What Not to Do If You Turn Invisible
Ross Welford
From the author of the unforgettable bestseller TIME TRAVELLING WITH A HAMSTER comes another surprising, beautiful and funny novel about a child who, by disappearing, will write herself into your heart forever…Turning invisible at will: it’s one way of curing your acne. But far more drastic than 13 year-old Ethel Leatherhead intended when she tried a combination of untested medicines and a sunbed.It’s fun at first, being invisible. And aided by her friend Boydy, she manages to keep her extraordinary ability secret. Or does she…?When one day the invisibility fails to wear off, Ethel is thrown into a nightmare of lies and deception as she struggles to keep herself safe, to find the remedy that will make her seen again – and solve the mystery of her own birth…
Copyright (#ulink_86b5beb6-2a39-562b-9810-71922dc516a7)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2017
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street,
London, SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Copyright © Ross Welford 2017
All rights reserved.
Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2017
Cover illustration © Tom Clohosy Cole
Ross Welford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008156350
Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780008156367
Version: 2016-12-02
To Mum, with love
Contents
Cover (#u14ce045f-6dc8-5d16-a360-8f97598f6473)
Title Page (#u220cb87b-511e-5832-847a-c635234837dc)
Copyright (#u0c9e1924-0724-5f37-87f5-42e0f4ad8946)
Dedication (#u4b332d2a-f848-517e-a22d-3ffa361cb28d)
Part One (#uefc1a252-85a3-5253-a874-3a3ac987158e)
Chapter One (#uc02b150c-9519-5261-ad8b-cac06b6e1be8)
Chapter Two (#ua6e9d144-03a4-5eca-82af-ec96e30ffc79)
Chapter Three (#uf312e18d-155b-50c2-bf88-53bdc6046766)
Chapter Four (#uc41e33b5-ecff-5a54-8779-8036ed44d58c)
Chapter Five (#ued0ad5ad-bd7e-5510-98f9-51d3e82b912a)
Chapter Six (#u2994e015-0c18-5f72-ad5e-0d2e3a24371f)
Chapter Seven (#ua933ee06-50b1-5f7d-ba83-86a7379905b2)
Chapter Eight (#ua2a12aff-027d-5c8b-8012-de648b3efaaa)
Chapter Nine (#u27329ef7-8873-5899-bde4-56a6525ff87a)
Chapter Ten (#u0c1c8904-5b65-53e2-b522-a2a447f5e242)
Chapter Eleven (#u58679f30-254b-58f1-b7af-604384546ade)
Chapter Twelve (#uce341f3d-69c5-5242-87ef-6403519ce445)
Chapter Thirteen (#ue7d6d67a-21b6-50d8-9e7d-28d86e1f1257)
Chapter Fourteen (#u09e703e1-b047-5999-8710-10f9b0658505)
Chapter Fifteen (#uba047ec2-3469-5b86-852d-c26ab81a9cc5)
Chapter Sixteen (#ue5160b1d-6f1e-5158-a92f-f0b830b17830)
Chapter Seventeen (#u1a53ec68-cb29-5835-b26f-20260c01ab10)
Chapter Eighteen (#u04aeb7f5-2d5e-50f1-ba78-7c1bd5b6be0f)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ninety (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ninety-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Three Weeks Later (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ninety-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ninety-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
One Week Later (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ninety-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ninety-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Two More Weeks Later (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ninety-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
Books by Ross Welford (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
(#ulink_055fd408-1f15-588c-9c82-dcd4ad3d7929)
Just before I fell asleep, I could see myself. I was visible, and I knew who I was.
That was before.
I’m not sure what actually wakes me: the brightness of the sunbed’s UV tubes, or Lady nudging her food bowl by the door between the hallway and the garage.
The purplish lights are so bright that even when I screw my eyes up they are still blinding me.
Have I been asleep?
Why didn’t the timer go off?
How long have I been here?
Crowding out those questions, though, is one main thing and that is how thirsty I am. My tongue’s not even sticking to my mouth, but scratching around inside it. I summon up enough spit to at least get everything working.
I have lifted up the lid of the sunbed and swung my legs over the side. There’s a little pool of sweat – perspiration, Gram would say – left where I’ve been lying. I’m still blinded by the lights and I’m blinking hard but – and this is strange – blinking doesn’t seem to make anything go dark, although there are spots and flashes going off behind my eyes.
With one hand, I grope for the switch on the side of the sunbed, and off go the lights.
That’s better, but only a bit. I still feel awful. I have a stinging headache and I sit for a while.
I should have tested the timer first. As I watch it, the old digital clock on the garage wall flips from 11.04 to 11.05 a.m.
Oh. My. God.
I’ve been under those lights for, like, an hour and a half. Hello, sunburn! Pale skin, red hair (well, auburn), galloping acne and severe sunburn: what a combination.
I stare ahead, letting my eyes become accustomed to the dusty gloom of the garage. There’s the old rolled-up hallway carpet, my kiddie bike that somehow we haven’t chucked away yet, some cardboard boxes of clothes for the church, and raindrops spattering the single narrow window in the door that leads to the back garden.
Probably twenty, even thirty seconds have gone by since I woke up.
Then my phone rings. I look down at it lying on the garage floor and see that it is Elliot flamin’ Boyd – which is not his full name, obviously. I’m not often in the mood to talk to him, so I reach down to switch my phone to silent and let it go to voicemail.
It is a moment that will stay with me for ever.
A moment so strange and terrifying that it’s quite hard to describe, but I’ll give it my best shot.
You see, at first, I don’t notice that I have become completely invisible.
And then I do.
(#ulink_dbfd2c45-6b2a-52fe-bc37-0f0332016987)
The actions of reaching down, picking up my tinkling phone, finding the silent button, switching it off, and staring at the screen while it vibrates in my hand and then stops … all of those things are so absolutely normal and everyday that I think my brain just fills in the missing stuff.
Missing stuff like my hand, and fingers.
It must be a bit like watching a cartoon. Everyone knows that a cartoon, or any sort of film for that matter, is really a sequence of still pictures. When you watch them quickly, one after the other, your brain fills in the gaps so that it doesn’t look all jerky.
I think that’s what my brain and eyes do in those two or three seconds that it takes to switch off my phone. They just ‘see’ my hand because they expect to see it there.
But not for long.
I blink, and look down at my phone on the floor. Then I look at my hand. I actually hold my hand in front of my face and turn it round.
It is not there.
OK, stop for a minute. Actually hold your hand in front of your face. I’ll wait.
It is there, isn’t it? Your hand? Of course it is.
Now turn it round and examine the other side. This is exactly what I was doing a few seconds ago, only my hand wasn’t – isn’t – there.
At this stage, I’m not scared or anything. More confused.
I think, That’s weird. Has the sunbed affected my mind? Like, am I still half asleep, or dreaming, or having a hallucination or something?
I look down at my legs. They’re not there either, although I can touch them. I can touch my face. I can touch every bit of me, and feel it, but I just cannot see it.
I don’t know how long I’m sitting there, just looking again and again at where I should be. It’s several seconds, but probably not as long as a minute. I’m going through things in my mind, like: has this happened before? Is this in any way normal? Is it my eyes – have I been temporarily blinded by the strong UV light? Except I can see other things – just not me.
Now I’m scared and my breathing has become a bit rapid. I stand up and go to the sink in the corner of the garage where there’s a mirror.
That’s when I scream. Just a little one – more a gasp, really.
Imagine, if you can, standing in front of a mirror and seeing nothing at all. Your face does not look back at you. All you can see is the room behind you. Or garage in this case.
After gasping, I realise what’s going on. I shake my head, smile, and even give a little chuckle. I tell myself, OK, so you must be dreaming. And – wow! – this is a vivid one! It really feels real. You know how some dreams are obviously dreams, even as you’re dreaming them? Not this one! This one is as real a dream as I have ever had, and I start to think it’s quite good fun. Nonetheless, I run through the Am I Dreaming? Checklist, blinking, pinching myself, telling myself, Wake up, Ethel, it’s just a dream.
Except, when it’s done, I’m still there, in the garage. This is one stubborn dream! So I do it all again, and again.
Nope, not a dream.
Definitely not a dream. I stop smiling right there.
I close my eyes tight and nothing happens. That is, I feel my eyelids tightening, but I can still see. I can see around the garage, even though I know I have my eyes shut tight – screwed up, in fact.
I put my hands over my eyes, and I can still see everything.
There’s a lurch in my stomach of fear, dread and terror, which is a horrible combination when they all come together. Without warning, I throw up into the sink, but I cannot see anything coming out. I hear it splatter. I taste the hot puke in my mouth. Then, in a second or two, it materialises as I watch: my half-digested cornflakes from before.
I run the tap to wash it away. I put my hand into the stream of water and the water takes its shape. I stare, awestruck, as I lift a palmful to my thirsty mouth and this bubble-like piece of water rises up before me. I suck it up then look in the mirror again: my lips are almost visible for a second where the water has touched them, and I can just make out the liquid as it starts to go down my throat, and then it’s gone.
I am consumed with a horror that is more intense than anything I have ever felt before.
Standing in front of the mirror, gripping the sides of the washbasin with my invisible hands, with my brain practically throbbing with the effort of processing this … this … strangeness,I do what anyone would do.
What you would do.
I scream for help.
‘Gram! GRAM! GRAM!’
A WARNING
I’m going to tell you how I got to be invisible, and discovered a whole load of other stuff as well.
But if I’m going to do that, you need a bit of what my teacher Mr Parker calls ‘backstory’. The stuff that led up to me being invisible.
Stick around for a couple of chapters. I’ll keep it brief, and then we’ll be back in the garage, with me being invisible.
However, the first thing I’d better do before I continue is to warn you: I am not a ‘rebel’.
I only say this in case you’re hoping I’m going to be one of those daredevil kids who is always getting into trouble and being ‘sassy’ to grown-ups.
That is, unless you count becoming invisible as getting into trouble.
As for the time I swore at Mrs Abercrombie: that was an accident, as I have said a thousand times. I had meant to call her a ‘witch’ – which, I admit, is rude enough in itself, but not as rude as the word I used by mistake that rhymes with it. It got me into a LOT of trouble with Gram. To this day, Mrs Abercrombie thinks I’m a very rude girl even though it was more than three years ago and I wrote her a letter of apology on Gram’s best notepaper.
(I know she’s still angry because her dog Geoffrey always snarls at me. Geoffrey snarls at everyone, but Mrs Abercrombie always says, ‘Stop it, Geoffrey’ – except when he snarls at me.)
Anyway, usually I just sit quietly at the back at school, minding my own business, getting on with my stuff – la-la-la, don’t-bother-me-and-I-won’t-bother-you kind of thing.
But you know what grown-ups say, in that way they have that’s designed to make them seem clever, ‘Ah, you see – it’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it?’
That’s me. A ‘quiet one’. So quiet that I’m almost invisible.
Which, come to think of it, is quite funny.
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How far back do you want to go?
If you ask me, it all started with the pizza thing. That was what got me so upset that I kind of lost a bit of my mind, and then ended up losing a lot more.
This is how it happened.
Jarrow Knight – who else? – shouted, ‘Pizza delivery!’ when I walked in the class, and pretty much everyone laughed. Not a LOL sort of laugh – more a spluttering cackle. Most people in my class are not actually cruel.
I didn’t get it at first. I had no idea it had anything to do with me. In fact, I thought it was some joke that I had walked in on halfway through, and so I smiled and laughed a bit as well, like you do when you don’t want to feel left out.
That must have looked odd, in hindsight.
Then a couple of days later, Jarrow, her brother, and some others were walking past me when I was talking to the girls outside the chemistry labs, and Jarrow said in a loud-ish voice, ‘Did you order the American Hot, Jez?’, and they high-fived, while Kirsten and Katie looked at their feet.
Do you get it? It still hurts to remember. (There’s going to be quite a lot of hurting and remembering, so we may as well get used to it.)
‘Pizza delivery’ is a reference to my face.
‘Pizza face’ = acne. That is, spots and zits and boils and the whole pimply shebang. You get it, yeah? The reference, not acne.
My face supposedly resembles the surface of a pizza. Hilarious. It doesn’t, anyway. It’s not as bad as that.
Acne on a twelve-year-old? I know, it’s kind of early. Even Dr Kemp said I was ‘at the earlier end of the spectrum’, but it’s not freakish. No, ‘freakish’ we’ll reserve for the acne itself, which is ‘towards the more severe end of the spectrum’. That’s nice family-doctor-speak for ‘Jeez, you’ve got it bad’.
I’ll spare you the details. You might be eating while you’re reading this and the details are not very nice.
So that was about three months ago. I realised a couple of things with those words, ‘Pizza Face’:
1 My policy of keeping a low profile at school had met with only limited success. Everyone knows Acne Girl. Up till that point, most of the mean stuff had been directed at Elliot Boyd, which was fine by me. Except, now I was a target too.
2 I honestly think some people reckon that you can catch acne. I mean, I’m not some saddo who spends the entire day alone, surrounded by people taunting her. It’s just that the whole ‘best friends’ thing is taking longer than I expected and I wonder if the acne is the cause? Gram says, ‘Just be yourself’, which sounds like good advice. I guess it is good advice if you have a reasonable idea of who you are – and I do. Or at least I did, until everything started to go wrong. Gram also says, ‘If you want a good friend, then be a good friend.’ She’s full of stuff like this. I sometimes think she collects it. Problem with that one is that there is a distinct lack of people around to be a friend to.
3 Jarrow Knight is a total nightmare. That’s not exactly a revelation but along with her twin brother the pair of them are pure poison.
4 I have got got got to do something about my skin.
My acne started about a year ago with a single, tiny pimple on my forehead. That pimple, I like to think, was sent as an advance scout by the Acne Army. It reported back to Pimple HQ, and within weeks a full regiment of spots and blackheads had encamped on my face and nothing I did could beat them back.
And then the Acne Army started colonising other parts of me. My neck hosted a small platoon of boils, which are actually large, shiny and painful. My chest had a company of tiny blackheads, which occasionally grew into whiteheads with pus in them, and within two months there was an expeditionary force annexing my legs.
Worst of all, though, Gram doesn’t really take me seriously and that is driving me nuts.
‘Spots, darling? You poor thing. I had spots too, and so did your mum. It’s just a phase. You’ll grow out of it.’
Even before the pizza incident, school had become much less fun than primary. It was just a coincidence, but at the same time as all this was happening, Flora McStay – who was probably my best friend – moved to Singapore, and Kirsten Olen was moved to a different class and started hanging out with the Knight twins.
Of whom more later.
The point is, I needed a plan to get rid of the acne, and that’s how the sunbed and the Chinese medicine entered my life.
And no, becoming invisible wasn’t part of the plan. That would definitely be ‘at the extreme end of the spectrum’.
Nor – in case it needs to be said – was getting any closer than strictly necessary to Elliot Boyd.
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So, we’re still on backstory and you’re still around, which is good.
Elliot Boyd, eh? ‘Smelliot’ Boyd as he’s known, because someone once made the joke and it kind of hangs around him like his smell is supposed to.
The kid that no one likes.
Is it his height? His weight? His hair? His accent?
Or, in fact, his smell?
It could be any of them, and all of them. He’s a big bear of a boy, as tall as a couple of the teachers, with a large stomach, and a chin with a fuzz of blond hair on it that I imagine he thinks disguises the fact that there’s another chin beneath it.
As for his smell, to be honest, he doesn’t seem to smell that bad, though I go to some lengths not to test the widely held belief that he is a stranger to soap and deodorant by simply avoiding him.
I think it’s his manner that grates on people. Overconfident, pushy, cocky, loud, and – my favourite, this one – ‘bumptious’. That was Mr Parker’s word, and he’s very good with words.
You know what, though? I think it’s just because he’s from London. Honestly. People took against him from day one because he started slagging off Newcastle United (he’s an Arsenal fan, or so he claims). Round here, unless you’ve got a very good excuse, you follow Newcastle. Possibly Sunderland or Middlesbrough. But definitely not a London football team – not even, it turns out, if you’re actually from London.
Boyd came into our class on the first day of Year Eight. No one knew him, so you’d think he would have kept his head down a bit, but no. I think he thought it was funny, what he did on his first day – you know, bold and a bit cheeky, but it didn’t come across like that.
As well as taking us for Physics, Mr Parker’s our form teacher who does the register and stuff. He clapped his hands and cleared his throat.
‘Welcome back, you lucky people, to the north-east’s finest edifice of erudition. I trust you all had a restful break? Splendid.’
He talks like that a lot, does Mr Parker. He used to be an actor and wears a cravat, which – incredibly – looks quite cool on him.
‘We have a new addition to our class! All the way from sunny London … Thank you, Mr Knight, booing is for boors …Please give it up for Mr Elliot Boyd!’
Now, at this point, the class – who had done this routine a couple of times before with new kids – would usually applaud on Mr Parker’s cue, and the new kid would look all shy and smile a bit and go red and that would be that.
Elliot Boyd, though, immediately stood up and raised both hands in the air in a triumphal gesture and said loudly, ‘Ar-sen-al! Ar-sen-al!’, which killed the applause dead. To make matters worse, he added, in his best London accent, ‘Wot? You lot ain’t never ’eard of a propah footbaw team?’
Wow, I thought at the time, way to become instantly unpopular, Elliot Boyd!
From that moment, at least half the class decided that they hated him.
Yet it didn’t seem to put him off, or make him any less pushy. Elliot Boyd was like one of those large, shaggy dogs that lollop up to other, smaller dogs in the park and freak them out.
Worse, he then started to hang around my locker after school, as if – just because we shared part of the route home – we should automatically be friends.
Fat. Chance.
I would have carried on ignoring him, except he was about to become part of what happened, and how I ended up turning invisible.
THINGS I HAVE TRIED FOR ACNE
1 Good Old Soap And Water. This was Gram’s first suggestion. ‘It worked for me,’ she said. And I had to stop myself from saying, ‘Yeah, but that was back in the Dark Ages of the twentieth century.’ Besides, the Good Old Soap And Water treatment comes from the idea that people get spots because they don’t clean their faces, and that’s not true.
2 Cleansers And Wipes. They just mean that my spots are shining out like beacons from a really clean face. I sometimes wonder if it actually makes them worse.
3 Cutting Out Fats. That was a horrible month. This theory is based on the fact that my skin is sometimes quite oily (and there’s an understatement to frame and hang on your wall). So if I didn’t eat butter, or cheese, or milk, or fried stuff, or salad dressings, or – as it turned out – anything delicious at all, then my face wouldn’t be greasy. Didn’t work. And I was hungry.
4 Garlic And Honey. Every morning, chop up three cloves of garlic and mix with a large spoonful of runny honey. Gross. And ineffective.
5 Spot Cream. This involved rubbing a cream into my face at night. Oddly, it’s quite an oily cream, which you’d think would make it worse, but it didn’t. Nor did it make it any better.
6 Good Old Fresh Air. Another one of Gram’s. Goes with Good Old Soap And Water. The only one to benefit from this was Lady, who for about a month got extra walks, until I noticed that my face was no different. Sorry, Lady.
7 Homeopathy. There are about five homeopathic medicines in Holland & Barrett that say they work for acne. None of them worked for me.
8 Nettle Tea. Tastes as bad as it sounds. Worse, actually.
9 Vitamin B5. All over the internet as the ‘miracle cure’. Next.
10 Antibiotics. This was what Dr Kemp finally recommended on my second visit, after showing him the list above. One Septrin tablet daily for a grand result of … no difference at all.
11 The Latest One: Dr Chang His Skin So Clear. An internet purchase. Gram said it looked dodgy and refused to buy it for me so I had to resort to subterfuge. Dr Chang, like Elliot Boyd, plays a big role in how I came to turn invisible.
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Gram tells me that Mum had acne when she was my age yet she grew up to be ‘such a beautiful young lady’.
She was. In the picture in my room she has shortish, reddy-blonde hair and these massive, slightly sad eyes. It sometimes makes me think that she knew she would die young, but then I look at other pictures where she’s laughing and I think she wasn’t really sad at all. Just – I don’t know – a bit … manic?
I hardly remember her, in case you’re wondering if I’m upset about it. She died when I was three. Cancer.
My dad had already left by then. Gone, disappeared. ‘And jolly good riddance too’ was Gram’s verdict. She can hardly bear to say his name (which is Richard, though to me he looks more like a Rick) and the only picture I have of him is a grainy snap taken shortly after I was born, with Mum holding me, and Dad next to her, smiling. He’s skinny, with a beard, hair longer than Mum’s, and dark glasses on, like some sort of rock star.
‘He turned up at the hospital drunk,’ said Gram during one of our (very) occasional conversations about it. ‘It was his usual state.’
Mum and Dad were not married when I was born, but got married later. I took Mum’s last name, Leatherhead, which is Gram’s too. It’s there on my birth certificate:
Birthday: 29 July
Birthplace: St Mary’s Hospital, London
Mother’s name: Lisa Anne Leatherhead
Occupation: teacher
Father’s name: Richard Michael Malcolm
Occupation: student
And so on.
I’ll give you the brief version. It’s pretty much all I have ever had anyway. Gram is not keen to talk about it because I think it upsets her too much.
Gram moved to London when she was little, and she grew up there. She and Grampa split up some time in the 1980s. He now lives in Scotland with his second wife (Morag? Can’t remember). Mum was twenty-three when she had me. She and Dad weren’t planning a family, Gram says – I just kind of happened.
My dad disappeared when I was little. It wasn’t a disappearance that involved the police or anything. There was no mystery. He just ‘left the scene’ and was most recently heard of in Australia, according to Gram.
The last time we talked about him was a few weeks ago.
We’ve always had tea, Gram and I, when I come in from school, ever since I was about seven. I know: most seven-year-olds are drinking juice or milk, but not me. Tea and cake, or biscuits. And none of your mugs: it’s all in a proper teapot, with china cups and saucers, plus a sugar bowl even though neither of us takes sugar. It’s just for show. I didn’t really like tea at first. It was too hot. I love it now, though.
In school, we had been talking about careers in Mr Parker’s PSHE lesson. I was at the back, keeping quiet as per, when the talk came round to what people’s parents did and how people sometimes follow their parents’ careers. All I knew about my dad was that he had been ‘a student’, according to my birth certificate.
I had been planning this for a day or two, how to bring it up. I asked Gram as she poured the tea why Dad had disappeared as a lead-in to what he had been studying.
Instead of answering me directly, she said, ‘Your father led a very wild life, Ethel.’
I nodded, without really understanding.
‘He drank heavily. Took far too many risks. I believe he wanted to live without responsibility.’
‘Wh … why?’
‘I really do not know, darling. I suppose it comes down to weakness of spirit. He was weak and irresponsible. Some men are not equipped to handle the demands of fatherhood,’ said Gram. Her glasses had slid down her nose and she looked at me over the top of them as she spoke. ‘I think perhaps your father was one of those.’
It was the nearest she ever got to saying something kind about him. It was rare for her to mention him without also using the words ‘drunk’ and ‘childish’. Her shoulders always stiffen, and her lips go tight, and you can tell that she’d rather talk about anything other than my dad.
We never got as far as what he was studying, because Gram changed the subject by telling me how she had told off a young man that morning who had his feet up on the seats of the Metro.
So anyway, now it’s just Gram and me, back where Gram was born, on the blustery north-east coast in a town called Whitley Bay. According to Gram, though, we don’t live in Whitley Bay – we live in Monkseaton, which is a slightly posher bit that most people would say started at least three or four streets further west. I still think of it as Whitley Bay. So now we happily live in the same house, but apparently in different towns.
Well, I say just Gram and me. There’s Great-gran too, who is Gram’s mum. She’s not exactly here very much. She’s very nearly 100, and ‘away with the fairies’, says Gram, but not in a mean way. She had a stroke years ago, which is when your brain bleeds; there were ‘complications’, and she never properly recovered.
Great-gran lives in a home in Tynemouth, about two miles away. She doesn’t ever say much. The last time I visited her, my spots were really bad, and she lifted up her tiny hand from under her shawl and stroked my face. Then she opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if she had said something. Would it have changed what happened next?
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He was with me. Again. Making three times that week.
This was just a couple of days before I turned invisible, so we’re nearly back to that.
‘Awright, Effow?’ he said. ‘You headin’ home? I’ll walk wif you, eh?’
It’s not like he gave me any choice, appearing just as I was shutting my locker as if he’d been lying in wait.
(I’ve looked up ‘bumptious’ by the way. It means ‘full of yourself’ and that’s a good description of Elliot Boyd. There are plenty of other things that annoy me. ‘Effel’ is one, or as he says it, ‘Effow’. I know it’s just his accent, but, stuck as I am with a name from 100 years ago, it would be nice to have it at least pronounced properly.)
So we walked home, Elliot Boyd keeping up a near-constant commentary on his current favourite topic: Whitley Bay lighthouse. At least it was a change from him trying to show me card tricks, which was last month’s obsession.
The lighthouse is there at the end of the beach. It doesn’t do anything, apart from appear on postcards. It doesn’t light up or anything, and this fact really bugs Elliot Boyd. (And only him, so far as I can tell.)
I have learnt – without ever even wanting to know:
1 It was built in eighteen-something-or-other, but there’s been a lighthouse there for ever, practically.
2 It was once the brightest lighthouse in Britain. I suppose that is sort of interesting.
3 You can get up to the top via a back door that’s never locked.
There’s something a bit touching about his enthusiasm. It’s probably because he’s not from around here. For everyone else, it’s just the disused lighthouse at the end of the beach, you know? It’s just kind of … there.
For Elliot Boyd, though, it’s a way of getting people to like him. I have a feeling he just pretends not to care what people think, and secretly cares a lot, and he hopes that taking an interest in something so local could be his way.
I may be wrong, of course.
He may be:
a) Just a tiresome nerd. Or
b) trying to hide something behind his constant blethering. I have noticed that he never talks about himself or his parents: it’s always about some thing. I could be wrong. It’s just a hunch. I’m going to test it soon: ask him something about his family and see how he reacts.
Anyway, I’d kind of switched off and I was just letting him chunter on because there was a shop coming up on the right that I’d had my eye on for a couple of weeks.
Whitley Road is a long strip of half-empty coffee shops, charity shops, nail bars (‘rather common’, according to Gram) and – next door to each other – two tanning salons, Geordie Bronze and the Whitley Bay Tanning Salon, which wins the prize for the least imaginative shop name on the street.
It was the window of Geordie Bronze that I was looking at. There was a huge handwritten sign saying, CLOSING-DOWN SALE, and if shops could smile there would definitely have been a smug one all over the face of its next-door competitor.
I just didn’t have the heart to tell Elliot Boyd to shut up/go away/stop bothering me about the lighthouse and some plan he’d got, but I was wishing he’d give it a rest.
Who. Cares?
‘Honestly, Effow, it wouldn’t be ’ard! Get a few of us togevver, make a little campaign website, an’ that. Call it “Light The Light” – you know, like in the song?’
He started singing. In the street, and not under his breath either.
‘Light up the light, I need your love tonight! Dee dee something something … love tonight!’
People turned to look.
‘It’s a landmark, innit? It should be shinin’ out – a beacon to the world. Otherwise what’s the point of havin’ it there? …’
On and on he went. He’d done this ‘Lighthouse Facts’ thing at school during form time a few days ago. No one had paid much attention. The general opinion was that he is/was nuts.
Most of the lights were off inside Geordie Bronze, but there was a woman sitting at a reception desk reading a magazine.
‘I’m going in here,’ I said and I moved to go in. ‘You don’t have to wait.’
‘Ah, I’m all right, fanks, Eff. I’ll just wait here for you. It’s … you know, it’s a girls’ place, you know?’
I knew what he meant. Tanning salons, like nail bars and hairdressers, are not the natural habitat of a teenage boy.
As for me, talking to strangers is one of the things that Gram thinks is really important. She has never said that she considers shyness ‘common’, because she’s not that mad, but she definitely thinks it’s ‘not to be indulged’.
‘Anyone above the age of ten,’ she told me on my tenth birthday, ‘should have learned to hold their head up and speak clearly, and if you do that you are equal to anyone.’
So, I straightened my back and pushed the door, which tinkled a bell as I walked in, making the girl at the desk look up from her magazine.
She had extra-blonde hair extensions and she was chewing gum. She had on a white(ish) tunic that buttoned down one side, like dental hygienists wear, and its colour made her tanned face seem even darker.
I smiled and approached her desk.
‘Hello,’ I said.
(Incidentally, Gram always recommends ‘How do you do?’ on first encounters, but she’s in her sixties and I’m not.)
According to a badge on her tunic she was called Linda. Linda nodded in acknowledgement and stopped chewing for a second.
‘I see you’re selling off your equipment,’ I continued.
She nodded. ‘Aye.’
A short conversation followed, during which I managed to learn that three all-over, walk-in tanning cubicles were being sold off because Geordie Bronze had fought a ‘price war’ with the salon next door and lost. Geordie Bronze had gone out of business, or something like that anyway.
The cubicles could be mine for ‘two grand each’. Two thousand pounds.
‘I see,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’ I turned to leave.
‘Hang on, pet,’ said Linda. ‘Is it for yourself, like?’
‘Umm … yeah?’
‘Is it for the …?’ And she made a sort of circular motion with her hand round her face, meaning, ‘Is it for my spots?’
I nodded, while thinking, What a cheek!
She gave a little half-smile, and it was only then that I noticed that, beneath her thick make-up and tan, her cheeks were pitted like the skin of a grapefruit.
Acne scars.
‘Aw, pet. You’ve gorrit bad, haven’t you? I had that when I was about your age.’ She paused, then looked again, head cocked on one side, and added, ‘Mind you … not quite as bad as that.’
Gee, thanks. She beckoned me to follow her to the back of the shop, where she pulled a sheet off a long, white sunbed, and lifted the lid.
I’m guessing you’ve seen a sunbed before? You lie on it, and then pull the lid down, and you’re sort of encased in this giant sandwich toaster. Brilliant UV tubes come on above you and below you and, well, that’s about it.
‘It’s knackered an’ old,’ said Linda, rubbing at a scratch on the lid. ‘But it still works. We’re just norrallowed to use it commercially any more. New regulations. We cannit sell it, neither. It’s gonna go to the dump tomorrow.’
Long story short, she let me have it for free (I know, right!), and five minutes later, me and Elliot Boyd were carrying it up Whitley Road, one end each.
Halfway home, we stopped for a rest. He was panting much more than me.
‘I’ve never ’ad a suntan,’ he said. ‘Never even been abroad.’
If he was hinting that he’d like to come and use it, then I was going to pretend that I hadn’t understood. Even he wouldn’t be crass enough to ask directly.
‘I was just wonderin’, seeing as I’m helping you home with it, if I could come and use it sometime?’
Hmm. Subtle. I found myself totally unable to say no. It would have been kind of rude, and he was so pleased, he babbled on – suggesting when he could come round, and saying how tanned he’d be – and I just switched off, heaving the thing along the pavement.
Fifteen sweaty minutes after that, I’d cleared a space in the garage. I propped the sunbed upright and covered it with the sheet, it kind of blended in with the old wardrobe, a pile of boxes and other garage junk destined for a church bazaar.
Gram and Lady were out. And it’s not like we ever use the garage for anything other than storing stuff.
In fact, given that Gram hardly ever even goes in the garage, I thought I might just be able to get away with not telling her at all. The very last thing I wanted was her forbidding me to use the sunbed, either because it’s ‘common’ or unsafe, or uses too much electricity, or … I dunno. Gram’s odd sometimes. You can never tell.
Boyd was red-faced and sweating.
‘You’ll get a nice tan,’ he said.
He was kind of making conversation and it was nice of him to help me carry it, so I said, ‘Yes. Erm … thanks for the, you know …’
There was one of those awkward silences before I said, ‘Soooo, erm … I’d better, you know … erm …’
And he said, ‘OK, erm … I’ll be … you know … erm … See you.’
That was it. He was off.
By the time Gram let herself in the front door, I was trying not to gag as I forced down my daily dose of some Dr Chang His Skin So Clear (it had been three weeks with no sign of improvement).
‘Hi, Gram!’ I said when she came into the kitchen.
Gram looked at me with an expression that could easily have been suspicion. Was I being a bit too enthusiastic?
But perhaps I was overthinking stuff.
Later on, I remembered Elliot Boyd’s round, sweaty face and it occurred to me that I was very close to him and he didn’t smell.
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The next day, Saturday, I was dying to try out the sunbed, naturally, but I couldn’t do it because it was Great-gran’s hundredth birthday and there was a bit of a party on in her care home.
I say ‘party’ like it was going to be a wild affair, but of course it wasn’t, seeing as me and Gram are about the only family Great-gran has. There was a cake, a few people from church, the other residents and the staff of Priory View, and that’s about it.
Great-gran has been in this home as long as I can remember. Apparently, when Gram first moved back to the north-east, Great-gran was still living in a big old house in Culvercot on her own. Great-grandad had died years ago, and then Great-gran fell over in her kitchen. (Gram always says ‘she had a fall’, which I think is odd. I never ‘have a fall’. If I ever fall over, I just ‘fall over’.)
The house was sold and turned into flats and Gram moved here. The home overlooks a little beach and the ruined old monastery on the clifftop.
It’s very quiet, and very warm. As soon as you go in the big front door, the cold seafront breeze outside is swapped for a hot, stuffy blanket of air that manages to smell both super-clean and a bit dirty at the same time. The clean smells are disinfectant and wood polish and air freshener; the less-clean ones smell of school dinners and other stuff that I can’t identify, and probably don’t want to.
Along the thickly carpeted corridor is Great-gran’s room. The door was half open. From inside I could hear the cheery Geordie nurse talking to her loudly.
‘There you are, Lizzie, sweetheart. You’re gerrin’ some visitors now, you lucky birthday girl. No misbehavin’ now, eh? Ah’ve got me eye on yuh!’
The nurse winked at us as she left the room, and once again, I found myself baffled as to why they talk to her like that. I wanted to follow the nurse and say, ‘She’s a hundred! Why are you talking to her like she’s six?’
But of course, I never do.
Great-gran’s name is Mrs Elizabeth C. Freeman. Gram told the staff that she was never called Lizzie, and would prefer to be called Mrs Freeman but I think they thought she was being snooty.
I know I shouldn’t dislike going to see Great-gran, but I do. It’s not her. Great-gran is a sweet and harmless old lady. No: what I dislike is me. I hate the fact that I find going to see her a chore, that I get bored, that I feel uncomfortable.
What’s worse is that that day should have felt special. One hundred years old? That’s pretty awesome. I was wishing I felt more stoked about it.
Then Gram started talking. It’s nearly always a monologue, because Great-gran so seldom responds, preferring instead to look out of her window and nod, a little half-smile sometimes appearing. Sometimes she even falls asleep. She looked tiny in the big armchair, propped up with cushions, her little head with wispy white hair emerging from a woollen blanket.
‘So, Mum, how have you been keeping? Have you been out for your walk today? It’s some blustery weather out there today, isn’t it, Ethel?’
‘Yes, very windy.’
Usually I’m not required to say much, and I just sit in the chair by the window, looking at the waves and watching the minutes tick by on the clock next to her bed. I’ll chip in a comment now and then, and sometimes I’ll sit next to Great-gran and hold her thin hand, which I think she likes because she responds with a weak squeeze.
That’s basically how it went this time too, except at the end when something weird happened.
After a few minutes of talking, Gram said something about heating up the sausage rolls and she left to go and talk to the kitchen staff.
That’s when Great-gran turned to me and for a moment her watery, grey eyes seemed to sharpen and she was really looking at me carefully. At first I thought she was looking at my spots and I shifted my position ready to move away, but she gripped my hand a little tighter so that I stayed, and I realised she wasn’t studying my skin. Instead she was looking right into my eyes, and she startled me by coming out with a whole sentence.
‘How old are you, hinny?’
(Hinny is Great-gran’s name for me. It’s an ancient Geordie term of affection. I reckon Great-gran is the only person left alive who uses it. She never calls me Ethel. Only hinny.)
The words came out as a very quiet croak – the first that Great-gran had spoken to us all morning.
‘I’m nearly thirteen, Great-gran.’
She gave a tiny nod. Gram had come back into the room, but Great-gran hadn’t seen her.
Great-gran said, ‘Tiger.’
Just that: ‘tiger’.
And then, with a huge effort, she said, ‘Pss-kat.’
I leant in a bit and said, ‘What was that?’
Again, slightly more distinctly: ‘Tiger. Pussycat.’
She pointed to me and gave a weak smile.
I looked up at Gram, and her face had gone white. I mean really – the colour had drained from her face. And then, as if she’d caught herself out, she went super-loud, super-energetic, and all ‘Right, the party is about to begin. Let’s sort you out, shall we, Mum? I’ve told them we don’t want the sausage rolls straight away …’ And so on. A long monologue of busyness that was obviously meant to distract from what Great-gran had just said.
I had no idea what it was all about. None at all. Tiger? Had she said ‘pussycat’? Or something else? Thing is, Great-gran is a hundred and not everything works like it should, but she’s not actually senile.
She turned her head to Gram. Her eyes still hadn’t lost their intensity and, for just a moment, it was like looking at a person half her age.
‘Thirteen,’ she repeated. There was something about all this that I wasn’t getting, but I’d have let it all go if Gram hadn’t suddenly come over all brisk and matter-of-fact.
‘Yes, isn’t she growing up fast, Mum?’ said Gram with a little forced laugh. ‘How quickly it all happens, eh? Goodness, look at the time! We’d better get into the sitting room. People will be waiting.’
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?
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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?
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‘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.
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That’s when I know she doesn’t believe me.
Why would she? It sounds completely demented. Gram doesn’t believe me because she cannot see me, and if she cannot see that I actually am invisible, then why on earth should she believe me?
It’s crazy. ‘Preposterous’ even, to use one of Gram’s favoured expressions.
I wait. I have told her everything. I have told her the whole truth and nothing but. All I can do is wait to see what she says.
What Gram says is this:
‘Ethel, my pet. It’s hard growing up. You’re at a very tricky crossroads in your life …’
Oo-kaay, I think. Don’t like the sound of where this is going, but go on …
‘I think many of us feel invisible at some point in our lives, Ethel. As though everyone is just ignoring us. I know I did at your age. I did my best to fit in, but sometimes my best was not enough …’
This is getting worse. Can there be anything worse than a sympathetic response that completely and utterly misses the point?
I’m struck dumb, sitting there listening to Gram drone on about ‘feeling like you are invisible’ while I watch my teacup magically rise and fall to my lips.
Then I look down and gasp in horror. There’s the tea that I have just drunk, floating in a little misshapen lump where my stomach is.
My gasp causes Gram to pause.
‘What is it, darling?’
‘My … my t-tea! I can see it!’ No sooner have I said this than I realise how daft it sounds.
‘I beg your pardon, Ethel?’
‘Oh, erm … nothing. Sorry. I, erm, I missed what you were saying.’
‘Listen, I’m sorry you’re feeling this way, but we’ll have to talk about it when I get back this afternoon. It’s the treasurer’s report next and Arthur Tudgey is sick, so I have to deliver it. I have to go back in.’
And I’ve had enough. That’s it.
‘No, Gram. You’re not listening. I really have disappeared. I don’t mean in an imaginary way. I mean really. Really really – not metaphorically. My body is not visible. My face, my hair, my hands, my feet – they are actually invisible. If you could see me, well … you wouldn’t be able to see me.’
Then it hits me.
‘FaceTime! Gram, let’s FaceTime and then you’ll see!’
I’m not even sure Gram can do FaceTime, but I’m sounding hysterical anyway.
I’m trying to put this the best way I can but it’s coming out all wrong, and the tone of her voice has gone from sympathetic and concerned to something a little bit harder, a bit stern.
‘Ethel. I think you have gone far enough with this, darling. We’ll talk later. Goodbye.’
It’s me who hangs up this time.
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Think back to the last time you were on your own. How alone were you really?
Was there someone fairly close by? A parent? A teacher? A friend? If you were in trouble, could you have called someone to help?
OK, so I’m not exactly Miss Popularity at school, but it’s not like people actually dislike me. Well, I don’t think so anyway.
‘There is absolutely nothing wrong with being “quiet and reserved”,’ said Gram when she read this on a school report once (and until then I had never thought there was, actually, or that anyone would think there might be).
‘Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought stupid than to open it and remove all doubt,’ she added in a typically Gram kind of way.
Gram has always been – to use a phrase she is fond of herself – ‘very proper’.
She is fond of saying that a civilised, cultured Englishwoman should know how to behave in every situation.
Honestly, she has books on stuff like this. Books with titles like Modern Manners in the Twentieth Century. They’re funny, usually, but most of them seem to have been written when Gram was alive, so they’re not that ancient. They include things like:
What is the correct form of address when meeting a divorced duchess for the first time?
Or:
How much does one leave as a tip for the household staff after staying at a friend’s country house?
If you didn’t know Gram, I daresay it could make her seem buttoned-up and strait-laced – the insistence on writing thank-you letters within three days, for example, or always asking permission before calling an adult by their first name. Actually it’s just about being polite to people and that’s quite sweet – only, Gram takes it further than anyone else I’ve ever met.
She once gave me a lesson in shaking hands.
Yes, shaking hands.
‘Eugh, dead haddock, Ethel, dead haddock!’ That was Gram’s description of a limp handshake. ‘You must grip more. Ow! Not that much! And I’m here, Ethel! Over here: look me in the face when you shake hands. And are you pleased to see me? Well, tell your face. And … what do you say?’
‘Hi?’
‘Hi? Hi? Where on earth do you think you are? California? If one is meeting for the first time, it’s “How do you do?” Now show me: a firm, brief handshake, eye contact, a smile and “How do you do?”’
(I actually tried this when I met Mr Parker for the first time. I could tell he was pleased, but also a bit, well, unnerved, like it was the first time any student had greeted him like that – which it may well have been. Mr Parker has been super-nice to me ever since, which Gram would say is proof that it works, and I think is probably just because Mr Parker quite likes me.)
So Gram is not all that old but she is old-fashioned, at least in her clothes. She’s proud of the fact that she has never owned a pair of jeans, even when she was much younger and good-looking. Her denim aversion is not a protest against the modern world, though. The reason she hates jeans is that she says they are unflattering.
‘Wear them tight and they are indecent; wear them loose and you look like some gangster rapper.’
Believe me: when my gram utters the words ‘gangster rapper’, it’s like she’s practising a foreign language. You can hear the quote marks round it.
Being able to talk to anyone, from any walk of life, is a great skill if you’ve got it, but even if I did, it would be no help to me right now. There is no one I can talk to about this whole invisibility thing.
Gram? Tried that.
I could go on Instagram and tell Flora McStay, the one who moved to Singapore:
Hey, guess what! I became invisible today! I’m in the picture next to the tree.
Funny.
I am completely on my own. It is not a good feeling.
SO what would YOU do? Come on, it’s not a trick question – honest.
What would you do?
What I decide is that I need to get to hospital, quick. Therefore I need an ambulance. This is, after all, an emergency.
I type 999.
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‘Emergency. Which service do you require?’
‘Ambulance, please,’ I say with a trembling voice. I have never made an emergency call before. It’s pretty nerve-racking, I can tell you.
‘Putting you through now.’
And I wait.
‘North Tyneside Ambulance Service. Can I get your name and number, please?’
It’s a young Geordie woman on the other end. She sounds nice and I relax a bit.
‘It’s Ethel Leatherhead. 07877 654 344.’
‘Thank you. What is the nature of your emergency, please?’
I should have learned my lesson from when I told Gram. It sounded ridiculous when I told her. It’s not going to sound any less ridiculous when I tell an emergency services operator that I have become invisible.
‘I … I can’t really say. I just need an ambulance urgently.’
‘I’m sorry, erm … Ethel, is it? I do need to know the nature of the emergency before I can send an ambulance.’
‘I can’t tell you. It’s just … really urgent, OK? I’m in serious trouble.’
The operator still sounds nice. She’s being gentle.
‘Listen, pet, I cannit help you unless you tell me what’s wrong. Are you calling from home?’
‘Yes.’
‘And are you injured?’
‘Well … not exactly injured, it’s just …’
‘OK, flower. Calm down. Are you in pain?’
‘No.’
‘And are you or anyone else in immediate danger of pain or injury?’
I give a little sigh. ‘No. Only—’
‘And is there anyone else there with you? Are you bein’ threatened in any way?’
‘No.’ I know where this is going.
‘Well, there is another number to call for non-emergency medical assistance, Ethel. Have you got a pen there, love?’
I am close to tears now, and if I was thinking straight I would foresee the consequences of blurting out to her as I do, but, well, I’m not exactly level-headed right now.
‘I’ve become invisible, and I’m really scared, and I need an ambulance now!’
That’s when the operator’s tone changes from reassuring and gentle to weary and tense.
‘You’ve become invisible? I see. Listen, pet, I have had enough. You know these calls are recorded and traceable? I’m logging this as a nuisance call, so if you call back I’m informing the police. Now gerroff the line and make way for genuine emergencies. Invisible? You kids, honestly. You drive us up the wall!’
And with that, the call ends – along with my hopes for an easy resolution to my problem.
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Two hours later, and I’m still invisible.
I have had a long, hot shower, wondering if perhaps the invisibility could be washed off – you know, like a coating or something? I scrubbed and scrubbed to the point that I was quite sore, but still the soap lathered up on what looked like nothing, and when I rinsed off there was still nothing, only wet footprints on the bathroom floor.
Since then, I have been wandering around the house, wondering what to do, how to deal with this, and I’m not making any progress.
The crying has stopped. That’s not going to get me anywhere, and besides I’m tired of it. I don’t mind admitting, though, that I am completely, utterly, one hundred per cent
TERRIFIED.
Terrified squared. Cubed.
Roughly every five minutes I get up and check in the mirror.
And then I go back to my laptop and search the internet again for topics including the words ‘invisible’ or ‘invisibility’.
Most of the things that I try to read are fantastically complicated, involving mathematics and physics and chemistry and biology that are way beyond what we do at school. All the same, it seems that people have been trying to achieve what has happened to me for decades.
On YouTube there’s a clip of James Bond with an invisible car.
‘Adapted camouflage, 007,’ says Q, walking round Bond’s Aston Martin. ‘Tiny cameras on all sides project the image they see onto a light-emitting polymer skin on the opposite side. To the casual eye, it’s as good as invisible.’
Then he presses a button and the car becomes invisible.
You know what? Up to right now, I would have said that that was just silly. The clip itself was in an internet list called Top Ten Bond Baloney.
But now?
Now I’m not so sure.
If it can happen to me, why not a car?
What I have managed to work out is that there are two ways that something could be invisible.
Are you ready for this?
I’ll keep it simple.
First you have to understand how we see stuff. Things are visible because light rays bounce off them and go into our eyes. So if there’s a tree in front of you, the light hits the tree and is reflected onto the back of your eye, and after some nearly instant clever stuff in your brain, you see a tree.
So the first way to make something invisible is to cover it with a ‘cloaking device’. This makes the light bend round the tree and keep on going, like sticking your finger in a stream of water from a tap: the water bends round your finger, and carries on below as a single stream.
Lots of scientists say they are very close indeed to developing cloaking devices, especially for military purposes. I suppose they mean making invisible tanks, or ships or planes or even soldiers, which would be pretty cool, actually.
Are you still with me?
OK, the second way is to make the light pass straight through the object. This is how glass works and if you’ve ever walked into a glass door like I did once at the Metrocentre, you’ll know how effective it is.
If you look at it straight on, glass is invisible.
It’s also how X-rays work. X-rays are a particular type of light, which can pass through some substances but not others. They’ll pass through your flesh, but not through your bones, so doctors can see inside you.
So it must be the second one that is causing me to be invisible. Light is passing through me, so even though I am still here, it looks as though I am not.
Not that knowing this helps me much.
I’m playing the sequence of events back in my mind: getting onto the sunbed, setting the timer, falling asleep, being woken by Lady nudging her bowl, and …
Lady. Where is she?
I last saw her running off out of the back door. Standing there, looking out, I call for her, then whistle, then call again.
It’s like: have I not got enough to worry about at the moment without a lost dog to add to it?
I’m thinking of the rash of Missing Dog posters on lamp posts lately, and I feel sick. Everyone has been talking about them.
There used to be one or two a year taped to lamp posts: lost dog, lost cat, have you seen it? That sort of thing.
Just recently there seems to have been about one a month. Gram mentioned it the other day, telling me to keep a close eye on Lady when I took her out.
‘You never know, Ethel,’ she said. ‘There’s some funny people around.’
What if someone has taken Lady? Lady is so friendly she’d go with anybody.
I need to find her, and to do that I need to go outside: probably to the beach as that’s where I would go if I was a dog.
It’s a risk. It’s a massive risk, in fact, but sometimes the only alternative to a risk is to do nothing at all, and that is not really an option right now.
I’m going to have to go outside, while invisible.
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I add some clothes to those I already have on. Socks and trainers, a polo-neck sweater that covers up my invisible throat, a long-sleeved hoodie, and already I’m looking slightly less weird – kind of like one of those headless shop dummies, if that qualifies as ‘less weird’.
In my bottom drawer is a pair of gloves, which leaves only my head to sort out.
There’s a plastic crate in the garage with old dressing-up gear. In it I find a sparkly wig from some school show I was in and a plastic mask with a clown’s face. I hate clowns, but still: it does the job. With the hood of my sweater up, I look like … what?
I look like some weird kid who’s decided to go around wearing a clown mask. Odd, definitely, but not totally mad.
I’m halfway to the front door in this get-up when my phone pings with an incoming text message.
From: Unknown Contact
Hi Ethel: Is now a good time 4 me to work on my beach bod? I’ll stay out of ur way. With you in 2 mins. Elliot
And there you have it, in one single text message, why Elliot Boyd grates on you so much. Pushy, presumptuous, in your face and a dozen other words that mean ‘total pain in the neck’ are all going through my head as my fingers compose a reply.
NO. Not a good time. Just on my way out. Try me later. Ethel
Why, why, why instead of saying ‘just on my way out’ did I not say, ‘I have gone out’? If I had, I could have pretended not to be in when the doorbell goes.
Which it does – seconds after I press ‘send’.
I’m in the hallway. I can see his outline in the front-door glass, I can even hear his phone when he gets my text, and then he sticks his fingers through the letter box and calls through the opening.
‘All right, Eff! Good job I caught you! Open the door, eh?’
What choice do I have?
I open the door.
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We both gasp when we see what the other is wearing.
‘Whoa!’ he says. ‘You never told me I had to come in fancy dress. What’s that all about?’
‘What about you?’ I say.
I may be in a bizarre outfit of sparkly wig and mask and gloves – but Boyd? He looks like he’s heading to Florida: vast baggy shorts, a Hawaiian-style shirt decorated with sharks, sunglasses (unnecessary today), and a baseball cap sitting on top of his springy hair. He’s carrying a beach bag and I can see it contains a towel and various tanning lotions.
We stare at each other in the doorway for a good few seconds.
If I wasn’t feeling so completely unnerved by what was going on inside my clothes, I could probably have said something smart like, ‘Sorry, I don’t take clothes advice from someone ejected from Disneyland for fashion crimes.’ But I don’t.
Instead I say, ‘It’s a sponsored thing. I’ve got to stay dressed up for a whole day to raise money for, erm …’
Quick, Ethel. Think of something. He’s waiting for you to finish the sentence.
‘… for your lighthouse thing.’
Why? Why that? It’s like there’s another me inside my head, yelling at me: ‘What did you say that for, you complete pinhead? Now he thinks you care about his stupid lighthouse obsession. You idiot!Why didn’t you just say famine relief or cancer research or climate change? Or anything else?’
And all I can do about the voice in my head is reply with another head-voice saying, ‘I know! I’m sorry! I’m just not thinking straight. I’ve got quite a lot on my mind at the moment in case you hadn’t noticed.’
Boyd has been talking.
‘… Terrific! Fanks a lot! Sponsored fancy dress? Brilliant idea! The whole day? Sweet! Anyway, I just got your text. Sorry, should have checked earlier. Just on your way out, are you? When are you back? I could wait for you, or, you know – let myself out?’
No. Definitely not. Instead, I tell him about Lady.
‘I saw her going down to the bottom of the backyard,’ I say to him. ‘I thought she was just going for a wee.’ That is less than entirely truthful. What I really thought was that Lady was utterly, totally freaked out by my invisibility and had legged it.
There’s a gap in the fence at the bottom of the yard that a dog could squeeze through, no bother. In fact, Lady did it once when she was a puppy, and we intended to get it fixed, but never got around to it, because she’s never tried to escape again.
Except … she’s not in the garden when we look.
So that’s how I find myself down on the beach, me in my ridiculous clown-and-gloves costume, Elliot Boyd in his comedy beach gear, calling for Lady.
Whitley Sands is easily my favourite walk with Lady, and we do it at least a couple of times a week. I throw her ball into the sea, and she leaps over the waves to retrieve it and then shakes herself, usually soaking me in the process, but I don’t really mind.
It’s hot under the mask. I check that Boyd is a little way ahead and I lift it up a bit to allow the sea air to cool my face, then I call for about the fiftieth time:
‘La-dy!’
I am trying to sound normal and happy. Have you ever lost a dog? It’s important not to sound angry when you call for it, whatever you’re feeling inside. What dog would return to an angry owner?
There are loads of dogs down here, but no Lady.
Soon we have got to the end of the beach and we are by the causeway that links the mainland to the island where the lighthouse looms, white and enormous.
‘Come on! Are you comin’ up?’ Boyd shouts.
Going to the top of the lighthouse is the last thing I want to do.
‘Come on,’ he repeats. ‘There’s somefing I wanna show you, now that you’re a proper part of it. It won’t take long. Besides, from the top you can get a view of the whole beach and you’ll be able to spot your dog.’
Once we are over the causeway and on the island itself we are pretty much the only ones there. It gets busier during the school holidays, but right now, the café is closed and the only thing open is the little museum and gift shop where you buy your ticket to walk up to the top of the lighthouse.
There are some steps leading up to the entrance and a path that goes round the back, which is where Boyd is heading. Two big refuse bins for the café are either side of a rusty door, which he prises open with his fingers before beckoning me in.
Inside, we’re in a cavernous chamber at the bottom of the lighthouse. There are one or two visitors looking at a big model of a lifeboat and some photographs on the wall, and our footsteps echo. One lady turns and raises her eyebrows, then nudges her friend, who looks at us too. I suppose that, dressed as we are, we’re worth at least a glance, but that’s all we get.
‘Come on,’ says Boyd, grinning. I can tell he’s really excited. ‘I’ve never shown anyone this!’
The narrow staircase hugs the circular walls and we climb up to the lantern room at the top, gripping the rusty rail all the way round.
Three hundred and twenty-eight steps later (I didn’t count them – Boyd told me), and I am panting like a racehorse. Boyd, for some reason, is not, in spite of the extra weight he carries. Perhaps it’s just enthusiasm.
Inside the circular lantern room, it’s like being in an enormous greenhouse: there are tall windows all round. In the centre, imagine a huge, upside-down tumbler, about a metre and a half high, made of glass lenses arranged in intricate concentric circles, its mouth about a metre from the floor – that’s the lantern.
‘See this?’ says Boyd, indicating the glass contraption, his face glowing. ‘It’s called a Fresnel lens. With a light inside, it reflects it and multiplies it so you don’t need all that much power to make it visible for miles. Except there’s no light in it now. Hasn’t been for years and years.’
I mean: OK. It is sort of interesting, but mainly I’m just being polite.
Then he takes me to a small hatch cut in the floor.
‘Check the stairs, Eff. Anyone comin’?’ He lifts up the hatch. ‘Come an’ look!’
Obediently, I shuffle round the room between the giant lens and the windows and look down the hatch. There’s a neatly coiled length of electrical cable – metres and metres of it – and a large light bulb on the other end, about the size and shape of a two-litre bottle of Coke.
‘I brought all this up a month ago,’ he says, pride seeming to ooze from every pore. ‘It’s the brightest light bulb you can buy – one thousand watts. When I’m ready, I’ll put the light in here,’ and he indicates the ‘mouth’ of the inverted glass tumbler, ‘and trail the cable out of this window here, down to the ground, where I’ll plug it in and switch it on and … Light The Light!’ He starts humming the song again.
I’m gazing at him through the eyeholes of my mask.
He is mad. Who would even think of such a thing? And why?
All I can say is: ‘I see.’
His face falls. ‘You think I’m crazy, don’t you?’
‘Erm … no. It’s just quite an … ambitious plan, Elliot.’
‘You won’t tell anyone? It’s going to be a sort of secret operation. Like a ‘happening’ – you know, announced shortly before it happens, then boom! The lights are on! A flash mob with a proper flash!’
Boyd stands up and replaces the hatch lid softly.
I can see that I’ve hurt him by not being more enthusiastic.
‘Aren’t you scared?’ I ask.
He looks at me, puzzled. ‘Scared? What of? What crime will I have committed? Who will I have harmed? You could possibly charge me with trespass, but that’s not even a crime; I won’t ’ave damaged anything, and I’ll even use the money you raise by dressing like an idiot to leave some cash for the electricity, so I can’t be charged with theft!’
The grin on his face makes me smile too.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Course I’m sure! My dad’s a lawyer.’
This is the first time Boyd has ever mentioned his dad. Or his mum, for that matter. And as soon as the words are out of his mouth, it’s as if he wants to take them back. He starts saying something else, but I cut him off.
‘A lawyer? That’s pretty cool. What sort of law?’
But he doesn’t answer. Instead, he stands up, and his voice loses a bit of its London accent, as if he’s addressing a court.
‘All right then. “Trespass” as defined in English common law – as opposed to statutory law – is an offence known as a “tort”, which is a wrongful act, but is not subject to criminal proceedings and therefore—’
‘OK, OK, I believe you.’
‘Promise you won’t tell anyone?’
‘What? That your dad’s a lawyer? Is it a secret?’
‘No, dummy. About the light – my plan. It has to be kept quiet till the time is right.’
‘I promise.’
‘Oh, and, erm … back in London my friends used to call me Boydy.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, so … you know, if you, like … erm … wanted …’
He lets it hang in the warm air between us.
Boydy. A friend?
I hadn’t realised I was quite that desperate.
INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT LIGHTHOUSES
By Elliot Boyd
With thanks to Ethel Leatherhead for allowing me space to say why lighthouses are awesome.
(I did this list for a talk I did at school in Mr Parker’s class. He said people really liked it, which makes me think lighthouses are not such a strange interest after all.)
Humans have been building lighthouses to warn ships about dangerous rocks ever since humans had ships. The first ones were basically just massive bonfires on cliffs!
Now there are 17,000 worldwide, and about 300 in the UK.
The lighthouse on the island of Pharos near Alexandria in Egypt was one of the wonders of the ancient world and was built in 270 BC. It stood for 1,500 years and then collapsed in an earthquake. In 1994 pieces of it were found at the bottom of the ocean!
In many languages, the word for ‘lighthouse’ comes from ‘Pharos’. Phare (French), Faro (Spanish and Italian). Farol (Portuguese), Far (Romanian), fáros (Greek)!
The brightness of a lighthouse is measured in candelas – that is, the brightness of a single candle. Modern lighthouses have beams that are between 10,000 and 1 million candelas bright!
One of the brightest lighthouses in the world is Oak Island Lighthouse in the USA: 2.5 million candelas!!!
In 1822 a Frenchman physicist called Augustin-Jean Fresnel developed a lens that multiplied the brightness of the light inside, meaning it could be seen much further. Almost all lighthouses now use the Fresnel Lens!
Long after the invention of electricity, most lighthouses continued to be powered by oil. St Mary’s Lighthouse in Whitley Bay did not convert to electricity until 1977. It has not been active since 1984, which I think is a real shame!
Mr Parker wrote on my presentation: 9/10. Well researched and confidently delivered. Well done. Easy on the exclamation marks.
(#ulink_8c3c0d49-7376-5c99-bd5c-20ac1702f12e)
One of the windows in the lantern room is really a little glass door that leads to an outside platform encircling the top of the lighthouse. An official-looking sign says, Danger: no admittance.
‘Come on,’ says Elliot Boyd, who I’m trying to get used to thinking of as Boydy. ‘You gotta see this.’
I follow him through the opening.
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