Cold Light (34 page)

‘I bet we could see right through though,’ I said, but not to him, ‘like a window.’

Chloe looked at me over her shoulder, then let go of Carl’s arm and turned completely round. She smiled. I could see the back of his head, and Chloe standing in front of him, slightly to the left and facing me. I never imagined it was me she was smiling at. A private, knowing smile. She blinked a few times, and rubbed her chin against her shoulder.

‘Come on,’ she said to Carl, almost under her breath. ‘What difference does it make?’

‘We need to go out on the ice,’ I said, ‘and look through it.’

Chloe darted a look at me.

‘Not all of us,’ I said, and she frowned.

‘The lighter the better,’ I explained.

‘See if he’s down there? Looking up at us?’

She put her tongue under her bottom lip and crossed her eyes.

‘Delp ne! Delp ne!’ she said, and made her hands into fists banging at an invisible surface over her face. She’d made herself ugly and mumbly, and it was cruel and accurate and funny. I laughed breathlessly, and the air hurt my throat. Carl threw his cigarette into the grass and didn’t bother to stamp it out. I watched it as the thin coil of smoke drifted upwards and died away.

Carl looked at her, pulled the packet out of his pocket.

‘Fucking hell, Chloe,’ he said, like she’d been saying it about Donald, and right in front of me.

It could have been that Carl would have wanted to light his fag then. Patted his pockets, held out the flat of his palm to me for the lighter that wasn’t his. And I’d have pulled it out of my pocket, and he’d have seen my face as I looked at it. That could have been dangerous for me. There was a bit of luck due though. Something made a noise then – maybe a car backfiring far away or someone slamming a door closed – and Chloe jumped, strung tight and startled, and stepped backwards onto the ice.

‘Chlo—’ Carl threw his arms out towards her – it looked like he had lost his balance instead of her. The cigarette rolled away.

‘It’s solid, it’s fine,’ she said. She leaned forward – she was only one arm’s length away from Carl – and stamped one foot gently. Her fingers were touching the sleeve of his jacket. I wondered again, with more than a little admiration, what Chloe had promised to Carl to get him to bring us out here.

‘I’m going out,’ she said, and slid her feet backwards as if she was skating. ‘I’m the smallest. If someone’s going, it should be me.’

Carl reached out his hand. ‘Don’t be stupid. Get back over here.’

Chloe laughed and stuck out her tongue and pushed herself backwards.

‘Solid as anything!’ she said, and tried to balance on one foot.

It isn’t ‘tried’, not really. She didn’t fall, and she made it look like it was no trouble at all. She turned and slid gracefully, as easily as if she had been wearing blades instead of trainers.

‘I’ll go out and see if he’s there,’ Chloe said, as if she was talking about a friend waiting in the park for us. As if she was talking about someone who could, possibly, be there.

‘Go on then,’ I said, daring her out. I stared, and I wanted her to catch my eye but she didn’t. She was still smirking at Carl. Still moving, one foot to another, she reached up behind her head to pull the scrunchie out of her hair. She shook it all loose and it spread out in the air and then fell back along her shoulders. Like an advert for something. Shampoo. Vitamins. She pouted, thinking she was that sexy, and then she was moving, and Carl was nodding his head as if music was coming out of her pores, smiling back at her, dumb and slack-eyed, and she said, ‘It’s great!’ and moved faster, pushing her feet across the ice and swiping her hands through the air like she was swimming.

Even when she was quite far away from us she kept twisting and swishing her hair about and laughing.

‘Stupid cow,’ Carl said, but his eyes were stuck to her. I watched Carl, not Chloe. I noticed every time she wobbled, he flinched.

‘Get out to the middle,’ I said, and Carl took a step closer to the edge and took his hands out of his pockets but he didn’t say anything.

He could have stopped it. Either of them could have stopped it in a second. I wanted her to stop it. I wanted her to weigh up her options and realise that confiding in me about Wilson was her only and her best choice. All she needed to do was come clean and give me this secret she’d been keeping. I was her best friend. I was first. She could have trusted me with anything. All I was doing was encouraging her: I was making telling me an easier, more attractive option than not telling me. She knew she didn’t need to go out on the ice: there wasn’t any pressure. I didn’t push her; I didn’t lay a hand on her.

Chloe started to pick up speed, sliding on flat feet and making rings around the outside of the pond in a tightening spiral to the centre. The far side was in the shade of overhanging trees. When she passed underneath them all I could see of her was flashes of her white hands and trainers weaving through the air, as if disembodied. If it was me out there, I would have fallen. I would have twisted an ankle, or overbalanced and cracked the back of my head against the glassy surface or bruised my backside on a stick.

‘She thinks she’s in a film,’ I said, even though I knew Carl wasn’t listening. He jerked his shoulder and grunted slightly, hardly a response at all, and I was overcome with the urge to turn my back on Chloe. She only did these things when other people were watching. That’s what Emma was for. I wanted to tell Carl that if he was that worried about her, the quickest way to get Chloe off the ice would be for us both to turn around and go back and sit in the car.

Not that I was that desperate to go and sit in the car with Carl on my own either. Chloe could get scared first, then she would talk, then she would come in off the ice and be safe again.

She came nearer, out of the shadow and trying to spin around. The soles of her trainers were snagging on some groove or imperfection on the ice that I couldn’t see, and she was laughing at nothing, and using her left foot like a sweeper, to brush the ice smooth. I looked at her and saw Barbara, pushing the pile of the carpet backwards and forwards with the toe of her slipper, staring at nothing for hours until it went dark and there was nothing to stare at.

‘It’s stones,’ she called, and waved with both hands over her head as if me and Carl were hundreds of miles away. ‘Someone’s been chucking stones. There’s hundreds of them.’

‘Come off now,’ Carl said, but there was a smile in his voice still. He didn’t sound worried anymore, and took another step forward on to the very edge of the ice. His trainers were unlaced and darker at the toes where the blue canvas had been stained by the wet from the grass. I twiddled with the fastening of the Christmas present school coat and stepped forward too.

It was nothing to do with Carl. Chloe always did things first, I’d accepted that, but she accepted that she was testing the way, and that I would follow along shortly after. Carl didn’t have anything to do with it.

‘Where are your boots?’ I said, gently. ‘How come you aren’t wearing your boots?’

Carl looked at me. Didn’t say anything for a long while.

‘I didn’t want them anymore,’ he said, ‘they were dirty.’ I stared at him, and he laughed, ‘So what?’

‘Are you coming?’ Chloe called, and we both paused, me and her boyfriend Carl, one foot on the ice each and waiting. Chloe carried on knocking the stones away with the side of her foot. They were the grey, straight-edged chips – big gravel from the path and the car park. Industrial – it comes in sacks and someone had chucked handfuls of it out onto the ice. Probably someone we knew. Someone in our year at school, at least.

I put my hands either side of my mouth and made a trumpet.

‘Can you see anything yet?’

Carl looked at me when I shouted, and snorted, ‘Is that what we’re here for? Still?’

I ignored him, and shouted again. ‘It’s behind you!’

The
oooo
sound didn’t echo – we were too much in the open for that – but it sounded hollow anyway, glancing over the ice and amplifying like we were at a pantomime. Chloe looked up and gave me the finger, for no reason at all, and then started stepping, half walking, half sliding, to the centre of the lake.

‘He just ran away,’ said Carl.

‘Chloe said we could come and check. To put my mind at rest. She’s nearly there now.’

‘Waste of fucking time,’ Carl said, and I thought he was getting to something – but I didn’t want it to be him to tell me, didn’t want it to be something he’d break to her:
Listen
– cocking his head towards me –
I’ve had to let her in on it, don’t start on though, will you?
No. It was not supposed to be like that.

‘Chloe doesn’t think it’s a waste of time,’ I said, and Carl laughed at me again and might have been about to say something else when Chloe interrupted us.

‘Oi!’ she shouted, sounding indignant. It was because we’d stopped looking at her. ‘I’m here!’ she said. ‘You two better not be talking about me!’

She put her foot on top of the football and Carl stepped forward with his other foot until he was completely on the ice.

So this was the way it was going to be. He was going to follow her out there.

I stepped back onto the bank.

‘Come back in now,’ he said, trying to sound like someone’s dad.

‘It’s stuck right in,’ she said.

‘Can you see through?’ I imagined that out in the middle, where the water was clearer, it would have frozen into something like thick glass.

Chloe stepped back and put her hands on her hips, drew her leg behind her and kicked the football. The ice broke, making a noise like snapped polystyrene. The football bobbed under the surface and popped back out. It rolled across the ice away from her and the leg she’d kicked with sank into the hole it had left.

I suppose she must have screamed.

Carl ran onto the ice as if he were sprinting across tarmac. I thought he might slip, but he didn’t. I put my hands back inside my pockets and felt for my mittens.

He got there quickly. When he reached her, Chloe was sprawled awkwardly across the surface. She’d leaned forward – her right leg buried in the black water up to her thigh and her left bent and flat behind her on the ice. Her arms were stretched out as if she was reaching for the ball which had hit one of the branches and stopped rolling six inches short of her scrabbling fingertips.

Carl grabbed hold of her left ankle. He was crouching behind her and pulling at her. It wasn’t doing any good. He was pulling her backwards, bringing the back of her thigh against the fragment of ice behind it. He would have done better to stand up and hold onto her hands, or try to slide her out frontward. I was watching them and wondering again if broken slabs of ice could cut a person. No, I decided at last, because a body’s heat would melt the edge and dull it.

Carl was shouting something, and Chloe was screaming and flailing and kicking with her free leg. She wasn’t doing herself any good. Panicking so much that Carl had a job keeping hold of her ankle. He stood up, heaved her leg up with him and then leaned back. It must have felt like she was being folded in two. Carl wobbled, as if he was losing his balance. I thought he was going to do it. Then he wobbled again, and I realised it wasn’t him that was moving, it was the piece of ice he was standing on.

He dropped her ankle and stepped back but the ice cracked again – a slab as big as a table tilting upwards under his feet and throwing him on top of her. I fluttered my fingers inside my pockets, feeling Carl’s lighter and the shiny side of the Polaroids. Something in the bottom snagged against my fingertips and under my nails. Something gritty, small and hard. It could have been bits of burned Donald left over from the sprinkling at the crematorium.

Chloe went right down – I saw the top of her head as she bobbed up again between Carl’s arms. Her hair was wet and flat against her scalp. Carl’s head was submerged, perhaps knocking the ice, and his flailing elbow hit her chin and forced her head back. She screamed in a breath and it was as if they were fighting. They were both under and it was quiet and I waited until they didn’t come back up again. I put on my mittens and waited until the surface of the water was still again before I decided to go home.

Chloe and Carl didn’t stay there long. The water might have frozen over their heads like a thin film in the dark to cover them up for a while, but in the morning the sun shone and up they came. Joggers and dog walkers emerged on the paths on cue to discover them, wet heads bobbing in the water like corks. It was Valentine’s Day, and the long-awaited thaw had begun, and I bet it was a right production to get them out and into their matching pair of ambulances.

I was sleeping when they were found. I never saw any of it.

I have imagined it. Hair plastered to their skulls. The blueness of their skin and fingernails. I had already imagined it for Wilson: transferring the details of the imagery to them was quick and involuntary.

When Terry reported it on the news that afternoon, I was eating a Marmite sandwich and looking at the first Valentine’s Day card I had ever received. Anonymous, handmade, and sent in a jiffy bag along with a mix tape of songs I had never heard of. I was examining the writing, trying to picture what the scrawl on Shanks’s whiteboard in the classroom would look like if he was writing properly, in a card like this, with a pen.