1
Rachel
‘There are things I don’t know. But I know people are dead, I know I killed them and I know it all started the day I realised I was invisible.’
‘Mrs Edwards.’ Her chair creaks. She must have shifted position. ‘Do you think you could take us back to that? To realising you were invisible?’
‘I can.’
Of course I can. Like most people, if my Mastermind specialist subject was myself, I’d win hands down. I look about me, try to settle. They’ve done their best to make this room look like an ordinary lounge in an ordinary house – impressionist landscape in a frame on the wall, me on a sofa, her in the armchair opposite. Neutral shades. But there’s a recording device on the coffee table next to the box of tissues and the jug and two glasses of water, so I’m not fooled.
‘When you’re ready,’ she says. ‘Take your time.’
Her eyes are blue. The colour of sea on white sand. I want to run in but I’m not sure I won’t drown in the cold water. I’ve forgotten her name. I know she’s telling me to take my time so I’ll give them what they want, but I’m here to give them what they want. It was me that made the call after all.
I glance up from fists clenched around a screwed-up tissue on my lap. ‘No one wants to be invisible, do they?’
Blue Eyes doesn’t answer. I obviously didn’t say that out loud. So much is unclear. Words spoken, words thought. What we hear, what we pick up by instinct. How we achieve affinity with another human being.
‘It was a Saturday night,’ I say. ‘I know that because it was our Katie’s party. We usually get a takeaway on Saturdays. Chinese, normally…’
I tell her how I got home from work that day: sore-eyed, heavy-boned, dog tired; how I put the plates and dishes from the side of the sink into the dishwasher, switched it on and put a cloth round. How I emptied the washing machine and put the clothes over the drying rack. There’s precious little chance of Mark spotting a load waiting to be hung out. Frankly, if he ever needed to find a saucepan, which is unlikely, you’d have to draw him a map.
‘We had quarter crispy duck.’ I look up at Blue Eyes, but only for a second. ‘Sweet and sour pork, Szechuan king prawn, egg-fried rice and a bag of prawn crackers. We have the same every other week. Mark usually goes for it in the car. We didn’t have crispy beef that week because Katie wasn’t eating, what with it being her party.’
Blue Eyes jots something down. Maybe I’ve put her in the mood for chicken chow mein. Why these thoughts come to me at inappropriate moments, I don’t know. Stress, I should imagine.
She looks up, tips her head back a bit. She has what I’d call natural authority. Regal, if you know what I mean. She did tell me her name, she did, but no, it’s gone. ‘Can you tell me when this was, Mrs Edwards?’ That hushed, patient voice you hear them use in police dramas. She scans the report on her knee but I’ve got nothing to hide anymore. I’ve already told it all to the other two, in the other room. The ones in uniform.
‘This is going back to June,’ I say.
‘That’s Saturday the twenty-second?’ She glances up from my statement and suddenly I’m not as sure as I was.
‘Or was it the week before?’ I say. ‘Hang on, no. Sorry. Let me just… It was the week before… before the girl… Jo. Joanna. I know that because… Hang on, sorry. Sorry, just let me…’
The trickle of water. I look up. Blue Eyes is holding out a glass.
‘Here.’
‘Thank you.’ I take the glass and drink. The water is cool in my throat.
‘So, your daughter had a party?’
‘Yes. We’d been banished from the kitchen, so we ate on trays while we watched a film.’
‘And then?’
‘And then the ad break came on.’
‘And?’
‘And Mark said, do you fancy a coffee? Which means, can you make us a cup of coffee? Twenty-seven years into a marriage, you get used to what your other half means when he says something, and it must be a year since Mark’s made me a coffee. Or a tea, for that matter. So anyway, I said I’d make it and he said, you sure? And I said, course. The dance we do, like, you know.’
I raise my eyebrows at Blue Eyes, but her face stays the same: neutral, like the colours in this room. Warm beige with a hint of encouragement. Again, I’m not sure what I’ve said and what I haven’t, what she can hear, what she’s picking up by instinct or police training. Over sixty per cent of communication is non-verbal. I read that in… oh, somewhere or other.
‘So, you made a cup of coffee for yourself and Mark, your husband?’
‘Sorry, yes.’
I carry on. Carry on regardless, carry on camping, carry on up the Khyber. How Katie had asked if she could have a do and I’d said no more than ten because our house is small. I said I’d chip in for the booze – I’d already given her a cheque towards her holiday in Ibiza so I thought that was fair enough. We used to get the neighbours over for barbecues all the time, and our mates from the pub, and Lisa and Patrick, of course, before they split up. We used to put ice in this big plastic frog bucket we had for camping trips and put all the beers in there with a bottle opener tied to the handle with string. Funny the little details that come back to you, but my heart’s not in anything like that anymore. And anyway, when I was growing up, you had your eighteenth and that was that. Katie’s eighteenth cost me a month’s wages. She wanted to hire out the cricket club off Moughland Lane so she could invite the best part of a hundred mates. She’s very sociable, is Katie. Anyway, it was a good do; Kieron DJ’d for it. He played all the old tunes and every single one of us danced the night away, so I’m not saying I regret it. It’s probably the last time I can remember feeling properly happy, although that could have been Kieron making me do a Jägerbomb. But even now I know Katie’ll be angling for another big bash for her twenty-first, because they all do now and if you don’t give them something decent, you’re a tight-arse.
Blue Eyes is making a note. I have no idea how much of that lot made it out of my mouth.
‘Mrs Edwards.’ A warm but businesslike smile from dark red lips. ‘If we could get to the moment you say started things… the moment you say you became invisible?’
Sounds like she’s prompting me. Mark says I drift off topic or off altogether. Get on with it, woman, he’s started saying lately, and I’ll realise I’m either rattling on about something or I’ve stopped halfway through a sentence. He’ll be there going, what? And I’ll have literally no idea what I was talking about. Sorry, I’ll say. It’s gone. And he’ll shake his head like I’m beyond hope. Which I am. I don’t suppose he’ll be shaking his head at me anymore. Not now.
‘Sorry,’ I say to Blue Eyes. ‘I was in the hallway, wasn’t I?’
I can picture it as if it were last week, so I don’t forget everything, apparently: I can see Katie and her mates through the finger-smudged glass panel of our kitchen door. The music is throbbing against the walls. Clouds of cigarette smoke. There are about twenty kids in there, not ten as we agreed, but it’s too late to make a fuss now, so I just stand there like a robot with dead batteries, one hand on the door handle. They’re laughing and shrieking the way young people do. The French doors are open to the back garden.