Invisible

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘Yeah. Who’s the stroppy kid, Davie?’

  ‘She’s not a kid.’

  ‘Looks like a kid from where we’re sitting, don’t she, Trish?’

  ‘She does. A big kid, mind you. Say that for her.’

  ‘Chunky little number.’

  ‘Nice big handfuls, Davie.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘You what? Not got your hands on them yet? Don’t believe you.’

  ‘Playing you along, this one, is she?’

  ‘Early days, Kath, early days.’

  ‘Looked like you were having a nice chat. Very philosophical, what I could hear. Very deep.’

  ‘Got interesting opinions, has she?’

  ‘She’s interesting, yes.’

  ‘I bet she is.’

  ‘Not from round here, is she?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why so cagey, Davie?’

  ‘Not being cagey, Kathie.’

  ‘What’s her name then?’

  ‘Hold up,’ says Trish, pointing with her cigarette. ‘Mystery girl’s come back.’

  ‘Give us a break, girls. Keep it down, all right?’ he tells them, but Step is hooking her bag off the back of the chair and scowling at them as if she’s overheard what they were saying.

  ‘Got to go,’ she tells him. ‘He’s on the warpath. I said I’d be back by now.’

  ‘I’ll come out with you.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘I’ll walk back with you, some of the way.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ she says, with a brittle smile. ‘See you tomorrow? But not here?’ she suggests, and before he can grab his jacket she’s gone.

  She finds her father in the kitchen, at the cooker, stirring something in a frying pan. When she comes in he doesn’t turn round. ‘Chicken and noodles OK with you?’ he asks, with a coolness rather than annoyance in his voice. He presses the button on the kettle, and the water begins to bubble. Still he does not turn round.

  ‘All right with me,’ she replies, dumping her jacket and bag on a chair, preparing to be lectured.

  He sprinkles soy sauce on the pieces of chicken, then scatters flakes of almond over them. ‘Ready to eat?’ he asks her, continuing to stir, perhaps deciding what to say.

  ‘Great,’ she replies, at which he nods. She watches him, becoming annoyed by his wilful placidity, even if it’s preferable to one of her mother’s rants. She watches his arm as it stirs the food. It moves with a mechanical steadiness, the steadiness of someone determined not to show what he is feeling. ‘Sorry I didn’t ring,’ she says.

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘Forgot to recharge the phone,’ she says, putting a finger-pistol to her temple, but he doesn’t see it. ‘I went for a walk round the town. Lost track of the time.’

  ‘Not to worry. Not been back long myself,’ he says, and now at last he looks at her, for a split second, and from his look she knows that he doesn’t believe her excuse, yet he would have her think that he doesn’t mind. Moving with the same air of tight efficiency as he displays at work, he pours the boiling water into a saucepan, resumes the stirring, adds a dash more soy.

  ‘Did it go OK, whatever it was you had to do?’ she asks.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘What was it exactly?’

  ‘Personnel problem,’ he answers, in a way that makes it plain he won’t say more. ‘Here you go, make yourself useful,’ he instructs her, handing over the cutlery and a pair of place mats, and he narrows his eyes at her in a way that makes her put a finger to the side of her mouth, testing for a wine stain. She rubs the spot, but the fingertip is unmarked. ‘A small glass?’ he suggests, removing a bottle of Chianti from the cupboard.

  ‘Please,’ she replies, and with a perfectly blank expression he puts two glasses on the table, then places the bottle between them. She bends low to the table and turns her head to look him in the eye. ‘Tell me, do you ever lose your temper?’ she asks him.

  ‘Of course,’ he answers, going back to the cooker.

  ‘But not very often.’

  ‘I try not to make a habit of it.’

  ‘When was the last time?’

  ‘Oh, now, let me see,’ he muses, turning off the gas. ‘I’ve had some peevishness with your mother recently.’

  ‘Peevish doesn’t count. I mean really losing your rag. Not your style, is it?’

  He stops, holding the handle of the pan, apparently considering a question that has never occurred to him before. ‘No, I’d have to admit that it’s been many years since I last let rip.’

  ‘And when was that?’

  ‘I can’t recall precisely. No doubt it would have been with your mother.’

  ‘Surprise.’

  ‘We used to have some humdingers. As no doubt she’s told you. Or you might remember,’ he adds, and now, for the first time this evening, he looks at her properly, asking for a response.

  ‘No,’ she replies. ‘I don’t.’

  He gives her answer a moment’s thought, then carries the saucepan to the sink and pours the contents through a sieve. ‘Well, we did. Toe-to-toe screamers.’

  ‘I can’t imagine it. I mean, I can imagine one way, but not the other.’

  ‘Mr Even Keel and his wife the mad banshee?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Dormant volcano,’ he says, straight-faced, wiggling his eyebrows comically. ‘I’ve made us a starter. In the fridge, middle shelf.’

  On the middle shelf of the fridge she finds two plates, each with a dish inverted on it. She puts them on the table and removes the dishes. On the plates lie two identical salads, composed of three thick slabs of gleaming white mozzarella arranged in steps, surrounded by slices of avocado and tomato, garnished with leaves of basil. ‘So you argued a lot?’ she asks him, as he drops a block of noodles into the pot.

  ‘In the end, yes.’

  ‘Is that why you gave up?’

  ‘It wasn’t a case of giving up. We hit the buffers.’

  ‘I meant give up with me.’

  Quietly, as though reminding her of something she should not have forgotten, he replies: ‘You went to live on the other side of the planet. And you had a new family.’

  ‘But not the dark side of the moon, was it? I mean, the phones work. New Zealand has a postal service. You could have made more of an effort.’

  He turns round and it seems that at last he’s going to be angry, but instead he states evenly: ‘I made an effort, Stephanie. Before you and your mother left, I made an effort. But it became a fight, and the fighting was counter-productive. None of us was happy. You certainly weren’t happy. You’d sulk all day when I came to see you. Or cry your eyes out.’

  ‘I don’t remember it being that bad.’

  ‘It was that bad, believe me. Sometimes you’d cry for an hour. Non-stop. I practically had to force-feed you. You just weren’t having it.’

  ‘I was a kid.’

  ‘You knew your own mind and you didn’t want to be with me. What was I supposed to do, once you’d gone? Fly all the way to New Zealand just to make you miserable?’

  ‘I’d have grown out of it.’

  ‘You didn’t show any signs of it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I wrote to you.’

  ‘Twice a year.’

  ‘And got virtually nothing back.’

  ‘I wrote back.’

  ‘“Thanks for the present.”’

  ‘More than that.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘So then you decided to give up.’

  Holding a bottle of olive oil, he halts midway between the cooker and the table. He looks at the label of the bottle, as if to remind himself what it is, and then he unscrews the top and pours some oil onto their salads. He looks her in the eye, dispiritedly, and sits down at the other end of the table. ‘And then I gave up,’ he says. He picks up his knife and fork. Frozen in mid-movement, he holds the knife and fork above the plate as he stares at the thick green rivulet tha
t is trickling down the steps of cheese. ‘They’ll be done,’ he says, glancing at the cooker, pushing his chair back.

  ‘Stay,’ she orders. She drains the noodles, then takes two glasses from the cupboard and lets the tap run until the water has become cold.

  ‘Your friend’s coming back, by the way,’ he says casually, cutting a slice of avocado.

  ‘Sorry?’ she replies, thinking he means David.

  ‘Mr Morton. He’s arriving tonight.’

  ‘Oh. Good.’

  ‘I knew you’d be pleased,’ he says with ironic flatness.

  ‘Yes. I am.’

  Her father begins to eat. Straight-backed as an instructor in etiquette, he conveys the half-slice to his mouth, then the other half-slice. She carries the glasses of water to the table, places one of them by his right hand, and as she passes behind him she pats him on the shoulder, a peculiar gesture, it strikes her as soon as she has done it, like patting a team-mate on the back as you leave the dressing room after a game.

  eighteen

  A high wall rises in front of him, and other buildings enclose the place where he is standing, buildings that are incompletely visible. He gives the wall a testing touch. The bricks are wet, but the cobbles beneath his feet are dry. He touches his hair, and his hair too is dry. He looks up: the wall has hundreds of small windows, tiny windows with tiny shutters hanging open, like a flock of birds taking flight. Though the place has no sound, he is conscious that he is somewhere in a town where the business of life is going on, in streets that are near. An awareness of urgency begins. His sister is waiting on the other side of the wall, but there is no door. Again he extends a hand, then he is indoors, in a long corridor that is paved and walled with stone. The corridor has the same light as outside, but it has no windows, then there is a door, a yolk-yellow door, which vanishes like a bubble of colour. At the end of the corridor there is a curving staircase, far away. Children are laughing under a very high ceiling, and now he is walking on carpet rather than on stone. Stairs are in front of him. Warily he begins to go up, towards a haze of sunlight, towards Charlotte, who is leading him, climbing a step or two in advance. Now there’s a stone banister and a tinny bell is ringing. The steps bend under his feet, like a staircase of sandbags. Charlotte is alongside him, offering her arm, then she is at the top, a long way above him, but he can see her beckoning, laboriously, as though her arm were weighted. She disappears through an arched opening. He tries to run up the steps, but his legs will not respond to the effort. It is like trying to sprint up a sand dune. A sound occurs in the stairway, a whistling that seems to be coming through the wall by his head, though the wall is solid. There is a window, in a room in another place, and Charlotte isn’t there any more. He is standing by a window, on a wooden floor, with his hand resting on a rough wooden frame, then on a sill of cool bricks. Claudia is talking to him, but he hears no words, only the sound of her voice. The whistling is inside this room as well, along with another voice, also a woman’s voice, none of whose words are clear until it says ‘Silvia’, then Claudia is talking quietly, as though he is overhearing her through glass. On his hand he feels a movement of the air. The wind moves across his hand, and Claudia is talking, and he is happy. ‘Silvia’ he hears, spoken by a voice that seems to be the voice of the room. The whistling is louder, but the sill is no longer underneath his hand. Claudia’s voice has gone, and the room has evaporated around him. He is not in the room, but the whistling has carried on, and the air is moving across his hand, across his face and back. His hand is touching creased fabric, his face is on a pillow, he is awake, in his bedroom in the Oak.

  He is awake, hearing birdsong from the garden, hearing the curtain brushing against itself with a sound like a soft intake of breath, and as he listens to the singing of the birds he is still in the mood of his dream, a mood of vague contentment. But then, in turning towards the open window, a flash of colour happens, a flash of yellow, a visible echo of the yellow in his dream, weaker than the colour he has just dreamed, he knows, yet a true colour: yellow itself, not a memory of yellowness. He claps his hands to his eyes, as if to seal in the colour. Out of nothing, one last dot of pungent yellow appears, and vanishes into nothing. He clenches his eyelids, as if to press colour from his skin, like oil from olives. Nothing is there. By an exertion of will he tries to summon yellow to mind. He thinks of sunflowers, of dandelions, of buttercups and marigolds. These things are yellow, he tells himself, and flowers take shape like shapes in smoke, with an evanescent bloom of colour, a fugitive quality of being coloured, but not the yellow that he saw in his dream.

  As if in the aftermath of a nightmare his heart is racing, and after he has washed and dressed it still has not settled. He checks the time. Finding it to be so early that nobody else will be about, he decides to go downstairs, taking his laptop and recorder. In the Randall Room he sits by the wall of glass. On the other side of the wall the birds are singing as he rejoins the eventful life of Jochen Stadler. Now in Brazil, recovering from an insect’s bite, Jochen is nursed by a girl whose skin is burnished copper, whose hair is the blue-black of a raven’s feathers. Together, as he is recovering, they walk in the forest under a canopy of foliage so dense, so richly green, that it is like walking in a tent of jade-coloured silk. Birds cry as loudly as fairground pipes, and the beetles are as big as clockwork toys.

  Again Eloni wakes up and her first thought is of Francesc. She turns on the light in the windowless room: it is less than an hour since she was last awake. She turns off the bulb, but the shock of the glare has knocked her out of sleep, and her mouth feels like sand, and the face of Francesc will not go away. For five minutes or more she lies on the mattress, but he will not go away, and she can barely swallow. Sitting up, she gropes for her skirt and blouse, finds her shoes beside the box of electric cables, then opens the door a centimetre or two, to dress in the light from the corridor.

  In the corridor, by the room of Mr and Mrs Sampson, she brushes her hair at the gold-framed mirror. She thinks of the Sampsons sleeping, of all the guests sleeping, and as she looks at the ivory-coloured panels of the door of room 48, at the gilded ivy leaves of the little lamp beside it, at the long crimson carpet, at all the doors behind which people are sleeping, she has a taste of envy that is stronger than she has felt before, a taste that is real and bitter. She walks away, towards the stairs. There is a purple sky in the skylight and the floor below has a deep gleam like dark water. She goes down the stairs, and through the glass doors at the front of the hall she can see the milky river of gravel, with cream and dark pink and violet ribbons of cloud above the blackness of the garden wall. As she looks the sky is cracking, the veins of cream and pink widening, while fringes of mauve are appearing around the violet. Holes of light are opening in the silhouettes of the trees. It is all beautiful and she cannot bear to look at it, because it gives her a feeling that is almost a pang of homesickness, and yet, as she turns to go to the kitchen, she finds herself wondering how the Randall Room looks in the dawn.

  She pushes the door and sees, by the far wall, Mr Morton sitting in an armchair, with his computer and tape recorder on the table beside him, staring at the glass as if he can see the sun through the trees. She steps back, not wanting to talk, but the creak of the door is as loud as the crack of a branch. Mr Morton turns towards her, but she neither moves nor speaks, until his face shows puzzlement, then she says: ‘Good morning, Mr Morton.’

  ‘Good morning, Eloni,’ Mr Morton replies, and as she approaches him she sees his fingers moving over his wrist. Pulling back his cuff, he flips open the little glass lid that covers the face of his watch. ‘Has this thing stopped?’ he asks, touching the dial, then he shows it to her.

  ‘No. It is right.’

  ‘Is this when your day starts?’

  ‘Not all days. This morning I am early.’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘There is a lot to do, for the last days.’

  ‘I’m sure there is. But still,’ he says, shaking h
is head in sympathy. ‘Only the milkman should be up at this hour.’

  ‘The milkman and you,’ she replies, smiling at him. ‘You are here, not in bed.’

  ‘That is true,’ he smiles back. ‘But only because I want to be.’

  A movement outside catches her attention. Along the top of the terrace wall a blackbird is hopping, carrying in its beak a scrap that it might have picked up from the saucer that has been left there. At the angle of the wall, by the steps, the blackbird halts. It cocks its head from side to side, as if it has forgotten what it’s doing, then flies away.

  ‘Are many people here, for the last night?’ Mr Morton asks.

  ‘Some more, yes.’

  ‘And Mr Caldecott’s daughter, she’s come back?’

  ‘Two days before today. But she is at his house, not in the hotel.’

  ‘It’s good to have young people around,’ says Mr Morton, talking as though he were far older than he is. ‘I like her. A thoughtful girl. In both senses.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, not knowing what he means.

  He nods his head and closes his eyes, perhaps listening to the birds in the garden. ‘Marvellous, isn’t it? In here, at this time of the day. This big room, and everything so peaceful,’ he says, with an expanding gesture of both hands.

  ‘I like it,’ she replies.

  ‘So do I. Very much. And the pictures sound nice.’

  She looks where he is looking, towards the painting of the wedding in the country. ‘They are pretty,’ she agrees.

  ‘A pity it’s closing.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agrees, with a tone that’s intended to bring the subject to a close and she takes a couple of steps towards the door to the terrace. ‘I am sorry,’ she says, ‘but I must do something. One moment, please.’

  ‘Of course,’ says Mr Morton, putting an earpiece into his ear as she tugs at the bolts of the door.

  Outside, the air has a smell that she has known only here in the early morning: a smell of soil, of damp grass and damp stone, a smell of warming dew, with a faint fragrance of roses. For a minute she stands on the terrace, breathing the air of the Oak, gazing at the heavy damp leaves of the trees, which move only where a bird bursting out from their depths makes them shiver. Beneath the branches of one of the trees a corner of the lawn is beginning to turn green amid the shadows, and for a minute more she watches the island of pale grass. She picks up the saucer from the wall and turns to go back into the hotel, and as she turns she is confronted by the reflection of herself in the glass wall of the Randall Room, a picture so strange and complicated that it makes her stop to look at it more carefully. Like a ghost she stands, hovering with the trees and the clouds behind her, and under the trees there is the huge room, dim and indistinct, like a room seen under the surface of the sea. The chandelier hangs in the clouds above her head, while the trees in the painted countryside mix with the real trees of the garden, in whose shadows sits the shadowy figure of the blind man, looking at her but not seeing her, with his hand cupped to his ear, listening to a secret voice. It is wondrous and very sad, the picture on the glass, like a ghost of the garden, and as she looks at it she can feel tears prickling her eyes.