Cold Light Read Free Page A

She starts to rinse me and the water she runs is too hot and the eggs scramble. When I have picked the last piece of egg out of my hair and poked it down the plughole she is still snorting and rolling and wiping her eyes on the bathmat.
    I smile. She is my best friend.
    She was special, even when she was alive – but not in the picture-perfect, pure and polished way people think of her now. Being dead has turned her into a final draft. She did things I’d have felt false and ridiculous even trying. She dried her hair upside down with the diffuser, tried scented panty liners, smeared Vaseline on her eyelids and said things like ‘T-zone’ and ‘accent colour’ and ‘handbag-must-have’. Once Carl arrived in our lives, she’d talk raucously about fingering and cumming and blowjobs, and I would listen – hot and horrified and compelled. She smelled like sweat and hairspray and cigarettes and I smelled like lavender ironing water and Vosene. I’m not sure why it mattered, but it did.
     
    The process of making Chloe into a saint began in 1998.
    A funeral wasn’t enough. First, they named a rose for her. For her, not after her, because there was already a Chloe rose: some other dead girl. They called it the Juliet, after an especially moving broadcast by Terry which we all remember, and which some of us taped to watch again later. So she wasn’t herself – she stood for something. And stood for it using someone else’s name and a four-hundred-year-old story that wasn’t even true. No one minded.
    The teachers planted the Juliet roses in the brand-new school flower-beds and huddled in the corridors to talk about Chloe fading. No one did any real work for weeks. Lesson plans and homework, Bunsen burners and hockey sticks, protractors and rough-books – they are ordinary objects but in school, one down, us leftovers stared at them as if they were strange things and their continuing existence became an insult to her memory. We cleared them away and slunk between classrooms, whispering. Even some of the boys cried. The teachers turned up late, blue shadows under their eyes. They let us see them smoking in the car park, and pretended they’d noticed her getting thinner, the cracks in her lips and the fineness of her hair.
    Second, there was an investigation. Ofsted, or the National Health. Back then that was the kind of thing they were supposed to be doing: even in a city like ours where we had Terry, and our own ways of dealing with things. Should someone have stepped in? Could they have made her speak to Patsy? Where was her doctor in all of this? Her form tutor? The head? That helped. Kept the interest going for months, with interim reports and preliminary findings and conclusive recommendations about food and teen mental health and drop-in advice centres ( Chloe House ) until she was famous.
    And the thing is, I was famous too, because I’d been her best friend. And Emma. People wanted to talk to us. They were kind. There were that many pictures of us in the paper and on Terry’s show – and that’s why I don’t mind wearing my glasses now when before I used to leave them in the house and put up with things being blurred. I let my hair grow out and tuck it into big hats, like a Rasta, if I’m planning to go out anywhere busy during daylight hours. No one looks these days. I don’t have friends at work. When people talk to me, I tap the ear-protectors and shrug, and after a while they stop trying.
    Third, there were the interviews. They asked all sorts. How we spent our time, what we did together, what Chloe thought about her future, her boyfriend, her weight, her parents, her GCSE options.
    ‘Did she have other friends that you might not have known about? Did she go out to pubs?’
    I told them about her New Year’s Eve party. I told them about the wallpaper, and the perfume counter, and the flat, and Woolworths. I told them about the glass ashtrays, and her poster collection. Emma told them about her