Cold Light (6 page)

‘Go on then, go and get it,’ Carl said. ‘I’ll give you a headstart.’

Wilson disappeared through the hedge. ‘Are you going to count me?’ he called, as if it was hide and seek. I could hear him crunching through dry twigs and leaves, blundering through the edges of the woods. He was counting himself, ‘Seven crocodile . . . eight crocodile . . . nine croco—’

Carl cupped his hands around his mouth.

‘I’m going to come and fucking belt you!’ he bellowed, the pitch of his voice sliding upwards. ‘Ready or noooo-ot!’

Chloe laughed, and from deep in the woods came the faint sound of wailing.

‘I bet he just shat himself,’ Carl said.

‘Let’s go, shall we?’ I said.

Carl shook his head. He was grinning and counting down from five silently, holding up his fingers to Chloe who was smiling and tugging at her collar. When he got to zero all his fingers were tucked into his palm and he clenched them into a fist and set off running, forcing his way through the hedge with a shout.

‘Better get moving!’ he called, and I could hear Wilson shrieking. It was so high-pitched, so obviously terrified, that I think I might have laughed if I’d heard it before I met him.

I might have laughed.

I think I laughed.

We waited. Chloe took a pot of lip balm from her pocket and pulled one of her gloves off with her teeth so she could apply it. I moved away from her and tried to look through the hedge.

‘Where is he? Shall we go after him?’

‘What’s your problem?’ she said.

‘Forget it.’

‘You’ve had a face on you all afternoon. We didn’t need to bring you out, you know. If you wanted to stay in and watch
It’s a Wonderful Life
with your grand— I mean, your parents, you should have just said.’

‘Fuck off, will you?’ I said, and stepped away, even though there was nowhere to go.

‘Be glad to. Been trying to get ten minutes with Carl without you cracking on for the last hour.’

‘You’ve been in the car for the last hour,’ I said. ‘If all he wants to do is get off with you, why don’t you go back to his house? Why have I got to come all the time? Is he into being watched or something?’

Chloe smirked. ‘His mum would be as keen on me as my parents would be on him,’ she said. ‘It’s complicated.’

I scowled. ‘You could always go and hide out in his
darkroom
,’ I said and Chloe laughed again.

‘You’re so jealous,’ she said, ‘and anyway, Carl’s been busy. We’ve got to snatch our time when we can take it. It isn’t easy for us, you know.’

I hated it when she pulled that ‘us’ stuff on me – rubbing it in, always, that she had a boyfriend and I didn’t. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t even want a boyfriend, not really. But now Chloe had one it was the next big thing I needed to do, and suitable candidates had been slow in appearing.

‘It’d be nice if we could do something, for once, without him or Emma turning up,’ I said. ‘It didn’t used to be like this.’

‘Never mind,’ she giggled, ‘you found a friend, didn’t you?’

‘I want to go home.’

I started to pace away, remembered there were no buses, and stepped back. It must have looked like I was jumping, or running on the spot. Chloe was smoothing her eyebrows with her finger and didn’t notice me.

‘I should have brought Emma,’ she said lightly. Pretending to talk to herself – pretending she’d forgotten I was there. ‘Emma never moans like this. Emma’s glad when me and Carl decide to bring her out in the car for a bit.’

I stepped away and didn’t answer.

Bring you out! As if I was a dog, a big stupid kid like Wilson. It was me and her that were supposed to be going out. Out to the park, walk about and see if anyone else from school was there. It had been empty, but someone was bound to have turned up sooner or later. Once the parents had crashed out in front of the telly someone would have come along with some booze. It was almost guaranteed.

But no. After about ten minutes Chloe had got cold, decided it wasn’t safe –
what with the flasher
– and phoned Carl to come and get her. Which was, I realised belatedly, exactly what she had planned to do all along. I was just the audience.

‘You’ve turned into a right bitch since you’ve started seeing him, do you know that?’ I said.

‘You
are
jealous,’ she said mildly.

‘Of what?’

There was a moment or two of silence. Rows like this were becoming normal. It was nothing that wouldn’t blow over but it irritated me that it was always me who made the first move to reconcile and not Chloe. Like she knew she could do without me fine, for as long as it took. It was all down to Carl. The summer just gone; we’d spent more or less every day together. I’d sleep at her house, she’d sleep at mine – sometimes even in the same bed.

We watched the stage version of
Bottom
and videos of
Carry on Emmannuelle
and
Barbarella
. We ate with her parents, who I actually think really liked me, and thought because I was quiet I was possibly a good influence on Chloe, who they worried had a tendency to run wild and get out of hand. Then, late October or early November she’d started seeing him – and overnight she’d changed, and even started encouraging Emma, who’d been nothing but a hanger-on up until Carl had come on the scene. It was all getting away from me.

‘You’re a slag,’ I said.

Chloe didn’t look at me, didn’t look hurt. She rubbed a hand over the mark on her neck.

‘Give it a rest, will you?’ she said wearily. ‘You’re being really, really immature, you know that? Do you want to come to my party, or not?’

I opened my mouth and I was about to say more, to really go off on one, when I heard the crackle of someone running towards us through the woods. Chloe tucked her lip balm into her coat pocket and put her gloves on fastidiously. I remember the sticky, sickly smell of the grease she put on her mouth. Peach melba, or peach crush. Something thick and orange. We both turned to the hedge and waited.

When Carl came out he was panting slightly and his eyes were bright. I’d never seen anyone look like that before, not even in films. It was an ‘ideas’ expression. Something new, something shining, deep in his mind. He was wiping his boots on the grass as if he’d stepped in dog-dirt.

‘What did you do with him?’ Chloe asked. She went over and tried to put her arm through his. He shook his head and shrugged her away.

‘Get off pawing at me, will you?’

Carl wiped his mouth and hawked up snot, spat on the grass, wiped his mouth again. ‘He ran off. Quick little bastard. Can they all move like that?’

I shrugged, and Chloe tittered and tried to hold his hand.

‘You want to go back in the car?’ she said, and moved her face so those loops of hair fell over her eyes. Carl was taller than her – a lot taller. She looked up at him through her eyelashes.

‘Get in the car,’ he said, and pushed her so hard she had to run a few steps for her feet to catch up with her body. She nearly fell and I was about to say something. I took another look at Carl and thought better of it. Chloe didn’t say anything either, just carried on moving. She didn’t look back at him. Trotted over to the car and didn’t wait, like she usually did, for him to open the door for her.

‘In the back,’ he gestured with his thumb, ‘both of you. I’m taking you home.’

‘What’s the rush?’ Chloe said, once we were strapped in and on the move. ‘I thought we had plans?’

She drew out ‘plans’, just so that I wouldn’t miss the reference – wouldn’t be able to take my mind away from what she and Carl would be doing as soon as I was out of the way. We were on the road that circled the outside edge of the park – spooning the trees and the Asda superstore.

‘That’s the rush,’ Carl said, and slowed the car to a crawl. He tapped his knuckle against the window and we looked into the Asda car park.

The shutters were down and the lights were off in the supermarket, but there was a van in the car park – a beige- and oatmeal-coloured Bambi camper with a sheet draped over the side of it. On the sheet someone had painted something in red paint or thick marker, and there were several men with scarves wrapped around their faces standing around admiring it. One of them looked in our direction. Carl put his foot down and we were on our way back towards the City.

‘Who were they?’ I asked. I felt sick.

‘Group of lads getting together to go through the woods, bus station, places like that. Looking for this pest.’ Carl laughed, and looked at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘Think they can do a better job than the police – slipping about on the ice all tooled up with potato peelers and bike chains.’

‘They’re a vigilante group,’ Chloe said knowledgeably. ‘Someone asked my dad if he wanted to be in it. Fathers only. He said he wasn’t sure if it was mob mentality or grassroots action. My mum went to one of their meetings and said they were a load of council-dossers and doleys.’

‘Your dad not going in on it?’ Carl said, and I looked away from the mirror and shook my head.

‘There’s some tea in the fridge for you, Lo.’

The house was overwhelmingly hot after outside, and it smelled of turkey and pine needles and Donald’s feet. That special Sunday dinner and Christmas smell. I used to really like it.

‘I’m not hungry. I’m going to bed,’ I shouted from the doorway, trying to get up the stairs before they could come out of the living room and grill me.

‘Bed? Bed?’ Barbara managed to get to the bottom of the stairs before I could cross the upstairs landing and get into the bathroom. ‘You can’t go to bed. It’s barely four o’clock. Come and have some cheese and crackers and watch the film with your father.’

‘I’m really tired.’

Barbara stared up into the dim hollow of the upstairs landing. I couldn’t hear much from the living room, but I bet it was
It’s a Wonderful Life
they were watching. You could practically guarantee it.

‘Have you been drinking?’

‘No. No, I haven’t.’ She carried on staring. ‘I haven’t. Smell my breath if you want.’

‘And you’ve not had another falling out with that Chloe, have you?’ Barbara took a step and put her hand on the immaculate cream receiver of the hall telephone. ‘I was hoping you were going to start seeing a bit less of her. Shall I call her mother?’

‘I’m just tired. I’m going to have a sleep. I’ll be back down in a bit, right? I’ll watch the end of the film with you later.’

Even I could hear it: my voice, thin and pleading. It wasn’t a lie. I really was very tired – although there was something else to it too, the way that those men in the car park might have been wearing their scarves over their faces because it was cold, but there was another reason. I thought of them crashing through the undergrowth, shouting into the stillness of the woods, and shivered.

‘Leave her alone, Barbara. She says she’s wanting her bed.’

Donald’s voice rumbled around the open living room door. I could imagine him sitting there with the remote control and a jar of pickled onions. A bottle of Newkie Brown and a glass between his feet.

‘He’s waiting for you,’ I said. ‘You’d better go in to him.’

When I opened my eyes someone had turned my bedroom light off and pulled the duvet up to my chin. I was roasting and I think that’s what woke me up. I looked around me. If I’d gone back to sleep that second I wouldn’t have remembered anything about waking up at all. It’s a fact, that – people wake up ten times in the night, on average, but as long as you surface for less than three minutes you never remember it.

That night I woke up worrying. It was dark. I could hear the telly downstairs and Barbara laughing every now and again.

I used to get sent to bed after my tea as a punishment when I was little. I would get out of bed and lie on the floor with my ear against the carpet, listening to the echo of Terry doing the six o’clock news between the floorboards. I could always imagine Donald and Barbara very clearly. Having a great time and completely forgetting about me.

It was still Boxing Day and I imagined them again. Barbara was going to stand up at the end of the film and brush imaginary crumbs from the front of her skirt.

‘Well, that’s that for another year,’ she’d say, and turn the lights on the Christmas tree off. Donald would nod absently.

‘You did us proud, love.’

And they’d laugh as if that was the remains of a hilarious joke the pair of them started years and years ago, before I was born and when they were still young.

I lay there, something fluttering in my stomach, and wondered about how long they were married before I was born. Fourteen years, which is ages. And I thought about how old they were when they had me. Old. They didn’t go to work anymore. They didn’t look too much like old people, they could still walk and everything, but when it came to getting picked up and parents’ evenings and things like that, it was humiliating.

Didn’t they really want to have children? Didn’t they worry about me turning out funny, like Wilson? Didn’t they realise I’d get hammered for it at school? In my bed I tried to muster up the energy to hate them again but Wilson was in my head, those hands tucking the ends of the scarf into his jacket, and my throat got so tight I felt like I was going to suffocate.