Something Invisible

by Siobhán Parkinson

  “I think she wants me to hold her again,” said Jake wonderingly.

  “Oh, you don’t need to,” said his mother. “Hand me that rattle there, we’ll soon distract her.”

  But Daisy kept on crying. She pushed the rattle out of her mother’s hand, and it clattered noisily to the floor, the little beads inside it rattling like crazy.

  “Here,” said Jake. “Give her to me.”

  He held out his arms, and his mother reluctantly unstrapped Daisy from her chair and handed her back to Jake.

  Instantly the crying stopped. Daisy snuggled and snuffled into Jake’s collarbone, and he lightly touched the top of her head. Her body gave a couple of spasmodic sobs, and then she settled, and gave just an occasional little sigh. Jake went on stroking the top of her head with the tips of his fingers. Within moments, the baby was asleep.

  “Well!” said his mother. “And I thought I was the only one who could do that!”

  “Oh, it’s a family gift,” said Jake, laughing, but very quietly, so as not to wake her.

  CHAPTER

  35

  “The Daisy follows soft the Sun,” Jake’s mother often whispered as she dressed Daisy or bathed her or fed her.

  “You know, I used to be the Sun, Jake,” she said, “but I think the center of her universe has changed.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “Well, it’s you she follows. You are the golden walker, Jake. Watch. Go out the door, and come back in, and see her little face light up.”

  “Don’t be silly, Mum.”

  “Just do it, Jake, I want to show you.”

  Jake sighed, but he did as he was told. He stood outside the door for a few moments, to give Daisy the idea that he was good and gone, and then he opened the door again and poked his head in.

  Sure enough, Daisy’s eyes lit up, and she waved her arms at him and kicked her legs.

  Jake laughed.

  “‘And when his golden walk is done— / Sits shyly at his feet.’ See, that’s the closest she can get to sitting at your feet.”

  “OK,” he said, “maybe she does like to see me.”

  “No doubt about it.”

  “But it’s just because babies like children. It’s a well-known fact.”

  “Hmm,” said Jake’s mother. “If you say so, Mr. Smarty Pants Encyclopedia Eater.”

  CHAPTER

  36

  It was Dad’s idea to go for that walk. “Just me and my children,” he said. He’d taken to talking about “my children,” to give Jake the idea that he considered him and Daisy equally his. This was silly, because Jake didn’t mind anymore about all that. He’d got over it. But then, of course, how was Dad to know that?

  “We’ll walk over as far as your friend’s house,” he suggested to Jake. “And then, if your friend is at home, you can give Daisy to me, and I’ll skip off home with her, and you can stay and … visit your friend, whatever you two do.”

  “Her name is Stella.”

  “That’s the one. The very thin girl. I have an envelope to deliver to a house on that road anyway.”

  “I don’t really want to,” said Jake.

  “But you haven’t seen her for ages,” said Dad. “Have you?”

  “No,” said Jake, looking firmly at the ground.

  “Had a row?” asked Dad.

  “No!” said Jake and shuffled his feet. It hadn’t been a row, exactly. You couldn’t call it that. It had just been some sort of stupid thing that had happened.

  “Sounds like one of those nos that mean yes,” said Dad.

  Jake shrugged. He wouldn’t mind seeing Stella, just by chance, like.

  “Well, look, I have to deliver this letter anyway, so why don’t you come with me? You don’t have to visit Stella if you don’t want to.”

  Jake shrugged again, but he stood still while Dad hooked him up with Daisy in the sling.

  They walked along together in the early evening sunshine, and Jake tried not to think what he would say if he met Stella.

  As they rounded the corner into Stella’s cul-de-sac, there seemed to be children everywhere. A bunch of girls were playing a skipping game on the pavement at the far end of the road, out of the way of passing cars. Stella didn’t seem to be among them, but he recognized a couple of her sisters. A few boys were sitting on a garden wall, not doing anything much, except pushing each other off the wall.

  Jake could see Stella’s little sister Joanne crouched on the pavement outside their house, poking in the gutter with a long stick. He smiled at the sight of her, and was just about to say to Dad, “Look, that’s Joanne, otherwise known as Joey,” when he realized his father had slipped into a gateway.

  “I’ll just be a sec, Jake,” Dad said, waving the envelope. “Don’t drop Daisy.”

  “No fear,” said Jake, and fondled his little sister’s feet. She squirmed and gurgled.

  There was a shiny new car in Stella’s driveway, Jake noticed. It was quite small, sky blue, and looked as if it were smiling. It’s funny, it occurred to him, how things can happen so quickly; how someone you thought you knew suddenly has a new car, and you had no idea about it. You wouldn’t even know to wave if you saw it beetling by on the road.

  Just then, Stella’s mother came charging out of the house, a scarlet scarf flying behind her.

  Joanne looked up and saw Jake. She hadn’t seen him for days. Her face broke into a smile.

  “Hey, Joanne!” Jake called to her, and waved.

  Rosie yanked open the door of the sky-blue car, got in and banged the door shut. The engine revved up almost immediately.

  “Dake!” Joanne shouted back and started to run toward him, her long stick still in one hand.

  Jake saw it all.

  In—slow—motion.

  The little girl running toward him, her arms outstretched, the smiling, sky-blue car backing out of the driveway, the child’s face turned toward him, heedless of the car.

  He raced toward her, jogging the baby in his arms, screaming at the child to watch out, watch out, WATCH OUT, but his breath came in gasps and he couldn’t make himself heard over the engine of the car.

  The girls at the end of the road must have heard him, though, and they stopped their skipping to watch.

  The car inched forward again and straightened up a little, and Jake’s breath escaped in a wild exhalation of relief. Daisy was crying, bewildered by the jogging and the shouting.

  The girls laughed and started up the rope again.

  “Shh, shh,” Jake said, halfheartedly, to Daisy, but it did nothing to soothe the frantic, frightened baby in his arms.

  And then suddenly the car shot backward again. By now, Jake was almost close enough to yank Joanne out of its path. Four or five more desperate strides and he could grab her out of harm’s way.

  But he hesitated. He couldn’t step into the path of the hurtling car, not with Daisy in his arms. He kept shouting, hoping Rosie would hear him, though she was inside the car with the windows all shut and the engine running. His arms hugged Daisy desperately to his body, as if by holding on to her he could somehow save Joanne.

  But Rosie didn’t hear him, and the car kept lurching backward. As Jake stood dithering on the pavement, the shiny back bumper of the pretty little car clipped the child sideways on, at speed, and Joanne’s little body flew sideways into the air, all flailing limbs, like a cat who has missed its footing in an upward leap, the long stick whipped out of her hand, turning and turning, like the only visible spoke in an invisible wheel. The little girl seemed almost to float to the ground and landed soundlessly in the middle of the road, like a fallen star, all akimbo, utterly still. The stick rolled away on the camber of the road, into the gutter.

  The car stopped short, inches from the fallen child, and the door opened. A screaming woman tumbled out.

  The girls with the rope dropped it and came running.

  Jake could hear his own screams, but he could not control them. They seemed to come from deep inside his body. He co
uld hear them and feel them as they labored out of his chest cavity, and he could feel how they reverberated against Daisy. Her screams echoed back at him, high and terrified at this terrible, noisy grief that beat against her body, and all the time, he held her in a grasp of steel.

  He screamed in terror. He screamed in anguish, for Joanne, for her mother. And he screamed out of his own guilt. If he had not rounded the corner at just that moment, if he had not called to the child, if she had not been so surprised to see him, if she had only been used to seeing him every day the way it used to be; if he and Stella, in other words, were not at loggerheads over … what? Over nothing … If he had not been hampered by the baby in his arms …

  “Jake!”

  His father was shaking his shoulders.

  “Jake, stop screeching! What is it? Give me Daisy! You’re suffocating her.”

  Dad hadn’t seen it yet. His whole attention was fixed on his screaming children.

  Jake loosened his grip on Daisy and raised his arm to point, though he could hardly hold it steady, and at last Dad saw it—the halted, guilty car, the stricken mother stumbling toward the lifeless body of her child, the little girls standing openmouthed in a semicircle, the skipping rope lying abandoned like a snake behind them.

  “It was the accelerator, it was the accelerator,” Rosie Daly was shouting, over and over, and sobbing. “I meant to stamp on the brake, the brake, the bra-aa-ake.”

  CHAPTER

  37

  On the third morning, another card came for Jake, with another dead fish on it. It was a different picture. This time the fish was peeping out of the top of a canvas bag that was hanging from a peg in what looked like a scullery.

  Jake had lain for two days in bed, refusing to get up, except to use the toilet, refusing to eat, refusing to speak to anyone. At night he woke screaming from nightmares that always ended in the same way, with that sickening fall and then the awful stillness and then his own screams. His face was permanently swollen from crying. His throat was raw, his nose peeling and chafed; his eyes were stinging from excess salt. His mother changed his sodden pillow and brought him ice cream as if he were a person with tonsillitis, but he pushed it aside.

  He couldn’t eat ice cream. He couldn’t bear to be himself.

  Daisy cried all the time. It was as if she knew there’d been some dreadful catastrophe, but of course it was just the shock. Her mother took her to see Jake, to try to soothe her, and to try to shake Jake out of himself, but he turned to the wall and lay staring at it until she went away, with Daisy whimpering in her arms.

  “I’m on my way,” said the card. “I know you will see me.”

  It was signed M squiggle K squiggle, as before.

  Jake stared dully at it. There was no stamp, he noticed. She must have delivered it herself, or sent someone with it. Who? Her son, perhaps, the daisy murderer. That was some joke, he thought bitterly to himself. Who was the murderer now?

  “When did it come?” he whispered to his mother, who had brought the card to him.

  “I don’t know. I found it in the hall just now.”

  “I’d better get up,” Jake said, sitting up in bed. His head pounded with the tears he hadn’t shed yet.

  His mother was visibly startled, but she said nothing.

  “I mean, she can’t come up the stairs, not very well, she’s an old lady with arthritis.” Jake sniffed.

  “I see,” said his mother.

  “She might come any time,” Jake said.

  “I suppose so.”

  “I’ll have a shower,” Jake said, and swung his feet out of the bed.

  “Right,” said his mother. “And a cup of tea and toast?”

  “Battenberg cake,” said Jake. “She likes Battenberg cake. Or porter cake.”

  “No, I mean, for you,” said his mother.

  “Oh, yes,” said Jake.

  “Right,” said Mum again. “You go and have that shower, and I’ll find some clean clothes for you.”

  CHAPTER

  38

  “Stella sent me,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “In a manner of speaking.”

  Jake was sitting, all clean and neat, but feeling hollow inside, as if he were a pillow whose stuffing had been emptied out, in the living room. Mrs. Kennedy was sitting opposite him, her three-legged stick standing by her chair. A plate of Swiss roll slices—not Battenberg, there hadn’t been any, Jake’s mother had explained breathlessly—sat on the table between them, with two cups of milky tea.

  Jake said nothing. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to. It was that he didn’t trust himself not to cry if he opened his mouth.

  “She wants you to come to the funeral,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “That is to say, she needs you there.”

  Jake said, “Did she tell you that?” His voice was cracked, and it hurt to talk.

  “Not in so many words, but I know she does. It’s tomorrow, eleven o’clock. Can you come?”

  Jake shook his head. He couldn’t possibly go. He couldn’t bear to see the little coffin, the weeping family, Stella distraught. What could he say to her? He couldn’t tell her he was sorry for saying … what had he said, anyway? He hadn’t said he didn’t like her sisters being around, he was sure he hadn’t. He definitely hadn’t said she had too many sisters. She’d just chosen to interpret it that way.

  “Jake, you’ve had a dreadful shock.”

  Jake nodded.

  “But it wasn’t your fault.”

  “It was,” he said listlessly. “Partly.”

  “Do you remember the first card I sent you?”

  Jake nodded again. His mouth felt dry. He took a sip of his tea.

  “That was because you had saved a child’s life. Remember?”

  He nodded miserably.

  “So, would you think that a boy who did that would have let another child get killed if he could help it?”

  “No,” said Jake. “But…”

  If he’d run faster, Jake knew, he just knew, he could have scooped Joanne up and twirled them all three out of danger. If only he could have run a little faster! If only he hadn’t stopped to think! If only he’d done as he did that day at the pier, and acted on instinct! He could have stood out of the path of the car and pulled her toward him. He could have pounded on the roof of the car and forced the driver to stop.

  “But me no buts,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “It’s as plain as the nose on your face.”

  “It was my fault,” he said. “I called to her. I waved to her. She didn’t see the car because she was running to me.”

  “Jake, listen. You are just not that important, you know.”

  Jake stared at her.

  “But it was my fault,” he whispered. She didn’t understand.

  “You are not important, at all.”

  Jake had no idea what she meant. He put his head in his hands.

  “Listen,” she said. “A little girl has died in a tragic accident. As if that is not bad enough, her poor mother was driving the car that killed her.”

  Jake gasped, as if someone had hit him with a fistful of nettles.

  “But it was…”

  “Stop! And think. Who is important, here, Jake? A boy who happened, by chance, to be on the street and by coincidence was the unwitting cause of the little girl’s distraction? A boy who could not prevent the accident because, if he tried, his own baby sister might have been killed also, not to mention himself. Is the boy the important one, or is it the mother of the dead child, who killed her little daughter by accident?”

  “The mother,” whispered Jake.

  “And how important is the boy?”

  “Not important.”

  “Even if he thinks it’s his fault, does that matter? Even if he drowns himself in remorse, does it change anything for that mother?”

  “No,” said Jake.

  “It was the car’s fault, if anything. Apparently those little cars are notorious for having the pedals too close together. I think they should take them off the market. If you wanted
to be really cruel, you could say it was the mother’s fault, for not checking—but she was in a rush, she didn’t check, it was a new car, she wasn’t used to driving it and the pedals were placed very close together. That’s why the accident happened, not because of you.”

  “But…” said Jake.

  “And, Jake,” Mrs. Kennedy went on, ignoring him, “a young girl has lost her baby sister. She has a friend whom she would like to see, because she thinks that friend might be able to be of some comfort to her. Who is more important here, Jake, the young girl or the friend?”

  “The young girl,” Jake said, still whispering. But Mrs. Kennedy didn’t know what Stella had said to him the last time they’d met. Nobody knew about that, except him and Stella. She didn’t like him anymore, and because of that, he hadn’t been around lately, and because of that, Joanne had been extra excited to see him, and because of that …

  “You might as well say it was the baby’s fault, Jake,” said Mrs. Kennedy, “for being there.”

  “That’s not fair!” said Jake. Something was sitting heavily on the back of his neck, between his shoulders.

  “Exactly. And it’s not fair to blame yourself either.”

  “But…” Jake started again.

  Mrs. Kennedy held her hand up, palm outward. She said nothing, but she shook her head.

  “Goodbye, Jake,” she said, after a moment.

  And she shuffle-stomped, shuffle-stomped across Jake’s living room carpet to the door.

  She turned then and said, with a hint of a smile, “Life is not a bowl of cherries, Jake, as we know. But a bowl of cherries is still a bowl of cherries.”

  Jake had no idea what that meant.

  He sat there, listening to her shuffle-stomping through the hall, and then the door closed, and he could see her wobbling down the garden path, and still he sat with the fish card in his hand.

  CHAPTER

  39

  As the car that had been waiting for Mrs. Kennedy drove off, Jake’s mother put her head around the living room door. Jake still sat completely immobile.