Something Invisible

by Siobhán Parkinson

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Copyright

  The Daisy follows soft the Sun—

  And when his golden walk is done—

  Sits shyly at his feet.

  He—waking—finds the flower there—

  Wherefore—Marauder—art thou here?

  Because, Sir, love is sweet!

  Emily Dickinson

  CHAPTER

  1

  Nobody ever blamed Jake for what happened.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Except himself.

  CHAPTER

  3

  But let’s go back to the beginning.

  CHAPTER

  4

  There was a girl at the bus stop. She looked about Jake’s age, or maybe a bit older. He didn’t usually notice girls much, except to make a mental note to avoid them. That was because he found they generally acted superior, which unsettled him. But he noticed this one because she was so thin. Not undernourished thin. More sort of greyhound thin. Her long, wispy hair was pale brown or dark blonde, no color really; that made her even more greyhoundish.

  She had two of those very green shopping bags, the ones that last forever, one dragging her right arm down and one on the ground, between her feet. Two younger children who were playing on the pavement behind seemed to be vaguely attached to her. They never looked at her, nor she at them; nor did they speak to each other. But somehow Jake knew they were together. Something invisible linked them.

  The bag at her feet had a tube of aluminum foil in it, the extra-big kind, for turkeys, which was too long to balance properly among the rest of the shopping. Jake noticed that she tipped at it with her knee, to keep it from falling over.

  She was waiting for the same bus as he was, but when it came it was full to bursting, and the driver only allowed two people on board, Jake and an old lady with an aluminum stick that had three little legs with rubber feet. The girl and the younger children pressed forward and looked hopeful, but the driver shook his head and pointed over his shoulder, to indicate that there was another bus coming soon.

  Jake dithered for a moment. He ought to let the girl on instead of him—not because she was a girl, but because of all the shopping—only there wouldn’t be room for the children too, and they would only get in the way of the woman with the funny stick, trip her up, even. She didn’t look as if she could cope with small children getting tangled in her stick.

  So in the end he got on the bus and squirmed his way into a gap between two tall people. He didn’t have much space, but at least he could see out the window. He watched as the thin girl transferred the bag with the long tube of foil in it to her hand, and put the other bag, which looked lumpy and heavier, at her feet instead. She put her chin to the top of the foil carton to steady it and shuffled her feet to make space for the other bag between them. Then Jake’s bus drifted away from the bus stop and he lost sight of her.

  CHAPTER

  5

  He swam up out of a dream in the night and thought, someone should tell her about the other kind of aluminum foil you can get. It comes in a shorter roll, like cling film, which makes it easier to manage in your shopping bag. Though she might be going to cook a turkey, of course, in which case maybe she needed the longer foil. He didn’t know much about cooking.

  CHAPTER

  6

  His mother woke him in the morning, as she always did, by chucking his curtains open. He flung his arm over his eyes to shut out the painful sunlight. She drew the top sheet over his head and said, “OK, you can take your arm away now.” Under the sheet, he moved his arm gingerly away from his face and opened his eyes. His eyelashes brushed the fabric of the sheet, which filtered the light. The smell of washing powder and fabric conditioner mingled in his nostrils with his own slight whiff. Slowly, he slid the sheet down and faced the daylight.

  His mother was standing at an angle, looking out of the window, but partly turned towards the room, and him. Her body was outlined against the light. She’d got awfully fat lately, heavy and slow, but her hair was the same as ever, wild and rich and bright. He liked looking at her, blurred against the sunshine. It made her seem more herself. He couldn’t explain it, but it made him want to touch her, to put out a hand and stroke her arm or finger her hair.

  He wouldn’t, though. That’d be soppy.

  “Come on, Jake, breakfast time,” she said, turning toward him. She sounded tired. “Hot or cold milk on your cornflakes?”

  “Hot,” he said. “Thanks,” he added.

  By the time he got downstairs, though, the milk was only lukewarm. There’s a lot to do in the mornings. He’d read that you should brush your teeth before breakfast, for example, not after, and that took time, among other things.

  “Do you think a person could have a job making up color names?” Jake asked as he dug into the lukewarm cereal, hardly realizing he was speaking aloud.

  He’d been thinking about it for a while. He often thought about things that didn’t seem to occur to other people. Not that this was a job he thought he would like to have himself, because he was going to be a fish painter, but he wondered all the same about where the paint names came from.

  “Colors already have names,” his dad said. He was one of the other people who didn’t seem to think about the kinds of things that Jake thought about. He was eating toast and reading the paper, in that jolly, Dad-ish, what-a-lot-of-endearing-rubbish-you-think way. “Red, orange, yellow…”

  Breakfast was the only meal where you were allowed to read in Jake’s family, but Jake never wanted to read at the table; he preferred talking. Thinking and talking were his favorite things, next to football and fish.

  “No,” said Jake. “I mean, like on paint cards: ‘Applemint,’ ‘Aqua,’ ‘Sunburst,’ ‘Cinnabar.’” You had to spell things out for Dad.

  “Donkey,” said his dad.

  “I know what you mean,” said Jake. “A sort of grayish brown. Or brownish gray.”

  “No, I mean, that’s what you are.” His dad grinned stupidly. “A donkey. Hee-haw.”

  Jake ignored this, or pretended to. “Stickleback,” he added.

  “Stickleback?”

  “They go blue,” Jake explained. “The males. And
red. But mostly blue.”

  “People wouldn’t know that,” his dad said. “Normal people, I mean, about sticklebacks going blue, so it wouldn’t mean anything.”

  “They would know it,” said Jake reasonably, “even normal people, if they’d got our encyclopedia, the one we have at school. There’s a picture of a stickleback when it goes blue. Anyway, ‘Cinnabar’ doesn’t mean anything either. Or ‘Aqua.’ Water is colorless—usually. That’s how you can see the fish so clearly.”

  Jake had a fish tank in his room. There were tropical fish in it, scarlet and royal blue and zebra striped, and rocks with fronds and pieces of coral (not real coral, as far as he knew) and grit in the bottom and a thing shaped like a sugarcane that bubbled. He liked to look at the tropical fish, from time to time, because they were pretty, but he wasn’t especially interested in them—they were like slowly moving wallpaper—and he wouldn’t have bothered with a fish tank himself. He was more interested in real fish. But he never let on to his dad, because the tank had been a present for his last birthday and Dad was dead proud of having bought him such a cool present.

  Jake’s dad tried pretty hard to be mates with him, and Jake tried to remember to appreciate that. Sometimes it was tough going.

  “What makes them go blue?” his dad asked now.

  “Fatherhood,” Jake said.

  Jake’s dad coughed. He coughed and coughed and splattered toast crumbs all over his plate. Jake ran the tap and filled a glass of water for him.

  “Here,” he said. “Drink this. Aqua, haitch-two-oh, a colorless liquid, key substance for life on earth, boiling point one hundred degrees centigrade, freezing point zero.”

  He’d learned that from the encyclopedia, the one at school with the blue stickleback picture in it. He liked encyclopedias. He usually took one down from the shelf during Reading Time on Fridays. The girls always read storybooks. That was another reason he didn’t much like girls, the way they were always reading stories. He bet they did it just to please the teachers. Teachers thought you were great if you liked reading stories. But Jake had noticed that teachers were mostly girls, or used to be, which probably explained this.

  “Did you know that a liter of water weighs a kilo?” Jake said, watching as his dad drank the water.

  “No,” said Dad. “That’s extraordinary. What a coincidence!”

  Jake sighed. There was no point in talking to some people. They just didn’t get it.

  Dad stood up from the table and jerked his arms a few times, to make the tips of his shirt cuffs appear out from under the sleeves of his jacket. That meant he was getting ready to leave for work.

  “Good lad,” he said, catching Jake’s eye watching him.

  Jake didn’t know what he’d done to deserve this kindly form of address, but he nodded gravely all the same and tried to look as if he was indeed an excellent lad that any father would be proud of.

  Lavender Dusk, he thought, as his dad left the room. He’d seen this weird poppy yesterday at the edge of the football pitch, not a wild one, but growing wild. If there were a paint the color of the poppy, that’s what he’d call it.

  “Lavender Dusk,” he said, trying the sound of it aloud.

  The front door banged. He asked his mother what that made her think of.

  “Lavender Dusk? Sounds like a lipstick,” she said unpoetically. She was often unpoetic; he’d noticed that about her, though she was supposed to be a poet.

  “Oh!” said Jake, taken aback. Disappointed.

  It did. That spoiled it.

  CHAPTER

  7

  The baby was a girl.

  CHAPTER

  8

  His mother hadn’t got fat. She’d been having a baby.

  They told him about it, of course, his parents, in the end, before the baby actually arrived. They’d meant to mention it earlier, they said, but somehow … They thought it was OK to end a sentence like that, just trailing off, with “but somehow.…” He wouldn’t get away with it. Jake kicked the cupboard with the side of his foot. There was a scuffed place where he always did that when he was confused or cross.

  “We kept thinking,” his mother said in a high, false-sounding voice, “he’s sure to notice, and we kept waiting for you to notice, but you kept on not noticing, and then, somehow, it all seemed…” His mother’s voice fell back to its normal pitch, and then it trailed away again.

  Jake hung his head. He felt stupid. At his age, not to notice a thing like that! But then, why should he? There are other things to think about, school and football and fish and stuff. You don’t go around noticing that your mother’s pregnant, do you? You don’t think of your mother as a reproducing female, as if she’s a classroom pet or a laboratory animal. She’s your mum, isn’t she?

  If he’d been a girl he might have noticed. If he’d been a girl, they might have told him sooner. No, he didn’t feel stupid; he felt they thought he’d been stupid. But that seemed worse, somehow. He felt himself getting hot and confused. He gave the door of the cupboard another furtive sidelong kick.

  “We didn’t want to force you to face it,” his mother was saying now, half apologetically. “I did try to mention it a few times. I did bring the subject up once or twice. But you just didn’t seem to be ready to talk about it. So we thought we’d let you come to it in your own time, Jake. Jake?” She was peering at him with an anxious expression.

  Jake tried to remember her bringing the subject up, but he couldn’t. He’d give her the benefit of the doubt, he thought, but he felt a bit conned all the same. He couldn’t say that, of course, because then there’d be a row and he didn’t want there to be a row about the baby. That’d be awful. It wasn’t the baby’s fault. Poor little scrap. Not that he was all that keen on babies, but you couldn’t go blaming them for stuff.

  So he said nothing; just shrugged. And they laughed at him, his parents, for not noticing something so obvious. But it wasn’t a mean laugh; it was a relieved laugh. It was as if they’d expected him to be upset and they were glad to see that he wasn’t. Why should he be upset? That would be silly, to be upset about a little baby. So he joined in and laughed too; that way, they’d know it was OK, he was OK about it. They all laughed at Jake, with Jake, and his mum and dad stroked the baby’s skin with wondering fingers.

  “It’s the best thing that’s ever happened,” his dad said. “Isn’t it, Jake? The very best thing ever.”

  “Umm,” said Jake.

  “A miracle,” said his dad. “That’s what she is, a little miracle. My miracle daughter.”

  “She’s—eh…” But Jake couldn’t think of a single nice thing to say about the baby. She was pink and her mouth kept opening and shutting and she stretched a lot. She was quite interesting to observe, like any life-form, really, but she was not “lovely,” which is what people usually said about babies.

  “You could have told me, though,” he mumbled at last, but nobody seemed to hear him.

  “We’re going to call her Marguerite,” said Jake’s mum. “After my mother.”

  Jake thought about that.

  “That’s a nice name,” he said carefully, after a while. “But it doesn’t suit her.”

  His mother frowned.

  “I mean, she’s nice and all, but you have to be tall and have a bun if you’re called Marguerite.” Not that his grandmother looked like that, but she was always called Rita; Jake hadn’t even known her name was Marguerite.

  “Mmm,” said his mother dreamily.

  “And a silver cigarette case,” Jake added. “With Russian cigarettes in it.” He smirked, pleased with that touch, though he had no idea what Russian cigarettes were actually like, apart from being cigarettes and Russian.

  His mother chuckled softly. He thought it was the Russian cigarettes that had amused her, but then he saw that she hadn’t been listening to what he’d said at all. She stroked the baby’s palm with her finger, and the baby closed its little fist tightly over the finger, and she chuckled again. It was a soft
sound, like music.

  “Look how tightly she grips,” she said, as if gripping tightly was some sort of extraordinary talent. But Jake knew that all babies did that. He’d read about it. Theirs wasn’t anything special.

  “What about Madge?” asked Jake. “Just till she’s older and gets a bun.”

  “No,” said his mother. “Definitely not Madge.” As if Madge meant something horrific, like Virus or Plague or Destruction.

  Or Margie? Maggie? Like in The Simpsons.

  “No.”

  “Midge? Midge suits her, doesn’t it? I mean, she’s dead small, isn’t she?”

  “Stop, Jake.”

  “Meg? Meg’s nice. Or Meggie? Peggy?”

  “No,” said his mother. She had that anxious look again. “I thought you’d be pleased, Jake.”

  “I am,” he said. “She’s class.”

  That was a bit of an exaggeration, but she was better than a tropical fish anyway, he’d grant that. Not much better, but she’d improve. They get more interesting, babies, whereas tropical fish stay at the gawping stage forever. Even tadpoles get more interesting, come to think of it.

  He thought he wouldn’t say that to his mother, though. She might take it the wrong way. She wouldn’t like to have her offspring compared to the juvenile stages of pond life, however interesting Jake might think them. Mothers were like that. They seemed to imagine that human babies, and especially their human babies, were somehow endowed with a fascination that had nothing to do with the inherent interestingness of the life cycle.

  CHAPTER

  9

  He met the girl again. The one who’d been at the bus stop before, the thin one. “Met” wasn’t exactly the word for it. She was in the supermarket, and so was he. He’d stopped at the fish counter to admire the mackerel, all striped and shiny and neatly packed into their skins without a pucker or a ruck, and he noticed her at the next counter, buying salami. She seemed to do a lot of shopping. She was buying a pile of salami. There must be loads of people in her family.