Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

It’s completely light by the time we get out of the car and start walking, carrying our shoebox like it contains something precious. It feels more normal up here. Makes me think it isn’t the whole world that’s sitting in listening to Terry broadcast a litany of his regrets: it’s just our city. I wonder why that should be so, and I want to ask Emma about it but before I can she is climbing the railings and leaning out over the mud.

I’m scared, and before I think about it I rush up behind her, put my arms around her waist and pull. She’s tried this sort of thing before.

‘Stop!’

‘I’m not after topping myself,’ she says, in her ordinary voice. ‘I’m just trying to get a better look.’

I leave my arms around her waist for a second, press my face into her back – smell the musty, doggy smell of her waxed jacket. It’s a mainly unpleasant smell – but I don’t move until she shrugs me off.

‘Get away,’ she says, without irritation. ‘Come up and look here.’

I jump up next to her and we are leaning on the railings, the cold coming off them biting through my jeans and making the top of my thighs ache. The clouds are low and pencil-leadcoloured. Can’t see out very far. Everything is brown or grey. I’m thinking a lot about Donald now – course I am.

‘Here’s where my dad drowned himself,’ I say, and edge closer to Emma.

‘I remember about that,’ she says, and doesn’t ask me if I am all right.

‘He was a bit –’ I pause, and realise no one who cares is listening anymore, ‘he was a bit soft.’

‘I heard about that as well.’

‘From Chloe?’

Emma nods. ‘Some things you were better off keeping to yourself.’

‘You wouldn’t have taken the piss, would you?’ I say. Maybe me and Emma can be friends now. We’ve stayed in contact, all these years. That must be worth something. Don’t want to think about all those years wasted – would rather have someone else, another Chloe, to sit in the house with me at night, to keep secrets with, to visit cafes and Debenhams and sit on the climbing frame in the park. She could be my friend.

‘I’ll come with you after here,’ I say. ‘I’ll come with you to the dogs’ home. You’ve got your shift first thing, yeah? Walk them, wash them and that? I’ll come in the car with you.’ I show her the toe of my trainers. ‘These things are old, doesn’t matter if they get in a bit of a state. Then we can have breakfast together afterwards?’

Emma doesn’t say anything. She is looking out at the moving brown and grey water in the channel – the way the exposed mud-flats seem to dissolve and resolve themselves into shadow and spits of almost solid land, and then back again into moving sludge and stirred-up water. I wonder how long it’s been since she’s been out of the City, since she’s driven on a motorway, since she’s been anywhere unfamiliar without being scared. She’s just looking out, very calmly. And this is a creepy, dangerous place. You stare out far enough, and the water lightens. It’s never blue, it’s just less brown. There’s a buoy, and further out, a shrimp boat with its red lights on, tailed by a train of screaming gulls.

‘You want to make friends with someone,’ she says mildly, ‘go and see your mother. She still lives in your old house. Still got that same car on blocks in the back garden. Same net curtains. Same cherry tree. Still puts out that wreath on Christmas Eve, and still chains it to the door handle so no one can nick it.’

‘You know more about her than I do,’ I say. It sounds sullen.

She shakes her head. ‘I never went in. Just went to see a couple of times. Wanted to know if you were still going to see her. Talking to her, maybe.’

‘I’ve never said anything.’

‘Well, there’s no need now, is there?’

I’m not looking at Emma, I’m looking at the water, and feeling the ground whip away from under my feet until suddenly it feels like I am tipping, falling, and there is nothing and nobody to hold on to. It’s been a terrible waste. I could cry, and my awareness of the world shrinks to a narrow, foreshortened view of my hands and feet on those cold railings, the paint scabby and flaking against my palms.

‘Lola?’ Emma touches my arm. ‘Come on, Lola, don’t be like that.’

I can’t speak. I want to speak. I want to tell her my name is Laura and she is never allowed to call me Lola again. Tell her she’s never allowed to speak to me again. I want to put my hand in the flat of her back and push her so she tips over the railings and sinks into the mud and I don’t have to see her or think about her anymore.

‘It’ll be all right,’ she says, ‘you know it will. Everything’ll be fine.’

I don’t know how she is able to say that to me. How she has got enough of herself left to share. I have done something very bad. I open my mouth and I still can’t speak but there’s no need because suddenly, far away on the water where the channels fall away into troughs and get deep and treacherous even for experienced sailors, I see a blue glow over the surface of the bay. It’s a light. A cold, artificial-looking light – like a fluorescent tube or the glow of a television and it blinks and swirls and then goes out.

I look at Emma, and she nods at me.

‘I’ve seen it before. Something to do with the algae.’

I’m laughing, and I can’t help it. She looks at me and pulls a face. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ and before I can answer she’s laughing too.

‘It’s the algae or the plankton,’ she says. ‘It’s dead common in the Pacific.’

‘I know how it works. Just didn’t think it was possible round here.’

‘No,’ she shakes her head, ‘it shouldn’t be. There’s the towers at Heysham. They warm up the water. It’s bad really. Not natural, at the very least.’

I’m still laughing, even as I’m staring and squinting and waiting for it to happen again. The water is dark and the sky is getting lighter.

‘Better at night, I reckon – but I wouldn’t bother. You can watch it on YouTube whenever you want.’

Something about what she’s said strikes me as hilarious and we’re laughing again – egging each other on, breathless and giddy and near-hysterical. Something close to tears. After too long, we stop.

‘I think us two are finished after today, aren’t we?’

It’s like a slap, even though she’s not saying it nastily. I hang onto the railing. My head throbs and burns. I want those lights to come back.

‘You weren’t planning on spending the rest of your life checking up on me, were you? I’m glad we don’t need to do that anymore.’ She knocks her chin against my shoulder and I can smell the old wine and tobacco on her breath, and then she’s away, lifting up the box over the railings and pulling off the lid.

If I’d have imagined this before now, I’d have pictured her taking the things out one by one and letting them drift into the water. She’d say something meaningful. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t wait to see if I’m watching or not – doesn’t ask me how I feel or what I’m thinking. She drops the lid of the box over the side and before it hits the mud, she turns the box upside down and lets it fall through her fingers. It’s only ten feet or so and the tide isn’t even properly in. The paper and photographs stick to the mud or blow away. She leans over and we watch the mobile phone sink into the grey sludge and disappear.

‘Do you want to wait until the tide comes in and covers it over?’ she says.

I shrug.

‘Might as well.’

We stare until the sea and sky are light and empty and I don’t see the blue lights again but I know they have been there and that someone else has seen them with me and that is the best I’m going to get.