Cold Light (18 page)

Two and a half years, then Chloe arrived in my form, transferred from another school.

‘It wasn’t meeting my needs,’ she’d said.

She’d been kicked out. Was on her last chance. There was a spare chair next to me that no one else wanted to sit in. Because it was her first day she didn’t know she was supposed to sit somewhere else too. We became friends. Other girls liked her or were scared of her. They started to leave me alone.

Chloe saved me. We had a special bond and she was ruining it, and it was all because of Carl. I thought about him and as I sat on the edge of Chloe’s hospital bed with that poster and the stupid Brook leaflet jabbing me through my pocket, Emma’s penguin dangling over my head, I snapped.

‘Where does this Carl live?’ Amanda was saying. I might as well have not been there, except Chloe wasn’t looking at her mother but leaning forward in the bed and shooting me a boiling look that made me want to leg it.

‘Forget it,’ Chloe said. ‘Just shut up.’

‘Chloe,’ Amanda wailed, ‘your father’ll have to hear about this. Just wait until he gets back from his meeting . . .’

Chloe scrabbled at the sheets and it was only the tube attaching her to the drip that stopped her getting out of bed completely and coming for me. I ignored the feeling in my stomach, turned, and ran.

Chapter 16

When I got out of the hospital it was properly dark. I checked how much money I had left and decided to get to Cuerden on my own and retrace Wilson’s path through the woods myself. I knew it was far too dark to be out at night and I was going to have to switch buses at the station and it would take me ages and ages to get there and get home again. I knew that I was going to get a roasting when I got home, but compared to what I knew I had coming from Chloe, a grounding from Barbara was nothing. I was mad enough to feel invincible and I was determined that I was going to find something to implicate Carl in Wilson’s disappearance. It shouldn’t be too difficult, after all – we were there, weren’t we? That was the truth. And Carl chased him off into those woods. All I needed to find (I skipped through hazily remembered plots of
Columbo
in my mind as I paced in the bus shelter) was a dropped cigarette packet. A set of tyre tracks. Something, anything, to prove that he was there even if Chloe was stupid enough to stick up for him and say he wasn’t.

When the 125 left the station it was empty. I sat at the back, lit a cigarette and tried to blow smoke rings at my reflection in the window. I thought about Wilson. It would not be nice if he was still there in the woods, if he fell down and hurt himself running away from Carl. I started to feel sick because I was thinking about Wilson lying in the wet plants and leaf-skeletons, lying from Boxing Day afternoon until now, even through New Year’s Eve: the night when there are parties everywhere, and fireworks in the sky, and drinking and party poppers and no one was supposed to be on their own. I imagined the creatures that would scuttle out from under the leaves and about his hurt hand hanging onto his new ball and the wrinkly, lookingafter hands, waiting for him at home for all this time. I think I might have been enjoying myself, in some horrible way, but I stopped myself as soon as I started trying to imagine his mother.

Most people who run away and go missing are young girls. They were like me. No, they were like Chloe – they have older boyfriends and they go out at night too much. And then someone grabs them and takes them away in a van. Or they are young girls whose parents are too busy drinking and injecting themselves to notice that they haven’t been to school but have got on a train and gone to London. Don’t notice until their girl has been swallowed up into the grey of the pavements and the big buildings and the all-night clubs of the capital city, hundreds of miles away. I could do it, I thought. That idea, or the smoke, made me dizzy. That is what happens. They hardly put it on the news anymore. What does not happen, I decided, blowing smoke at the corner of the little window, is grown-up men vanishing. Even if they are a bit funny, like a Mong, like Wilson is, going out with their football and then never coming home. Especially at this time of year.

I ran across the car park with my hood up in case anyone else was there. Didn’t stop to look at the stoat and the cowslip on the sign. To me, it felt safer in the woods than it was in the car park.

When we were driving here on Boxing Day, Carl told Chloe that people go to this car park in their cars at night to have sex. And sometimes, he said, they leave the lights inside the car on and one of the back windows open so that people can stand about and watch and even put their hands through the window if they feel like it.

‘It’s called dogging,’ he said, and looked over his shoulder at me – he wanted to see if I’d heard and was blushing.

Chloe laughed. ‘That’s so weird!’

I nearly told Chloe he was just making it up and trying to put ideas in her head. He was obviously trying to acclimatise her for something he was planning on doing to her himself, but as usual, they were in the front so speaking to the backs of their heads would have been pointless. Before I could say anything he had turned the music up loud and revved the engine.

That night there was a car in the car park but it was dark inside and I couldn’t see if anyone was in it. I ran past it anyway, leapt over a ridge in the soil, and was in the woods. The moonlight coming through the trees was bluish and faint. I couldn’t see my legs because I was wearing jeans, but my white trainers flashed in and out in front of me as I stepped. When I stood still it was absolutely silent until my ears got used to the space and then I could hear cars somewhere far away. And when I moved, the crack of sticks and the rustle of frozen leaves was almost deafening. I tried to tiptoe, but that made it worse.

It was stupid, being there. Stupid being in a dark place on my own at night, even though I had my house keys with me. The keys had a little metal ornament on them that was shaped like an upside-down tear-drop. When the attacks had first started, me and Chloe had scraped the edge of the tear-drop into a point against a wall. I held it in my hand inside my pocket and tested the point against my thumb. It didn’t hurt, but I thought if I needed to, I could take someone’s eye out with it.

I saw nothing, and as I went on it got darker. The things in the undergrowth that caught my eye, that I thought might be something to do with Carl, turned out to be plastic carrier bags caught against twigs, a curved piece of green and yellow plastic, and hundreds and hundreds of crisp packets. An old chest freezer was there, along with a bike frame and an old buggy and a mattress that someone had tried to set fire to. It all smelled rank and catty, and as I knew these things weren’t evidence of anything I walked right past them to find the path and follow the steps downwards out of the trees and onto the cleared and gravelled walkway that goes around the pond.

In the summer there are ducks and plants and things, and it is a nice place to come and walk about. There used to be loads of ducklings too, but someone got sick of their pet terrapins, released them into the water and, the story goes, every spring the terrapins swim about under the surface and snap the legs off the little birds swimming on the top. I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve never seen them.

That night it was frozen solid, just like I’d told Wilson. Like everyone else, I’d made promises to Barbara and Donald that I would never, ever walk on the pond when it was frozen. All our parents made us swear down that we wouldn’t do it. Out of the trees it was a bit lighter and I could see stones and cans and big sticks lying on top of the ice. People do it all the time. Throw heavy things onto it as hard as they can. If it doesn’t break – if it doesn’t crack at all – then it is all right to walk on. Someone had even chucked a hub-cap out there. I could see the grooves where it had skidded across the top. I went around the outside carefully, not looking for anything anymore, but shivering and stamping my feet against the sparkle of frost growing on the path. The metal poles with the signs on had scales of ice on them and I remembered the boy who licked one of them to see if his tongue would stick, for a dare.

It was freezing. More freezing there than it was even in the woods, because the wind was skating across the frozen lid of the water and making my hair fly about and slap my ears. I tucked it all into the back of my hood and walked on. There was a lump in the ice – a disturbance in the flat surface. I walked fast to get to it, squinting to see, and not wanting to look at the same time. My teeth were chattering. It was too cold to hang about here and it was too cold a fortnight ago, and he might have been a bit soft, but if he could have, he would have gone home, or got on a bus, or tried to find a cafe or something when he got cold, and before it got dark, even if Carl had really, really scared him.

There used to be a wooden jetty thing poking out from the path and onto the water. There was a railing around it, to show it wasn’t for boats. It wasn’t for anything, except walking out over the water right into the middle of the pond. But people were using it for the banned things: feeding the ducks and fishing. And in the summer people used to jump off the end to go swimming. The water at the edge of the pond was too full of reeds and bread and floating carrier bags and pop bottles to wade through, but if you jumped off the edge of the wooden platform you got in where the water was clear. And they took it away – because of the fish and the bread and the jumping – the thinking being that it was only a matter of time before someone took a stupid dive and cracked their head open on the concrete bottom.

Some of the posts were still there though, and they were sticking out of the top of the ice like trees that had been lopped off before the branches started. The lump in the ice was between the two poles furthest away from the edge. I got as close to where the ice started as I could without stepping on it, and looked. If I’d have been braver, I would have walked out on the ice, or stood on the flat tops of the old wooden poles and used them like stepping stones to get to the middle of the water. I wasn’t that brave. I just leaned forward, and squinted against the wind, and stared at it a bit until the shape resolved itself into an object.

It was a football. Half a football, really. The other half was under the water, and the skin of the ice had frozen around it and locked it into place. My heart started to rattle. I remembered Wilson’s new Christmas football and I made myself think about the park-keeper or the nature warden or whatever he was called – the man who hauls the bike frames and shopping trolleys out of the pond with a rope, the man who takes the primary school kids around on the stoat and cowslip walks. He’ll have put it in there so he can pull it out later and leave an air hole for the fish. It would make sense to use a football rather than a ping-pong ball or a tennis ball, because this pond is much bigger than most people’s garden ponds – it’s a lake really – and would have more fish in it, and the fish would need more air, and so there would need to be a bigger hole.

All true facts.

And I heard my own voice, telling Wilson about ice skating on the lake. Recommending it, saying that what his parents didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. I could call up the picture as easy as anything – Wilson blundering through the woods while Carl called through the trees behind him. Crashing through the undergrowth, branches snapping and sounding like gunshot. He’d have been scared – wanting to get away fast. And when he came out between the trees and saw the pond in front of him, its surface as flat as a pavement, it would have made sense for him to dash right across it rather than wasting time following the path around it. The shortest distance between two parallel points.

Carl was only chasing him, after all. It was me who’d told him it was safe to walk on the ice. My fault.

I turned away from the lake and ran off in the opposite direction to the one I’d come in. I slipped on the frosty path, and lurched into the woods again, running through the dark with sticks hitting me in the face and leaves sparkling and sliding under the heels of my trainers.

When I got onto the main road the cold air was burning my lungs and I pulled my phone out of my pocket and tried to call Chloe. The call went right through to the answer machine. She probably wasn’t allowed to have it with her in the hospital, or she’d turned it off and put it under her mattress because she didn’t want her parents to find it. I guessed at the time, checked a bus timetable and finally gave up and telephoned Carl.

He answered right away. I could hear loud music, someone laughing.

‘Carl,’ I said, and I was still panting. Probably sounded to him like one of those dirty hoax callers.

‘What’s up?’ he said, in his funny, bored voice. ‘What are you calling me for, little girl?’

I felt humiliated and angry. This whole adventure had been to get him into trouble and show Chloe how much better off she’d be without him. Instead, all I’d done was find out that I was probably responsible for something terrible happening myself. And Carl was the only one I could rely on to pick me up and tell me what to do.

‘Where are you? I need you to come and get me.’

‘I can’t hear what you’re saying. What is it?’

His friends were with him. I could hear the sound of the car engine revving too, and imagined him doing handbrake turns in a supermarket car park, taking his hand off the wheel to make an opening and closing beak in the air. I swallowed, tried to think clearly.

‘Hurry up, I’ve got another call waiting.’ I heard him chewing on something, the sound of his mouth working against the handset. ‘Lola? What are you after?’

‘Chloe’s ill,’ I said at last, ‘she’s in hospital. You’ve got to come and meet me right now.’

‘What is it?’ he said, more seriously. The music faded.

‘I’m at Cuerden,’ I said. ‘Come right now. I need a lift.’

‘
Cuerden?
What are you doing
there
?’

Carl sounded scared. The music in the background stopped abruptly.

‘Just come quick, will you? I’m fucking freezing.’

I hung up, went and sat on the bench, and crossed my fingers. Chloe normally managed to get Carl to do what she wanted, so he must be quite stupid.

He arrived fifteen minutes later and shoved the passenger side door open while he was still pulling into the kerb.

‘What’s up with Chloe?’ Carl said. ‘Has she done something to herself?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I was supposed to be meeting her tonight,’ he looked at his watch, ‘after her mum and dad go to sleep. Is Emma with you?’

‘No!’ I said. ‘Chloe’s in the hospital, she can’t meet you.’

‘What’s she done?’

‘She thought she might be pregnant, but it’s all right, she isn’t,’ I said.

Carl shook his head, and laughed quietly. ‘Silly cow. She turned up at the hospital for that?’