Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

‘You think he’s going to jump out of the bushes at me at half eight on a Friday morning?’ I said, and remembered the things we said about the man in the Halloween mask. How harmless he was – how it was funny and pathetic and almost sweet in a way.

‘I can get us a packet of fags on the way. I know you’re probably feeling bad right now – what with, everything – but it might be all right. The two of us, walking in together.’

‘Maybe,’ I said. Donald’s money was rolled up in the toe of a sock, and shoved into a wellington boot at the back of my wardrobe. I wasn’t short of fags, not if I didn’t want to be.

‘It’s getting worse,’ Emma said again. She was pleading with me.

‘Did Shanks really say we had to come in pairs? Is it just our year, or the whole school, or what? Chloe never said anything. She lives nearer to me than you do.’

Emma lifted her hand and let it fall back onto her lap weakly, as if she was planning an argument and had decided to give up before starting.

‘I’m just saying, that’s all. You don’t have to.’ She looked away from me, pulled a piece of paper across my desk towards her and wrote something on it.

‘That’s my phone number,’ she said. ‘If you want someone to walk with, ring me up when you wake up and I’ll come over.’

‘I probably won’t,’ I said. ‘Don’t wait in or anything.’

Emma should have stood up then. Should have gathered her things and got ready to leave. She didn’t, but looked at me again as if she wanted her eyes to ask me something. Begging, almost.

‘Chloe will get Carl to take her,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you get him to pick you up as well?’

Emma shook her head slowly.

‘I’d better go,’ she said.

I heard her walking slowly down the stairs, the bump of her case as it knocked against the banister. Barbara did not get up, and Emma must have let herself out, closing our front door gently behind her.

I walked to school the next morning and the roads were as busy as usual and I felt safe and nothing happened. I was invincible because I was walking around inside my own bright, brittle halo of ice and because I knew the police weren’t going to come and get me, my thoughts were so far away from men in Halloween masks it was as if the pest didn’t exist.

Chloe got Nathan to drive her – I imagined her sat in the back with her head against the window, her kohled eyes taking it all in as they negotiated the rush hour traffic in silence. Nathan was the kind of dad who talked about himself at parents’ evenings, telling Shanks he saw himself as ‘firm, but fair’. He’d have tried to talk to Chloe, get her to stop sulking and communicate with him. Share her problems. Her worries about boys, and pregnancy, and her GCSE options. And Chloe would have stared at the window, looking into the eyes of her own reflection and ignored him. I don’t know how Emma arrived, but she arrived late, her coat buttoned up wrong and sweat along her hairline. She had to squeeze in at the back because I was in my normal place, next to Chloe.

It was only later that I realised Emma wasn’t offering to do me a favour, wasn’t trying to check up on me, wasn’t on an errand from Chloe. She was scared, and she was desperate for someone to walk with her. I should have seen it. Her house was half a mile away from mine, and in the wrong direction. She didn’t have a Carl, and her dad didn’t have a car. She must have felt like a sitting duck.

Although Barbara didn’t make me go and I had to iron my uniform myself, I almost enjoyed the next few days at school. Home was strange, quieter than usual and in theory, pleasanter, because Barbara had given up getting me to do anything. I ate junk food in front of her, wore my hair loose for school, and let the jam and butter sit out of the fridge all day. I left the bathroom light on all night, just to test it, and she never said a word. I don’t think she even noticed. I carried on smoking in my room, stole her gin and left the bottle on my windowsill. This sudden freedom should have made things better but there was something else different about the house too, which I didn’t like. A breath-held feeling, a strung-out anticipation for Donald shuffling out of his room after a long sleep, or turning up late for tea. His magazines kept arriving and we pretended that we didn’t notice – left them lying in their plastic envelopes in the hallway until Barbara slipped on one. Then she threw the lot away.

I wanted to go to school, probably for the first time ever. There was none of that silence at school. No expecting someone to be there who wasn’t. And after the pats and the whispers and the first two days I was allowed to slot, more or less, into where I had been before except I wasn’t expected to go to assembly, or eat in the main dining room if I didn’t feel like it. I let Chloe sit in the empty form room with me while the others listened to the morning announcements and we waited for it to be over and school to start properly. I hated assembly, and didn’t mind missing it. Boring announcements about school sports fixtures and warnings that if we weren’t sensible the City really would put a curfew in place, whether we liked it or not. We had our whole-school assemblies in the sports hall – and we had to take our shoes off. I never remembered the special instructions because I always had to concentrate on sitting so that my feet weren’t lying flat on the floor. If that happened, when I stood up to file out with the rest of the row, I would leave behind a smudged wet imprint of feet on a floor the colour of blue toothpaste.

A death in the family gives you a few benefits. The people left behind become special in a way that they definitely weren’t before. And by her proximity to me, constantly clinging at my arm and frowning people’s attention and questions away from me ( Would you like that? Do you think that’s what she wants to be reminded of? ), Chloe got her own benefits too. She was grounded, probably forever, but Amanda would make an exception for me because I was her best friend and I needed her. And of course Chloe and I were alone together a lot. She hadn’t confided in me yet, but I was working on her and I felt we were moving in that direction. She was so solicitous she even came to my house again that week with her Polaroid camera and some of her special clothes.

‘Let me do your make-up,’ she said, and let a smile tug at the corners of her mouth. She’d brought her make-up bag with her. She was getting thinner. ‘I’ll do you a make-over and we can take some pictures. It’ll cheer you up.’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said, making a show of being reluctant.

‘Come on,’ she was cheerful and brisk, ‘put some music on. Have a drink. It’ll be fun.’

She showed me a how-to guide for smoky eyes in Just Seventeen that she wanted to try. ‘I’ll do it on you, and you can do it to me,’ she said. ‘It’ll be like old times. Remember, we used to do this loads during the summer holidays?’

I let her put mascara on me even though she always ended up poking me in the eye with the wand.

‘Ta da!’ She winked at me, and spoke with her stupid American accent, ‘You look like a million dollars, baby!’

‘I feel stupid,’ I said, looking at myself in the little handmirror.

‘That’s crap. You look like a model,’ she said.

She gave me her basque to try on and made me lie on my stomach with my knees bent and my feet in the air. I felt her fingers on my skin as she adjusted the straps and hooks on the basque so that it fit me, and slid my glasses off my face. She folded them up and left them on my desk where I couldn’t reach them.

‘Put your tongue behind your teeth and think about something sexy,’ she said. She painted my mouth thick with lipstick that smelled like frying pans.