Something Invisible

by Siobhán Parkinson

  “To send to my friends,” she replied.

  “Like the one you sent me,” he said, slightly shamefaced at his lack of enthusiasm. “But even so…” he said.

  “The thing is, the paintings in the house are all ones I have bought over the years, and I love them all, but I don’t have any truly great paintings, by the Old Masters. They cost thousands. Millions. You only get to see them in art galleries, and then you buy a few postcards of them as a souvenir. Like a consolation prize.”

  “I’ve never been to an art gallery,” Jake said. “I thought they’d be boring.”

  “Like Hull?” said Mrs. Kennedy. “Well, they are like Hull—not as dull as you’d expect, as long as you are prepared to look hard. And if you want to be a fish painter, I’d say you should go and look at a few fish paintings, don’t you think?”

  “Are there others? Apart from the one you sent?”

  “Of course. Oodles.”

  “You mean, lots of other people have painted fish?” asked Jake, surprised.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  It was the strangest thing. Mrs. Kennedy had a whole shoebox full of fish paintings. Jake was in heaven. Well, actually, there were a few other things as well in the paintings. Not absolutely every one had fish. Some had dead pheasants. Some just had apples and pears. Some had a Bible and a globe and a tablecloth. Some just had a group of jugs. But they were all pictures of things on tables.

  “But do you know something queer?” Mrs. Kennedy said, as they examined the postcards. “People don’t like pictures of dead fish. They must give them the creeps, or something. The thing is, if you have a picture of, say, grapes or watermelons or something like that, and let’s say it’s by an important painter, and it’s worth, oh, let’s say half a million euro—it’s mostly dead painters whose paintings are that expensive, by the way—well, now, if you have a picture by the same artist only it’s of a dead fish, it’s probably worth only about half that. Isn’t that the oddest thing?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, people don’t like looking at dead things, I suppose. They don’t want to have them on their walls. So the paintings aren’t as valuable.”

  “Does this mean I shouldn’t be a fish painter?” asked Jake.

  “Well, it means you should probably only paint live fish.”

  “But you couldn’t do that,” Jake protested. “They wouldn’t keep still long enough.”

  “That’s a point. Maybe you could photograph them instead. Or film them. You could be a fish filmer.”

  “Is there such a thing?” asked Jake.

  “There must be,” said Mrs. Kennedy, “because you do see fish on the television, from time to time, don’t you?”

  “I suppose,” said Jake. “And they are usually wiffling, aren’t they? Which means they’re alive.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “I don’t think I’ve heard of wiffling.”

  “It’s Stella’s word. She probably made it up. She’s good with words. I think she should be a poet when she grows up.”

  “There’s no money in poetry,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “Even less than in fish painting, I’d say.”

  “Oh, well,” said Jake, “I suppose we could work in McDonald’s for our real jobs and only paint fish and write poems at the weekends. Do you think that would work?”

  “Possibly,” said Mrs. Kennedy.

  CHAPTER

  31

  “Where’ve you been?” asked Stella, opening the door to him. “I said four o’clock.”

  “Having lunch with Mrs. Kennedy,” said Jake.

  “Lunch? But it’s after five.”

  “Well, it was a late lunch,” Jake explained. “And then I helped her with the washing up, and that took ages, because she does everything so slowly and then…”

  “What did you have for lunch?” asked Stella.

  “Tomato sandwiches and cold sausages and frozen peas, only we unfroze them, of course. And then we were still hungry so we fried some eggs. And we finished the porter cake from last week.”

  “She isn’t supposed to eat cake,” said Stella.

  “No,” said Jake. “But she does. She does what she likes. She says it’s the only advantage of being old. There’s no one else who’s old enough to be able to tell you not to. Her son tells her what to do, she says, but she doesn’t listen to him, because after all, she’s changed his nappy.”

  “Oh, yuck,” said Stella.

  “I thought you liked babies,” said Jake.

  “That’s not the point,” said Stella.

  “Do you think your mum or dad could show me how to photograph fish?” Jake asked.

  “No,” said Stella sulkily.

  “Why not?”

  “Because they work in a studio. They don’t have underwater cameras. They’re not Jacques Cousteau, you know.”

  “No, but they might be able to…”

  “Oh, Jake, give it over,” said Stella. “I invite you here and you’ve been wuffling on about Mrs. Kennedy and porter cake and underwater photography since you arrived, and I don’t want to talk about those things. I want you to help me to cook.”

  “Cook?” said Jake doubtfully. “I thought you’d invited me to tea. Wuffling’s a good word, by the way,” he added, seeing a frown forming between her eyebrows. “Is it related to wiffling?”

  “I don’t know,” said Stella. “I haven’t decided. I did invite you to tea, but I didn’t think you’d mind helping with the cooking. Will you be able to eat it after all that lunch?”

  “No problem,” said Jake.

  “OK,” said Stella, cheering up. “Right, you can chop the onions. We’re having spaghetti.”

  CHAPTER

  32

  Stella’s parents were doing a jigsaw with Joanne, Stella’s littlest sister, at the kitchen table. There were three children under the table—they seemed to like sitting under tables—two of them banging upside-down saucepans with wooden spoons, but nobody seemed to mind the noise, except Jake. Another child was sitting at the other end of the table, doing sums, or so it appeared.

  Joanne looked up.

  “Dake!” she said and opened and closed her hand at him.

  That was supposed to be a wave, Jake conjectured, and he waved back.

  Stella’s mother looked around. “Ah, Jake,” she said with a grin. “The Pied Piper of Mount Gregor.”

  “What?” said Jake.

  “You know, the one who spirits children away? The Pied Piper. I hear you took all my daughters fishing. Not a clever move, Jake, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “I never…”

  “Yes, you did, Jake,” said Stella resolutely. “It was your idea to go fishing, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “However, we forgive you,” said Stella’s dad, “because we heard you tried to rescue one of them. Which one we aren’t quite sure.” He finished with a short laugh that sounded like he didn’t really think it was all that funny.

  “How do you do?” said Jake firmly. He was going to be polite even if they weren’t. He’d never met this person before, and that was the right thing to say in the circumstances. “I really did rescue a little girl,” he added defensively.

  “How do you do?” answered Stella’s dad, looking slightly embarrassed at his own rudeness. “Name’s Brian. This is Rosie.” He nodded toward Stella’s mum. “But it wasn’t our little girl that you rescued.”

  “No, but it might have been,” said Jake stoutly.

  “Precisely my point,” said Brian. “Any one of them might have fallen in and drowned. I don’t think it was very responsible of you to take them all fishing with you, that’s all. They’re very young. But, as I say, we have forgiven you, so let’s forget about it.”

  “But…” Jake was seething. He looked at Stella for support, but Stella was mouthing and making wild gestures that he couldn’t interpret, except for the last one, where she drew her finger dramatically a
cross her throat. He got the message, and shut up.

  “Edel is just working out how much spaghetti we will need,” Stella’s mum explained, when she noticed Jake looking curiously at the girl doing the sums.

  “Yes,” said Brian. “She’s been having a spot of bother in the maths department, don’t you know, so we get her to do all the kitchen sums, just for practice.”

  “But does she not get them wrong?” Jake asked in a whisper, so as not to insult Edel.

  “Usually,” said Stella’s dad. “But she’s getting better at working out how it goes. The actual answer is not the important part.”

  “Except that you do need the correct answer if it has to do with how much food to cook,” said Jake practically.

  “Not really,” said Brian. “If she gets it wrong by too much, we have leftovers. And if she gets it wrong by too little, we just fill up on bread and butter. The main thing is the working out.”

  “Two and a half kilos,” announced Edel.

  “I don’t think so, Dell,” said her dad kindly. “Have another go. Not even this lot could eat two and a half kilos of spaghetti. I mean, I wouldn’t mind letting them try, but we haven’t got a pot big enough to cook it in.”

  Edel scrunched up her forehead and went on calculating.

  “Half a kilo,” she said in a moment.

  Brian went to the kitchen cupboard and took out a packet of spaghetti. “This is half a kilo, Edel,” he said. Then he took out four more packets. “And all together, this is two and a half kilos.”

  She stared, nodded, and stared again.

  “Now, Edel, do you think we could eat five whole packets of spaghetti for one meal?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Right, so your first answer had to be wrong. Now, what about a single packet? Do you think that would be enough? For all of us? Count Jake in too.”

  “No,” she said again.

  “So what is the right answer to the sum?” Brian asked.

  Edel looked at her piece of paper.

  She looked at the packets of spaghetti.

  “Two packets,” she announced.

  “That’s more like it,” said her dad, and put three packets back in the cupboard

  “But she hasn’t done the sum,” said Jake. “She’s just guessed.”

  “True,” said Brian. “But it was an intelligent guess. That’s a start.”

  Jake shook his head. He thought two packets was probably still too much, but he didn’t argue.

  “Help me with the onions, Jake,” Stella commanded.

  It was true about their kitchen smelling of onions and raw meat. Today at any rate.

  “Huh-way!” screeched Joanne suddenly. “Huh-way!”

  Jake looked up from his onion chopping. Joanne had finished her jigsaw, it seemed, and was having a little celebration. She clapped her hands and cried, “Huh-way!” again.

  “Good for you, Joey!” he said, and she beamed at him.

  When the onions were chopped, Stella said it was time to set the table.

  “But the jigsaw!” objected Jake. “What about Joanne’s jigsaw?”

  Joanne spread her hands out over it protectively.

  “Easy,” said Rosie, taking a thick blanket out of a drawer. “Help me to spread this out, Jake. We just need to lower it gently over the table, so as not to disturb the jigsaw.”

  The children under the table whooped with feigned terror as the blanket was lowered over the table and settled over the sides, darkening their under-table den. They banged their saucepans extra hard and laughed loudly. Jake would have covered his ears against the noise if he hadn’t been holding one end of the blanket.

  After Stella’s mother had smoothed out the blanket very carefully, Jake helped her to spread a bright-red check tablecloth over the blanket.

  “Now, set the table, please, Jake,” said Rosie. “Cutlery is in that drawer there. Joanne will help you, won’t you, Joey?”

  Jake had never been ordered about like this in anyone else’s house, but he did as he was told and he handed spoons to Joanne, as he didn’t think knives or forks would be the safest thing for her. She carried the spoons one at a time from the drawer to the table.

  A head appeared from under the tablecloth as Jake was laying out the cutlery.

  “Hi, Jake,” said the head.

  He could feel its breath on his knee.

  “Hi,” he answered, squinting down. He didn’t know which sister it belonged to.

  The youngest one, the little boy, crawled out from under the table and sat on the floor. He started to try to unbuckle Jake’s sandals as he stood at the table.

  The head laughed.

  “Stoppit!” said Jake, and shook his foot.

  Rosie glared at Jake and scooped the child up.

  “Come on, Fergie,” she said. “Let’s get you into your high chair, where you’ll be safe.”

  “Sorry,” muttered Jake. “I’m not used to so many children.”

  “Why not?” asked Rosie. “Do you not go to school?”

  “Yeah,” said Jake dejectedly. “I do.”

  She’d got him there.

  CHAPTER

  33

  “You abandoned me!” Jake hissed at Stella when they were finally alone together, a couple of hours later, in the back garden.

  They’d all eaten and then there’d been an interminable amount of washing up, even though Stella’s family had a dishwasher, because there were so many odd-shaped things that didn’t fit in the machine.

  “I never did,” said Stella. “I was there every minute.”

  “No, I mean you let me take the blame for the fishing.”

  “Well, it was your idea, Jake, you have to admit that.”

  “But I didn’t want all your sisters there! That wasn’t part of the plan.”

  “And what was I supposed to do with them? Tie them to their beds and leave little bowls of water for them?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jake. “But it had nothing to do with me. I didn’t like the idea of their being there, you may remember. I was nervous.”

  “I see,” said Stella stiffly. “You have a problem with me having a lot of sisters, is that it? Well, I’m sorry, that’s just how it is. I can’t send them back. There isn’t some sort of return counter for unwanted siblings, you know.”

  She turned away from him and started to climb the cherry tree.

  “I know that,” said Jake to her back. Boy, did he know it! But he couldn’t work out how he’d got into this argument. It didn’t seem to be going the way he’d expected. He didn’t know what to say next. All he knew was that he was being wronged. And Stella was the one doing it. “But it’s not fair,” he added. He could hear the whine in his voice. He didn’t like it, but he couldn’t help himself.

  Stella didn’t say anything.

  “I’d better go home,” he said heavily, almost to himself.

  “Yes, maybe you’d better,” said Stella. She’d evidently heard him, even though he thought he’d spoken very quietly.

  She didn’t say goodbye. She didn’t even look around at him. She just went on climbing the cherry tree.

  Jake felt as if there was a stone in his chest. It did sound whiny to say it wasn’t fair, but it was true; it wasn’t. He hadn’t said anything about Stella having too many sisters. He’d only said he hadn’t liked taking them all fishing. And now it seemed he was somehow in trouble with Stella’s parents for doing the very thing he hadn’t wanted to do, and hadn’t actually done. It was Stella who had done it. He wanted to shout at her, but instead he just breathed very hard and stomped to the back door, dashed through the house before anyone saw him, and slipped quietly out the front door.

  All the way home, the words “It’s not fair!” kept ringing in his head.

  He kicked a stone in the gutter, but it was too heavy to roll away and now his toe hurt.

  He wasn’t going back to Stella’s, he decided, as he limped in his garden gate. Not unless she apologized.


  CHAPTER

  34

  Jake’s parents had got one of those slings for carrying Daisy around. His mum thought it might be a good idea for Jake to try it on too.

  Jake knew what this was about. It was about trying to make him take more of an interest in Daisy.

  She had a point.

  So he let his mother slip the sling on over his head and click it into place behind his back, and he watched as she then slid one side of it down off his shoulder, to make space for the baby; very carefully she worked Daisy’s little body in between the fabric of the sling and Jake’s chest, poked her chubby little legs into the legholes, and then raised the shoulder strap of the sling again, and pulled it tight, so that Daisy was snuggled safely against her brother’s chest.

  He tried to look at her, but all he could see was the top of her downy, bald head, her scalp showing pinkly through her lick of pale, fair hair.

  She was heavier than he expected, and he had to make a bow with his arms under her body to support her weight. He could feel her breath hot and damp against his breastbone, and her fast little heartbeat pittered away against his ribs, through his Manchester United top.

  “OK, now, walk,” his mother commanded, and Jake gingerly took a few steps across the kitchen floor.

  “Are your shoulders aching?” she asked him.

  “No,” he said bravely, though they were, “but she kicks.”

  “She’s just exercising her little legs,” his mother said dotingly.

  “Right,” said Jake as she dunted him again in the thighs.

  “OK, I’ll take her now,” said his mother anxiously. “I don’t want to tire you out.”

  But Jake knew she really didn’t trust him to hold the baby carefully enough.

  He stood still as she slid the strap over his shoulder again, and pulled Daisy away from him.

  Daisy yelled and yelled as her feet kicked free of the legholes of the sling. Jake undid the strap at the back and slithered out of the sling, and then quickly put his hands over his ears. Daisy went on yelling and roaring. His mother sang softly to her, and popped her quickly into her rocking chair, to distract her, but the baby went on yelling and waving her arms. She had made little fists of her hands, and she opened and closed them, opened and closed them frantically in the direction of Jake.