Cold Light (12 page)

‘We thought you’d think it was a laugh,’ Chloe said.

‘It
was
funny,’ Emma said weakly.

‘See?’

I looked away, felt humble and stupid and young.

Chloe and Emma got their way, and instead of telling anyone else, we carried on telling the story to each other. I think it made Chloe feel special, and almost famous, and because she’d found Emma first and had told her while the whole incident was still fresh in her mind, that was the thing that had brought them together. She’d often rely on Emma to fill in the details, or elaborate on the shape of the mask or the exact intonation of the words the man had spoken.

The story was theirs, really – I was just the person who they told it to. Just audience. Whenever there was another sighting of the pest, or something new about the case appeared in the local news, she’d look meaningfully at Emma and I would try to join in with their laughter but it never worked. Sometimes I thought if Emma would just mind her own business, Chloe would do the right thing and report the flasher to the police. That was ridiculous though. I’d yet to meet the person who could coax Chloe into doing anything she didn’t feel like doing.

The next time the three of us went to the park she showed us the exact place where it had happened, as if she knew I didn’t quite believe her. Just where she said, on a track through an unkempt, almost wooded area of the park, and behind the bandstand where lots of hawthorn and holly had been planted to discourage people from sleeping or injecting there. She didn’t seem scared or upset, not on any of the occasions that we spoke about it, but she did once claim that she’d had a dream about the man – still in his mask and his light brown boots, crunching through the leaves and staring at her through the eyeholes.

‘Right here,’ she said, ‘that’s where he came out.’

‘Okay,’ I’d said, and she moved around me quickly, standing on the path with her hands on her hips.

‘And here’s where I was, just walking along like this.’

‘Right,’ I said.

Emma was nodding furiously.

‘And what were you doing in the park?’ I said to Emma. ‘Wandering around on your own. That’s not a good idea.’

Emma looked away and Chloe rolled her eyes.

‘She was in a bush, stoned off her tits and fucking her boyfriend – what do you think she was doing?’ she said, and she laughed, and Emma laughed too, and the two of them were laughing so hard I thought it was a joke – that even the
idea
of Emma having a boyfriend when Chloe didn’t was hilarious – so I joined in with the laughing and didn’t ask her again.

Apart from the dream, which she had mentioned more in the spirit of entertaining me than confiding a worry, Chloe didn’t seem interested in talking about it anymore. After her initial excitement and hysteria the whole incident seemed to be boring to her. The evening when she showed me where it had happened was the time that she took me to meet Carl, and soon after that whenever we were in the park he managed to turn up too, so at least she didn’t need to worry about strange men in the bushes creeping up and surprising her anymore.

Chapter 11

I stand and look at Emma sitting on my couch and I wait for a second, as if she is going to say something else. Nothing. So I sit next to her. We watch the pictures change on the soundless television. Nothing new. The replay of the replay of the discovery: the mayor leaning back on his spade, the balloon floating upwards into the damp air.

‘Were you watching it when it happened?’ Emma says.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you sure I didn’t miss anything? On my way over here? Do they know if it was a man or a woman? How old they were, even? Those things must be quick to find out.’

I shake my head. ‘Nothing like that,’ I say.

‘Did you think about going down there for the groundbreaking?’

The police have set up a cordon with yellow tape and uniformed officers. Terry is standing in front of it, gesticulating behind him at the comings and goings of the forensics people. They really do wear all-in-one suits made out of white carrier bags. I thought that only happened in films. Now and again, someone just out of the camera shot catches Terry’s eye and he nods, or frowns slightly. It’s busy there. There’s a crowd. The first lot turned up early, for Chloe’s memorial. Now it is dark and the body is being dug out of the clasp of soil, the ghouls have come out.

‘No,’ I say carefully, ‘did you?’

She shakes her head. ‘I was scared someone would recognise me.’

I remember something. ‘You know what I was thinking of tonight?’ I say. ‘That time you and me and Chloe went into town, nicking stuff, and Carl came to pick us up. Do you remember? It was freezing – the cars were slipping all over the roads but he insisted on driving us back.’

Emma nods. ‘I remember,’ she says. ‘Chloe walked out with half a make-up counter up her jumper and all you managed to swipe was a handful of toffees out of the pick ’n’ mix.’

‘No,’ I say, ‘that’s not right. You got a load of camera film and Chloe got some weird stuff – screws and bolts and nails and things. Carl had sent you out with a shopping list. He wanted the stuff for his darkroom. I wonder if he ever finished it?’

Emma frowns. ‘It wasn’t a proper darkroom. He nailed a load of scrap wood over the window in the back bedroom and put a red lightbulb in. Took the wallpaper off the walls and moved all the furniture out apart from the bed. I don’t think he knew what he was doing with that, not really. His mum would have gone mad if she’d seen it.’

‘How do you know?’

She shrugs. ‘He told me. Showed me up there one time. His mum never went upstairs. She was half deaf, in a wheelchair. No idea what was going on half the time, or pretended not to know.’

‘I never knew you went to his house,’ I say, and Emma shrugs again and asks me if there’s any more wine. We settle into the couch, watching each other as much as the television.

It’s funny, how me and Emma have stayed in touch. Or not, when you think about it. I haven’t kept up with anyone else from school, but Emma was the only other one who really knew Chloe. That’s not to say that she was as close to Chloe as I was, just that it makes sense that the two of us would stick together.

It happened without either of us planning it. I ran away from Barbara when I was sixteen. Wanted to get away – partly from her and partly from Terry’s researchers, who were still desperate to get us on the show for the inside scoop on Chloe. I didn’t get far. Felt like, in the end, I needed to stay put and keep an eye on things. Everyone was still so cut up over the loss of Chloe. It had been two years and nothing was normal. So I ran away but only got four miles across the City, talked to a youth worker, came to live in this flat, found a job at the shopping centre across the road, and settled.

I started going by ‘Laura’ again, changed my last name and didn’t speak to anyone.

Then one day, I saw Emma. I was twitching the hood of my duffel coat over my face, trying to get out of the wind and light a cigarette. I was half in and half out of the entrance to the flats when Emma walked right past me in a gale of perfume and chinking metal bangles and the clatter of knee-high boots. I could have touched her, easily. She was with two other girls and laughing her way through a story about a bouncer on the door of a nightclub who’d lifted her off her feet and twirled her around in the street with such force her skirt blew up, her knickers were on show and the taxi drivers on the rank had flashed their lights and beeped their horns.

She says now she never saw me, but I know that’s rot. Her eyes flicked over me. Her make-up was blurred. Dangling earrings in her ears and the three of them carrying around their own pocket of noise and the friendly fug of alcohol. I waited in the doorway until they passed by and turned a corner. I felt trembly and insubstantial: a bit of dry grass. I was shaking. I wanted to shake her. Why should she have all this – the friends, and the nightclub nights out, and the earrings and the perfume and the drunken laughing in the night – when it was not possible, would not ever be possible, for me to have those things? Friends. She had friends. For a while there, I saw how far the scales had tipped in her direction and I wanted to kill her. Put my hands on her skin and pull out her earrings and scream my secret into the whorl of her ear and kill her.

That night I started dreaming about Chloe. I hadn’t forgotten about her. In my dreams she skated and slid. They were always silent dreams – as if someone had muted the sound on a film – but I could see her laughing and watch her blue lips move, trace the shapes she made while she was shouting. They weren’t good dreams.

A year or two after I saw Emma outside the flats, she sent me a postcard. It was addressed to me by name – my old name and the block of flats. No number, but the postie knew me so it got to me safe. Of course he knew me – I’ve been here years, staying put in this damp box in the sky while everyone else moves on. He’s a good lad. He’s never let on, never asked me a question, never stared, never tipped off Terry’s researchers. I don’t know if it’s pity or professionalism, but either way I am grateful for it. The picture on the postcard was of the train station. Miniature daffodils and ivy in wooden planters on the platforms. No dirty pigeons. No drunks. No tramps. A sunny day.

After I’d read it, I’d stared at the picture until my clammy hands warped the card. The train waiting at the platform. Her handwriting. Postmark. Stamp – not the Queen’s head, but a robin perched on the handle of a spade, the spade driven into a hillock of earth. Wondering if it was significant. If she was trying to tell me something. And she was a liar too. A sly one, like Chloe. She hadn’t been so drunk she didn’t recognise me, not so drunk she didn’t notice the name of the block of flats where I lived.

Emma is much less stupid than she looks.

We drink together a fair bit these days. It isn’t exactly what you’d call social. We make trips to the park, to Debenhams. Take each other on guided tours over the topography of our memories.

‘Look,’ she’ll say, ‘here’s where me and Chloe first went and got our ears pierced.’

I’ll have to take her to HMV just to keep up and show her where I distracted the security by flashing my new bra at the cameras while Chloe ran out of the door with the second series of
Dawson’s Creek
up her jumper. Emma will watch patiently, and then take me to Boots and show me the exact brand of icywhite glitter that Chloe liked to stroke over her brow-bone on special occasions. Like New Year’s Eve.

She doesn’t come to the flat, but I meet her once or twice a month in a Thirties-themed cafe called Brucciani’s that we choose because it’s almost exactly half way between her place and mine. I have to get there first and order for us – if she looks through the windows and sees that I’m not there she’ll turn around and go home. We don’t talk much. I tend to sit opposite her, look at her dirty hair and dull eyes and try to guess what she is thinking. She looks different now.

I wonder about those other girls – her friends. The make-up and the boots and going-out clothes. Making friends with the bouncers. These days, she can’t hold down a real job and doesn’t even raise her eyes to the waitress when she is paying for her tea. I don’t know where her friends are now. I don’t know if she still likes a drink, a dance, a kebab on the way home. I don’t think there’s a boyfriend. Is she into girls? I think about the photographs I took of Chloe, wonder if she ever handed the camera to Emma. I try to picture them kissing, their mouths working wetly together. It doesn’t work. Emma hates to be touched – it’s like she’s bruised all over.

On our visits to Brucciani’s, we make attempts at small-talk like normal people do. Emma will ask about my job. I will ask after her family, who I don’t think she is in touch with anymore. It’s always a relief when the waitress comes with the tray of tea. There are a few minutes of distraction bestowed by the individual metal teapots, the condensation on the flick-up lid, the scald to the ball of the thumb as I pour and the tea slopping onto my saucer. I take those minutes gratefully and I mop the table with napkins more carefully than is necessary.

Most of the time we sit in silence. Often, we’ll give up and escape outdoors, past Winkley Square and back into the park. The fountain is still there, the rockery and the Japanese water garden and the folly at the top of the hill. We sit on one of the benches and more often than not, Emma will slip me a tenner and send me away to the off licence. She always pays because she won’t talk to strangers: it’s one of her phobias. It’s the reason she can’t get a job anyone would actually pay her for. Even I’m not that bad. I take the money and come back with a half bottle of vodka or a few cans inside my coat and we will sit there like that for most of the afternoon. Even in the rain: the damp won’t kill us. Sometimes we see other girls there doing the same as us, and we’ll shout over at them and offer them cigarettes and see if they’ll come and join us. Emma’s more confident when she’s pissed, more likely to nudge my shoulder with hers, tell me a joke, offer a secret. She’ll wipe the neck of the bottle on her sleeve and offer it to whoever is sitting on the next bench.

The other girls never want to come and sit with us. To them, we’re too old.

The last time we were due to meet – about a week ago – Emma never turned up. I waited until nearly closing time and the cafe was almost empty. In there the waitresses wear black dresses and white aprons – a caricature of a maid’s outfit that might sound erotic, but isn’t. The dresses are Teflon and spotted with margarine and dropped coffee. They glide between the tables, wiping and lifting chairs. I was far away, thinking about worms as long as freshwater trout, as long as skateboards, even, and the girl behind the counter shouted over to me – told me to order now if I wanted anything else because she was going to cash up the till. I shook my head. There were wet rings under her arms.

I was sweating too. Wondering what Emma was up to, why she hadn’t come. It was the anniversary coming up, I thought. The memory of it. The way flowers were starting to appear on the verges outside the school again, in the windows of the bank and post office. You couldn’t open a paper without Chloe’s face smiling out at you. Happy Valentine’s Day. The patron saint of lovers and dead schoolgirls. It was bound to make her twitchy. Erratic. Maybe she’d want to talk to someone. I ignored the waitress, who was tutting and slamming the till closed, and waited.

‘You never came, the last time,’ I say. ‘I sat there for ages.’

If you say you’re going to be somewhere, you should show up. No questions asked. Take me and Chloe – for all her faults, she never once let me down like that. What Chloe and I had was rare and special and it isn’t really fair to compare Emma to her in that way, but all the same, I am pissed off.

Emma’s eyes are glued to the screen and she has that look people get when they’re immersed in television – slack, absent, stupid.

‘I sat there like a lemon, waiting. I looked like a dick.’

‘There was an emergency at work,’ she said. ‘I needed to stay and help out.’

‘Emergency?’

I don’t believe her. Emma doesn’t ‘work’. She claims incapacity benefit for depression, anxiety attacks and phobias. She volunteers at a dogs’ home sixteen hours a week and because they can’t pay her they let her take her pick of the clothes people donate to sell in their charity shop.

Emma nods. ‘There was a holdall of puppies dumped around the back of the office. I only noticed it because one of them squeaked as I walked past. Would have walked right past otherwise. I got them out – newborn ones – and I had to wait until the on-call vet turned up.’ She turns to me, and suddenly smiles. ‘We only lost four of them.’

‘That’s good,’ I say. I want to ask her what they did with the dead ones, but I don’t.

Emma nods, turns back to the television and makes herself another roll-up.

‘I thought you were giving up?’

She pulls a face. ‘Too late for that. I started at school. Chloe used to give them to me. I’ll probably smoke forever. The earlier you start,’ she sucked at the tube hungrily, ‘the harder it is to stop. More than half my life now.’

‘Me too,’ I say. ‘I wonder how many other people she passed that habit on to?’

Emma turns her head and stares at me as if I’ve said something shocking and blasphemous. The branch of Nationwide on the high street kept a framed photograph of Chloe and an everfresh bunch of Juliet roses in the window for three years. No one is allowed to say anything bad about Chloe. Chloe was born beautiful, had no ugly duckling phase, and stayed beautiful. The world didn’t dirty her: Chloe would have got to thirty and still had her unmarked skin and fine, pale hair.