Something Invisible (6 page)

“Hear you've been fishing for compliments, so here's one: Well done!” was the message. There was a squiggly signature, but all Jake could make out were the initials: MK.

He got the shivery feeling again when he read it, only not as strongly as when his dad had said, “That's my boy.”

“What sort of a fish is it?” asked Stella, when she came to visit.

“I don't know,” Jake said. “Whiting maybe, they're lovely and silvery. I wonder how she knew my address.”

“Who?”

“MK. Mrs. Kennedy. You know.”

“No, I don't know any Mrs. Kennedys. And I don't think people put M for Mrs. in their signatures.”

“It could be M for Maureen, though. Or Myra, or Miriam, or Molly, or Mairéad.”

“Do you mean our Mr. Kennedy next-door's wife?” Stella asked. “I don't think she's called Mrs. Kennedy, though.”

“His mother,” said Jake. “The old lady with arthritis.”

“What makes you think it's her?” Stella squinched up her eyes, but she couldn't make anything more out of the signature than MK.

“Because she knows I want to be a fish painter.”

Stella didn't look convinced.

“Well, make a better suggestion,” Jake said.

“Oh, you're probably right,” said Stella. “Can I bring my sisters in? To meet you. I mean, formally. You've met them before, but you don't even know their names, and you saved their lives. Sort of. At least, that's what you thought you were doing. They're thrilled. You're their hero.”

“But I didn't save their lives. I possibly saved the life of some other child called Naomi Something. And I'm not a hero. I didn't even think. I wish…”

“Oh, do shut up, Jake, dear,” Stella said. “You're blathering and rawmayshing. And it was Nuala Something.” She opened the get-well card again. “O'Halloran,” she added.

Jake wasn't used to being called “dear.” Not even his mother ever called him that. He blushed.

“Where are they?” he said, banging on his pillows to fluff them up and cover his embarrassment.

“Outside the door, waiting.”

“They're not making any noise.”

Stella assumed this meant yes. She opened the door, and in tumbled the nesty-haired quartet.

“This is Isobel,” Stella began. “Also known as Bella.”

“Hi, Isobel,” said Jake sheepishly. She was the tallest, next to Stella, and she was wearing a sparkly thing in her mussed hair. They all had mussed hair, except Stella, who had a ponytail today. It made her face seem even thinner than normal. Her cheeks were hollow.

“And this is Edel. Also known as Della.”

Jake laughed. “Stella, Bella, Della! Hi, Edel.”

Edel was the next in size. She gave a deep curtsy, holding out the corners of her bright green skirt. She wore a sparkly thing in her hair too—Jake could see when she bent her head—and she had a flower painted on the back of her hand, or perhaps it was a transfer.

“And this is Danielle,” said Stella.

“Let me guess,” said Jake. “Also known as Ella.”

“Wrong!” said Danielle. “Also known as Danny.” She tried to copy Edel's curtsy, but she wasn't very good at it, and anyway, it didn't work so well with dungarees, which is what she was wearing.

“And the little one,” said Stella, “is Joanne.”

“Joanne!”

“Hi, Dake,” said Joanne.

“Also known as Joey,” Stella added.

“What happened to you?” asked Jake. “How come your name doesn't match?”

Joanne was too shy to answer, so Stella said, “Oh, we just got bored with that idea, and anyway, Danielle wouldn't play along, so we gave up on it.”

“What age are you, Joanne?” asked Jake, thinking that was the sort of thing adults usually asked children, and he was so much older than Joanne that he might as well be grown up.

“Theenahaff,” said Joanne, and beamed a big blue-eyed beam at him. “I go to pwayschoow.”

This was not the kind of information Jake had much experience of dealing with, but he rose to the occasion.

“That's … that's just terrific, Joanne,” he said. “Um … what a big girl you are!”

Joanne beamed again and climbed up onto Jake's bed. He moved his legs to make room for her, and she sat happily in the warm space he made.

“Fiss!” she yelped suddenly, spotting the aquarium. “Oh! Fiss!” She opened her hand into a star and flapped it in the direction of the fish. Then she looked at her other hand, in a fist, and opened it too.

It wasn't just the fish tank. Jake's room was full of fish. Posters of freshwater and sea fish of Ireland. Posters of fish of the world. And one whole wall was covered in drawings and paintings that Jake had done of fish, practicing for when he grew up. He didn't think they were much good, but everyone has to start somewhere was his attitude.

“One fiss, two fiss, wed fiss, boo fiss,” Joanne chanted happily, and flapped her starry little hand again at the fish. Then she flapped the other one. Then she flapped them both together.

“She's … she's…” said Jake.

“Yeah,” said Stella. “She is, isn't she?”

CHAPTER

23

Daisy was sleeping through the night. At least, that's what Jake's mother said. That meant she went to bed at two o'clock in the morning and didn't wake until six.

Big deal, thought Jake. But he kept his mouth shut.

“She belongs to both of you,” he said one day, watching how his mum and dad looked adoringly at the baby. “You're the perfect little family, aren't you?”

His dad looked at his mum, and his mum looked at his dad, and nobody said anything. The silence was like a wall behind which Jake had trapped himself.

After a while, his mother said, “She belongs to you too, Jake, and you belong to us. We all belong together.”

Corny, or what? Anyway, that wasn't what he had meant.

He went out and phoned Finn and arranged to meet him in the park for football. He wasn't going to bed that afternoon, he'd decided. And just let his mother try making him.

He wasn't sick, and he wasn't a hero. He was going back to being just Jake, right now.

CHAPTER

24

“My dad's not really my father,” Jake announced to Stella. His heart was flipping madly against the inside of his chest. He'd never told a soul before. It was like a secret that he'd carried around all his life, and took out sometimes when he was alone to examine and have a think about.

They were sitting on the garden wall, picking cherries off the old cherry tree in Stella's back garden and putting them in an enamel bowl.

Stella's mother was going to make a tart. Someone had given her a cherry stoner for Christmas and she wanted to see if it worked, and you could only justify stoning cherries, she said, if you were going to put them in a tart. So she was. Jake thought this was a funny reason to make a tart. A better reason was that there were so many cherries.

“Hmm?” said Stella. She put a really dark-red cherry to her mouth and bit into it. “Mmm,” she said. “Delicious.” Juice dribbled down the side of her mouth when she spoke. She looked like a vampire, very pale, with blood dripping down her chin.

“So?” Jake asked anxiously.

“I'm just thinking about it, Jake,” Stella said. “It's…”—she swallowed—“interesting.”

“I mean, he is my
dad
of course; I've always called him that. But not my father. My real father disappeared years ago. I never knew him. He just left. My mother says he didn't like babies. That was me, the baby, only there was only one of me, of course, but one was one too many. It was nothing personal, my mum says. Just babies in general drove him mad.”

“Oh, I see. OK.”

Stella spat out the cherry stone and bit into another cherry. Jake stared at her, willing her to say something more.

“That explains why you don't look remotely like him, I suppose, your dad,” she said eventually, sticking her tongue out as far as it would go to lick up the juice from around her mouth. “Not that I ever thought about it before, but now you mention it, you don't. Look like him, I mean.”

Jake's heart wasn't flipping so wildly now, but it was still going faster than usual. It seemed to fill his chest cavity.

“Well, of course I don't. I've just told you. He's not my father.”

“Of course you don't,” Stella repeated dutifully. “How could you? Unless it's like dogs and their owners. But it's not, is it?”

“So that's it, then?” Jake said. “That's all you've got to say?” He didn't know what he'd expected, but he'd thought there'd be more of a reaction than this.

Stella spat out the second cherry stone.

She squinched up her face, in that way she had, and said nothing for a moment. Jake guessed she was thinking.

“Well,” she said at last, “I suppose you get to have two fathers, so.”

That had never occurred to Jake before. Two fathers. One more than most people. Two more than some people.

Was this necessarily a good thing?

“I suppose,” he said.

“Good for you,” said Stella, and put another cherry in her mouth.

Well …

OK then. Good for him.

Yeah.

“And how old were you, you know, when your new dad came along?”

“Oh, I was only a baby. I don't know. Six months?”

“Well then,” said Stella.

“Well then, what?”

“Well then, that hardly counts, does it?”

“What?”

“I mean, he might as well be your father, mightn't he, if he's been there all along, you know? So it hardly counts, does it, that he isn't?”

Jake sighed. She didn't get it.

He gave up trying to explain himself and bit into a cherry.

CHAPTER

25

Shuffle, stomp.

Shuffle, stomp.

It was an unmistakable sound.

“Here comes the walrus,” sang Stella softly. She indicated with her head toward the next-door garden.

Jake laughed, and turned around gingerly. He had the bowl of cherries on his lap and he didn't want to topple them.

“Hello, Mrs. Kennedy!” he called over his shoulder.

Shuffle, stomp.

“It's Mrs.
Peacock,
” Stella muttered, standing up on the wall. “Remember, she murders daisies.”

“No, she doesn't. She's only the daisy murderer's mother. Don't be mean about her. I think she's cool.”

“Ah, Jake!” said the old lady with arthritis, looking up through the cherry foliage. “How do you know my name?”

“Worked it out. Maybe I'll be a detective when I grow up.”

“Instead of a fish painter?”

“Well, if times get bad and I can't sell my paintings. Thanks for the card.”

She smiled. “Ah, you worked that out too, did you?”

“Couldn't be anyone else,” he said.

“Is what's-her-name there?”

“Stella?”

“I'm here!” Stella called. She was actually in the cherry tree now, with one foot on each of two boughs, reaching out for the very darkest, juiciest cherries, from the topmost branches.

“Well, will you come in for some tea, the pair of you?” Mrs. Kennedy asked.

“We will,” said Stella's voice from up in the tree. “We'll be in in five minutes. Will we come over the wall?”

“No, ring the doorbell. There's nobody here, only me. They're all away on holidays, I'm minding the house. It'll take me five minutes to get to the door anyway, so there's no rush. And check with your mother first, Stella. I don't want to be accused of stealing you.”

“We're not worth stealing,” Stella called as she climbed down the cherry tree. “But I'll tell Mum we're dropping in to you. See you in five!”

“Make it fifteen, actually,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “I have to get things ready, and I'm slow.”

CHAPTER

26

“I love your dancing pumps, Stella,” was the first thing Mrs. Kennedy said when she opened the door.

Stella grinned and did her pointy thing with her foot in the air. There were pink satin ribbons that went halfway up to her knees and tied in a bow at the side.

“But I hope you weren't climbing trees in them, you'll ruin them.” She seemed to worry a lot about things getting ruined.

“No,” said Stella. “I changed into them. Specially.”

“Well, I'm flattered, I'm sure,” said Mrs. Kennedy. She didn't mention the cherry juice on Stella's white T-shirt, which she hadn't bothered to change.

“We brought you some cherries,” said Jake, offering her a small bowl.

“Ah, what life is not a bowl of,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “Thank you.”

“Excuse me?” said Jake.

“Life is not a bowl of cherries, Jake,” said Mrs. Kennedy gravely.

“Oh, I see,” said Jake. “I knew that, actually.”

“Will you carry them for me, Jake? I can't manage my stick and a bowl of cherries. Come in, come in, children.”

The house was unbelievably tidy and clean and beautiful and very, very still. It reminded Jake of a painting, only you couldn't be actually
in
a painting. There were carpets on the floor—not just one carpet, like in a normal house, but lots of rugs, some of them overlapping, and even Mrs. Kennedy's characteristic shuffle-stomping was muffled.

A huge portrait of a very beautiful young girl in an old-fashioned dress and carrying a candle in a candlestick hung on the landing, and looked right down the stairs at everyone who came in the front door. She stared rather sadly at them as they shuffled, stomped, wriggled and jiggled through the hall and into the drawing room.

That's what Mrs. Kennedy called it, but there were no drawing things in there, only more overlapping red rugs with flowers and designs on them, low, cream-colored sofas and chairs, with large red tasseled cushions flung and heaped in the corners. The air felt thick, warm, and there was a smell of roses. Jake looked around for a vase of roses, but there weren't any that he could see, though there was an embroidered vase of deep-red roses on a funny sort of framed picture that stood in front of the fireplace. It had feet, so it could stand on the hearth and didn't need to be hung or propped up. There was a long stool in front of the fireplace, covered in a deep-red fabric. At least three people could sit on it, side by side. It was nearly as big as a sofa, only without a back. Best of all, the walls were lined with pictures. Paintings, drawings, watercolors, portraits, landscapes, coloredy blobs—all sorts of things. They weren't just in rows, they completely covered the walls.