Cold Light (7 page)

Chapter 7

It was New Year’s Eve and I should have been at Chloe’s house, not at home with too many boxes of Ritz crackers. Barbara had bought them cheap because the boxes had fallen off the display and had to be patched up with brown tape.

Chloe had said there was going to be a party, with cousins and friends of the family. There would be a room set aside just for us, with films up to certificate fifteen, and a limited amount of booze. Her mother had said she could invite one friend, and it was a toss-up between me and Emma right up until the last minute. But on the last day of school, Chloe had hugged me and said she was going to lend me her pointy shoes. I’d bought some white tights to match. The tights were still in the packet and Chloe hadn’t called me since Boxing Day.

I could have telephoned her. We both had our mobile phones – heavy, brickish objects we flashed about at school. We had no one to send messages to but each other because hardly anyone else had them. They were secrets from our parents. Donald would have been suspicious about radio waves that near to your head, and Barbara liked to listen on the upstairs extension. People at school knew, of course. We’d let them beep and then refuse to let anyone else have a go. Other girls were jealous, or hated us. Not even Emma had one. I loved that phone. It was what made me special.

I never forgot, because Chloe never wanted me to forget, that we only had them because Carl worked in Currys. He liked to keep tabs on her, and it wasn’t as if he could ring her at home. She gave her first one to me and told Carl she’d lost it so he’d get her another. Now and again, she’d promise to get Emma one. Emma would shrug and pretend she didn’t care, but when she thought I wasn’t looking she stared at Chloe’s phone like it was a lump of chocolate.

I didn’t ring Chloe. I remembered her saying ‘bring you out’ and I was angry. It was her turn to phone me, and she hadn’t. By tea-time on New Year’s Eve I was in a full-blown sulk, loitering sullenly around the kitchen and thinking about Emma’s lumpy feet in Chloe’s pointy shoes, wearing her glitter eye-shadow and drinking my share of the limited amount of alcohol. I wasn’t going to ring and invite myself. Wasn’t going to act desperate. Barbara had her own plans for the three of us, and was standing at the draining board hacking tomatoes into garnishes.

‘Will you take that look off your face and put a dress on?’ she said, without turning. ‘We’re going to have a nice evening,’ she insisted, ‘the three of us together. It’s going to be quiet, and civilised, and
nice
.’

Donald sat at the kitchen table and flattened empty cornflake packets. He was making Secchi disks by cutting circles out of the cardboard and using a black marker pen and a bottle of Tipp-Ex for the design. He used my school ruler to divide the circles into half, and then four, and then started to colour in the quarters. The kitchen stank of solvents instead of cocktails. The point of these disks was to measure the transparency of sea water. The depth to which light from the surface could penetrate. Donald had a theory. He always had a theory.

‘I think twelve should be enough, for the first outing,’ he said.

I was almost at the bottom of the stairs, escaping to the silence of my room with a bag of clementines and a magazine, but Barbara turned and looked at me pointedly, pursed her lips, and nodded at the kitchen chair next to Donald’s. She wasn’t fond of his projects and the effect they had on his moods but we had a deal: when she was cooking or otherwise occupied it was my job to babysit him, and how I did that was up to me.

‘What are you going to do to make them waterproof?’ I asked. I’d asked the same question the last time, and the time before that.

‘I could cover them with sticky tape, I suppose,’ he said thoughtfully, as if he’d never considered it.

‘How long do they need to last in the water for? Sticky tape might not be enough.’

‘I really don’t know.’ Donald smiled and shrugged and started colouring in with his black marker. I watched him, and I wondered if all families were like this: sitting in kitchens, speaking their lines and acting in a soap they already knew the ending to. For a minute, the peaceful, vacant expression Donald had on while he was colouring, the way the rims of his eyelids were pink – it reminded me of Wilson.

I picked up a pen, started to help, and asked another question – something not in the script – just to take the thought away.

‘Are you going to get the boat soon?’

Donald nodded. He looked excited.

‘I need to collect all the evidence for the article before the spring sets in. The tides, the organisms in the water – they’ll all change once it starts getting light.’

Donald looked up as he spoke but carried on moving his marker. The nib of the pen slipped from the edge of the cardboard and made a mark on the table, but he didn’t notice.

‘As soon as I’ve got my statistics,’ he went on, back onto his script, ‘I can write up the article and send it off whenever I like. I’ve got months before they’ll be deciding on the trip.’

I wasn’t really listening. It was the kind of thing he said a lot when he was planning his application to the
National Geographic
Field Trip
Sea Eye
Programme. It was an annual programme and this year they were accepting proposals from parties interested in coming along on the first manned trip of a deep-sea submersible in years. Last year, it had been the jungle somewhere, and the year before, one of the Poles.

Donald hadn’t been interested then – he was still on magic or hot air balloons. But this year, it had caught his eye and he was determined to impress them with his investigations and win a place as a research assistant. Barbara told him it was for PhD students and university professors and they didn’t mean people like him. She said there was more to being an assistant on a trip like that than typing up, making tea, and cleaning lenses.

‘You’ve not got the qualifications,’ she’d say.

If he was in a good mood Donald would just shrug at this. ‘So?’ he’d say, grinning. ‘So? Anyone that can read can find out what they need to do to conduct an investigation. I’ve trained myself,’ he tapped his head, ‘all up here. Whole world of it. Information’s free, isn’t it?’

Barbara would put the yellow magazines in the bin when he was sleeping. It didn’t work because I’d bring them back into the house for him.

I made a lot of effort to keep him off the subject when Chloe was around. I knew how it would sound and what him and his junk room and his felt-tip pens would look like to someone outside the family who didn’t know his phases.

‘
Blockbusters
’s on now,’ I’d say, or something like it. It was like rolling a ball for a dog – he’d chase it into the living room and Barbara would feed the video cassette into its slot and close the door on the theme tune and Chloe and I would have the kitchen, my bedroom – the house – to ourselves. When that didn’t work, there were the magazines – brought back in from the bin in the shed, pushed under his door. That’s what I did.

‘You’re getting it on the table, Dad,’ I said, under my breath.

I was aware of Barbara at my back, still slicing at the tomatoes, and the tension in the room – Donald was a soap bubble and we all needed to keep him away from the walls and the floor, just by blowing.

‘I reckon if I write it all out you could type it up for me, couldn’t you, love?’ He stopped colouring, and I moved the card-board closer to his pen and rubbed at the marks with the cuff of my jumper.

‘I can use the computer at school, I suppose,’ I said. ‘As long as it isn’t too long.’

‘I’m not sure yet. It depends what I find. I have some theories about the water-flows that are going to need a lot of backing up so they make sense to someone else. There are organisms there that should not be there. I’m not sure if it’s light, or temperature, or mineral deposits, or what. Need to get out there and do a spot of investigation.’ He twirled the disk. ‘That’s what the measuring is for. Science is precise measurement, and nothing more. Remember that one, for when you do your exams,’ he said, then pointed at me, smiled, and carried on, lost in the whirl of his own words.

I didn’t need to listen. Donald’s talking was disposable. I’d heard the speech about precise measurement many, many times before. The
Sea Eye
application had come out of nowhere, one of Donald’s fussy little projects, and there had been a lot of them. Most of the time they hadn’t amounted to much more than the hoarding of books and papers and magazine pictures pasted up on the walls of his room. But this one, this latest ‘spell’ had gone a bit further than the other ones I could remember. Sometimes I thought he really would find something out about the water at Morecambe – something new – and then I would help him write an article about it and then he would send the article to the scientist who was in charge of the
Sea Eye
and then he would be allowed to go too.

People discover new things all the time, so why not someone who is actually trying to? That would make Donald happy and everything would be normal. Not ‘back to normal’, because as long as I could remember I’d seen Donald being a bit weird, but it would get normal, and once it was, Barbara would loosen up a bit and I’d magically get on a bit better at school and everything would be easier than it was.

Barbara had her back to us; the knife nestled between her fingers like a pen.

‘Why your father thinks taking a friend’s wreck of a boat out through the quicksand into the rip-tides and whirlpools of Morecambe Bay, very possibly illegally, when he can barely swim, is totally beyond me,’ she said, without turning. She’d been holding it in for long enough, and couldn’t wait any longer.

‘You could come, Barbie, if you wanted to. I could do with a hand for the note-taking,’ he said. ‘Your mother’s got lovely handwriting.’

I snorted and Barbara’s shoulder blades moved together, although she didn’t make a sound. She could have been laughing or just coughing silently.

‘Think of it,’ Donald said, standing up and scraping his chair back. He waved his hands in the air. I thought he looked like Michael Aspel. ‘Think of the romance. The sand, the sea. Floating in the moonlight . . .’

‘. . . through a tide of untreated sewage,’ Barbara said, rolling her ‘r’s.

Donald shrugged.

‘Your mother’s no imagination, you know that? She knows it, of course – otherwise why pick a man of vision, like myself?’ He winked. There was a moment of silence. ‘And you know what I found out at the library today?’ He started paddling through the papers on the table, sticking his pale, sausagey fingers between the flaps of scuffed paper folders.

‘I’m wanting to set the table now, Donald.’

‘And I can do that for you in a while,’ he said. ‘Go back to your tomato-carving and hold your horses one minute, will you?’

She sighed, but didn’t say anything else.

He turned back to me.

‘Now, Lola, have a look at this. Two years’ more education on you than your father ever had, so here’s a little test for you. Tell me what you think’s going on here. We’ll have a battle. Your qualifications against my self-training. A pound for you, if you guess it right.’

He slapped the coin onto the table and I pulled the paper towards me. It was boring, having to stand in for Barbara like this.

The sheet of paper was a grainy photocopy of a picture in a magazine but at first I thought it was a copy of a painting. A dragon. The creature had teeth; milky, almost transparent teeth. They looked like they were made of cartilage, or ice. It was all mouth, with eyes like shrunken walnuts pressed into the sides of its head.

‘Another fish, Dad? You going to go and catch one of these?’

‘Not likely,’ he replied. ‘These live so far under the sea that they’d probably implode and turn into fish paste if we brought them up to the top.’

‘Really?’ I was interested, in spite of myself. He’d told me stories before. Fish that crawl along the bottom of the sea like worms, fish that make their own light, transparent, poisonous jellyfish the size of cars that fly about in groups as big as football stadiums.

I examined the picture, even though Barbara was crashing cutlery about. Partly it was because Donald had not been as enthusiastic as this about anything, not for months. Partly it was to make up for the bad Christmas present. I was scared that the shine on him would go out and he’d go back to staying in bed again if someone didn’t play along with him.

‘Oh I don’t know,’ Donald said, but he was still smiling, ‘I might have filled in the facts a little. Embellished, here and there. Why shouldn’t I? She’s a mythical-looking creature though, isn’t she?’

‘It’s a female one?’ I asked doubtfully. I leaned over and put my face closer to the picture, staring into its shadows. ‘How can you tell?’

Donald slapped his hands on the table. I jumped back. This was the other side of the coin: sudden outbursts and enthusiasm over nothing.

‘By God, she’s getting close! You’re costing me a fortune. Have a look. Make your guess.’

Barbara muttered from the sink, ‘For God’s sake,’ but she didn’t turn, didn’t tell us to stop and clear the table. I kept one eye on her back.

‘Is it pregnant?’ I asked, looking at the picture again. It was round, but fish don’t get pregnant with babies like animals do, do they? They can’t, because there is such a thing as fish-eggs, and people eat them. ‘What’s that, stuck to it?’