Authors: Jenn Ashworth
I look at the screen, expecting to see the memorial that Emma gestured towards, but instead it’s showing the photograph of Wilson in his party hat again with another digital list of the victims of the pest, along with dates and ages. Terry is reading the list and it is frightening.
‘Shouldn’t someone know about it then? That it wasn’t Wilson’s fault? That he didn’t do anything wrong?’
‘What difference would it make?’
‘It would to his parents. Everyone’s saying he’s a paedo. Terry’s as good as said that someone murdered him to stop him, and that’s fair enough by him and everyone else who believes it.’
‘Listen,’ Emma says, counting on her fingers, ‘look at those dates. Carl was at it from the summer, wasn’t he? As soon as he got that new job and bought a car. Loads and loads over the winter. Stopped for a bit, over Christmas and New Year.’
‘Yes,’ I say. He stopped. Busy figuring out what to do with Wilson, I thought. A little break – didn’t want to draw any more attention to himself. Had to keep Chloe in line. He was busy then – and a dead body is enough to put anyone off.
‘But then he started again, didn’t he? January, February? Two more. Tried to drag a girl into his car in the middle of the day.’
I think about Donald and nod.
‘My dad was worried sick about it,’ I say. ‘Chloe wasn’t talking to me then, but even if she had been I wouldn’t have been allowed past the front door unless it was to go to school. Barbara even thought about getting me a phone.’
‘You’re not listening,’ Emma says. ‘They’ll work it out. The timings. They’ll figure out that Wilson didn’t get very far after Boxing Day and that however he ended up dead, it happened before New Year. And the attacks were going on after that. It’ll sort it out. They’ll know it wasn’t him and they’ll have to say it –’ she points at the telly, ‘Terry will have to say it. He can’t not do.’
‘He hasn’t done so far.’
‘He’ll have to,’ she says. ‘He can’t carry it on anymore. He’s wrong and he knows he is. Why else do you think this has been on all night?’ She waves at the television. ‘No one really cares that much about Wilson. It’s Terry. He’s hanging on by a thread.’
I think about it and realise she is right.
‘So it’s done with now?’
‘Yes.’
Emma turns away from me, she doesn’t ask why I telephoned Carl that night, what was so important that I told on Chloe and demanded we meet. I think about Wilson again, and feel the old pangs of pity and guilt. And then anger.
She hasn’t noticed because she’s still looking around the room. ‘You should have a better flat than this. A better job. Friends.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You live like I do, and you’ve no excuse. No one ever hurt
you
.’
This is what happened to Chloe and Carl. I know, because I was there.
Freezing night, and back once again to Cuerden Valley Park, the cowslip and stoat sign with the lighter-burned plastic, and through the woods along a path that wasn’t really a path – along to the water and where it first began. Chloe led the way and we followed her as she zig-zagged down a strange route through thicker trees and undergrowth than the real path. The ground sloped sharply and the leaves had settled in black drifts. It was a detour, of course. I pretended not to notice.
Chloe’s teeth chattered and she swung her arms and strode, stamping her feet into the frosted, crunchy grass and the sugarcoated leaves. She had a bottle of fizzy white wine with her and she carried it by jamming a thumb into the neck and swinging it against her thigh as she walked. Now and again she’d stop, unplug the neck and tip her head back to drink. The foil label around the neck was in tatters, scratched off and glittering under her thumbnail.
‘Have a bit, it’s lush.’
Carl wouldn’t touch it even though he’d brought it for her, but when she offered it to me I sipped and thought about my lips touching the place she had been drinking from. It felt a bit special.
She sang too, as we walked. I remember the song – ‘Jingle Bells’ – over and over again. Carl pushed her in the shoulder and told her to shut up but she laughed and started singing louder, gesturing with her hands and opening her mouth and eyes wide as if she were on a stage. She didn’t have a bad voice, really. It carried through the cold and through the trees and didn’t make an echo. She was giddy and fragile – the embodiment of the phrase ‘highly strung’. And I was numb with the cold and with everything else too.
Maybe I should have been scared of Carl, knowing what I did about what he had done and what he was capable of. But it was still hard to look at him with anything other than contempt. And Chloe wasn’t scared of him either. Getting her to fear him wasn’t the plan – I needed her to want to save her own skin – I needed to convince her, no matter what it cost, to get him out of her life and things back to normal between us. I couldn’t do that cowering at home, so I walked behind them, following the whole way.
‘Did you bring anything for me, lover-boy?’ she said, her voice too loud because she was half drunk. There was a bruise on her throat.
Carl pointed at her hand. ‘I brought you the bottle, didn’t I?’
‘That’s not right,’ she said, and looked over her shoulder at him, pouting. ‘You’ve to send flowers, cards, chocolates.’ She held up the bottle and I thought she was offering it to me so I reached out to take it, but then she rattled her wrist and I realised she wasn’t looking at me at all, but showing Carl her charm bracelet.
‘You could get me another heart for this.’
‘You’ve already got three.’
‘And one more would make four. One for every month you’ve known me, right?’
Carl turned his head to one side and looked into the woods. We trudged. It was slow-going. He was tense. Jumpy.
‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you some money. Go and get it yourself, next time you’re in town.’
‘Carl, that’s not the same . . .’ she started to whine. ‘It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow. Some girls get weekends away. They get taken out to nice places for meals. New dresses.’
‘Aye, all right then,’ he said, not listening to her.
‘I bet I won’t even see you,’ she said, and then, as if she’d decided to be cheerful anyway and not care about it, she made a show of taking another long drink from the bottle, waiting for me to catch up and then handing it back to me.
‘Have this,’ she said, ‘finish it off.’ Her eyes were narrow and hazy. I wondered if she’d taken one of Carl’s special tablets. The bottle was olive green and freezing. The ragged foil around the top scraped at the soft bit of my hand, under my thumb.
‘Come here, Carl,’ she said, ‘come and show Lola what you’ve got.’
Carl edged nearer to us and clumsily took the bottle out of my hand. He finished the two inches of liquid in the bottom and threw it high over our heads and into the bushes. The motion of transferring his weight from one foot to another made him stagger and he toppled into Chloe. She pushed her face against his chest and giggled. I listened for a smash but it never came.
‘Here,’ he said, and crooked his finger at me, ‘closer. I int going to bite you.’
I took a step or two forward and watched as he pulled a small handful of dog-eared Polaroids out of his inside pocket. I knew he carried a picture of Chloe around with him because she’d told me. But these weren’t Chloe. They were me.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said, almost formally. ‘Chloe showed me them.’
My face burned and I cringed away and stared at my feet.
‘Don’t be like that, Lola,’ she said, and put her arm around me. When she kissed my cheek I could smell her unwashed hair and the alcohol on her breath.
‘You look very nice,’ he said, and burped gently. ‘These aren’t professional quality, but you’ve really got something. Have you ever thought about taking it further?’
I looked up. He was rubbing his thumb along the bottom of the Polaroid, touching the place where my bare forearms were in the picture.
‘You’ve got a certain magic,’ he said. ‘It’s a special quality really – you see it now and again in the big budget movies. On the catwalks. An unassuming beauty. Not many girls look like this,’ he gestured at the picture and not at me, ‘and don’t know it.’
Chloe laughed. ‘He thinks you could be a model,’ she said. ‘It was the first thing he said when I showed him.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘You need a portfolio,’ Carl said. ‘Something a bit better than this.’ He shook the Polaroid as if he was waiting for it to be developed, and then put it back in his pocket. ‘You should think about it. I could do it for you, if you wanted.’ He shrugged. ‘Up to you, of course.’
‘The darkroom,’ I said.
Carl smiled, almost shyly. His front two teeth overlapped slightly and the crevice between them was stained dark with nicotine.
‘It’s all ready for you. Whenever you like.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, and shook my head. ‘Shouldn’t we just go on down to the pond? That’s what we’re here for.’
Carl laughed. ‘I’ll make you a deal,’ he said. ‘How about we get this done, put your mind at rest, and then I take you back to mine so you can have a look at the room? I’ve a set of professional lights in there, so I could take your picture and get it developed all in one. My mum’s out, your mum’s – well, not expecting you back soon. We could have all evening. Chloe would be there to do your make-up and make you feel comfy.’
I looked at her and she was nodding, eagerly. ‘We do it all the time, Lola, it’s a laugh, and you’ll look amazing.’
I bit my lip and wondered if Carl could have been telling the truth. An unassuming beauty? Was it possible? What did she show him for?
‘Maybe,’ I said. He rolled his eyes and put his hand back into his pocket.
‘You don’t trust me?’ he said. ‘Here. You keep them then. It was sneaky of Chloe to take them but she knows the sort of thing I like to see. You keep these and come back to the house later.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. Chloe smiled.
‘That’s my girl, come on then,’ Carl replied, and we started walking.
I don’t know what it cost Chloe to convince Carl to take us because I never asked her. Still, by the time we got there, all I remember thinking was that they were happy. They were almost giddy with a kind of frantic, forced excitement that seemed to belong to Christmas. I guessed they’d been drinking all afternoon.
We got to the edge of the pond. Carl and Chloe went first, I followed on slightly behind but near enough to hear them talk.
‘I left my gloves in your car,’ Chloe said. ‘Did you bring them out for me?’
Carl shook his head. ‘Must be at the house. You should have rung me.’
Chloe put her head on one side.
‘Where is your phone, anyway?’ he asked.
‘Look, we’re here now,’ I said, ‘and we’re not going to be long. I’ve got some mittens you can borrow. Chloe?’
I called after her, but in the time it took for me to pull my mittens out of my pockets they were already too far ahead, their faces turned towards each other so that for one second they looked like that optical illusion you see in books – two heads close on one minute, and a vase the next. You know the one I mean. I still remember it like that – their noses level, Chloe’s eyes pointed up at Carl. He pulled her face towards his and whispered something in her ear. She giggled.
‘It’s been ages, you sicko,’ she said, and swished her head away. They bumped each other’s shoulders as they walked on and Carl stuck out his foot and pretended he was going to trip her up.
‘Come on, dickhead,’ he said softly, and poked her in the side with his elbow. Chloe stopped, put her hands on her hips, and pursed her lips at him. It was as if they could talk like that: they had a secret they were sharing backwards and forwards through a code of breaths and eye movements.
Then we were at the pond. Others had walked around it before us and recently too – the grass between the path and the bank was frosty and pressed with footprints.
Chloe complained again about the cold.
‘Here we are, Lolly-Lola,’ she said. ‘What do you want us to look at?’
I didn’t answer. I was struggling behind, they’d already arrived and I was trotting through the leaves then – making the effort to catch them up without trying to look desperate or get sweaty.
‘I don’t see anything,’ Carl said. He was bored, his voice was hoarse.
‘Further out,’ I said, and lost the rest of what I was going to say in a coughing fit. Carl rolled his eyes.
‘She needs a fag. Give her a fag, Carl, don’t be tight.’
Carl flicked open the packet, jiggled it so one of the cigarettes jumped out at me.
‘You got a lighter?’
He pulled it out of his pocket without looking at it. Tossed it through the air. The metal part caught the light and shimmered slightly. I lit the cigarette with the lighter tucked into my palm, and Carl was walking towards Chloe when I turned to give it back to him so I put it away and didn’t see what he’d given to me until I got home and I looked for the Polaroids.
It gets to your throat more, when you smoke in the cold. Carl was coughing too. The white air came out of his mouth and I saw it in spumes either side of his head. I remembered being seven and saw myself blowing clouds of warm white air into the cold, pretending I was smoking with a broken twig.
‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘Can we get on with this?’
‘It’s right in the middle,’ I said. Carl stamped over the grass. ‘Over there.’
Donald told me that in wildlife documentaries the sound that penguins and polar bears make stepping into the snow isn’t real – they put it in afterwards with a sound man squeezing a rubber glove full of custard powder in time to the steps. You want a noise like that, in here. Not loads of custard powder, because it wasn’t deep white snow, but grey slush clogging the grass, with a crust of frost. Carl was at the edge of the water. Chloe followed him and if the ground hadn’t been frozen they both would have sunk into it because their feet were in the place where the grass turned into reeds.
‘I can see it,’ Chloe said, and I imagined her at the front of the class, arm waving – always first with the right answer. She grabbed Carl’s arm and turned him towards her.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I see it. It’s a football. What are we supposed to do now?’
This last question was for me, but he didn’t bother turning his head to look at me and so I didn’t bother answering him. Chloe put her hand in his back pocket and squeezed.
‘Doesn’t prove anything, just looking,’ Chloe said, and I didn’t know who she was talking to. Suddenly I wanted to touch her. Nothing weird – just a hand on the padded sleeve of her coat, or my cheek against the fluff at her collar. She was with Carl, and miles away.
‘We could go out and look,’ I said. It was definitely me that said it. I’d been hoping Chloe would suggest it – she was the one who decided on the plans, on what was the best response to any problem. But I’d already decided, at home while I was brushing my teeth and staring at my fringe in the bathroom mirror, that if she wouldn’t, I was going to. And that was fine with me.
The ice was thick – bubbled and uneven in places where it had cracked and refrozen. Didn’t look like water. Didn’t look like ice. Put me in mind of the scorched plastic on the cowslip and stoat sign. Further out the surface was smoother. No reeds or plants to poke through it, just the six wooden stumps of the old platform. Someone had wanted to test the ice – there were branches and bottles, broken bricks and large stones – skidmarks where they’d been thrown and slid over the hard lid on the water. We stared. I imagined the Year Elevens, out here on weekends tossing stones and bottles, someone getting their nerve up to slide right out. It had been all right. No one had fallen so far. If Wilson had got this far he’d have been fine. I imagined him, dashing out onto the water and then stopping, delighted, as it held between his feet and Carl gave up the chase on the bank.
‘It’s a football,’ Carl said again, trying to turn away from the pond, but Chloe was still hanging onto his back pocket and wouldn’t let it go. ‘We’ve come, we’ve seen it, it’s a fucking football,’ he laughed, and Chloe pulled at his arm. ‘Well done, Laura, you were right. A footie.’