Cold Light (22 page)

You’re chubby anyway, I thought briskly, and walked in the other direction towards the library and the bank of computers you were allowed to use for homework. I had Donald’s paperwork with me. Might as well try to type some of it up.

Despite everything, there was something soothing about the typing. Donald’s handwriting was always cramped and erratic – often smudged because he was left-handed. I didn’t find it difficult to read because I was used to it – I’d done jobs like this one for him before and it was how I knew how to type. Before Year Nine, when I’d finally been allowed to use the school computers for coursework, I’d used Barbara’s old Silver Reed – a portable with a slipping ampersand key and a matching plastic case the colour of a hearing aid – the one that Donald had ruined with a lump of lard. I remember I used to spray the ribbon with water from the plant sprayer and wind it back up again because I didn’t know you could buy replacements.

Sometimes what I found out during this typing was interesting, if not exactly useful. The Montgolfier brothers made a balloon, and tested it by offering convicted criminals a pardon if they survived a trip over the Channel. Or Wrigley’s chewing gum: the first product in the world to be sold with a barcode.

I sat at the computer furthest away from the door in a corner next to a mural of famous dead writers waving and wearing the school colours. The computer hummed and the monitor crackled with static as it loaded up. I took Donald’s exercise books out of my bag, fed my floppy disk into the front of the unit, and started to type.

The 27th of January, at the entrance of the vast Bay of Bengal . . . about seven o’clock in the evening, the
Nautilus
. . . was sailing in a sea of milk . . . Was it the effect of the lunar rays? No; for the moon . . . was still lying hidden under the horizon . . . The whole sky, though lit by the sidereal rays, seemed black by contrast with the whiteness of the waters.

‘It is called a milk sea,’ I explained . . .

‘But, sir . . . can you tell me what causes such an effect? for I suppose the water is not really turned into milk.’

‘No, my boy; and the whiteness which surprises you is caused only by the presence of myriads of infusoria, a sort of luminous little worm, gelatinous and without colour, of the thickness of a hair and whose length is not more than seventhousandths of an inch. These insects adhere to one another sometimes for several leagues.’

‘. . . and you need not try to compute the number of these infusoria. You will not be able, for . . . ships have floated on these milk seas for more than forty miles.’

Jules Verne,
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

June 1854. South of Java. Aboard the American clipper
Shooting Star
. Captain Kingman reports:

The whole appearance of the ocean was like a plain covered with snow. There was scarce a cloud in the heavens, yet the sky . . . appeared as black as if a storm was raging. The scene was one of awful grandeur; the sea having turned to phosphorus, and the heavens being hung in blackness, and the stars going out, seemed to indicate that all nature was preparing for that last grand conflagration which we are taught to believe is to annihilate this material world.

The British Meteorological Office has established a Bio luminescence Database, which presently contains 235 reports of milky seas seen since 1915. Surely bioluminescent organisms must be the explanation for them? But most of these organisms simply flash briefly and are incapable of generating the strong, steady glow observed. Marine bacteria alone glow steadily. However, calculations show that unrealistic concentrations of bacteria would be needed to generate the observed light. Herring and Watson admit there is no acceptable explanation of the milky sea and yet urge observers of it to retain the water, spiked with bleach, for further study.

Here, Donald’s notes dissolved into fragments. I rearranged, trying to line his words up into coherent sentences. I may have distorted his meaning – I really don’t know.

Milky Seas Sightings in British Waters and Their Uses: a request for attention, funding and assistance with further research.

Do not want
to hand this project over.

There are commercial as well as social and humanitarian applications to any possible findings that must be explored with all haste.

Letters to BMS and various university marine research departments (unanswered) enclosed for your records and perusal.

N. B. What kind of bleach?

Nearly forty minutes later I set the document to print and packed the folders and papers away in my bag. I went to the printer, which was on the side of the librarian’s desk at the front of the room. There was a red biscuit tin in the shape of a telephone box with a slit in the top for your money. Mr Brocklehurst (Broccoli, or Meat and One Veg) never looked up. As long as he heard money going into the tin he was happy enough with you taking your printouts. They were five pence each, but I shoved a handful of pennies through the slit, keeping my eyes on his bowed head. I was paying so much attention to him that I didn’t see Chloe and Emma, leaning on each other, grinning like leggy, white-socked vampires, and pulling the sheets out of the printer as they arrived.

‘What’s this?’ Chloe said, the bundle clutched tight between her fingers. She was creasing the pages – holding on tight and expecting me to grab for it.

‘Give me it,’ I said. Emma leaned over, put her head on Chloe’s shoulder and ran her fingers along a line of text.

‘
Despite my age and lack of swimming ability it is my fervent hope
,’ she read in the seal-like bark that we heard from the remedials who were forced to read out in class.

‘What the fuck is that?’ she asked.

Broccoli turned his head and smiled.

‘You girls wouldn’t mind taking that outside, would you?’

‘Of course not, Mr Brocklehurst,’ Chloe said, and tucked the sheets under her arm. ‘Come on,’ she said, over her shoulder. Emma sniffed, and followed without looking at me.

I waited until I saw them through the glass doors, huddling over the pages and laughing. I followed too. The corridor outside the library was busy. The second meal sitting was over, and the day was too cold for anyone to want to go outside.

‘So,’ Chloe said.

‘I’m writing a story,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing.’

The trick, I thought, was to keep my hands in my pockets. Sit still, don’t lean in, don’t grab for it. Stand back, breathe casual. She only wants it because she thinks it’s important.

‘Really?’ Chloe said, got so close it looked like she was sniffing the pages. She turned them like a fan. ‘What about?’

‘Explorers.’

‘Bullshit,’ she said. ‘This is your dad’s, isn’t it?’

‘What?’ Emma said.

Chloe turned away from me. I saw the side of her face – her mouth opening and closing, a loop of hair curled around her ear. She had a mole on the side of her neck. I stared at it. I wanted to stab it with a pencil.

Emma screwed up her nose. Panhead. Panhead. ‘Her dad’s writing a story?’

Chloe licked her lips, took a breath, and spoke as loudly as she could without shouting.

‘No one’s supposed to know, but Lola’s grand— I mean, dad – he’s gone soft in the head. He’s got this junk room where her mum keeps him because he’s not safe to wander around the house on his own.’

Emma glanced at me. Are we going too far? she seemed to ask. It wasn’t funny anymore and Emma wasn’t cruel, not like Chloe. This was worse. This was pity, and the effort of understanding. Ah yes, she was thinking, that’s why you’re the way you are. That’s why you’re not one of us – always on the outside, left at home on New Year’s Eve, waiting outside the car on Boxing Day. Standing guard. Watching, waiting, following. It’s because of your dad. He’s soft. I should have known.

I couldn’t speak. It wasn’t true. Not even half true. There had been accidents with aspirin and disposable razors, but Chloe made it sound like we kept him chained to a bolt in the wall. More than the untruth of it, the betrayal took my breath away. I knew they weren’t like ordinary parents, of course I did. Things had been bad enough for me without Donald and the junk room and his writing being made public knowledge. It wasn’t a junk room, it was a den, and it had taken me a long time to let Chloe come and see me at my house.

‘Give me those back, Chloe,’ I said quietly. ‘There’s no need for it.’

Chloe hooted with laughter.

‘Come here, Em, have a look.’

Emma glanced at me again, almost reluctant but not quite, and leaned against Chloe, reading the papers over her shoulder. She giggled and started to read aloud.

‘
The humanitarian applications of this project, assuming we are able to locate and extract the bacteria behind the Heysham milky seas phenomenon
–’ She stumbled over that word, but Chloe didn’t remark on it even though Emma was in set three for everything and me and Chloe were in set one, ‘
are vast and wide-ranging. We will
,’ she looked at me, frowning, ‘
be able to fund these aims with proper exploitation of the more commercial applications, but it should be remembered by all readers of this report that
. . .’ She trailed off and looked at me.

‘What is this? Why’s he going on about Christmas trees and rapists? I don’t get it.’

‘There’s nothing to get, you chump,’ Chloe said, and elbowed Emma out of the way. ‘Her father’s a crackpot. And it’s catching. She’s probably made half of this up herself.’

‘Give them to me,’ I said quietly. I reached out my hand, and she knocked it away.

‘You’re a weird, frigid little bitch, aren’t you?’ she said. Emma was at her side again. ‘Sitting in here, typing all this up. You’re as bad as he is.’

‘He pays me,’ I said. ‘It’s just a job. Bit like you getting on your back for Carl every time you want a new album. You know?’

Chloe lurched forward and I thought she was going to hit me, but at the last moment she bit her bottom lip and turned away.

‘You don’t know anything about me and Carl.’

‘I know
I’m
not the one who’s frigid. Last time I saw him, he stuck his tongue down my throat. You not giving it up anymore, Chloe? Or is he just bored with you hanging off his arm all the time? Don’t suppose you’d know, would you, now mummy’s keeping you locked up at night.’

I expected her to hit me then, I really did. She clenched her fist and the papers crumpled. They’d have to be printed out again, I thought, but that was easy enough. No big deal.

Chloe glanced at Emma.

‘He
did not
make a move on you,’ Emma said. ‘You’re a liar. He didn’t.’

‘Why’s it your problem?’ I said. ‘What’s it to you that Chloe can’t keep a boyfriend?’

‘He didn’t,’ she said again. ‘Admit it.’

Chloe was quiet. I laughed, thinking, like an idiot, that I’d hit a nerve.

‘Yes, he did. Don’t worry though, I turned him down. Not interested, Chloe. You keep him if you’re so keen on him.’

Emma was frozen. Her face looked stiff and horrified.

‘Just leave it, Chloe, she’s not worth getting a detention over.’ She looped her arm through Chloe’s and tried to tug her away.

‘Go back home to your daddy,’ Chloe said. She narrowed her eyes to slits and threw the papers at me. They fluttered between us like birds. The bell rang for the end of lunch and the corridor quickly filled with people charging around getting their bags out of their lockers and hurrying to their next lesson. The typing got crushed under tens of pairs of feet.

Chloe stared at me, daring me to kneel and collect them, but I shrugged and walked away.

‘Carl’s nothing to do with you,’ she spat after me. ‘He’s
ours
.’

Chapter 20

In all the photographs printed of her after her death Chloe was smiling, her hair pulled back tight, the collar of her school shirt stiff and blinding white. But sometimes I remember her the way she was that lunchtime – her hair falling out of her plait and hanging down by her ears – her lips pursed, one hand on her hip and a spot forming on her chin. That scowl. A look that could have curdled milk.

Tonight I remember the things that happened during that winter and it is like watching myself in a reconstruction. Some girl who isn’t quite real enough to be me stumbles through the corridors in a school that cannot have been so large and sits near a pair of girls that would never have been allowed to be so cruel. Our spats were probably comic and insignificant to Shanks, Brocklehurst and the others. No one noticed anything other than the ordinary ebb and shift of teenage girls’ friendships. That’s why they had all those inquiries afterwards: someone, they said, should have noticed something.

Sometimes I remember my thoughts so exactly it seems like I knew which moments would be significant, even before the significance of them became clear. Is that possible, do you think? Something happens – the event explodes like a firework and illuminates the memories before it, as well as after? Maybe. At the time I was preoccupied with my guilt and worry for Wilson and with Emma’s strange shouldering-in and taking Chloe away from me. I was angry with Chloe, as if what had happened to Wilson was her fault instead of mine. I’d always expected that as best friends we’d share each other’s secrets and go halves on all these burdens. And when I needed her most, she was acting like a person I didn’t even know.

No, that wasn’t right. Nothing about Chloe’s behaviour was remarkable. She’d been thrown out of schools before for bullying and truancy. She was only hanging by a thread at our school. But that part of the story has been rewritten now. After she died, ‘wild’ became ‘spirited’ and ‘bully’ became ‘stubborn’.

It happens while I am dozing – my eyes gritty and the muscles at the back of my neck slowly stiffening. The quiet hum of Terry’s broadcast punctuates the adverts and Emma elbows me awake.

‘Breaking news – we’re finally able to confirm the identification of the remains found here earlier this evening as Daniel Wilson, who disappeared without trace on Boxing Day, 1997, three weeks before his thirty-fourth birthday.’

Terry pauses a moment but it’s not the same – this isn’t real solemnity. He’s hardly containing himself – almost itching with glee.

Emma nudges me and I look up to see the picture of Wilson on the screen – the one of him in his Christmas hat. He is like Chloe now, and will never get any older than this. I am so absorbed by the picture, so lost in my own memories of the first time that I saw it and the way I carried the poster about in my pocket until it fell into fragments, that I don’t notice Emma is clutching the arm of the sofa and shaking her head wordlessly. She’s crying. Crying and laughing at the same time.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ I say.

She didn’t know Wilson. I am sure she didn’t know him.

She tries to speak, but for the time being she can’t. She gulps, and smiles, and as she smiles her eyes brim over and tears fall from her eyes onto the front of her jacket.

‘Thank God,’ she says, ‘thank God for that.’

I’ve never seen Emma cry before. Even at Chloe’s funeral she stood next to me with her jaw set and her lips clamped together in a perfectly straight line while the rest of the girls snivelled and wailed like a chorus. I don’t understand. I wish she’d shut up so I can watch the rest of this segment – find out what they think they know, and how they know it. Wilson wasn’t likely to carry about a nice plastic non-biodegradable driving licence in his back pocket and it’s been far too quick for forensics to do anything. How do they know it is him?

‘Jesus,’ Emma says, and rests her face in her hands, sighing out the air between her fingers.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s all right now,’ she says, picks up her glass and takes a long swallow. ‘I’m all right.’ She takes a tissue – no, not a tissue but a real, environmentally friendly handkerchief – from her pocket, and rubs at her eyes, which are red, and as usual, bare of make-up. The rims look raw. I realise she’s been crying for a while – sitting here leaking while I’ve been asleep. How could I have slept?

‘Do you remember him?’ she asks.

My mouth is dry. I reach for my wine glass and my hand bumps hers. She’s handing me cold coffee, and I sip at it and rub my eyes. I’ve been dreaming.

‘I remember the news about him,’ I say carefully, ‘that Christmas when he disappeared.’

‘Yes, they did a reconstruction, didn’t they? Those two girls. Chloe was seething mad because she’d have volunteered to act in it like a shot.’ She laughs again, and coughs back her wine.

‘What’s got you so worked up?’ I say, and my voice is irritated – not sympathetic at all.

‘I had an idea,’ she says slowly, ‘as soon as I saw the mayor dig that jacket up, I had this thought. You remember those girls? The ones that got attacked when we were at school?’

‘I remember.’

‘I thought it was one of those. Someone who didn’t just get a flash or a bit of a feel. Someone who got it worse. Someone who got murdered. I thought they’d be telling us it was a young girl. Someone our age.’

‘The age we used to be.’

‘Yes.’

‘They didn’t report anyone missing,’ I say, ‘no girls disappearing. Someone our age would have been missed.’

Emma shrugs. ‘You never know. Not with some families. You were only sixteen when you went. Bet your mum’s not got a clue where you are, what you’re doing with yourself.’

‘Doesn’t mean I’m dead,’ I say, and I am still irritable. ‘Anyway, why should you be so worked up about it? It isn’t anything to do with us.’

‘I remember it,’ she says. ‘Hard not to take it personally when every week someone else got grabbed at in the bushes.’ She will not look at me, but runs her thumb up and down the stem of her glass as if she’s scraping away dirt from the surface. ‘I’m not upset, I’m relieved.’

‘Yes, so long as it’s not some pretty blonde fourteen-year-old, it doesn’t matter, does it? That man –’ I point at the screen, ‘he had parents too.’

‘It isn’t the same,’ Emma says, ‘you know it isn’t.’

For a while we don’t say anything. We watch the screen, but there’s nothing new. Emma’s breaths are ragged but she’s clamer now, and doesn’t start crying again.

‘What a time,’ she says. ‘They were on the brink of sticking us all on a curfew. And your dad . . .’ She tails away.

Is she remembering that afternoon outside the library when she and Chloe took Donald’s application away from me? Maybe she’s putting together the events in her head – slotting what she knows and what she’s found out tonight into the right order, and realising what Donald was doing while she and Chloe were tormenting me about how soft he was.

‘Sorry,’ she says, and coughs. I think she’s about to touch me, to put a hand on my shoulder, and I wonder what I’d do if she did. But she doesn’t. She coughs again.

‘Sorry,’ she says. She’s still giddy with relief and speaks too quickly, her words crashing into each other and slurring slightly. ‘It’s safer now though, isn’t it? Because of Chloe. People haven’t ever forgot. They don’t let the girls roam about as much as they used to. I think it’s a good thing.’ Emma smiles. ‘Do you remember how much Chloe wanted to be on the telly? She’d have gone mad if she knew her big moment was ruined by a . . .’ She’s about to say ‘Mong’ but she bites her lip. I can tell it is the same for her as it is for me. Time, which stuck at the point Chloe died, seems to have come unstuck and started moving again tonight. She’s realised we’re too old for talk like that anymore – it’s ten years later and no longer excusable.

Terry is in front of his van and doing an interview with a hairdresser that used to own a salon in Longton near where Wilson and his parents lived. She’s dressed up as if for a night out, and whenever she speaks to Terry she looks uncertainly towards the camera because she can’t forget she is being watched. They must have had her lined up for hours – ready to go on air as soon as the identification was confirmed. There’s lipstick on her teeth.

‘I’m glad to be here,’ she says, and laughs when Terry asks her if she’s normally up this late, and if the night isn’t a bit too nippy for her. I think about teeth and fingerprints and hair and wonder how they did it. Must have been something in his wallet or in his pocket because forensic tests take longer than a few hours – everyone who’s watched
CSI
knows that. I learn something new from this hairdresser though. Wilson had a job. It surprises me.

‘He was a lovely man,’ she says. ‘He’d always be round first thing in the morning with his bucket of water and his sponge. Never asked for any money – in the end we had to insist on giving him free haircuts, whenever he wanted. It wouldn’t have been right otherwise, would it?’

‘And did you ever notice anything strange? Perhaps the hours he was keeping? Late mornings? Early nights? Ever see him talking to any of your staff or customers? Lots of young ladies coming in and out of your salon, I expect.’

‘We ran a successful business,’ she beams, ‘always very busy.’

Terry bites his lip. You can see he’s getting worked up. ‘And Wilson, did he attempt to make any friends? Particularly with the
very
young women?’

I know what he’s getting at. The ex-hairdresser shakes her head. She’s wearing gold chains and they rattle over her chest.

‘No, never anything like that. He just cleaned the windows and the pavement sign for us. Never even asked him to, he just liked it. We did look into paying him properly, but we thought it might mess up his benefit, and we’d have had to take the tax and NI off him so it wouldn’t have been worth it, really.’

Terry grimaces in frustration and reels off the phone number scrolling along the bottom of the screen. Emma turns the tap on the box and refills her glass. She knocks back half of it straight away. The skin around her fingernails is cracked and brown with flakes of old blood. There’s a drop of wine on her thumb and when she notices it she sucks it off, and then starts chewing on her thumbnail. When she runs out of nail, she starts nibbling on the skin, tearing fine shreds of it away. It reminds me of Chloe. I hear her teeth click.

‘He’s still harping on about that flasher,’ Emma says. ‘It’s been years.’

‘He thinks he’s finally got his man,’ I say. ‘Terry always thought Wilson was the pest. He’s after an award. Services to young girls everywhere.’

Emma snorts. She’s recovered now. Can see the funny side. ‘
Servicing
young girls everywhere, more like,’ she says. She stands up and walks out of the front room. I hear the bathroom door slam as if she is angry with me. As if this is all my fault. The water runs, and I wait, watching Terry who is so excited he’s practically hopping. The one that got away. The prolific flasher, whose attacks became more frequent until finally, when it seemed they were about to culminate in a rape or a murder, they stopped – and just as suddenly as Wilson disappeared. He’s never been able to prove it although he was never above taking credit for it, but tonight, you can tell, he thinks he will.

When Emma comes out from the bathroom there’s a picture of a chunky silver bracelet on the television screen. She looks at it, and does a double-take. I know what she’s thinking.

‘It’s not hers,’ I say quickly, ‘it’s Wilson’s. It’s something he wore all the time, apparently.’

Her face is red – she’s scrubbed with soap and rubbed herself hard with the rough bath towel, and her fringe is pushed back in wet and uneven clumps.

‘So they’re certain it’s him then. No mistakes?’

‘They’ll have to do the DNA, but it’s engraved with his name and phone number. It’s a medical thing. He had a heart condition. If he passed out in the street, the ambulance people know to look for it. There’s certain drugs you can’t give people with bad hearts. Something like that.’

I remember the way my mother used to embroider our telephone number onto the cuff of Donald’s shirts. Backstitch in pale yellow embroidery cotton. He’d rub his thumb along it whenever he felt nervous. It was so he could always ring home if he went out and got lost or anxious. So he’d always know there’d be someone he could talk to. I frown and drink more to get the memory to leave me.

Emma rubs her hands over her face, not interested now she knows for sure it can’t be one of the girls she worried about, and sits down. I look at her sideways and remember the time I saw her laughing with her friends outside my flat. The heels and earrings. She’s not the same person anymore. I ask her about it, but she shrugs.

‘I used to go out a lot. Drinking. Boyfriends. So what? I don’t like to do it anymore.’

‘Why not?’ I press her. ‘What changed?’

She picks at her hair, running her fingers through the wet ends. She could be almost pretty – if her face wasn’t so raw and puffy – her skin, like mine, grey and swollen with too many bottles of wine, too many cheap takeaways and late nights.

‘Too much effort,’ she says, after a long pause. ‘I’m not like that. Not really. I thought I’d feel better, a bit more normal, if I tried to get a boyfriend. Went out a bit.’

‘And did you?’ I say, curious as a tourist because it is something I have never done. I think I know what she is talking about. The not-feeling-normal. After Chloe died our photographs were on the news so much that our faces weren’t our own. People recognised us in the street and wanted to hug us or ask us questions. It was horrible.