Invisible

by Jonathan Buckley

  At the Bath Road shopping centre she tries everywhere. At the petrol station they don’t need anybody, not until the autumn, when the students go back, and maybe not then either. The supermarket sometimes has vacancies for the checkouts and the night shifts, stacking shelves, but not this month, and the DIY superstore might need a girl on the tills in a couple of weeks, so she should come back then. They prefer to employ men at the carpet warehouse, because it’s heavy work, and there’s nothing right now, sorry, which is what the manager says at the shop for washing machines and fridges and computers. In the gardening centre a young man with a patchy beard tells her that you have to know all about gardening to work here, but as the doors slide apart to let her out he comes running up to her. A call centre will be opening soon, in a new building a bit further down the road, he says, giving her a price ticket on which he’s written the name of the company. ‘Insurance firm,’ he explains. ‘Pay’s crap, probably. And I bet it’ll be all women. Always are, them places. Hundreds of women, yakking all day,’ he smiles, making his eyes roll. Eloni thanks the young man and uses his pen to write the words ‘call centre’ underneath the company’s name, so she can ask Mr Caldecott what kind of work this is.

  The tanker that is now parked on the forecourt of the petrol station looks just like the one she arrived in. Seeing that the driver is not in the cab, she slows down as she walks by, hoping that he will appear and be the driver who brought her, because it would be nice to say hello to him. When she is opposite the forecourt she sees a man in a bright blue jacket, like the outfit her driver wore, talking to someone behind the counter, but his face is hidden by the reflection of the lorry on the glass. She waits on the verge until the door of the station opens. A man who is not her driver emerges and jumps into the cab. The tanker turns around the petrol pumps and swings past her, so close that she can see the heart tattooed on the driver’s arm, but he doesn’t even glance at her, and she is struck by a dejection that makes no sense, a disappointment heavier than she had felt when the shops all turned her down. Gathering speed, the tanker roars off down Bath Road, away from the town.

  Straight as a high-wire the painted white line leads to the traffic lights, and like a wire-walker she keeps her sight trained on those distant lights, while the cars hurtle by, inches from her shoulder. At the break in the barrier she looks down the embankment. Segments of red glass and big splinters of black plastic still litter the grass below the road, and though the car in which she sheltered that night has gone, in places the patterns of its tyres can still be seen, printed into the crumbling earth. Balancing on the crest of the slope, she looks down at the ditch, at the thick mat of weeds that broke her fall when she slithered down the bank that night, and when she fell in the morning, trying to clamber up to the road in the darkness and the rain. She trudged towards the traffic lights, walking on the white line, and the rain was so bad, she remembers, that she could not see that there was a town beyond the lights. Concentrating on keeping her feet on the line, she did not even notice that a car had stopped, though green was showing. Exactly here the car stopped, and Mr Caldecott leaned out of the door and called to her.

  She goes back to her room to make herself a meal before work. While the pasta is cooking she takes the plastic wallet and empties it onto the table. For tonight’s work she will get paid fifteen pounds, which means that she can spare two pounds of the money in her pocket, so she takes three coins from the pile and puts a five-pound note on top. Deliberately as a fortune teller with her cards, she distributes the money in ranks of piles worth twenty pounds each, and when all the coins and notes have been laid out she finds that she has managed to set aside almost five hundred pounds. As if for reassurance that the sum is real, she taps a finger along each row, counting aloud to nineteen, and then she checks the value of the coins in the twentieth pile. Nearly five hundred pounds, she encourages herself, gathering the cash into the wallet. Five hundred pounds, she repeats aloud, but she is faltering, and before all the money has been tucked back into the bag her mind has become clouded by the possibility, the probability, that this will not be enough for Francesc, and by the fact that there will be little to add to it, now that her job at the Oak is ending. Stirring the pasta, she looks out of the window, into the white-blue sky above the yard. Trying to chase away the foretaste of failure, she tries to imagine the white-blue sky of Gjirokastër, with an eagle in it, wheeling above the trees. She closes her eyes and glimpses the shape of an eagle, sliding on the skin of her eyelids.

  She eats at the table, with the bag of money sitting beside her plate, like a tiny cannonball, her single shot. The sauce, a mix of tinned tuna and tinned tomatoes and onions, is the sauce she makes three or four times a week, but this evening it tastes so stale, it awakens a craving for the taste of real tomatoes and fish that has come from the sea, a craving which revives in her mind the evening when the Spanish man cooked a meal for them. He swaggered towards the table carrying a wooden baker’s tray above his head, supported on his spread-out fingertips. Without a word he placed the tray in their midst. The tray was filled by a mound of snow-white, hard-baked salt. The Spanish man picked up a bread knife and raised it over the mound, like a murderer about to finish off his victim. The knife came swiftly down, but he locked his arm as the blade touched the salt, so it barely penetrated the surface, which cracked with the noise of thick ice breaking on a pool and fell apart in an avalanche of crystals, exposing the huge silver-skinned fish that was lying inside. It tasted like no fish she had ever eaten. The flesh was as sweet and delicate as the flesh of some unknown fruit, and every mouthful brought a perfume of the ocean to her nose. Her mother had almost cried, it was so good, and her father had raised a glass of brandy to the fish and then to the Spanish man.

  And after that Filip was always telling her about what the man had said, the things he had described, the bars and the restaurants and the fabulous girls in Cadiz. He talked about Cadiz, she remembers, on the day of the fog at Sarandë, when she sat on the sand, gazing into the fog that rose like a wall from the water’s edge, while he roamed around the wreck. For more than a year the wreck had been on the sand and the rust was like a thick red frost all over it. Under the prow, where the tide reached, hung a huge beard of barnacles and weeds. Everything useful had been stripped from it: all the winches had gone, the cables and lights had been taken away, even the doors of the cabin had gone. But Filip spent all afternoon on the boat, and he called to her, saying there was something to see. She went up the ramp of rusty sand and into the breach in the hull. The darkness stank of shit and tar and a dead animal. When Filip came back he said that somebody had scraped a drawing of a skeleton, as tall as him, into the rust of the cabin wall. The skeleton was holding a telescope to its eye and had a three-cornered hat on its head. It was a very good drawing, said Filip. They stared and stared at the fog, but couldn’t see anything, not even the boat that was so close to the shore that they could hear the crew talking. It was then that he started talking about Cadiz, and took a gold ring from his pocket, a ring he had stolen. He showed it to her on the palm of his hand. She furled his fingers over the ring and continued to gaze into the fog.

  It took three more years, almost three years, and then one morning, instead of going to the factory, they left Gjirokastër. She remembers Gjergj arriving at the shed by the olive grove, driving a tractor with a trailer hitched to it. She remembers being huddled beside Filip in the trailer, watching the lake turning pink and the shadows gathering on the mountains. Two black-scarfed women were working in a field; they could have been her mother and aunt, and that made her cry. And she cried all night in the room behind the bar, after they had handed their money to Gjergj’s friend, and she could not sleep the following day, because there was a hole in the floor of the car. By the time they came to Italy she was so tired that as soon as the driver of the lorry locked the doors she was asleep, and when the doors were opened, and she saw the clay-coloured sky, she was not sure if it was dawn she was seeing or dusk.
She had no idea what time of day it was and no idea where they had stopped. They had stopped beside two other lorries, in front of a huge showroom that was packed tightly with furniture: dozens and dozens of settees and chairs and tables arranged in squares, like a floor of a big apartment building that had lost its walls. On one side of the furniture place there was a showroom for tiles and stone slabs, and on the other side there was a glass-walled hangar filled with cars. All the cars were German but the showrooms had Italian names, and this was the only clue as to where they were, because there were no road signs to be seen, no traffic, no buildings except the showrooms. She looked around, hoping to glimpse a field or a hill, but the land was entirely hidden. They were nowhere, Filip said, and then he kissed her and without another word climbed into the lorry that was taking him into Germany. Seeing the doors close on him, she wanted to stay there, in that no-place. She wanted to stay wherever this was, and whatever would happen to her would happen to her, but the driver of the French lorry took hold of her elbow, as if arresting her, and took her to the doors of the lorry and thrust her in, throwing a bag of food after her. At the harbour she walked on to the boat, showing the papers that said she was Greek, but on the other side of the water Francesc was there, raising a hand towards her, not to help her get down from the cab but to take the passport.

  She picks up the ball of coins and banknotes. It is not a small amount, she tells herself, bouncing it in her hand, taking some comfort from the weight of it. Tomorrow she will find out about the call centre, but for now there is a problem she must solve: how to speak to Francesc. She carries the money to the draining board, packs the wallet away, and then she has the thought that Mr Morton might be part of the answer. He seems a friendly man, and he lives in London; he could post a letter from there. And Mr Morton’s being blind will make it easier for her, she tells herself, putting on her overall, feeling that a plan is taking shape.

  Malcolm arrives home, having heard nothing from Kate. There is a message on the answering machine, but it’s only Pete from the garage, reminding him to drop off the car on Monday. On Channel Four in forty minutes there’s a film he almost went to see when it came out. Before preparing his meal he rings Kate. Her line is engaged, and is still engaged when he tries again, while the food is cooking. Eating from a tray on his knees, he watches the film. Charismatic cop and charismatic villain, bound as much by mutual respect as by antagonism, glower admiringly at each other across a table. Halfway through the mayhem of a bank robbery, as taxis explode against buses and shattered glass falls like hail over unbloodied corpses, he gives it up and turns off the TV. Again he tries to phone Kate. This time he gets her answering machine. Her recorded voice is peculiarly prim and youthful, like the head girl of a school for moneyed young ladies. He puts down the phone as the beeps begin, and goes upstairs to tidy the room where Stephanie will sleep. The whiteness of the paintwork has taken on a curdled hue, he notices. Tomorrow, he decides, he’ll buy a new lampshade, a large white paper globe. He removes his old overcoat from the back of the door and clears the trainers and sweatshirts from the wardrobe. He puts fresh sheets on the bed and carries the duvet cover downstairs to the washing machine. The news is almost over. He watches the summary of the day’s sport, then it’s a choice between a chat show, a compilation of comedy sketches from ten years ago, a compilation of TV mishaps, or a film that has been running for half an hour. He reverts to the comedy show, but the sketches aren’t funny and his attention drifts repeatedly to the photograph on the sideboard.

  Showing her teeth in a gleeful smile, Stephanie stands on a bench in front of the train station in Amsterdam, clutching a ball to her belly. Her top, scarlet when new, has faded to the red of an unripe tomato, with pinkish blotches here and there, and the ball, a metallic gold ball which Kate had bought a minute before the picture was taken, is now the yellow of an overfried egg yolk. It was a bright day, but the colours of the picture are losing their contrast, as though the day in the photograph were becoming overcast. And it’s strange that the child in this picture, the small girl who existed vividly in his mind for so many years, cannot be revived at this moment, as if she has been cast away from him, cast deeply into the past, with the arrival of the young woman she has become. He takes the picture down and peruses it. They were on their way to the coast. He knows this, and he could recite the names of every stop at which their train would call. He knows where they bought the top that Stephanie is wearing and what was being advertised by the poster on the blurred flank of the departing tram in the background, yet the tone of that day, a tone he has so often summoned from this photograph, tonight eludes him. He replaces the picture. For a few more minutes he tries to find some amusement in the programme. Again he phones Kate. He leaves a message, but she does not call back.

  Finding that he cannot muster the will to work, Edward lies on his bed, holding a tape recorder to his ear. In her tent on the beach, Claudia whispers: ‘it is important for them to catch a coconut crab to show me. Three men have torches and a fourth man has a dead rat on the end of a stick. I am very tired. At seven o’clock this morning I was in the water and now it is I don’t know what time, but it must be tomorrow. My head is all wobbly, but I am not allowed to sleep until I have seen the crab. It is a monster, this animal. Frightening. It can weigh three kilos and measure a metre from tip to tip. The claws are huge and strong as steel. They will break the bones in your hand, no problem. Like a bear-trap that runs around on its own legs. It’s the largest crab in the world. More than that: the largest invertebrate that lives on land. On some of the islands they hunt them for their meat. If they catch two together they have to keep them apart, because the stronger one will eat the weaker one. In England you have dog eat dog – here we have crab eat crab. And this animal is what I must see before I can go to bed. A horrible animal. A horrible cannibal animal,’ Claudia sings, laughing, and then there is a pause in which she makes a small exhalation, perhaps easing a leg that has become cramped, and in this instant the quality of her presence is such that it is as if this were a conversation on the telephone. Pressing the speaker to his ear, he hears the scraping of the tape in Claudia’s recorder.

  ‘So what more can I tell you about this beast, Edward? I can tell you that it lives all the time on land. Did I say that before? I think I did. It does have gills but they are not like the gills of marine crabs. You can say they are like men’s nipples – they work, but they do not work much. It has been living out of the water for so long, for so many thousands of years, it would drown if you put it in the sea. At first, when it is young and very small, it lives in a shell that it steals. The hermit crab does the same. When it gets bigger it throws away the shell and finds a bigger one to live in, and so it goes on until it becomes too big for any shell. Then it has to dig a burrow, or make its home in a crack in the earth, or some other place where there is a lot of shade and a little moistness. Some of its legs have pinholes in them, which it uses to take up the water it needs from wet sand and pools. It hunts for food at night, because the sun would bake its body dry. They say the crabs are most active on nights when there is no moon. Tonight there is no moon, and the beach is nice and damp after all the rain, so the men thought they would find a crab easily. Just sit on the beach and a crab will appear. We sat on the beach for two hours and did not see a single crab, not of any kind. The men had torches and every five minutes they turned them on, all of them, but we saw only a lot of wet sand. Then they went looking around the back of the beach. A big tree has fallen down there, making a place where a coconut crab would hide from the sun. Near the tree they found a hole. They put the dead rat down the hole, on the end of the stick. There was a crab in the hole: it took the rat and broke the stick. Now they are digging in the sand to get him out. They have a net to throw over him. It is mad. I don’t need to see the thing and it does not need to see me. Let us both sleep, I say, but they will not stop. It is an affair of honour. I am going to put my head out of the tent. Listen, Edward,’ she urges, and
suddenly he can hear the wind and the sea. A distant shout is answered by another. ‘Can you hear them?’ asks Claudia, her voice warped by the wind. ‘I don’t know what is happening. I can see the lights waving around. They are having some trouble, I think. Someone has fallen over. Someone is running.’ There is a shriek and Claudia laughs again. A gust of wind rasps the microphone; a flap of canvas snaps. ‘Madonna. What are they doing? I am going back inside. Wait.’

  For several seconds the tape relays only the sound of its running, then Claudia’s voice returns, slightly lower. ‘It has become quiet outside,’ she whispers. ‘I hope the crab has got away. I am going to have a look. Perhaps they have given up.’ Canvas crackles and damp sand is stirred underfoot; again the wind flusters. ‘No. They have not given up. Of course they have not given up. They have gone over to the other side of the hill, behind the trees. I can see the flashlights. They are making a nice show on the horizon. Like a little disco is happening. It looks pretty, but I want to sleep,’ she sighs. ‘I don’t want to see a monster crab. Not now.’ He hears the soughing of the sea and the rattling of what he assumes to be the leaves of a coconut tree.