Free Cold Light by Jenn Ashworth Page A

it?’
    Barbara would put the yellow magazines in the bin when he was sleeping. It didn’t work because I’d bring them back into the house for him.
    I made a lot of effort to keep him off the subject when Chloe was around. I knew how it would sound and what him and his junk room and his felt-tip pens would look like to someone outside the family who didn’t know his phases.
    ‘ Blockbusters ’s on now,’ I’d say, or something like it. It was like rolling a ball for a dog – he’d chase it into the living room and Barbara would feed the video cassette into its slot and close the door on the theme tune and Chloe and I would have the kitchen, my bedroom – the house – to ourselves. When that didn’t work, there were the magazines – brought back in from the bin in the shed, pushed under his door. That’s what I did.
    ‘You’re getting it on the table, Dad,’ I said, under my breath.
    I was aware of Barbara at my back, still slicing at the tomatoes, and the tension in the room – Donald was a soap bubble and we all needed to keep him away from the walls and the floor, just by blowing.
    ‘I reckon if I write it all out you could type it up for me, couldn’t you, love?’ He stopped colouring, and I moved the card-board closer to his pen and rubbed at the marks with the cuff of my jumper.
    ‘I can use the computer at school, I suppose,’ I said. ‘As long as it isn’t too long.’
    ‘I’m not sure yet. It depends what I find. I have some theories about the water-flows that are going to need a lot of backing up so they make sense to someone else. There are organisms there that should not be there. I’m not sure if it’s light, or temperature, or mineral deposits, or what. Need to get out there and do a spot of investigation.’ He twirled the disk. ‘That’s what the measuring is for. Science is precise measurement, and nothing more. Remember that one, for when you do your exams,’ he said, then pointed at me, smiled, and carried on, lost in the whirl of his own words.
    I didn’t need to listen. Donald’s talking was disposable. I’d heard the speech about precise measurement many, many times before. The Sea Eye application had come out of nowhere, one of Donald’s fussy little projects, and there had been a lot of them. Most of the time they hadn’t amounted to much more than the hoarding of books and papers and magazine pictures pasted up on the walls of his room. But this one, this latest ‘spell’ had gone a bit further than the other ones I could remember. Sometimes I thought he really would find something out about the water at Morecambe – something new – and then I would help him write an article about it and then he would send the article to the scientist who was in charge of the Sea Eye and then he would be allowed to go too.
    People discover new things all the time, so why not someone who is actually trying to? That would make Donald happy and everything would be normal. Not ‘back to normal’, because as long as I could remember I’d seen Donald being a bit weird, but it would get normal, and once it was, Barbara would loosen up a bit and I’d magically get on a bit better at school and everything would be easier than it was.
    Barbara had her back to us; the knife nestled between her fingers like a pen.
    ‘Why your father thinks taking a friend’s wreck of a boat out through the quicksand into the rip-tides and whirlpools of Morecambe Bay, very possibly illegally, when he can barely swim, is totally beyond me,’ she said, without turning. She’d been holding it in for long enough, and couldn’t wait any longer.
    ‘You could come, Barbie, if you wanted to. I could do with a hand for the note-taking,’ he said. ‘Your mother’s got lovely handwriting.’
    I snorted and Barbara’s shoulder blades moved together, although she didn’t make a sound. She could have been laughing or just coughing silently.
    ‘Think of it,’ Donald said, standing up and scraping his