Chapter 1
ONE
KATE
Present day, London
‘I’ve turned invisible,’ I announce to myself. ‘I’m Kate Daniels, the amazing invisible woman! I could rob a bank, or spy on my ex, or sneak into the cinema without a ticket…’
I’m pondering the exciting possibilities of my new state of existence as I stand at the side of a busy London street, drenched head to toe in filthy gutter water. It’s cold and yucky and everywhere. I couldn’t be wetter if I’d jumped into a canal and done the YMCA dance with all the actions.
I’m at a bus stop, trying to get home from my job as an office temp.
The bus, however, had different ideas, and sped straight past me despite my very obviously upraised hand.
It didn’t even slow down, just splashed.
This morning, the coffee shop lady ignored me for five whole minutes, and a man I’d worked with for the last two weeks asked me if it was my first day.
The only explanation for all of this is that I’m now invisible.
I stare at my own trembling fingers. I can still see them, but that means nothing.
‘You could watch people’s PIN numbers when they go to the cash machine,’ says a voice from behind me.
‘Or move stuff around in their houses so they think they’ve got a poltergeist!’ adds another.
‘You could hang around in football changing rooms and try to look at Travis Kelce’s bum – he’s well fit, him!’
I whirl around, soggy hair dripping onto my just-as-soggy coat, and see a gang of teenaged girls in green and white school uniform.
They’re maybe fifteen, and all now dissolving into fits of giggles.
‘Perv!’ one says, poking her friend in the belly.
‘Anyway, she’s old, she’s not interested in Travis Kelce’s arse! ’
‘I very much am!’ I claim defiantly. ‘Or at least I might be… who is he anyway? Plus, I’m not old. I’m forty!’
‘You’re older than my mum,’ the belly-poker deadpans, meeting my eyes in a way that says she’s done a risk assessment, and decided she could take me in a fight. ‘And anyway, I suppose I can’t really tell how old you are, what with you being invisible and all…’
They snigger en masse, and I wonder what the collective noun for a group of teenaged girls is.
Maybe a murder, like crows. Or a plague, like locusts.
‘An annoyance,’ I say, again out loud. The girls exchange looks, and one of them makes the universal fingers-at-side-of-skull gesture that implies someone has a screw loose.
‘Yeah, right,’ the ringleader says, and goes back to her phone. The rest follow suit, and all of a sudden I’m dismissed. Irrelevant.
Invisible.
I wring my ponytail out, and stare behind them at the timetable on the bus stop.
Great news – there isn’t another one for an hour.
I step a bit closer to the girls, just to prove that I’m not intimidated.
I actually am, but it’s important to keep up the act.
I remember being that age, hanging around with my pal Lucy, trying to look so much tougher than we felt.
‘Why don’t you piss off, you mental case?’ the alpha female says. Her face is set in a surly grimace, and I’m shocked and slightly scared at the venom in her voice. She’s probably called something hideous like Maud or Veruca, and it’s soured her from birth. ‘You’re dripping on my iPhone!’ she adds.
I glance down and see that she’s right. I shuffle back, and embarrass myself by uttering a weak apology.
There’s nothing else for it, I have to leave.
I might get stabbed otherwise, or bludgeoned to death by an annoyance of iPhones.
I’d be an urban legend. There might even be memes on the internet.
‘Be careful out there,’ worried mothers would whisper to their kids, ‘don’t get killed by the sharp corner of an Apple device like that poor invisible woman did! ’
I briefly toy with grabbing the phone and running.
I have a bus pass and can’t afford a cab, but she probably has an Uber account, and I could ride home in triumph.
But then I might get arrested, and it would be a lame way to end up in jail.
I’ll save that for something big, like stealing a Krispy Kreme doughnut from the display case in Tesco.
It’s early summertime in London, which sounds magical.
Like something out of a musical filled with romance, cartoon bluebirds tweeting around our heroine’s hopeful face as she tap dances through Hyde Park.
The reality is a bit less magical. It’s been raining for days now, grey skies blanketing out the sun, drains flooding and triangular warnings on the maps every evening.
Nice weather for ducks, as my mum used to say.
Sadly I’m not a duck. I think being a duck might be fun.
More fun than ambling through the crowded streets of a big city getting poked in the eye by other people’s umbrellas.
It serves me right for being tall, and for ambling.
You’re not allowed to amble in London. You have to dash around, looking all confident and busy, like you simply must get to NATO headquarters in time to avert a global crisis.
I make my way past gift shops with rain-battered awnings shielding their plastic statues of Big Ben, and pause outside a crowded bar. The windows are all steamed up, but I can see it’s packed. Couples, friends, fun. I vaguely remember those things.
The girls at the bus stop have got me thinking about Lucy, who I haven’t seen for a few years now. We started to lose touch when she had her kids, and I got married. Life got busy, and we drifted into being Facebook friends who communicate mainly through blue thumbs-up symbols.
It seems like a lot of my friendships ended up that way, after I was married. All wrapped up in our own lives. She might be the closest thing I have left to a friend.
On impulse, I get out my phone and dial her number, relieved when it goes to voicemail as I have no idea what I’d say. ‘Just met some hideous mean girls at a bus stop and it reminded me of us, even though we weren’t actually mean’?
Maybe she’ll call me back later, and we can arrange to go for a drink. I’d like that, I decide. I’d like to not be invisible, and maybe I need to make more effort to reconnect with people who will actually see me.
I put my phone away, and see a homeless man who is sheltering in the doorway with his dog, a Staffie with a big smile on its face. I have ￡3.29 left in loose change, and I hand it over. ‘Sorry it’s not more,’ I say regretfully. ‘That’s my last.’
‘Then it counts for more, love,’ he replies, as I pat the dog. ‘Widow’s penny and all that.’
I move on, realising that my soaking feet are taking me towards Charing Cross Road without me even telling them to.
It’s changed a lot in the years since I was a kid and my grandmother used to bring me here to visit the bookshops.
It always felt like a magical place, full of wonder and possibility – just like books themselves.
These days I have a Kindle, because it’s more convenient and because it’s sometimes cheaper, but the call of a good old-fashioned paperback is still there.
I browse the window displays, smiling in particular at a place that sells children’s books.
It’s full of unicorns and rainbows, so pretty and optimistic.
The very opposite of me, I realise, catching my own reflection in the rain-streaked glass.
I’m not invisible after all, it seems. I’m a gloomy-looking woman approaching middle age. One who badly needs a haircut. Uggh. I move on. I have no children in my life to buy books for, and that is a wound always ready to reopen.
The shop next door looks warm and inviting, a lovely display of classics in the window.
Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Little Women.
I smile, remembering reading that one when I was young, how it swept me away into the world of Jo March and her sisters.
I may not have any family left, and my budget might be non-existent, but I can’t resist going in anyway.
Inside, it’s dimly lit, and smells vaguely of incense and dust. I inhale as I lurk in the doorway, and let out an enormous sneeze that makes the assistant glance up in shock. She’s a well put-together lady in her sixties, long grey hair and a necklace with an evil-eye pendant.
‘Come in out of the rain!’ she says. ‘Nice weather for ducks, isn’t it?’
Weird. I was just thinking about that. My mum is long gone, but maybe this is a sign that I’ve come to the right place.
‘I… probably won’t be buying a book today,’ I tell her, thinking of my bank account and how I really can’t make any impulse purchases. I can’t bear the thought of being welcomed in under false pretences.
‘It’s quite all right to sit down and read one, though,’ she replies, gesturing to one of the sofas. Two people are already here, their noses buried in their pages.
I mutter my thanks, and see that there is a big coat stand in the corner.
I peel my coat off, shivering slightly as the clammy fabric skims over my wrists, and hang it up.
It’ll make a puddle on the floor, I know, and vow to clean it up before I leave.
No idea how – maybe I’ll just mop it with my hair. It wouldn’t look much worse.
I’ve been neglecting myself since He Who Shall Not Be Named walked out on me.
Or Shithead, as I sometimes affectionately call him.
My ex-husband left me broken in so many different ways it’s hard to count them.
After years of him chipping away at my self-esteem, making me feel useless and ever-so-slightly crazy, he finally announced that he’d had enough of my ‘glass half empty’ approach to life, and disappeared off into the sunset with a woman he met at a work conference.
They now live happily ever after in Basildon.
Or maybe not that happily, as he still occasionally drunk-messages me on a Friday night, looking for a booty call.