Authors: Jenn Ashworth
‘Let me do your make-up,’ she said, and let a smile tug at the corners of her mouth. She’d brought her make-up bag with her. She was getting thinner. ‘I’ll do you a make-over and we can take some pictures. It’ll cheer you up.’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, making a show of being reluctant.
‘Come on,’ she was cheerful and brisk, ‘put some music on. Have a drink. It’ll be fun.’
She showed me a how-to guide for smoky eyes in
Just Seventeen
that she wanted to try. ‘I’ll do it on you, and you can do it to me,’ she said. ‘It’ll be like old times. Remember, we used to do this loads during the summer holidays?’
I let her put mascara on me even though she always ended up poking me in the eye with the wand.
‘Ta da!’ She winked at me, and spoke with her stupid American accent, ‘You look like a million dollars, baby!’
‘I feel stupid,’ I said, looking at myself in the little handmirror.
‘That’s crap. You look like a model,’ she said.
She gave me her basque to try on and made me lie on my stomach with my knees bent and my feet in the air. I felt her fingers on my skin as she adjusted the straps and hooks on the basque so that it fit me, and slid my glasses off my face. She folded them up and left them on my desk where I couldn’t reach them.
‘Put your tongue behind your teeth and think about something sexy,’ she said. She painted my mouth thick with lipstick that smelled like frying pans.
‘Chloe,’ I moaned, ‘I’m cold. I feel stupid.’
She laughed. ‘No pain, no gain.’
Chloe snapped handfuls of pictures, and I posed in the itchy red and black basque that Carl had bought her. My flesh came up in goosepimples and I tried to think about something sexy while the world, watery and formless without my glasses, shrank to the sound of her breath as she stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth and tried to work out the settings on the camera.
The photographs were okay. Chloe handed me my glasses so I could see them. She blew on them, and lined them up across my desk. I saw myself, looking pale and uncertain, posing with a cigarette, my lips pursed like Jessica Rabbit. I was better at taking them than she was, and most of them were washed-out and crooked-looking. Chloe seemed disappointed.
‘Carl’s got a proper camera,’ she said, and mimed twisting a lens, with one eye closed. ‘He develops them himself.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know.’
It wasn’t going to be long before she’d speak to me about what she and Carl had been doing in the woods that night. A person couldn’t walk around with that on their conscience forever. She’d need someone to talk to, and that person would be me, and then things would go back to the way they had been in the summer. I got as close as I could to her, prodded her gently when the conversation led in that direction, and waited.
‘You look terrific,’ she said, and hugged me.
Chloe let me keep most of the pictures.
It was our last week at school together.
Barbara still padded about the house in her night-clothes. She kept odd hours, and often woke me up knocking ice cubes out of the plastic tray with a rolling pin. She dusted in the middle of the night and once I found her at three in the morning folding and refolding stacks of Donald’s shirts on the living room floor. She never put them away or got rid of them. Her behaviour was getting to be really creepy – no wonder Chloe wanted me to come to her house. And she’d decided it would do me good not to be in my bedroom. She said ‘a change of scene’. It sounded like a phrase she’d culled from Amanda, except the two of them were still at war.
I walked. The winter had not broken yet and the sky was white and the windows of the cars I passed were covered in frost. Someone had kicked a half-empty can of Fanta over in a bus stop and the orange trickle had solidified into a spike across the pavement. I stopped and stared at it a while, even though I wasn’t really interested. A poster pasted onto the bus shelter caught my eye. Not the one with Wilson’s face on it – a different, newer one, with a huge clip-art picture of an eye on it. The details underneath were for the next Community Action Group patrol. Men only, meeting at the train station at 9 p.m. to do a slow loop of the town centre. The eye was anatomically correct – the optical nerve still attached. It looked gruesome. ‘
Watch Out!
’
I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to sit on the peach settee and talk to Chloe’s mother: she always wanted me to call her ‘Amanda’ and chat about period pains and boys and pimples, none of which I had much experience of, any interest in, or any inclination to discuss with her. But even less did I want to stay at home and watch Barbara fluttering the shirts through the air for one last refolding. The arms dangled and made me think of Guy Fawkes dummies.
I was an hour or two later than I said I would be. Amanda opened the door and hugged all the air out of me in an ouff (
Sweetheart! Brave girl!
) and then made me go around the back and take my shoes off in the kitchen (
Just had the carpets done, my angel
). When I got into the kitchen I saw all the nuts and tweezers laid out on the kitchen worktop waiting for me and Chloe to begin. The objects shone, like they were specifically trying to make me feel guilty.
Chloe was in the kitchen too. She talked to me ostentatiously, a long gabbled sentence about the weather, and snow, and needing to wash her hair, and how she thought I’d forgotten. Amanda stood to one side of her, watching, and moving her hands about in her cardigan pockets. When Amanda had taken the television out of her room, Chloe had upped the ante and stopped talking to her altogether. Chloe had told me that she was even refusing to eat in front of her parents so that they’d think they’d made her into an anorexic, feel guilty and relent.
It was working. She looked terrible. Her hair was so dull it looked sticky, and there was sleep in her eyes, yellow crusts along her eyelashes that reminded me of a sick dog Donald had found once, and insisted on keeping in the shed until it was better and could be ‘released into the wild’ to go back to foraging in bins. She was skinny too – as skinny as she’d ever wanted to be – which made her look sickly and pale and more ill than she’d looked when she’d been in hospital. She didn’t look pretty anymore, but I still didn’t want to cross the kitchen and stand next to her. Didn’t want my thigh next to hers for a comparison.
‘I haven’t slept more than four hours a night in three weeks,’ she’d said, not quite proudly.
She was making herself ill. She told me all this herself and so I thought most of these symptoms were just ploys, and ways of levering her parents into relenting. I didn’t think there was anything really wrong. Knowing what kinds of things she had on her mind, I should have.
‘They’re buying me things to get me to eat,’ she’d said gleefully, and shown me a new personal stereo.
‘Wow,’ I’d responded dutifully, ‘can I have your old one?’
‘I’ll leave you two girls to it, shall I?’ Amanda said, but didn’t move. She was like Emma, waiting to be asked to join in.
‘Lola,’ Chloe said, and turned her whole body towards me and away from her mother, ‘I’m going to take a quick shower. My hair is disgusting. Can you entertain yourself for fifteen minutes?’
‘Sure,’ I said, the beginning of a sentence Chloe never heard the end of, because she’d already swished out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
Amanda shook her head at the space in the air Chloe had left. She’d left the smell of her White Musk Christmas perfume hanging around behind her.
‘Oh dear,’ she said weakly, and pushed the button on the kettle. I listened to the fizz of the element heating up.
‘I’m glad you and Chloe have started seeing a bit more of each other again,’ Amanda said, ‘but you mustn’t let it get to be a hassle for your mother.’
‘Barbara doesn’t mind,’ I said.
Chloe’s footsteps banged over our heads. The shower started. She was always washing off her make-up and putting it back on again.
‘Yes, but all the sleepovers you’ve been having. You must let us return the favour. We’ve bought a camp-bed, so you can come whenever you like.’
I registered
all the sleepovers
without letting it show on my face, and then
Carl
. And still keeping my mouth as still as I could manage, I wondered angrily if the camp-bed was a present to me to make up for Donald getting drowned. Chloe isn’t allowed to have her boyfriend anymore and she gets a personal stereo. Sony, and not the Alba shit that I’ve got. Donald drowns himself and I get a zed-bed.
I felt the words bubbling in my throat and wanted to say them so I started chewing at my thumbnail to stop myself from talking.
Amanda wasn’t filling up the gap in the conversation, just looking at me sympathetically.
‘It isn’t any trouble for Barbara,’ I said again. The anger evaporated quickly. I was sad. Despite everything, Chloe still wouldn’t tell me the truth. She’d probably already confided in Emma.
Amanda poured the boiling water into a pink mug I knew was Chloe’s, then led me into the living room and made me sit in the recliner chair, tilted backwards so my feet were up. She perched on the edge of the settee across from me, and smiled, and stared, and nodded encouragingly whenever I put the mug to my mouth. I had to drink hot chocolate with marshmallows in it until Chloe had finished soaping her hair and scraping at her face.
‘We’ve made some ice for you,’ she said, and I looked at the brown drink inside the mug. Ice?
‘Chloe said you might want to do ice. She and Emma put the trays outside last night.’
She pointed through the arch and I looked along her arm and into the conservatory, through the pointy leaves of some dangling white and green plants and out into the garden. They had filled old seed trays and roasting tins with water and left them to freeze outside overnight. The ice had swelled and the plastic trays were bowed out at the edges.
I’d forgotten that I’d said that, about the ice, but Chloe had remembered and put the water out for me. That was a kind thing to do. I felt bad again, for being late and then silent.
‘I think,’ I said, struggling to push the recliner down to a proper sitting chair so I could get out of it, ‘I’ll go up to Chloe’s room now. She’s got some tapes of mine and I want to take them home with me.’
Amanda looked at me for a long time. She still had her new Christmas earrings on, and blue mascara. I started to feel nervous. She looked like Chloe and her eyes were the same too: glinting at me as if she could guess what I was going to do next.
‘She’s not eating, you know,’ she said abruptly. ‘Not here, anyway.’
I didn’t know what to say.
‘I know you’re in the middle . . .’ She bit her lip ‘. . . of your own troubles.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said.
‘It’s this project. Calories. You know we’ve stopped her seeing that boy.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s hard to tell. Revenge, or to get attention. Or something real. Does she worry?’
‘What about?’
‘Her size. Weight. Does she think she needs to diet?’
I shrugged. Chloe was always more interested in my diet than her own. Some things make your skin worse, she’d tell me, and watch approvingly while I scraped them off my plate and into the bin. Chloe ate whatever she liked. She had that kind of metabolism, she said. I wasn’t to feel bad about it. It was luck, genes, and nothing to do with either of us as real people, which to her, was the important thing.
‘I don’t think so.’
Amanda stood up and started to rearrange the school pictures of Chloe on the mantelpiece. Four different kinds of school uniform and every picture in an expensive silver frame. You could run them together like a flickerbook and see her growing up before your eyes.
‘We’ve never had a teenage girl before, her father and me. People expect you to know how to be a parent by the time your child gets to be this age. But we don’t know. She’s up in her room with Emma for hours – in and out of the greenhouse – phone calls at odd hours. I’ve caught her sneaking out at night a few times. What about the times I haven’t caught her? She won’t let us meet this boy. I daren’t think what they get up to together. I had to throw out a pair of her jeans they were so filthy.’
She stopped fiddling with the pictures and turned to face me. ‘Is there something I should know? It seems such an extreme reaction. It’s hard to know what’s normal.’
‘We’ve never spoken about it. Sorry.’
Amanda smiled, and shook her head.
‘I shouldn’t be pestering you. Nathan told me to leave you alone. Don’t worry about it. You just have a nice afternoon,’ she waved her hands at me and her voice cracked, ‘go on and get your tapes.’
Chloe’s room was full of eyes. We spent whole weekends sitting on her bedroom floor cutting pictures out of
Smash Hits
and pasting them to her walls. The shower was still going in the bathroom. I stepped onto the pink carpet and held my breath, listening for the shower water.
Chloe had a special drawer. It was just the bottom drawer of her night-table. She told me that in Year Seven when she’d started wearing bras she’d kept them in there instead of her usual sock drawer. In Year Eight she’d used it to keep her fags in. Now it was full of clear zip-locked bags that were stuffed with condoms.
She’d been to a Talkwize clinic in town where they handed them out, for free, no questions asked. Patsy – Dr Jamrag – had told her where to go and what to say. Chloe liked shiny new things. Liked having a special drawer, and accessories, and secrets. She must have got over the embarrassment and been ten times. I’d been with her once, and was embarrassed enough that I had to wait outside (
You can’t come in, do you want them to think we’re lezzers?
), counting the lumps of chewing gum on the pavement and watching the morning queue outside the pub across the road.
I slid the drawer back and saw the bags. More occasions of sex than any one person would ever have in their life, probably. And underneath them, hardly hidden, the black block of a mobile phone. I picked it up, listened for the continued fizz of the shower water hitting enamel next door, and turned it on. There were holes in the plastic at the ear-piece. I covered them with my thumbs and felt the thing buzz against my hand. Remembered the day the police came to my house and the message that I left on her answering service.
It would have been better if they really had come to talk to me about Wilson.
I touched the buttons, lifted it to my ear, listened. There I was. Pissed off and panicking and as good as admitting to something that she knew full well I hadn’t done. And she’d kept this message anyway. Nice insurance for her.
I turned the phone back off again, put it in the drawer, closed it. Opened the drawer, took it out, stuffed it into the back pocket of my jeans and pulled my jumper down to cover the lump it made on my backside. The tapes I wanted were on Chloe’s desk, stacked up neatly. I picked them up and went downstairs, not bothering to close the door behind me.
I could have just deleted the message and put the phone back into the drawer. Chloe wouldn’t have known, and if she did notice and guess that I had done it, she could hardly come to me and complain about it. I thought about those retching noises she made in the woods. But I stole her phone and I did it because I wanted her to know. I wanted her to notice it was missing and figure out for herself how and why I had taken it. I wanted her to feel scared and confused, like she’d been making me feel – and most of all, I wanted something solid in my pocket – something to hold and take home and look at when I was on my own and doubting that any of this could really be happening.
The ice was stuck hard into the roasting tins and seed trays. Amanda had made Chloe dry her hair before we were allowed to go out, and then given me a tub of salt. I stared at it in my hand and wanted to laugh. The laughter felt like dry, hot stones at the back of my mouth where my tongue started. I tried to let it out, but it turned into a cough.
‘You didn’t think this through, did you?’ she said, poking at the trays with her shoe.
I picked one of the seed trays up and flexed it as if it was an ice cube tray. Blocks of ice, curved at the top like corks where the water had overflowed the individual compartments for the soil, fell onto the lawn and bounced. None of them broke, and I crouched and touched them.