Authors: Jenn Ashworth
The coffee smells ashy and foul – there’s a ring of multicoloured bubbles around the rim of the mug that I sweep away with the teaspoon.
‘Here,’ I say, still standing when Emma comes in.
‘I’m not drunk,’ she says, takes the coffee and sniffs it without drinking.
‘I never said you were. It’s four in the morning. I’m knackered, even if you aren’t.’
‘Yes,’ she says, and her eyes are moving around the wall behind me, looking, I think, for a clock. When she finds nothing more than a cracked tile and a cleaning supplies calendar I got free from work and is still showing the page for January (
SupaSponge – cuts grease in half!
) she brings her eyes back to my face. ‘It is late,’ she agrees, and sips quickly. ‘Do you want me to go?’
I take my own coffee and we cross back into the sitting room – although it isn’t a separate room, it’s just the place in this bigger room where you get to walk on worn carpet instead of curling linoleum.
‘I’m going to stay up,’ I say. ‘They’ve either got to find something out, or put something else on. There was supposed to be a film on tonight.’
She shakes her head. ‘You and your films,’ she says. The tone of her voice is almost affectionate and her expression reminds me of something.
‘You came to my house once,’ I say, ‘just after Donald—’ I still can’t talk about it and Emma knows and she nods respectfully and lets me off the hook. ‘You wanted to walk in to school together because everyone had to go in pairs.’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘Shanks’s orders. Danny Towers’ older sister brought him in and no one let him forget it for months.’
‘You were scared too,’ I say, teasing her, ‘scared shitless the man in the mask was going to leap out from somewhere and show you his cock.’
I expect her to laugh but she turns on me so suddenly some of her coffee slops over the side of her mug and spatters on the knee of her jeans. It must be scalding her but she doesn’t move, doesn’t stand up and pluck the fabric away from herself.
‘I wasn’t scared; I was trying to look after you. I was trying to protect you.’
‘You’d have battered him with that violin case?’ I joke. ‘Or did you have a gun inside it? Emma Capone!’ I laugh, but she doesn’t join in and the longer the silence between us goes on for the more embarrassed I am at the joke.
‘Emma?’
‘Leave it,’ she says, venomously. She’s ashamed of being caught out. At being soft and worrying about me when she pretends to be so hard that she doesn’t need friends.
‘All right,’ I say. ‘Fine.’
There’s a long pause where we drink our coffee and do not speak. Emma motions for the remote control and turns the volume on the television back up.
‘Are you going to be all right for work in the morning?’ she says.
I shrug. ‘We won’t be the only ones staying up. It’ll be quiet tomorrow, everyone sleeping in – or taking the day off so they can stay plugged in and see what happens.’
‘It’s kind of disgusting, isn’t it?’ she says, ‘making a whole programme out of it?’
‘Yes. Yes,’ I say.
‘And those nutters ringing in. Upsetting everyone.’
‘Funny they never got Nathan and Amanda on the air,’ I say.
‘Not really. I bet Terry made that a condition of them covering the memorial and helping to fund the summerhouse. Get a microphone near Amanda and she starts screeching about how old Carl was,’ Emma says.
‘When Terry does a phone-in in the studio, there’s a mute button under that plastic bowl of fruit,’ I tell her.
‘What?’
‘You know – when the callers start swearing or asking him out. There’s that button built in to the coffee table and they’ve put that fruit bowl on top of it so it doesn’t show. Watch his hand next time.’
Emma smiles. ‘That doesn’t make turning the whole night into a circus any better.’
I pause, not sure if I should say the next thing or not because I’m still not sure enough of her to be able to predict how she’ll react.
‘It’s only what they did with Chloe. They wanted to put her
funeral
on the telly.’
‘No,’ Emma says, and settles herself back on the couch, ‘it was different with Chloe. People knew who she was. They wanted to talk about her. Figure out what went wrong and make sure it could never happen again. This –’ she points the rim of her mug at the screen, ‘this is a mystery. People aren’t sad: they think it’s exciting. It’s stirring everyone up.’
‘You’re probably right,’ I say, and she interrupts me.
‘But they’ll have those forensic people working overtime. We’ll know how he died, what time of day, who did it – everything. Then all this will fade away. In three days’ time, they’ll get back on with the memorial and everyone will forget about this,’ she sniffs, as if she is daring me to disagree with her. ‘It’s only a matter of time.’
Now it is my turn to stand quickly and head into the bathroom. The bitter coffee on a stomach already tipping and churning with cheap wine is suddenly too much, and I sit on the edge of the bath with my head between my knees. I think of clear cool water, fountains and lagoons and undersea springs. Hydrothermal vents and the frozen, secret sea inside Triton. The tiles in the bathroom are spotted with soap, and I stare at them and try to hear the sea moving, all kinds of other, restful, calming things, and clamp my teeth together so hard I can hear my jaw creaking.
A matter of time.
I lean over to the toilet, flip the lid and vomit quietly and efficiently until I am empty and sober. When I come back, Emma has fallen asleep.
Nothing new happens. Terry abandons the phone-in and the programme repeats itself. Replays of the original reconstruction footage, as if the tape is on a loop. It feels like it did at the time: all the repeated warnings about curfews and walking in pairs. The school uniforms look false and dated and I realise even the most exciting things become boring if they are repeated often enough.
I wonder if Melanie and Dawn are watching themselves – cringing at the way the white dimpled fat of their thighs strains against a tight band of school skirt as they sit on that bench. They must have been freezing. I wonder how many times they had to film it – how many takes until it was exactly what the police were after? They make token mentions of Chloe now and again but her parents have long gone home and that decorated spade has been bagged up and taken away. When Emma wakes, she stares at the screen as if it’s all new to her.
‘Do you remember all those interviews we had?’ she says, and I do. I sit on my couch with her and I remember the upstairs classroom. The waiting, the way we looked at the flowers at the front of the school and talked about the different kinds – the ones we liked the best, even – as if we were at a garden centre. I remember that spider plant, and Emma’s too-tight school socks.
The police interviews went on for three weeks, and during that time we were allowed into staff sitting rooms and drank tea from teachers’ mugs and saw secret places inside the school – smoky lounges behind doors I thought were only cupboards or boiler rooms, rows of pegs with coats and umbrellas, and the sight – tender and thrilling – of Shanks’s lunchtime sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil with folded hospital corners, dangling from a peg in a tattered carrier bag.
‘They were interviewing loads of people,’ I say, which was only half true.
One morning with Shanks and the whole form until they established who were her real friends. Then the focus on me and Emma – as if we were criminals. I remember the look on Emma’s face when they asked us to hand in any photographs we had of Chloe. We looked at each other, hostile and questioning, and I knew something was up and she knew something was up and the policewoman interviewing us pushed the tape recorder towards us very gently with her finger, and asked us about Carl.
No one wanted it to be suicide. No one wanted the City to be the sort of place where fourteen-year-old girls who came from good, semi-detached homes south of the river actually drowned themselves. They wanted to get someone for it. Terry wanted them to get someone for it – he’d have probably tried to pin Chloe’s death on Wilson if he could have bent time and made the dates fit.
‘I only met him a few times,’ I said. ‘Chloe only went out with him since the autumn.’
‘Since Halloween,’ Emma chipped in. I nodded. It sounded about right.
‘Do you know what she thought of him, what their relationship was like?’
Emma didn’t say anything. We were in the staff room, and I followed her gaze up to the high rectangular windows – slices of grey sky and rivulets of rain.
‘She loved him,’ I said, ‘better than anyone else. Better than family and friends. She told me once he was her soul mate. He bought her a charm bracelet.’
There was a short silence, then, far away, the muffled echo of the bell and the thuds and shouts as the morning classes were released into the corridors. The policewoman – I think her name was Alison – turned away and leaned over the back of her chair. We waited. We were getting used to waiting. She rustled gently inside a cardboard box and a moment later she turned back to us and put a bag on the table. A zip-lock plastic bag with a row of numbers and letters written on it with red marker pen. The last three numbers were smudged – someone had handled the bag before the writing dried. Beside me, Emma laughed – a sudden, choking sound.
‘Yes, that’s the bracelet,’ she said. ‘He bought her that.’
Alison stared at her for a second, then swished the bag over towards me. I nodded without looking.
‘So he loved her. He bought her presents. She was happy?’ I was sitting so close to Emma I could hear the clicking noise in the back of her throat. She said nothing.
‘Yes,’ I nodded again, ‘very happy. She had Carl, she had her friends.’
‘They were romantic with each other,’ Emma added. ‘She liked holding hands.’
‘And how was she when her mother stopped her from seeing Carl? What was she like then?’
‘Angry,’ Emma said. ‘Chloe wanted to do what she liked.’
I glanced at Emma. It wasn’t as if we were lying.
‘She made herself ill she was so worked up about it,’ I added. ‘Her mum told me she wasn’t eating. Asked me to keep an eye on her.’
‘She’d been looking forward to Valentine’s Day,’ Emma said.
Yes, we knew what we were doing. Saying something until it became true and the whole City believed it. Even better, we convinced ourselves. I have not been troubled by sleepless nights these past ten years. My reasons are clear enough. I don’t know about Emma’s.
‘Thanks, girls,’ Alison said, ‘that’s enough for now. We’ll let you get back to your classes.’ She opened the door and the next time they interviewed us, we were in separate rooms.
‘It can’t have been legal,’ Emma says, ‘all that questioning. Were your parents there?’
I shook my head. ‘Barbara didn’t even know what day it was.’
‘They never asked my dad either,’ she says. ‘There was a letter went back, saying that the police were coming to the school to collect background information. Stuff about her timetable, who her friends were, what kind of person she was. Nothing about interviews. And they taped us,’ Emma says. ‘Not on, really. They wouldn’t be allowed to do that now.’
‘It was out of order,’ I say, and in this way we comfort each other until the adverts finish and Terry comes back. He never got us on air. His researchers and a troop of other journalists tailed us for two years – until I ran away – but he never got us. I imagine him lying awake at night, burning with the indignation of it. Would we have talked to Fiona?
It is getting light outside but still the coverage of what has happened this evening does not stop. For a dizzy, queasy minute I imagine this footage spinning on a loop for years and years and years. Chloe and Carl, our city’s Romeo and Juliet. They will carry on with the memorials and the flowers and the special music until Terry thinks we’ve all learned the lesson and made sure nothing so senseless and tragic could ever happen here again.
He’s still outside the van, gesturing at a digital list that appears on the screen next to him. It must be a knack – being able to point at nothing and talk and talk so that even if the digital people messed up, we’d still be able to picture the glowing words and graphs in our mind’s eye – as if they were really there.
‘A recap of the facts on the case,’ Terry says. ‘On Boxing Day 1997, Daniel Wilson left his home for a walk. The house was full of relatives and he told his mother and father he wanted some fresh air. He left his house, and we know he made the long walk across the City to Avenham Park, where he approached two girls and asked for a cigarette. These two girls escaped him, and later took part in an award-winning reconstruction first broadcast on this programme in early 1998.
‘The next footage we have of Wilson is on the forecourt of a Texaco petrol station five miles away – it’s possible that he walked, but more likely that someone gave him a lift. That person has never been identified, despite appeals from both the police and Wilson’s parents.
‘At the time of his disappearance, the City was plagued with attacks and indecent exposures on young girls. I was not able to bring you the facts about the perpetrator at the time, but it is true that these attacks stopped at the same time as Daniel Wilson disappeared – which has led some sources to believe the anonymous attacker and this missing man are one and the same.’
‘There were two after that,’ I say in frustration. ‘Why does he always miss out those two?’
Emma looks at me strangely, as if to ask me why I care so much.
‘You can’t just make things up. You can’t just twist things any way you like and put it on the telly so everyone will think it’s true,’ I say. ‘That girl in the swimming baths. She was from our school. That happened afterwards.’
‘A copy-cat flasher,’ Emma says with sarcasm, ‘except he wasn’t just flashing.’
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ I say. ‘They were constantly telling us he was going to get worse. And when it did get worse, when he tried to drag a girl into a car, Terry said it wasn’t him after all, but a copy-cat and we should discount it.’
Emma laughs. ‘Well if Terry says it, it must be true.’
Terry carries on, never letting the facts get in the way of how perfect and neat the story could be if he could prove it.
‘Was Wilson a victim of vigilante justice? Are you a father, brother or uncle of one of the young victims at the time? What do you think has gone on here?’
‘He’s the one who got away,’ I say, and Emma nods. ‘Even at the time I never thought it was him. I had this idea that because he was like he was, he wouldn’t be capable.’ I laugh. ‘I was fourteen, what did I know?’
‘You think Terry’s right? The last two were someone else?’
I have thought about this a lot. ‘I reckon it was that Video Man,’ I say. ‘He couldn’t wait to get in on that reconstruction, could he? Probably gave him all kinds of cheap thrills. Chloe told me Shanks drove a bunch of the Year Seven girls home one night, stopped off at the video shop for some pop and Video Man saw him, and reported
him
to the school. Who’d do that? Shanks got in bother for it because he’d left himself wide open to people saying
he
was the perv.’ I pause and think for a while longer. ‘On the other hand,’ I chopped my palm through the air, ‘it did stop. Just like that. The girl in the swimming baths was the last. Maybe Terry was right. Because it
was
Wilson who was doing it and then someone decided they liked the idea and wanted to give it a try themselves.’
He was obsessed with jailbait.
I nearly say it, but I don’t. The video shop is closed now – has been for years. When people want to watch films they just type in their credit card number on their remote control and download whatever they want to watch then and there. The Video Man is obsolete. He is probably cleaning a shopping centre or something now, the same as me.
‘You don’t really think that,’ Emma says, and she’s right, I don’t – but I carry on anyway. Doing violence to the way things really are in order to make the story work can be addictive. I can see why Terry does it. I won’t get an award but it does make you feel safe.
‘It could make sense,’ I say. ‘He wouldn’t have thought he was doing anything wrong. Probably just his way of meeting girls. Chatting them up. They don’t think the same way as we do.’
‘No,’ Emma says.
‘Oh, I think so. In his mind, he was probably thirteen or fourteen himself. He wouldn’t have felt an age difference between him and the girls he was after, would he?’
Emma looks at me blankly.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she says, and her voice is thick with contempt. ‘It was Carl.’