The Invisible Ones

by Stef Penney

  “I know it seems incredible.”

  “Incredible! You’re saying that . . . What are you saying?”

  “Well, I’m saying that the person you know as Ivo has really been Christina, for the past twelve years.”

  Lulu is shaking her head.

  A sharp exhalation, almost a laugh.

  “You’ve been ill, Ray . . .”

  “Think of what we actually saw today . . .”

  “I saw Ivo!”

  “What if . . . Just think, what if it wasn’t Ivo disguised as a woman, but Christina, for the first time in years, not disguised as a man?”

  She makes no answer to this. I plough on.

  “The disease—Barth syndrome—it gives us the answer. Lulu . . . please listen, these are facts: Christo could not inherit it from his father. I spoke to Gavin, the doctor, and that can’t happen. It’s an x-linked recessive disorder. That means he could only inherit it from his mother. His mother, Christina.”

  “Christina died! She’s dead!”

  “The other fact we can know for sure, Barth syndrome is incurable. You can’t get better. Ivo’s recovery wasn’t a miracle . . . It wasn’t Ivo.”

  Lulu crushes her half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. Her face looks hard and wooden.

  “Christina’s death was a . . . fiction. That’s why there was no funeral. That’s why no one knew how it happened, or where . . .”

  I can’t think of anything else to say. I dare to look at her again. She’s lighting another cigarette. Her tea, like mine, is untouched. When she speaks, her voice grates.

  “Why?”

  The adrenaline, the certainty, that has been sustaining me suddenly decides to flag. I put my face in my hands. I think I know, but it is pure speculation. All so much smoke.

  “Only Christina knows that for sure, and Tene . . .”

  “My brother . . . ?”

  “He had to know. He was there. Do you want me to tell you what I think? Lulu?”

  Suddenly, tears are running down her face, although she doesn’t make a sound. It would be more bearable if she collapsed in noisy sobs; if she broke down, I might be allowed to comfort her, but I am not to be given that chance. Her face is wet but perfectly rigid, like that of a mannequin left out in the rain. She shrugs minutely.

  “Um, well . . . I think they were very close, Ivo and Christina. Ivo got worse and worse. Their mother had died—you know all that, of course. Tene took Ivo to Lourdes, in a last-ditch attempt to help him, but it didn’t work. He died, perhaps at the Black Patch, I don’t know . . . But whatever, they buried him there, in secret, so that no one would know. And between them, they decided that . . . that it would be Christina that had died. Ivo was the last Janko heir. The only boy—the one they had pinned their hopes on—and they couldn’t bear to let him go.”

  She still doesn’t speak. She doesn’t look at me. Not knowing what else to do, I go on.

  “They were very alike, weren’t they? I’ve seen photographs. No one in your family saw Tene and . . . well, who they thought was Ivo, for years— until the wedding. And in that time the person you all thought was Ivo had gone from a sick child to a healthy adult—of course he had changed. I know it’s tremendously shocking, but it’s not impossible.”

  Lulu looks at me now, her face fierce. She spits the words out.

  “Not impossible? Do you think we’re stupid or something?”

  “No! Of course not. I didn’t know, either.”

  “Kath and Jimmy and Sandra saw him every day! For six years, every day! You think they wouldn’t know?”

  I swallow. I should have foreseen this.

  “People accept what they see. When you all saw Tene again, what did you expect? You knew his daughter had died; you knew Ivo had recovered . . . If someone appears to be something, you accept it, don’t you? And once it’s accepted . . . I think he would have been more worried about seeing people like you—that he rarely saw—not the people he saw every day.”

  I can see that—however unwillingly—she is thinking about it.

  “He married. Why would he get married? If you had to . . . keep that secret.”

  This is the most difficult bit. If my guess is right, it is dreadful. There doesn’t seem to be enough oxygen left in the room.

  “From what Rose told us, she never got near enough to Ivo to find out anything.”

  “So why do it? It’s crazy!”

  “Tene cared about the pure black blood, didn’t he? The pure blood of the Jankos. I think they thought that if they found a really innocent, pureblooded girl, that he could . . .”

  “Stop it! Stop it! Stop . . . saying those things.”

  Her voice—painfully sharp, like a broken knife. Her wet, white face is turned away from me.

  I wait, hardly daring to breathe, staring at the side of her cheek, willing her to turn toward me, to say anything. Seconds crawl past. And then she speaks in a tiny voice, looking at the carpet.

  “Maybe it’s possible. I don’t know. Maybe it’s some clever answer that makes everything fit . . .”

  She takes a deep, shuddering breath.

  “But it’s not true . . . and you can’t accuse people like that.” “I’m not . . . maybe that’s not . . . but—”

  “I want you to go. Just go!”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. I . . . Sorry.”

  She twists the little, mortal blade in my heart.

  “I want you to leave us alone. I don’t want to see you again.”

  After a moment I stand up. She doesn’t look at me as I leave.

  62.

  Ray

  A big dog fox runs across my path as I walk up to my front door. He’s the only other creature who seems to be awake when I get home. There are no lights on in the houses. No trains, no planes. The road respects a deep and perfect silence. I pause with my keys in my hand, bathed in the yellow streetlight that banishes the wolf. No one knows I am here, because no one is watching. It is not yet dawn, but there is always enough light to see by, in the city—to see that a fox is a fox, that a dog is not a wolf, and that a private investigator has made a terrible error of judgment. But you have to be looking.

  Lulu would have to find out sooner or later, I tell myself. They all will. Why should they be spared an unpalatable truth? There are some things they don’t ever have to know, like the drugged seduction, and there are some things that can’t be known, can be only guessed at. I guess at them, because that is my business. A business I have not conducted well in this instance. Mainly, I feel a fool. Stupid. Stupid dog, barking up the wrong tree for so long. I am sure Lulu feels a fool, too. Being lied to humiliates you. Belittles you. And the longer you are lied to, the worse it feels when you are faced with the truth.

  I let myself in to the communal corridor, and stump up the stair to my flat, my footsteps sounding very loud and heavy, the key clattering in the lock. The truth hurts, too, that’s what Lulu said; hurts maybe, but in the long run, surely it’s better—isn’t it?

  The flat looks small and grubby in the overhead light. Because it’s rented, I’ve never made much of an effort; I always thought there was a chance that Jen would take me back. I clung to that. Not anymore. It’s long past time I moved. Got a proper place of my own. Something permanent. Somewhere I’m not staring at other people in transit.

  Later I lie in bed, wakeful. The vase of dead flowers is still on the chest of drawers. I gaze at dim objects in the darkness; I’ve been told this cures insomnia, but I don’t think anything is going to let me sleep tonight. Did I imagine it would impress her? Part of me did. But I hadn’t thought enough about what it meant; what I assumed—implied—Tene and Christina had done out of desperation and grief, and a refusal to watch the family die.

  They would have given anything to save Ivo, but there was nothing they could do. They begged for a miracle and were ignored. And when Ivo did die, in that lonely fen, shortly after they came back from Lourdes, I suppose it happened then. She gave her life for his, in the onl
y way she could.

  Crazy. Or perhaps that was the miracle.

  I’m also assuming, I suppose, that she was willing to trade a life of structures and submission for a life of lies. What did Sandra say about Christina? That she was fearless. Yes. Maybe . . . Maybe it offered an escape she was already looking for.

  Hadn’t Tene, in his own roundabout way, told me all this? The ninth child, Poreskoro—neither male nor female but both. It explains many things about Ivo—the smooth skin I had thought a hangover from his illness, the heavy clothing, the fear of intimacy . . . And, of course, what happened to me that night.

  Poreskoro, the most terrible child of all. It is extraordinary, I know. But some things are extraordinary.

  I could be wrong. Perhaps Tene is not Christo’s father. It’s all conjecture. The only thing I really know is that the body in the Black Patch is that of a teenage Gypsy boy—and that Christo’s mother was a Janko. Those are facts. That is evidence.

  But everything else isn’t even information; it’s just so much smoke.

  63.

  JJ

  Our new house is called 23 Sunningdale Lane. I liked the name as soon as I heard it. I thought it sounded like a country lane in summer, arched over with green branches. Quiet. Girls on ponies clopping down it.

  Of course, it isn’t—it’s a red-brick box surrounded by other red-brick boxes on a long road the buses go down, so it’s noisy from traffic. But my bedroom (God, that sounds weird) is at the back and looks over our garden(!), which is quite big and backs onto the playing fields of my new school, so it’s quieter. I can leave the window open and hear tree branches moving and birds singing, even foxes barking—all that and we’re practically in London, although not according to the postcode.

  It’s so weird being in a house. Mum has lived in a house before—when Gran and Granddad threw her out for having me (so I suppose I have, too, but of course I don’t remember). Actually, it’s more that sometimes it’s really weird, and the rest of the time (most of the time, if I’m honest) it’s not weird at all. When I first moved into my bedroom it felt enormous and lonely—I didn’t want to shut the door—and I didn’t feel I could ever fill it with my stuff or me. But now it’s only a few weeks later and I seem to be getting more stuff—expanding, somehow. We’ve talked about getting a piano. I’m going to paint my room sky blue.

  One thing I really like is going upstairs to bed. Or just upstairs. Looking down from the window. You feel different when you’re higher up. It’s not that high, so if there was a fire I could jump out onto the lawn and not hurt myself. I think about that quite a lot. I dream about fire— nightmares, really. Great-uncle isn’t in them, but the fire is. I don’t have them every night, just sometimes. I wake up sweating, and I’m glad we’re in the town rather than in the woods, because there’s always a bit of light from the streetlights. I don’t want to wake up in the dark.

  The other thing that’s changed is that I can’t stand Chinese food anymore.

  Christo’s room is downstairs. He’s got to have wheelchair access, although he’s getting stronger with the physiotherapy. And he talks more, although not that much yet. They think he might have this disease that they’ve discovered in Holland. It’s a rare genetic disease, and they don’t know much about it at the moment, but there’s always hope. The good news is that I don’t have it, and I’m not going to have it, because I wasn’t born with it. I’m relieved about this, and I feel guilty about being relieved. I’m just going to make sure that Christo has a really nice time. He can live with me for the rest of my life. I don’t mind—in fact, I’d like it. It’s the least I can do.

  Christo had his latest appointment yesterday. Lulu brought him back in a bit of a state—she was in a state, I mean, not Christo. She said something to Mum, and then Mum told me to take Christo and go outside into the garden until she said I could come back in. That’s the first time she’s ever said that. I can see how gorjios keep so many secrets. Then she slammed the sitting-room door, and although I could hear that they were talking, I couldn’t tell what they were saying. Luckily, it was quite a warm evening, and the last swallows were squeaking and swooping around the telegraph wires. We dug up earthworms and searched for cheesy bugs under the toolshed and tried to make them have races. Christo can do that for hours, although after about forty minutes Mum came and said we had better come back in or Christo would catch his death.

  She was in a funny mood all evening.

  That was last night. Then, this morning, Lulu comes around again. It’s before nine, but I’m still here because it’s Saturday. In fact, to be perfectly honest, when the doorbell goes, I’m still in bed. Mum answers the door, and I hear Auntie Lulu’s voice—raised and upset-sounding. Sensing something’s up, I creep downstairs in my pajamas. They’re in the kitchen this time, with the door closed, but Mum obviously thinks I’m still asleep.

  “What? . . . What?” She’s practically shouting.

  “That’s what he said. That they switched all those years ago . . . And he said it explains everything, ’cause of the disease, and . . . God almighty, San, I’ve been nearly going out of my mind since then . . .”

  Lulu sounds like she might be crying, something I can’t imagine.

  “But how could that be true? You know him better than me . . . I mean, it’s insane, isn’t it?”

  Mum doesn’t say anything that I can hear from the stairs. What on earth are they talking about? From her tone of voice, it must be something awful. I start to move softly up to the kitchen door, when, to my horror, I hear Mum crying, little fluttery sobs that go on and on. That’s too much, so I stop creeping and open the door.

  Lulu and Mum jerk around and stare at me. They both look very white and strange; Lulu is hugging herself tightly, her face different—less colorful and sort of tired-looking. Mum has been scrubbing her hands through her hair so that it stands up in all directions. She hates it like that. I wonder whether to get cross with Auntie Lulu for upsetting Mum like this, on a Saturday, when I realize that I was wrong about the noise I heard. Mum is leaning against the cooker, wild-eyed and shaking, but she isn’t crying. She’s laughing.

  64.

  Ray

  Several times over the following days, I think about ringing her. I should apologize. I should qualify some of my guesses. But I don’t know how to apologize for the truth. I wonder about talking to Sandra, and then think perhaps I should leave it until the next hospital appointment, when, I imagine, Lulu will not be coming.

  I haven’t done much work since that day; I can’t seem to concentrate. And every time I’ve been on the verge of telling Hen what has happened, something stops me. I’ll have to at some point, but I don’t know what it is; maybe it’s the questions he’s undoubtedly going to ask, that I have no answers to, although I feel I should.

  Then, out of the blue, my phone rings; unbelievably, it is her. I break into a sweat.

  “I was going to ring you—I wanted to apologize for telling you like that. It was stupid of me,” I start in a rush.

  “Yeah. It was. I’ve been thinking about . . . everything you said. I told Sandra, you know, and do you know what? After a while she started laughing. She said she can believe it. She knew him better than anyone— I mean . . . you know what I mean.”

  “Yes. Oh. Well . . .”

  “I was so angry . . . It was just so . . . such a shock.”

  “No, no, I should have . . .”

  We arrange to meet in the same pub as before. It’s quiet, still only mid-afternoon, desultory drinking time for serious drinkers. Two solitary men stand like statues at the bar, smoke rising from gnarled fists. Don’t get overexcited, I tell myself. My capacity to screw things up is endless. But still, hope leaps and flutters within me, in my Pandora’s box of a heart.

  I get to the pub early and order a half of lager. I sip it slowly, making myself wait. I have showered. Cut my nails. My hand is shaking slightly. The first thing I do when I catch sight of her across the road is loo
k down at her feet. She’s wearing the red shoes.

  She doesn’t smile when she sees me, and it strikes me that she is nervous. She has let her hair down in soft waves. With a thrill, I wonder if she has had it done—specially. I can’t imagine how I ever thought she was less beautiful than Jen, than anyone.

  She sits down beside me. I pass her the rum and Coke I’ve bought in anticipation.

  “I shouldn’t really be drinking at this time of day.”

  “Well, it’s an unusual day—unusual week.”

  “Yeah.”

  She picks up her bag and fishes for her cigarettes and lighter.

  “So are you all right?” I say.

  She shrugs.

  “I’m getting used to the idea. It’s not so hard for me—I mean, I only saw him half a dozen times over those twelve years.”

  She doesn’t correct herself, and I don’t say anything. It feels less wrong to go on referring to Christina as “he.”

  “What about Kath and Jimmy? Do they know?”

  Lulu rolls her eyes.

  “No. We haven’t told anyone else. We thought we’d leave that one for a bit. Maybe if there could be more proof—that the body really was Ivo’s, or something, and then it’s not so . . . you know.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. But Sandra believes it?”

  “She said it made sense of a lot of things she never understood.” “Was she angry?”

  “That’s what I expected, but she wasn’t. They were quite close, you know, and even . . . I think she had a bit of a thing for him. I think she was sad about that, but now she says she understands—why he didn’t want her.”

  She shrugs again.

  “Like I said, it’ll take some getting used to.”

  “Yes. Well . . . thank you.”

  “What for?”

  “For coming.”

  I take a sip of lager. The fruit machine burbles behind us. A quiet racing commentary on the television over the bar comes to a desultory climax.