Authors: Jenn Ashworth
‘Is that what Emma told you to say?’ I said.
Chloe stared at me. ‘What are you talking about Emma for?’
‘Why?’
‘What?’
‘Why didn’t you tell her we were the last people to see Wilson? If you and her are so tight all of a sudden?’
‘Oh, she’s –’ Chloe waved her hand. ‘She’s too keen. She’s a trier – you know? She really cares what I think of her. It’s a bit pathetic really.’
I nodded. I was fairly sure that Chloe would have described me like that to Emma too. She was a two-faced little cow when she wanted to be.
‘It’s just I keep thinking about that football I saw frozen into the ice. Keep imagining him chasing it through the woods and ending up under the water. Do you reckon he could swim?’
‘Don’t think about it,’ Chloe said. ‘You’re just making stuff up in your head. You’ve no idea what happened to him. No one does. He probably just ran away.’
‘You reckon?’
‘How many times have we got to talk about this? It’s boring. And you wonder why I’d rather hang out with Emma?’
‘It’s on my mind, all the time.’ I put my head on her shoulder. ‘I can’t sleep. I’m blaming myself, a bit. I just need to know what happened. To know it wasn’t my fault.’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Chloe said mechanically. With my head on her shoulder, I could smell her sweat.
‘I don’t know that for sure. Barbara thinks that what happened with, well, you know. That was down to me. How do I know she’s not right about that too?’
I tried to cry, but I was empty.
‘What’s the matter?’ Chloe asked. She shuffled right up close to me until her knee was pressed against my leg.
‘Just sad,’ I said. ‘My head’s a mess.’
I did cry then, and it wasn’t all pretend, and she knew just what to do with me.
‘Poor baby,’ she said and squeezed my arm. Tears leaked out until they stopped. She kept squeezing. She probably thought I was going to start wailing or thrashing about. I imagined us in a painting, our heads close together, four white kneecaps and shiny polished shoes touching.
‘I’ve been horrible to you, haven’t I, and now this has happened. Your . . .
misfortune
.’
I nearly laughed, and the moment was gone. It wasn’t unusual for Chloe to talk as though she was starring in a period drama. She read
Jane Eyre
and for weeks afterwards, instead of asking me if I wanted to come out, she’d enquire if I fancied ‘taking a turn around the park’.
I looked at our knees and felt all jangly and hysterical and didn’t say anything. We listened to Barbara’s feet on the stairs and the sound of the toilet flushing. Silence while the cistern refilled.
‘Shall I put your hair up?’ she said. I think she was noticing how slowly the time was passing, unpunctuated by Donald’s interruptions.
‘No. I’m going to go to bed now.’
‘Now? But it’s—’
‘I’m tired.’ I flopped backwards onto the duvet and turned my face away from her.
‘Shall I go then? I’ll ring my dad and get him to come.’
Her voice was tiny. I’d never heard her talking to me like that before, only to Carl. A kind of begging voice.
I shrugged and lay still until I heard the front door open and close behind her.
Emma always carried her PE kit in a torn Morrisons bag with her name written on the plastic in black marker. The rest of us had special PE bags with the school badge on, or holdalls from a sports shop. Emma carried her carrier bag around without shame, as if she hadn’t noticed she was the only one who did it like that. She had it with her – that and a black violin case – when she came to see me later that week.
‘Sorry,’ she said. I’d thought it was Barbara and was shoving Donald’s journal down the side of my bed in case the sight of his handwriting upset her.
‘I thought you heard me call up the stairs. Your mum told me just to come up.’
‘It’s fine. Is Chloe with you?’ I looked over her shoulder but she was closing my bedroom door behind her. She shook her head.
‘Just me.’
She leaned the violin case against the wall and put the bag and her school rucksack down carefully before sitting down on my desk chair. All done very deliberately and slowly as if she was putting off the moment when she’d have to speak to me. I sat up properly and swung my legs out of the bed; I didn’t want to feel like a patient in a hospital.
‘We haven’t had a chance to talk,’ she said. She tucked her hands into the pleats of her school skirt – she was trembling.
‘About what? I’m all right,’ I said. ‘I’m coming back to school tomorrow.’
She leaned over and smiled at me and there were black clogged pores on her chin and nose. ‘They’d let you stay off for longer, if you wanted.’
‘I know. I’m bored though. I’ve got to go back sometime. There’s this science project.’
She smiled, as if she knew I was lying. I didn’t ask her about chromatography, or if she’d decided to abandon that and go in with Chloe on the nuts. I didn’t tell her about ice, and she didn’t ask me about Donald’s funeral or how I was feeling. There was nothing to say, and the silence was awkward. I didn’t rush in to speak – she had come to see me so she could sit there and come up with something to say. And if she didn’t, feeling bad about it was her own problem. Maybe she’d just pick up her case and go home again.
‘Chloe will be glad to have you back, I reckon,’ she said. ‘She’s not been well lately, did you know?’
I thought of that crack at the side of her mouth.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s her and Carl. It’s stressing her out that she’s been banned from seeing him. She probably thinks he’s going to get someone else to take her place.’
Emma looked at her hands and said nothing for a long time. I got the feeling she was on the brink of confiding something in me. But we’d never been on our own together before. We weren’t friends – we were Chloe’s friends. I hadn’t known she played the violin, I didn’t know the names of her brothers, what the inside of her house was like, whether she liked using body spray or just plain soap. And I’ve no doubt that I was as peripheral to her as she was to me – it was only Chloe we had in common, Chloe who brought us together and in many ways, kept us apart.
‘I felt bad after hearing about your dad. The things that me and Chloe said to you. It wasn’t on.’
That was not what she had come to say. I shrugged.
‘It doesn’t matter. Chloe can be like that sometimes, I’ve known her longer than you. Long enough to know when she means something, and when she’s just blowing off steam.’
Emma just fiddled with the pleats in her skirt. Her socks hadn’t been washed right – Barbara was very careful about washing only white things together, same as Amanda. Whoever did the washing at Emma’s house didn’t take the same kind of care, and her socks were the colour of old porridge. Most of the time she was careless about her hair. She never tried to sneak a bit of make-up on for school. She chewed the cuff of her school shirt when she was thinking. I could list the things I knew about her on one hand.
‘I’ve been friends with Chloe for ages,’ I said. ‘She tells me everything. She’s already been round to see me. We’ve talked it through.’
‘I just wondered if you wanted me to start meeting you on your way to school?’ she said quickly. ‘We can walk in together. I don’t mind setting off a bit earlier and coming to your house first. I get up early for gymnastics practice anyway.’
‘You want to walk to school with me?’ I said.
She twitched, as uncomfortable with this as I was.
‘If tomorrow’s your first day back, I’ll come in with you.’
I stared at her. She stared back. Brown eyes, expressionless and unreadable. She was checking up on me. She wanted to keep tabs on me? Chloe had told her to walk me in – make sure that I didn’t get upset and start opening my trap about Wilson, or Carl, or her, or any of the other things she didn’t know I knew? None of that made sense.
‘You heard, didn’t you?’ Emma said, by way of explanation. ‘I suppose you’ve had other things to think about the last couple of weeks.’
‘I knew there’d been another two.’
‘Both from our school – the baths and the playing fields. They’re getting extra teachers to stand along the route when we do cross-country now.’
‘Barbara’s always watching videos,’ I said. ‘We never have the news on.’
I don’t know if Emma understood or not, but she nodded. ‘He’s started again,’ she said. ‘It’s so close to us now.’ Her voice was strange. ‘You need to be careful. Very careful.’
The baths were attached to the school – they were our baths really, and our sports hall and tennis courts – but they were also open to the public and there was some sort of complicated timetable that dictated when the pool was available and when we got our lessons. It was so complicated and the barrier between the leisure centre and the school nothing more than a set of unmarked double doors so that half the time you’d be doing your swimming lessons with the spectators’ gallery full of people wrapped in towels, waiting impatiently for us to finish so they could get back in. I always found the idea of having a gallery up above the pool weird anyway – who’d want to spectate at a school swimming lesson?
‘I’ve lived this long,’ I said, and laughed.
‘Terry doesn’t think it’s the same person,’ Emma said. ‘He reckons the first ones were that Mong, and this is someone else. A copy-cat.’
I laughed. ‘Not that Mong,’ I said, and looked out of the window down into the garden which was bare and white-blue with frost. ‘Why does Terry think that?’
‘The girl by the playing fields – she was a Year Seven. He didn’t just get his cock out or have a feel of her,’ Emma said, ‘he tried to drag her off along that little path. She says there was a car parked at the end of it. He was going to try and take her away, she reckons.’
I shrugged.
‘And the other girl,’ she said quickly, ‘the one in the swimming baths . . .’ She paused and followed my gaze out of the window. ‘She’s still not talking. Not to the police, not to her parents, not to anyone. It’s a lot worse. An
escalation of activity
. Doesn’t matter who’s doing it. Doesn’t matter how long it takes for them to catch him. We’ve just got to stick together. Make sure nothing happens to us. He’s not finished yet. They’re the girls that got away.’
‘So Terry says.’
She sighed, suddenly annoyed with me. ‘I’m only trying to tell you for your own good,’ she said. ‘Even Shanks says it’s all gathering around our school – they think the pest is someone very local, he’s said we’ve all to get a partner to walk there and back with – and I didn’t know if you’d heard or not. Thought you might want to come with me.’
‘You think he’s going to jump out of the bushes at me at half eight on a Friday morning?’ I said, and remembered the things we said about the man in the Halloween mask. How harmless he was – how it was funny and pathetic and almost sweet in a way.
‘I can get us a packet of fags on the way. I know you’re probably feeling bad right now – what with, everything – but it might be all right. The two of us, walking in together.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. Donald’s money was rolled up in the toe of a sock, and shoved into a wellington boot at the back of my wardrobe. I wasn’t short of fags, not if I didn’t want to be.
‘It’s getting worse,’ Emma said again. She was pleading with me.
‘Did Shanks really say we had to come in pairs? Is it just our year, or the whole school, or what? Chloe never said anything. She lives nearer to me than you do.’
Emma lifted her hand and let it fall back onto her lap weakly, as if she was planning an argument and had decided to give up before starting.
‘I’m just saying, that’s all. You don’t have to.’ She looked away from me, pulled a piece of paper across my desk towards her and wrote something on it.
‘That’s my phone number,’ she said. ‘If you want someone to walk with, ring me up when you wake up and I’ll come over.’
‘I probably won’t,’ I said. ‘Don’t wait in or anything.’
Emma should have stood up then. Should have gathered her things and got ready to leave. She didn’t, but looked at me again as if she wanted her eyes to ask me something. Begging, almost.
‘Chloe will get Carl to take her,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you get him to pick you up as well?’
Emma shook her head slowly.
‘I’d better go,’ she said.
I heard her walking slowly down the stairs, the bump of her case as it knocked against the banister. Barbara did not get up, and Emma must have let herself out, closing our front door gently behind her.
I walked to school the next morning and the roads were as busy as usual and I felt safe and nothing happened. I was invincible because I was walking around inside my own bright, brittle halo of ice and because I knew the police weren’t going to come and get me, my thoughts were so far away from men in Halloween masks it was as if the pest didn’t exist.
Chloe got Nathan to drive her – I imagined her sat in the back with her head against the window, her kohled eyes taking it all in as they negotiated the rush hour traffic in silence. Nathan was the kind of dad who talked about himself at parents’ evenings, telling Shanks he saw himself as ‘firm, but fair’. He’d have tried to talk to Chloe, get her to stop sulking and communicate with him. Share her problems. Her worries about boys, and pregnancy, and her GCSE options. And Chloe would have stared at the window, looking into the eyes of her own reflection and ignored him. I don’t know how Emma arrived, but she arrived late, her coat buttoned up wrong and sweat along her hairline. She had to squeeze in at the back because I was in my normal place, next to Chloe.
It was only later that I realised Emma wasn’t offering to do me a favour, wasn’t trying to check up on me, wasn’t on an errand from Chloe. She was scared, and she was desperate for someone to walk with her. I should have seen it. Her house was half a mile away from mine, and in the wrong direction. She didn’t have a Carl, and her dad didn’t have a car. She must have felt like a sitting duck.
Although Barbara didn’t make me go and I had to iron my uniform myself, I almost enjoyed the next few days at school. Home was strange, quieter than usual and in theory, pleasanter, because Barbara had given up getting me to do anything. I ate junk food in front of her, wore my hair loose for school, and let the jam and butter sit out of the fridge all day. I left the bathroom light on all night, just to test it, and she never said a word. I don’t think she even noticed. I carried on smoking in my room, stole her gin and left the bottle on my windowsill. This sudden freedom should have made things better but there was something else different about the house too, which I didn’t like. A breath-held feeling, a strung-out anticipation for Donald shuffling out of his room after a long sleep, or turning up late for tea. His magazines kept arriving and we pretended that we didn’t notice – left them lying in their plastic envelopes in the hallway until Barbara slipped on one. Then she threw the lot away.
I
wanted
to go to school, probably for the first time ever. There was none of that silence at school. No expecting someone to be there who wasn’t. And after the pats and the whispers and the first two days I was allowed to slot, more or less, into where I had been before except I wasn’t expected to go to assembly, or eat in the main dining room if I didn’t feel like it. I let Chloe sit in the empty form room with me while the others listened to the morning announcements and we waited for it to be over and school to start properly. I hated assembly, and didn’t mind missing it. Boring announcements about school sports fixtures and warnings that if we weren’t sensible the City really would put a curfew in place, whether we liked it or not. We had our whole-school assemblies in the sports hall – and we had to take our shoes off. I never remembered the special instructions because I always had to concentrate on sitting so that my feet weren’t lying flat on the floor. If that happened, when I stood up to file out with the rest of the row, I would leave behind a smudged wet imprint of feet on a floor the colour of blue toothpaste.
A death in the family gives you a few benefits. The people left behind become special in a way that they definitely weren’t before. And by her proximity to me, constantly clinging at my arm and frowning people’s attention and questions away from me (
Would you like that? Do you think that’s what she wants to be reminded of?
), Chloe got her own benefits too. She was grounded, probably forever, but Amanda would make an exception for me because I was her best friend and I needed her. And of course Chloe and I were alone together a lot. She hadn’t confided in me yet, but I was working on her and I felt we were moving in that direction. She was so solicitous she even came to my house again that week with her Polaroid camera and some of her special clothes.