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‘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, cryingit’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 leasthesaw 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.
