Cold Light (36 page)

‘You want to make friends with someone,’ she says mildly, ‘go and see your mother. She still lives in your old house. Still got that same car on blocks in the back garden. Same net curtains. Same cherry tree. Still puts out that wreath on Christmas Eve, and still chains it to the door handle so no one can nick it.’

‘You know more about her than I do,’ I say. It sounds sullen.

She shakes her head. ‘I never went in. Just went to see a couple of times. Wanted to know if you were still going to see her. Talking to her, maybe.’

‘I’ve never said anything.’

‘Well, there’s no need now, is there?’

I’m not looking at Emma, I’m looking at the water, and feeling the ground whip away from under my feet until suddenly it feels like I am tipping, falling, and there is nothing and nobody to hold on to. It’s been a terrible waste. I could cry, and my awareness of the world shrinks to a narrow, foreshortened view of my hands and feet on those cold railings, the paint scabby and flaking against my palms.

‘Lola?’ Emma touches my arm. ‘Come on, Lola, don’t be like that.’

I can’t speak. I want to speak. I want to tell her my name is Laura and she is never allowed to call me Lola again. Tell her she’s never allowed to speak to me again. I want to put my hand in the flat of her back and push her so she tips over the railings and sinks into the mud and I don’t have to see her or think about her anymore.

‘It’ll be all right,’ she says, ‘you know it will. Everything’ll be fine.’

I don’t know how she is able to say that to me. How she has got enough of herself left to share. I have done something very bad. I open my mouth and I still can’t speak but there’s no need because suddenly, far away on the water where the channels fall away into troughs and get deep and treacherous even for experienced sailors, I see a blue glow over the surface of the bay. It’s a light. A cold, artificial-looking light – like a fluorescent tube or the glow of a television and it blinks and swirls and then goes out.

I look at Emma, and she nods at me.

‘I’ve seen it before. Something to do with the algae.’

I’m laughing, and I can’t help it. She looks at me and pulls a face. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ and before I can answer she’s laughing too.

‘It’s the algae or the plankton,’ she says. ‘It’s dead common in the Pacific.’

‘I know how it works. Just didn’t think it was possible round here.’

‘No,’ she shakes her head, ‘it shouldn’t be. There’s the towers at Heysham. They warm up the water. It’s bad really. Not natural, at the very least.’

I’m still laughing, even as I’m staring and squinting and waiting for it to happen again. The water is dark and the sky is getting lighter.

‘Better at night, I reckon – but I wouldn’t bother. You can watch it on YouTube whenever you want.’

Something about what she’s said strikes me as hilarious and we’re laughing again – egging each other on, breathless and giddy and near-hysterical. Something close to tears. After too long, we stop.

‘I think us two are finished after today, aren’t we?’

It’s like a slap, even though she’s not saying it nastily. I hang onto the railing. My head throbs and burns. I want those lights to come back.

‘You weren’t planning on spending the rest of your life checking up on me, were you? I’m glad we don’t need to do that anymore.’ She knocks her chin against my shoulder and I can smell the old wine and tobacco on her breath, and then she’s away, lifting up the box over the railings and pulling off the lid.

If I’d have imagined this before now, I’d have pictured her taking the things out one by one and letting them drift into the water. She’d say something meaningful. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t wait to see if I’m watching or not – doesn’t ask me how I feel or what I’m thinking. She drops the lid of the box over the side and before it hits the mud, she turns the box upside down and lets it fall through her fingers. It’s only ten feet or so and the tide isn’t even properly in. The paper and photographs stick to the mud or blow away. She leans over and we watch the mobile phone sink into the grey sludge and disappear.

‘Do you want to wait until the tide comes in and covers it over?’ she says.

I shrug.

‘Might as well.’

We stare until the sea and sky are light and empty and I don’t see the blue lights again but I know they have been there and that someone else has seen them with me and that is the best I’m going to get.

Epilogue

Imagine this. It could happen.

I am at home. Not at the flat. Not in my front room, or the kitchen, or the bathroom with the toothpaste-coloured tiles. Not in the service corridors at the shopping centre, feeling tiny in the silence as I put my trolley away and wind up the wire for the portable floor polisher. No, my real home. The one with the crooked back gate and the cherry tree in the garden and the shed with the paperback-sized window.

It is sunny. Say we’ve had a mild winter but a long one, and this day, first of a new month, feels like the first day of spring too. Barbara and I are sitting out in the garden on the mildewspotted plastic patio furniture and because the sky is improbably blue and even a few bees are flying about the garden, she’s asked me to rig something up with the extension cable and the television on the sill of the open kitchen window. It’s a warm day, but a fresh one – even after lugging the telly through the house I’m not sweating as I lean back and tuck the kitchen net behind it so it doesn’t get tangled in the aerial.

‘It’ll probably fall in the sink and electrocute us,’ Barbara says, but she is smiling and she comes out from the kitchen with no apron, and her hair down, and she’s carrying a bottle of Gordon’s and two glasses with ice and wedges of lemon in them on a round plastic tray, and she pours the drinks and we sit on our patio chairs with the sun on the backs of our necks, and watch the television. I put my feet in her lap and feel the slats of the plastic chair sticking into my back, but not uncomfortably. She’s wearing a loose skirt with green leaves and red flowers on it – looks like the sort of thing they put in the window in charity shops, but it falls softly around her calves and the breeze twitches the hem and it suits her.

We’re watching Wilson’s funeral. It’s April and it’s taken them this long to release the body.

‘His poor mother,’ Barbara says, and Fiona, who is still in her camel-coloured two-piece suit, slightly shimmering tights and a new hairdo – blonde waves, to celebrate her new job – narrates the slow procession snaking its way along a path and into the dark open mouth of the church. The coffin is at the front of the queue, and it is white, like the ones they use for babies and young girls. The dad is too old to bear it, and he walks behind with the mother and their heads are bowed, not looking at the press, but they do not cry and they are not ashamed.

‘Imagine having a photographer at a funeral and you not even being a member of the royal family,’ Barbara says, scandalised and admiring. There’s an ashtray on the table, a little blue glass lump with depressions in the side, and I light up, and offer one to Barbara, and for a few seconds we’re absorbed in the apparatus of smoking – the flick of the lighter, the draw, the crackle, the delicious feeling of the first pull, grey threads of smoke sucked into the lungs, darkening and filtering into the blood. She sighs and puts her head back, exhales upwards towards the sky, and balances the ashtray on my shins so I can’t move my feet now, even if I wanted to.

‘A nice day for it though, eh?’ As if it wasn’t a funeral, but a wedding. ‘I wonder if they’ll ever catch who did it?’ The ice cubes click in her glass as she drinks.

I don’t answer her, but look away from the television and around the garden, where I have been working for Barbara all morning. The grass is neat and there is a small heap of clippings and pulled weeds at the side of the shed. Fiona’s voice still emanates thinly from the colour portable, quoting from Terry’s final broadcast where, before retiring, he admitted that the police were able to prove beyond doubt that Wilson was innocent of anything suspected of him. The noise of her is filling the tiny garden, flying up into the air and travelling outwards, the waves getting wider and further apart until we can’t hear them anymore.

Acknowledgements

While researching bioluminescence I found many books, articles and websites useful. In particular, ‘Milky Seas: A Bioluminescent Puzzle’ (
Marine Oberver
, 63.22, 1993) by P.J. Herring and M. Watson, and
The Science Frontiers Sourcebook Project
at http://www.science-frontiers.com/sourcebk.htm, edited by William R. Corliss helped inform my understanding. The research forum at
The Bioluminescence Website
: http://lifesci.ucsb.edu/~biolum/ edited by S.H. Haddock, C.M. McDougal and J. F. Case was also helpful.

Thanks are owed to Emma Lannie, who knew about Wrigley’s and barcodes, to Kim McGowan who helped with water-cooled power stations and continuity errors in late drafts and to Angela Fitzpatrick: a librarian extraordinaire. Thanks to all the writers from the Northern Lines Fiction Workshop – Tom Fletcher, Andrew Hurley, Sally Cook, Emma Unsworth and Zoe Lambert – for invaluable feedback, advice and moral support. To my agent Anthony Goff and my editors Carole Welch and Ruth Tross for their patient, professional and meticulous approaches.

The time I needed to develop this novel was supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. My employer, Lancashire County Council’s Library and Information Service, generously agreed to a career break that gave me the space to write and my colleagues at Lancashire Libraries and HMP Garth were especially understanding. Sarah Hymas, at Lancaster Litfest, acted as a wise and patient mentor during the final stages.

Most of all, thanks to Duncan McGowan, for not reading this one either.

About the Author

JENN ASHWORTH’s
first book,
A Kind of Intimacy
, won the U.K.’s Betty Trask Award. She lives in Preston, Lancashire, with her family and writes an award-winning blog at www.jennashworth.co.uk.

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Also by Jenn Ashworth

A Kind of Intimacy

Credits

Cover design by Mary Schuck

Cover photograph by Mark Owen/Trevillion

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

COLD LIGHT
. Copyright © 2011 by Jenn Ashworth. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton, an Hachette UK company.

FIRST U.S. EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-06-207603-8

Epub Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062076045