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He comes nearer, slowly, like a child. ‘And then, well, I see the woman I kept out till midnight so it would be her birthday before I asked her to marry me. And I didn’t really think she would but she said,All right then, you’re on.’ His eyes have started to shine; mine too, I can feel them – how hopeless we both are.
He sits next to me on our son’s bed. I feel the weight of him, the warmth of him. He’s not looking at me anymore, he’s looking at the knot of our hands on my lap.
‘I see the woman who hurt my fingers squeezing them when she brought my beautiful boy into the world, who did it again when she gave me my crackpot daughter. I see a woman with her nose covered in flour when I came in from work, making biscuits with the kids and no dinner for me.’ He stops. We are both crying now – we can’t help it. He is telling us the story of our life so that we can look at what we’ve lost and be thankful for all that we still have.
‘Don’t say any more,’ I manage.
‘I want to.’
‘I know. Just sit here with me for a minute. Let’s sit.’
I lean my head on his shoulder. He puts his arm around me. Simple things.
‘I see the woman on the phone that terrible night,’ he whispers. ‘I see her break into tiny pieces and I know in that moment that I can never put her back together.’
‘You see all that?’
‘Every time I look at you. Every time I look at you, you’re everything you’ve ever been in every moment we’ve been together, and I see that, I do – I see all of it and it’s just that for a time there I didn’t want to. I couldn’t cope with seeing it, Rach. And I’m so sorry.’
‘There’s no need to say sorry to me, love. I didn’t see you either, did I? Not really.’ I kiss his cheek and we cry fat tears together because at last we can, and it’s tough, the toughest, but it’s better than crying alone.
‘Let’s go for that drink now,’ I say. ‘I’ll finish my essay tomorrow.’
It’s for my bereavement counselling course. If it continues to go as well as it has been, I should qualify next year. As I said to Amanda, I’m pretty good at making connections. I’ve had a lot of practice. And it wasn’t just me who felt invisible. There are many people who live their lives thinking no one sees them: the homeless, the elderly, the poor, the lonely, the heartbroken, the grieving, the mentally ill, the disabled, those who haven’t found their voice, those who haven’t discovered what they’re good at, those who shun praise and attention, those who work quietly with love and patience. I could go on. I want to connect to all of them. I want to connect to you. I want to tell you that whoever you are, I care about you. I am interested in the troubled tickings of your heart; I want to know what makes your soul ache, what makes it sing. I want to tell you that all our souls ache sometimes, sometimes sing. I want to tell you that love helps. I want to tell you that love heals. I want to take your hand in mine. I want to tell you that I see you.
Epilogue
Saturday night. A middle-aged couple cuddle up in front of a film, takeaway boxes stacked on a tray at their feet. Their daughter is away at university. The house feels empty without her, but they are making plans for their first holiday alone together in over twenty years. If you saw them from the street, you would see a peaceful, happy couple, warm and safe in their home. Lucky them, you might think, so close after all these years. You would have no idea what they have been through, how strong they have to be every day just to keep going. But no one sees them. No one is watching them. Not anymore. On the street, all is still. It is October, cold, no night to be out.
But peopleareout, despite the chill, the hint of mizzle in the autumn air. Down in the town, a homeless man shuffles along the bank of the canal. It is shadowy here. From the bridge above, the reflection of a street light elongates, yellow and shimmering in the water, the amber glow of the moored-up gas-lit barges. He sleeps beneath the bridge these days, in a dirty Oxfam suit and a sleeping bag he found behind the pub where he used to drink. He doesn’t go there or to the betting shop anymore. Even if he had any coins left to feed into the machines or buy himself a pint of bitter, they would drop through the holes in his tattered trouser pockets.
He is hungry. He is so hungry that, there on the towpath, he digs into the rubbish bin in the hope of finding some food. There are a few plastic bottles, fast-food containers, a half-eaten pasty, which he devours in three animal bites. The meat and pastry are cold and soggy with rain, but it tastes all right. Further in, an apple core, which he slips into his pocket. The rubbish piles up on the wet gravel. Almost at the bottom of the trash, a supermarket bag ignites a spark of hope. But in it are only writhing maggots, left by the fishermen who come here at weekends. In disgust, he throws it into the canal, where it floats, then fills, then sinks. If he were to dive in after that bag, those maggots, he might see the glint of a blade in the dark depths of the water, a knife lying flat on the canal bed. A Spanish hunting knife, the type you’d find in a tourist shop, unsheathed from its brown patterned leather case, washed clean of blood. But he doesn’t dive in; why on earth would he? Instead, he carries on pulling out the litter, finding nothing more.
Leaving the scattered rubbish on the path, he shuffles back to his makeshift home and sits on the decrepit foldable picnic chair he salvaged from a skip and repaired with a coat hanger. Here under the bridge, at least it is dry. He lights the gas lamp one of the barge dwellers gave him for light and warmth, takes a fiery swig from his hip flask. From his breast pocket he plucks the front page of an old edition of the local newspaper, whose headline he reads most days, the name he knows as well as his own bones in bold black capitals above the picture of the woman whose almost daily cruelty crushed him up so tightly he has never been able to unfurl.
Ingrid Taylor given three life sentences.
He felt shock, yes, but not surprise when he first read that headline. What was a surprise was that Ingrid appeared to have had his friend Rachel, the barmaid from the Barley Mow, in her sights, had waged a hate campaign against her and driven her to a breakdown. He has no idea why she would do this, but he knows that she could – that she is capable. He knows that this was what she did to him. People like her leave bodies behind them on the road, literally and figuratively.
He folds the page back into its pre-made creases, returns it to his inside pocket and pats the neat square it makes over his heart. Along the canal path, a couple of young lovers are taking a stroll, pointing out the group of coloured barges, there, where the canal breaks into a fork. They don’t say hello. They don’t see him. No one sees him.
At the other end of the canal, the sandstone railway bridge, black with soot, shudders under the beat of the train that speeds away towards Liverpool Lime Street. It is the same train a young woman catches on her way back to university after a visit home. She too is outside on this cold autumn night. She has taken a bus from her student lodgings to Sefton Park and now stands on the grass, surrounded by trees in the near pitch darkness. In her numb, gloveless fingers is a white sheet of A4: a typed letter, signed in biro. Her therapist told her to write letters during her anger-management counselling. Anger is common in grief – the girl knows this now. She knows too how it can inhabit a person, how it can turn to hate, how that hate will find a way out, no matter what. She and her mum have spoken about this. But she is not the girl she was back then. She doesn’t know who that girl was, but it wasn’t her.
There is no one about. No late-night walkers on the path that runs around the lake. But even so, she feels self-conscious at what she is about to do. It is time to fulfil a promise, her promise to a dead girl. She kneels on the damp grass and clears her throat.
‘Dear Jo,’ she whispers aloud, her throat already closing with tears. ‘I am so, so sorry for what I did to you. If I could turn back time, I would. I was in a terrible place. My brother was everything to me, and when he was killed, my world fell apart. My family exploded and there was nothing left. My mum wouldn’t speak to me, my dad was never there. I was so lonely, Jo, and I was so angry, but I know that doesn’t excuse what I did. I only took the knife from the garage because I wanted to protect myself. After what happened to Kieron, I thought it would keep me safe. I was stupid, I was wrong. The thought of my beautiful brother on the wrong end of a knife that night and me using one on someone else, some other innocent person, is too horrible to think about. I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m not saying I’m a victim. All I know is, every single day I think about how, if I hadn’t taken that knife out with me, what happened would never have happened. I was so angry. And when I saw you talking to my mum, linking arms with her, laughing, I just freaked. I was jealous, raging. I was mad. I should never have come after you. I was only going to have a go at you for talking to my mum; I swear I never meant to hurt you. I only wanted to scare you and I don’t even know why. I’d been drinking and I know I did scare you. I scared myself. But when I read that you’d died, I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it. I know others were killed but I had nothing to do with those, I swear. But I’m so sorry for you. I’m sorry for your parents and everyone you loved and who loved you. Please forgive me, Jo. I am truly better now and I will never, ever carry a weapon with me as long as I live. I’d rather die than kill. I wish I could go back and change what I did, but I can’t.
‘Rest in peace, Jo.
‘Yours, Katie.’
Crying violently now, she stands and digs out the cigarette lighter from her jeans pocket. A flick of the cog, and the flame licks at the corner of the paper, spreads quickly. At the last, she drops it to the wet grass, where it flashes, consumes itself and dies. A gust of wind sends it rolling, then dancing away in black, flaking wisps.
‘Goodbye, Jo.’
She turns and walks slowly back to the pathway, her boots sucking at the soaked lawn. There is no one about. No one would see her if there were. She is lost in the darkness. Invisible.
