Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

‘Chloe,’ I moaned, ‘I’m cold. I feel stupid.’

She laughed. ‘No pain, no gain.’

Chloe snapped handfuls of pictures, and I posed in the itchy red and black basque that Carl had bought her. My flesh came up in goosepimples and I tried to think about something sexy while the world, watery and formless without my glasses, shrank to the sound of her breath as she stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth and tried to work out the settings on the camera.

The photographs were okay. Chloe handed me my glasses so I could see them. She blew on them, and lined them up across my desk. I saw myself, looking pale and uncertain, posing with a cigarette, my lips pursed like Jessica Rabbit. I was better at taking them than she was, and most of them were washed-out and crooked-looking. Chloe seemed disappointed.

‘Carl’s got a proper camera,’ she said, and mimed twisting a lens, with one eye closed. ‘He develops them himself.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know.’

It wasn’t going to be long before she’d speak to me about what she and Carl had been doing in the woods that night. A person couldn’t walk around with that on their conscience forever. She’d need someone to talk to, and that person would be me, and then things would go back to the way they had been in the summer. I got as close as I could to her, prodded her gently when the conversation led in that direction, and waited.

‘You look terrific,’ she said, and hugged me.

Chloe let me keep most of the pictures.

It was our last week at school together.

Barbara still padded about the house in her night-clothes. She kept odd hours, and often woke me up knocking ice cubes out of the plastic tray with a rolling pin. She dusted in the middle of the night and once I found her at three in the morning folding and refolding stacks of Donald’s shirts on the living room floor. She never put them away or got rid of them. Her behaviour was getting to be really creepy – no wonder Chloe wanted me to come to her house. And she’d decided it would do me good not to be in my bedroom. She said ‘a change of scene’. It sounded like a phrase she’d culled from Amanda, except the two of them were still at war.

I walked. The winter had not broken yet and the sky was white and the windows of the cars I passed were covered in frost. Someone had kicked a half-empty can of Fanta over in a bus stop and the orange trickle had solidified into a spike across the pavement. I stopped and stared at it a while, even though I wasn’t really interested. A poster pasted onto the bus shelter caught my eye. Not the one with Wilson’s face on it – a different, newer one, with a huge clip-art picture of an eye on it. The details underneath were for the next Community Action Group patrol. Men only, meeting at the train station at 9 p.m. to do a slow loop of the town centre. The eye was anatomically correct – the optical nerve still attached. It looked gruesome. ‘ Watch Out! ’

I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to sit on the peach settee and talk to Chloe’s mother: she always wanted me to call her ‘Amanda’ and chat about period pains and boys and pimples, none of which I had much experience of, any interest in, or any inclination to discuss with her. But even less did I want to stay at home and watch Barbara fluttering the shirts through the air for one last refolding. The arms dangled and made me think of Guy Fawkes dummies.

I was an hour or two later than I said I would be. Amanda opened the door and hugged all the air out of me in an ouff ( Sweetheart! Brave girl! ) and then made me go around the back and take my shoes off in the kitchen ( Just had the carpets done, my angel ). When I got into the kitchen I saw all the nuts and tweezers laid out on the kitchen worktop waiting for me and Chloe to begin. The objects shone, like they were specifically trying to make me feel guilty.

Chloe was in the kitchen too. She talked to me ostentatiously, a long gabbled sentence about the weather, and snow, and needing to wash her hair, and how she thought I’d forgotten. Amanda stood to one side of her, watching, and moving her hands about in her cardigan pockets. When Amanda had taken the television out of her room, Chloe had upped the ante and stopped talking to her altogether. Chloe had told me that she was even refusing to eat in front of her parents so that they’d think they’d made her into an anorexic, feel guilty and relent.

It was working. She looked terrible. Her hair was so dull it looked sticky, and there was sleep in her eyes, yellow crusts along her eyelashes that reminded me of a sick dog Donald had found once, and insisted on keeping in the shed until it was better and could be ‘released into the wild’ to go back to foraging in bins. She was skinny too – as skinny as she’d ever wanted to be – which made her look sickly and pale and more ill than she’d looked when she’d been in hospital. She didn’t look pretty anymore, but I still didn’t want to cross the kitchen and stand next to her. Didn’t want my thigh next to hers for a comparison.

‘I haven’t slept more than four hours a night in three weeks,’ she’d said, not quite proudly.

She was making herself ill. She told me all this herself and so I thought most of these symptoms were just ploys, and ways of levering her parents into relenting. I didn’t think there was anything really wrong. Knowing what kinds of things she had on her mind, I should have.

‘They’re buying me things to get me to eat,’ she’d said gleefully, and shown me a new personal stereo.

‘Wow,’ I’d responded dutifully, ‘can I have your old one?’

‘I’ll leave you two girls to it, shall I?’ Amanda said, but didn’t move. She was like Emma, waiting to be asked to join in.

‘Lola,’ Chloe said, and turned her whole body towards me and away from her mother, ‘I’m going to take a quick shower. My hair is disgusting. Can you entertain yourself for fifteen minutes?’

‘Sure,’ I said, the beginning of a sentence Chloe never heard the end of, because she’d already swished out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

Amanda shook her head at the space in the air Chloe had left. She’d left the smell of her White Musk Christmas perfume hanging around behind her.

‘Oh dear,’ she said weakly, and pushed the button on the kettle. I listened to the fizz of the element heating up.

‘I’m glad you and Chloe have started seeing a bit more of each other again,’ Amanda said, ‘but you mustn’t let it get to be a hassle for your mother.’

‘Barbara doesn’t mind,’ I said.

Chloe’s footsteps banged over our heads. The shower started. She was always washing off her make-up and putting it back on again.

‘Yes, but all the sleepovers you’ve been having. You must let us return the favour. We’ve bought a camp-bed, so you can come whenever you like.’

I registered all the sleepovers without letting it show on my face, and then Carl . And still keeping my mouth as still as I could manage, I wondered angrily if the camp-bed was a present to me to make up for Donald getting drowned. Chloe isn’t allowed to have her boyfriend anymore and she gets a personal stereo. Sony, and not the Alba shit that I’ve got. Donald drowns himself and I get a zed-bed.

I felt the words bubbling in my throat and wanted to say them so I started chewing at my thumbnail to stop myself from talking.

Amanda wasn’t filling up the gap in the conversation, just looking at me sympathetically.

‘It isn’t any trouble for Barbara,’ I said again. The anger evaporated quickly. I was sad. Despite everything, Chloe still wouldn’t tell me the truth. She’d probably already confided in Emma.