If You Could See Me Now

by Cecelia Ahern

  Elizabeth suddenly pressed Mute on the television remote control and the room was silenced. She cocked her head to one side. She thought she’d heard something again. After looking around the room and seeing that everything was as it should be, she turned the volume back up again.

  There it was again.

  She silenced the TV once more and stood up from the armchair.

  It was 10.15 and not yet fully dark. She looked out to the back garden and in the dusk she could only see black shadows and shapes. She pulled the curtains closed quickly and immediately felt safer in her cream and beige cocoon. She tightened her dressing gown again and sat back down in her armchair, tucking her legs even closer to her body and wrapping her arms protectively around her knees. The vacant cream leather couch stared back at her. She shuddered again, turned the volume up even higher than before and took a gulp of coffee. The velvety liquid slid down her throat and warmed her insides and she tried once again to be sucked back into the world of television.

  All day she had felt odd. Her father always said that when you got a chill up your spine it meant that someone was walking over your grave. Elizabeth didn’t believe that but as she stared at the television, she turned her head away from the three-seater leather couch and tried to shake off the feeling that a pair of eyes was watching her.

  Ivan watched her mute the television once again, quickly put her coffee cup on the table next to her and jump out of her chair as though she had been sitting on pins. Here she goes again, he thought. Her eyes were wide and terrified as they darted around the room. Once again Ivan prepared himself and pushed his body to the edge of the couch. The denim of his jeans squeaked against the leather.

  Elizabeth jumped to face the couch.

  She grabbed a black iron poker from the large marble fireplace and spun round on her heels. Her knuckles turned white as they tightened around it. She slowly tiptoed about the room, eyes wild with fear. The leather squeaked again underneath him and Elizabeth charged towards the couch. Ivan leaped from his seat and dived into the corner.

  He hid behind the curtains for protection and watched as she pulled the cushions out of the chair while grumbling to herself about mice. After ten minutes of searching through the couch, Elizabeth put all the cushions back in place to restore its immaculate form.

  She picked up her coffee cup self-consciously and made her way into the kitchen. Ivan followed closely on her heel; he was so close that strands of her soft hair tickled his face. Her hair smelled of coconut and her skin of rich fruits.

  He couldn’t understand his fascination with her. He had been watching her since after lunch on Friday. Luke had kept calling him to play game after game and all Ivan had wanted was to be around Elizabeth. At first it was just to see if she could hear him or sense him again, but then after a few hours he found her compelling. She was obsessively neat. He noticed she couldn’t leave the room to answer the phone or front door until everything had been tidied away and wiped clean. She drank a lot of coffee, stared out to her garden, picked imaginary pieces of fluff from almost everything. And she thought. He could see it in her face. Her brow would furrow in concentration and she would make facial expressions as though she was having conversations with people in her head. They seemed to turn into debates more often than not, judging by the activity on her forehead.

  He noticed she was always surrounded by silence. There was never any music or sounds in the background like most people had, a radio blaring, the window open to allow in the sounds of summer – the birdsong and the lawn mowers. Luke and she spoke little and when they did it was mostly her giving him orders, him asking permission, nothing fun. The phone rarely rang, nobody called by. It was almost as if the conversations in her head were loud enough to fill her silence.

  He spent most of Friday and Saturday following her around, sitting on the cream leather couch in the evenings and watching her watching the only programme she seemed to like on TV. They both laughed in the same places, groaned in the same places and they seemed to be completely in sync, yet she didn’t know he was there. He had watched her sleeping the previous night. She was restless – she slept only three hours at the most; the rest of the time she spent reading a book, putting it down after five minutes, staring into space, picking the book up again, reading a few pages, reading back over the same pages, putting it down again, closing her eyes, opening them again, turning the light on, doodling sketches of furniture and rooms, playing with colours and shades and scraps of material, turning the light off again.

  She had made Ivan tired just watching her from the straw chair in the corner of the room. The trips to the kitchen for coffee couldn’t have helped her either. On Sunday morning she was up early, tidying, vacuuming, polishing and cleaning an already spotless home. She spent all morning at it while Ivan played chasing with Luke out in the back garden. He recalled Elizabeth being particularly upset by the sight of Luke running around the garden laughing and screaming to himself. She had joined them at the kitchen table and watched Luke playing cards, shaking her head and looking worried when he explained the rules of patience in extreme detail to thin air.

  But when Luke went to bed at nine o’clock, Ivan read him the story of Tom Thumb quicker than he usually would, and then hurried to continue watching Elizabeth. But he could sense her getting jitterier as the days wore on.

  She washed her coffee cup out, ensuring it was already spotless before putting it in the dishwasher. She dried the wet sink with a cloth and put the cloth in the wash basket in the utility room. She picked imaginary fluff from a few items in her path, picked crumbs from the floor, switched off all the lights and began the same process in the living room. She had done the exact same thing the last two nights.

  But before leaving the living room this time, she stopped abruptly, almost sending Ivan into the back of her. His heart beat wildly. Had she sensed him?

  She turned round slowly.

  He fixed his shirt to look presentable.

  Once facing him he smiled. ‘Hi,’ he said, feeling very self-conscious.

  She rubbed her eyes tiredly and opened them again. ‘Oh, Elizabeth, you are going mad,’ she whispered. She bit her lip and charged towards Ivan.

  Chapter 5

  Elizabeth knew she was losing her mind right at that moment. It had happened to her sister and mother, and now it was her turn. For the last few days she had felt incredibly insecure, as if someone was watching her. She had locked all the doors, drawn all the curtains, set the alarm. That probably should have been enough but now she was going to go that one step further.

  She charged through the living room straight towards the fireplace, grabbed the iron poker, marched out of the room, locked the door and made her way upstairs. She looked at the poker lying on her bedside locker, rolled her eyes and turned her lamp off. She was losing her mind.

  Ivan emerged from behind the couch and looked around. He had dived behind it thinking Elizabeth was charging towards him. He had heard the door lock after she stormed out. He slumped with a disappointment he had never experienced before. She still hadn’t seen him.

  * * *

  I’m not magic, you know. I can’t cross my arms, nod my head, blink and disappear and reappear on the top of a bookshelf or anything. I don’t live in a lamp, don’t have funny little ears, big hairy feet or wings. I don’t replace loose teeth with money, leave presents under a tree or hide chocolate eggs. I can’t fly, climb up the walls of buildings or run faster than the speed of light.

  And I can’t open doors.

  That has to be done for me. The grown-ups find that part the funniest but also the most embarrassing when their children do it in public. I don’t laugh at grown-ups when they can’t climb trees or can’t say the alphabet backwards because it’s just not physically possible for them. It doesn’t make them freaks of nature.

  So Elizabeth needn’t have locked the living-room door when she went to bed that night because I couldn’t turn the handle anyway. Like I said, I’m not a s
uperhero; my special power is friendship. I listen to people and I hear what they say. I hear their tones, the words they use to express themselves and, most importantly, I hear what they don’t say.

  So all I could do that night was think about my new friend, Luke. I need to do that occasionally. I make notes in my head so that I can file a report for admin. They like to keep it all on record for training purposes. We’ve new people joining up all the time. In fact, when I’m between friends, I lecture.

  I needed to think about why I was here. What made Luke want to see me? How could he benefit from my friendship? The business is run extremely professionally and we must always provide the company with a brief history of our friends and then list our aims and objectives. I could always identify the problem straight away but this scenario was slightly baffling. You see, I’d never been friends with an adult before. Anyone who has ever met one would understand why. There’s no sense of fun with them. They stick rigidly to schedules and times, they focus on the most unimportant things imaginable, like mortgages and bank statements, when everyone knows that the majority of the time it’s the people around them that put the smiles on their faces. It’s all work and no play, and I work hard, I really do, but playing is by far my favourite.

  Take, for example, Elizabeth; she lies in bed worrying about car tax and phone bills, babysitters and paint colours. If you can’t put magnolia on a wall then there are always a million other colours you can use; if you can’t pay your phone bill then just write letters telling them. People forget they have options. And they forget that those things really don’t matter. They should concentrate on what they have and not what they don’t have. But I’m veering away from the story again.

  I worried about my job a little the night I was locked in the living room. It’s the first time that had ever happened. I worried because I couldn’t figure out why I was there. Luke had a difficult family scenario but that was normal and I could tell he felt loved. He was happy and loved playing, he slept well at night, ate all his food, had a nice friend called Sam and when he spoke I listened and listened and tried to hear the words he wasn’t saying but there was nothing. He liked living with his aunt, was scared of his mom and liked talking about vegetables with his granddad. But Luke seeing me every day and wanting to play with me every day meant that I definitely needed to be here for him.

  On the other hand, his aunt never slept, ate very little, was constantly surrounded by silence so loud that it was deafening, she had nobody close to her to talk to, that I had seen yet anyway, and she didn’t say far more than she did actually say. She had heard me say thank you once, felt my breath a few times, heard me squeak on the leather couch but yet she couldn’t see me nor could stand me being in her house.

  Elizabeth did not want to play.

  Plus she was a grown-up, she gave me butterflies and wouldn’t know fun if it hit her in the face, and believe me I’d tried to throw it at her plenty of times over the weekend. So I couldn’t possibly be here to help her. It was unheard of.

  People refer to me as an invisible or an imaginary friend. Like there’s some big mystery surrounding me. I’ve read the books that grown-ups have written asking why kids see me, why do they believe in me so much for so long and then suddenly stop and go back to being the way they were before? I’ve seen the television shows that try to debate why it is that children invent people like me.

  So just for the record for all you people, I’m not invisible or imaginary. I’m always here walking around just like you all are. And people like Luke don’t choose to see me, they just see me. It’s people like you and Elizabeth that choose not to.

  Chapter 6

  Elizabeth was woken up at 6.08 a.m. by the sun streaming through the bedroom window and onto her face. She always slept with the curtains open. It had stemmed from growing up on a farm. Lying in her bed she could see through the bungalow window, down the garden path and out of the front gate. Beyond that was a country road that led straight from the farm, stretching on for a mile. Elizabeth could see her mother returning from her adventures, walking down the road for at least twenty minutes before she reached home. She could recognise the half-hop, half-skip from miles away. Those twenty minutes always felt like an eternity to Elizabeth. The long road had its own way of building up Elizabeth’s excitement, almost teasing her.

  And finally she would hear that familiar sound, the squeak of the front gate. The rusting hinges acted as a welcoming band to the free spirit. Elizabeth had a love/hate relationship with that gate. Like the long stretch of road, it would tease her, and some days on hearing the creak she would run to see who was at the door and her heart would sink that it was only the postman.

  Elizabeth had annoyed college room-mates and lovers with her insistence on keeping the curtains open. She didn’t know why she remained firm on this; it certainly wasn’t as though she was still waiting. But now in her adulthood, the open curtains acted as her alarm clock; with them open she knew the light would never allow her to fall back into a deep sleep. Even in her sleep she felt alert, and in control. She went to bed to rest, not to dream.

  She squinted in the bright room and her head throbbed. She needed coffee, fast. Outside the window a bird’s song echoed loudly in the quiet of the countryside. Somewhere far away a cow answered its call. But despite the idyllic morning, there was nothing about this Monday that Elizabeth was looking forward to. She had to try to reschedule a meeting with the hotel developers, which was going to prove difficult because after the little stunt in the press about the new love nest at the top of the mountain, they had people flying in from all parts of the world willing to share their design ideas. This annoyed Elizabeth; this was her territory. But that wasn’t her only problem.

  Luke had been invited to spend the day with his grandfather on the farm. That bit, Elizabeth was happy with. It was the part about him expecting another six-year-old by the name of Ivan that worried her. She would have to have a discussion with Luke this morning about it because she dreaded to think of what would happen if there was a mention of an imaginary friend to her father.

  Brendan was sixty-five years old, big, broad, silent and brooding. Age had not mellowed him; instead it had brought bitterness, resentment, and even more confusion. He was small-minded and unwilling to open up or change. Elizabeth could at least try to understand his difficult nature if being that way made him happy, but as far as she could see, his views frustrated him and only made his life more miserable. He was stern, rarely spoke except to the cows or vegetables, never laughed, and whenever he did decide someone was worthy of his words, he lectured. There was no need to respond to him. He didn’t speak for conversation. He spoke to make statements. He rarely spent time with Luke as he didn’t have time for the airy-fairy ways of children, for their silly games and nonsense. The only thing that Elizabeth could see that her father liked about Luke was that he was an empty book, ready to be filled with information and not enough knowledge to question or criticise. Fairy tales and fantasy stories had no place with her father. She supposed that was the only belief they actually shared.

  She yawned and stretched and, still unable to open her eyes against the bright light, she felt around her bedside locker for her alarm clock. Although she woke up every morning at the same time, she never forgot to set her alarm. Her arm knocked against something cold and hard and it fell with a loud bang to the floor. Her sleepy heart jumped with fright.

  Hanging her head over the side of the bed she caught sight of the iron poker lying on her white carpet. Her ‘weapon’ also reminded her that she had to call Rentokil to get rid of the mice. She had sensed them in the house all weekend and she had felt so paranoid that they were in her bedroom the past few nights she could hardly sleep, although that wasn’t particularly unusual for her.

  Washed and dressed, after waking Luke she made her way downstairs to the kitchen. Minutes later, with espresso in hand, she dialled the number of Rentokil. Luke wandered into the kitchen sleepily, blond hair tossed, d
ressed in an orange T-shirt half tucked into red shorts. The outfit was completed with odd socks and a pair of runners that lit up with every step he took.

  ‘Where’s Ivan?’ he asked groggily, looking around the kitchen as though he’d never been in the room before in his life. He was like that every morning; it took him at least an hour to wake up even once he was up and dressed. During the dark winter mornings it took even longer. Elizabeth supposed that at some point in his morning classes as school he finally realised what he was doing.

  ‘Where’s Ivan?’ he repeated.

  Elizabeth silenced him by holding her finger to her lips, and giving him the glare, as she listened to the lady from Rentokil. He knew not to interrupt her when she was on the phone. ‘Well, I only noticed it this weekend. Since Friday lunchtime actually, so I was wond—’

  ‘IVAN?’ Luke yelled, and began looking under the kitchen table, behind the curtains, behind the doors. Elizabeth rolled her eyes. This carry-on again.

  ‘No, I haven’t actually seen…’

  ‘IVAAAAN?’

  ‘… one yet but I definitely feel that they’re here.’ Elizabeth finished, and tried to catch Luke’s eye so that she could give him the glare again.

  ‘IVAN, WHERE ARE YOOOUUU?’ Luke called.

  ‘Droppings? No, no droppings,’ Elizabeth said, getting frustrated.

  Luke stopped shouting and his ears perked up. ‘WHAT? I CAN’T HEAR YOU PROPERLY.’

  ‘No, I don’t have any mousetraps. Look, I’m very busy, I don’t have time for twenty questions. Can’t someone just come out and check for themselves?’ Elizabeth snapped.