Cold Light (19 page)

He pulled out and started to drive back towards the city centre.

‘It wasn’t that, nothing to do with that. It was something else,’ I said quickly. ‘I don’t know what exactly. An infection.’

Carl didn’t say anything – as if Chloe being ill was my fault.

‘She’s going home tomorrow morning. It wasn’t anything serious.’

I tried laughing but in the car it sounded really fake and it made me cringe. ‘You know what she’s like,’ I said, and swallowed hard.

‘Did she tell anyone about it? Did she tell anyone about me?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.

Chloe was probably explaining all about Carl to Amanda and Nathan right now. Still, there was no need to tell him that. The lights on the dashboard were blinking green and red and I wanted to find out which ones belonged to the heater, but I didn’t dare. I pushed my feet against the bottom of the car. A crisp packet crackled loudly and I lifted my bum off the seat to get the poster out of my pocket to show to him.

‘Does anyone know you called me?’ Carl said, and jerked his hand out to adjust the heating. He talked too loudly – almost shouting. That, and his elbow jabbing me as he twisted the dial made me jump and drop the folded paper. It dropped between my knees, down into the dark and I bent over to get it.

‘I want to show you,’ I said, and I was struggling and unfastening my seatbelt. ‘I want you to look at this. It’s that boy who we saw on Boxing Day.’

I straightened up and offered him the paper, still folded and warm from my back pocket, but he knocked my arm away as he turned the steering wheel to navigate a roundabout.

I didn’t think much of Carl but he was a grown-up, and yet somehow one of us too. He was moody and unpredictable and he said really horrible things to me sometimes, but when we’d all had a drink he’d put his arms around mine and Chloe’s shoulders and say we were ‘his girls’. Of all the people I knew, Carl was someone who knew what to do with a secret – especially one that might get you into trouble.

‘Who else did she tell?’ We stopped jerkily at a set of traffic lights. ‘Stop waving that paper about and answer me.’

He did shout then, and lift home or not, I put my hand on the door handle.

‘How would I know? You don’t have to be such an arsehole, Carl. You’re not
my
boyfriend.’

There were a few moments of silence, during which I cried a little. Carl didn’t reach out a hand and touch me, or pat my back or anything like that. He smiled. I could smell fags and something spicy on his breath or in his clothes. His face was pale and it looked blue in the dark.

It’s never properly dark, not in cities. The streetlamps and shop windows throw their light up into the air in a hundred thousand pinpricks that stain the night green and yellow.

The lights changed and we started moving again. He turned off the main road before he should have, and in a few minutes he’d parked under the arches of the bridge that goes over the Ribble.

‘I’ll take you home in a bit.’

He waited for me to stop crying and after a few minutes lit a cigarette, lit a second one from the glowing tip of the first, tapped my shoulder and made me take it.

‘Talk,’ he said, ‘slowly.’

I gulped at the smoke, burning my throat and swallowing back a cough so he wouldn’t laugh at me.

‘I’ve done something,’ I said, ‘I’ve done something terrible. I’ve got to go to the police. I’m going to get locked up.’

I was still finding it hard to get myself under control. I carried on sucking at the cigarette and the car slowly filled with smoke. Carl used his thumb and his first finger to rub his eyebrows.

‘For God’s sake. Show me your bit of paper, then,’ he said.

I wanted to go home. Even if it did mean getting a taxi and hoping it was Donald and not Barbara up to pay for it when I got back. But this was important. It was about Wilson, not me. I was going to do the right thing even if Carl did shout at me and behave like a prick – which was nothing unusual or surprising because he was always like that to me, and even worse to Chloe.

Carl had his hand out. The ends of his fingers were as wide as his knuckles and his nails were chewed short. I gave him the paper and didn’t talk, let him have some peace to look at it. Carl’s lips moved as he read and when he’d finished with it, he folded it up along its creases like it was a map.

‘I heard about that,’ he said. He put his hands on the steering wheel as if the car was moving and we were driving somewhere, flexing and unflexing his elbows. ‘It’s been on the telly.’

‘It’s that boy we met on Boxing Day,’ I said, ‘the one you chased away.’

I tried not to sound accusing, but it came out like that anyway.

‘No, it isn’t,’ Carl said, ‘it’s just some Mong. They all look like that.’

‘It’s him,’ I said, ‘he told me his name.’

‘I forgot you talked to him,’ Carl said. He didn’t say anything else for a long time.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I talked to him and we were chatting about the pond, and the ice – the frozen top. You know how at our school we all go out there, and skid across it and that?’

Carl didn’t reply. I caught myself chewing my hair, and I tucked it behind my ears and felt the soggy end of it stick to my cheek.

‘I told him to go out on the ice – just for a laugh. I thought he might like it. And then you chased him off – and he was probably scared – you said you were going to batter him, and so he ran right out onto the pond and,’ I gulped again, and Carl motioned for me to put the cigarette out in an empty Coke tin he was holding between his thighs, ‘he went through. His ball is there, right in the top of the ice. Frozen in. I saw it.’

For a long while, Carl didn’t say anything. I wondered what he was thinking. He might have been coming up with a plan.

‘What were you doing poking about in the bushes anyway? This time of night?’

I shrugged and Carl seemed to accept it. ‘I think we should go and explain,’ I said. ‘I think we should ring the number on the poster.’

‘We? Nah,’ he said, and laughed. He moved his face nearer to mine and I could see the wet of his eyeballs and the gleam of the gold chain he wore around his neck. I followed it with my eyes down to where it disappeared into his tee-shirt. Chloe told me that he never took it off, even when he was in the bath. Like she’d know.

‘But this is important,’ I said, and I heard myself in the dim hollow of the car, whining over the hum of the heater, even though when I formed the words in my mind I wanted them to sound reasonable.

‘Oh, I know it is,’ Carl said, and instead of moving back away from me he came in even closer until his arm was pressed against mine. He was holding onto the edge of my seat. The car was getting hotter and the warm air was hitting me in the face, blowing my fringe about, and I wanted to rub my eyes, which felt sticky, but I kept my hands still.

‘You’ve done a daft thing,’ he said, and I nodded, ‘but it isn’t like you meant it. Isn’t like you pushed him out there with your bare hands, is it? You never touched him.’

I started to tell him again about the football and what it meant, but Carl brushed my lips with fingers that smelled like fags and curry, and I stopped talking.

‘I know you’re not like Chloe,’ Carl said, and touched my hand. ‘She can be a bit . . . overdramatic. It’s her age. You’re much more sensible though.’

‘Sensible. Thanks. Great.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that. I mean,’ he paused, ‘you think things through before you dive in. You’re careful not to get yourself into a mess you won’t be able to talk your way out of.’ He smiled at me.

‘We need to tell them,’ I said, ‘because if they find out from someone else it’ll look like we were trying to hide something.’

‘No one saw us with him, so who’s going to tell?’ said Carl. ‘The way I see it, there’s no point involving ourselves if we don’t have to.’

‘But—’

‘It was dead. Everyone was tucked up in the house sleeping off their Chrimbo dinners.’

‘There were those guys near Asda. The vigilantes?’

Carl sighed with exaggerated patience. ‘So say someone did see us? Goes to the police, gives them our description? It’s a nogoer. You were at Chloe’s house. She was at your house. I was nowhere near. It’s all worked out, isn’t it?’

I nodded slowly.

‘But I’ve no way of proving it,’ Carl said easily, ‘and when I come to think of it – Chloe doesn’t either. And neither do you, if we’re going to split hairs,’ he smiled at me, ‘but even that doesn’t have to be a problem. Look. Say the police came around to your house tonight. Say you turned the corner and there they were, outside the house. You go in and there’s two of them sitting on your mother’s suite, and they’ve come that sudden she hasn’t even been able to clear your father away.’

He stopped to let me picture it, and I did.

‘So you go in there, and they ask what you were up to on such and such a day. Where did you go? Who were you with? Who did you talk to? Normally, you might get away with saying that you can’t remember. But this is Boxing Day that they’re asking about. Everyone knows what they were up to on Boxing Day. You see what I mean?’

‘Yeah, but—’

He interrupted me. ‘You can get your mum to swear you were in the house with her all day and all night. She’s got to say it straight out, without even looking at you. They’ll dig into it. She’ll have to be ready to name the television programmes you watched, tell them what you had for tea, what time you went to bed, whether you got up for a piss in the night. Do you think your mum would do that for you?’ He didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘Mine would,’ he said, ‘which is why I’m not worried.’

The idea of Barbara lying to anyone at all (
the truth hurts, does it?
) was unimaginable: the police, even less. Barbara took cups of tea out to the traffic wardens checking the residents’ permits on our street. She wasn’t like Carl’s mum. She was respectable. What would Amanda say? Chloe always managed to get her own way. She’d think of something.

‘No one’s going to find out,’ Carl said, waving his hand lazily in an arc. ‘You don’t need to worry about that Mong. He’s not going to be telling anyone your name, is he? Not if you’re right about what’s happened.’ His hand flopped down onto my knee and perched there for a second before squeezing then moving on through the air. ‘About what
you
made happen.’

‘I thought you said it wasn’t my fault. That I never touched him?’

‘Don’t get worked up. Figure of speech,’ he paused, ‘but it wasn’t me telling him to go skating, was it?’

I wound down the window, threw out the cigarette. Carl offered me another and I shook my head.

‘Who else have you told? How long have you been worrying about this?’

‘All day,’ I admitted. I didn’t tell him that less than three hours before I was trying to convince Chloe to call the police and have him taken away. Of course I didn’t. But the guilt was drifting off me like a smell.

‘Chloe’s been – under the weather, out of action – this isn’t the sort of thing you’d tell your parents about, so,’ his hand bumped my knee again, ‘it probably seems more important than it actually is, because you’ve been thinking about it so much with no one to talk to. Did you know twenty people go missing every day?’

I shook my head and tried to imagine them – twenty people out of assembly disappearing – just popping out of existence and leaving nothing behind but gaps in the crowd. Soon, I thought, there weren’t going to be any people left.

‘Most of them come back,’ Carl said. ‘They don’t bother putting it on the news. If they did, they wouldn’t have time for anything else. If you’re wrong about what happened, and this Wilson does turn up after a few days, then you’ve not got nothing to worry about. We didn’t do anything. Just a bit of banter. Nothing nasty in it, was there?’

I wasn’t listening then. I was looking at his hand on the edge of his seat, creeping towards my knee. I was noticing the way he had loosened his seatbelt and edged so far towards me that the handbrake was jabbing into the side of his thigh.

I didn’t even know he liked me like that.

‘I’m not going to try and get one over on you,’ Carl said. ‘I think we both know you’re cleverer than Chloe gives you credit for. I don’t need to “handle” you like I have to with her. No hysterics.’

I felt pleased. My heart was beating in my throat and I didn’t think about what Carl had done to Chloe to make her hysterical. Carl drew a circle in the air in front of his ear, and I thought he was trying to say that I was mad.

‘You’ve let it build itself up in your mind. Talking to me was the right thing to do.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but—’

‘If you ring this number,’ the page appeared and he tapped on it before making it vanish again. His hands were big and clumsy but I could imagine him being able to work good magic tricks and make things disappear, ‘they’re going to ask you who you were with. Want to know how you got there. And then they’re going to want to know why I was taking you and Chloe out. And if they asked me, I might need to stick to what we started with, and say I’ve never heard of you, and I was never there.’

I finally realised what his problem was, and I blurted it out without thinking, ‘you’d get in trouble, about Chloe. Because she’s only—’