Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

Imagine this. It could happen.

I am at home. Not at the flat. Not in my front room, or the kitchen, or the bathroom with the toothpaste-coloured tiles. Not in the service corridors at the shopping centre, feeling tiny in the silence as I put my trolley away and wind up the wire for the portable floor polisher. No, my real home. The one with the crooked back gate and the cherry tree in the garden and the shed with the paperback-sized window.

It is sunny. Say we’ve had a mild winter but a long one, and this day, first of a new month, feels like the first day of spring too. Barbara and I are sitting out in the garden on the mildewspotted plastic patio furniture and because the sky is improbably blue and even a few bees are flying about the garden, she’s asked me to rig something up with the extension cable and the television on the sill of the open kitchen window. It’s a warm day, but a fresh one – even after lugging the telly through the house I’m not sweating as I lean back and tuck the kitchen net behind it so it doesn’t get tangled in the aerial.

‘It’ll probably fall in the sink and electrocute us,’ Barbara says, but she is smiling and she comes out from the kitchen with no apron, and her hair down, and she’s carrying a bottle of Gordon’s and two glasses with ice and wedges of lemon in them on a round plastic tray, and she pours the drinks and we sit on our patio chairs with the sun on the backs of our necks, and watch the television. I put my feet in her lap and feel the slats of the plastic chair sticking into my back, but not uncomfortably. She’s wearing a loose skirt with green leaves and red flowers on it – looks like the sort of thing they put in the window in charity shops, but it falls softly around her calves and the breeze twitches the hem and it suits her.

We’re watching Wilson’s funeral. It’s April and it’s taken them this long to release the body.

‘His poor mother,’ Barbara says, and Fiona, who is still in her camel-coloured two-piece suit, slightly shimmering tights and a new hairdo – blonde waves, to celebrate her new job – narrates the slow procession snaking its way along a path and into the dark open mouth of the church. The coffin is at the front of the queue, and it is white, like the ones they use for babies and young girls. The dad is too old to bear it, and he walks behind with the mother and their heads are bowed, not looking at the press, but they do not cry and they are not ashamed.

‘Imagine having a photographer at a funeral and you not even being a member of the royal family,’ Barbara says, scandalised and admiring. There’s an ashtray on the table, a little blue glass lump with depressions in the side, and I light up, and offer one to Barbara, and for a few seconds we’re absorbed in the apparatus of smoking – the flick of the lighter, the draw, the crackle, the delicious feeling of the first pull, grey threads of smoke sucked into the lungs, darkening and filtering into the blood. She sighs and puts her head back, exhales upwards towards the sky, and balances the ashtray on my shins so I can’t move my feet now, even if I wanted to.

‘A nice day for it though, eh?’ As if it wasn’t a funeral, but a wedding. ‘I wonder if they’ll ever catch who did it?’ The ice cubes click in her glass as she drinks.

I don’t answer her, but look away from the television and around the garden, where I have been working for Barbara all morning. The grass is neat and there is a small heap of clippings and pulled weeds at the side of the shed. Fiona’s voice still emanates thinly from the colour portable, quoting from Terry’s final broadcast where, before retiring, he admitted that the police were able to prove beyond doubt that Wilson was innocent of anything suspected of him. The noise of her is filling the tiny garden, flying up into the air and travelling outwards, the waves getting wider and further apart until we can’t hear them anymore.

While researching bioluminescence I found many books, articles and websites useful. In particular, ‘Milky Seas: A Bioluminescent Puzzle’ ( Marine Oberver , 63.22, 1993) by P.J. Herring and M. Watson, and The Science Frontiers Sourcebook Project at http://www.science-frontiers.com/sourcebk.htm, edited by William R. Corliss helped inform my understanding. The research forum at The Bioluminescence Website : http://lifesci.ucsb.edu/~biolum/ edited by S.H. Haddock, C.M. McDougal and J. F. Case was also helpful.

Thanks are owed to Emma Lannie, who knew about Wrigley’s and barcodes, to Kim McGowan who helped with water-cooled power stations and continuity errors in late drafts and to Angela Fitzpatrick: a librarian extraordinaire. Thanks to all the writers from the Northern Lines Fiction Workshop – Tom Fletcher, Andrew Hurley, Sally Cook, Emma Unsworth and Zoe Lambert – for invaluable feedback, advice and moral support. To my agent Anthony Goff and my editors Carole Welch and Ruth Tross for their patient, professional and meticulous approaches.

The time I needed to develop this novel was supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. My employer, Lancashire County Council’s Library and Information Service, generously agreed to a career break that gave me the space to write and my colleagues at Lancashire Libraries and HMP Garth were especially understanding. Sarah Hymas, at Lancaster Litfest, acted as a wise and patient mentor during the final stages.

Most of all, thanks to Duncan McGowan, for not reading this one either.

JENN ASHWORTH’sfirst book, A Kind of Intimacy , won the U.K.’s Betty Trask Award. She lives in Preston, Lancashire, with her family and writes an award-winning blog at www.jennashworth.co.uk.

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A Kind of Intimacy

Cover design by Mary Schuck

Cover photograph by Mark Owen/Trevillion

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

COLD LIGHT. Copyright © 2011 by Jenn Ashworth. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton, an Hachette UK company.

FIRST U.S. EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-06-207603-8

ePub Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062076045