What Not to Do If You Turn Invisible

by Ross Welford

  He doesn’t see me, obviously.

  He feels the impact, though, as the car ploughs into me. All he sees is the splash as I bounce off the car and hit the water.

  THE WHITLEY NEWS GUARDIAN

  LIGHTHOUSE GIRL STILL ‘SERIOUS’

  Doctors at North Tyneside General Hospital said last night that Ethel Leatherhead, the twelve-year-old girl involved in a freak motor accident on the lighthouse causeway in Whitley Bay on Wednesday night was still in a ‘serious’ condition.

  The driver of the car, Mr Richard Malcolm, is Ethel’s father. Her grandmother – Mr Malcolm’s former mother-in-law, Mrs Beatrice Leatherhead – was a passenger in the car when it struck the girl at 9.00 p.m. and knocked her into the sea.

  Bystanders who helped with the dramatic rescue had gathered on St Mary’s Island for an unofficial ‘Light The Light’ ceremony. A classmate of Ethel’s – Elliot Boyd, thirteen, of Woolacombe Drive, Monkseaton – had been planning to effect an unofficial ‘relighting’ of the decommissioned lighthouse.

  Moments before the light was due to be switched on, they heard cries for help from Mr Malcolm. Elliot Boyd waded into the waist-deep water where his classmate was lying face down, apparently dead. Elliot, a qualified first-aider, dragged her lifeless body to safety, where he performed CPR until paramedics arrived fifteen minutes later.

  It has not yet been established why Ethel was unclothed at the time of the accident.

  A spokesman for North East Ambulance Service said, ‘Ethel is very lucky to be alive. She was, to all intents and purposes, dead when the ambulance reached her. She had no pulse and was not breathing.’

  She was rushed to the waiting ambulance, where paramedics performed emergency defibrill-ation – the administering of a controlled electric shock to stimulate the heart.

  Det. Insp. Maxwell Ford of Northumbria Police said, ‘This was clearly a tragic accident and the police will not be pursuing charges against Mr Malcolm. Our thoughts are with Ethel and her family.’

  North Tyneside Council, which owns St Mary’s Lighthouse, yesterday responded to public pressure and withdrew an earlier statement calling for action against Elliot Boyd for trespass.

  ‘Without Elliot Boyd’s quick and selfless actions, Ethel would almost certainly have died at the scene. In the light of his heroism, we are taking no further action,’ said the Mayor of North Tyneside, Cllr Pat Peel.

  The Revd Henry Robinson, vicar of St George’s Church in Culvercot, where Ethel and her grandmother are members of the congregation, led an open-air vigil at the scene of the accident last night, which was attended by churchgoers and students of Whitley Bay Academy, which Ethel attends. He said, ‘Please pray for Ethel. She is a lovely girl with a wonderful smile, and we want her to make a full recovery.’

  Things I notice when I open my eyes:

  I’m not at home.

  That’s it. That’s all I notice.

  The light hurts so I close my eyes again. (Closing my eyes makes it go dark, but I don’t notice this. Not at first.)

  My head hurts. My chest hurts. Everything hurts.

  I don’t know how long it is until I open my eyes again, but, when I do, this is what I notice:

  I’m still not at home.

  It’s dark outside. I can see an orangey street light through a half-closed blind if I turn my eyes one way.

  Looking the other way, there’s a man sitting in a chair. His head is slumped forward.

  The man is my dad.

  I am visible again.

  I learn that Dad and Gram stayed with me at the hospital, never leaving my side, till I came round.

  Fractured skull, two broken ribs, extensive bruising, cardiac arrest. That is, a heart attack.

  I was dead when Boydy and Dad pulled me out of the water.

  I was hit by the car, thrown into the water unconscious, drowned and suffered a heart attack.

  (In case you’re wondering – and I know I would – I didn’t have a ‘near-death experience’ and see what was happening as I floated above the scene, or feel drawn towards a bright light, or any of that stuff. I don’t remember any of it.)

  So I was pretty darn dead-as-a-doornail, brown-bread dead.

  Now, though, I’m sitting up in bed.

  Everything aches.

  Gram and Dad stayed at the hospital until I ‘stabilised’, taking turns to stay by my bed or sleep in the room that the hospital has for relatives of accident victims.

  Gram cries a lot. She looks twenty years older. She keeps saying, ‘I’m sorry, Boo. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’

  Dad says sorry a lot too, but he doesn’t cry. Instead he grips my hand – sometimes a bit too hard, but I don’t mind.

  I think he’s saying sorry for running me over, which isn’t really his fault.

  Gram is saying sorry for my whole life.

  The nurses come and go.

  The doctors shine lights into my eyes, and murmur to each other, and ask me things like, ‘What is your name?’ to check my brain is OK.

  No one has mentioned invisibility.

  Good.

  A few days later, Boydy comes to visit, and I end up in agony because he makes me laugh and I have broken ribs.

  He brings me flowers! I have never been bought flowers before, ever, and it’s nice.

  ‘All right, Eff?’ He has a solemn expression. ‘I nicked these for ya. Some fella down the corridor’s died so I figured he wouldn’t miss ’em.’

  I stare at him.

  He keeps a straight face, but not for long. ‘Kidding! Gave up me daily doughnut ration to buy you these.’

  That’s what makes me laugh. He is poking fun at himself, at me, at everything, and once I start to laugh I try to stop myself because it hurts, but I can’t, and I moan so hard one of the nurses comes scuttling in, tutting at Boydy, who’s helped himself to a banana from a bowl of fruit at the end of my bed.

  I’m in my own hospital room, not a ward, probably because I’ve just come out of Intensive Care, and Dad has got up and left us alone.

  Boydy sits on the bed, peels the banana and takes a big bite.

  ‘Glad you made it, Effow,’ he says with a full mouth. ‘If you’da snuffed it, there’da been a right ol’ kerfuffle. Turns out, I’m a hero. Fanks for that!’

  I feel myself starting to laugh again. ‘Don’t!’ I say.

  ‘No, I mean it. People look at me a bit different. I’m not just the fat London loudmouth.’ He pauses and looks at me while he finishes the banana. ‘I know what they say, what they thought. I’m not daft. But it’s just me. It’s who I am. Bit loud, a bit brash. I can’t be anyone else. If you don’t like it, tough.’

  ‘But I do like it.’

  He grins. ‘Yeah, well. You just got lousy taste, ain’tcha! You gonna eat those grapes?’

  The nurse returns with a thermometer and a little cup of painkillers. While she takes my temperature, Boydy busies himself with the grapes, tossing them up and catching them in his mouth.

  He finishes the grapes and takes something from his pocket: Jesmond Knight’s mobile phone.

  ‘He’s back from the school trip tonight. This is wiped as clean as a baby’s how’s yer father.’

  ‘Hang on, Boydy. It’s theft, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve effectively stolen his phone.’

  Boydy grins. ‘Me? I fink you mean “we”. And besides, it’s only theft if you intend to permanently deprive the owner of his property. This, I was just borrowing. Thought I’d shove it through his letter box on the way home.’

  When the nurse leaves, Boydy pulls up the chair next to me and leans in close.

  ‘So … did they find anything? The doctors? Anything weird? Any bits of you missing, or invisible?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘You haven’t told ’em?’

  Another shake. ‘Why would I? It’s got nothing to do with the accident.’

  ‘But it’s why your dad didn’t see you. It’s why it happened.’

  ‘And I became vis
ible again when I died. Just like my tears, my sick, my blood. There’s no proof of anything. All that’s left is that last bit of the powder. You have still got it, haven’t you?’

  His silence says everything.

  Eventually he murmurs, ‘It was in my trouser pocket. I was wearing ’em when I jumped into the water to get you. It all washed away.’

  ‘All of it?’

  He nods.

  I’m not even angry. If anything, I’m relieved.

  Those people who know me the best – they know the truth.

  Everyone else? Well, ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof’.

  I reach, wincing, for my laptop and open it up. I’m about to show Boydy the film I took of my last venture into invisibility when I remember that I’m naked in it. I don’t want to embarrass him so I fast-forward to when I’m lying down on the sunbed and things are not quite so obvious.

  It’s not a bad picture, exactly. It’s in focus and in shot and everything. It’s just that the brilliance of the sunbed’s UV light creates a kind of blurry glow around me so that when I fade away, it’s …

  ‘Not all that convincing, is it?’ Boydy says, looking glum. It could easily be a simple home-made special effect.

  ‘It wouldn’t persuade anyone.’ Then I smile. ‘But we know the truth.’

  There are voices outside my room, and seconds later three girls come in, wearing school uniform. Kirsten Olen, Katie Pelling and – of all people – Aramynta Fell.

  The girls have been sent as a delegation from Mr Parker’s class to deliver a get-well card signed by all my classmates who are not on the adventure-centre trip to the Lake District.

  There aren’t enough chairs in my room, so between them and Boydy they sort of share bed-space and the two chairs that are there.

  Kirsten and Katie behave as if everything is fine, and has always been fine.

  And actually – that’s OK by me.

  But there’s something bugging me about Aramynta. I can’t put my finger on it. She’s even being nice to Boydy.

  She’s behaving … suspiciously, I suppose. She definitely doesn’t want to be there, and it’s separate from the fact that she’s always been at the very least frosty to me, if not completely hostile. There’s something nagging at me, a memory trying to come to the surface, but I can’t quite get to it.

  We’re talking about Mr Parker, and Boydy’s riot-causing Whitley’s Got Talent performance, and his pretending to be all mysterious and saying he can’t reveal the secret of his trick, when Katie says:

  ‘You were close to it. You saw it, didn’t you, Mynt?’

  Mynt.

  That’s when it comes back to me. Jesmond’s conversation in his bedroom, when he was arranging with Aramynta to claim the reward on Geoffrey.

  I just blurt it out.

  ‘Thanks for coming. But before you go: Aramynta? How much reward money did you collect from old Mrs Abercrombie?’

  And I know I’ve got her – not from what she says, but from the colour she goes, which is the brightest pink I have ever seen on anyone.

  ‘I … I … what?’

  None of them has any idea what I’m talking about – not even Boydy. I tell them what I’ve guessed about Aramynta’s role as a ‘spotter’, delivering free newspapers and takeaway leaflets and identifying houses with pets that could easily be taken by Jesmond and Jarrow and held until a reward is offered. And if no reward is offered, it’s an easy job just to return the dogs they’ve taken.

  I’m kind of making it up as I’m saying it, but I know I’m right.

  Aramynta doesn’t even try to deny it. She just stares at the floor.

  ‘The twins are back tonight, aren’t they?’ I go on. ‘So unless you want me to go to the police – and I will, I promise – you will return the reward money to Mrs Abercrombie.’

  ‘You … you have no proof,’ says Aramynta. But I can tell she’s scared.

  ‘Oh yes we do, don’t we, Boydy?’

  Boydy – who, till this point, has been watching me, astounded – snaps his mouth shut and springs to life. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out Jesmond Knight’s distinctive red-and-white-striped phone with a football crest on it.

  ‘Sure do,’ he says without missing a beat.

  He stands up and addresses them like they’re in a court, with his lawyer’s voice. ‘Do you recognise this mobile telephone? Of course you do – it belongs to Jesmond Knight, does it not?’

  ‘Does it not?’ I have to bite my cheek to stop myself smiling. I can see where this is going. He’s brilliant.

  Aramynta nods.

  Boydy turns the phone on and starts to dial a number. ‘Oh, good,’ he says, pretending to talk to himself. ‘FaceTime seems to be working. Hello, Jarrow. How lovely to see and hear you!’

  On the little screen of the phone is a stunned-looking Jarrow Knight. It looks like she’s on the school coach. There’re other people around her, but the only one I can pick out is Jesmond, who puts his face close to the phone’s camera and snarls:

  ‘Is that my phone, Boyd? You, my friend, are dead.’

  But Boydy just grins, super-confident.

  ‘I don’t fink so, Jezza, me old china plate.’ He resumes his lawyer voice. ‘You see, on this very device, I found a good deal of evidence. Text records, call logs, the lot, all leading to the firm conclusion that several crimes have been committed – those of obtaining money by deception, and of holding an animal in contravention of the Domestic Animals Act of 1968. All of the evidence points to a prima facie case that the perpetrators of the said offences are Mr Jesmond Knight and his twin sister, Jarrow, of Number Forty Links Avenue, Whitley Bay.’ He stops and points a dramatic finger at Aramynta. ‘And you, Miss Aramynta Fell, are an accomplice to the crime and will be prosecuted accordingly.’

  It’s a bluff – a massive bluff – but it’s enough.

  Aramynta has turned white.

  On the phone’s screen, Jarrow is chewing her bottom lip furiously, and blinking hard.

  We’ve got them.

  Boydy turns back to the phone, which he’s holding up selfie-style so that Jarrow and Jesmond can see the scene properly.

  ‘Prosecuted, that is, unless all the money obtained by said deception is returned to the victims within a week.’ Boydy leans close to the phone. ‘Case closed. Sort it out, will ya?’ He looks at his watch. ‘Mynt? Queenie Abercrombie can be first. You’ve got an hour until we call ’er to check it’s been done. Got it? Chop chop.’

  Aramynta nods and practically runs from the room.

  Boydy turns his face back to the phone, and he’s dropped the posh voice. ‘I mean it, Jarrow, Jesmond. All the money returned, or everyone gets to know – starting wiv your dad. This phone will be posted through your letter box tonight, but don’t worry – I’ve backed up all the data. Bye-bye!’ Without waiting for a response, he ends the call.

  Katie and Kirsten have watched all this with mounting astonishment.

  ‘What a cow!’ says Kirsten.

  ‘Never liked her. Not really,’ adds Katie.

  After the girls leave, I ask Boydy, ‘That stuff about all the data you found on the phone?’

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘Were you just bluffing?’

  ‘Not entirely. But, you know, when it comes to bluffin’, Effow, I’ve learned from the best.’

  I’ve no idea what he means, but I will soon.

  I’m out of hospital, but I’m still aching all over and I have stitches in my scalp.

  Dad has rented a house in Monkseaton. He wants me and Gram to move in.

  To be honest, I think he wants me to move in and has asked Gram out of politeness, but I hope she does. It’d be fun.

  In the end, I had to ask Gram to stop saying sorry.

  She’d been doing exactly what Mum asked her to do. For my sake, she endured ten years living as Beatrice Leatherhead instead of her real name, Belinda Mackay. She worried every day that someone might recognise her, or make the con
nection between her and ‘Felina’.

  She persuaded Great-gran to go along with the deception, on the promise that she would tell me the truth when I was ‘old enough’. But by then she was so far into her lies that she couldn’t extract herself.

  I grew up as Ethel Leatherhead, and that is who I am. I did not grow up as ‘Boo Mackay (or Malcolm? Who knows?), daughter of the tragic princess of pop, Miranda “Felina” Mackay’ – and that suits me fine.

  Who wants to be that visible?

  And if Gram hadn’t lied, what would be different?

  My mum still would not be here. That wouldn’t have changed.

  My dad would still have had his ‘lost years’, as he calls them, and would still have come back.

  I might have grown up in London, but do you know what? I went there on a school trip once and it’s not all that. There’s no beach, no seagulls, no lighthouse.

  And there’d be no Boydy, a proper friend who makes me laugh every day.

  I’m going round there later. He invited me with this text:

  Mr Elliot Boyd invites

  Ms Ethel Leatherhead

  To an evening of supper and revelation

  8 July, 7.00 p.m.

  Supper ‘and revelation’?

  What the totally heck?

  I’m at Boydy’s at seven, and when he answers the door, he’s changed out of his school uniform (which is strange for him) and he’s in a clean white shirt, although he’s wearing summer shorts. He looks shiny, like he’s had a bath.

  When I go into his front room, I burst out laughing because there are two candles lit on the dining table, even though it’s still light.

  ‘Boydy! What are the candles for?’ I laugh and then wince because laughing still hurts a bit.

  ‘Oh, them? Nothing. I, erm … I fink my mum left ’em there from some client or something from before, that’ll be it.’

  ‘Where is your mum? I’ll go and say hello.’

  ‘Oh, she’s erm … out.’

  He’s acting shiftily, or nervous. Perhaps he’s edgy about the revelation, whatever that’s going to be. I would expect Boydy and I to get down to playing some music, or the Xbox, or watching TV, but instead, he’s opened up the French windows onto the terrace (which – now that I think it – sounds much grander than it really is, as it’s actually a little paved area of the tiny back garden).