Cold Light (21 page)

‘We don’t care what anyone says he’s done, or not done,’ she said, ‘he’s our son. He’d never hurt or frighten anyone. Never. We want him to come home.’

She stopped and swallowed. The camera zoomed in on her until her face and hands filled the screen. She shook out a handkerchief and dabbed at her dry eyelids.

I wanted to speak then – tell Donald it was all wrong, before I either lost my nerve, or threw up. It was me, I wanted to say. Me. My fault. I did it. I wanted to be honest. I believed what people say: that telling the truth lifts a weight off your mind.

I told him to go and test the ice, and he fell through and drowned.

The words were right there, and Donald was the safest person to tell – the best person to test the theory of getting it off your chest, because he’d forget, and even if he didn’t and told someone else, they wouldn’t believe him.

But they might. And then it would be me on the television. I stiffened, trying to imagine what that would feel like. How weird would it be to see yourself on the telly? How much trouble would I really be in?

I remembered the conversation I’d had with Carl. The last time I’d seen Chloe. I was on my own – there was no way they were going to stick up for me, and tell anyone who asked that I only spoke to Wilson, that I didn’t mean it.

‘I’d make you glow in the dark, if I could,’ Donald said thoughtfully, and changed the channel.

‘What?’

He squeezed my hand, let go of it and stood up. Stared at me, smiling – although less at me than the wallpaper over my head.

‘Or the bushes in the park where you and that Chloe go,’ he said.

‘We don’t go in the bushes, Dad,’ I said.

‘You’ve not been out for a while,’ he said. ‘Is it the weather? Too cold for you?’

I shook my head.

‘Shall I get your mother to get you some new gloves?’

‘Chloe’s not been out.’

‘She’s recovered though, from her time in hospital?’

‘She’s out. It was nothing, really.’

‘You’ve been missing her, then?’ Donald said. ‘In your room after school. Sulking?’ he smiled, ‘trouble in paradise? Or is it a young man? Something else on your mind?’

I looked at him while I gathered up the cards and slotted them into the packet, making sure all the backs were facing the right way. I was surprised by how much he had noticed.

‘Chloe’s going to be hanging out with Emma from now on.’

‘And there’s no room for one more?’

I shook my head. ‘It goes like that sometimes, at our school. It doesn’t matter.’

‘Nothing your old dad can sort out for you?’

‘I doubt it,’ I said, imagining him turning up at Chloe’s house and sitting in the kitchen with Nathan and Amanda, using the reasonable voice Barbara put on when she was speaking to the water board or the doctor’s surgery.

‘Oh dear,’ he said. Without noticing, I’d dropped the cards and they’d scattered over the carpet. My hands were shaking. ‘What’s up? You hungry?’

My throat closed. I wanted to tell him, but it seemed easy and impossible at the same time, so I hovered and said nothing.

‘Things like this blow over,’ he said, ‘and before you know it, you’ll be back out gallivanting with your Chloe. And this Emma too. She can’t be that bad, can she, if Chloe likes her so much?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘But when you do go out, stay away from the park. Do your dad a favour, eh? Put his mind at rest and tell him you’ll stay away from the park, all dark places, until this,’ he gestured at the television, ‘is all cleared up.’

‘I thought he’d stopped?’

‘For the time being. But where there’s one, there’s another. Creeping about. There’s all sorts out there.’ Donald touched his mouth, swallowed as if it hurt him. He closed his eyes and put his finger in the air – his signal for me to be quiet. Then he laughed.

‘Remember your Uncle Ronald? True love, or whatever stands in for it, knows no bounds.’

‘You all right, Dad?’

‘Make them glow in the dark first,’ he said, and opened his eyes. He was wearing brown trousers and a brown and green shirt with a pattern on it – repeating diamonds between narrow stripes. It was his favourite shirt and it was threadbare to the point of transparency at his elbows.

‘Dad?’

‘You could do something to their genes,’ Donald said. ‘It wouldn’t hurt them – it would,’ he was pacing, ‘
prevent
such a lot of—’ he caught himself and cut it short, as if he was about to say a dirty word. ‘Lola,’ he said, leaned over, grabbed my shoulders and smiled into my face, ‘it would keep you safe.’

I smelled fags then, powerfully, and Barbara was in the room, her hand on Donald’s elbow.

‘Put her down,’ she said briskly. His grip tightened and then relaxed. His smile faded. He rolled his eyes. We’ll humour her, he was saying, and didn’t need to speak the words out loud.

‘Donald? Donald? When did you last eat?’ she spoke loudly, as if he had trouble with his hearing, which he never did. ‘Come on, both of you. The plates have been on the table for five minutes now.’

She bustled him into the kitchen. I clung onto the edge of the couch as if the floor was moving, and trembled.

Chapter 19

Chloe was back at school that same week. Paler, a little bluer around the temples, perhaps, but as she assured everyone ‘basically all right’.

Except she didn’t assure me of anything at all. I arrived at the art room to find Emma sitting in my spot. I should have anticipated it – I should have got myself ready and planned how I wanted to react when I saw the pair of them talking ‘confidentially’ about Chloe’s experiences in hospital; loud enough for everybody to hear.

When she saw me, Chloe blinked, touched Emma’s arm very gently with her first finger, and said, ‘There she is.’

Emma looked at me slowly. A lazy, only half-interested sneer. She was wearing a gold chain with a heart on it over the front of her school blouse. I recognised it as Chloe’s. She looked different too. Where Chloe was pale, the open pores on her nose showing, Emma had colour in her cheeks and her hair was sleeker and glossier than I’d ever seen it before. Her shoulders slumped less and she was smiling more. She was still buck-toothed, but somehow it didn’t look quite as bad as it had done a few weeks ago.

‘So she is,’ she said, and turned her head quickly. ‘Anyway.’

I actually went and sat with them. I pretended I didn’t know what was going on. Where else would I have sat? I pulled out the stool and felt a strange mixture of things. Cold stones in my stomach and the first real grief I’d ever experienced.

‘What’s she doing?’ Emma asked Chloe. She jerked her head and paused with an open homework diary resting on her palm. I wanted to tear out the pages and screw them into balls and shove them in her mouth. Her fringe shook every time she exhaled.

‘I sit here,’ I said, and shrugged. ‘I always sit here.’

The rest of the class was at my back, staring. I could hear them, the unknown and largely harmless bragging and racket of the boys and in between their deeper and more rumbling sounds, the high-pitched snarl and snap of the girls, gossiping, testing and comparing.

‘Come on,’ I said reasonably, and put my bag on the table, ‘there’s loads of room.’

I was going to ask Chloe how she was feeling. It was easy to get her to talk about herself. I might even have smiled – a sticky and fearful smile, forced and less grown up than I would have wanted. I’d have been Emma’s friend, and endured a threesome to avoid being thrown to the rest of the form like bloody chump from the back of a boat.

Chloe stretched her feet out under the table. Her shoes met my shins. It wasn’t a kick but more of a push that transferred the mud from the bottom of her shoes onto my socks. She yawned luxuriantly, the back of her hand over her mouth, and then leaned forward and draped herself over the pile of bags and coats on the table. Bizarrely, Emma looked at Chloe through that yawn with a kind of pride on her face. Like Chloe was a new baby or the best sort of clutch bag. There was sheer love in that look, and a kind of smug ownership too, that depended on me being there to see it. I saw myself sitting there, only last week, and understood in a terrible cringing flash of insight what people meant by the lessbefrens thing.

‘I don’t remember her sitting here before,’ Chloe said, and settled over the desk, using Emma’s bag as a kind of pillow. I could see the top of her head, her razor-sharp parting and the complication of a French plait so tight it was making her hair come out at the temples.

Emma put down the homework diary and rubbed Chloe’s back.

‘She’s still not well,’ she said, with sickly kindness, ‘probably shouldn’t be here at all, but she was desperate to get out and away from her mum.’ She licked her teeth behind her lips and stared glassily into the air between us, determined not to look at me. ‘They’ve decided she’s grounded for fucking
months
,’ Emma said, as if to no one.

Chloe said something but her voice was muffled by her bag and her head-down position. ‘Tell it to fuck off. I don’t need the stress.’

‘You heard what she said,’ Emma said, still rubbing, and made a clicking noise in her throat. It could have been asthma, or purring. ‘Why don’t you take the hint and go and sit with one of your
other
friends?’

Her smile made her flat face even wider.

Chloe calls you panhead
, I wanted to say.

The walls of the art room were covered in drawings mounted on sheets of black construction paper. One wall was devoted entirely to still life: carrots and tomatoes arranged suggestively and sketched by some joker, wobbly bananas done in felt pen, and a painting of a crumpled crisp packet almost hallucinatory in its detail and accuracy. Another wall devoted to blotchy and smudged attempts at pointillism and one more of pictures of knotted rope, balls of wool, hanks of tangled string: all vivid in black and brown oil pastels, thick enough to scrape your initial into with a fingernail.

I got up, dragged my bag roughly out from under Chloe and went to lean against the paintbrush sink at the side of the classroom. Of course there was nowhere else to sit. It didn’t feel like anyone else had been paying attention, everyone all caught up in the intricacies of their own dramas, but I scanned the room and saw the gaps close up and the empty stools disappear as if the walls themselves were absorbing them.

I should mention this to Donald, I thought, because he will know something about this: herds, mass minds, schools of tiny fish insignificant and edible as individuals, but fearsome and magnificent as one huge flickering shoal. People do it too, I thought, but I already knew that.

Shanks emerged from his office patting the back of his collar. It looked, I thought with a jolt, and before I could stop myself, as if he’d only just put his shirt on. The thought of him being naked in front of a poster of Marc Bolan, maybe even painting like that, made my feet tingle. I closed my eyes and waited for the sensation to pass. Chloe would have called it a cheap thrill. He clapped his hands, as usual, and sat on a corner of his desk, put one ankle on the opposite knee and reached for his register.

‘Glad to see you back in fine fettle, Miss Farley,’ he said.

‘Thanks, sir,’ Chloe said, her cheeks colouring up.

Then he leaned towards her, spoke quietly while the usual classroom noise surged around him, but I heard what he said.

‘Come and see me afterwards. A quick word, please. Bring,’ he waved the corner of the register in Emma’s direction, as if he was wafting away a bad smell, ‘Laura if you want.’

He didn’t sound pissed off, only stern and calm and determined to be kind. He was going to do his pastoral care voice, I thought, and force her to go and see the nurse.

In the first year or two of high school, the nurse, whose real name was Patsy, was called Nitty Nora the Biddy Explorer, because if you went to get a plaster or a suck on your inhaler, she’d always sneak in a check of your head as well.

In Year Nine the girls would call her Dr Jamrag, because you had to go to her office for supplies if you were caught short. She had a drawer filled to the brim with Dr White’s – the sort of hospital-issue sanitary towels that made you waddle and weren’t even for sale in pound shops. Someone once asked for a tampon, and got a lecture about toxic shock syndrome, natural flow and the importance of the hymen. Seeing her for the hymen talk was such a terrifying prospect that none of us were ever caught short – there was a trick you could do with toilet paper and a folded-up sandwich bag that would hold you over until home-time, and we taught it to each other in whispers during PE.

If the Year Tens and Elevens spoke about Patsy at all it was with a bit more respect because there was a rumour that you could get little paper bags full of condoms from her, or at least she knew where you could get them for free, no questions asked. It might have been a rumour, but being sent to the nurse, or being seen coming out of her office meant only one thing to the rest of us. And all of us, well, all of the boys, at least, were obsessed with condoms – there were always one or two stuck to the windows, and such a plentiful supply of them spare for water bombs that the rumour about Patsy and her paper bags was probably true.

I imagined Chloe in her office, and under the folding sick bed, a treasure chest of foil packets shining like coins.

‘What are you doing perched there?’ Shanks said. He looked at me, up on the sink, and shook his head. ‘You’ll give yourself piles – that porcelain must be freezing.’

I know he didn’t mean it. Most adults have completely forgotten the way things are at school. The word ‘piles’ released such a great gale of laughter that it took Shanks several minutes to get the class under control again.

He was standing in front of the longest wall – the one covered in all the coursework from the Year Elevens who were taking art for GCSE. Usually the ones who had problems reading or writing, or getting themselves dressed properly. They were the best pictures though. Chalk, charcoal, pencil, on blue and white and grey paper. Glasses filled with ice and something carbonated, so well drawn you could almost hear the fizz. Car wing mirrors, windows, the curved reflective bonnet of a car. Lightbulbs, more windows, and the strange lozenge-shaped bulbs of streetlamps. I fell into the pictures, gazing at the glass and water, ice and bubbles, until Shanks banged the spine of the register against the edge of the desk and demanded silence.

‘For those of you that have been watching the news,’ Shanks said, and held the closed register in front of his crotch like he was taking a penalty, ‘the rumours that the school is going to close so you can all stay safe at home and in bed have no doubt got your little minds working.’ He put down the register and started to pace. His hair sprung up from his head in thick pale tufts – there was a touch of red in it, as if he’d been a full-on ginger in his younger days. Strawberry blond, although that’s not a very manly way of describing it.

‘I’m here to tell you that’s not even half true – there are no plans for closures, and if there were, I’m sure I’d know about them before Terry Best. While the council has had a chat about 8 p.m. curfews for the under-sixteens, that’s not something the school would decide, so there’s no point passing around that petition when you’re supposed to be listening to me, Rachel Briggs. Thank you. In your bag until home-time.’

The thing is Shanks wasn’t even that tall. Chloe said height, the ownership of a car and foreplay were all you needed from a man – expecting anything else was being picky, a perfectionist, and the reason why I shouldn’t be expecting to get a Valentine from anyone but Donald this year. Again. She could talk. Carl had
both
ears pierced.

‘No closure, no curfew, but I’m asking you – for the sake of yourselves, your parents and my nicotine-addled heart – to be careful with yourselves. I know what you get up to at night. Monsters, the lot of you, sneaking out of the back bedroom window as soon as your parents are asleep. I know what you get up to in the bus shelters, in the back of the train station, on the roof of the Spar, round the docks, underneath the jungle gym in the kiddies’ swing park – Danny Towers.’

He stopped for the expected laugh, which came. Danny was shoved and punched by his friends, and smirked proudly.

‘I’m a realist,’ Shanks said, glanced at me on my porcelain perch and almost winked. ‘I’m not asking you to stop. I’m not telling you to stay in at night and I’m not telling you that you need to spend the whole weekend hoovering up for your mother and arranging flowers at St Peter’s. I’m not that old that I don’t remember what it’s like. What I am doing, is asking, imploring, beseeching and warning you that whatever you do, do it in pairs. At least. Promise me, 3Y1, that you’ll be sensible until this pest is caught.’

He’d got serious towards the end – his voice slowed and dropped until he had the attention of almost everyone in the room.

‘But, sir, he’s packed it in,’ Danny let his voice slide up at the end as if he was asking a question. We all spoke like that.

‘When I say “caught”, I mean caught properly – not just taking a rest, not just having a bit of time off over Christmas or while it’s a bit nippy out – but locked up somewhere, answering to a cellmate who just happens to be two foot wider than he is, and someone’s doting dad. Do you hear me? Now’s not the time to start getting careless.’

I saw the back of everyone’s heads, nodding at him obediently.

‘Chloe,’ he said quickly, ‘get your head up off the desk and stop whispering. Emma? Turn this way please. Is there something about this you think doesn’t apply to you? You think you’re immune to what’s going on in this city? The last victim was fifteen – you’re not far off that now, are you? If he’s stopped, brilliant – you won’t catch me complaining. But a fortnight without an attack and some rumours about some poor boy who didn’t find his way home doesn’t mean you’re all safe. I don’t want to be called into the headmaster’s office one morning to be told one of you lot has been caught in the crossfire between Jack the Ripper and a vigilante mob – right? Think about it, and wash that make-up off your face before Mrs Grant sees you and decides to be less tolerant than me. One more detention this term, Chloe, and it’s a meeting with your parents.’

Emma was stiff and pale and horrified – probably because she wasn’t used to a telling off. Slowly, very slowly, Chloe lifted her head. Her face was red. She was shaking with laughter.

After the wreck of morning registration, I didn’t even attempt the dining hall. There was no chance I would be able to go in there, queue, pay, sit, eat and return my tray alone. My stomach squeaked and popped with hunger.