The Invisible Ones

by Stef Penney

  “She started to act like Christo didn’t exist. Like she’d never had him. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid that . . . she might hurt him or something. I wouldn’t leave him alone with her. When she went . . . it was sort of . . . a relief.”

  Ivo seems to be focusing on a tractor that’s crawling up a lane toward the horizon. There’s a white estate car right behind it, impatient to pass.

  “Would you say she was depressed?”

  “Dunno. She didn’t seem happy.”

  “Some women suffer from postnatal depression. The symptoms can be quite severe. And if the baby wasn’t well . . . that wouldn’t help.”

  “No one ever said. But she wasn’t happy. She didn’t seem right in the head.”

  “Did she see a doctor?”

  “No.”

  His tone implies, Why would she have done that?”

  “Did you . . . talk to anyone else about her?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Not even your father?”

  “I didn’t want him worrying. Besides, she was my wife. It was my family. My business.”

  He relights the broken cigarette and sucks it, hollowing out his smooth cheeks even further.

  “Did you love her?”

  He stops fidgeting. The only thing that moves is the cigarette smoke.

  “Mr. Janko . . . ?”

  Suddenly a vision of Lulu flashes into my head. Lulu straddling the inert body of her—what?—lover? Client?

  Ivo hasn’t answered. He seems to be struggling with the idea.

  “We were married, you know . . .”

  “Was it a happy marriage, I mean, to begin with?”

  “I didn’t do away with her. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?” There’s nothing aggressive in his tone—his voice is as soft as ever, and he’s still watching the tractor inching along the lane in the distance.

  “I would never have hurt her. She left us. I think she couldn’t take it. Had a . . . breakdown or whatever you call it. I think she wanted to wipe Christo and me out of her mind—like it never happened. Start again. That’s what I think.”

  He flicks the spent cigarette into the hedgerow and turns to walk back toward the trailers. I am dismissed.

  I follow him back to the trailer where he collects his son from the young cousin. The boy dawdles on the step, peering at me through curtains of dark hair.

  “You’re the detective.”

  “Yeah. I’m Ray. Ray Lovell.”

  I hold my hand out. Slowly he takes it and shakes.

  “JJ.”

  “Hi. Could I have a word?”

  I’m trying to remember how to talk to teenagers. Unfortunately, I never knew.

  22.

  JJ

  I don’t think Mr. Lovell can be a very successful private detective—his car is quite old and dirty. He seems all right, though. Some people make you feel uncomfortable, and some don’t. He doesn’t. He makes you feel at ease. I asked him about being a private detective, and he said he’d tell me one day. It was funny—I don’t think he was just putting me off.

  About a minute after he drives away, Ivo flings open the door to the trailer.

  “Jesus! Can’t you knock?” I say.

  “What did he want?”

  “What?”

  “The snooper. What did he want to talk to you about?”

  “You know . . . same as he asked you. What I remembered about Rose.”

  “What’s he asking you for?”

  “I dunno.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “What I remember. About the wedding. That’s all.

  Why?” “Why’s he asking you? You were a snotty little kid!”

  “I don’t know, do I? I suppose he’s asking everyone.”

  “I don’t like the way he keeps nosing around. Like he’s suspicious. Like he thinks I did something to her.”

  “I don’t think he seemed like that. He seemed all right.”

  “He’s not going to think you did away with her, is he?”

  I sigh. I hate it when people burst into the trailer without knocking. It’s the least they can do when you don’t have your own room, in my opinion.

  “I don’t think . . . that he thinks anyone did away with her.” But this has never occurred to me before. I look at my uncle with fresh eyes. Could a relative of mine have murdered his wife? My uncle Ivo? No, of course not. Ivo seems to relax.

  “Sorry, kid, it’s just . . . on top of all the worry about Chris, that’s all.”

  “Actually . . . Mr. Lovell asked about him, too.”

  “About Chris? Fucking hell. Christo’s nothing to do with him! Fucking nerve.”

  “He said you should get a second opinion. Take him up to London and see a specialist.”

  “Yeah? What sort of specialist?”

  “A children’s specialist. I don’t know. Maybe we should.”

  “Oh, you’re an expert now and all, are you? Going to pay for it, are you?”

  “No.”

  I’m really fed up with him; otherwise, I wouldn’t say what I say next. “But there’s not going to be some stupid miracle, is there? Why are we all pretending? It’s all crap, isn’t it?”

  Ivo doesn’t disagree. He doesn’t agree. He doesn’t say anything at all. He looks sad.

  “Because when you—”

  He grabs my hair then, right at the neck, so it hurts, and puts his face right next to mine, and shouts, so that I see the nicotine stains on his teeth, so I can smell his stinking faggy breath.

  “Christ, JJ! Can’t you ever shut up?”

  His eyes look wild, like a stranger’s, a madman’s. I’m too shocked to speak. My uncle Ivo hasn’t shouted at me for years. He doesn’t ever lose it. Not really. Even when he’s really angry, it’s a quiet, sulky sort of anger. He lets go of me then, and grabs his own hair between his fists. His mouth screws up like he’s trying to keep something in. For a freaky minute I think he’s actually going to cry, or something, but he swallows it.

  “Sorry, JJ. Sorry. You’re right. We should. We’ll do that. Yeah? A specialist.”

  “I’ll come with you, if you like.”

  “Yeah. Okay. We’ll do that. You and me.”

  He says this in a way that means we’re not going to talk about this anymore. He takes out his fags and pokes one in his mouth.

  “Want one?” He holds out the pack of JPS. I shake my head, even though Mum’s out at work and wouldn’t ever know.

  Ever since the other night, when I came back from Katie’s, I’ve felt kind of twitchy with Ivo. I’ve been trying not to think about it, but it’s hard not to. Trying not to think about what I saw, but it keeps going through my mind, jostling for space with Katie’s hair and her red lips, and the beautiful chestnut horse in the stable that was more beautiful than their house. You know what I mean—like sometimes you can’t get all the pieces in your head to lie down and stop moving for long enough to look at them? What I saw was . . . I don’t even know. I was walking up to the trailer, and the curtains weren’t drawn, although the lace curtains were, of course, so I could see in because the lights were on, but not totally clearly . . . and Mum and Uncle Ivo were inside. That was quite unusual in itself—without Christo or me or someone around, I mean. But the weird thing was—it looked like they were . . . not kissing. No. Not kissing, but she—Mum—had her hands on his face, in a way that you don’t touch people normally. In a way you don’t touch your cousin. Normally. But it was just for a second, and then he pulled away from her and went to the door and went out. And she put her hands on the kitchen counter and leaned there, with her head down, with her shoulders hunched, looking really sad.

  I froze in the shadows outside, not knowing what to do. Ivo stopped a few yards from the door, and I held my breath, hoping he hadn’t seen me. He sighed and lit a cigarette. I just stood like a statue, waiting for him to go home, or to see me, or something, and at long last, he went into Great-uncle’s trailer. I breathed a sigh
of relief. But I wasn’t relieved. I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t.

  I think about how I used to pretend that Ivo was really my father, when I was too young to know what that meant. And I think about how Great-uncle did marry his first cousin, and that’s why all their sons apart from Ivo died of the family disease. Then I wonder if I’m going to get the family disease, too. And, come to think of it, his father, my great-grandfather, who was called Milos Janko, married his first cousin, too . . . So, so . . . if that was all okay, why didn’t Mum marry Ivo? Because he was ill? Because he was younger than her? Does she love him now?

  Where was I? Katie. I don’t want to think about them at all. I want to think about Katie. About tea-flavored kisses and silky hair sweeping across my mouth. It had exactly the same cool, soft feeling as when you take a brand-new brush in art class—one of the expensive ones that are made of squirrel hair (from their coat fur, not their tail fur)—and brush it against your lips when no one’s looking, because you can’t not. What would have happened if I hadn’t said I had to go home? On the blue-brick stable floor . . .

  Just as I’m getting into this fantasy, I see Mum and Ivo again—it is, apparently, seared onto the insides of my eyelids. It was the expression on her face that scared me so much. Could I really tell from outside? What if I’ve got the whole thing wrong?

  Normally, when I have the trailer to myself for a bit—even without the help of Katie Williams—I celebrate by having a wank, but at the moment, I’m too depressed.

  23.

  Ray

  When I came home from Richmond the other night, it was a struggle to stop myself from picking up the phone and calling Jen. I fought the urge by reminding myself what would happen if I did speak to her. She would sound distant and bemused. Relieved that she didn’t have to deal with me anymore. Hatred, screaming, abuse I could take: it would feed me, it would mean she still felt something. It’s the detachment that crucifies.

  When she first told me she was having an affair, she said she didn’t love him. She did care about him, because, she said, she wasn’t a callous person. Even in my state of shock, I saw red.

  “Yes, you are,” I shouted. “You are callous. You’ve done this to me! How could you do this to me? To us?”

  Jen sighed, a bone-deep, weary sigh. There was a glimmer of tears in her eyes. For her, my tough, loud girl, that was something.

  “Oh, Ray . . . You have such high expectations. Of how perfect it all has to be. You want to be everything to me. I can’t stand it. And I’m not perfect!”

  I couldn’t believe she said that. Complaining because I wanted to be everything to her. What was so wrong with that? I didn’t say—because I couldn’t trust myself to speak—that she had always been everything to me.

  I paced up and down the sitting room. It was still barely ten o’clock. My hands were shaking. When she’d told me, my hands shook all the time, as though I had contracted Parkinson’s. My hands never shook like that when I became an orphan. Someone told me that the death of the second parent is the worst, because that’s when you realize that there’s no one standing between you and the grave. When my father died, following my mother to the cemetery plot just outside Hastings, with a view of the English Channel, I did cry for him. I mourned him—acutely, at times. But only in short bursts. Suddenly, from the depths of grief, I would find myself dialing for a pizza, starving, obsessing about pepperoni. I do find it strange that adultery, which is by no definition a tragedy, is so much more painful than death.

  What did I say? Of course I called. I called anyway, despite everything. The phone rang and rang. But she either wasn’t there or was wise enough not to answer. At length I put the phone down and scrabbled through the papers on the table. I found the piece with Vanessa’s number on it and dialed, trying to sharpen my memory of her face. I realized, with a pang of guilt, that I couldn’t quite remember what she looked like.

  More than two weeks had passed since the night we spent together, so I wasn’t surprised to get a guarded response.

  “It’s been a while.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’ve, um . . .” I discarded the idea of saying “I’ve been busy.” It would have been insulting. “I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I don’t know if Madeleine explained, but I’m getting divorced, and . . . I’m not very good at moving on. Isn’t that what they call it?”

  “So why are you calling?”

  “Well, I . . . I wondered if you still wanted to get together sometime— for a . . . film, or something? You know . . .”

  There was a pause. I pictured her weighing her options. I suppose she was thinking that most men she might meet—at our time of life, I mean—would be, to some degree, damaged goods.

  “I don’t know. Can I think about it?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Okay, then. Well . . . Bye.”

  I put the phone down, a bit startled. It had the result of taking my mind off things, at least.

  The next evening, when she phoned back, I felt my spirits lift. I had decided that she wasn’t going to ring, to punish me—which was no more than I deserved—so I was all the more pleased to hear her voice. Then she told me she had thought it over, and although she liked me, she didn’t want to get involved with someone so unreliable. She said she was too old for that. She said she was sorry, which was kind but unnecessary. I said I was sorry, too, and I understood. We were both sorry and understanding. When I put the phone down I felt a hundred years old.

  Today, on the other hand, Lulu sounds cheerful, if anything, even pleased. I ask her to meet me again, to “clear up some points.” She doesn’t ask what they are, or why I can’t clear them up over the phone.

  We meet in the same café as before. It’s busier this time, being a Saturday. Lulu walks in a minute after I do, wearing jeans, and under them—I can’t help noticing—a pair of black, shiny, viciously high-heeled boots. She seems more relaxed, as if a weight has been lifted off her mind. Even her hair looks softer, less aggressively black.

  “How is your investigation going?”

  “Not very well, I’m afraid. Working day today?” I really didn’t mean to say that, but somehow it fell out.

  “No.”

  “I hope I’m not interrupting your day off.”

  “You are. But it’s okay. I wanted to do some shopping, anyway.”

  Lulu scrabbles in her shoulder bag, and at length fishes out a packet of Silk Cut and a plastic lighter. She has to click the lighter a dozen times before it lights.

  “I suppose being a private carer can be pretty long hours?”

  “Can be. Yeah. But David—the guy I look after—his family’s very supportive. He lives with his mother. She still does a lot for him.”

  “Oh—he’s not old, then?”

  I sound casually surprised, I think.

  “No. He’s disabled. It’s terrible, really. When he was twenty, he had a tumor on his spine. They operated, but they damaged his spinal cord. Not once but twice—can you imagine? He’s pretty much paralyzed from the neck down.”

  “Poor guy.”

  She nods.

  “Really makes you count your blessings. He’s so cheerful, though. Most of the time.”

  She smiles fondly. I just bet he is.

  Lulu crosses her legs and stares at one of the glossy boots flashing as she wiggles it up and down. I wonder what else she does with wheelchair guy. I’ve heard about people like that—they like to be in control, to have someone else absolutely in their power. Is that why she does it?

  “So how did you get into that line of work?”

  “When you’ve got no qualifications, you don’t have a lot of choice. And when you’re a woman—and not as young as you used to be—it’s either that or cleaning.” She doesn’t sound bitter about it, just stating a matter of fact.

  “It sounds like a decent job.”

  “It is. I used to work in an old people’s home. This is . . . better.”

  She smiles. I can’t t
hink of a suitable reply. We sip tea.

  “No sign of Rose yet?”

  “No. But I met your nephew—and his son.”

  “Oh. And?”

  “He doesn’t seem to remember much about his wife’s disappearance. Or he didn’t want to tell me.”

  She doesn’t rise to this.

  “There were a couple things that I don’t quite understand.”

  “Oh? Like what?”

  “Tene said that Rose went missing while they were stopped at the Black Patch near Seviton.”

  “That’s when you asked me about it.”

  “And you said the Black Patch was near Watley, which it is.”

  “So he made a mistake.”

  “The site at Seviton isn’t called the Black Patch. It’s called Egypt Lane. No one calls it the Black Patch.”

  She shrugs.

  “But Ivo insisted it was near Seviton, and that it was the Black Patch.”

  She looks confused and wary.

  “So what?”

  “Maybe nothing . . . but you didn’t know Seviton as the Black Patch?”

  Lulu looks unhappy now.

  “Not that I remember . . . but I haven’t been there for twenty years. I didn’t know where they were. I only know what I heard—and that was later.”

  “When?”

  “God, probably when Tene had his accident. Yeah. It was. That was the first time I’d seen them since the wedding.”

  “His accident. When did it happen?”

  “What has this got to do with Rose? It was after she’d gone.”

  “I know it may seem irrelevant. Not very much does seem relevant at the moment. I’ve looked for a few missing persons, and . . . it’s odd that there is no trail at all. I’m looking for anything.”

  She sighs, and stares at a corner of the ceiling for a moment, lips pursed, tapping out a rhythm with her foot.

  “I got a phone call from Kath, saying that Tene had been in a car crash. He was in hospital.”