Cold Light Read Online Free Page A

right. It was a feeble joke. I let the scrap of tissue paper drop into the basket.
    ‘Come over here,’ Chloe said and stepped behind a tall revolving rack. It was hung with strings of beads, velvet chokers with butterfly clasps and earrings pinned onto pieces of card. She began to turn the display.
    ‘Stand there,’ she said, her fingers slowly grazing the coloured things, ‘and just chat to me.’
    ‘What about?’
    ‘It doesn’t matter. Whatever you like. No one’s listening to you.’
    This was confusing. Chloe continued to twirl the stand and examine the beads. She weighed them in her hands and pretended to be deciding. There was a mirror built into the top of the rack. She adjusted it downwards like it was in a car, and smiled at herself.
    A fat woman edged by us and poked me with the point on her closed umbrella. It snagged my ankle and I made a little noise, an involuntary gasp. The woman turned and frowned at me. I stared back at her until she tutted and walked away then I bent and pulled up the leg of my jeans. There was a graze on the sticking-out bone of my ankle, weeping clear fluid and not blood. I could see Chloe’s feet too, and the little squares of black cardboard that were dropping between them.
    ‘Talk then,’ Chloe said.
    ‘That woman just hit me with her umbrella!’ I looked for her grey head in the crowd. ‘She never even said sorry!’
    ‘Did she?’ Chloe said. ‘Did it hurt?’
    ‘It wrecked!’ I said, freshly outraged. ‘And then she looked at me as if I was the one who’d done something wrong. Fat bitch.’
    The Christmas music and the bubble of people talking was loud, but Chloe was still nodding at me.
    ‘I don’t know why people think they can just walk about and do what they like,’ I went on. ‘Shall we go and find her? Tell her what’s what? I reckon we should. Chloe?’
    ‘Right,’ she said, ‘that’s enough now.’
    I thought she was telling me to stop whining but she glanced upwards at a red light blinking in the swivelling black eye-socket of a camera, and then behind my shoulder. I saw a flick of movement in the corner of my eye, but didn’t turn to see what it was – I was more interested in what Chloe was doing.
    ‘Got to go,’ she said, and slipped away giggling. I could hear her laughing long after she’d gone.
     
    The security guard put his hand on my shoulder and not hers. It had happened before, but still, I never saw it coming. She told me once that I got caught and not her because I stood there looking ashamed of myself. I had a guilty-looking face, apparently: a magnet for suspicious shop assistants and men with brown shirts and walkie-talkies.
    I turned limply. You always had to go to an office or a staff room somewhere. He walked behind me and tried to hold onto my elbow.
    ‘I’m not going to run,’ I said, ‘but take your hands off me or I will go home and tell my dad you touched me.’
    He recoiled because I said it like Chloe had told me to – the emphasis is on the word ‘touched’.
    And then you leg it , she’d said, but I didn’t. I walked slightly in front of him, as if I was leading him. I only let him stand beside me when I was not sure which way I needed to go next. He tapped my shoulder but didn’t hold onto it.
    This was the same winter the City was plagued by an anonymous pervert who was cornering young girls in parks and bus stations and exposing himself to them. The news coverage about it was feverish. There were more police in the public places, and talk about a curfew. No man wanted to hear the word touched said about him by a fourteen-year-old. Chloe knew this.
    In the back room, I let him have my real name.
    ‘Where do you live?’
    I shrugged. ‘You can’t ask me anything without my dad here,’ I said and emptied out my pockets. A cigarette lighter and a packet of Polos.
    ‘That it? What about your coat?’
    ‘I’ve nothing,’ I said. ‘You can’t keep me.’
    I flicked open my jacket to show him there