What Not to Do If You Turn Invisible

That’s when I know she doesn’t believe me.

Why would she? It sounds completely demented. Gram doesn’t believe me because she cannot see me, and if she cannot see that I actually am invisible, then why on earth should she believe me?

It’s crazy. ‘Preposterous’ even, to use one of Gram’s favoured expressions.

I wait. I have told her everything. I have told her the whole truth and nothing but. All I can do is wait to see what she says.

What Gram says is this:

‘Ethel, my pet. It’s hard growing up. You’re at a very tricky crossroads in your life …’

Oo-kaay, I think. Don’t like the sound of where this is going, but go on …

‘I think many of us feel invisible at some point in our lives, Ethel. As though everyone is just ignoring us. I know I did at your age. I did my best to fit in, but sometimes my best was not enough …’

This is getting worse. Can there be anything worse than a sympathetic response that completely and utterly misses the point?

I’m struck dumb, sitting there listening to Gram drone on about ‘feeling like you are invisible’ while I watch my teacup magically rise and fall to my lips.

Then I look down and gasp in horror. There’s the tea that I have just drunk, floating in a little misshapen lump where my stomach is.

My gasp causes Gram to pause.

‘What is it, darling?’

‘My … my t-tea! I can see it!’ No sooner have I said this than I realise how daft it sounds.

‘I beg your pardon, Ethel?’

‘Oh, erm … nothing. Sorry. I, erm, I missed what you were saying.’

‘Listen, I’m sorry you’re feeling this way, but we’ll have to talk about it when I get back this afternoon. It’s the treasurer’s report next and Arthur Tudgey is sick, so I have to deliver it. I have to go back in.’

And I’ve had enough. That’s it.

‘No, Gram. You’re not listening. I really have disappeared. I don’t mean in an imaginary way. I mean really. Really really – not metaphorically. My body is not visible. My face, my hair, my hands, my feet – they are actually invisible. If you could see me, well … you wouldn’t be able to see me.’

Then it hits me.

‘FaceTime! Gram, let’s FaceTime and then you’ll see!’

I’m not even sure Gram can do FaceTime, but I’m sounding hysterical anyway.

I’m trying to put this the best way I can but it’s coming out all wrong, and the tone of her voice has gone from sympathetic and concerned to something a little bit harder, a bit stern.

‘Ethel. I think you have gone far enough with this, darling. We’ll talk later. Goodbye.’

It’s me who hangs up this time.

Think back to the last time you were on your own. How alone were you really?

Was there someone fairly close by? A parent? A teacher? A friend? If you were in trouble, could you have called someone to help?

OK, so I’m not exactly Miss Popularity at school, but it’s not like people actually dislike me. Well, I don’t think so anyway.

‘There is absolutely nothing wrong with being “quiet and reserved”,’ said Gram when she read this on a school report once (and until then I had never thought there was, actually, or that anyone would think there might be).

‘Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought stupid than to open it and remove all doubt,’ she added in a typically Gram kind of way.

Gram has always been – to use a phrase she is fond of herself – ‘very proper’.

She is fond of saying that a civilised, cultured Englishwoman should know how to behave in every situation.

Honestly, she has books on stuff like this. Books with titles like Modern Manners in the Twentieth Century. They’re funny, usually, but most of them seem to have been written when Gram was alive, so they’re not that ancient. They include things like:

What is the correct form of address when meeting a divorced duchess for the first time?

Or:

How much does one leave as a tip for the household staff after staying at a friend’s country house?

If you didn’t know Gram, I daresay it could make her seem buttoned-up and strait-laced – the insistence on writing thank-you letters within three days, for example, or always asking permission before calling an adult by their first name. Actually it’s just about being polite to people and that’s quite sweet – only, Gram takes it further than anyone else I’ve ever met.

She once gave me a lesson in shaking hands.

Yes, shaking hands.

‘Eugh, dead haddock, Ethel, dead haddock!’ That was Gram’s description of a limp handshake. ‘You must grip more. Ow! Not that much! And I’m here, Ethel! Over here: look me in the face when you shake hands. And are you pleased to see me? Well, tell your face. And … what do you say?’

‘Hi?’

‘Hi? Hi? Where on earth do you think you are? California? If one is meeting for the first time, it’s “How do you do?” Now show me: a firm, brief handshake, eye contact, a smile and “How do you do?”’

(I actually tried this when I met Mr Parker for the first time. I could tell he was pleased, but also a bit, well, unnerved, like it was the first time any student had greeted him like that – which it may well have been. Mr Parker has been super-nice to me ever since, which Gram would say is proof that it works, and I think is probably just because Mr Parker quite likes me.)

So Gram is not all that old but she is old-fashioned, at least in her clothes. She’s proud of the fact that she has never owned a pair of jeans, even when she was much younger and good-looking. Her denim aversion is not a protest against the modern world, though. The reason she hates jeans is that she says they are unflattering.

‘Wear them tight and they are indecent; wear them loose and you look like some gangster rapper.’

Believe me: when my gram utters the words ‘gangster rapper’, it’s like she’s practising a foreign language. You can hear the quote marks round it.

Being able to talk to anyone, from any walk of life, is a great skill if you’ve got it, but even if I did, it would be no help to me right now. There is no one I can talk to about this whole invisibility thing.

Gram? Tried that.

I could go on Instagram and tell Flora McStay, the one who moved to Singapore:

Hey, guess what! I became invisible today! I’m in the picture next to the tree.

Funny.

I am completely on my own. It is not a good feeling.

SO what would YOU do? Come on, it’s not a trick question – honest.

What would you do?

What I decide is that I need to get to hospital, quick. Therefore I need an ambulance. This is, after all, an emergency.

I type 999.

‘Emergency. Which service do you require?’

‘Ambulance, please,’ I say with a trembling voice. I have never made an emergency call before. It’s pretty nerve-racking, I can tell you.

‘Putting you through now.’

And I wait.

‘North Tyneside Ambulance Service. Can I get your name and number, please?’

It’s a young Geordie woman on the other end. She sounds nice and I relax a bit.

‘It’s Ethel Leatherhead. 07877 654 344.’

‘Thank you. What is the nature of your emergency, please?’

I should have learned my lesson from when I told Gram. It sounded ridiculous when I told her. It’s not going to sound any less ridiculous when I tell an emergency services operator that I have become invisible.

‘I … I can’t really say. I just need an ambulance urgently.’

‘I’m sorry, erm … Ethel, is it? I do need to know the nature of the emergency before I can send an ambulance.’

‘I can’t tell you. It’s just … really urgent, OK? I’m in serious trouble.’

The operator still sounds nice. She’s being gentle.

‘Listen, pet, I cannit help you unless you tell me what’s wrong. Are you calling from home?’

‘Yes.’

‘And are you injured?’

‘Well … not exactly injured, it’s just …’

‘OK, flower. Calm down. Are you in pain?’

‘No.’

‘And are you or anyone else in immediate danger of pain or injury?’

I give a little sigh. ‘No. Only—’

‘And is there anyone else there with you? Are you bein’ threatened in any way?’

‘No.’ I know where this is going.

‘Well, there is another number to call for non-emergency medical assistance, Ethel. Have you got a pen there, love?’

I am close to tears now, and if I was thinking straight I would foresee the consequences of blurting out to her as I do, but, well, I’m not exactly level-headed right now.

‘I’ve become invisible, and I’m really scared, and I need an ambulance now!’

That’s when the operator’s tone changes from reassuring and gentle to weary and tense.

‘You’ve become invisible? I see. Listen, pet, I have had enough. You know these calls are recorded and traceable? I’m logging this as a nuisance call, so if you call back I’m informing the police. Now gerroff the line and make way for genuine emergencies. Invisible? You kids, honestly. You drive us up the wall!’

And with that, the call ends – along with my hopes for an easy resolution to my problem.

Two hours later, and I’m still invisible.

I have had a long, hot shower, wondering if perhaps the invisibility could be washed off – you know, like a coating or something? I scrubbed and scrubbed to the point that I was quite sore, but still the soap lathered up on what looked like nothing, and when I rinsed off there was still nothing, only wet footprints on the bathroom floor.

Since then, I have been wandering around the house, wondering what to do, how to deal with this, and I’m not making any progress.

The crying has stopped. That’s not going to get me anywhere, and besides I’m tired of it. I don’t mind admitting, though, that I am completely, utterly, one hundred per cent

TERRIFIED.

Terrified squared. Cubed.

Roughly every five minutes I get up and check in the mirror.

And then I go back to my laptop and search the internet again for topics including the words ‘invisible’ or ‘invisibility’.

Most of the things that I try to read are fantastically complicated, involving mathematics and physics and chemistry and biology that are way beyond what we do at school. All the same, it seems that people have been trying to achieve what has happened to me for decades.

On YouTube there’s a clip of James Bond with an invisible car.

‘Adapted camouflage, 007,’ says Q, walking round Bond’s Aston Martin. ‘Tiny cameras on all sides project the image they see onto a light-emitting polymer skin on the opposite side. To the casual eye, it’s as good as invisible.’

Then he presses a button and the car becomes invisible.

You know what? Up to right now, I would have said that that was just silly. The clip itself was in an internet list called Top Ten Bond Baloney.

But now?

Now I’m not so sure.

If it can happen to me, why not a car?

What I have managed to work out is that there are two ways that something could be invisible.

Are you ready for this?

I’ll keep it simple.

First you have to understand how we see stuff. Things are visible because light rays bounce off them and go into our eyes. So if there’s a tree in front of you, the light hits the tree and is reflected onto the back of your eye, and after some nearly instant clever stuff in your brain, you see a tree.

So the first way to make something invisible is to cover it with a ‘cloaking device’. This makes the light bend round the tree and keep on going, like sticking your finger in a stream of water from a tap: the water bends round your finger, and carries on below as a single stream.

Lots of scientists say they are very close indeed to developing cloaking devices, especially for military purposes. I suppose they mean making invisible tanks, or ships or planes or even soldiers, which would be pretty cool, actually.

Are you still with me?

OK, the second way is to make the light pass straight through the object. This is how glass works and if you’ve ever walked into a glass door like I did once at the Metrocentre, you’ll know how effective it is.

If you look at it straight on, glass is invisible.

It’s also how X-rays work. X-rays are a particular type of light, which can pass through some substances but not others. They’ll pass through your flesh, but not through your bones, so doctors can see inside you.

So it must be the second one that is causing me to be invisible. Light is passing through me, so even though I am still here, it looks as though I am not.

Not that knowing this helps me much.

I’m playing the sequence of events back in my mind: getting onto the sunbed, setting the timer, falling asleep, being woken by Lady nudging her bowl, and …

Lady. Where is she?

I last saw her running off out of the back door. Standing there, looking out, I call for her, then whistle, then call again.

It’s like: have I not got enough to worry about at the moment without a lost dog to add to it?

I’m thinking of the rash of Missing Dog posters on lamp posts lately, and I feel sick. Everyone has been talking about them.

There used to be one or two a year taped to lamp posts: lost dog, lost cat, have you seen it? That sort of thing.

Just recently there seems to have been about one a month. Gram mentioned it the other day, telling me to keep a close eye on Lady when I took her out.

‘You never know, Ethel,’ she said. ‘There’s some funny people around.’

What if someone has taken Lady? Lady is so friendly she’d go with anybody.

I need to find her, and to do that I need to go outside: probably to the beach as that’s where I would go if I was a dog.

It’s a risk. It’s a massive risk, in fact, but sometimes the only alternative to a risk is to do nothing at all, and that is not really an option right now.

I’m going to have to go outside, while invisible.

I add some clothes to those I already have on. Socks and trainers, a polo-neck sweater that covers up my invisible throat, a long-sleeved hoodie, and already I’m looking slightly less weird – kind of like one of those headless shop dummies, if that qualifies as ‘less weird’.

In my bottom drawer is a pair of gloves, which leaves only my head to sort out.

There’s a plastic crate in the garage with old dressing-up gear. In it I find a sparkly wig from some school show I was in and a plastic mask with a clown’s face. I hate clowns, but still: it does the job. With the hood of my sweater up, I look like … what?

I look like some weird kid who’s decided to go around wearing a clown mask. Odd, definitely, but not totally mad.

I’m halfway to the front door in this get-up when my phone pings with an incoming text message.

From: Unknown Contact

Hi Ethel: Is now a good time 4 me to work on my beach bod? I’ll stay out of ur way. With you in 2 mins. Elliot

And there you have it, in one single text message, why Elliot Boyd grates on you so much. Pushy, presumptuous, in your face and a dozen other words that mean ‘total pain in the neck’ are all going through my head as my fingers compose a reply.

NO. Not a good time. Just on my way out. Try me later. Ethel

Why, why, why instead of saying ‘just on my way out’ did I not say, ‘I have gone out’? If I had, I could have pretended not to be in when the doorbell goes.

Which it does – seconds after I press ‘send’.

I’m in the hallway. I can see his outline in the front-door glass, I can even hear his phone when he gets my text, and then he sticks his fingers through the letter box and calls through the opening.

‘All right, Eff! Good job I caught you! Open the door, eh?’

What choice do I have?

I open the door.

We both gasp when we see what the other is wearing.

‘Whoa!’ he says. ‘You never told me I had to come in fancy dress. What’s that all about?’

‘What about you?’ I say.

I may be in a bizarre outfit of sparkly wig and mask and gloves – but Boyd? He looks like he’s heading to Florida: vast baggy shorts, a Hawaiian-style shirt decorated with sharks, sunglasses (unnecessary today), and a baseball cap sitting on top of his springy hair. He’s carrying a beach bag and I can see it contains a towel and various tanning lotions.

We stare at each other in the doorway for a good few seconds.

If I wasn’t feeling so completely unnerved by what was going on inside my clothes, I could probably have said something smart like, ‘Sorry, I don’t take clothes advice from someone ejected from Disneyland for fashion crimes.’ But I don’t.

Instead I say, ‘It’s a sponsored thing. I’ve got to stay dressed up for a whole day to raise money for, erm …’

Quick, Ethel. Think of something. He’s waiting for you to finish the sentence.

‘… for your lighthouse thing.’

Why? Why that? It’s like there’s another me inside my head, yelling at me: ‘What did you say that for, you complete pinhead? Now he thinks you care about his stupid lighthouse obsession. You idiot! Why didn’t you just say famine relief or cancer research or climate change? Or anything else?’

And all I can do about the voice in my head is reply with another head-voice saying, ‘I know! I’m sorry! I’m just not thinking straight. I’ve got quite a lot on my mind at the moment in case you hadn’t noticed.’

Boyd has been talking.

‘… Terrific! Fanks a lot! Sponsored fancy dress? Brilliant idea! The whole day? Sweet! Anyway, I just got your text. Sorry, should have checked earlier. Just on your way out, are you? When are you back? I could wait for you, or, you know – let myself out?’

No. Definitely not. Instead, I tell him about Lady.

‘I saw her going down to the bottom of the backyard,’ I say to him. ‘I thought she was just going for a wee.’ That is less than entirely truthful. What I really thought was that Lady was utterly, totally freaked out by my invisibility and had legged it.

There’s a gap in the fence at the bottom of the yard that a dog could squeeze through, no bother. In fact, Lady did it once when she was a puppy, and we intended to get it fixed, but never got around to it, because she’s never tried to escape again.

Except … she’s not in the garden when we look.

So that’s how I find myself down on the beach, me in my ridiculous clown-and-gloves costume, Elliot Boyd in his comedy beach gear, calling for Lady.

Whitley Sands is easily my favourite walk with Lady, and we do it at least a couple of times a week. I throw her ball into the sea, and she leaps over the waves to retrieve it and then shakes herself, usually soaking me in the process, but I don’t really mind.

It’s hot under the mask. I check that Boyd is a little way ahead and I lift it up a bit to allow the sea air to cool my face, then I call for about the fiftieth time:

‘La-dy!’

I am trying to sound normal and happy. Have you ever lost a dog? It’s important not to sound angry when you call for it, whatever you’re feeling inside. What dog would return to an angry owner?

There are loads of dogs down here, but no Lady.

Soon we have got to the end of the beach and we are by the causeway that links the mainland to the island where the lighthouse looms, white and enormous.

‘Come on! Are you comin’ up?’ Boyd shouts.

Going to the top of the lighthouse is the last thing I want to do.

‘Come on,’ he repeats. ‘There’s somefing I wanna show you, now that you’re a proper part of it. It won’t take long. Besides, from the top you can get a view of the whole beach and you’ll be able to spot your dog.’

Once we are over the causeway and on the island itself we are pretty much the only ones there. It gets busier during the school holidays, but right now, the café is closed and the only thing open is the little museum and gift shop where you buy your ticket to walk up to the top of the lighthouse.

There are some steps leading up to the entrance and a path that goes round the back, which is where Boyd is heading. Two big refuse bins for the café are either side of a rusty door, which he prises open with his fingers before beckoning me in.

Inside, we’re in a cavernous chamber at the bottom of the lighthouse. There are one or two visitors looking at a big model of a lifeboat and some photographs on the wall, and our footsteps echo. One lady turns and raises her eyebrows, then nudges her friend, who looks at us too. I suppose that, dressed as we are, we’re worth at least a glance, but that’s all we get.

‘Come on,’ says Boyd, grinning. I can tell he’s really excited. ‘I’ve never shown anyone this!’

The narrow staircase hugs the circular walls and we climb up to the lantern room at the top, gripping the rusty rail all the way round.

Three hundred and twenty-eight steps later (I didn’t count them – Boyd told me), and I am panting like a racehorse. Boyd, for some reason, is not, in spite of the extra weight he carries. Perhaps it’s just enthusiasm.

Inside the circular lantern room, it’s like being in an enormous greenhouse: there are tall windows all round. In the centre, imagine a huge, upside-down tumbler, about a metre and a half high, made of glass lenses arranged in intricate concentric circles, its mouth about a metre from the floor – that’s the lantern.

‘See this?’ says Boyd, indicating the glass contraption, his face glowing. ‘It’s called a Fresnel lens. With a light inside, it reflects it and multiplies it so you don’t need all that much power to make it visible for miles. Except there’s no light in it now. Hasn’t been for years and years.’

I mean: OK. It is sort of interesting, but mainly I’m just being polite.

Then he takes me to a small hatch cut in the floor.

‘Check the stairs, Eff. Anyone comin’?’ He lifts up the hatch. ‘Come an’ look!’

Obediently, I shuffle round the room between the giant lens and the windows and look down the hatch. There’s a neatly coiled length of electrical cable – metres and metres of it – and a large light bulb on the other end, about the size and shape of a two-litre bottle of Coke.

‘I brought all this up a month ago,’ he says, pride seeming to ooze from every pore. ‘It’s the brightest light bulb you can buy – one thousand watts. When I’m ready, I’ll put the light in here,’ and he indicates the ‘mouth’ of the inverted glass tumbler, ‘and trail the cable out of this window here, down to the ground, where I’ll plug it in and switch it on and … Light The Light!’ He starts humming the song again.

I’m gazing at him through the eyeholes of my mask.

He is mad. Who would even think of such a thing? And why?

All I can say is: ‘I see.’

His face falls. ‘You think I’m crazy, don’t you?’

‘Erm … no. It’s just quite an … ambitious plan, Elliot.’

‘You won’t tell anyone? It’s going to be a sort of secret operation. Like a ‘happening’ – you know, announced shortly before it happens, then boom! The lights are on! A flash mob with a proper flash!’

Boyd stands up and replaces the hatch lid softly.

I can see that I’ve hurt him by not being more enthusiastic.

‘Aren’t you scared?’ I ask.

He looks at me, puzzled. ‘Scared? What of? What crime will I have committed? Who will I have harmed? You could possibly charge me with trespass, but that’s not even a crime; I won’t ’ave damaged anything, and I’ll even use the money you raise by dressing like an idiot to leave some cash for the electricity, so I can’t be charged with theft!’

The grin on his face makes me smile too.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Course I’m sure! My dad’s a lawyer.’

This is the first time Boyd has ever mentioned his dad. Or his mum, for that matter. And as soon as the words are out of his mouth, it’s as if he wants to take them back. He starts saying something else, but I cut him off.

‘A lawyer? That’s pretty cool. What sort of law?’

But he doesn’t answer. Instead, he stands up, and his voice loses a bit of its London accent, as if he’s addressing a court.

‘All right then. “Trespass” as defined in English common law – as opposed to statutory law – is an offence known as a “tort”, which is a wrongful act, but is not subject to criminal proceedings and therefore—’

‘OK, OK, I believe you.’

‘Promise you won’t tell anyone?’

‘What? That your dad’s a lawyer? Is it a secret?’

‘No, dummy. About the light – my plan. It has to be kept quiet till the time is right.’

‘I promise.’

‘Oh, and, erm … back in London my friends used to call me Boydy.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, so … you know, if you, like … erm … wanted …’

He lets it hang in the warm air between us.

Boydy. A friend?

I hadn’t realised I was quite that desperate.