What Not to Do If You Turn Invisible

by Ross Welford

  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.

  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

  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.

  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.

  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.

  Garlic And Honey. Every morning, chop up three cloves of garlic and mix with a large spoonful of runny honey. Gross. And ineffective.

  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.

  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.

  Homeopathy. There are about five homeopathic medicines in Holland & Barrett that say they work for acne. None of them worked for me.

  Nettle Tea. Tastes as bad as it sounds. Worse, actually.

  Vitamin B5. All over the internet as the ‘miracle cure’. Next.

  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.

  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.

  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?

  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:

  It was built in eighteen-something-or-other, but there’s been a lighthouse there for ever, practically.

  It was once the brightest lighthouse in Britain. I suppose that is sort of interesting.

  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.