I get pulled in for shoplifting, I’ll get the sack,’ I said.

When I think about work, I hear the piped music, the squeak of squeegee against the glass lift doors. See green plastic plants sunk in a pot of what looks like brown baked beans, but is really just polystyrene painted to look like pebbles. It’s not much. It’s home.

‘I need my job.’

Emma shrugged. She doesn’t have a job other than the kinds of volunteering that you can’t get sacked from, so it doesn’t matter to her.

‘Let’s go then,’ she said, and made a clucking noise under her breath as I squeezed past her to get out of my seat. She moved and her saucer tipped, sending grains of sugar pattering to the marble-effect floor. ‘We’ll find a pub.’

It wasn’t as easy as that. We stopped again for another look in Women’s Accessories. That was where it had happened. She insisted it was time to face up to my past.

‘Look,’ she said, and plucked a red and white chiffon scarf from a basket on the counter, swished it through the air like a streamer, and then wound it around her hand. She was laughing, and someone passed between us and frowned. Emma’s got brown teeth because she smokes hundreds of roll-ups a day. She stinks. My hair, when it’s not folded into a knot and covered up with the crocheted hat, is a matted dark swirl of damp and sweatsmelling curls. We don’t do make-up. I’ve got acne scars and Emma’s always running with cold sores.

We’re not the kind of girls we used to be.

I watched Emma twirling but I never caught the moment when she made the streamer disappear, or how it got from her pocket to mine. Some sleight of hand. A knack, a magic trick. Chloe will have shown her it. A familiar spark of jealousy. How come Emma got to know that, and not me?

A morning sometime in the winter before she died. The three of us went into town; it must have been before Christmas because the daft music was playing in all the shops and the tinsel in every window made my eyes ache. Town was so busy that I kept losing them – chasing them between racks of clothes and shoes that seemed to grow and divide and close in on me like a dream while my eyes itched with tears because I couldn’t help but feel the two of them were doing it on purpose, and really wanted me to go away.

‘Come on, Lola!’

I followed them around the shopping centre – it was as if they had a list. Jessops, Superdrug, Wilkinson. Emma was wearing a cardigan that belonged to Chloe – a pale blue thing that crossed over at the front and tied at the waist with a ribbon. It was too delicate for her square, broad shoulders. She was taller than me and Chloe. I thought about how unfeminine that was and wondered if she’d stayed over at Chloe’s last night.

‘Are you coming, or not?’

Carl was going to meet us in the multi-storey car park over the bus station. He was right at the top, and we went up to him in the lift. It smelled weird in there, like bleach and piss and the thin chicken soup you could buy in plastic cups from the vending machines in the bus station. The doors were painted orange and slid shut with a rickety clank that was not reassuring.