Authors: Jenn Ashworth
I knew the report was going to be about Chloe as soon as I saw Terry’s tie. He didn’t skip to his chair, or do a run and slide over the shiny floor of the studio, as he sometimes did. But he’d walked soberly to his seat before and the news had been no worse than another fuel shortage, or a local carpeting firm going bust, or one more assault with a broken bottle and a bike chain in a pub car park. As I say, it was the tie. What other than a death – a pair of deaths, although it was Chloe’s that was important, because she was the blonde – would have induced Terry to wear a black tie on Valentine’s Day when Ladbrokes had him down at five to one for the ‘kiss me quick, untie me slowly’ design that Woolworths had been carrying with him in mind since Burns Night?
Barbara was in her bedroom. It didn’t matter how close to the television I sat: no one was going to stop me. The Marmite sandwich was my first and only meal that day – it was like I didn’t have a mother anymore. The Christmas tree was long gone, brown and bare and out in the garden, leaning against the back wall, but the odd needle from it was still caught in the carpet and something pricked the palm of the hand that I leaned on.
They showed her school photograph, with her hair Frenchplaited and tiny sapphire studs in her ears. Taken at the end of the summer, while she still had a tan and before she started getting thin.
I hardly listened to the bulletin. I could tell from the way his eyes were moving that Terry was reading from the autocue. He said polished, careful things like ‘local treasure’ and ‘tragic winter flower’ and ‘the heart-shattering sorrow of her parents, who will remember this season of love and romance with heavy hearts for as long as they both shall live’.
They showed pictures of the school, and the car park outside the nature reserve, and the pond. It looked the same. You couldn’t see the hole in the ice – just the trees, and lots of cars, and blue and white tape stretched between the bench and the railings.
Eventually, I realised what Terry was saying. Not only the words, but the implication of them. Chloe, apparently, had faded in front of her parents’ eyes after they had banned her from seeing Carl. Carl, who was not twenty-three, as we’d thought, but twenty-nine (and mourned by his mother who was in a wheelchair, and talked about how he always took her to the supermarket in his car, no matter what, and because of that, Terry made him out to be a hero), had given away a pair of expensive brown-envelope-coloured boots, and an almost new pair of jeans to a friend. And then he and Chloe had held hands and drank Cava and walked out onto the ice towards hypothermia, serious injury and certain death, because of their great and
inordinate
(which is not a word you hear on the news very much) love for each other.
A Valentine’s Day Suicide Pact. And the thing is, I thought, licking Marmite off my thumb and considering a banana for afters, that’s exactly the sort of overblown, influenced-by-television, schmaltzy gesture Chloe
would
make. The people who knew her were shocked, and they were sad, but they weren’t surprised.
It was a special extended programme: they cut into
Family Fortunes
and Terry Best interviewed various experts – including Patsy the school nurse. She tipsily gave five helpful hints to the parents of teenage girls, which were displayed on the screen behind her in courier font as she spoke. She seemed to think Chloe had died of an eating disorder because she talked a lot about the importance of making sure young girls didn’t feel self-conscious about their developing breasts and mistake the natural swellings (she sketched a shape in the air in front of her sweater) for unwanted weight gain. That was never Chloe’s problem.
I didn’t wonder about anything. I was waiting for something else to happen, something worse, or more important, but every time my mind skated forward to think about what it might be, a light went out and everything went dark and I couldn’t think about anything. The sensation was new and peculiar, but it has never quite left me.
I stared and I watched my television and I didn’t say anything to anyone.
It wasn’t long after that the interviews started. The photographs. The way they wanted me and Emma to tell them everything. I knew what they wanted to hear. We helped them make Chloe into who she is today.
When the spring came in proper the headmaster got someone to bulldoze up the cement courtyard at the front of the school and filled it with the yellow Juliet roses. The town has never stunk like it did in the late spring of 1998. Loads of people planted them and although now, ten years later, they are a lot less fashionable, you can still smell them occasionally.
In my dreams now it is always night and their soaked heads break the surface again and again. They want to float and my hands and arms are frozen with trying to push them back under.
Emma and I are opening the drawers in the tallboy in my bedroom. She’s sitting on the carpet next to me. I can smell her trainers and see the pattern on her socks out of the corner of my eye as I jiggle the sticky bottom drawer open. The grain of the carpet digs into my palms as I lean towards her. I feel young, hunched down on the floor with her like this. We might have been better friends, Emma and me, if it hadn’t been for Chloe.
‘Let’s have it all out then,’ she says.
The photographs of Chloe are tucked between folded jeans and sweatshirts and hiding under balls of socks and old scarves I’ve not worn in years. We lift out the clothes, throw them onto my bed or pile them on the floor, and excavate.
Here’s one of Chloe’s mittens. Here’s a homework diary, filled with her round, squat handwriting. A pink pot of raspberryripple-scented lip balm. A dangling cubic zirconia pendant. I wasn’t as bad at stealing things as Emma and Chloe thought I was. Emma looks at the objects, gathering them in a pile between her crossed legs as I hand them to her. Eventually, I have to go and find her a shoebox.
‘There’s so much of it,’ she says.
‘She used to stay over a lot,’ I say. ‘She spent half the summer living at my house. The other half, I was with her. I bet there was loads of my stuff round at her place too.’
I think of those lost objects. I try to count them, to list the spare socks and abandoned magazines. The notebooks and pens with moulded plastic tops in the shape of cats. I wonder if Amanda still has her things.
‘Come on,’ Emma says, and thrusts a pile of folded tee-shirts at me. ‘Put these up on your bed for the time being, we can put it all back after.’
Here’s an envelope stuffed with newspaper clippings. I hitch my finger under the flap but Emma shakes her head and holds out her hand.
‘You’ve read it all already,’ she says.
More. There’s the cord from her dressing gown. A stack of old tapes, a pair of headphones. I know I’m going to get to her mobile phone, but even as my hand brushes it and I see the cracked black plastic of the casing, I feel shocked. To Emma, it’s just a piece of broken equipment. It’s nothing. It’s not worth anything, not dangerous, not significant. I give it to her, my voice trapped inside it. It goes into the box.
‘There can’t be much more,’ she says.
I give Emma a photograph of Chloe that I took for Carl and kept for myself. She stares at it without embarrassment.
‘His mother must have known,’ she says, looking at Chloe leaning over the bed in her underwear.
‘His wheelchair-bound mother, who Carl, despite having a full-time job, drove to the supermarket each and every Sunday without fail.’ I’m quoting Terry, but Emma doesn’t know that and glances at me with a strange expression on her face. She’s staring at the Polaroid. Chloe’s face is a faded oval – there is no definition to her features except for the bright slash of lipstick around her mouth.
‘She must have gone through his stuff. Found pictures like this. Chloe. Some of me. God knows who else.’
‘She’d have got rid of them,’ I say, and Emma nods.
‘That’s what you should have done. Chuck it all out. It’s disgusting.’ She tears the picture in half. ‘I don’t want anyone ever knowing about this,’ she says. ‘It’s bad enough having to think about it.’ She reaches out her hand and strokes the carpet beside her. It’s an unconscious movement and I wonder if she’s thinking about her dogs, about putting her hands into the coarse fur at the back of their necks.
‘I’d never say anything,’ I say quickly, ‘you can trust me on that. I’m your friend.’
Emma snorts, but doesn’t answer and I remove the very last thing, something I found in a black school coat pocket, a coat that pretended to be a Christmas present, a long time ago. I hold it in my hands. It’s a tiny thing. Could have been a dangerous thing. A cigarette lighter with a woman in a bikini on it. When it was new, you flicked the lighter to ignite the flame and her bikini disappeared. A bit of a surprise. Something saucy and harmless. Now her skin has a greenish tinge and the gas in the chamber is long gone. I hold it between my palms for a second, feeling the cold of the metal top against the web of skin between my thumb and first finger.
I remember this lighter.
I remember.
Emma takes it off me. ‘Was this Chloe’s?’ she asks, and frowns. She tests the wheel with her thumb a few times. There’s a scraping sound, but it doesn’t spark. The flint is gone. The feel of it in her hand reminds her, I think, that she wants to smoke, and she’s leaning forward, easing the green packet of tobacco out of her back pocket. The lighter is on the floor between us as she fiddles with matches and filters, runs the sliver of transparent paper along her tongue.
‘Here,’ she says, and hands me a cigarette. I light it from a match and we exhale together. My bedroom is tiny and soon the smoke is making a dusky halo around the bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, shrouded with its own ropy cobwebs of dust.
‘It doesn’t look like Chloe’s,’ she says. ‘Is it going in the box?’
I know what she’s thinking. It isn’t pink. It isn’t fluffy. It doesn’t sparkle or smell like strawberries, it doesn’t glitter or glow in the dark. So it isn’t Chloe’s. A long minute passes before I speak.
‘It was Carl’s,’ I say, ‘and he got it off Wilson. Or Wilson lost it, and Carl picked it up. I don’t know exactly.’
‘Carl gave it you?’ she says carefully. ‘Like a present?’ She says present with a tilt to it, and I realise what she’s implying, what she’s offering up to me. I can talk if I want to. I can be her friend like this.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I found it in the woods.’
I gesture half-heartedly at the television in the next room. We’ve left it on, and across the hallway and between two halfclosed doors, I can still hear Terry’s voice. He speaks into the silence, talking about human error and regret and despite everything how he’d like to take the opportunity to recap his personal career highlights. Emma was right. He can’t get away without admitting he was wrong.
‘Those woods on the telly?’
‘Yes.’
Emma looks at the lighter, and looks at me. She’s calm. She picks it up, examines it again as she finishes the last of her cigarette.
‘She’s supposed to get naked, when you flick it,’ I say. Emma nods. ‘I’ve seen them before. Sell them everywhere. Pound shops, newsagents, pubs. Hundreds of them.’
There’s no ashtray in here. No conveniently placed empty coffee mug or wine bottle. She flicks the ash into the shoebox and stubs out the cigarette in the lid.
‘It’s Wilson’s,’ I say, and Emma looks at me again – the same even, unreadable expression on her face.
‘I don’t want to know,’ she says. ‘I haven’t asked, have I?’ She opens her eyes wide and I can see she’s biting her bottom lip.
‘No,’ I say.
‘It goes in the box too then?’ she says neutrally.
‘Yes, okay. Get rid of it.’
She throws it in, and makes a show of pushing everything down flat and rearranging the papers and photographs so she can get the lid on tight.
‘Is there anything else?’ She is brisk and efficient now. She sounds like Barbara. I wonder about what’s left in that house – whether Barbara cleaned out my room as quickly as she emptied Donald’s. I think of my old things, and wonder who there is in the world to tuck them into drawers and keep them safe for me.
‘No, that’s it,’ I say. ‘I’ve nothing else.’
‘Good. Come on then, get up and get your coat on.’
‘What are we going to do with it?’
‘We’re going to chuck it out,’ Emma says, as if she expects me to challenge her.
‘I know a place,’ I say. ‘Do you have your car?’
She nods.
Outside, it’s getting light but the street is empty. I’ve been up this early before. The bread van should be arriving around now – the milk float, and the first bit of morning traffic. The early bus. But there’s nothing, and instead of a street full of darkened windows we can see the lights still on behind the closed curtains; people sitting up late, sitting up early – as long as it takes. The racks in front of the block of flats are still loaded with people’s bikes: no one’s leaving the house early for work this morning.
‘We’re missing Terry’s resignation speech,’ I say, not really meaning it.
Emma turns the keys in the ignition and smiles.
‘So what? We’ll get home in a couple of hours and catch his concluding remarks. As soon as he goes, Fiona is going to do an interview with Amanda. Exclusive.
What her mother knew
. I’ll lay down fifty quid on it for you.’
We smirk. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen her smile properly, ever. It used to flatten her face out – Chloe called her panhead because of it. Maybe something has changed as she grew up, or maybe I was just too quick to believe Chloe in the first place. The car is clean and the seats are covered with colourful afghans. It looks worn and loved in here.
‘Are you going to be all right to drive?’ I say. ‘We’ve been drinking all night. You must be knackered.’
She shakes her head. ‘I’ve driven in worse states than this,’ she says, which is not reassuring. ‘You’ll have to give me directions: I don’t know where I’m going. And when you want me to turn, don’t say left or right – point with your hand. I can’t tell, otherwise.’
I buckle my seatbelt and she thrusts the shoebox onto my lap and puts her foot to the floor. The screech of the car engine is deafening in the empty street, but we’re not waking anyone up – and no one opens their front door and shouts.
‘You want to get on the M6,’ I say. ‘We’re going up to Morecambe.’
Emma doesn’t shudder or tremble. Her phobias do not seem to be bothering her this morning.
The place where we stop isn’t miles away from where Donald might have taken his boat into the water. We park on the seafront at the northern edge of Morecambe after a long drive through the town and along a deserted, shuttered-up promenade. There are arcades, and the hoarding outside Frontierland tilts and lifts with a strong wind that whips across the bay and onto the hunched and huddled shopfronts flanking the curve of the land. We park on a double yellow line that Emma assures me doesn’t apply outside business hours. The road hugs the coast and the sharp outline of the concrete promenade contrasts with the ragged, muddy edge of the shallow bay. There are boats too – peeling, abandoned-looking things half sunk into the mud or sitting, tilted on the sand, chained to concrete-filled oil cans or bolts in the sea defence wall. And there are birds, big white birds sitting on posts and swooping to peck at fag-ends and abandoned polystyrene chip trays.
It’s completely light by the time we get out of the car and start walking, carrying our shoebox like it contains something precious. It feels more normal up here. Makes me think it isn’t the whole world that’s sitting in listening to Terry broadcast a litany of his regrets: it’s just our city. I wonder why that should be so, and I want to ask Emma about it but before I can she is climbing the railings and leaning out over the mud.
I’m scared, and before I think about it I rush up behind her, put my arms around her waist and pull. She’s tried this sort of thing before.
‘Stop!’
‘I’m not after topping myself,’ she says, in her ordinary voice. ‘I’m just trying to get a better look.’
I leave my arms around her waist for a second, press my face into her back – smell the musty, doggy smell of her waxed jacket. It’s a mainly unpleasant smell – but I don’t move until she shrugs me off.
‘Get away,’ she says, without irritation. ‘Come up and look here.’
I jump up next to her and we are leaning on the railings, the cold coming off them biting through my jeans and making the top of my thighs ache. The clouds are low and pencil-leadcoloured. Can’t see out very far. Everything is brown or grey. I’m thinking a lot about Donald now – course I am.
‘Here’s where my dad drowned himself,’ I say, and edge closer to Emma.
‘I remember about that,’ she says, and doesn’t ask me if I am all right.
‘He was a bit –’ I pause, and realise no one who cares is listening anymore, ‘he was a bit soft.’
‘I heard about that as well.’
‘From Chloe?’
Emma nods. ‘Some things you were better off keeping to yourself.’
‘You wouldn’t have taken the piss, would you?’ I say. Maybe me and Emma can be friends now. We’ve stayed in contact, all these years. That must be worth something. Don’t want to think about all those years wasted – would rather have someone else, another Chloe, to sit in the house with me at night, to keep secrets with, to visit cafes and Debenhams and sit on the climbing frame in the park. She could be my friend.
‘I’ll come with you after here,’ I say. ‘I’ll come with you to the dogs’ home. You’ve got your shift first thing, yeah? Walk them, wash them and that? I’ll come in the car with you.’ I show her the toe of my trainers. ‘These things are old, doesn’t matter if they get in a bit of a state. Then we can have breakfast together afterwards?’
Emma doesn’t say anything. She is looking out at the moving brown and grey water in the channel – the way the exposed mud-flats seem to dissolve and resolve themselves into shadow and spits of almost solid land, and then back again into moving sludge and stirred-up water. I wonder how long it’s been since she’s been out of the City, since she’s driven on a motorway, since she’s been anywhere unfamiliar without being scared. She’s just looking out, very calmly. And this is a creepy, dangerous place. You stare out far enough, and the water lightens. It’s never blue, it’s just less brown. There’s a buoy, and further out, a shrimp boat with its red lights on, tailed by a train of screaming gulls.