What Not to Do If You Turn Invisible

by Ross Welford

  You can add that I am terrified that my invisibility seems to be permanent.

  Plus, I am weak and exhausted, and I remember that I haven’t eaten since last night. I haven’t even thought about it, what with the worry and the excitement and the fear and the anger and about several billion other emotions that I’ve been experiencing in the last half day or so.

  But yeah. Now that I am thinking about it, I am one hundred per cent starving, and thirsty too.

  I turn to look back at Priory View and see my dad’s hired Nissan Micra pull out of the driveway and speed away down the seafront with Gram in the passenger seat.

  I know I have been too hasty, and without thinking, I raise my hand and wave.

  Fat lot of good that does, what with me being invisible.

  I see Dad’s car retreating up the coast road.

  I know I won’t be able to do this – do anything – on my own. I look at the hand that I’ve lifted up. The nail varnish that I put on my nails is still there: on each hand, five little shiny discs that are almost – but not quite – invisible.

  I turn back to the sea and plonk down on a wooden slatted bench.

  I am going to be the Invisible Girl. You just cannot keep a secret like that. Gram’s lies and deceit to keep me from the world of fame will have been pointless.

  Because, unless I live my life as a total recluse, never going out, never going back to school, I will be known … Headlines. Documentaries. High-profile experiments. Medical research. Books.

  I can see the headlines:

  Dead Star’s Long-lost Daughter Is Medical Mystery

  The Invisible Girl – Incredible Legacy of Tragic Singer

  Have You Seen Felina’s Girl?

  Ethel Leatherhead or Tiger Pussycat ‘Boo’ Mackay? Beatrice Leatherhead or Belinda Mackay? Miranda or Felina? Who cares who anyone is anyway? I’m not sure I even know myself.

  I feel like nobody – which is odd. Odd, because I used to think that I felt like nobody.

  Now I know I am.

  Food, food, food. Wow, I’m hungry. My mind is spinning anyway and I’m feeling pretty light-headed.

  Options:

  Go back into Priory View and hang around their kitchen. There’s plenty of food there, but how would I get it? And assuming I could get hold of a sandwich or something, how would I eat it? Like I saw the first time I drank tea, stuff in my stomach stays visible for a little while until it is – what? … Invisibilised? There are always nurses and carers here, there and everywhere in Priory View. It’s really not a viable option.

  There’s a café down on the beach, but the same problems arise.

  There’s plenty of food back home, and it’s really my only choice, so I cross the road and wait by the bus stop.

  There’s a bus that runs every half-hour along the seafront all the way to Seaton Sluice. When it comes, the front doors don’t open because there’s no one else waiting to get on, and the driver can’t see me. The central doors open and a man in a wheelchair is pushed out by his wife. There’s just enough room for me to squeeze by them, holding Lady’s collar.

  But before the doors hiss shut again, one of the passengers calls out, ‘’Scuse me, driver! There’s a dog just got on on its own!’

  And I see the driver open his little door and start to come up the aisle towards us.

  I don’t wait; instead I tug on Lady’s collar and get off while the passengers and driver look on, smiling at the dog who can boldly get on and off a bus.

  Half a minute later, I’m left waiting again, watching the bus in the distance.

  To walk would take an hour or so, and I’m exhausted and weak, but I have no choice. To make it easier on my feet, I go down the tarmac path onto the beach, where I start walking. It’s the first boiling hot day of the summer and Lady runs in and out of the waves to cool down, and even the seagulls seem to be complaining about the heat.

  I walk faster towards Culvercot and the church that overlooks the sea. No one notices the line of footprints that appear in the wet sand, or the ten tiny semicircles of translucent fingernails, which I painted with varnish, that dance along above them.

  What will Dad do now?

  He promised he’d help me. Can I trust him?

  To be honest, I don’t really have much choice.

  The afternoon heat seems to be increasing and I can feel sweat droplets forming on my forehead.

  If I can feel them, then that means someone could see them. I look down and there is the faintest sheen of sweat forming an outline. I have got to get out of the heat. I look up the beach and at the long flight of stone steps that leads up to the church.

  If I say a prayer at all it’s one of those silent in-my-head types, and either the prayer is answered or I am just lucky: the church is open. Lady and I step inside the cool, dark interior – so cool that I give a little shiver at the contrast with the heat outside. I’m the only person in there. It smells of wood polish and incense and I feel safe as I sit down on one of the back pews, the wood cold under my bottom. The heat and the swimming have worn Lady out and she stretches out beneath a pew.

  It’s nice there in the shade. I think part of the tiredness that washes over me is because I can’t properly close my eyes and shut out the brightness of daylight. Maybe, I think, those countless little blinks that we do all day are a way of resting our eyes from the light?

  I’ve been in this church loads of times with Gram. She says she likes it because of the ‘liturgy’, which I think is the words used in the service. It’s all old English, with ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ – just like people who never go to church always think it is. Gram also once said, approvingly, that no one ever plays the guitar with the hymns, which I think is a shame, but Gram doesn’t.

  As I sit, I slump forward, resting my head on my clasped hands, and I remember the words of something I used to say in church when I went with Gram. It’s like a prayer, but it’s not a prayer because you don’t say ‘amen’ at the end of it. Everyone says it together:

  We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty:

  Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible …

  ‘Just put it there, Linda – on that table. Thanks, pet.’

  I’ve been lost in thought and didn’t even hear them come in, although the door is a heavy, studded one. I look round and there are two ladies who I sort of recognise but I don’t know their names. Well, I know one because I heard it: the younger one is Linda.

  Each is carrying a cardboard box that they put on a trestle table at the back, right behind me.

  I’m staring at Linda because I do know her from somewhere. It’s when she talks that it dawns on me.

  ‘Ee, that’s heavy, tharriz! I’ve gorra be careful not to dee me back in!’

  The broad Geordie, the suntan: it’s the lady from Geordie Bronze, and she’s unpacking tins of soup, and bags of pasta, and loaves of bread …

  ‘You better just leave it in the box, Linda. They’ve got to take it to the church hall anyway.’

  Back in the box it all goes, and I know what this is: it’s the church’s food bank, where people donate food for the poor.

  I want to go after Linda and show her that I am invisible. Show her what happened after I used the sunbed that she gave me. It’s not like I’m proud or anything; it’s just that if I’m going to have to get used to being invisible, she might be a good starting point? Perhaps?

  I’m too late anyway. They’ve gone, the door shutting behind them with a padded thud, and I’m alone again in the silent church.

  The boxes are on the table, lit by a shaft of light coming through one of the coloured windows, and I tell you: if this was a film, there’d be a choir of angels to accompany it, singing, ‘Aah-aah-aah …’

  The bread is first to be opened. It’s brown, nutty and delicious. Most of the stuff in the boxes isn’t much good to me: bags of flour and rice, raw eggs and vegetables (though I eat a carrot, which is OK), and tins that need an opener. The
re’s a can of baked beans with a ring-pull top, so I open that and start to eat the beans with the bread. In the other box there’s a bag of apples. I’m eating greedily, and spilling stuff, and I’m just about to take a huge bite of apple when the church door opens again.

  I drop the apple on the ground and dodge behind the pew just in time to see it roll across the tiled floor towards Linda, who is carrying in another box. It’s kind of like an instinctive reaction, this hiding. In reality there’s no need to because I’m invisible, but I’m glad I do because, looking down, there’s a slop of un-invisibilised food hovering at stomach level.

  Linda puts the box down and gawps first at the apple, and then at the table. The other woman follows her a few seconds later, holding two full supermarket carrier bags.

  ‘Ee, my God, looka that!’ says Linda.

  The other lady says nothing.

  ‘It was rollin’ towards me, the apple was. It just kind of dropped and rolled.’

  ‘Well, who’s been at the food? We’ve only been to your car and back, Linda.’

  ‘Th’ must still be here, Maureen.’

  ‘It’ll be one of them choirboys,’ says Maureen, then she raises her voice. ‘This food’s for the poor people, you little sods!’ she calls.

  And it echoes around the building: ‘Sods … sods … sods …’

  ‘Prob’ly hidin’,’ says Linda, and she starts marching up the aisle, looking left and right along the pews.

  By now I’ve slid myself beneath the wooden bench and she doesn’t see the strange lump of liquid slop in the shade.

  ‘Was it you?’ I hear her say, and my heart leaps.

  But she’s a few pews away, bent down.

  ‘I’ve found the culprit, Maureen. There’s a dog here!’

  I hear Lady’s tail thumping on the ground as she wags it.

  ‘Ee, you cheeky monkey, what are you doin’ here?’

  Maureen says, ‘Who’d leave a dog in a church?’

  And I stay there until Linda and Maureen decide to leave Lady where she is as she probably belongs to the organist or someone, and they leave a few minutes later, chuckling about a dog who would steal food from poor families and how they’ll have a word with the Revd Robinson.

  I crawl out from under the pew, and I’m beaten. I’m just done in. I’m exhausted from the running, and the hiding, and the lying, and the whole lot of it.

  I pick up one of the little cushions that are used for kneeling on, and position it like a pillow, and I stretch out on the pew in the dark and try to sleep, but can’t because I can’t close my eyes. I find a hymn book and place it, open, over my face, and that shuts out most of the light.

  Maybe, when I wake up, everything will be all right.

  I hear the organ start.

  The organist must have come in to practise. I take the book off my face and look around. The shafts of light coming through the stained-glass windows have shifted around the interior of the church.

  I cannot tell what time it is, but it must be much later. The boxes of food have gone from the table at the back, so someone has been in, I know that. Lady is still asleep beneath the pew.

  I walk slowly down the wide aisle of the church towards the altar at the front, and bits of the church services that I used to go to with Gram keep coming back to me.

  I even know, without guessing, that the piece the organist is playing is Bach. This one is Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue in D Minor’. I bet you’d know it if you heard it, honestly.

  It’s not like I feel religious or anything. I’m not having some huge revelation or being ‘filled with the holy spirit’ like Suki Kinghorn said she was after she went on some church camp and wouldn’t shut up about her ‘new best friend’ Jesus. (For a while the Knight twins teased her about her ‘invisible friend’, which I thought was a bit mean, long before the idea of an invisible friend became more real than I would like.)

  It’s more like remembering. I gaze up at a huge carving of Jesus on the cross hanging over the altar. It used to scare me when I was little. It’s painted in colour, and there’s blood on his hands and feet, and I remember the story of Jesus dying and coming back to life and I remember thinking, even when I was little, how unlikely that was.

  Of course, that was all before I turned invisible myself, which I wouldn’t have believed was possible when I was little either.

  Is that me? Am I a living ghost?

  I look down at myself: my invisible self, casting no shadow like the vampires in films.

  Can I live my life, my whole life, like this?

  Outside the church, it’s light, but the temperature has dropped a bit with the advancing evening. There’s no breeze, but at least I’m not going to sweat any more. Out to sea, a huge thundercloud is building up, and the air is so thick that it even seems to muffle the sound of traffic on the seafront.

  Behind me, through the thick door, the organist is still playing the Bach which echoes in my head as I look up to the big clock on the side of the church. It’s nearly nine, which is OK because …

  Nine?

  Nine o’clock?

  As in, nine o’clock tonight?

  I’m staring at the clock and listening to the muffled organ, and I see the minute hand clunk round to twelve. As it does, a thought stumbles forward to the front of my mind.

  Boydy.

  Light The Light.

  Light The Light tonight.

  I promised. He’ll never forgive me if I’m not there. Never ever. How could I have been so selfish, stupid, unthinking?

  Poor Boydy. He’s put his heart and soul into this, he’s spent money, he’s risked ridicule, and now?

  He told me it was going to be tonight. He’s invited loads of people: journalists and TV crews especially. I tried to tell him that I didn’t think it would be the sort of thing that people would turn up to – you know, ‘managing his expectations’ – but, typical Boydy, he didn’t want to know. All of which makes it even more important that I, at the very least, turn up.

  Now I have let him down, and that’s not what friends do. I can’t even smile at my surprise at the realisation that Boydy is now my friend: a proper friend, the kind you don’t want to let down, because you know they won’t let you down. I’ve been so wrapped up in my own problems that I’ve forgotten the thing he has been planning for months.

  With no mobile phone, I can’t call him to apologise, or tell him where I am, or to tell him this:

  I’ll be there.

  If I run.

  If I run from here to St Mary’s Lighthouse, I can get there by nine. What is it? Three kilometres? Four? I’ve never run that far, ever. But now I start, Lady trotting excitedly by my side, and the rhythmic action of putting one bare foot in front of the other is kind of hypnotic.

  Soon, I’m past the little amusement arcade and the tandoori restaurant in Culvercot, round the bend where there’s the slip road going down to the beach and the promenade.

  Five minutes later, my breathing is deep but steady.

  ‘I’m coming, Boydy,’ I pant to myself.

  Culvercot ends with a Welcome to Whitley Bay sign. The lighthouse is in the distance, white against the slowly darkening sky; there’s the big white dome of the old Spanish City dance hall that’s all boarded up; and I’m running past Waves swimming pool with the bossy attendants, and still Lady is sticking by my side. (She’s usually pretty hopeless at ‘heel’, but right now, she’s like a dog in an obedience trial. Perhaps she thinks if she runs ahead, she won’t be able to find me again.)

  I’ve got it worked out. I don’t want to steal Boydy’s thunder. I’ll wait until he’s done the light thing. That’s when I’ll tell the people who are there. I’m assuming someone will turn up.

  I’m running past people out for an evening walk. My breathing is heavy and rasping now. Noisy.

  I just don’t care any more. I know people are turning in surprise at the sound of my feet slapping the paving stones, my panting, but if anything I’m going faste
r because I know time is running out. My feet are agony now, especially my heel where I trod on the china dog, and I have to get onto the sand so I go down the sandy path to the beach, where the running is slower but less painful.

  We’re nearly there. Five hundred metres more? Four hundred?

  I picture Boydy to keep me going – his hurt face when he realises I’m not going to be there for his big moment – and I scramble across the rocks to get onto the causeway to the island, slashing another cut in the bottom of my foot on a razor-clam shell, but still I keep running.

  ‘Boydy!’ I shout. ‘Wait!’

  As if he could possibly hear me above the sound of the music that’s playing on his home-rigged sound system. He’s blasting out Felina. Of course he is. Because that’s just what I need.

  ‘Light the light

  I need your love tonight

  I wanna see you, see you tonight …’

  The tide is retreating, but there is still water on either side of the causeway.

  I’m close enough now to see them in the twilight. There’s a group of people, but not many: maybe six or something. Is that everyone who has turned up?

  Boydy is standing on some steps, elevated above them, and he’s peering out along the causeway. He’s looking to see if I’m coming, I’m sure of it.

  The music ends suddenly, the way so many of Mum’s songs do: a thrashing chord and a double drumbeat – boom-boom.

  Lady has evidently decided she isn’t going to lose me, and she’s run ahead towards the group.

  ‘I’m here! I’m coming!’ I scream through my exhausted breathing. My blood is pounding in my ears.

  The small crowd turns to the source of the noise.

  Then there’s a light, and it’s coming towards me. I turn in shock, and the car headlights are thundering at me along the causeway. It’s Dad at the wheel and Gram is next to him.

  ‘DAD!’ I shout, or at least I think I shout.

  I don’t really know. I know it’s the last thing I hear.