Cold Light (25 page)

‘Sleep now,’ she said. ‘Sit in your chair and sleep for a while. I’ll stay in here with you tonight. Sleep in with you. Look, I’ve got the camp-bed. Drink your Lemsip. Close your eyes.’

She was more his mother than mine. Always, always and especially when I needed her the most. I haven’t thought about this for a long time. Tenderness so raw it hurts to bring it back, I think – and something passing between my parents – Donald understanding, only for a moment, that there was no such thing as the
Sea Eye
, that he’d mistaken his wishes for facts, and coming undone about it. I heard Barbara tucking it all back in, so privately that words wouldn’t touch it.

Chapter 22

I heard Barbara coming unsteadily down the stairs, turned off the television, and waited. For a moment there was no sound but her slippers dragging on the stair treads and the fizz of the static escaping from the curved blank screen in the dark room. A shaft of light from the kitchen fell over the carpet and stopped at my feet. I could smell the booze on her before she got near me.

‘Mum?’

She threw the pages at me from the doorway. They fluttered. Twice that week someone had thrown a bunch of paper at me. You flinch, even though you know it can’t hurt you, and it’s humiliating. I sat still and the sound of the pages fluttering and settling quickly died away. It reminded me of two things. One, the time Donald and I had been playing Crazy Eights in front of the news, and he’d tried to speak to me about Chloe, and I’d dropped the cards. Two, the final stage in
The Crystal Maze
, where the contestants have to dive about catching gold and silver pieces of paper as they blow about in the air under a giant plastic dome. They do it for prizes.

‘I told you not to encourage him,’ she said. Her voice was hoarse and each word melted into the next, like a bad VHS or a dream: she was drunk.

‘I didn’t,’ I said.

She knelt on the carpet and started gathering the papers – the typed sheets and the pages torn from scrapbooks. She was clumsy, knocked the occasional table with her elbow and swore as the remote controls rained down on her.

‘He didn’t type all this up himself. You did it all. You took it away from him, typed it up, brought it back – told him he was in with a chance, how clever he was, how impressed those bloody biologists were going to be with him.’ She stumbled and lisped over ‘biologists’ and I didn’t laugh.

One of the papers had landed face-up near my foot. She scrabbled for it. A perfect pencil and ink drawing of a bathyscaphe in cross-section. Copied from a Dorling Kindersley book I’d found in a charity shop and brought back for him.

‘I didn’t do—’

‘I don’t want to hear it, Laura. What did he promise you? Did he give you money? Tell you he’d put your name in the front of his first article? Mention you to the
New Scientist
?’

She looked up at me. She wasn’t crying. Without mascara, her eyes looked bald and strange.

‘Half of this I’ve never even seen before –’

‘Don’t talk to me. Don’t say anything to me.’ She was kneeling on the carpet, her nightdress bunched against the back of her knees. ‘I know you. Mooning about in the bathroom. Staring into mirrors. You thought if he won, you’d get your face on the front of a magazine, didn’t you?’

The light from the kitchen fell on her calves and I could see the blue and purple lumps of veins there and the discoloured skin she hid with American Tan popsocks and massaged with sunflower oil in the bath. She was lining up the remote controls on Donald’s side table, putting them in order and fitting them into the shapes they’d left in the dust.

‘I’ll help you,’ I said, and stood up.

‘Just get out of my sight.’

I went up to Donald’s room slowly because I didn’t want to be on my own. Didn’t want to go to sleep. We’d both been having dreams, but Barbara was allowed to hose them down with a bottle of Gordon’s, and I wasn’t.

The stairwell was dark. The door to his den didn’t creak ominously. There was no special atmosphere. No comforting sense of presence, or sudden rush of happy memories. It was an empty, half-cleared junk room that belonged to a dead person. The table was empty, the debris swept away into three cardboard boxes on the floor in front of it. The drawers were all open, and the contents stirred and disturbed. She’d taken away his blanket and started to pull down the pictures from the wall. The room stank of fags and her perfume. There was a stack of books and papers on the floor in front of the chair. She’d been sitting in it and reading them. I sat too, and picked up the top scrapbook from the pile.

A lot of it was pasted-in printouts of papers I had typed up for him. Drafts of his application for the
Sea Eye
programme. Experiments he could do if only he had the money for the equipment. Long, digressive arguments for funding, for assistance, for advice. Theories about lights under the sea that were somehow connected to the nuclear power plant at Heysham Port.

I turned the pages, stiff and sweet-smelling with flour and water paste, and carried on reading. I started to understand.

He’d had an idea. According to one of the journals it had come to him while walking on Morecambe beach: either he’d seen something out there in the shallow grey water that had sparked the train of thought, or the boredom of pacing across the featureless, muddy sands had encouraged him to daydream. It was all there, scratched out in an erratic handwriting that was almost too familiar to read. Bioluminescence, and the commercial applications of engineering it into living things that didn’t have it naturally. Like privet bushes, or yoghurt, or teenage girls. So that’s where he went on those long afternoons when Barbara couldn’t find him. We’d never have believed he could have managed the trains.

His dreams of being called an inventor and winning his place on the
Sea Eye
must have seemed so close to being fulfilled they were almost inevitable. Donald didn’t know, while he was making this list and scrawling draft after draft of his submission to the
National Geographic
, that the reward was already behind him – somewhere in the grey sucking mud of Morecambe Bay. That was the place the ideas had started coming, the place where he’d first imagined allotments filled with rows of lettuce glowing faintly blue whenever they needed water.

He’d been researching the idea from several different angles at once: there were notes about fireflies; lists of glowing fungus; paragraphs on the luminous solution of frightened squid; and a pencil diagram of an angler fish’s lure. How to show them that he was serious – that he meant business? Business meant business and that meant money – he knew that much about the world and so the commercial applications were not the cake, but the icing on it – meant to sweeten the pill of what he really wanted to do, although when these ideas finally came to him, they’d come in a rush.

He wrote about flashing pet mice for fairground prizes. Electricity-free glowing Christmas trees to save the planet, yoghurt that glowed in the fridge – either as a warning that it had spoiled, or to replace the traditional fridge light and so save energy. Saplings planted along the side of motorways that would also become street lights when the night fell and their cold, ghostly light became visible. Specially adapted clothing for potholers, search and rescue teams, and miners. Finally, he came to it – tried to smuggle his real idea in amongst the others.

The painless tagging of men who wait in dark places and are apt to rape.

This last was underlined, and cushioned between rustling newspaper clippings from the
Evening Post
counting and detailing the twelve occasions when the flasher had made himself known in the City that autumn and winter. In this part of his scrapbook the writing is erratic and tilted. He never asked me, but I would have had a hard time typing it up for him. In places his biro had run out of ink and he’d carried on anyway – not looking at the page, or not caring – just scratching the words into the paper with the dry metal nib of the pen.

He thought he could protect women by making their predators glow in the dark. Barbara would never have let him join the vigilante group even if the other men would have welcomed him, which they wouldn’t. He was impotent, but in his own way, he was thinking of me.

I let the scrapbook fall onto the floor.

Barbara was right. He’d been doing all this for me.

Because of me.

You can kill a person without touching them.

I sat there for a long time. Thinking about the way I had behaved – about how obsessed I had been with Chloe and then with Wilson – never realising the more serious things that were happening both at home and out in the world, the things that had been keeping Donald awake at night, and had finally propelled him out onto the water in a boat he didn’t know how to operate.

There wasn’t a way to fix this, I realised. No going back, nothing as easy as returning a bottle of perfume and writing a contrite letter to the man in charge. I should have acted earlier. Should have sorted the problem out for myself instead of waiting in the house for someone – Chloe – to step in and do it for me. I was nearly fifteen, and it was time enough for me to be looking after myself. My mind travelled to that frozen pond and the football trapped in its surface like a flag – pointing out Wilson to anyone who might walk past and remember the CCTV image of him carrying it across the garage forecourt and put two and two together.

I could, if I had the guts, go there right now and get rid of it. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be something.

Even then, with the decision made, I didn’t act right away – but sat in Donald’s chair for longer, thinking over my plan and wondering how it had got to this. Eventually, I reached into the open drawer next to me, and rooted around at the back between the old gloves and my worn-out baby clothes. All his precious things.

My limbs felt heavy – as if I was swimming through sand. Everything was slow and damp and cold. The air had thickened. The back of the drawer felt as if it was miles away, the wood dry and splintery under my scrabbling fingertips. Barbara hadn‘t found the margarine tub yet. I pulled it out, opened it and pocketed all the money that was in there. Didn’t count it, but there must have been close to four hundred pounds. Enough to get away quickly if I couldn’t manage to get rid of the football.

I heard Barbara moving around downstairs, and an hour later, come past Donald’s den and go into her bedroom. I waited until the light under her door went out, holding the money in my hand and staring at the torn pictures on Donald’s walls and the cardboard boxes full of rubbish that Barbara had been sorting through. When I was sure she was asleep, I went downstairs, drank what was left in the bottle she’d abandoned on the coffee table, and grabbed my coat from the peg in the kitchen.

I half turned towards the river and up the hill to go to Chloe’s house, but then I remembered it couldn’t be her anymore – that we weren’t friends in the way that we used to be. I was half drunk and knew only vaguely where Emma lived. In a house whose back garden backed steeply down onto the canal, and I only knew that because of the time she’d told me and Chloe about her brothers going out on a boat to fish out a large handbag they were sure was full of money, but actually contained a dead bloody cat and seven hairless slimy kittens.

Boats. I had to walk fast, in any direction – just to tear my mind away from boats. I started running then, sloppily – banging into parked cars and hedges, until I came to the taxi rank. I jumped into a black cab and asked the driver to take me to Cuerden Valley Park.

‘What do you want to go there for at this time of night? And on your own?’

That’s the thing about being young. People always think they can ask about things that are none of their business.

‘I’m meeting someone there,’ I said. ‘My older brother’s picking me up. It’s all right.’

‘You got money?’

I pulled the roll of notes I’d taken from Donald’s margarine tub and showed them to him. ‘I can pay,’ I said.

‘Where did you get all that from?’ he said. I didn’t exhale, didn’t want him to smell the booze on me in case he got worried about me throwing up and made me get back out in the cold.

‘My dad gave it me,’ I said, and jutted my chin at him. Go on then, bloody ask me. Ask me, and I’ll tell you.

The driver shrugged, started the engine and turned up the radio. Terry again – talking about a tree branch that had blown onto a primary school roof and destroyed the nesting site of a family of rare birds.

‘They’re going to put a curfew on for you young girls,’ he said, ‘keep you in at night.’

‘Really,’ I said.

‘Yes. In with your mums and dads – tucked up early. None of this White Lightning and Blue Bols on a park bench. No boyfriends,’ he laughed. ‘If you ask me, they should do it for the lads too. Everyone under eighteen can stay in after 8 p.m. whether they catch this nonce, or not.’

I couldn’t see out of the windows because the driver had left the interior light on, all the better to stare at me in his rearview mirror. I felt drunk then, and tried to sit up straight and not breathe out of my mouth.

Nonce. Not of normal criminal experience. Out of the ordinary. He was special, see, this flasher of ours. Like Terry’s bird family – a rare breed.

‘What time is it, please?’

‘Getting up to midnight. Funny time to be meeting your brother, that’s all I’m saying. You know?’

I ignored him, and drummed my fingers on my knees. Worried about my brother waiting for me in the cold. Imagined him – pacing, hands in his pockets, a parka hood zipped almost over his face.

The heat and the soft vanilla smell of the shampoo the cleaners must have used the last time someone threw up in the back made my eyelids droop. The low chatter of the radio murmured while the taxi chugged through almost empty streets and along familiar roads where we only stopped for the lights. I was almost asleep when the car drew up. I’d calmed down. Maybe sobered up a bit too.