All the Invisible Things

by Orlagh Collins

  She cartwheels into the room in reassuringly rude health. Dad’s upper body is entirely in the freezer and an icy mist gathers around his dismembered stripy legs. ‘Did you see the letter about that sixth-form induction thing you missed?’ he shouts up.

  ‘I showed it to you.’

  ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘Forgot.’

  I lean over the sink, stabbing at a raisin that’s been jammed in the plughole since breakfast. ‘And I scanned back the confirmation to the removals company.’

  ‘Good,’ he says, slinging a giant sack of peas on to the counter and pulling himself up to standing. ‘Please say they took the credit card?’

  I slide the plastic ziplock along and stare in at the frosted green pearls. It’s a lovely image. Comforting. Dad has tons of photography books, weighty hardback ones with beautiful covers, and I often spread them all out on the living room floor to pore over the glossy pages. Mum would buy them for his birthday and they felt like proper presents, because I knew he’d never spend that much money on books for himself. There’s one photographer who only takes pictures of ordinary everyday stuff: people at the beach, plates of eggs and chips, that type of thing, but in his photos, nothing seems ordinary; he makes you look again. He’s my favourite. He might appreciate these freezer-burned peas.

  ‘Vetty? The credit card?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Yeah.’ He bobs his head, ticking it off the list in his mind. I grab the potatoes out of the fridge and start to peel one into the bin. Arial likes real chips, homemade like Mum used to make, but they take ages. We’ll have to make a real dinner every day once we get to London. Seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, not including extra weekend meals and Arial’s packed lunches. ‘How was your conference call?’

  I’m only being polite, but he sighs like he’s thinking about the answer. ‘The client asked another agency to pitch. Everyone is nervous we could lose the account, but apart from that …’ He trails off.

  I shouldn’t have gone there. I only ask this stuff because I feel like I should, probably cos Mum isn’t around to any more. But my head is already full with other things.

  He whisks Arial up on to his knee. ‘It’ll be fine,’ he says, wrapping his arms around her and popping the white buds from his ears like he’s up for a chat. ‘Because it has to be, eh? All set for tomorrow?’

  I nod but my eyes veer off towards the fridge. It’s an old American-style one and looks like it should no longer work, but it does. It came with us from London and it’s like another pillar holding us all upright. Sometimes its gentle hum will break for seconds, and the silence frightens me as much as if an actual human had stopped breathing. That fridge was Mum’s scrapbook and today it’s still covered with photos, bills, Arial’s gym certificates and a thousand school notices. Barely an inch of stainless steel is visible.

  It’s the storyboard of our family, a sort of shrine, and high up in the left-hand corner, above our invites to Wendy and Fran’s wedding, is a photo of Pez and me. Luna took it on the steps outside his house. I’m wearing green polka dot shades and my short, bobbed hair blazes in the sun. Pez’s left arm is slung casually around my neck as his face squints up to the camera. Both our purple sweet-stained tongues jutting out like ten-year-old punks. It’s been there for years, never questioned, never covered over. It might be my favourite photo in the world. It hits me that this precious collage should come down for the movers tomorrow, but I resolve not to move it now, or ever.

  ‘Mum used to say you were like those kids in that film,’ he says, scratching his head trying to think of the title.

  ‘Pretty in Pink,’ I say, turning around. ‘But I’d hardly call them kids. And she only said it because my hair is red like Molly Ringwald.’

  ‘She loved that film.’ He mumbles it to himself, pulling the chopping board towards him and slicing my newly peeled potatoes into chubby sticks. ‘And your hair’s not red,’ he says, looking up.

  ‘Auburn, whatever, and anyway Pez wasn’t exactly Duckie.’

  Dad lays down his knife. ‘What!’ he says. ‘I saw him, waiting outside on that bike like a puppy. I watched his face light up when you’d come to the door.’

  ‘That’s such a dad thing to say.’

  ‘Well, it’s true,’ he says. ‘Mum arrived home one afternoon fit to burst, I’ll never forget.’ His hand covers his mouth and he looks out of the window. ‘She’d been walking past the square from the bus stop and heard giggling coming from the swings over the hedge. She must have recognised your laugh and squeezed her head into the gap in the railing above the sign on the square.’ He turns to me. ‘You know the one?’

  I’ve heard this story so many times but I let him go on. ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘There you were, kissing Pez! On the lips, she said!’ At this, Arial’s face does the full revolted grandma and she slumps from Dad’s knee. Neither he nor I protest when she edges towards the door and slinks back into the TV. His shoulders give a small shudder as the memory hits. ‘You’d barely turned twelve,’ he says, staring into thin air.

  I shut my eyes. I remember that kiss, but it sounds like life on another galaxy now. It was a week before the doctors found the grapefruit and it’s hard not to wonder whether Mum really had heard us laughing, or whether she stopped by the railings because she had to. She’d been getting short of breath for months. It was one of those things you only notice looking back, and I wonder whether Dad is thinking this too.

  It was the only kiss. I was actually twelve and three quarters and Pez was only a few months behind. I made him pretend he was George, our new tennis teacher who was twenty-two and from Greece. I don’t know what made these details so dizzying or how exactly Pez was supposed to be George, particularly given George was a girl, but this didn’t bother either of us much. There were no tongues, but I made him do it over and over, quite a few times in fact, and my cheeks smoulder remembering the urgent feeling between my legs and how I had to stop myself from pushing up against him in his white shorts.

  ‘Bet he’s thrilled?’ Dad says, throwing an uncooked chip at me from the other side of the table and missing.

  ‘About what?’ I ask, dipping down to rescue the chip. When I look up, he’s making Arial’s duh face, which is one thing on her, or even me, but on a man pushing fifty, is not good.

  ‘That you’re moving back.’

  I can’t bring myself to say we haven’t been in touch enough for me to tell him. ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

  He watches as I bite my lip and then he spins slowly around. ‘True friendship, Vetty,’ he says, shuffling his stack of uncooked chips, ‘is for the brave.’

  I pick up the peeler and bend back over the bin, trying to look busy, hating that my lack of courage might be so obvious. Then Dad switches on the fryer and starts humming, which he does when he’s nervous. His pitch matches that of the fridge. ‘I watched a few episodes of the new Darkzone the other night,’ he says, cheerily. ‘Luna does all her own stunts apparently.’ Darkzone is in its fourth series. Dad’s watched them all. Everyone has. ‘It’ll be on iPlayer, but maybe some of it is a little adult,’ he says, shaking all the fish fingers from the giant box into the pan.

  I stop chopping. ‘Dad!’

  ‘What?’ He twists around.

  ‘You’ve done it again! They don’t cook properly when you put that many on at once.’ He turns away and stares into the frying pan, not saying anything, and my words bounce around the room. I watch his back go up and down as giant breaths fill his chest. Why isn’t he teasing me about getting so wound up like he usually does?

  Very slowly he returns to face me. ‘Sweetheart—’ He stops. His face has a new expression and his soft voice only makes my words echo louder. His lips purse like he’s concentrating hard as he folds up the huge, empty Birds Eye box. ‘You’ve taken on a lot,’ he says with a sigh. ‘You’ve had to.’ He raises a hand up to make his point, but he’s holding the box the wrong way up and bright orange breadcrumbs scatter like co
nfetti all over the tiles. It’s everything I can do not to reach over to clean them up. ‘And the truth is you’ll have to take on more once we move.’ He puts the egg flipper down and reaches for my hand. He looks disturbingly serious.

  ‘I just meant we’ll never eat all—’

  ‘I’m not talking about the bloody fish fingers now, Vetty,’ he says. ‘Believe it or not,’ he passes his hand slowly over the range, ‘after four years, I’m still working out how to do this parenting thing on my own. And I’m not sure if I’m always doing it right. I keep asking myself, what would she do,’ he says, briefly closing his eyes and moving his balled fist to his chest. ‘Look, I know going back to London is a big move but I think she’d agree that we’re ready.’

  It takes me a minute to speak. ‘But your work, isn’t that why—’

  He gives the pan a brusque shake. ‘It’s not just that. This –’ he sniffs and looks around the kitchen – ‘was never meant to be permanent. We needed to be here. We needed Wendy and Fran. You were too young.’ He looks into my eyes and I feel see-through. ‘But we need to live our lives again. Does that make sense?’ He tilts my chin to his face. ‘I’m tired of holding my breath. Aren’t you?’ The truth in his words knocks me but I manage to nod back. ‘And I’ll try not to land too much on you,’ he says. ‘I promise.’

  I pull away and kneel down, pretending to sweep up the fish finger mess, but he bends down too, shaking the crumbs from my fingers. Then he puts his arm around my neck and we kind of slowly slump against the warm oven door, him gently rubbing my head until my eyes close. All I see in my mind is those two faces staring out from that fridge.

  4

  The motorway was hell. It’s taken us forever to reach Camden, and now a white van is blocking the residents’ parking bay outside our flat. Dad pulls the car up behind it and I roll down the window while we wait for the driver to finish offloading. Even this late in the evening the city air is thick with heat.

  I steal a glance at Pez’s pale blue house across the street. It’s not really a glance; I only stop staring when Arial wakes up and announces ‘I smell bins’ before she starts questioning the logic of us still sitting in a parked car.

  Dad laughs, but she’s right. I take my belt off and shift around in my seat, joining her as she looks out at our house, No. 6 St Agnes Villas. Her eyes travel up and down it. ‘It’s not that small,’ she says, sticking her head out of her window for a better view.

  Dad and I share a look. ‘Ours is the basement flat, Arial,’ I say. ‘Giles, the old guy with the cats, lives above. I told you. But we have the garden out the back.’ I add this bit more cheerfully.

  ‘I know,’ she says, her shoulders sinking. ‘It’s just different from how I remember.’

  An angry dog drags a man down the street and Dad pulls Arial back inside the car. ‘The truck is nearly an hour behind,’ he says. ‘We should grab something to eat.’

  I hold up the button to shut my window. ‘There’s a Domino’s on the high street.’ Food usually gets Arial’s attention, but she’s watching Dad, who is staring at our house like he’s wondering how our stuff will ever fit back into that flat. I know this because I’ve been wondering the exact same thing. I’m about to say something when the van in front pulls away and I nudge Dad to get moving.

  ‘Forget Domino’s,’ he says, once he’s finished reversing. ‘The Italian on Brecknock Road does the real deal.’

  Arial seems content, so I open the car door and step on to the street like I’m putting on old shoes, wiggling my toes and praying they still fit. Even my fingertips fizz. It’s like the air itself is electrically charged. I look up and let all the blurred details come back into focus. The house was built in Victorian times, I think, and it looks every bit as lived-in as it should. A not-very-famous German guy wrote poems here two hundred years ago and there’s a little blue plaque on the wall outside Giles’s living room window with his name on it. It’s not as tall as the other houses on the street, having only two floors above the basement, whereas some houses, like Pez’s, have four floors in total. Every entrance along the street looks different, like a large front door will move to the side to make way for another window, or a top floor will slope in a half triangle with only one window instead of two, so each house manages to look unique. They all have their own shade of brick and some are painted in pastel colours, like the pale pink and the yellow ones further up.

  I love this street. I love it for more than the obvious reason like it’s where we lived with Mum. I also love that it’s a hill, which is great for freewheeling and eating ice cream at the same time, and I love that it’s two minutes from the square with its playground and climbable white willow, and I love it for the odd stew of people who live here too. Most of the houses are split into flats, like ours, but in another a dusty writer might live alone with their books. The Indian lady who Mum went to for acupuncture above the pub on Murray Street could flip between Bengali, Somali and Albanian as well as English within the one conversation. All sorts of people live here: actors like Pez’s parents, teachers, artists, politicians and the white-haired guy who reads the news on TV, and Giles, who doesn’t work any more. When Arial was really little, a couple slept in an abandoned car right outside our flat and for months they lived upside-down days under a blanket, smoking pipes that made their eyes blaze.

  Giles’s window box with its bright purple pansies is so lovely I almost don’t notice how grubby the surrounding paintwork is. Apparently, the tenants who rented our flat were also big into cooking but less into cleaning and Dad had to pay contractors to freshen the place up. Under her arm, Arial clutches Eeyore, her blue donkey. He’s come everywhere with us since she was two years old, but she’s taken to hiding him lately, which makes me sad. He’s threadbare from love and covered in stains. I suggested a pre-move spa day, but she rescued him from the wash basket and hasn’t let go of him since. She’s standing by the car now like she doesn’t want to walk any further and I sense the weight of her feet from here. We haven’t stepped inside the flat and already this place is full of Mum. Despite the fizzing in my nerve endings, my feet feel heavy too and it’s a jittery mix. I walk around and grab our overnight bags and as we make our way down the side passage to our front door, I jangle the keys as jollily as I can.

  The door opens straight into the kitchen, which in four strides leads into the living room. I drop the bags and cast my eye around the space. The light is bad, the ceiling is lower than I remember, and it smells too. The furniture we left behind looks older and the place badly needs air … ideally some paint and possibly a few books. How did the four of us fit in here before? I try not to think about how we will make it a home again without her.

  ‘Where’s our room?’ Arial asks.

  Just then Dad appears. ‘Arial can take the spare room,’ he says. ‘I won’t need an office.’ Arial forces a smile, but my chest sinks with relief. ‘C’mon, Arial,’ Dad says, checking his phone. ‘Let’s grab that pizza. Ten minutes, Vetty.’

  He pulls the door open with a wink and I trudge to the end of the room, thrusting the glass doors wide and stepping out into the garden that’s not a whole heap bigger than our kitchen back at Wendy’s. I stand there, soaking up the heat of the evening sun, trying to think of nothing, just for a few seconds. I close my eyes, and my ears revel in the hum of traffic on Agar Grove blending with a heavy drumbeat that pounds from a distant window.

  It’s a long minute before a cloud passes overhead and I open my eyes in the new shade. Then I see it! I blink and it’s still there. An explosion of pink feathery petals on a tiny tree, almost taller than me, bursting out from the back wall. It’s the silk tree me and Mum planted from tiny seedpods a few months before we knew about any grapefruit and I step forward and examine the flowers that fall like clusters of pink powder puffs from its large green leaves. I knelt beside her on this wall, up to my wrists in mulch, neither of us believing the photo of exotic colour that the tiny plastic triangle promised.

&
nbsp; ‘Look!’ I say to nobody, sprinkling a smattering of showy stamens into my hand. I want to hug it for being here. I want to hug it for being alive. I take out my phone and snap, snap, snap, getting up real close. My eyes sting as mascara trickles down into them but I break off several short flowers and I wander into the kitchen to find a glass. I find one that must have come free with a Japanese beer and I fill it with water then head for my old room.

  It’s more Lilliputian than I remember and grubbier too. There’s a narrow full-length mirror where my bed used to be, and I inspect the stubborn remains of the Despicable Me stickers stuck to the bottom. My bedroom at Wendy’s was nearly double this size, with a window where I’d watch the sunrise over a field of cows. Still, there were times, in the beginning mostly, when my insides cramped with longing to be back here. Looking around, it’s hard to believe I felt that way.

  I place the glass beside the bed and already the place looks a bit brighter, then I wedge my head between the edge of the blind and the window frame. I pull the blind to the side and shove the sash upwards to let out the stale air. I’d almost forgotten the painted white bars outside. This is the spot where I always stood. From here I can see up the whole street, but it’s the blue house across the road I want to look at. His large front door is a new colour but other than that the house looks the same. Faded lace still hangs from the small windows on the very top floor where Luna and Harland sleep and from where we pinched coins from on top of the dressing table like it was treasure left specially for us.

  Pez would speak about his parents like they were people he watched on TV, which was at least half right. He’d feed me snippets of their conversations like something he glimpsed through a passing window or overheard changing the channel during the ads. I never showed it of course, but sometimes listening to his stories made me nervous. Not that Mum and Dad never rowed because they did, but there was something sharp in the way Luna and Harland spoke to each other that was different.