Free Cold Light by Jenn Ashworth

face and put a dress on?’ she said, without turning. ‘We’re going to have a nice evening,’ she insisted, ‘the three of us together. It’s going to be quiet, and civilised, and nice .’
    Donald sat at the kitchen table and flattened empty cornflake packets. He was making Secchi disks by cutting circles out of the cardboard and using a black marker pen and a bottle of Tipp-Ex for the design. He used my school ruler to divide the circles into half, and then four, and then started to colour in the quarters. The kitchen stank of solvents instead of cocktails. The point of these disks was to measure the transparency of sea water. The depth to which light from the surface could penetrate. Donald had a theory. He always had a theory.
    ‘I think twelve should be enough, for the first outing,’ he said.
    I was almost at the bottom of the stairs, escaping to the silence of my room with a bag of clementines and a magazine, but Barbara turned and looked at me pointedly, pursed her lips, and nodded at the kitchen chair next to Donald’s. She wasn’t fond of his projects and the effect they had on his moods but we had a deal: when she was cooking or otherwise occupied it was my job to babysit him, and how I did that was up to me.
    ‘What are you going to do to make them waterproof?’ I asked. I’d asked the same question the last time, and the time before that.
    ‘I could cover them with sticky tape, I suppose,’ he said thoughtfully, as if he’d never considered it.
    ‘How long do they need to last in the water for? Sticky tape might not be enough.’
    ‘I really don’t know.’ Donald smiled and shrugged and started colouring in with his black marker. I watched him, and I wondered if all families were like this: sitting in kitchens, speaking their lines and acting in a soap they already knew the ending to. For a minute, the peaceful, vacant expression Donald had on while he was colouring, the way the rims of his eyelids were pink – it reminded me of Wilson.
    I picked up a pen, started to help, and asked another question – something not in the script – just to take the thought away.
    ‘Are you going to get the boat soon?’
    Donald nodded. He looked excited.
    ‘I need to collect all the evidence for the article before the spring sets in. The tides, the organisms in the water – they’ll all change once it starts getting light.’
    Donald looked up as he spoke but carried on moving his marker. The nib of the pen slipped from the edge of the cardboard and made a mark on the table, but he didn’t notice.
    ‘As soon as I’ve got my statistics,’ he went on, back onto his script, ‘I can write up the article and send it off whenever I like. I’ve got months before they’ll be deciding on the trip.’
    I wasn’t really listening. It was the kind of thing he said a lot when he was planning his application to the National Geographic Field Trip Sea Eye Programme. It was an annual programme and this year they were accepting proposals from parties interested in coming along on the first manned trip of a deep-sea submersible in years. Last year, it had been the jungle somewhere, and the year before, one of the Poles.
    Donald hadn’t been interested then – he was still on magic or hot air balloons. But this year, it had caught his eye and he was determined to impress them with his investigations and win a place as a research assistant. Barbara told him it was for PhD students and university professors and they didn’t mean people like him. She said there was more to being an assistant on a trip like that than typing up, making tea, and cleaning lenses.
    ‘You’ve not got the qualifications,’ she’d say.
    If he was in a good mood Donald would just shrug at this. ‘So?’ he’d say, grinning. ‘So? Anyone that can read can find out what they need to do to conduct an investigation. I’ve trained myself,’ he tapped his head, ‘all up here. Whole world of it. Information’s free, isn’t