He sniffed. ‘It really hurts,’ he whispered back. ‘I can’t stand on my leg.’
‘Nothing broken, is it, mate?’ Uncle Warren called. ‘He’ll be all right. Just clean him up and get him up, he’ll be fine. Soonest mended and all that.’ He looked at his watch, which had a huge face that you could see from really far away. ‘Aww, must dash. Mag-rat, see you soon. Damian, you were really brave, mate, really proud of you. And Roni, my little dynamo, see you soon.’
I stared at Uncle Warren. I couldn’t believe this had happened and he wasn’t even going to wait to see if Damian was all right. Up until then he’d been my favourite uncle, but right then, I wasn’t sure I liked him at all. Sometimes he could be not nice but he’d always say sorry afterwards, but this was the not nicest thing he’d ever done. He was going to leave us like this, and Mum would take ages to notice that Damian needed help and probably to go to the doctor if not the hospital. Dad wouldn’t be home from work for hours.
‘But Uncle Warren,’ I said. ‘Can’t you stay for a little bit longer and help look after Damian?’
‘I wish I could, sweetheart, but I really have got to run. Damo will be all right, won’t you? Your mum will look after him.’
I looked at my mum, who was still examining the bicycle – she was going to be no help at all. When the door shut behind Uncle Warren, Mum propped the bike up against the corridor wall, staring at it like she was confused and upset. ‘We’ll never be able to fix this, we’ll have to get a new one,’ she said. ‘I suppose your father will be upset.’
‘Mum, Damian’s leg really hurts,’ I said.
‘Oh, poor love,’ she said. ‘Like your uncle Warren said, it’ll be fine. Just walk it off.’ She smiled at us.
‘Mum, you really need to do something,’ I said. Damian didn’t look very well: he was pale and his eyes were like he was far away. Then he put his head on his arm and started crying. It was quiet at first, but it got louder and louder.
This seemed to shock Mum out of whatever weird mood she was in. ‘Yes, yes, you’re right, of course, Veronica. I don’t know what I was thinking. Why don’t you go and get him some new trousers? Then go into the bathroom and get a few plasters and the TCP.’
I ran up the stairs, went into my brothers’ bedroom and got him some clean trousers. Then I went into the bathroom and opened the mirror cabinet and took out the TCP and the whole roll of sticky plasters. I got the scissors, too, so Mum could cut some off the roll. All the while I could hear Damian crying and I heard nothing at all from Mum. I stood at the top of the stairs with everything in my arms, ready to go down, but I decided not to straight away. Instead I went into my parents’ bedroom. I wasn’t allowed in there normally, but they had a phone in there. I wasn’t allowed to use it, but Dad had taught us to call 999 in an emergency. This felt like a nearly emergency. I settled everything on the bed, then picked up the phone. Each button beeped when I pressed it.
Twenty minutes later, Dad came home. Mum was still trying to stop the bleeding from Damian’s knee without taking his trousers off, and she kept sending me upstairs to get towels and cotton wool, and warm water in a bowl.
Mum was really surprised to see him. I hadn’t told her I’d called him because this was a nearly emergency and I wasn’t allowed to dial 999 unless it was a real emergency.
‘He’s fine, Geoffrey, really he is,’ Mum said as Dad gently bundled up my brother and headed straight for the open front door.
‘He is not fine. Look at him, Margaret, he’s barely conscious. He could have concussion or anything. If Veronica hadn’t called me, you’d have let your son sit here in pain until six o’clock tonight when I got home,’ he said.
‘Honestly, Geoffrey, you do make a fuss sometimes,’ Mum said. ‘You and Veronica, both. This sort of thing happened to me all the time in my day and I was fine.’
‘This can’t happen again, Margaret,’ Dad said. He was so cross I could see all the muscles in his face bulging because he was trying not to shout. ‘It cannot happen again. Do you hear me?’
Once the door shut behind them, Mum turned to me and shook her head. ‘He’s going to look very silly when the doctor tells him it’s a little sprain. Children are too coddled nowadays, everything is always the worst-case scenario. He’ll be fine.’
I nodded at Mum, wishing that Dad had taken me with him. ‘Come on, Veronica, let’s start dinner before they come back and Brian comes back from his friend’s house.’
Damian came home on crutches with a severely torn ligament and five stitches in one of his knee cuts. Mum apologised to Damian for not realising how bad he’d felt and she promised Dad she would take this sort of thing more seriously next time. Even as she was promising him, I could tell she couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about and was only saying sorry so that Dad wouldn’t cause more ‘fuss’ by still being angry with her about it.
London, 2016
‘I hope you like the cake,’ Mum says. She is moving the tray items on to the table to avoid having to look at me while she starts this conversation. I really would help her out if I knew anything about what next. When I asked to be released from my vows, I thought it would take months, as it had with other professed Sisters, but mine was granted in weeks. Was this divine intervention or had something Mother Superior said meant they’d expedited my release? I didn’t have time to dwell on it, or to formulate a more robust, non-parents/Chiselwick-involving plan. This was the plan; what next is a genuine mystery.
‘I’m sure I will. I love Victoria sponge,’ I say.
‘Now, Veronica,’ Mum begins. She rattles the cup and saucer and has to set them down quickly before she breaks something.
‘Yes, Mum?’
‘It’s nice to see you and everything but …’ Her voice peters out.
‘Yes, Mum?’ Is she going to break the habit of a lifetime and start a potentially difficult conversation that could result in even the slightest hint of unpleasantness?
‘But don’t forget that dinner is at six-thirty,’ Mum states.
‘That’s perfect,’ I say, disappointed in her. I thought you could do it, Mum, I really thought you could.
‘We’ve got a guest for dinner, too,’ she adds. ‘I’m sure you’ll be very happy to see him.’
‘Is it Brian or Damian?’ I ask.
As usual, Mum smiles at me without making eye contact. ‘You’ll just have to wait and see. Don’t let your tea grow cold.’
‘I won’t,’ I say to her. She closes the door and I know who it’ll be coming for dinner: Uncle Warren. Mum won’t have told Brian and Damian I am back and asked them to come to dinner, because she won’t take the risk of them explaining to her they aren’t desperate enough to see me to see her, too. The only person, apart from Dad, who hasn’t effectively washed their hands of Mum is Uncle Warren.
Oh well, I think to myself as I search for the positive in the situation, at least if he comes to dinner tonight, that will get that part of being back in Chiselwick over and done with.
Nika
London, 2016
Wasn’t sure I’d see this place again. I didn’t think I’d ever come back to Chiselwick, let alone this part of it, and let alone this road. The house I grew up in is near the middle of a terraced street and it stands out to me because I spent seventeen years going in and out of it. The door is the same colour – a sombre black – as when I shut it behind me over eighteen years ago, when I was seventeen, but it’s newer paint. The whole of the outside has been repainted a few times and the windows look sort of new, like they’ve been updated in the last decade.
My plan, hastily formulated when I left Birmingham last night, is to fix things with my parents. I’m going to turn up, talk to them, be humble, be contrite, see if we can find a middle ground. See if they will let me stay with them for a couple of nights so I don’t have to sleep on the streets. Their address was always my home address, because I could never be sure I’d get everything when I lived in a shared house. When I moved in with Todd, my sister used
to package up my post and forward it to me at his address, even though she didn’t still live at home. My parents never spoke to me but apparently they accumulated all my post. My sister, who would clean up for them, still, would send on the post with a little ‘how are you?’ note, but nothing more. I’d guessed it was because she didn’t want to get in the middle of what had happened. I never explained to her the reasons for my exodus, and since we were never close – despite sharing a room – I didn’t feel the need to make her choose a side. Besides, I’d rather have an arm’s length relationship with her than one where she didn’t believe me when I told her one of my secrets.
Our family had an odd dynamic: Sasha and I were never ones to share secrets or have each other’s backs but we always seemed to be waging wars against the rules our parents imposed – she being the older girl, getting the brunt of their control, me being younger, getting the best of their disinterest if I was doing what they wanted. Our brother, Marlon, was the golden child: first born, most loved, the one who treated them with the most disdain but seemed adored for it.
I won’t think about that now. I got off the coach at Victoria with a plan: I will fix things with my parents as much as I can to let me stay and then I will get a job and then I will find somewhere to live. Saying all of this, it’s only really occurred to me now, standing in front of their door, that they might not live here any more. One or both of them might not be alive any more. I haven’t been in touch for so many years, I don’t know what fundamental and microscopic shifts have taken place in the Harper household.
I have thought about them over the years, I’ve even thought about sending Christmas cards, birthday cards, etc. but I never got around to it. I could never bring myself to send them when it would all be fake – fake sentiments from a fake woman, who stopped signing her name Veronika or even Nika a long time ago. Every time I had the urge to get in touch with my family I would remind myself that I was Grace Carter and Grace Carter had no past and no family. That was all there was to it.
Veronika Harper, on the other hand, raises her hand and presses the doorbell before she changes her mind and runs away, pulling on her Grace Carter protective armour as she runs.
Immediately, there are sounds of movement on the other side of the door, someone getting up, a woman’s voice that doesn’t sound like my mother’s comes closer, and through the mottled glass in the door I watch the approach of a shape that is too tall and too slender, to be my mother. They don’t live here any more. Maybe they are both dead and I will have to deal with that news, too. I take a step back, ready to run rather than hear that news from a stranger, but I don’t move quickly enough because the door swings open.
The woman who opens the door frowns, the action scoring deep creases into her forehead. She frowns some more and then her mouth drops open, and her eyes are suddenly awash with tears.
‘Who is it, Sasha?’ my dad’s voice calls from somewhere in the house and he sounds the same. Through the open doorway I see the ornate gilt mirror on the wall, the brown, flowery carpet, the coats hanging up beside the mirror, the neatly lined-up shoes below the coats. I see the square of window in the back room that overlooks the back garden. That is the room where I last spoke to them, the place where I made them choose me or denial. Denial won.
My sister clamps her hand over her mouth, blinking hard at me.
‘Sasha? Who is it?’ my dad calls again.
‘Erm, erm, no one, Daddy. Just someone trying to sell something.’ She shakes her head at me, presses her forefinger to her lips, holds her hand up for me not to speak.
‘What are they selling?’ Daddy calls.
‘Nothing, nothing. Look, I’ll get rid of them, OK? It’s nothing for you to worry about.’ She steps out of the house, comes right up to me. Her slender hands with beautifully shaped and varnished nails are on my face, holding me as though she can’t believe I’m real. Tears are burgeoning in her eyes and she draws me close, hugs me, although I’m not sure I smell very pleasant after a night on the coach. ‘The park,’ she whispers to me. ‘Twenty minutes, in the park by the swings. I’ll see you there, OK?’
I nod.
She covers her mouth with her hand again and her face collapses into the beginnings of a cry. ‘Twenty minutes,’ she whispers. ‘Twenty minutes.’
I nod again and stand waiting for her to shut the door before I leave. Seems like, from that reaction, my parents have still chosen denial.
London, 2003
The dark was approaching and the air was cooling as though the temperature and the light were keeping each other company, holding hands as they fell and lowered themselves into night-time.
I sat on a park bench, wearing the leather jacket my boyfriend had bought me when we first started dating, staring at the cemetery opposite the park. The headstones and statues, monuments and plaques took on different forms the longer I sat there, immobile and stuck. My parents lived not far from there, probably about a mile or so away, in Chiselwick. I’d got the Tube all the way across London and walked to this park and then my legs decided they’d had enough walking. Memory Lane was, as expected, no fun at all. I’d sat on this bench and hadn’t moved since.
I wanted to go home. I wanted to see my folks and have them put their arms around me and tell me that they loved me, and everything that had gone before was forgotten. We didn’t need to talk about it unless I wanted to, but if I did we would and they would listen, they would hear, they would believe. I wanted to be folded into the safety of my mother’s arms, comforted with the pat of my father’s hand on my shoulder, and told none of it was my fault. From a distance – even one this close to them – I could imagine the parents I wanted instead of remembering the parents I actually had.
My parents were only on my mind because I had finally seen Todd’s true form earlier and it had terrified me.
I’d stepped out of the shower, caught a fleeting glimpse of the bruise – the perfect size and shape of his hand – around my left bicep, the colours so deep and severe that they had been prominent against my skin, and I had stopped and stared. And stared. And stared some more. While what had happened, what he had done three nights ago, had come stampeding into my mind on a crescendo of loud hooves. The noise of the memory had been inside my head, and I hadn’t been able to get it out. And while the memory had continued its violent journey across my mind, one of those hooves had caught the edge of the blinkers I had been wearing and kicked them clean off.
After everything I had told him, everything we had been through, Todd had … I’d put the palms of my hands over my eyes.
My eyes had been covered, but I’d been able to see, suddenly. Slowly, slowly, slowly, he’d been doing this thing to me for years. It had never been as clear, though, not like the other night. But slowly, slowly, slowly with the never stopping when I wanted him to, the underwear, the degrading positions, the wanting to take photos, the wanting to let others watch, he’d been doing it for years. I’d just never been able to admit it until the other night when I had said an outright no.
Slowly, slowly, slowly, he’d eroded my resistance, he’d persuaded me to go ahead with things when I hadn’t wanted to, he’d keep on asking for my reasons for saying no until I stopped arguing that I hadn’t ‘wanted it really’, he would carry on having sex on me to prove that I’d ‘enjoy it once we got going’. Slowly, slowly, slowly he had become this monster that I only saw when he finally stopped pretending to take my wishes into account.
I loved him. He noticed me, he paid me attention, and I used to believe he wanted what was best for me. He loved me and I was always, always desperate to please him.
Seeing his hand mark on me, with the memories galloping wildly through my mind, I’d been able to see who Todd was. I’d had to acknowledge what he had been doing over the years, and then the tears had started to fall. I wasn’t really a crier, so it had been shocking to feel them swell through me and fall from my eyes like a flood.
I wasn’t really a crier, and I hadn’t
been crying for me. I hadn’t been sobbing for the pain, for the sickness that had sat in my stomach since last Saturday night, for the bruised skin and painful muscles. I’d been crying for the fact I loved him so much. I loved him so much. And now I’d seen the shape of him, his true form, I wasn’t allowed to love him any more.
I’d pulled myself together, I’d managed to get dressed, but when he’d returned from his run, and I’d seen him, I’d broken down again, the tears faster this time, each breath a deep gasp of sorrow. He’d come straight to me, gathered me in his arms, hushed me, rocked me with his love. ‘Oh baby, please stop crying,’ he’d whispered. ‘I didn’t realise how much it’d upset you. Please stop crying, please.’ He’d made me promises, told me I was the only one for him, all the while begging me to stop crying. Still I’d cried. I’d tried to stop: every breath I’d held, every sob I’d tried to swallow, every tear I’d tried to stem, but it hadn’t worked. I hadn’t been able to stop.
He’d kept saying the right words, more hushing, more explanations, more pleas for me to understand. More and more until ‘STOP IT!’ he’d screamed at me. He’d got to his feet, almost tossing me aside he’d been so desperate to get away from me. ‘You’re making me feel like a rapist,’ he’d snarled.
‘I’m sorry,’ I’d whimpered.
‘Just stop it. Stop trying to make me feel guilty.’
‘I’m not,’ I’d gasped. ‘I’m really not.’
‘Then stop crying. Stop crying!’
‘I can’t,’ I’d sobbed. ‘I can’t.’
I’d pushed the palms of my hands on to my eyes, doubled over, but nothing, nothing would stop it.
‘I’m going for a shower,’ he’d growled at me. ‘Either you will have stopped this nonsense by the time I get back or don’t be here.’ Every word had been like a razor through the centre of my being, each syllable a sword that slashed another part of me and produced large, quiet tears.
When I Was Invisible Page 6
