Читать книгу: «What Not to Do If You Turn Invisible», страница 3
AN ADMISSION
So there’s another problem with visiting Great-gran, even on a happy occasion like a birthday. Old people make me sad.
It’s like: I’m starting to grow up, but they finished all that ages ago and they’re growing down. Everything is done for them, to them, and they don’t really get to decide anything, just like little children.
There’s a man who is very old and very deaf, and the staff have to shout to make themselves heard. So much so that everyone else can hear as well, which is sort of funny and sort of not.
‘EEH, STANLEY! I SEE YOU’VE HAD A BOWEL MOVEMENT THIS MORNING!’ bellowed one of the nurses once. ‘THAT’S GOOD! YOU’VE BIN WAITIN’ ALL WEEK FOR THAT, HAVEN’T YOU?’
Poor old Stanley. He smiled at me when I went past his room; the door is always open. (Most of the doors are open in fact, and you can’t help looking in. It’s a bit like being in an overheated zoo.) When he smiled he suddenly looked about seventy years younger, and it made me smile too, but then I felt sad and guilty all over again, because why should it make me happy that he looked young?
What’s wrong with being old?
Great-gran was wheeled out of her room by one of the staff, Gram scuttling behind her, and I was left alone, staring at the sea.
There was something missing. Someone missing.
My mum. She should have been there. Four generations of women in the family and one of them – my mum – was being forgotten.
How much do you remember from when you were very little? Like, before you were, say, four years old?
Gram says she hardly remembers anything.
I think of it like this: your memory is like a big jug that gets gradually fuller and fuller. By the time you’re Gram’s age your memory’s pretty much full, so you have to start getting rid of stuff to create room and the easiest stuff to get rid of is the oldest.
For me, though, the memories I have of when I was tiny are all I have left of my mum. Plus a little collection of mementos, which is really just a cardboard box with a lid.
The main thing in it is a T-shirt. That’s what I always see when I open the box up because it’s the biggest item. A plain black T-shirt. It was Mum’s and smells of her, still.
And when I open the box, which stays in my cupboard most of the time, I take out the T-shirt and hold it to my nose, and I close my eyes. I try to remember Mum, and I try not to be sad.
The smell, like the memory, is really faint now. It’s a mixture of a musky perfume and laundry detergent and sweat, but clean sweat – not the sort of cheesy smell that people say Elliot Boyd has but that I’ve never smelt. It’s just the smell of a person. My person, my mum. It’s strongest under the arms of the T-shirt, which sounds gross but it isn’t. One day, the smell will be gone completely. That scares me a bit.
There’s also a birthday card to me, and I know the rhyme off by heart.
To a darling little person
This card has come to say
That I wish you joy and happiness
On your very first birthday
And in neat, round letters it’s handwritten: To my Boo, happy first birthday from Mummy xoxox
Boo was Mum’s pet name for me. Gram said she didn’t want to use it herself because it was special to me and Mum, and that’s cool. It’s like we have a secret, me and Mum, a thing we share, only us.
The nice thing about the card is that it has picked up the tiniest bit of the T-shirt’s smell, so as well as smelling of paper it, too, smells of Mum.
I was thinking about this, sitting in Great-gran’s room, when Gram interrupted my thoughts.
‘Are you coming, Ethel, or are you going to daydream? And why the long face? It’s a party!’
I’ll skip through it quickly because it was about as exciting as you would expect … apart from another weird thing that happened towards the end.
GREAT-GRAN’S PARTY
Guests:
About twenty people. Apart from me and a care assistant called Chastity, everyone else was properly grown up or ancient.
What I wore:
A lilac dress with flowers on it with a matching Alice band. Gram thought I looked lovely. I didn’t. Girls who look like me should just be allowed to wear jeans and T-shirts until the whole gawky-skinny-spotty thing runs itself out. As it is, I looked like a cartoon version of an ugly girl in a pretty dress.
What I said:
‘Hello, thank you for coming … Yes, I’m nearly thirteen now … No, I haven’t decided my GCSEs yet … No, [shy, fake grin] no boyfriend yet …’ (Can I just say at this point: why do old people think they can quiz you about boyfriends and stuff? Is it some right you acquire as soon as you hit seventy?)
What I did:
I handed round food. Gram had asked me what she should serve, but my suggestion of Jelly Bellys and Doritos had been ignored. Instead there were olives, bits of bacon wrapped round prunes (yuk – whose idea was that?), and teeny-tiny cucumber sandwiches. The chances of me sneaking much of this into my own mouth were slim to zero.
What Great-gran did:
She sat in the centre of the room, smiling a bit vacantly and nodding as people came up to her and congratulated her. I was thinking she was not ‘all there’, not aware of what was going on. As it turned out, I was wrong about that.
The photograph:
A photographer from the Whitley News Guardian took a picture of me and Gram and Great-gran next to a large cake. He had a tiny digital camera instead of a big one with a flash that goes whumph! I was a bit disappointed: like, if you’re going to be in the local newspaper, it should feel dramatic, like a special moment, you know? (Irony alert: as it happens, that photograph is going to turn out to have very dramatic consequences.
Anyway, Mrs Abercrombie was at the party with Geoffrey, her three-legged Yorkshire terrier, who was doing his bad-tempered snarly-gnarly thing – and I have a new theory about this. I think the reason he’s so snappy is because she never lets him run around. She is forever holding him in one arm. I’d be annoyed if I was forever pressed into Mrs Abercrombie’s enormous chest.
Gram looked nice. ‘A veritable picture’, as Revd Henry Robinson said.
She sipped from a glass of fizzy water and smiled gently whenever people spoke to her, which is about as far as Gram’s displays of happiness go. She hardly ever laughs – ‘Ladies do not guffaw, Ethel. It’s bad enough in a man. In a woman it is most unseemly.’
(Personally, though, I have my own idea and it has nothing to do with being ‘unseemly’. I think, deep inside, Gram is sad about something. Not me, not Great-gran, but something else. It could just be Mum, but I think it’s more.)
The vicar was the last to leave. He played ‘Happy Birthday’ on the piano then a classical piece off by heart, and everyone clapped. Old Stanley clapped very enthusiastically, and shouted, ‘Bravo! Bravo’, until one of the nurses calmed him down like a naughty child, which I thought was a bit mean.
Gram seemed flustered as soon as Revd Robinson had gone, and there were only me, Gram and Great-gran left as the care assistants were clearing up.
‘Goodness me, look at the time, Mum! That was quite a shindig!’ ‘Shindig’ is a Gram sort of word, meaning party, but it was only one in the afternoon. I think parties must get earlier and earlier the older you get.
Honestly, if I hadn’t already suspected something was up, then Gram’s bad acting would have alerted me. She couldn’t wait to get away.
Anyway, the ‘look at the time’ remark seemed to have an effect on Great-gran, like switching off a light. The distant gaze returned to her face along with the constant nodding, and that was that.
Well, pretty much.
As I leant in to kiss Great-gran’s papery cheek, she whispered in my ear, ‘Come back, hinny.’
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘We’ll be back soon.’
Great-gran’s eyes darted to Gram, who was halfway to the door, and it’s the way she did it: I knew instantly what she meant.
Come back without her is what she meant.
That is the weird thing that I told you about. That, and the whole tiger thing.
Just what was going on? And whatever it was, why was Gram so worried about it?
We drove home. Two miles in which I could ask Gram, ‘What did Great-gran mean by saying “tiger” and “pussycat”, Gram?’
Except I couldn’t because from the moment we were alone in the car, Gram kept up a near-constant chatter that could almost have been a deliberate attempt to stop me from asking the question that I was dying to ask.
The Revd Henry Robinson this, Mrs Abercrombie that, sausage rolls not heated through even though I asked them, the beautiful English spoken by ‘that nice foreign girl’ (Chastity), even the pattern on the carpet (‘I do think swirls on a carpet are just a little common’), and so on … And on.
Honestly, I don’t think she even paused for breath.
I would have no chance to use the sunbed today, I knew that. I needed a time when Gram would be out for a good while, and that wouldn’t happen till the next day, when Gram would be busy with church and one of her committees.
I’d have the morning to myself. So even though I was a bit confused by what was going on with Great-gran and Gram, I was excited, because I was going to get to try my latest acne-fighting tactic very soon.
Sunbeds, by the way, very definitely fall into the category of things that Gram would describe as ‘rather common’. There are plenty of things that Gram thinks are ‘rather common’:
Sunbeds, as I’ve already said. Any type of fake tan, really.
Swirly carpets, apparently. But only ‘slightly’.
Tattoos and piercings other than ears.
Ear piercings if you’re under sixteen.
Naming children after places, and that definitely includes Jarrow and Jesmond Knight. Brooklyn Beckham is not included because Gram met David Beckham once at a charity do, and apparently he was a ‘real gentleman’. And smelt nice.
Designer dogs. Basically, anything prefixed with the word ‘designer’, so: jeans, kitchens, handbags and so on.
Most people on television.
Hanging baskets.
And if you’re thinking of rolling your eyes at the ridiculousness of this list, then know this: rolling your eyes is common as well.
I tell you, I could carry on: this list could fill the book, and I haven’t even started yet on things that are not ‘rather common’ but are instead ‘frightfully common’. Here’s today’s top three ‘frightfully common’ things:
Eating in the street.
All daytime television, and people who watch daytime television, and most things that are not on the BBC, especially Sky channels.
Football (although not David Beckham, for reasons stated above).
This ‘common’, by the way, is not common as in ‘frequent’. It’s common as in ‘lacking refinement’ and is not to be confused with ‘vulgar’, which Gram is usually OK with, although the distinction can get blurry.
The Eurovision Song Contest is vulgar, says Gram, but she loves it. The X Factor is common, and she won’t have it on.
Football, as I have said, is common. Rugby is vulgar.
Want another one? OK. Takeaway fish and chips = vulgar, and as such, acceptable, which is a huge relief because I love them. Takeaway hamburger and chips (or worse, fries) = common. And Burger King is more common than McDonald’s.
I know: it’s tricky to navigate.
‘Eructating’ is how Gram refers to burping. She says it is both vulgar and ‘frightfully common’, so heaven knows what she’d make of what’s to come. If you’re like Gram and are completely horrified by burping, then you should skip the next chapter.
Sunday morning. Sunbed-day morning.
Gram had gone off to church. Sometimes I go with her, but I told her I had a stomach ache (which was true) and she didn’t seem to mind at all. She was very keen to get to church and left me at home with Lady.
Gram would be gone most of the day. This, by the way, is a big development in our little household. About a year ago, she started trusting me to be left alone in the house, sometimes in the evenings. I was nervous at first, but I soon got to quite like it.
After church she’d be going straight to a coffee morning for a Bible study group, then she’d be having lunch at Mrs Abercrombie’s, and then it’s on to the annual general meeting of yet another of her causes. I sometimes wonder where she gets the energy.
I had been guzzling Dr Chang His Skin So Clear and I had probably overdone it, which accounted for the slightly dodgy stomach. The drink – it comes in a powder that you dilute to make a sort of cold ‘tea’ – has a mushroomy smell and tastes exactly how I imagine worms taste. It’s foul, but Dr Xi Chang (‘A highly noticed practiser of tradional Chinese Herbal Medicine’ is how the website put it) claims that it is effective against severe acne and has some pretty impressive before-and-after pictures to prove it.
The effect had been that I woke up this morning with a bloated stomach. Really, my tummy was distended like a little balloon and I flicked my middle finger against it to get a noise like a tom-tom.
Now, embarrassing though this is, I’m just going to have to tell you, so ‘forgive my indelicacy’, as Gram might say. I could use all sorts of words to get round it: words like ‘eructating’ or ‘expelling gas’, but nobody apart from adults and teachers and doctors actually says that, so here goes. Immediately after waking I let go the most enormous burp, which – if you did not know otherwise – you would swear was the stench of a rotting animal. A skunk probably, even though I’ve never smelt a skunk, what with them not being native to Britain. I just know they stink.
And the weirdest thing is, it didn’t taste of anything (thank goodness).
Look, I know we all joke about bodily gases and so on. (All apart from Gram, of course – do I need to keep saying this? Probably not. In future, just assume it, OK? I’ll mention it when relevant.) Anyway, most of us find it hilarious.
This wasn’t.
It was so foul-smelling that it was kind of … scary, I suppose. Certainly totally unlike any, um … fart I have ever smelt, and much worse than the one Cory Muscroft let off in assembly in Year Six, which people still remember. Had I known what was to come, I might even have taken it for a warning. But, of course, we never know these things until after the event.
Anyway, after another couple of smaller burps, my tummy was a lot less swollen, and I was in the garage with its smell of dust and old carpets. I was shivering a little on the concrete floor because I was in my underwear with bare feet, thinking, This is so not the tanning salon/spa treatment experience, so I went back inside the house to get my phone.
On Spotify, I found some slow trancey nineties electronica tracks that sounded like the sort of stuff they put on in salons, and I plugged in my earbuds. Naked, I lay on the sunbed, which was glowing purply white with the UV tubes. I set the timer on the side for ten minutes – better start gently – then I pulled down the lid so that it was only a few centimetres from my nose.
My eyes were shut, the music was a soft dum-dum-dum in my ears, the UV tubes were warm, and I didn’t mind drifting off a bit because the timer would wake me.
A bit later, though, I’m woken by the bright lights of the UV tubes shining thorough my invisible eyelids and Lady nudging her food bowl.
This is where we came in – remember?
‘Gram? Can you hear me? I’m invisible.’
I’m on my phone in the garage, sitting on the edge of the sunbed, and I was right. Before I had even tapped on Gram’s number, I was wondering if calling someone up and saying I was invisible would sound ridiculous.
It does. Very.
But still I try.
‘I’ve become invisible, Gram.’ Then I start sobbing again.
Long pause.
Really. Long. Pause.
There’s a buzz of conversation in the background.
‘I’m not sure I’m hearing you right, darling. I can’t really talk at the moment but I can hear that you’re upset. What’s wrong, darling?’
I take a deep breath. ‘I’m invisible. I’ve disappeared. I was on a sunbed and I fell asleep and now I’ve woken up and I can’t see myself.’
‘All right, my darling. Very funny. Thing is, it’s not a good time at the moment. Mrs Abercrombie is about to read the minutes of the last meeting so I have to go. There’s some cold ham in the fridge, and Lady needs her walk. Got to go. See you later.’
Click.
Gulping back more sobs, I quickly fling on my underwear, jeans and a T-shirt. I’m mesmerised into silence as I can see the clothes filling out with my invisible body as I put them on. Somehow, the mundane action of getting dressed is a little bit calming (only a little bit – I’m still bubbling inside, like a pan of milk boiling over), and I can breathe better, and at least I stop crying.
On the way to the kitchen I catch a glimpse of myself in the long hallway mirror. Well, I say ‘myself’. What I really see is a pair of jeans and my favourite red T-shirt walking all by themselves. It would be funny, like watching a special effect for real, if it wasn’t me inside the clothes, and I catch my breath again and swallow hard to stop myself from restarting the crying.
In the kitchen, Lady lifts her head from her basket. She pads over to where I am standing and sniffs at my feet, or at where my feet would be. I reach down and stroke her.
‘Hello, girl,’ I say, automatically, and she looks up.
I’m not sure if anyone can really read the expressions on a dog’s face, but I swear Lady looks scared and confused. I crouch down to reassure her, but it seems to have the opposite effect. I tickle her ears because I know she likes that, but instead of licking me and making me laugh, which is what always happens, her tail goes between her legs and, with a little whine, she heads straight out of the kitchen door into the backyard. I’m left looking at the door as it bangs shut behind her, and the corners of my mouth turn downwards.
I try Gram’s number again.
It goes to voicemail.
I don’t leave a message.
And now there’s this kind of continuous monologue going on in my head, running through various courses of action.
I still have not completely let go of the idea that I am dreaming. Perhaps this is just some especially persistent dream-state that the usual dream-checks don’t dislodge? I keep pinching myself, shaking my head – all that stuff.
Obviously, none of it works, so I decide on something a bit more extreme. Standing there in the kitchen, I slap myself on the cheek. Gently at first, then a bit harder, then really quite hard, and finally – to finish off – a powerful wallop with my right palm against my left cheek that is both noisy and very sore, and more tears prick my eyes.
I do a sort of checklist.
This much I know:
1 I am alone, and I am invisible.
2 I am definitely, definitely not dreaming. (Pinch, slap, ow! Check again.)
3 Gram is not picking up her phone, presumably because she thinks I’m messing about, or – just as likely – she has put it on silent so that it doesn’t ring during Mrs Abercrombie’s thing.
4 I could go round there. (Where? I’m not even sure where she is. The church hall, probably. Well, that’s in Culvercot, for a start, and what am I going to do? Just wander into the church hall and announce I am invisible? No.)
5 Is there a friend I trust? Once it would have been Kirsten Olen, but more recently? No: I no longer trust her enough.
6 I am so thirsty my throat actually hurts.
First I will deal with the easiest thing to put right. Besides, it gives me something else to think about.
I start to make tea. Tea is Gram’s response to pretty much everything. She told me once that the actual making of tea – waiting for the kettle to boil, putting the cups out and so on – was just as effective as drinking it for calming the nerves.
Then my phone rings.
It’s Gram. Yesss!
‘I’ve come out of the meeting, Ethel. I see you’ve called me again. What is it now?’ Her tone is brisk, no nonsense, which doesn’t bode well.
‘I told you, Gram: I’ve become invisible.’
And then I spill it all out: the acne, the ‘Pizza Face’ jibes, the sunbed, falling asleep, waking up ninety minutes later in a pool of my own sweat, looking in the mirror, screaming for help …
Everything up to now. Sitting here, drinking tea, telling Gram what happened.
It all comes out kind of garbled, I’m pretty sure, but not completely nonsensical.
I finish up by saying, ‘So that’s why I called you. You’ve got to help me.’
For a long time, Gram doesn’t say anything.
