Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

I had stacked the big ice cubes into a tower while she was talking to me. Then I started to pour salt on the top one. The salt wore a dint into it. The dint filled with water, then overflowed. The overflowing water solidified again on its way down. It made the tower less wobbly than it had been before.

‘That’s all right,’ I said, poking at it with my finger.

‘You have to write about how you’re going to apply it. You can’t just mess about.’ Chloe’s teeth were chattering. I thought about ways to apply it, this stupid tower of ice – this useless thing that I’d made and now had to explain and assign a value to. It made me think about Donald. I wanted to kick the ice tower over, to shatter the cubes into fragments. He did it all for me, and that wasn’t fair. I didn’t ask him to. It’s too much to put on another person’s shoulders – to expect me to be happy all the time just to keep Donald on an even keel. I leaned back and kicked the tower. It hurt my foot, right through the toe of my trainer. The blocks broke apart, flew through the air and plopped onto the grass.

‘What did you do that for?’ Chloe’s shoulders were shaking, even though she was more bundled up than I was. It was because she was so thin. ‘Don’t dick about,’ she said irritably. ‘I spent ages doing this.’

The ice was harder to get out of the roasting tins because they wouldn’t bend like the plastic seed trays had. I put them upside down on the grass and stood on them with one foot. There was a sound, something between a snap and a squeak. When I pulled the metal tray away it was dented and the ice was in pieces.

‘I wonder if you can cut yourself on it,’ I said, looking at the hard edges and not wanting to touch. It looked like glass, bubbled and broken, but it wasn’t glass.

‘I’m fucking freezing,’ Chloe said, and we went in to burn her Brazil nuts.

What should I say now? I didn’t talk to her enough? I talked to her too much? I couldn’t get her to listen to me and understand that things would be much better for us both if we’d have confided in each other?

I was fourteen. She was my best friend.

And now it is Emma who I am sitting up late at night with, in something that is nowhere near a companionable silence. I want to ask her if Chloe talked to her about the things that were on her mind – the things she did not tell her mother and would not tell me. I want to ask Emma if Chloe let her listen to the message on her phone – if they laughed over it, or discussed a plan of action. I want to tell Emma that I still talk to Chloe. That I toast her in the early hours. That now I have to try all the things she should have done first, and I have to do it on my own.

I have a pink and white mug I bought for her three years ago and sometimes I bring it out of the cupboard and hold it between my hands like the stem of a posy.

‘Here,’ I say, offer it out to the dark and try to believe in ghosts. Nothing ever happens. Chloe isn’t here and Chloe has never left the City.

Later, we were standing behind the greenhouse, hiding between the wall and the panes of cloudy glass. Smoking.

‘I know you’re still seeing Carl – don’t pretend like you aren’t.’

Chloe turned her back to me quickly and shook her head so hard that her ponytail hit the sides of her neck.

‘I’m not,’ she said, in a strange, muffled voice. Usually, when she was lying, she liked you to know that she was lying. Not that there was a big secret to keep, but that something was going on and you just weren’t quite important enough to know about it. Or she’d withhold, to extend the pleasure of the questioning for as long as possible.

‘I don’t want anything to do with him,’ she said, and she sounded like she had something in her mouth.

My hands had gone past cold from playing with the ice, and past sore, and into numb. The skin on my fingers felt like rubber – like it was nothing to do with me at all. As I was wondering what it would be like to have a whole body like that – even tongue and eyes, the warmth in my blood started to prickle back into them and they began to hurt. That seemed more important – that pain in my fingers – than the conversation I was trying to have with Chloe.

‘I know you have,’ I said. ‘You’re talking shite.’

‘What?’ Chloe blew her smoke at the iced panes of glass, melting a little circle. She watched the steam and smoke bounce off the surface and didn’t look at me. Her eyes were sly, slitty. I could see her eyelashes brushing her cheeks – clumped together with cheap mascara.

‘What do you know?’ she said, but when she turned and looked at me, her face was red.

‘You’ve been staying out all night with him,’ I said. ‘No, I haven’t,’ she said. It wasn’t lazy – usually she didn’t care if I believed her or not, and usually I didn’t bother so much. But this time she was shaking her head, and insisting.

‘I think you have. Out in his car at night. In the woods.’

I exhaled a cloud of my own smoke. Didn’t try for a ring.

‘No.’

‘Your mum thinks you’ve been sleeping at mine,’ I said, ‘keeping me company. Comforting me.’

I could smell her. After her shower she’d put fresh perfume and make-up on, but got back into her old clothes. She smelled yeasty and musty – dirty knickers and airing cupboards and bathmats, with a choking cover-up of White Musk. It was so weird. Chloe was obsessive about outfits, and hygiene.

‘All right,’ Chloe said, and dug the cigarette into the gravel with her toe, burying it. ‘I’ve been staying out. So what?’

I pulled the Polos out of my pocket. Only two left, both of them broken.

‘Have one of these,’ I said. ‘You can talk to me about anything.’

She shook her head. ‘They’ll make me sick,’ she said. ‘I don’t care if she smells the smoke on me.’

‘I’m your best friend, aren’t I?’ I said, still holding out the mints.

She smiled and took one just to please me, put it in her mouth and I could see the scale on her teeth and she sucked it hard, so her cheeks puckered and her eyes popped, like she was trying to make me laugh.

‘Best friends,’ she said, ‘but there’s nothing to tell.’

‘Where have you been going at night?’

‘Carl’s, of course,’ she said lightly.

‘You can’t have been,’ I said. ‘His mother. He’d never take you back to his house.’

‘His mother’s sick,’ Chloe said. ‘She doesn’t know what’s going on. Carl hammered a sheet of wood over the window in the box room and she never even noticed.’

‘The darkroom?’

Chloe smiled. ‘Nearly finished. I’ve been helping him.’

‘In the middle of the night?’

She shrugged, and smiled at me. ‘You’re going to get to see it soon. Come on,’ she said, ‘it’s too cold. Let’s go in.’

Chloe and I crossed the garden without speaking, sucking on the mints and marching past the ice – the cracked edges and triangular shapes melting into lumps where I’d put the salt on them. We went into the kitchen. She stood at the counter and started sweeping nuts and pieces of burned paper into the bin.

I tried again.

‘I want to go back to that pond,’ I said. ‘Carl’s going to have to take us in the car. I want to go and look again.’

‘Why?’ Chloe said, and shook her head. ‘It’s nothing to do with me. I didn’t do anything wrong. You’ve already been out there once.’

Her voice was high and cracked. She carried on shaking her head, in a slow thoughtful arc, even after she’d finished speaking.

‘I want you to come with me. You’re supposed to be my best friend.’

‘No point,’ she said, more quietly.

‘I want you to come. I think he’s under the ice. I can’t sleep for thinking about it.’