Something Invisible (12 page)

“Oh my,” said his dad. “Oh, Jake, I see what you mean.”

Jake felt as if the thing on the back of his neck had got a little bit lighter. He wriggled his shoulders.

“But it's not true, you know,” his dad went on. “She won't think that. She'll have forgotten all about that silly row.”

“You can't know that.”

“I just think it won't seem so important now, that's all,” his dad said. “So much has happened that's much more important.”

“And I'm not important,” Jake said softly.

“You might just be very important,” his dad said. “Only not in the way you think.”

“I don't know what
to do,
” wailed Jake.

“Well, think about something else for a while,” his dad suggested. “That's what I always do when there's a hard thing to worry about, and then when you go back to thinking about the hard thing, sometimes it seems clearer.”

“OK,” said Jake.

There was silence for a few minutes, while Jake tried to think about something else.

“So are there any art galleries over there?” he asked after a while.

“I dunno,” Jake's dad said. “I'm sure there must be.”

“Can we go?” Jake asked.

“Yes, if you want to, but there's an art gallery in Dublin too.”

“Is there?” said Jake. “I didn't know. With fish paintings?”

“I dunno,” his dad said again. “We could check, couldn't we?”

“We could,” said Jake.

There was a bit more silence. Jake thought very hard about other things.

“Jake?” said his dad after a while. “I know you don't want to talk about it, but I think you can walk the walk. Have you ever heard that expression?”

“No,” said Jake.

“Well then, you wouldn't understand it, I suppose. Sorry I mentioned it.”

“That's OK,” said Jake.

“I only like them with pepper on them,” said his dad after a while. “Tomato sandwiches. Do you think she'll remember to put pepper on them? It's not the same if you have to open them up and put it on afterward. I don't know why.”

“Ah, yeah,” said Jake. “She will. She's an ace cook.”

CHAPTER

41

Jake sat beside Stella at the funeral, because that's where Mrs. Kennedy had indicated he should sit. He'd met her at the church door and she had caught him firmly by the wrist and marched him—shuffle, stomp, shuffle, stomp—up the aisle till they got to the top, where the family sat, and she'd pointed to an empty space, a long expanse of dark brown pew beside Stella, and nudged him into the seat. He'd slid along on his bottom till he was sitting next to her.

Stella looked like a ghost, her skin even paler than usual, her hair all loose about her thin shoulders, like a ghost girl's, and she was wearing the kind of dress she never wore, in pale lemon with long sleeves and buttons all up the front and a turndown collar. She seemed like a character in an old movie. She reminded Jake of the portrait of the beautiful girl that hung on the stairwell in Mr. Kennedy's house. She didn't look like the girl, but she had the same expression on her face.

The other children sat in a row in the seat behind, with their parents. They sat unnaturally still, and all their hair was brushed, so that they looked like paintings too, paintings of themselves. There was a scent of lilies in the air. Nothing seemed natural, and everything was too calm. There was organ music.

Nobody explained why Stella needed a whole pew to herself, but then one or two people came and sat at the other end of it. They sat quietly and riffled through notebooks and prayerbooks and looked grave and important.

They said nothing to each other, Jake and Stella. They didn't even look at each other. Jake thought he would burst if he caught Stella's eye, and he imagined she probably felt the same about him, and neither of them wanted to burst and spoil everything.

He wondered if he should say he was sorry, about … whatever it was. Though he wasn't. He was sorry about Joanne, but he couldn't be sorry about the other thing, because he didn't understand what he was supposed to have done. He wouldn't mind
saying
he was sorry, though, if it would help. He wouldn't mind doing anything if it would help. He felt as if his head was going to split right down the middle like a cracked-open walnut from the sheer pressure of how sorry he felt about Joanne and how sorry he felt for Stella and for her family. Sorrow was like a taut wire in his brain, and if he moved, he felt, it would slice right through and cleave his brain in two, the way the cheese cutter did in the supermarket—it sliced right through the cheese, even though it was only a piece of wire, but it was held very taut, and that was what made it so powerful.

It became clear later why Stella was in that special pew. It was for the people doing the readings and saying the prayers, so they could slip out easily and go to the top of the church when their turn came.

When it was her turn to go, Stella read, in a high, restrained voice, like a person reading the news, from Joanne's favorite book,
One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish,
and Jake's heart broke all over again. He could hear the little voice in his head, “One fiss, two fiss, wed fiss, boo fiss,” but Stella didn't cry, and Jake didn't either, though his head ached with the effort.

Even if it was my fault, he said to himself—which it wasn't—it's not my fault that it was my fault. It was a complicated thought, but it seemed to have its own comforting logic. He felt as if the cheese cutter in his head had slackened a little bit. He thought maybe his head wouldn't burst now.

When Stella came back to her seat, Jake did dare to catch her eye, and he mouthed, “Well done.”

She looked away.

Just for a moment, Jake felt offended. Then he remembered who the important one was and he stopped feeling sorry for himself.

Later, when Jake was just getting into his dad's car to go home and Stella was standing with a group of her cousins from the country, she waved to him. That was all. But it made him feel better.

On the way home, he tried to think of things that might make Stella feel better. But he couldn't think of a single one. That made him feel worse.

It would probably go on like that for ages, he thought. Feeling better and then feeling worse. Only for Stella and the rest, there'd be more feeling worse and not much feeling better.

CHAPTER

42

The summer felt old. After the funeral came the football and fish paintings trip, and after that there was nothing to look forward to except school. To distract them from that terrible thought, Stella's dad had suggested that they should build a tree house in the cherry tree. So that is what they were doing, building the tree house, and he was helping them.

The official line was that
they
were helping
him,
but it was pretty clear to Stella and Jake that he didn't know the first thing about the requirements for a good tree house for the use of five children and their friends. But Jake had found a recipe, as he called it, for a tree house, in a library book. It looked unnecessarily complicated, but they could adapt it. They didn't need a veranda, he reasoned, or an attic. And you could always put on an extension later, he and Stella had agreed, if necessary. Anyway, they didn't want to fill up the whole tree. They had to leave room for the cherries next year.

They were only at the stage of measuring up and planning. They hadn't got as far as buying the wood yet, much less actually sawing and hammering. Stella's dad said he'd do that part, and Stella wanted it finished quickly, so the children could play in it for at least a month before the weather started to get chilly and the evenings short.

“We're all going to be Cotter Burkes,” Jake told Stella. He watched her spreading her arms across to see how wide the thing was going to be. “Did I tell you?”

“I thought you said you were going to be a fish painter,” she said. “I can't keep up with you. Now you want to be a cotterberk, whatever that is. Hold your end of the tape steady, Dad, the measurements will be out if you let it bend like that!”

Jake snorted a small laugh. “It's not a job, it's a name. My mum's a Cotter. So am I. That's our surname. Dad's a Burke. But now that we're all an official family, since they got married and everything, we thought we'd join up the names so everyone could be the same. It was my idea.”

“We're just Dalys,” Stella said. “But we don't mind being friends with double-barrelled people, do we, Daddy? Will you have to change your passport, Jake?”

“I haven't got a passport. I've never been abroad. Except to Old Trafford, but you don't need a passport for England.”

“You should get one,” said Stella's dad, sticking a pencil purposefully behind his ear. “In case you need to run away from home. All my children have them expressly for that purpose, or so they tell me.”

“I don't think I will want to run away. Or not that far.”

“When I met you first,” Stella said, “—remember, in the supermarket?—you were a proper little bundle of misery. You looked then as if you wanted to run away, as far away as you could get.”

“Was I? Did I? I don't remember.”

“Oh, yes. You didn't like babies. And you didn't like girls. You especially didn't like
me.
Don't say a word, I know you didn't. I wanted you to be my friend because I thought you looked more interesting than most boys, but I had to work very hard at it. I had to
follow you home
to see where you lived. I don't think you liked your dad too well either. You only liked fish and football. You didn't even seem to like yourself very much.”

“I do like my dad.”

“You didn't like him much then. I don't understand why. Just because he isn't the one who ran away is not a very good reason.”

“Well, he laughed at me.”

“Everyone laughs at you, Jake. That's nothing to get upset about. You can make a career out of that, you know. It's called being a comedian.”

“But I want to be a fish painter,” Jake pointed out. “Or something along those lines.”

“Ah, yes,” said Brian. “I remember. The boy with the fish tank, that was you. Remember the day you took the girls over there, Stella, and Joey came running home all excited about the ‘fiss.'”

Jake froze. He didn't know where to look. They'd mentioned the thing he didn't dare even to think about.

Stella was laughing too. How could they laugh? After the dreadful thing that had happened. He couldn't understand that, how they weren't all swimming in a black murk of depression all the time. He thought about Daisy, and he shivered at the thought of anything happening to her, anything like the horrible thing that had happened to Joanne; the thing that had nearly happened to Nuala Something.

“How come you can laugh?” he asked.

There was silence for a few moments. Perhaps he shouldn't have asked.

Jake sucked in his breath and waited, and then Stella said, “Because we can't always be crying. That's why. And anyway it would be silly only to cry, when you can laugh sometimes.”

“That's it,” her dad said. “There are enough sad things to cry about without crying about the funny things too.”

“I see,” said Jake. Something clicked in his head. Something he hadn't understood before. “Like how life is not a bowl of cherries, but a bowl of cherries is still a bowl of cherries.”

Stella stared at him. She didn't get it. But her dad did.

“Something like that,” he said. “Sort of.”

“Mrs. Kennedy told me that,” Jake explained to Stella.

“Oh,” said Stella, but she still didn't see.

It didn't matter.

“Let's go to the park,” Jake said, “while your dad is getting the wood and stuff. Let's have a game of one-a-side football, you know, goal to goal, and afterward, I'll buy you an ice cream. I got extra pocket money this week for cleaning the downstairs windows.”

“OK,” said Stella. “Sounds good. Let's go. If that's OK with you, Dad? Can you manage the rest by yourself?”

“That's OK,” said Brian, who had taken the pencil from behind his ear and was writing down measurements. “I think I can cope. Just about.”

“And then,” said Jake, “after the ice creams, we can go to see Mrs. Kennedy. I want to tell her about the tree house. I bet she'd love to hear about it.”

“Yeah,” said Stella, “and we have to make sure she doesn't let her son put in an objection with An Bord Pleanála.”

“An Bord what?” said Jake.

“The planning people,” Stella explained. “You know. They stop you building things.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Jake. “Daisy murderer,” he hissed. “Fish faker.”

“Curmudgeon,” added Stella. “That's my word of the week. Good, isn't it? And after all that, can we go and see Daisy?”

“Yeah,” said Jake. “The small marauder.”

“What?”

“Oh … nothing. Come on, then. Let's go!”

Copyright © 2006 by Siobhán Parkinson

Published by Roaring Brook Press

Roaring Brook Press is a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings Limited Partnership

143 West Street, New Milford, Connecticut 06776

First published in the United Kingdom in 2006 by Puffin Books, London

All rights reserved

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

First American Edition March 2006

eISBN 9781466892934

First eBook edition: February 2015