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She backed up, still holding the front door open. ‘Come in then, if you’re coming.’
I’ve known Lisa since we were kids – jigsaws and Sindy dolls, primary school, secondary, first boyfriends, first time getting drunk, borrowing each other’s clothes, make-up, you name it. Even got pregnant at the same time – my first, her second. Kieron and Jodi. Both her girls are at uni now. Jodi went off to Leeds the year before Kieron to do modern languages and Kieron went to Goldsmiths to do fine art last year after his foundation. I thought Katie would leave home this year with her being so academic, but she said she wanted to do a gap year, which so far seems to mean seventy-two zillion hours alternating between Instagram, YouTube and Netflix. Oh, and getting bladdered with her mates twice a week. I’m not sure she’ll ever go to uni now to be honest. What a waste.
Lisa brought us a coffee. It wasn’t quite warm enough to sit out, so we went to sit in her conservatory, where Archie had a quick sniff before curling up for a doze. ‘So, what’s new?’
I dived straight in, told her about how I’d become the invisible woman.
‘I was so shocked it gave me a nosebleed,’ I said.
I’d expected her to tell me I was mad or to call an ambulance, but she didn’t. She was nodding her agreement before I’d even finished.
‘I know exactly what you mean,’ she said. ‘I was in a café the other day and the guy served the woman behind me in the queue. Behind me, can you believe that? He literally looked through me to her as if I was made of glass.’
‘What did you do?’
She eyeballed me and raised her forefinger. ‘I said, “Oi, ferret face! What am I then, chopped liver?”’
‘You never did.’ I laughed.
‘I didn’t, no, but when he took my order, I told him how kind he was to give me a complementary cappuccino, that I appreciated the gesture.’
‘He gave you a free coffee?’
‘He did then. He was too embarrassed not to.’
‘Bloody hell, Lis.’ I was full-on laughing by then. Lisa has this way of building her routines until you’re helpless on the couch. She shows no mercy; won’t stop even if you tell her to – especially if you tell her to.
A determined expression setting in on her face, she put her coffee down on the smallest of her nest of pine side tables.
‘I was furious,’ she started. ‘Costs them ten pence to make a coffee – it’s a bloody licence to print money – and I reckon after all I’ve already been through, with periods and pregnancy and torn lady bits from childbirth and spaniel’s ears from breastfeeding and mopping up shit and sick and you name it I’ve cleaned it, and all the invisible woman-hours spent running a hotel cum counselling service single-handed for non-paying guests, and reduced job prospects and low pay and divorce from a randy dog man-child, if on top of that I’m now going to be having the sweats and the rages and the memory loss and this bloody extra tyre I seem to have acquired that seems to be made entirely from porridge, not to mention the face, oh, the face, the sodding eyebrows on it, disappearing as fast as the bloody beard seems to be growing, do you know, I now have to push down my facial hair with moisturiser every sodding morning, literally smear it down and hope to God it doesn’t fluff back up…’ She breathed, finally, eyebrows shooting up. ‘So I reckon I deserve a free frigging coffee.’
She cracked a smile and we both chuckled.
‘I mean,’ she added. ‘Backlit, I look like Robert Redford.’
I wiped my eyes, feeling better already. Five minutes with Lisa’s like a shot in the arm. ‘I can’t get out of a chair without making a noise these days.’
‘Just be thankful you can still get out of a chair. Woman down the road got stuck in the bath last week. She had to call 999. She’s only fifty-eight and thank God she’d taken her phone in with her, but talk about embarrassing… Pass me a towel, officer, isn’t in it.’
Hysterical. God, I miss her.
Once we’d stopped laughing, she had a good moan about her ex, Patrick, a headmaster, who, in a fit of originality, had left her for a young geography teacher with a pierced belly button called Caz – the woman, not the belly button – before we came back around to where we’d started, i.e. me moaning about Mark.
‘He might not look at you like he used to,’ Lisa said. ‘But at least he’s a decent bloke. Unlike Patdick, he’s actually there.’
‘In body if not in spirit.’ I regretted saying that straight away. Yes, you could be lonely in a marriage, but Lisa was lonely full stop and she’d always liked Mark, always had a soft spot for him. And before Patrick left, he made sure he drove in the final nail by telling her he didn’t find her attractive anymore and that he only had one life. Talk about kicking her when she was down. It was as if he’d died, she said at the time. Except that he hadn’t and she wanted to kill him. And all the jokes in the world couldn’t hide the longing in her for someone to grow old with now that her girls were off living their own lives. All she had was the smoke and mirrors of gags and laughter to hide her pain, her fears, the yawning abyss of loneliness.
‘Like most of us,’ I say, and give Blue Eyes a smile.
She almost smiles back. ‘And did you tell Lisa that you’d read or felt you’d read the man in the park? That you’d understood him by instinct?’
‘I did, actually.’
‘And how did she respond?’
I tell Blue Eyes that, again, Lisa didn’t seem at all bothered.
‘That’s a skill you’ve been practising your whole life,’ was all she said, as if telepathy were the most natural thing in the world.
