Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

‘A teenage girl who loved so deeply, and so completely, that she felt no other option but to end her life alongside her forbidden lover. Ten years has passed – which is why we’re here tonight. Let’s take a moment of silence to reflect on that and – as Peggy has reminded us – return our focus to Chloe, departed, not forgotten, and loved in death as much as she ever loved in life.’

The minute’s silence, the second of the evening, is the opportunity to show the jingle from the chocolate sponsor and cut to the adverts. Emma stands up and goes into the bathroom. She’s hunched, and the back of her shirt is darkened with sweat between the shoulder blades. I think, just for a second, about following her in there.

That is what is supposed to happen, isn’t it? Girls go to the toilets in pairs. She’s supposed to cry and I am supposed to hold her and say some comforting things, pass her loo paper and help her fix her mascara. Reassure her, before we emerge into the glare of the screen in the sitting room, that she looks fine, that it isn’t a problem, that no one thinks she’s stupid. I mute the television and listen to the water running for a few seconds, then go into the kitchenette to make coffee.

This evening is turning into another Chloe-thon. Terry asked Peggy about the body in the present tense – ‘ Do you believe you know the deceased? ’ – and I think about it, think about how Wilson is still here, not dead at all, not to his parents, not to anyone who misses him and is still waiting for him to come home. Not to Terry, who always refused to believe, despite the last two attacks, that it was not Wilson who was stalking us. I wonder, not for the first time, if Wilson’s parents were watching when the mayor started to dig. If they were feeling the sickly churning of anticipation that I’ve been feeling in my stomach all night.

The present tense is full of possibilities: a future is bolted on to it like time is a row of railway carriages flicking through a train station, one after the other after the other. Now the body has been identified that possibility has been cut off and worse than that, Wilson’s mum and dad, wherever they are, are going to know that it never really existed and didn’t all the years they were hoping for it.

The coffee smells ashy and foul – there’s a ring of multicoloured bubbles around the rim of the mug that I sweep away with the teaspoon.

‘Here,’ I say, still standing when Emma comes in.

‘I’m not drunk,’ she says, takes the coffee and sniffs it without drinking.

‘I never said you were. It’s four in the morning. I’m knackered, even if you aren’t.’

‘Yes,’ she says, and her eyes are moving around the wall behind me, looking, I think, for a clock. When she finds nothing more than a cracked tile and a cleaning supplies calendar I got free from work and is still showing the page for January ( SupaSponge – cuts grease in half! ) she brings her eyes back to my face. ‘It is late,’ she agrees, and sips quickly. ‘Do you want me to go?’

I take my own coffee and we cross back into the sitting room – although it isn’t a separate room, it’s just the place in this bigger room where you get to walk on worn carpet instead of curling linoleum.

‘I’m going to stay up,’ I say. ‘They’ve either got to find something out, or put something else on. There was supposed to be a film on tonight.’

She shakes her head. ‘You and your films,’ she says. The tone of her voice is almost affectionate and her expression reminds me of something.

‘You came to my house once,’ I say, ‘just after Donald—’ I still can’t talk about it and Emma knows and she nods respectfully and lets me off the hook. ‘You wanted to walk in to school together because everyone had to go in pairs.’

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘Shanks’s orders. Danny Towers’ older sister brought him in and no one let him forget it for months.’

‘You were scared too,’ I say, teasing her, ‘scared shitless the man in the mask was going to leap out from somewhere and show you his cock.’

I expect her to laugh but she turns on me so suddenly some of her coffee slops over the side of her mug and spatters on the knee of her jeans. It must be scalding her but she doesn’t move, doesn’t stand up and pluck the fabric away from herself.

‘I wasn’t scared; I was trying to look after you. I was trying to protect you.’

‘You’d have battered him with that violin case?’ I joke. ‘Or did you have a gun inside it? Emma Capone!’ I laugh, but she doesn’t join in and the longer the silence between us goes on for the more embarrassed I am at the joke.

‘Emma?’

‘Leave it,’ she says, venomously. She’s ashamed of being caught out. At being soft and worrying about me when she pretends to be so hard that she doesn’t need friends.

‘All right,’ I say. ‘Fine.’

There’s a long pause where we drink our coffee and do not speak. Emma motions for the remote control and turns the volume on the television back up.

‘Are you going to be all right for work in the morning?’ she says.

I shrug. ‘We won’t be the only ones staying up. It’ll be quiet tomorrow, everyone sleeping in – or taking the day off so they can stay plugged in and see what happens.’

‘It’s kind of disgusting, isn’t it?’ she says, ‘making a whole programme out of it?’

‘Yes. Yes,’ I say.

‘And those nutters ringing in. Upsetting everyone.’

‘Funny they never got Nathan and Amanda on the air,’ I say.

‘Not really. I bet Terry made that a condition of them covering the memorial and helping to fund the summerhouse. Get a microphone near Amanda and she starts screeching about how old Carl was,’ Emma says.

‘When Terry does a phone-in in the studio, there’s a mute button under that plastic bowl of fruit,’ I tell her.

‘What?’

‘You know – when the callers start swearing or asking him out. There’s that button built in to the coffee table and they’ve put that fruit bowl on top of it so it doesn’t show. Watch his hand next time.’

Emma smiles. ‘That doesn’t make turning the whole night into a circus any better.’

I pause, not sure if I should say the next thing or not because I’m still not sure enough of her to be able to predict how she’ll react.

‘It’s only what they did with Chloe. They wanted to put her funeral on the telly.’

‘No,’ Emma says, and settles herself back on the couch, ‘it was different with Chloe. People knew who she was. They wanted to talk about her. Figure out what went wrong and make sure it could never happen again. This –’ she points the rim of her mug at the screen, ‘this is a mystery. People aren’t sad: they think it’s exciting. It’s stirring everyone up.’

‘You’re probably right,’ I say, and she interrupts me.

‘But they’ll have those forensic people working overtime. We’ll know how he died, what time of day, who did it – everything. Then all this will fade away. In three days’ time, they’ll get back on with the memorial and everyone will forget about this,’ she sniffs, as if she is daring me to disagree with her. ‘It’s only a matter of time.’

Now it is my turn to stand quickly and head into the bathroom. The bitter coffee on a stomach already tipping and churning with cheap wine is suddenly too much, and I sit on the edge of the bath with my head between my knees. I think of clear cool water, fountains and lagoons and undersea springs. Hydrothermal vents and the frozen, secret sea inside Triton. The tiles in the bathroom are spotted with soap, and I stare at them and try to hear the sea moving, all kinds of other, restful, calming things, and clamp my teeth together so hard I can hear my jaw creaking.