Cold Light Read Free

There’s nothing else to do but work. It’s not Woolworths or a perfume counter, but I have my own trolley and I know my way round the service corridors even in the dark. I do all right.
    Chloe, who did not grow up to clean a shopping centre, or anything else, sits in my head while I stand on the escalator in the centre of the arcade, pressing a duster against the handrail on either side and walking slowly against the flow. Light bounces through the pointy glass atrium ceiling and I change escalators and she slides out a poster from the centre of her new Smash Hits . She is squeezing the staples closed with the flat edge of a scissor blade. All the posters: the walls of her bedroom jangling with eyes. Everything she owns has a face stuck to it. You can’t get away with coveting any of her things because most of the time her possessions stare back.
    We had a perfect summer together – the last summer before Emma involved herself in our lives. And then summer turned into autumn and we went back to school and things started to change. I think of the times we went to Avenham Park and we are there and she is taking my arm. I feel the inside of her wrist against the crook of my elbow. We’re laughing, following the footpath around the edges of the rose-beds and kicking at empty conker cases. Someone has been here before us and collected everything and we find the conkers bobbing in the turned-off fountain, swelled with water. Their shiny skins are split. Lichen spreads over stone faces and we walk around and around until it gets dark. She slips a hand into my pocket. Later, I find a packet of cigarettes. I hide it under my mattress and learn how to smoke in the shed.
    Or she is sitting next to me in class. We’re at the back, the eyes of the teacher on us. Something has been said. Maybe we’ve been passing notes again. There are always new boys to talk about. What we like changes, mysteriously, from one week to the next. A matter for constant discussion. There are lists. We compare ratings. We invent love lives for our teachers, as intricate as soap operas.
    The eyes of the other girls are slick and curious and hostile. Emma is there, but ghostly. We aren’t paying attention to her yet. When someone bitches, Chloe sticks up her fingers and hurls pieces of broken pencil eraser. We write our names on the desks in Tipp-Ex, our initials intertwined like a monogram.
    She is leaning into the mirror. The basin, toilet and bath aren’t white, they’re blue plastic in a shade called ‘aqua’ and it seems exotic. She is plucking hairs out of her eyebrows with a pair of tweezers. It hurts. She flinches away and her eyes water, but she is grinning.
    ‘Fuck me,’ she says. It’s still a new word for her. ‘The natural look is very hard work,’ she quotes into the glass, and laughs.
    Because I am standing behind her I can see myself over her shoulder: a pale face surrounded by a frizzing halo of woolly brown hair. An expression that looks stupid but is just myopic. I am watching my own eyebrows. My face is chubby and whiter than hers. The brows are like someone has drawn a loaded paintbrush across my forehead. Chloe says I’m not delicate enough; there’s no arch. This is going to be a painstaking operation and I am waiting my turn. Chloe always tests the water for both of us. If she deems this desirable, I will follow on after.
    ‘We need to do something with that,’ she says, and spins around. I am caught in her stare, but it isn’t my eyebrows she’s looking at, it is my hair. The tweezers clatter into the sink and she twirls away. Eggs are broken into a bowl, beaten, poured onto my head. She wraps my head in clingfilm. Her fingernails dig into my scalp as she pats and rubs. She layers on more clingfilm, then hot, wet towels, then dry towels.
    Slime that feels like snot and smells like nothing drips into my ears. My neck aches. We watch the clock. Twenty minutes, the magazine says, then I will have hair like Chloe’s.