When I Was Invisible

by Dorothy Koomson

  She turns to look at me then. She is struggling: she wants to break down in tears, but she is fighting herself. ‘What if I want justice? My uncle has disappeared, probably gone to Spain, and I want justice. I want this man to pay. Not just for me, but for you, too.’

  ‘I don’t need justice,’ I repeat.

  ‘Well, I do,’ she says, so full of determination she grits her teeth before she spins on the spot and pushes the doorbell.

  ‘You won’t be able to do it,’ I tell her. ‘You saw your uncle for years and you didn’t do it – what makes you think you’ll be able to do this?’

  ‘Because it’s for you.’

  ‘I don’t need justice.’

  ‘You don’t understand!’ she cries. ‘It was—’

  She’s cut short by the door being opened. The tall, sophisticated-looking woman on the other side is immaculately dressed. She’s a classic beauty, always has been. I remember the first time I saw her, how beautiful I thought she was. She was poised, almost regal, and I wanted to be like her. I wanted to be exactly like her. Her hair is now a grey-streaked bun, her face has a few more lines, but she is essentially that goddess I saw that day as an eight-year-old who decided she wanted to be a ballerina.

  ‘Hello?’ she says, smiling at Roni first, then me. ‘Can I help you?’

  I take the steps as fast as I can, put my hand on Roni. ‘No, no, wrong address,’ I say. ‘Sorry to have wasted your time.’ I tug at Roni, try to get her to move.

  ‘Don’t I know you?’ she says when Roni does not move, will not move. Instead Roni stares at the woman as though she is an incarnation of the Devil.

  ‘No, no,’ I say quickly. ‘Come on, Roni, let’s go.’

  ‘Roni?’ Mrs Daneaux says. ‘Wait a minute … Roni?’ She moves her gaze to me. ‘Nika?’

  ‘Yes,’ Roni replies. ‘That’s us. And I’ve come to give something to your husband.’ I don’t know who is more surprised when Roni suddenly barges past the woman in the very expensive cashmere twinset – Mrs Daneaux or me. I didn’t know Roni had it in her. She marches straight into the building, her eyes wildly searching for where her quarry might be. ‘Darling, who is it?’ His voice. I am eleven again, horrified by what he has just done for the first time. I am thirteen again, hearing the click as he pushes play on the CD player and the ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ fills the room and I am almost broken by what he does next. I am fifteen again, seeing his face as he tells me the police have been to talk to him and he is going to punish me for continuing to tell people our secret.

  I inhale, inhale, inhale, inhale. My heart feels like it is hurtling through time, attempting to escape the past in the present-future. I need to get away from here, I need to turn and run.

  ‘What is going on?’ Mrs Daneaux demands of Roni, who is racing up the stairs, to where the voice has come from.

  Calm, Nika, calm, I tell myself. You have to stop Roni. Forget about him – think about her and what will happen to both of you if she does it.

  I barge my way in too, nowhere near calm. But I have to stop her. I don’t want justice, I don’t want any of this.

  In their living room at the top of the house, Roni is standing by the dining table. From the look of the table, the smell in the room, they have had their dinner, drunk their wine, now they are on to fine port and a cheeseboard with various types of crackers, and fruit. I might have guessed, if I thought about them for any longer than was necessary, that they were people who turned dinner into an evening-long indulgence. Roni’s hand is precariously close to the knife placed on the table to slice fruit. It is small, sharp, dangerous. There are two other people in the room – a man and a younger man – and I try not to look at them. I focus instead on Roni, who is staring at the couple in front of the fireplace while her hand moves closer to the wooden-handled knife on the table.

  ‘Who are you people?’ Mr Daneaux says and the torment of all the years sweeps through me again. I try not to petrify, but I am fighting a pitched, losing battle with my terrified younger selves.

  ‘I’d like you to leave before I call the police,’ Mrs Daneaux states, coming up behind us.

  ‘Call the police,’ Roni says. ‘I really think they should be here for this.’ Her voice has changed. She sounds detached, she sounds cold. She is stepping outside of herself so she can do this. The other two people in the room are not speaking – they are probably as focused on the weapon that is millimetres away from this stranger’s hand as I am.

  ‘Roni, please don’t do this.’ I am speaking to her slowly, calmly. Her breathing is quiet but erratic, which tells me she is not quite ready. She is working herself up to it, and when her breathing, the sound of what she is thinking, finally slows and normalises, she will have completely detached. That’s when she’s most likely to do it. That’s when she will use that knife on that man and there will be no going back for either of us.

  ‘The thing is, Nika, I have to do this,’ she says.

  ‘You really don’t.’

  ‘I do. You don’t know how terrible I’ve felt every day, every day since I lied to that policeman.’

  ‘I do know. I’ve felt it too. We both went through it, remember, so I do understand how you felt.’

  ‘No, you don’t. It wasn’t the same.’ She turns to me, briefly, shakes her head in what I think is regret and turns back to her prey. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’ She shakes her head again, as though trying to dislodge a memory, trying to rid herself of a truth she does not want to tell. ‘After you went to the police, and they came to have a “friendly” chat with him, he never touched me again.’ It’s my breathing that is slow and measured now, almost at the point of being deadly. ‘He said I had shown great loyalty but you … you had to be punished. That was why you always went first after you told the police. He would tell me afterwards what he had done to you, while I had to dance for him.’

  From the corner of my eye, I see the younger man, possibly his son, raise his hand to his mouth while looking at the older man. Beside me Mrs Daneaux keeps making small little gasping sounds, and I think she is crying but I can’t think about her, I can’t think about anyone else.

  The only person I am truly focused on is Roni. And what she has just confessed. ‘That was nearly a year before it stopped because his wife kept dropping by,’ I say to her.

  ‘He said you deserved everything he did to you. Didn’t you?’ She spits the words at him, her breathing slowing some more. She’s approaching that point when she’s going to do it. ‘I’m so sorry, Nika. I’m so sorry. But it was me who made his wife turn up. I knew she was like my mother, only worried about herself, so I wrote an anonymous letter saying that her husband was planning to leave her for his Nutcracker pupil.’

  ‘That was you?’ Mrs Daneaux says.

  ‘Yes, that was me. I had to do something. The things he told me he was doing to Nika …’

  Roni stops crying, fretting. She’s calm now; still; ready. Ready to take his life and make him pay for what he did to her, to us, probably to countless others.

  I focus on his son, just a bit older than us – his eyes are wide, horrified. He used to come to group classes, but he always sat to the side with a book and never once joined in. He doesn’t deserve to see this happen.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ I say to Roni. ‘You are not to blame, for any of it. Not even lying to the police is your fault. And it’s not down to you to get justice. Let’s just go.’

  ‘He has to pay for what he did,’ she replies. ‘He has to pay. And once I’ve done this, I’ll be able to sleep at night and I’ll stop hating myself and I’ll feel normal.’

  ‘Oh, Roni,’ I say teasingly while I move towards her. ‘You really are the queen of magical thinking, aren’t you? That’s not what will happen. What will happen is every day for the rest of your life, you will remember his face, you will remember the sensation, and you will likely never sleep again. You know that, don’t you? Deep down.’ I am close enough that our bodies almost touc
h. I feel the heat from her bare arms, even though they are covered in goosebumps. Carefully, I cover her hand with mine, wrap my fingers around hers, and slowly I move her away from the table, away from the knife, away from making one of the biggest mistakes of her life.

  I am trying not to look at him because every time I catch a glimpse of him the memories flash through my mind, reverberate through my body. Every time I can hear his frequency and how it resonates in the world, I feel pain, I experience fear, I remember what it’s like to want to stop existing.

  Slowly, carefully, I pull Roni back until she is by me, by the door, ready for us to leave. The three other people in the room exhale, but the breath I can hear loudest, most clearly, is his. He was scared. Actually, properly scared.

  I want him to feel that again. I want him to know what it is like to feel small and weak and terrified of what will happen to you next. I want him to experience for even the shortest of seconds, what it is to be truly scared. My gaze is drawn to the knife. To what it could possibly do. To the one thing that has ever made him feel what it’s like to be the victim.

  Roni

  Brighton, 2016

  She’s quick, so quick I can barely register what is happening. She moves at lightning speed, and the knife is in her hand before I can say stop, don’t do that, it really isn’t worth losing your immortal soul for. He isn’t worth losing your freedom and soul for.

  I imagined it would take more force than she uses, it would be harder than that to do what she does. His face is a mask of shock, his eyes twin beacons of pain, his mouth a small ‘o’ of surprise before he slumps, falls to the floor in one move.

  The four of us left standing are suddenly petrified; all horrified immobile by what has been done. But it is Mrs Daneaux who recovers enough to move first: she throws down the knife in her hand. It clatters loudly on the polished wood floor. My gaze moves from the man on the ground to the fruit knife his wife has just wielded. I take a step backwards, pushing distance between me and the wooden-handled weapon. I can’t believe I thought for even a moment that I could do what she has just done. I can’t believe I thought myself capable of it.

  ‘What have you done?’ Nika says quietly. Her shock runs like a network of veins through every syllable. ‘What have you done?’

  Without warning, Mrs Daneaux explodes. The beautiful, poised shell of a woman that she was, the one who I wanted to be like, who wears cashmere and pearls, and has her hair swept up in the most elegant of styles, disappears and a screaming monster takes her place. ‘YOU TOLD ME IT WAS ALL LIES!’ she screams at her husband. ‘That they didn’t like how much you pushed them, so she had made it all up! You told me that once you offered her the role in The Nutcracker she would back off and it’d be clear that she had made the whole thing up to manipulate me, control you! And it wasn’t lies, you were doing that to her! To them! You were doing that to them and all the others who have accused you!’ Her eyes are wild, her body is murderous, everything about her now is incensed.

  In the background, I see her son, the carbon cut-out looks-wise of his father, calmly remove his mobile from his pocket and begin to dial. Press, press, press goes the index finger of his right hand. ‘Ambulance, please. And police,’ he says in an undisturbed, even tone. All the while, his mother continues to scream.

  ‘You forced me to move here from London because those new girls didn’t understand your methods, they were going to lie about you, too, and in this new climate a good man’s reputation could be ruined by the simple allegation, you said! I left everything behind because of you and now I find out it was all true! You abused those girls! You raped them! And I believed you every time!’

  The son’s eyes seem glazed over as he speaks into the phone, as though he is in another world, one where the horror of what he is hearing is wiped away as soon as it reaches his ears in order for him to quietly, sedately call an ambulance, tell them his father has been stabbed by his mother. That his mother is hysterical. No, he isn’t in danger. Yes, he would like the police. Yes, he knows CPR and he will be administering it as soon as he puts down the phone if he needs it but his father doesn’t seem that bad right now. No, he’s fine, he really is, he doesn’t need them to hold on the line until the ambulance arrives. ‘Yes, please hurry,’ he says to end the call.

  When his son hangs up the phone, he doesn’t move to his father, to comfort him, to administer CPR, to even acknowledge him. He stands still, his eyes still wide, his face now a deathly white oval against his thick black hair. He looks from Nika to me to Nika again.

  I can’t look at Nika because I do not know how to face her after what I have just revealed. I can’t look for too long at the man bleeding on the floor in front of me. He is oddly, eerily silent but his eyes are open, sweat is pouring from him, and he has his hand over the knife wound, so I know he isn’t dead. Every time I glance briefly in his direction, I see his eyes are unfocused, as though seeing something that isn’t there. I suspect I know what he is looking at, what it is he is probably seeing as his life force drains away. Which is why I can’t look at him for too long because I know what I should be doing: offering comfort. I should be holding his hand, offering him the only version of Last Rites I can perform as a former nun – being a comfort to him in what could be his final minutes. But that is not in me. I simply can’t do it.

  Suddenly, the son seems to snap back into himself, the shock of what has happened gone. He moves towards his mother and I expect him to open his arms, to draw her close, to comfort her and tell her, in whispers we aren’t privy to, that he understands and would have done the same if it was him. Instead, he reaches around his mother, snatches up the cloth napkins from the table, and suddenly, he is on his knees, beside his father. He carefully takes away his father’s hand, briefly examines his wound before he pushes the napkin over it to stem the flow of blood. He is so tender with him, so caring and worried, I’m stopped short. Where is my humanity, my forgiveness, my compassion as a woman who once devoted her whole life to the Lord? I ask myself. Where is my compassion as a human being?

  This is why I could never have stayed in the monastery, I remind myself. I could never have this amount of forgiveness in my heart. And forgiveness, true forgiveness, is about this ability to move beyond your personal hurt and do the right thing, even if it does not directly benefit you. This moment, all the moments leading up to it, have shown me that.

  ‘You need to live,’ he says to his father, calmly. ‘You need to live so you can face this. You don’t deserve to die without facing up to what you have done.’ He then looks at his mother, who has finally stopped shouting and ranting and is staring at her son. ‘And I hope there’s a special place in hell for you for looking the other way all these years.’ After his quiet, damning words, he seems to glaze over again while he stems the flow of blood from his father’s wound and waits with the rest of us for help to arrive.

  The sirens arrive first, then the heavy, hurried footsteps of people trying to help. There is shouting and there are orders, the house is intermittently lit with the flashes of the blue-light-topped vehicles outside, we are moved aside, then moved apart; many people are talking at once. I finally look at Nika, try to see what she is thinking, feeling, what she wants us to do from now on. Whatever she wants I will do, whatever she needs I will provide for her. My whole life will be about her and how to make it up to her now.

  She stares through me, does not seem to notice I am there. She seems to not notice anyone is there. She moves where she is prodded to, but doesn’t respond to even the simplest questions.

  Is this it? Is it all over now, or is it just beginning?

  20

  Nika

  London, 2016

  My parents’ house is in chaos when I arrive.

  The front door stands wide open. Outside, there is a parked white van with its side door open, and it is partially stacked with brown cardboard boxes. Boxes line the corridor, leading to the back room. Some boxes sit at the bottom of the stairs. All
sealed up and ready to be stacked into the van. I bet Sasha and Ralph had no idea they had so much stuff crammed into my parents’ house.

  I go up to the front door, and walk in. I probably should knock – I am a stranger after all – but it’d also feel odd to do that. This was my home, the place I should have been able to come to when I was homeless, after all. That was what was so odd about being known as ‘homeless’. It was as though being called that means you are merely without a roof over your head. What if you’re without all the other things that make up a home: love, acceptance, attention and caring? A sense of belonging? Aren’t you homeless then? Aren’t you without a home? What I had with Todd wasn’t a home. What I had on the street was all of those things.

  ‘Nika! Oh my God!’ Sasha says when I enter the back room.

  She steps around the items littering the floor and comes to me, throws her arms around my neck. It’s still a little jolting to see how much my sister loves me, how pleased she is to see me after so many years of feeling she didn’t notice me at all. ‘I’m so glad to see you. How did you know we were moving today?’