‘Did you bring anything for me, lover-boy?’ she said, her voice too loud because she was half drunk. There was a bruise on her throat.
Carl pointed at her hand. ‘I brought you the bottle, didn’t I?’
‘That’s not right,’ she said, and looked over her shoulder at him, pouting. ‘You’ve to send flowers, cards, chocolates.’ She held up the bottle and I thought she was offering it to me so I reached out to take it, but then she rattled her wrist and I realised she wasn’t looking at me at all, but showing Carl her charm bracelet.
‘You could get me another heart for this.’
‘You’ve already got three.’
‘And one more would make four. One for every month you’ve known me, right?’
Carl turned his head to one side and looked into the woods. We trudged. It was slow-going. He was tense. Jumpy.
‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you some money. Go and get it yourself, next time you’re in town.’
‘Carl, that’s not the same…’ she started to whine. ‘It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow. Some girls get weekends away. They get taken out to nice places for meals. New dresses.’
‘Aye, all right then,’ he said, not listening to her.
‘I bet I won’t even see you,’ she said, and then, as if she’d decided to be cheerful anyway and not care about it, she made a show of taking another long drink from the bottle, waiting for me to catch up and then handing it back to me.
‘Have this,’ she said, ‘finish it off.’ Her eyes were narrow and hazy. I wondered if she’d taken one of Carl’s special tablets. The bottle was olive green and freezing. The ragged foil around the top scraped at the soft bit of my hand, under my thumb.
‘Come here, Carl,’ she said, ‘come and show Lola what you’ve got.’
Carl edged nearer to us and clumsily took the bottle out of my hand. He finished the two inches of liquid in the bottom and threw it high over our heads and into the bushes. The motion of transferring his weight from one foot to another made him stagger and he toppled into Chloe. She pushed her face against his chest and giggled. I listened for a smash but it never came.
‘Here,’ he said, and crooked his finger at me, ‘closer. I int going to bite you.’
I took a step or two forward and watched as he pulled a small handful of dog-eared Polaroids out of his inside pocket. I knew he carried a picture of Chloe around with him because she’d told me. But these weren’t Chloe. They were me.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said, almost formally. ‘Chloe showed me them.’
My face burned and I cringed away and stared at my feet.
‘Don’t be like that, Lola,’ she said, and put her arm around me. When she kissed my cheek I could smell her unwashed hair and the alcohol on her breath.
‘You look very nice,’ he said, and burped gently. ‘These aren’t professional quality, but you’ve really got something. Have you ever thought about taking it further?’
I looked up. He was rubbing his thumb along the bottom of the Polaroid, touching the place where my bare forearms were in the picture.
‘You’ve got a certain magic,’ he said. ‘It’s a special quality really – you see it now and again in the big budget movies. On the catwalks. An unassuming beauty. Not many girls look like this,’ he gestured at the picture and not at me, ‘and don’t know it.’
Chloe laughed. ‘He thinks you could be a model,’ she said. ‘It was the first thing he said when I showed him.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘You need a portfolio,’ Carl said. ‘Something a bit better than this.’ He shook the Polaroid as if he was waiting for it to be developed, and then put it back in his pocket. ‘You should think about it. I could do it for you, if you wanted.’ He shrugged. ‘Up to you, of course.’
‘The darkroom,’ I said.
Carl smiled, almost shyly. His front two teeth overlapped slightly and the crevice between them was stained dark with nicotine.
‘It’s all ready for you. Whenever you like.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, and shook my head. ‘Shouldn’t we just go on down to the pond? That’s what we’re here for.’
Carl laughed. ‘I’ll make you a deal,’ he said. ‘How about we get this done, put your mind at rest, and then I take you back to mine so you can have a look at the room? I’ve a set of professional lights in there, so I could take your picture and get it developed all in one. My mum’s out, your mum’s – well, not expecting you back soon. We could have all evening. Chloe would be there to do your make-up and make you feel comfy.’
I looked at her and she was nodding, eagerly. ‘We do it all the time, Lola, it’s a laugh, and you’ll look amazing.’
I bit my lip and wondered if Carl could have been telling the truth. An unassuming beauty? Was it possible? What did she show him for?
‘Maybe,’ I said. He rolled his eyes and put his hand back into his pocket.
‘You don’t trust me?’ he said. ‘Here. You keep them then. It was sneaky of Chloe to take them but she knows the sort of thing I like to see. You keep these and come back to the house later.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. Chloe smiled.
‘That’s my girl, come on then,’ Carl replied, and we started walking.
I don’t know what it cost Chloe to convince Carl to take us because I never asked her. Still, by the time we got there, all I remember thinking was that they were happy. They were almost giddy with a kind of frantic, forced excitement that seemed to belong to Christmas. I guessed they’d been drinking all afternoon.
We got to the edge of the pond. Carl and Chloe went first, I followed on slightly behind but near enough to hear them talk.
‘I left my gloves in your car,’ Chloe said. ‘Did you bring them out for me?’
Carl shook his head. ‘Must be at the house. You should have rung me.’
Chloe put her head on one side.
‘Where is your phone, anyway?’ he asked.
‘Look, we’re here now,’ I said, ‘and we’re not going to be long. I’ve got some mittens you can borrow. Chloe?’
I called after her, but in the time it took for me to pull my mittens out of my pockets they were already too far ahead, their faces turned towards each other so that for one second they looked like that optical illusion you see in books – two heads close on one minute, and a vase the next. You know the one I mean. I still remember it like that – their noses level, Chloe’s eyes pointed up at Carl. He pulled her face towards his and whispered something in her ear. She giggled.
‘It’s been ages, you sicko,’ she said, and swished her head away. They bumped each other’s shoulders as they walked on and Carl stuck out his foot and pretended he was going to trip her up.
‘Come on, dickhead,’ he said softly, and poked her in the side with his elbow. Chloe stopped, put her hands on her hips, and pursed her lips at him. It was as if they could talk like that: they had a secret they were sharing backwards and forwards through a code of breaths and eye movements.
Then we were at the pond. Others had walked around it before us and recently too – the grass between the path and the bank was frosty and pressed with footprints.
Chloe complained again about the cold.
‘Here we are, Lolly-Lola,’ she said. ‘What do you want us to look at?’
I didn’t answer. I was struggling behind, they’d already arrived and I was trotting through the leaves then – making the effort to catch them up without trying to look desperate or get sweaty.