Cold Light (13 page)

The thing is, Emma and I both know that if either of us had drowned ourselves the news wouldn’t have made page six. At fourteen, Emma was sullen and sallow and buck-toothed, but when she was with Chloe and me she laughed a lot and it wasn’t so noticeable. I wonder if she still likes children. I know she likes her job in the dogs’ home, feeding and cleaning the kennels. She told me in a rare moment of confiding that she stays longer than she needs to in order to wash the dogs and brush their coats because she thinks it increases their chances of being adopted. This, and what I remember about her from school, are the only things that I know about her.

Sometimes I am consumed with curiosity and I imagine myself following her home and looking through her bathroom window while she unwraps soap and pulls a comb through her hair. I picture her alone, in a bare and empty flat – but maybe that’s just because that’s how I live. The walls are white, the sink and toilet are white, she uses white soap and a rough white towel to take the dog smell off her angular, yellow body. I imagine her nipples: as small and dark as melanomas.

When I am feeling kinder, I imagine Emma with the dogs. I’ve been to the dogs’ home once before, with Donald. There’s a narrow walkway between rows of wire cages, concrete floors with channels, and glinting metal plugholes. The noise of the dogs barking and throwing themselves against the rattling wire panels and the stink of piss and fur and meat and Jeyes Fluid is nearly overwhelming. I try not to hate Emma, and I imagine the dogs falling quiet as she passes by them with a brush and a tartan blanket that smells of Persil. In this dream life I have made for her they lick her hands and she smiles and talks to them in the high-pitched, expressionless voice she was saving for her children.

Yes. I try not to hate her, and I give her cleanliness and solitude in her white flat, and I give her her dogs, but I don’t call on her and I don’t ask exactly where she lives. I don’t know what she thinks she knows about me and Chloe and I don’t want to know.

‘Well don’t stand me up next time,’ I say weakly, and Emma ignores me. She finishes her wine, holds her glass out to me and smiles, and I push the tap on the box and top it up for her. We stare at the television. The remote control lies between us, untouched.

‘This is just the regional news,’ Emma says. ‘I bet for the rest of the country things are going on as usual.’

I nod, and I can’t tell by the tone of her voice if she thinks this is a bad idea or not. The rest of the country is a vague, fuzzy place. It might not even exist.

Terry is talking about how they date long-buried bodies. There are tests they can do on the organisms of the bacteria on the remains. Any insects or larvae remaining. They know how fast certain materials are supposed to decay. There’s carbon-dating. It is not going to take all that long for people to start putting two and two together.

‘You think all this is going to outshine Chloe?’ Emma says scornfully and gestures towards the screen with her wine glass. ‘After all this time?’

‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘We’ll have to wait and see, I suppose.’

My words hang in the air. Emma turns her attention back to the screen. I feel the wine churning in my stomach. I do not want to wait and see. I want to press stop, but real life, as I am constantly reminded, does not work like that.

Something that often surprised people about Chloe: she loved her cars. She bought
Top Gear
as well as
Just Seventeen
, and she knew all the makes and models and engine sizes. Could have had a conversation with anyone about it and held her own, but most of her conversations were with me and Emma, who knew nothing and could only nod. But if she liked her cars, she liked the boys that drove them even more and what she liked best of all was the combination.

When we walked – from one of our houses to the shop for cigarettes and an attempt to buy booze, or from school to one of our houses, or aimlessly around the streets, in circles with arms linked like lovers or old ladies – sooner or later we would hear that sound. A car slowing to draw up beside us on the pavement, the passengers whooping and gesturing and the driver revving the engine as if the mechanical mess under the bonnet that worked the car was part of his body and the growling and pinking of the engine was a language.

She loved it. Even better if the windows were down and the music was booming into the street. Bare forearms hanging out, with palms slapping the outside of the door in a lazy rhythm. The boy driving – although he would have seemed like a man to us – jerked his head. Not an invitation, exactly. An appraisal. She’d been passed. All her parts in working order, and fit for a closer inspection some other time.

I can see her posture change – her head lifts and her chin juts, and her eyes dart about: looking, and not looking at the same time. Not wanting to appear too interested, although she jabs me with her elbow and giggles as we turn the corner, and sometimes, turns right around, puts one hand on a cocked hip, and, smiling that brilliant smile of hers, gives them the finger. It is a complicated dance I don’t know the steps for.

What about me? I probably just turned away from the road and walked a bit quicker. I wasn’t shy; I was scared. Donald and Barbara liked to draw my attention to all those stories in the news: young girls dragged into vans, into bushes, ambushed in quiet places, given something nasty to drink and then undressed. They made a nasty incident with a boy, an attack, an assault, a too-rough groping at a disco, sound like a rite of passage I should try to avoid, even though the avoidance of it would be futile: they’d all get me in the end. They would all get all of us in the end. It was a certainty.

Chloe wasn’t scared – whatever was going to happen was going to happen – and she was standing on the pavement grinning at cars and welcoming it with open arms. When I was on my own the cars didn’t come. When I was with Emma and not Chloe, the cars didn’t come. It was her. Her blonde head, which caught the sun, shone and drew the eye. Some smell she had on her. She was willing. There were rumours about her that she took no pains to dispel although I don’t think, despite her raised eyebrows and veiled references, she’d had much experience at all until a man in a mask approached her in the park.

Soon after that she started going with Carl, who had his own car, had a job, topped up the credit on our mobile phones, gave us cigarettes and bottles of orange-flavoured alcohol. Carried mints to freshen Chloe’s breath when she threw up from too many of the bottles. Was generous, sometimes sullen, tolerated me, sometimes Emma, and didn’t like us knowing that he’d quite like to be able to grow a proper moustache.

This is my secret: I still have Chloe’s mobile phone. For a long time I would dial the number to hear her voice on the answering service. I bet her mother did too. I used to think her answer machine message, and any messages people recorded for her, were trapped inside the phone itself, like letters inside a post box. That’s why I stole it from her. It wasn’t the phone I wanted, it was the messages.

But now I know that the recording service exists somewhere else, probably powered by a computer that lasts forever. I know you don’t, if you’re the police, even need the phone to listen to the messages people left for the person who owned it. So I am regularly amazed that no one checked it after she died. She flashed the phone about at school; everyone knew about it, but I suppose us girls were used to keeping things to ourselves and no one who was questioned about Chloe mentioned it.

Carl and I were the only people who rang her because we were the only people in the world who knew her number. Her message is more personal than most and directed at the two of us, in a fake American accent that I cringed to listen to, even at the time.

‘Lo, Carl – you know what to do. Keep it clean on the answer machine! Wait for the beep. Hit it!’

My voice is in there too, hoarse and panicked. I used to listen to my own frantic voice telling her to frigging ring me back – blurting out on record what I’d been trying to tell her in person for nearly a month.

I’d sit in my room and listen to it, and feel cold and blank inside, and listen to it again, again and again until the battery ran out – and I would wonder what she was playing at.

Chapter 12

I went to sleep on New Year’s Eve that year with my mobile in my hand, in case she called to wish me happy New Year. Nothing. I didn’t hear from her until we were back at school. But just as I thought things had been ruined between us for good, she decided to confide in me again.

She strode up to me as we were filing out of morning registration.

‘All right?’

She always did have a fantastic smile. It worked on almost everyone.

‘All right, nothing,’ I said, and turned away. Started walking – as if the Geography block was the place I most wanted to be in the world.

‘What you ignoring me for?’ she said, and jogged along beside me. She pulled at my arm and I stopped. She turned on that smile again – full beam. She had her hair up in a high ponytail, and she shook her head, twitching it as she spoke. ‘Come on, don’t be like that.’

‘Where did you disappear to? What’s your problem?’ I didn’t want to mention the party. It sounded petty and needy.

‘You know what it’s like sometimes. My parents invited all the cousins round. We had family staying.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘for your party. I thought I was coming?’ I didn’t want to cry. ‘I waited up.’

I felt the tears coming anyway, and turned my head away so she wouldn’t see. She stepped to the side so she could maintain eye contact with me, and I started walking again.

‘What did I do? I didn’t do anything to you. Is it to do with Carl? Did you ask Emma instead?’

Chloe threw her arm around my shoulders and squeezed me.

‘Don’t be like that,’ she said, and laughed, ‘there’ll be loads of parties. You’re my best friend, I wasn’t blanking you.’

I sniffed.

‘Then what was it?’

I stared at her, waiting for an excuse that would make everything all right. If she’d been ill, or grounded, or her parents had found out about Carl and banned her from using the phone. Or if there’d been a death in the family, or if the marital problems had got worse and Nathan had left them both. Any of those things. I really badly needed it to be one of those things. Chloe stared back. She looked tired. Her make-up was lighter than usual and I could see little red patches on her cheeks under her eyes, like the start of eczema.

‘Well?’

She sighed. Squeezed me again. Put her head on my shoulder. I felt her hair prickle the side of my neck.

‘I need to talk to you.’ Her voice was muffled. ‘There’s something wrong with me.’

‘You’re telling me.’

I said it quickly, without thinking about it. Chloe opened her mouth, huffed, flicked her hair. She expected people to make allowances for her, and they did. Her father was terrified of her – put it all down to hormones and monthly cycles. Her mother thought she should have had a sibling and tolerated a lot because of that. School knew her history – the fact that this was the fourth high school she’d been to and the City would either have to keep her in it, or pay for another Education Welfare Officer and a Home Tutor.

‘I can’t believe you just said that to me. I cannot believe it.’ She was as incredulous as ever, and I was scared. Yes, she was being selfish and unreasonable and she probably had spent half of the Christmas holidays in the back of Carl’s car and the other half telling Emma about it, but she was talking to me now – and what if she never spoke to me again?

‘What’s up with you then? Tell me.’

‘I’m
trying
to tell you. I actually thought you were my friend?’ Chloe said.

She did look worried. Genuinely. It didn’t look like she was trying to be excused from cross-country and she didn’t look hungover, or pretending to be. She looked like she’d been crying. But I’d seen Chloe cry on command. She cried sometimes if Carl didn’t text her to check if she’d got home all right after she had been out with him. She cried when Amanda shouted at her. Still, it looked like she had been crying that morning and then had gone and got a piece of toilet roll and tried to fix her make-up. There were tiny pieces of damp tissue sticking to her eyelashes.

‘Don’t stare at me. Come in the toilet. I mean it, I’ll talk to you but you’ve got to promise not to tell anyone. On your own life.’

I followed Chloe into the girls’ toilets. Whatever was wrong with her would be my fault – I could predict it, guarantee it and would bet my life on it. But it was a relief all the same. The alternative – that her silence would be carried on publicly in the great staring arena of our lives at the high school – wasn’t something I’d dared to think about.

‘Are you coming, or not?’ Chloe hissed at me over her shoulder. She knew I didn’t like to spend time in there.

My toilet at home smelled like the little yellow block Barbara put in the cistern and the bowl of dried-up flowers and pine cones and things that was always on the window ledge. But the bogs at school smelled like what they were used for, and cigs, and blood. They smelled like everyone was on their period and had just done PE. It was horrible. I always tried to time myself so I went at home just before I left and then again as soon as I got back.

We went inside past the prefects who were waiting near the door. It was their job to make sure that no one was using the toilets for smoking or writing on the walls. Inside there were a group of Year Elevens standing by the mirrors in a huddle. They were smoking and writing on the walls and taking turns listening to something on someone’s personal stereo. Even though they were not the girls who’d bugged me when I was in Year Seven and Eight, I didn’t look at them. I looked at Chloe’s bag which was just in front of my face. It was light pink and she had written ‘Carl’ on it in biro and drawn a heart around it. Chloe walked quickly right into the cubicle that was furthest away from the door. I paused by the cracked sink and Chloe frowned at me again.

‘Get in here, will you?’

I followed her into the cubicle. There was a poster on the inside of the door about chlamydia, and lots of writing with Tipp-Ex pen or scratched into the paint with a compass: lists of names of people accused of having chlamydia, and who they’d got it from. The door caught on my rucksack as I tried to close it behind me. I turned to take it off and elbowed Chloe in the stomach.

Chloe said, ‘For fuck’s sake,’ under her breath and I was about to tell her to get lost but the girls waiting under the mirror had noticed us, struggling with our bags in the doorway of the cubicle.

‘Look at them two,’ someone said.

‘Look at the lezzies.’

There was a little chorus of whooping and two of the girls said ‘Woooo’ at the same time, which made the rest of them laugh.

‘Let’s be friends,’ said someone else.

That is something that they all said, even the boys. Sometimes I said it too, but it was ages before I knew what it meant. It was the sort of thing people said to you quietly in the dinner queue. You had to say it in a certain tone of voice or it didn’t work. Lessbefrens. Like that. I didn’t think it was a great joke, actually, but I was wrong – Chloe told me it was hilarious.

‘Shut up, you slags,’ Chloe shouted over the top of the cubicle. I was facing the door and I slid the bolt across and looked at the letters and pictures on the inside of the door until the banging outside stopped.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ I said.

A disaster to do with Carl, no doubt. Nothing too bad, but bad enough to get Chloe worked up. Although I’d heard about rows with Carl before and listened to them and agreed to go and stay at her house and drink Bacardi Breezers and watch
Titanic
to make her feel better, I did not feel like doing that today.

‘I can’t tell you unless you promise you’re going to keep it to yourself. It’s confidential.’

‘Right,’ I said. Confidential was a word that Chloe used quite a lot.

‘I’m sorry about the party. I had other things on my mind.’

‘What?’

‘I’m trying to tell you.’

‘Did you cancel it then?’

‘No, it wasn’t cancelled. Just forget about the fucking party, will you? You know I would have called you, would have let you know what was going on if I could have done,’ she said.

‘Right.’

‘Don’t be like that. It’s serious.’ She paused, and I wondered if she was about to start lying to me. ‘Me and Carl had sex,’ she said, not smiling, but with a pale, blank look about her face. She wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘Like, properly, all the way in.’

‘For God’s sake. You’ve been going on about this party for weeks and then you flake out on me just because you fancied screwing your boyfriend instead?’

I kept my voice down but I could hear the chatting outside, the taps running. Those girls weren’t paying any attention to us anymore. I put my hand on the door.

‘Lola!’ There was something about her voice, something highpitched and fragile, that made me stay.

‘I know about all this already,’ I said, ‘so you fucked me off for Carl. Surprise surprise. We’re going to be late for Food Tech.’

‘You don’t know . . .’ She bowed her head and scratched the back of her neck. ‘We weren’t even doing it before.’

‘I thought you said . . .’

‘We did other things,’ she said quickly, ‘just as good as. We might as well have been. I mean, I had my clothes off and stuff, didn’t I?’

‘Right,’ I said.

‘It was his idea!’ Chloe said shrilly, ‘to hang on a bit. Until I was fully ready. That’s what he said. There was no rush. He was happy with the other stuff. The pictures and that.’

I didn’t say anything. I knew for a fact that Chloe had been hinting, if not actually saying, that she and Carl had been having sex for ages. Since about two days after they met. She had been going on about how big his cock was and how much better it was to be going out with someone who was more mature and experienced than the little boys in our school. She’d been carrying on like this, holding it over me, for weeks and weeks.

‘Anyway. We’ve done it now, but something went wrong.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It hurts, like, loads.’

‘It’s meant to hurt, isn’t it?’ I pulled a face, and thought about ruptures. We didn’t get sex education until we were in Year Ten but I reckoned I knew the basics.

‘I know that. I’m not thick.’ Chloe shook her head, but still wouldn’t look at me. ‘I mean, I knew it was going to hurt the first time. Like when it was going in. You’d expect it to, wouldn’t you? Emma said I might get a bit of bleeding. I know about that.’

How come Emma was suddenly a world expert? Who’d shag her?

‘Did it bleed?’ This was like the eyebrow-plucking, the legwaxing, the pierced ears. There was a reason I always let Chloe go first.

‘I don’t know. It was dark. And then I was wearing my black going-out knickers, so if I did, it didn’t show. Anyway. That’s not the point. Stop being a perv.’

‘Then what’s the problem?’

‘That was like a full eleven days ago and it’s still really hurting. Like every time I go to the toilet it really stings. It burns. It’s horrible.’

Chloe looked upwards and ran her index finger along her lower eyelid. First one, then the other.

‘Eleven days?’ I counted. ‘That was Boxing Day. You had sex with him for the first time when I was hanging around outside the car?’

I couldn’t believe it. I could not, seriously, believe what I was hearing.

‘I’m supposed to be your best mate,’ I said. ‘It was fucking cold, waiting for you outside that car. We were supposed to be hanging out that day.’

‘No,’ she said, impatient – as if I was missing the point. ‘Later on. At night.’

‘You went back out?’

‘This really isn’t the issue here.’

Chloe sounded like my mother. She sounded like a teacher. She was deliberately trying to make me feel like a dick, for no reason. Just because she’d been taken out in the dark to have sex with some weird guy in the back seat of a car she thought she could take me into the toilet and get everyone to call me a lezzer and then talk down to me.

‘Well, I’m pleased for you,’ I said.

When I first thought Chloe was having sex I was sort of interested in it, not in a lezzer-type way, but just curious about knowing the facts and how much on a scale of one to ten it hurt, and whether it was embarrassing having to have no clothes on or whether you just kind of got carried away in the moment and didn’t mind. But then you’d still probably mind afterwards, when you’d settled down a bit, and then you’d have to put your clothes back on in front of someone else and not make a mess out of it and I was sort of curious about that too.

And I’d asked, and Chloe had made out like it was some big private secret and wouldn’t tell me, and it was all because the silly bitch didn’t even know because she hadn’t even done it yet.

‘Don’t be like that. I’m trying to tell you,’ Chloe said. ‘Something’s wrong. I went to the doctor’s and they had this leaflet in the waiting room. I only read the first page, then I was too scared to go in.’

Chloe sat down on the closed lid of the toilet and opened her bag and showed me it. It had been folded and unfolded and folded again and the paper was fraying in places. It was a leaflet about being pregnant.

‘It’s this bit, here.’

I read the part that Chloe pointed to. It said that for some women one of the very first signs of being pregnant is the need to pass urine very frequently. It said this is because the womb is growing downwards and pressing on the bladder. That might also cause backache.