Cold Light (3 page)

Chapter 3

Chloe wanted to go into Debenhams to look at earrings. We were supposed to be Christmas shopping but I think she had her eye out for something special to wear to her New Year’s Eve party. She’d lingered at the perfume and make-up counters, tried things on, used all the eye-shadow testers and had been shooed away. Her shoplifting habit was a secret but I knew about it because I was the one she told her secrets to. It goes without saying. Sometimes I got the blame, but that was okay – it was what close friends did for each other. She moved quickly between the aisles and displays and slid between and around people without touching them. Like a slinky. I followed her. People blocked my way after letting her pass only a second before. I always followed her.

‘Look at this!’

She went to a basket filled with Christmas decorations. She was like a much younger child in that way – always gravitated to anything shiny or wrapped up. I think she liked Christmas a lot more than she would admit. She only ever described anything as ‘all right’ or ‘boring’ but that year, I think she was excited.

When I caught up with her she was already opening boxes and taking small glass reindeer out of their tissue paper beds. She laughed at them, and held them up against her ears. The broken boxes and tissue paper lay around her feet.

‘What about these for my mum?’ she said, and jiggled the ornaments until the little bells on their harnesses rattled.

‘What are you doing?’ I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

We had a lot of running jokes going on between us about people that we knew – mainly people at our school or members of our families. Her mother’s habit of always wearing large, bright earrings was something that we laughed about a lot. I thought these people didn’t know that we were laughing at them. Or I made myself forget what being laughed at felt like. We underestimated ourselves. Who cared? We were just girls – a nuisance, harmless, too loud in shops.

‘What about this?’ I said. I picked up one of the pieces of discarded tissue paper and held it against my top lip. ‘Hello, Chloe,’ I said, in a pretend deep voice. ‘Have you seen my new car? It’s a real pussy wagon!’

Chloe looked, blinked her metallic eyes once, twice, and turned half away. ‘Who’s that?’ she said. She made her face go very still and serious.

I waggled the paper. ‘I’ve got a box of chocolates for you, Chloe, come here and give us a kiss!’

‘That’s not really funny, actually,’ she informed me.

The last time we saw Carl he’d been growing a moustache. He obviously wasn’t used to the feel of it on his face because while Chloe had been talking to him I’d noticed him stroking it repeatedly. I was going to point it out to her – a fault or at least a potential embarrassment it was my duty to bring to her attention – but they’d left me alone and I’d had to sit on the bandstand and hold her bag while she disappeared into his car. I’d looked inside her purse at the picture on her bus pass, the pretend student ID card she’d got hold of from someone’s older brother, who fancied her. A bracelet made with tiny beads that looked like glass but were only blue plastic. I’d smoked her cigarettes while I waited and the impression of Carl, the joke about the pussy wagon, was my attempt at revenge. Chloe was the one who was in charge of deciding what exactly was funny and what wasn’t. She was right. It was a feeble joke. I let the scrap of tissue paper drop into the basket.

‘Come over here,’ Chloe said and stepped behind a tall revolving rack. It was hung with strings of beads, velvet chokers with butterfly clasps and earrings pinned onto pieces of card. She began to turn the display.

‘Stand there,’ she said, her fingers slowly grazing the coloured things, ‘and just chat to me.’

‘What about?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Whatever you like. No one’s listening to you.’

This was confusing. Chloe continued to twirl the stand and examine the beads. She weighed them in her hands and pretended to be deciding. There was a mirror built into the top of the rack. She adjusted it downwards like it was in a car, and smiled at herself.

A fat woman edged by us and poked me with the point on her closed umbrella. It snagged my ankle and I made a little noise, an involuntary gasp. The woman turned and frowned at me. I stared back at her until she tutted and walked away then I bent and pulled up the leg of my jeans. There was a graze on the sticking-out bone of my ankle, weeping clear fluid and not blood. I could see Chloe’s feet too, and the little squares of black cardboard that were dropping between them.

‘Talk then,’ Chloe said.

‘That woman just hit me with her umbrella!’ I looked for her grey head in the crowd. ‘She never even said sorry!’

‘Did she?’ Chloe said. ‘Did it hurt?’

‘It wrecked!’ I said, freshly outraged. ‘And then she looked at me as if I was the one who’d done something wrong. Fat bitch.’

The Christmas music and the bubble of people talking was loud, but Chloe was still nodding at me.

‘I don’t know why people think they can just walk about and do what they like,’ I went on. ‘Shall we go and find her? Tell her what’s what? I reckon we should. Chloe?’

‘Right,’ she said, ‘that’s enough now.’

I thought she was telling me to stop whining but she glanced upwards at a red light blinking in the swivelling black eye-socket of a camera, and then behind my shoulder. I saw a flick of movement in the corner of my eye, but didn’t turn to see what it was – I was more interested in what Chloe was doing.

‘Got to go,’ she said, and slipped away giggling. I could hear her laughing long after she’d gone.

The security guard put his hand on my shoulder and not hers. It had happened before, but still, I never saw it coming. She told me once that I got caught and not her because I stood there looking ashamed of myself. I had a guilty-looking face, apparently: a magnet for suspicious shop assistants and men with brown shirts and walkie-talkies.

I turned limply. You always had to go to an office or a staff room somewhere. He walked behind me and tried to hold onto my elbow.

‘I’m not going to run,’ I said, ‘but take your hands off me or I will go home and tell my dad you touched me.’

He recoiled because I said it like Chloe had told me to – the emphasis is on the word ‘touched’.

And then you leg it
, she’d said, but I didn’t. I walked slightly in front of him, as if I was leading him. I only let him stand beside me when I was not sure which way I needed to go next. He tapped my shoulder but didn’t hold onto it.

This was the same winter the City was plagued by an anonymous pervert who was cornering young girls in parks and bus stations and exposing himself to them. The news coverage about it was feverish. There were more police in the public places, and talk about a curfew. No man wanted to hear the word
touched
said about him by a fourteen-year-old. Chloe knew this.

In the back room, I let him have my real name.

‘Where do you live?’

I shrugged. ‘You can’t ask me anything without my dad here,’ I said and emptied out my pockets. A cigarette lighter and a packet of Polos.

‘That it? What about your coat?’

‘I’ve nothing,’ I said. ‘You can’t keep me.’

I flicked open my jacket to show him there was nothing inside.

‘What about your friend? What’s her name?’ He had a notebook in front of him, but the pencil was on the desk, not in his hand. He looked hot and bored.

Even in the back room the sound of ‘White Christmas’ on pan pipes floated in. There was a cold cup of coffee and an out-of-date copy of the
Mirror
on the desk in front of him. He looked at the newspaper longingly.

I smiled. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘The blonde. The pretty one. You know who I mean. What’s her name?’

‘You really shouldn’t be conducting an interview with me without my parents here. Can I have your name? And what’s that number on your sleeve? That’d come in handy too, thanks.’

I wrote the number down on the notepad using his pencil, then tore off a strip of paper and tucked it into my back pocket. He sighed.

‘Laura Webb. I’ll remember you. You at the Valley School?’

I nodded. He must have seen the badge on my rucksack.

‘That means you must live round here. Walking distance. I’ll find out your address. Talk to your parents. They’ll tell me who your good-looking mate was.’

‘She never took anything,’ I said, ‘and I’ve got nothing either.’

I scooped up the mints and the lighter, and walked out. I sauntered home, waiting for Chloe to pop out from somewhere, her pockets rattling with jewellery. By the time I got there the security guard had gone through the phone book and called Barbara to tell her that I was banned from our Debenhams and all other Debenhams in the entire chain – for life.

I didn’t catch up with Chloe that afternoon. She’d seen me getting caught, I suppose, and bombed it home. It might seem heartless, but there was no point in both of us getting caught, and, as she’d probably say, it served me right for not being as observant as she was.

When I got back home Barbara was waiting for me. She opened the door before I’d even gone up the path. Sometimes she hovered in the hallway and yanked the door inwards when my key was in the lock, but that day she pulled it back and stared at me while I was still fumbling with the gate. Her fringe was stuck to her forehead and she was wearing an apron with a recipe for Scotch Broth written down the front of it. We had a matching tea-towel and set of soup dishes.

‘Get inside, you,’ she said, and looked past me into the street as if there was going to be a van full of policemen parked outside and a man in a white overall unrolling crime-scene tape between the cherry tree and the gatepost. I wasn’t quick enough: she grabbed my shoulder and pulled me into the house.

That was twice I’d been manhandled. Three times if you count the woman with the umbrella, which I did count, because she hadn’t apologised. I was made to turn out my pockets again. I’d expected this, and I’d tucked the cigarette lighter into the waist of my jeans, so I was all right.

‘I didn’t do anything,’ I said.

‘They telephoned me just for fun then, did they?’ Barbara said quickly. ‘Was it that Chloe?’

‘Chloe went home.’

Barbara sighed and leaned forward, her hands flat on the table.

‘What did you take? What is it that you need so much you’d steal it?’

‘Nothing. I didn’t take anything.’

‘I know we don’t have money, but—’

‘I didn’t take anything.’

She sighed. Picked her hands up from the table and put them into the front of her apron. Waited a while before speaking.

‘If I didn’t seriously think you’d spoil yet another Christmas for your father,’ she said, ‘I’d tell him about this.’

I didn’t say anything. By ‘yet another Christmas’ I think she meant the year before when I got the chickenpox. Because Donald and Barbara had never had it, I gave it to them too, and because Donald didn’t do much, his immune system was rubbish and he had to spend a week in bed and miss everything.

She confiscated the Polo mints.

Except for the sudden, unexpected freeze on Christmas Eve and a hailstorm during the night that settled and pretended to be snow, Christmas Day went as usual that year.

I’d bought Donald a compendium of magic tricks. I’d got it months before from a remainder bookshop. I’d bought it too early. By Christmas he’d gone off magic and moved on to fish. Still, he pretended he liked it and sat with the box on his knees while we watched the Queen and waited for the turkey to be ready. I’d also saved up and bought Barbara a bottle of the perfume that Chloe’s mum always wore. She wouldn’t open the box and try it on and when Donald went to sleep she put it on top of the television.

‘That can stay up there until the shops open,’ she said.

I stared at it and listened to Donald snoring from his chair. The box stared back. The lights on the Christmas tree were reflected in the silver foil writing on the box and the twinkling dragged my eye back to it no matter where in the room I looked. Barbara got tipsy.

‘You want me to swap it?’ I said. Hurt. Barbara shushed me. Pointed at Donald. ‘Charity shop,’ she said, slurring slightly. ‘I am,’ she poured another glass, ‘not comfortable receiving stolen goods.’

‘You can’t nick perfume,’ I whispered back. ‘They keep it locked up behind the counter. The boxes on the shelves are just for show.’

‘So you’ve been “scoping it out” then,’ Barbara said.

‘Everyone knows that,’ I said. ‘It’s like fags and razor blades. The dear, small things.’

‘Fags?’ she said, and changed the channel on the telly without asking. I couldn’t wait for it to be Boxing Day so I could go out on the park with Chloe and compare what we’d got.

Chapter 4

There are Debenhams department stores all over the world. They’ve got them in Israel, in Russia, in Australia. Years later I told Emma the story about me being banned from them and she laughed, but when I told her that I’d never actually been in a Debenhams since,
ever
, she insisted we leave the park where we’d been sitting sharing a bottle of cider on a bench in the Japanese water garden, and go into town. The very same Debenhams, and although I don’t think it occurred to her, I kept expecting to see Chloe hovering somewhere, one eye on the security cameras. Blonde girls caught my eye and I stared at them sniffing their wrists at the perfume counters and holding dresses against themselves in front of long smudgeless mirrors. They were nothing like ghosts.

Emma and I had a cup of coffee in the cafe at the top. It’s on a mezzanine, except everyone calls it the rotunda, and the chairs and tables are against glass panels so that you can look through and down at everyone inspecting the racks, picking things up and putting them down and queueing for changing rooms.

Emma took the paper packets of sugar, tipped them into her saucer and slowly ate them, licking her finger and dabbing it at the grains until they were all gone.

‘Now it’s your turn,’ I said.

‘My turn for what?’

‘Tell me something about her that I don’t know. I told you about the shoplifting, didn’t I? You and her went out together. Without me. Tell me what you got up to.’

Emma shook her head and told me I should take something. ‘Go down there and put something in your pocket. Some earrings. Sunglasses. Something little.’

‘No!’ I said. Louder than I’d meant to. ‘Tell me about Chloe. Do you really think she . . .’ I couldn’t look her in the eye. ‘. . . did what they said she did?’

No one says suicide. It makes us all look bad. We say
tragedy
.

‘Go on,’ Emma said, and smiled into her cup. ‘Or are you too scared?’

We’re grown up now and Chloe is still sitting with us, waiting to be impressed.

‘We’re too conspicuous to shoplift,’ I said.

People were already staring. Two grown women acting like guilty schoolgirls. Laughing too loudly. Our coats were faded, stained, past their best. We might have smelled like cheap vodka and onions, or unwashed knickers and yesterday’s Stella Artois.

‘You already got blamed,’ she said. ‘You should get something out of it.’

That’s the way her mind works. Emma likes to go on walks and let down people’s tyres or break off their wing mirrors as a kind of revenge because she thinks cars are killing the planet. She’s got a WWF badge and an embroidered rainbow on the lapel of her jacket. She’s got a car, but she makes up for it by only driving when she’s a bit pissed, covering the rust with Greenpeace stickers, and volunteering for things. She’s shy of people but she cares about plants and animals. She hates men and she’s angry at everything.

‘If I get pulled in for shoplifting, I’ll get the sack,’ I said.

When I think about work, I hear the piped music, the squeak of squeegee against the glass lift doors. See green plastic plants sunk in a pot of what looks like brown baked beans, but is really just polystyrene painted to look like pebbles. It’s not much. It’s home.

‘I need my job.’

Emma shrugged. She doesn’t have a job other than the kinds of volunteering that you can’t get sacked from, so it doesn’t matter to her.

‘Let’s go then,’ she said, and made a clucking noise under her breath as I squeezed past her to get out of my seat. She moved and her saucer tipped, sending grains of sugar pattering to the marble-effect floor. ‘We’ll find a pub.’

It wasn’t as easy as that. We stopped again for another look in Women’s Accessories. That was where it had happened. She insisted it was time to face up to my past.

‘Look,’ she said, and plucked a red and white chiffon scarf from a basket on the counter, swished it through the air like a streamer, and then wound it around her hand. She was laughing, and someone passed between us and frowned. Emma’s got brown teeth because she smokes hundreds of roll-ups a day. She stinks. My hair, when it’s not folded into a knot and covered up with the crocheted hat, is a matted dark swirl of damp and sweatsmelling curls. We don’t do make-up. I’ve got acne scars and Emma’s always running with cold sores.

We’re not the kind of girls we used to be.

I watched Emma twirling but I never caught the moment when she made the streamer disappear, or how it got from her pocket to mine. Some sleight of hand. A knack, a magic trick. Chloe will have shown her it. A familiar spark of jealousy. How come Emma got to know that, and not me?