Something Invisible (2 page)

“We kept thinking,” his mother said in a high, false-sounding voice, “he's sure to notice, and we kept waiting for you to notice, but you kept on not noticing, and then, somehow, it all seemed…” His mother's voice fell back to its normal pitch, and then it trailed away again.

Jake hung his head. He felt stupid. At his age, not to notice a thing like that! But then, why should he? There are other things to think about, school and football and fish and stuff. You don't go around noticing that your mother's pregnant, do you? You don't think of your mother as a reproducing female, as if she's a classroom pet or a laboratory animal. She's your mum, isn't she?

If he'd been a girl he might have noticed. If he'd been a girl, they might have told him sooner. No, he didn't feel stupid; he felt they
thought
he'd been stupid. But that seemed worse, somehow. He felt himself getting hot and confused. He gave the door of the cupboard another furtive sidelong kick.

“We didn't want to force you to face it,” his mother was saying now, half apologetically. “I did try to mention it a few times. I did bring the subject up once or twice. But you just didn't seem to be ready to talk about it. So we thought we'd let you come to it in your own time, Jake. Jake?” She was peering at him with an anxious expression.

Jake tried to remember her bringing the subject up, but he couldn't. He'd give her the benefit of the doubt, he thought, but he felt a bit conned all the same. He couldn't say that, of course, because then there'd be a row and he didn't want there to be a row about the baby. That'd be awful. It wasn't the baby's fault. Poor little scrap. Not that he was all that keen on babies, but you couldn't go blaming them for stuff.

So he said nothing; just shrugged. And they laughed at him, his parents, for not noticing something so obvious. But it wasn't a mean laugh; it was a relieved laugh. It was as if they'd expected him to be upset and they were glad to see that he wasn't. Why should he be upset? That would be silly, to be upset about a little baby. So he joined in and laughed too; that way, they'd know it was OK, he was OK about it. They all laughed at Jake, with Jake, and his mum and dad stroked the baby's skin with wondering fingers.

“It's the best thing that's ever happened,” his dad said. “Isn't it, Jake? The very best thing ever.”

“Umm,” said Jake.

“A miracle,” said his dad. “That's what she is, a little miracle. My miracle daughter.”

“She's—eh…” But Jake couldn't think of a single nice thing to say about the baby. She was pink and her mouth kept opening and shutting and she stretched a lot. She was quite interesting to observe, like any life-form, really, but she was not “lovely,” which is what people usually said about babies.

“You could have told me, though,” he mumbled at last, but nobody seemed to hear him.

“We're going to call her Marguerite,” said Jake's mum. “After my mother.”

Jake thought about that.

“That's a nice name,” he said carefully, after a while. “But it doesn't suit her.”

His mother frowned.

“I mean, she's nice and all, but you have to be tall and have a bun if you're called Marguerite.” Not that his grandmother looked like that, but she was always called Rita; Jake hadn't even known her name was Marguerite.

“Mmm,” said his mother dreamily.

“And a silver cigarette case,” Jake added. “With Russian cigarettes in it.” He smirked, pleased with that touch, though he had no idea what Russian cigarettes were actually like, apart from being cigarettes and Russian.

His mother chuckled softly. He thought it was the Russian cigarettes that had amused her, but then he saw that she hadn't been listening to what he'd said at all. She stroked the baby's palm with her finger, and the baby closed its little fist tightly over the finger, and she chuckled again. It was a soft sound, like music.

“Look how tightly she grips,” she said, as if gripping tightly was some sort of extraordinary talent. But Jake knew that all babies did that. He'd read about it. Theirs wasn't anything special.

“What about Madge?” asked Jake. “Just till she's older and gets a bun.”

“No,” said his mother. “Definitely not Madge.” As if Madge meant something horrific, like Virus or Plague or Destruction.

Or Margie? Maggie? Like in
The Simpsons.

“No.”

“Midge? Midge suits her, doesn't it? I mean, she's dead small, isn't she?”

“Stop, Jake.”

“Meg? Meg's nice. Or Meggie? Peggy?”

“No,” said his mother. She had that anxious look again. “I thought you'd be pleased, Jake.”

“I am,” he said. “She's class.”

That was a bit of an exaggeration, but she was better than a tropical fish anyway, he'd grant that. Not much better, but she'd improve. They get more interesting, babies, whereas tropical fish stay at the gawping stage forever. Even tadpoles get more interesting, come to think of it.

He thought he wouldn't say that to his mother, though. She might take it the wrong way. She wouldn't like to have her offspring compared to the juvenile stages of pond life, however interesting Jake might think them. Mothers were like that. They seemed to imagine that human babies, and especially their human babies, were somehow endowed with a fascination that had nothing to do with the inherent interestingness of the life cycle.

CHAPTER

9

He met the girl again. The one who'd been at the bus stop before, the thin one. “Met” wasn't exactly the word for it. She was in the supermarket, and so was he. He'd stopped at the fish counter to admire the mackerel, all striped and shiny and neatly packed into their skins without a pucker or a ruck, and he noticed her at the next counter, buying salami. She seemed to do a lot of shopping. She was buying a pile of salami. There must be loads of people in her family.

There were, he realized then. The smaller children were with her again, only they had multiplied. There were dozens of them. Well, four. Their hair was all soft and springy-looking and no-colored, but it hadn't been combed, so it sat like tousled nests on their heads. Some of them had knitted cardigans on, and their shorts were long, for shorts, and very pale, as if they had been washed a lot. Three of them wore pink plastic sandals and one wore blue Wellingtons. The girl herself wore a sundress with a flouncy skirt and flip-flops, but it was cold in the supermarket because of the food, and Jake shivered just looking at her, even though he was wearing a thick sweater that one of his grandmothers had brought him back from a holiday and had a picture of a football stadium—unidentified—on it.

He was supposed to be buying nappies for Marguerite. He moved away from the fish counter, and went looking for the baby things.

“Newborn,” his mother had said.

“I know that,” he'd said. What kind of an idiot did she take him for?

“No, I mean, it's a size,” his mother had explained. “The smallest.”

“Oh,” he said. “All right.”

But there weren't any “Newborn” that he could see, only sizes that seemed to go by weight. He wondered what Marguerite weighed. Not a lot was about the best estimate he could manage. They didn't do nappies in “not a lot,” though.

“How old is it?” said a voice beside him.

“What?” he asked, startled, and spun around.

It was the girl again.

“The
baby,
” she said.

“Oh, nought, I suppose,” he said, reddening. “I mean, it's not old enough to have an age.”

The girl stared at him. Her eyes were mostly pupil, huge black pools, fringed with yellowy green, not the sort of color eyes usually are. Cat's eyes, he thought.

“They all have an age,” she said evenly. “You count it in months before they get to one, or in weeks when they're very new.” She spoke extra clearly, as if she thought he might be a bit thick.

“Newborn,” Jake said promptly.

“Then you count it in days,” the girl said. “But there aren't any ‘Newborn.' You'll have to ask.”

“Ask!”

Jake was horror-stricken. It had been embarrassing enough to have to get the wretched things, but he'd planned on doing it in manly silence, just picking up the packet and marching nonchalantly to the checkout. He hadn't reckoned on needing to have a conversation about it, with an adult he'd never met.

“Or you could get the next size and hope for the best,” the girl went on. “Even if they don't fit, they soon will, so it won't be a waste. Is it yours?”

Jake blushed bright red. “Of course not,” he said. “I'm only eleven.”

She burst out laughing. Her teeth were small and even and he could see right down her throat when she threw her head back.

“I didn't mean that!” she said when she'd gotten over the first gale of laughter. “I meant, is it in your family? But I suppose it must be, or they wouldn't have asked you to get the nappies. Boy or girl? Oh, dear,” she added as she went off into another fit of laughter. She wiped a tear apologetically from her face. Her skin was very pale, and she had freckles, but they were very pale too, so pale you didn't notice unless you looked at her face closely under the harsh lights of a supermarket.

“Girl,” he muttered. “Marguerite.”

“I see,” said the girl, sobering up. “What weight is she?”

Weight, weight, what's all this obsession with weight? Jake wondered. It's not as though you could eat babies or had to carry them in your arms over mountains. Who cares what weight it is? It's going to change all the time anyway, not like the weight of a liter of water, which stays comfortingly static.

He shrugged.

“Well, look,” said the girl, losing interest, “I have to go. Take those ones, you can't go wrong with them.” She thrust a brightly colored packet at Jake and yelled at the top of her voice at the same time: “Come on, Dalys!” The children in the cardigans and shorts materialized magically and gathered around her.

“I'd call her Daisy if I were you,” the girl said as she swung her supermarket basket onto a bony hip. “You have to be beautiful for Marguerite. Daisy will do for just pretty.”

She was gone before he got a chance to ask her own name. “Or even plain,” she added, walking away from him.

“In a pinch,” he thought he heard her say, but he couldn't see her. She must be in the next aisle.

What did she mean?

Was she suggesting that their baby wasn't beautiful?

She had no right! What did she know about their baby? Nothing. Not a thing.

CHAPTER

10

His mother didn't seem to mind that he'd bought the wrong size of nappies. In fact, Jake thought she hadn't even noticed. Just goes to show what a lot of nonsense it all is, he thought, all that weight stuff.

“What would you think of Daisy?” his mother asked, opening the packet. “Mmm,” she added, sniffing the clean smell of the fresh nappy.

Daisy! That's what the girl had suggested. Jake jumped guiltily, as if his mother had caught him doing something he shouldn't have been doing, or thinking something he shouldn't have been thinking.

“Daisy?” he managed to squeak out. “What made you think of that?”

“Mrs. O'Dea was here,” his mother said. “You know, the large woman who runs the garden center and smokes too much? She brought me a potted marguerite, for luck, she said, because of the baby's name, and it turns out it's one of those big daisies. Isn't it pretty? All sort of smiley. So I thought, Daisy. For everyday, I mean. She can be Marguerite on her birth cert, of course, and her passport.”

“Yeah,” said Jake, pouring himself a glass of milk. “Whatever.”

“Oh, Jake, I hope you're not … I don't know, going to be
difficult?
”

“I'm not,” said Jake, reaching up for the ginger biscuits, which his mother always put deliberately slightly too high up, so that people wouldn't scoff too many of them. “You know I'm not. I just mean, it's your choice. It's nice. Daisy's nice. What does Dad think?”

Dad loved Daisy. The name, the child. He was, in short, besotted. Jake had never seen him like this before about anything. He woke her up when he came home from work, just so he could look at her. He fished her feet out of her Babygro and kissed the soles of them and the tiny ankle bones. That made her squirm. Her squirming made him laugh. She squirmed, he laughed, they were happy together. He pressed the tip of her nose with the ball of his thumb, as if he were ringing a doorbell, and she opened her eyes wide in surprise and waved her fingers around like little starfish arms.

Jake pressed his own nose experimentally, to see what it felt like. He wondered if anyone had ever done that to him. He couldn't imagine it.

CHAPTER

11

Jake looked up “Daisy” in the library. He'd looked up “Marguerite” before, and found it meant “pearl,” which had seemed completely wrong. “Daisy” was more down to earth.

“The word ‘daisy' comes from ‘day's eye,'” he told his parents that evening. “Did you know that?”

“Of course,” said Jake's mum. She always knew everything, or pretended to.

“Why?” Dad asked. He could never work things out for himself. Jake sometimes wondered how he didn't get fired from that job of his.

“Because it opens up in the morning and closes at night,” said Jake. “Those little white petals, just like eyelashes.”

The baby cried. She often did, and she seemed to make a point of doing it when Jake had an interesting conversation going.

“She doesn't get it,” Jake said resentfully. “About closing at night, I mean. Somebody should tell her to start living up to her name.”