What Not to Do If You Turn Invisible

by Ross Welford

  ‘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.

  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 tha
t?’

  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?

  Great-gran was wheeled out of her room by one of the staff, Gram scuttling behind her, and I was left alone, staring at the sea.

  There was something missing. Someone missing.

  My mum. She should have been there. Four generations of women in the family and one of them – my mum – was being forgotten.

  How much do you remember from when you were very little? Like, before you were, say, four years old?

  Gram says she hardly remembers anything.

  I think of it like this: your memory is like a big jug that gets gradually fuller and fuller. By the time you’re Gram’s age your memory’s pretty much full, so you have to start getting rid of stuff to create room and the easiest stuff to get rid of is the oldest.

  For me, though, the memories I have of when I was tiny are all I have left of my mum. Plus a little collection of mementos, which is really just a cardboard box with a lid.

  The main thing in it is a T-shirt. That’s what I always see when I open the box up because it’s the biggest item. A plain black T-shirt. It was Mum’s and smells of her, still.

  And when I open the box, which stays in my cupboard most of the time, I take out the T-shirt and hold it to my nose, and I close my eyes. I try to remember Mum, and I try not to be sad.

  The smell, like the memory, is really faint now. It’s a mixture of a musky perfume and laundry detergent and sweat, but clean sweat – not the sort of cheesy smell that people say Elliot Boyd has but that I’ve never smelt. It’s just the smell of a person. My person, my mum. It’s strongest under the arms of the T-shirt, which sounds gross but it isn’t. One day, the smell will be gone completely. That scares me a bit.

  There’s also a birthday card to me, and I know the rhyme off by heart.

  To a darling little person

  This card has come to say

  That I wish you joy and happiness

  On your very first birthday

  And in neat, round letters it’s handwritten: To my Boo, happy first birthday from Mummy xoxox

  Boo was Mum’s pet name for me. Gram said she didn’t want to use it herself because it was special to me and Mum, and that’s cool. It’s like we have a secret, me and Mum, a thing we share, only us.

  The nice thing about the card is that it has picked up the tiniest bit of the T-shirt’s smell, so as well as smelling of paper it, too, smells of Mum.

  I was thinking about this, sitting in Great-gran’s room, when Gram interrupted my thoughts.

  ‘Are you coming, Ethel, or are you going to daydream? And why the long face? It’s a party!’

  I’ll skip through it quickly because it was about as exciting as you would expect … apart from another weird thing that happened towards the end.

  GREAT-GRAN’S PARTY

  Guests:

  About twenty people. Apart from me and a care assistant called Chastity, everyone else was properly grown up or ancient.

  What I wore:

  A lilac dress with flowers on it with a matching Alice band. Gram thought I looked lovely. I didn’t. Girls who look like me should just be allowed to wear jeans and T-shirts until the whole gawky-skinny-spotty thing runs itself out. As it is, I looked like a cartoon version of an ugly girl in a pretty dress.

  What I said:

  ‘Hello, thank you for coming … Yes, I’m nearly thirteen now … No, I haven’t decided my GCSEs yet … No, [shy, fake grin] no boyfriend yet …’ (Can I just say at this point: why do old people think they can quiz you about boyfriends and stuff? Is it some right you acquire as soon as you hit seventy?)

  What I did:

  I handed round food. Gram had asked me what she should serve, but my suggestion of Jelly Bellys and Doritos had been ignored. Instead there were olives, bits of bacon wrapped round prunes (yuk – whose idea was that?), and teeny-tiny cucumber sandwiches. The chances of me sneaking much of this into my own mouth were slim to zero.

  What Great-gran did:

  She sat in the centre of the room, smiling a bit vacantly and nodding as people came up to her and congratulated her. I was thinking she was not ‘all there’, not aware of what was going on. As it turned out, I was wrong about that.

  The photograph:

  A photographer from the Whitley News Guardian took a picture of me and Gram and Great-gran next to a large cake. He had a tiny digital camera instead of a big one with a flash that goes whumph! I was a bit disappointed: like, if you’re going to be in the local newspaper, it should feel dramatic, like a special moment, you know? (Irony alert: as it happens, that photograph is going to turn out to have very dramatic consequences.

  Anyway, Mrs Abercrombie was at the party with Geoffrey, her three-legged Yorkshire terrier, who was doing his bad-tempered snarly-gnarly thing – and I have a new theory about this. I think the reason he’s so snappy is because she never lets him run around. She is forever holding him in one arm. I’d be annoyed if I was forever pressed into Mrs Abercrombie’s enormous chest.

  Gram looked nice. ‘A veritable picture’, as Revd Henry Robinson said.

  She sipped from a glass of fizzy water and smiled gently whenever people spoke to her, which is about as far as Gram’s displays of happiness go. She hardly ever laughs – ‘Ladies do not guffaw, Ethel. It’s bad enough in a man. In a woman it is most unseemly.’

  (Personally, though, I have my own idea and it has nothing to do with being ‘unseemly’. I think, deep inside, Gram is sad about something. Not me, not Great-gran, but something else. It could just be Mum, but I think it’s more.)

  The vicar was the last to leave. He playe
d ‘Happy Birthday’ on the piano then a classical piece off by heart, and everyone clapped. Old Stanley clapped very enthusiastically, and shouted, ‘Bravo! Bravo’, until one of the nurses calmed him down like a naughty child, which I thought was a bit mean.

  Gram seemed flustered as soon as Revd Robinson had gone, and there were only me, Gram and Great-gran left as the care assistants were clearing up.

  ‘Goodness me, look at the time, Mum! That was quite a shindig!’ ‘Shindig’ is a Gram sort of word, meaning party, but it was only one in the afternoon. I think parties must get earlier and earlier the older you get.

  Honestly, if I hadn’t already suspected something was up, then Gram’s bad acting would have alerted me. She couldn’t wait to get away.

  Anyway, the ‘look at the time’ remark seemed to have an effect on Great-gran, like switching off a light. The distant gaze returned to her face along with the constant nodding, and that was that.

  Well, pretty much.

  As I leant in to kiss Great-gran’s papery cheek, she whispered in my ear, ‘Come back, hinny.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘We’ll be back soon.’

  Great-gran’s eyes darted to Gram, who was halfway to the door, and it’s the way she did it: I knew instantly what she meant.

  Come back without her is what she meant.

  That is the weird thing that I told you about. That, and the whole tiger thing.

  Just what was going on? And whatever it was, why was Gram so worried about it?

  We drove home. Two miles in which I could ask Gram, ‘What did Great-gran mean by saying “tiger” and “pussycat”, Gram?’

  Except I couldn’t because from the moment we were alone in the car, Gram kept up a near-constant chatter that could almost have been a deliberate attempt to stop me from asking the question that I was dying to ask.

  The Revd Henry Robinson this, Mrs Abercrombie that, sausage rolls not heated through even though I asked them, the beautiful English spoken by ‘that nice foreign girl’ (Chastity), even the pattern on the carpet (‘I do think swirls on a carpet are just a little common’), and so on … And on.