Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

Not that I was that desperate to go and sit in the car with Carl on my own either. Chloe could get scared first, then she would talk, then she would come in off the ice and be safe again.

She came nearer, out of the shadow and trying to spin around. The soles of her trainers were snagging on some groove or imperfection on the ice that I couldn’t see, and she was laughing at nothing, and using her left foot like a sweeper, to brush the ice smooth. I looked at her and saw Barbara, pushing the pile of the carpet backwards and forwards with the toe of her slipper, staring at nothing for hours until it went dark and there was nothing to stare at.

‘It’s stones,’ she called, and waved with both hands over her head as if me and Carl were hundreds of miles away. ‘Someone’s been chucking stones. There’s hundreds of them.’

‘Come off now,’ Carl said, but there was a smile in his voice still. He didn’t sound worried anymore, and took another step forward on to the very edge of the ice. His trainers were unlaced and darker at the toes where the blue canvas had been stained by the wet from the grass. I twiddled with the fastening of the Christmas present school coat and stepped forward too.

It was nothing to do with Carl. Chloe always did things first, I’d accepted that, but she accepted that she was testing the way, and that I would follow along shortly after. Carl didn’t have anything to do with it.

‘Where are your boots?’ I said, gently. ‘How come you aren’t wearing your boots?’

Carl looked at me. Didn’t say anything for a long while.

‘I didn’t want them anymore,’ he said, ‘they were dirty.’ I stared at him, and he laughed, ‘So what?’

‘Are you coming?’ Chloe called, and we both paused, me and her boyfriend Carl, one foot on the ice each and waiting. Chloe carried on knocking the stones away with the side of her foot. They were the grey, straight-edged chips – big gravel from the path and the car park. Industrial – it comes in sacks and someone had chucked handfuls of it out onto the ice. Probably someone we knew. Someone in our year at school, at least.

I put my hands either side of my mouth and made a trumpet.

‘Can you see anything yet?’

Carl looked at me when I shouted, and snorted, ‘Is that what we’re here for? Still?’

I ignored him, and shouted again. ‘It’s behind you!’

The oooo sound didn’t echo – we were too much in the open for that – but it sounded hollow anyway, glancing over the ice and amplifying like we were at a pantomime. Chloe looked up and gave me the finger, for no reason at all, and then started stepping, half walking, half sliding, to the centre of the lake.

‘He just ran away,’ said Carl.

‘Chloe said we could come and check. To put my mind at rest. She’s nearly there now.’

‘Waste of fucking time,’ Carl said, and I thought he was getting to something – but I didn’t want it to be him to tell me, didn’t want it to be something he’d break to her: Listen – cocking his head towards me – I’ve had to let her in on it, don’t start on though, will you? No. It was not supposed to be like that.

‘Chloe doesn’t think it’s a waste of time,’ I said, and Carl laughed at me again and might have been about to say something else when Chloe interrupted us.

‘Oi!’ she shouted, sounding indignant. It was because we’d stopped looking at her. ‘I’m here!’ she said. ‘You two better not be talking about me!’

She put her foot on top of the football and Carl stepped forward with his other foot until he was completely on the ice.

So this was the way it was going to be. He was going to follow her out there.

I stepped back onto the bank.

‘Come back in now,’ he said, trying to sound like someone’s dad.

‘It’s stuck right in,’ she said.

‘Can you see through?’ I imagined that out in the middle, where the water was clearer, it would have frozen into something like thick glass.

Chloe stepped back and put her hands on her hips, drew her leg behind her and kicked the football. The ice broke, making a noise like snapped polystyrene. The football bobbed under the surface and popped back out. It rolled across the ice away from her and the leg she’d kicked with sank into the hole it had left.

I suppose she must have screamed.

Carl ran onto the ice as if he were sprinting across tarmac. I thought he might slip, but he didn’t. I put my hands back inside my pockets and felt for my mittens.

He got there quickly. When he reached her, Chloe was sprawled awkwardly across the surface. She’d leaned forward – her right leg buried in the black water up to her thigh and her left bent and flat behind her on the ice. Her arms were stretched out as if she was reaching for the ball which had hit one of the branches and stopped rolling six inches short of her scrabbling fingertips.

Carl grabbed hold of her left ankle. He was crouching behind her and pulling at her. It wasn’t doing any good. He was pulling her backwards, bringing the back of her thigh against the fragment of ice behind it. He would have done better to stand up and hold onto her hands, or try to slide her out frontward. I was watching them and wondering again if broken slabs of ice could cut a person. No, I decided at last, because a body’s heat would melt the edge and dull it.

Carl was shouting something, and Chloe was screaming and flailing and kicking with her free leg. She wasn’t doing herself any good. Panicking so much that Carl had a job keeping hold of her ankle. He stood up, heaved her leg up with him and then leaned back. It must have felt like she was being folded in two. Carl wobbled, as if he was losing his balance. I thought he was going to do it. Then he wobbled again, and I realised it wasn’t him that was moving, it was the piece of ice he was standing on.

He dropped her ankle and stepped back but the ice cracked again – a slab as big as a table tilting upwards under his feet and throwing him on top of her. I fluttered my fingers inside my pockets, feeling Carl’s lighter and the shiny side of the Polaroids. Something in the bottom snagged against my fingertips and under my nails. Something gritty, small and hard. It could have been bits of burned Donald left over from the sprinkling at the crematorium.

Chloe went right down – I saw the top of her head as she bobbed up again between Carl’s arms. Her hair was wet and flat against her scalp. Carl’s head was submerged, perhaps knocking the ice, and his flailing elbow hit her chin and forced her head back. She screamed in a breath and it was as if they were fighting. They were both under and it was quiet and I waited until they didn’t come back up again. I put on my mittens and waited until the surface of the water was still again before I decided to go home.

Chloe and Carl didn’t stay there long. The water might have frozen over their heads like a thin film in the dark to cover them up for a while, but in the morning the sun shone and up they came. Joggers and dog walkers emerged on the paths on cue to discover them, wet heads bobbing in the water like corks. It was Valentine’s Day, and the long-awaited thaw had begun, and I bet it was a right production to get them out and into their matching pair of ambulances.

I was sleeping when they were found. I never saw any of it.

I have imagined it. Hair plastered to their skulls. The blueness of their skin and fingernails. I had already imagined it for Wilson: transferring the details of the imagery to them was quick and involuntary.

When Terry reported it on the news that afternoon, I was eating a Marmite sandwich and looking at the first Valentine’s Day card I had ever received. Anonymous, handmade, and sent in a jiffy bag along with a mix tape of songs I had never heard of. I was examining the writing, trying to picture what the scrawl on Shanks’s whiteboard in the classroom would look like if he was writing properly, in a card like this, with a pen.