Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

Amanda poured the boiling water into a pink mug I knew was Chloe’s, then led me into the living room and made me sit in the recliner chair, tilted backwards so my feet were up. She perched on the edge of the settee across from me, and smiled, and stared, and nodded encouragingly whenever I put the mug to my mouth. I had to drink hot chocolate with marshmallows in it until Chloe had finished soaping her hair and scraping at her face.

‘We’ve made some ice for you,’ she said, and I looked at the brown drink inside the mug. Ice?

‘Chloe said you might want to do ice. She and Emma put the trays outside last night.’

She pointed through the arch and I looked along her arm and into the conservatory, through the pointy leaves of some dangling white and green plants and out into the garden. They had filled old seed trays and roasting tins with water and left them to freeze outside overnight. The ice had swelled and the plastic trays were bowed out at the edges.

I’d forgotten that I’d said that, about the ice, but Chloe had remembered and put the water out for me. That was a kind thing to do. I felt bad again, for being late and then silent.

‘I think,’ I said, struggling to push the recliner down to a proper sitting chair so I could get out of it, ‘I’ll go up to Chloe’s room now. She’s got some tapes of mine and I want to take them home with me.’

Amanda looked at me for a long time. She still had her new Christmas earrings on, and blue mascara. I started to feel nervous. She looked like Chloe and her eyes were the same too: glinting at me as if she could guess what I was going to do next.

‘She’s not eating, you know,’ she said abruptly. ‘Not here, anyway.’

I didn’t know what to say.

‘I know you’re in the middle…’ She bit her lip ‘… of your own troubles.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said.

‘It’s this project. Calories. You know we’ve stopped her seeing that boy.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s hard to tell. Revenge, or to get attention. Or something real. Does she worry?’

‘What about?’

‘Her size. Weight. Does she think she needs to diet?’

I shrugged. Chloe was always more interested in my diet than her own. Some things make your skin worse, she’d tell me, and watch approvingly while I scraped them off my plate and into the bin. Chloe ate whatever she liked. She had that kind of metabolism, she said. I wasn’t to feel bad about it. It was luck, genes, and nothing to do with either of us as real people, which to her, was the important thing.

‘I don’t think so.’

Amanda stood up and started to rearrange the school pictures of Chloe on the mantelpiece. Four different kinds of school uniform and every picture in an expensive silver frame. You could run them together like a flickerbook and see her growing up before your eyes.

‘We’ve never had a teenage girl before, her father and me. People expect you to know how to be a parent by the time your child gets to be this age. But we don’t know. She’s up in her room with Emma for hours – in and out of the greenhouse – phone calls at odd hours. I’ve caught her sneaking out at night a few times. What about the times I haven’t caught her? She won’t let us meet this boy. I daren’t think what they get up to together. I had to throw out a pair of her jeans they were so filthy.’

She stopped fiddling with the pictures and turned to face me. ‘Is there something I should know? It seems such an extreme reaction. It’s hard to know what’s normal.’

‘We’ve never spoken about it. Sorry.’

Amanda smiled, and shook her head.

‘I shouldn’t be pestering you. Nathan told me to leave you alone. Don’t worry about it. You just have a nice afternoon,’ she waved her hands at me and her voice cracked, ‘go on and get your tapes.’

Chloe’s room was full of eyes. We spent whole weekends sitting on her bedroom floor cutting pictures out of Smash Hits and pasting them to her walls. The shower was still going in the bathroom. I stepped onto the pink carpet and held my breath, listening for the shower water.

Chloe had a special drawer. It was just the bottom drawer of her night-table. She told me that in Year Seven when she’d started wearing bras she’d kept them in there instead of her usual sock drawer. In Year Eight she’d used it to keep her fags in. Now it was full of clear zip-locked bags that were stuffed with condoms.

She’d been to a Talkwize clinic in town where they handed them out, for free, no questions asked. Patsy – Dr Jamrag – had told her where to go and what to say. Chloe liked shiny new things. Liked having a special drawer, and accessories, and secrets. She must have got over the embarrassment and been ten times. I’d been with her once, and was embarrassed enough that I had to wait outside ( You can’t come in, do you want them to think we’re lezzers? ), counting the lumps of chewing gum on the pavement and watching the morning queue outside the pub across the road.

I slid the drawer back and saw the bags. More occasions of sex than any one person would ever have in their life, probably. And underneath them, hardly hidden, the black block of a mobile phone. I picked it up, listened for the continued fizz of the shower water hitting enamel next door, and turned it on. There were holes in the plastic at the ear-piece. I covered them with my thumbs and felt the thing buzz against my hand. Remembered the day the police came to my house and the message that I left on her answering service.

It would have been better if they really had come to talk to me about Wilson.

I touched the buttons, lifted it to my ear, listened. There I was. Pissed off and panicking and as good as admitting to something that she knew full well I hadn’t done. And she’d kept this message anyway. Nice insurance for her.

I turned the phone back off again, put it in the drawer, closed it. Opened the drawer, took it out, stuffed it into the back pocket of my jeans and pulled my jumper down to cover the lump it made on my backside. The tapes I wanted were on Chloe’s desk, stacked up neatly. I picked them up and went downstairs, not bothering to close the door behind me.

I could have just deleted the message and put the phone back into the drawer. Chloe wouldn’t have known, and if she did notice and guess that I had done it, she could hardly come to me and complain about it. I thought about those retching noises she made in the woods. But I stole her phone and I did it because I wanted her to know. I wanted her to notice it was missing and figure out for herself how and why I had taken it. I wanted her to feel scared and confused, like she’d been making me feel – and most of all, I wanted something solid in my pocket – something to hold and take home and look at when I was on my own and doubting that any of this could really be happening.

The ice was stuck hard into the roasting tins and seed trays. Amanda had made Chloe dry her hair before we were allowed to go out, and then given me a tub of salt. I stared at it in my hand and wanted to laugh. The laughter felt like dry, hot stones at the back of my mouth where my tongue started. I tried to let it out, but it turned into a cough.

‘You didn’t think this through, did you?’ she said, poking at the trays with her shoe.

I picked one of the seed trays up and flexed it as if it was an ice cube tray. Blocks of ice, curved at the top like corks where the water had overflowed the individual compartments for the soil, fell onto the lawn and bounced. None of them broke, and I crouched and touched them.

‘You have to write about your method,’ Chloe said. ‘You can’t fuck up on this. It isn’t possible. So long as you write about what you did, what you used, and what you thought was going to happen, you’ll get the marks, even if you end up blowing something up.’