Chloe stared at me, daring me to kneel and collect them, but I shrugged and walked away.
‘Carl’s nothing to do with you,’ she spat after me. ‘He’s ours.’
Chapter 20
In all the photographs printed of her after her death Chloe was smiling, her hair pulled back tight, the collar of her school shirt stiff and blinding white. But sometimes I remember her the way she was that lunchtime – her hair falling out of her plait and hanging down by her ears – her lips pursed, one hand on her hip and a spot forming on her chin. That scowl. A look that could have curdled milk.
Tonight I remember the things that happened during that winter and it is like watching myself in a reconstruction. Some girl who isn’t quite real enough to be me stumbles through the corridors in a school that cannot have been so large and sits near a pair of girls that would never have been allowed to be so cruel. Our spats were probably comic and insignificant to Shanks, Brocklehurst and the others. No one noticed anything other than the ordinary ebb and shift of teenage girls’ friendships. That’s why they had all those inquiries afterwards: someone, they said, should have noticed something.
Sometimes I remember my thoughts so exactly it seems like I knew which moments would be significant, even before the significance of them became clear. Is that possible, do you think? Something happens – the event explodes like a firework and illuminates the memories before it, as well as after? Maybe. At the time I was preoccupied with my guilt and worry for Wilson and with Emma’s strange shouldering-in and taking Chloe away from me. I was angry with Chloe, as if what had happened to Wilson was her fault instead of mine. I’d always expected that as best friends we’d share each other’s secrets and go halves on all these burdens. And when I needed her most, she was acting like a person I didn’t even know.
No, that wasn’t right. Nothing about Chloe’s behaviour was remarkable. She’d been thrown out of schools before for bullying and truancy. She was only hanging by a thread at our school. But that part of the story has been rewritten now. After she died, ‘wild’ became ‘spirited’ and ‘bully’ became ‘stubborn’.
It happens while I am dozing – my eyes gritty and the muscles at the back of my neck slowly stiffening. The quiet hum of Terry’s broadcast punctuates the adverts and Emma elbows me awake.
‘Breaking news – we’re finally able to confirm the identification of the remains found here earlier this evening as Daniel Wilson, who disappeared without trace on Boxing Day, 1997, three weeks before his thirty-fourth birthday.’
Terry pauses a moment but it’s not the same – this isn’t real solemnity. He’s hardly containing himself – almost itching with glee.
Emma nudges me and I look up to see the picture of Wilson on the screen – the one of him in his Christmas hat. He is like Chloe now, and will never get any older than this. I am so absorbed by the picture, so lost in my own memories of the first time that I saw it and the way I carried the poster about in my pocket until it fell into fragments, that I don’t notice Emma is clutching the arm of the sofa and shaking her head wordlessly. She’s crying. Crying and laughing at the same time.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I say.
She didn’t know Wilson. I am sure she didn’t know him.
She tries to speak, but for the time being she can’t. She gulps, and smiles, and as she smiles her eyes brim over and tears fall from her eyes onto the front of her jacket.
‘Thank God,’ she says, ‘thank God for that.’
I’ve never seen Emma cry before. Even at Chloe’s funeral she stood next to me with her jaw set and her lips clamped together in a perfectly straight line while the rest of the girls snivelled and wailed like a chorus. I don’t understand. I wish she’d shut up so I can watch the rest of this segment – find out what they think they know, and how they know it. Wilson wasn’t likely to carry about a nice plastic non-biodegradable driving licence in his back pocket and it’s been far too quick for forensics to do anything. How do they know it is him?
‘Jesus,’ Emma says, and rests her face in her hands, sighing out the air between her fingers.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s all right now,’ she says, picks up her glass and takes a long swallow. ‘I’m all right.’ She takes a tissue – no, not a tissue but a real, environmentally friendly handkerchief – from her pocket, and rubs at her eyes, which are red, and as usual, bare of make-up. The rims look raw. I realise she’s been crying for a while – sitting here leaking while I’ve been asleep. How could I have slept?
‘Do you remember him?’ she asks.
My mouth is dry. I reach for my wine glass and my hand bumps hers. She’s handing me cold coffee, and I sip at it and rub my eyes. I’ve been dreaming.
‘I remember the news about him,’ I say carefully, ‘that Christmas when he disappeared.’
‘Yes, they did a reconstruction, didn’t they? Those two girls. Chloe was seething mad because she’d have volunteered to act in it like a shot.’ She laughs again, and coughs back her wine.
‘What’s got you so worked up?’ I say, and my voice is irritated – not sympathetic at all.
‘I had an idea,’ she says slowly, ‘as soon as I saw the mayor dig that jacket up, I had this thought. You remember those girls? The ones that got attacked when we were at school?’
‘I remember.’
‘I thought it was one of those. Someone who didn’t just get a flash or a bit of a feel. Someone who got it worse. Someone who got murdered. I thought they’d be telling us it was a young girl. Someone our age.’
‘The age we used to be.’
‘Yes.’
‘They didn’t report anyone missing,’ I say, ‘no girls disappearing. Someone our age would have been missed.’
Emma shrugs. ‘You never know. Not with some families. You were only sixteen when you went. Bet your mum’s not got a clue where you are, what you’re doing with yourself.’
‘Doesn’t mean I’m dead,’ I say, and I am still irritable. ‘Anyway, why should you be so worked up about it? It isn’t anything to do with us.’
‘I remember it,’ she says. ‘Hard not to take it personally when every week someone else got grabbed at in the bushes.’ She will not look at me, but runs her thumb up and down the stem of her glass as if she’s scraping away dirt from the surface. ‘I’m not upset, I’m relieved.’
‘Yes, so long as it’s not some pretty blonde fourteen-year-old, it doesn’t matter, does it? That man –’ I point at the screen, ‘he had parents too.’
‘It isn’t the same,’ Emma says, ‘you know it isn’t.’
For a while we don’t say anything. We watch the screen, but there’s nothing new. Emma’s breaths are ragged but she’s clamer now, and doesn’t start crying again.
‘What a time,’ she says. ‘They were on the brink of sticking us all on a curfew. And your dad…’ She tails away.
Is she remembering that afternoon outside the library when she and Chloe took Donald’s application away from me? Maybe she’s putting together the events in her head – slotting what she knows and what she’s found out tonight into the right order, and realising what Donald was doing while she and Chloe were tormenting me about how soft he was.
‘Sorry,’ she says, and coughs. I think she’s about to touch me, to put a hand on my shoulder, and I wonder what I’d do if she did. But she doesn’t. She coughs again.