Can You See Her?: An absolutely compelling psychological thriller

by S. E. Lynes

  I was on the early shift that day. I parked the car next to the arts centre by the canal. Mist rose from the brown water; there were a couple of brightly painted barges that hadn’t been there the week before, an arrow of ducks gliding up towards the bridge. I walked down the path that runs past the GPs’ surgery. It was a grey day, the air heavy. As I walked, I held my hands out in front of me and turned them this way and that. I touched my cheek, sort of patted it.

  ‘I am here, I am here,’ I muttered. ‘Definitely here. In the sagging flesh.’

  There was a chap coming up the path towards me. Mid-forties, thereabouts, grey suit and white shirt with no tie, grey hair pushed back from his forehead. Clean-looking, if you know what I mean. Silver fox type. Past me he came, head down.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said.

  He jumped, blinked; his hand flew to his chest. ‘Ah. Oh. Yes, good morning,’ he blurted and carried on up towards the canal, but in those few seconds, I knew two things: one, he hadn’t seen me until I’d spoken; and two, I knew him like I’d known that chap in the park the day before. I don’t mean knew him as in knew him inside out and back to front sort of thing – I’m not psychic. I mean by instinct. That he was a GP, for a start. Well educated. And that he was lonely. I thought he might be divorced, although thinking about it, I could have noticed the pale band where his wedding ring used to be. There was something in the weary set of his shoulders, his face beaten and harassed at the same time.

  He walked to his car and grabbed a file of documents from the passenger seat. I was still rooted to the spot, watching. I see now that maybe that was a strange thing to do, but I wasn’t one hundred per cent aware of myself in that moment. It was only the fact of him coming back down the path that shook me out of one of what Katie calls my ‘earth to Mother, come in, Mother’ moments. When I blink out of them, she always says, ‘Three, two, one… you’re back in the room,’ like the funny hypnotist off that comedy show.

  I came back to myself. My breathing was ragged and I felt faint. A cloud of heat was expanding inside me but I wasn’t sure exactly where it was, whether it was in my brain or my body or what. A rivulet of sweat trickled down between my breasts. Knowing I should move but for some reason unable to, I watched the GP stride past. Off he went, rounding the corner clutching what I suspected were a patient’s files. He was diligent. He’d taken some case notes home to read through.

  I think about how that must sound, how I must sound. I don’t want Blue Eyes to think I’m bonkers, even though it’s a bit late for that now, and besides, what anyone thinks of me is irrelevant.

  ‘I didn’t know any of this for certain, obviously,’ I qualify. ‘But it’s like Lisa said: when you get to a certain age, you get the hang of people. University of Life, as I said. But it was still weird. What I mean is, it felt weird.’

  Blue Eyes frowns in a way that suggests she thinks everything I’ve said is reasonable. The fact that she’s treating me with respect and warmth and kindness makes me think she might have kids, though younger than mine – she looks about thirty-five. Not that you need to have kids to show compassion to someone who has done terrible things, but just… something. It could be tactics, obviously. She’s the good cop, not pinning me against a wall to force the cuffs on, more holding them out for me to willingly place my guilty wrists inside.

  ‘So what are you saying?’ Her mouth purses and she chews the inside of her cheek again, then presses her lips together, inflates them to stop herself. Ah. The cheek chewing is a nervous habit; she’s trying to quit.

  ‘I suppose I’m saying that I was noticing other people more than I had before. Or that I was noticing how much I noticed them, if you know what I mean. And I was starting to wonder if noticing people was connected to being invisible in some way.’

  How it all connects to the bleeding bodies left for dead, I don’t know. But she’s told me to take my time, and time is what I’ll take and maybe we’ll find out together. For the moment, her guess is as good as mine, but it does feel good to lay it all down in this silent room in front of the woman with the neutral smile and the crystal-blue eyes that seem to see me in a way I can’t remember being seen for a long, long while.

  I admit that my imagination took over as I made my way through the bus station onto Church Street. I had this GP chap’s marriage failing because his wife had left him for another man; now he was involved in a new relationship with a woman he really liked but who he worried would cheat on him in the end. His kids were both at university, and he feared he would lose touch with them one day because they visited his ex-wife more often than him. He was trying to get a bigger flat so that they would have a room each whenever they came. He’d even thought about getting a dog as an extra draw, but he couldn’t look after it, what with the hours he did. His life was a mess, he was thinking. How had it all come to this?

  ‘And how did imagining all that make you feel?’ Blue Eyes says.

  I think for a minute.

  ‘Like I was connected to someone,’ I say, ‘even if he was a total stranger. My husband and my daughter took no notice of me. Lisa and I were still close at that point but it wasn’t enough. I wish it had been enough.’ My voice falters. ‘But it wasn’t. It wasn’t enough.’

  The interview room falls silent. Outside, I hear the traffic go by. We’re next to the expressway, near the shopping centre and the big Asda and the library. Touchstones of my life before. I wonder how long it will be before I go shopping again, borrow a book; if I ever will. I wonder if there’s a library in prison or if they’ll let me take my Kindle in or what. How will I get on inside, as they call it? I’ve no airs and graces; that should count for something.

  I realise I haven’t said anything for several minutes, possibly more.

  ‘Were you troubled by your imagination at that point?’ Blue Eyes says. ‘By how developed it was?’

  I shake my head, even though I was; I was nothing but troubled.

  ‘I love people,’ I say instead. ‘Always have. I love their complications and their faults as much as their qualities. I love what makes them them, if you know what I mean. And I suppose I’ve developed a way of flowing around people, keeping everyone afloat sort of thing.’

  ‘Like water?’

  ‘Exactly like water, yes.’

  ‘So you use your instinct or your natural empathy to read people so as to accommodate them? Their needs?’

  ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  But how did this crone’s insight relate to being invisible? To my own husband shuffling around me as if I wasn’t there, no one smiling at me in the street anymore? To Katie’s mate staring through me to the kitchen wall? These were the questions in my mind that morning as I took in with new attention all the people going about their business. Some of them I knew to say hello to, some not. No one really looked at each other, I realised. People got on with their lives. You could be having a quiet breakdown and people would just think you had heartburn or something. You’d have to drop to the ground clutching your head in your hands, crying it’s all too much, or strip off and start telling people you’re Jesus before anyone took much notice.

  Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t about to strip off and walk into work just so I could see how invisible I was, although to be honest, Dave would probably have just grunted and asked me to fill the ice bucket. But at the same time, there’d been that fleeting expression of shock on the GP’s face when I’d said hello, the flashing understanding of the basics of him that had stuck my trainers to the tarmac like gum.

  My appearance didn’t attract attention, fine. But what did that have to do with instinct?

  I stepped onto the zebra crossing. A car coming towards me didn’t slow down. Another step and I realised it wasn’t going to. If I hadn’t run across, it would have flattened me. I stood on the opposite pavement, gasping like a marathon runner after twenty Silk Cut, swearing under my breath. The car – it was only a Ford Focus, not even a sports car – turned right at the end of the high street
and drove off. It had been a woman driving it, youngish, thirties tops. She hadn’t slowed down not because she was mean or reckless, but because she hadn’t seen me.

  Perhaps I really was invisible.

  And then it hit me, square on.

  The link, not the car.

  You can get away with murder, Lisa had said. What she meant, what I thought she meant, was that if no one could see me, it left me a kind of freedom, didn’t it? With no one looking at me, I was free to see out. I was a birdwatcher in one of those hideaway things, a slot in the leaf-covered hut for my eyes. I was a Muslim woman in a burqa, hidden from the world under swathes of black cloth, watching the world without the world watching me.

  ‘I can get away with anything,’ I muttered to myself, there on the pavement. ‘I’m free.’

  And I was. Free of being observed, noticed, appraised, judged. With no one’s gaze on me, I could put my gaze wherever the heck I wanted. I could observe by stealth.

  I didn’t feel too bad about being invisible then. I could hardly wait to bump into someone else to see if it would happen again: that instinctive knowing, that connection, that affinity. I wanted it to. I yearned for it. I think even then I wondered how far it would take me.

  I just wish it hadn’t taken me so far.

  9

  Rachel

  On the way into the pub, I said hello to the homeless lad who sometimes sleeps on the bench outside. He waved and said hello back – at least he saw me, I thought. I always get in at about quarter to, so I have time to open up properly before any punters arrive. I popped my coat into the office, took the cash out of the safe and put it in the till, and emptied the dishwasher. At five to, Bill the chef arrived, gave me a cursory wave and headed for the kitchen to start the lunch prep, and on the dot of eleven, Phil, a regular, took up residence on his stool.

  ‘All right, Phil,’ I said.

  ‘Morning, Rachel.’

  ‘All out?’

  He nodded, as he always did, regardless of whether he’d won or lost.

  ‘Usual?’

  ‘Please. And a Jack Daniel’s, thanks.’

  Jack Daniel’s meant a loss. I poured his pint and a measure of bourbon, took the ten-pound note and gave him his change before filling the ice bucket and putting out the bar towels. The smallest glance over my shoulder at Phil was enough to take in the silhouetted hunch of his back. And that was it. I felt his loneliness and pain as if it were my own. I mean, I’d seen him deteriorate these last few years. He used to be really quite a good-looking chap, did Phil. Smartly dressed, the occasional flutter. Now he was a shell with a gambling habit, which he indulged at the betting shop along the road. If he won, he drank to celebrate; if he lost, he drank to drown his sorrows – a little less, since he’d usually cleaned himself out to his last tenner. He’d told me once that his nan used to take him out with her on Saturdays after his parents split up, an acrimonious event that traumatised him as a kid. He didn’t use those exact words; the bit about being traumatised was in what he didn’t say.

  ‘While she went to lay a fiver on the horses,’ he’d told me, ‘she’d give me a few coins for the one-armed bandit and I’d sit there with my legs dangling off the stool, slotting those coins in, waiting for that waterfall of cash.’

  ‘And did you ever get it?’ I’d asked him.

  ‘Twice,’ he’d replied. And then he’d said something really interesting: ‘But that wasn’t what kept me on the stool,’ he’d said. ‘It was the waiting. The stress of it made me feel calmer.’

  I didn’t say anything at the time, but I remember thinking it was probably because, in those moments, at least he knew what he was stressed about. He could name his unease, unlike so many other woollier sources of dread in his life. And that morning I realised something else as I watched him wander over to drop what little change he had left into the one slot machine we have in the bar area. I realised that sitting at the slots took him back to the safety of those Saturdays with his nan, waiting while she placed her bets, away from his troubled domestic life. And then I wondered whether fresh domestic trouble had brought him back to gambling, his childhood escape.

  Something had.

  My hand was at my chest. My eyes filled with tears. I almost bumped into Dave, stood there with his crusty red hands on his hips, bright copper locks sticking up in an unintentional quiff caused by putting a beanie hat on while his hair was still wet.

  ‘All right, Dave?’

  ‘Parched, actually.’

  ‘Brew?’

  ‘Go on, if you’re making.’ He handed me the dirty mugs from yesterday, and as he did so, the backs of our fingers touched, which made me go all shivery but not in a good way.

  ‘Coming right up,’ I said, almost breaking into a run.

  I went upstairs to where there’s a grotty little staff kitchen with a kettle, a microwave and a two-ring stove to heat stuff up. There’s a bedroom up there too, where Dave sometimes sleeps when he closes up, a loo, a sink and a very basic shower, the cleaning of which is left to guess who. I put the kettle on and rested my hands on the counter top. My heart was battering in my chest; my brain felt like it was pressing against the inside of my skull.

  I already knew quite a bit about Dave, having worked with him for a year or two. But now I saw the dirty fridge, the Xbox and the Domino’s pizza boxes, crusts hardening on the crumby living-room floor of his flat in Duke Street. I saw the ring of dirt around his kitchen sink, saw him sniff a pair of underpants before putting them on in the yellow dawn light. I even saw the psoriasis on the backs of his knees and knew, completely without wanting to, that he never had sex with the light on because of it.

  I make myself look straight at Blue Eyes, who remains as impassive as ever. ‘Not right, is it, to know that about a colleague? You think I’m nuts, don’t you?’

  She coughs into her hand, shakes her head a fraction. ‘That’s not a term I would use. I’m wondering how much of Dave’s personal life you actually knew. And, as with Phil, how much you tuned into what you already knew about him that day more than other days because of your trauma.’

  ‘Trauma?’ The hair stands up on the back of my neck. Where she’s going with this, I don’t like.

  ‘The experience of invisibility. That was a trauma.’

  I laugh. ‘Come on, I hardly lost a limb.’

  She shifts, crosses her long legs. She has the most fabulous shoes – silver, wedge heels. Not afraid of her height, obviously. ‘Rachel, you don’t need to lose a limb to experience trauma. Trauma is subjective. You might cope with a whole host of terrible things but it might be something relatively small that pushes you over the edge. Can you relate to that?’

  ‘I can, yes. After Patrick walked out on Lisa, she seemed all right, but then one day she dropped red wine on her trousers and that was it. She wept like a professional mourner. I had to take her in my arms and calm her down, promise her I’d get them clean. I did. I soaked them in cold water and washed them on cool and they came out fine.’

  But here I am again, going off topic.

  The light alters. A cloud.

  ‘So, Rachel, with a revised view of trauma and what it might have caused you to believe about your own abilities to know people by instinct, what do you believe when you say you saw the psoriasis on Dave’s legs?’

  ‘I mean in my mind’s eye. But I’m guessing I’m not far off. I’d glimpsed his flat once when I dropped off a parcel he’d left at work. And I suppose he had red patches on his hands and in summer, when he wore short sleeves, the same thing on the inside of his elbows.’

  ‘So you made a deduction?’

  ‘I filled the kettle is what I did. But yes, I know what you’re getting at.’

  She’s right. I suppose I was honing my detective skills, but instead of trying to crack cases, I was trying to crack people. I’d become hyper-aware. Woken. I was looking for connections where I shouldn’t, having little affairs of the mind, I see that now. But that’s all it was. It was all
it was ever supposed to be.

  I made the teas and took a mug out to the homeless lad, because I did that every day and I knew how he took it: white, two sugars. He gave me one of his lovely smiles and said thanks, and then I went back in to Dave.

  ‘Here’s your tea,’ I said, handing him his Everton mug.

  He put it on the counter behind the bar. ‘Here, look at this.’ He rolled up his sleeve to reveal a blue crest inked into still blazing red skin: Nil Satis Nisi Optimum, a turret and two laurel wreaths. I recognised it, of course. It was the same crest as the one on his mug.

  ‘New tattoo,’ I said.

  ‘Come on the Blues!’ He beamed. ‘What do you think? Nil Satis Nisi Optimum. That’s my message to you today and every day, Rachel. Nothing but the best is good enough, eh? Nothing but the best.’

  He’d enjoyed the pain of having that tattoo. A bit like Phil, I thought – it comforted Dave to know what was hurting for once. It was all about putting it somewhere. The pain, I mean. You have to put pain somewhere, whether it’s into a slot machine or into your skin or into your veins. I could add that Dave’s a bit of a knob, but I think that’s self-evident from what he said, isn’t it? Nothing but the best? Sod off, Dave. It’s a boozer, not the ruddy Hilton. I didn’t say any of that, obviously.

  ‘Oh, Dave, that’s smashing is that,’ was what I did say and set about cutting up some lemons.

  For the rest of the day, I kept my head down, but customers don’t serve themselves, do they? Our pub is what you’d call a community pub. Our clientele are a little older and we never get any trouble, not even at the weekend, as the younger crowd tend to go elsewhere. Most of our punters are regulars: Sid, who comes in at quarter past four every single day, overalls covered in paint splashes – pint of mild, always one, never more, never less; the couple that show up every Monday lunchtime for the buy one get the second one half price steak and chips offer, pint of lager for him, half for her, and never say a word to one another; and Lena, who generally gets in at about five, half five for her first gin and tonic, always in the high heels, the tight clothes, and always alone. If I do a late shift, I generally see her leave at around ten o’clock, though where she goes I’ve never asked. It’s not my job to know their business; my job is to create a friendly atmosphere for them, and that’s what I did that day like any other. Only that day, as the punters came and went, my head filled with their fears and boredom, their money worries and tiredness levels, their petty bitterness and secret longings, and most of all their howling, fathomless black wells of loneliness. Not that any of them said any of that aloud. By five, my head was aching with it: all that angst, all that anger. All that damn despair.