Cold Light Read Free Page B

gentle nature, her shyness covered up by extroversion, her determination to come top of the class. She talked about how kind Chloe was to animals, and a collection of glass owls I didn’t know she owned. All of those things got into the newspapers. Every single time Emma came up with a fact, I provided one more and she ran out of things to say first, and at the end I was still holding Chloe’s secret in my mouth, like the time we put buttons under our tongues to make us sound posh when we made prank phone calls.
    They asked us if we had any photographs of her doing ordinary teenage stuff. Singing into a hairbrush, for example – or dressed up to go to a disco. Carrying a loaded tray through McDonald’s. That sort of thing.
    ‘We need something to give to the media,’ the policewoman explained. They already had her school photograph, but they wanted something more personal – showing a side to her that only girls her own age would have known. Showing Chloe larking about with us, her friends.
    Emma shrugged, and I couldn’t give them a photograph either.
    One of the things that we did together, I could have said, was lock ourselves in her bedroom for hours and hours and hours. Whole afternoons – rows of them. Chloe insisted. She’d put on her special underwear and her silky dressing gown, pull out the Polaroid camera that Carl had given her and get me to take her picture.
    ‘Did you know,’ I could have said, ‘that Polaroid film costs ten pounds a box, and you only get ten pictures from each film? That’s a pound a picture, and she had drawers of the stuff because Carl gave it to her, and the clothes, and the camera, and she got me to do it because she could never work out the timer on her own.’
    So yes, there are pictures. Pictures that never found their way back to Carl or to the police. Even I wasn’t supposed to have them. I’d pretend the film had overexposed and pocket a few each time. These pictures were too private for anyone to see. Chloe, kneeling on her bed with the dressing gown falling off her shoulders. Chloe, shaking her hair and staring into the camera, not smiling. Chloe, her lipstick smudged across her cheek, posing with an unlit cigarette. Chloe on all fours, her hair falling around her face and her mouth slightly open. She is out of focus in this one. Her expression is a blur, her hair must have been moving.
    There’s more. Chloe from behind, her hands on her hips, pretending to unlace the thing she was wearing. I remember the red marks on her skin from the cheap, too-tight corset – the way she’d run her thumb under the edge of it and squirm between every photograph. Her eyes are dark and dull and unreadable. There’s something about her look I should have noticed at the time. She doesn’t seem unhappy, she looks bored. Her face shows she wasn’t fully committed to what she was doing. It felt ridiculous. We didn’t know what we were doing.
    Polaroid film doesn’t keep well. I don’t want to use up these pictures, so I look at them only rarely. The colours are disintegrating: her face is the same shade as her hair; her limbs are smudged; the decoration on the corset – I remember a film of lace and some ribbons I’d have to arrange at the back – has dissolved. She’s fading. I keep them in the dark, in a drawer, but they’re on their way out. By the time they get that summerhouse finished, she’ll be gone.
    I never showed anyone these pictures. Never said a word. I was her best friend. I kept all the secrets she trusted me with. Could she have taken pictures like this with Emma? After ten years, it is still difficult for me to accept that I will probably never know.
    I also have in my possession a picture of Emma and me, taken around this time. I leave the television flickering its news onto the blank walls of my flat, and get it from the drawer where I hide it. It is old but not faded. We are pretending to dig a hole in the school beds. The Juliet rose bushes are lined up