What Not to Do If You Turn Invisible. Ross Welford
I wish you joy and happiness
On your very first birthday
And in neat, round letters it’s handwritten: To my Boo, happy first birthday from Mummy xoxox
Boo was Mum’s pet name for me. Gram said she didn’t want to use it herself because it was special to me and Mum, and that’s cool. It’s like we have a secret, me and Mum, a thing we share, only us.
The nice thing about the card is that it has picked up the tiniest bit of the T-shirt’s smell, so as well as smelling of paper it, too, smells of Mum.
I was thinking about this, sitting in Great-gran’s room, when Gram interrupted my thoughts.
‘Are you coming, Ethel, or are you going to daydream? And why the long face? It’s a party!’
I’ll skip through it quickly because it was about as exciting as you would expect … apart from another weird thing that happened towards the end.
GREAT-GRAN’S PARTY
Guests:
About twenty people. Apart from me and a care assistant called Chastity, everyone else was properly grown up or ancient.
What I wore:
A lilac dress with flowers on it with a matching Alice band. Gram thought I looked lovely. I didn’t. Girls who look like me should just be allowed to wear jeans and T-shirts until the whole gawky-skinny-spotty thing runs itself out. As it is, I looked like a cartoon version of an ugly girl in a pretty dress.
What I said:
‘Hello, thank you for coming … Yes, I’m nearly thirteen now … No, I haven’t decided my GCSEs yet … No, [shy, fake grin] no boyfriend yet …’ (Can I just say at this point: why do old people think they can quiz you about boyfriends and stuff? Is it some right you acquire as soon as you hit seventy?)
What I did:
I handed round food. Gram had asked me what she should serve, but my suggestion of Jelly Bellys and Doritos had been ignored. Instead there were olives, bits of bacon wrapped round prunes (yuk – whose idea was that?), and teeny-tiny cucumber sandwiches. The chances of me sneaking much of this into my own mouth were slim to zero.
What Great-gran did:
She sat in the centre of the room, smiling a bit vacantly and nodding as people came up to her and congratulated her. I was thinking she was not ‘all there’, not aware of what was going on. As it turned out, I was wrong about that.
The photograph:
A photographer from the Whitley News Guardian took a picture of me and Gram and Great-gran next to a large cake. He had a tiny digital camera instead of a big one with a flash that goes whumph! I was a bit disappointed: like, if you’re going to be in the local newspaper, it should feel dramatic, like a special moment, you know? (Irony alert: as it happens, that photograph is going to turn out to have very dramatic consequences.
Anyway, Mrs Abercrombie was at the party with Geoffrey, her three-legged Yorkshire terrier, who was doing his bad-tempered snarly-gnarly thing – and I have a new theory about this. I think the reason he’s so snappy is because she never lets him run around. She is forever holding him in one arm. I’d be annoyed if I was forever pressed into Mrs Abercrombie’s enormous chest.
Gram looked nice. ‘A veritable picture’, as Revd Henry Robinson said.
She sipped from a glass of fizzy water and smiled gently whenever people spoke to her, which is about as far as Gram’s displays of happiness go. She hardly ever laughs – ‘Ladies do not guffaw, Ethel. It’s bad enough in a man. In a woman it is most unseemly.’
(Personally, though, I have my own idea and it has nothing to do with being ‘unseemly’. I think, deep inside, Gram is sad about something. Not me, not Great-gran, but something else. It could just be Mum, but I think it’s more.)
The vicar was the last to leave. He played ‘Happy Birthday’ on the piano then a classical piece off by heart, and everyone clapped. Old Stanley clapped very enthusiastically, and shouted, ‘Bravo! Bravo’, until one of the nurses calmed him down like a naughty child, which I thought was a bit mean.
Gram seemed flustered as soon as Revd Robinson had gone, and there were only me, Gram and Great-gran left as the care assistants were clearing up.
‘Goodness me, look at the time, Mum! That was quite a shindig!’ ‘Shindig’ is a Gram sort of word, meaning party, but it was only one in the afternoon. I think parties must get earlier and earlier the older you get.
Honestly, if I hadn’t already suspected something was up, then Gram’s bad acting would have alerted me. She couldn’t wait to get away.
Anyway, the ‘look at the time’ remark seemed to have an effect on Great-gran, like switching off a light. The distant gaze returned to her face along with the constant nodding, and that was that.
Well, pretty much.
As I leant in to kiss Great-gran’s papery cheek, she whispered in my ear, ‘Come back, hinny.’
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘We’ll be back soon.’
Great-gran’s eyes darted to Gram, who was halfway to the door, and it’s the way she did it: I knew instantly what she meant.
Come back without her is what she meant.
That is the weird thing that I told you about. That, and the whole tiger thing.
Just what was going on? And whatever it was, why was Gram so worried about it?
We drove home. Two miles in which I could ask Gram, ‘What did Great-gran mean by saying “tiger” and “pussycat”, Gram?’
Except I couldn’t because from the moment we were alone in the car, Gram kept up a near-constant chatter that could almost have been a deliberate attempt to stop me from asking the question that I was dying to ask.
The Revd Henry Robinson this, Mrs Abercrombie that, sausage rolls not heated through even though I asked them, the beautiful English spoken by ‘that nice foreign girl’ (Chastity), even the pattern on the carpet (‘I do think swirls on a carpet are just a little common’), and so on … And on.
Honestly, I don’t think she even paused for breath.
I would have no chance to use the sunbed today, I knew that. I needed a time when Gram would be out for a good while, and that wouldn’t happen till the next day, when Gram would be busy with church and one of her committees.
I’d have the morning to myself. So even though I was a bit confused by what was going on with Great-gran and Gram, I was excited, because I was going to get to try my latest acne-fighting tactic very soon.
Sunbeds, by the way, very definitely fall into the category of things that Gram would describe as ‘rather common’. There are plenty of things that Gram thinks are ‘rather common’: