Something Invisible (7 page)

Stella looked around her, awestruck.

“I can't believe this house is next door to ours,” she said. “You should see our living room, Mrs. Kennedy. There's no carpet, because you can't tricycle on carpet; we took it up long ago, and my dad made the mistake of painting the floor a sort of apple green—it's pretty revolting. There's hardly any furniture either.”

“That'd be because of the tricycling too, I suppose,” said Mrs. Kennedy.

“Partly,” said Stella, “but I think it just got broken, bit by bit, and got thrown out. We have a very large, square coffee table, and a lot of beanbags. We sit on the coffee table if we don't want to sit in the beanbags, though we're not supposed to.”

“I don't think I'll come to tea if you invite me back,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “I couldn't sit in a beanbag—or even on a coffee table. And what about you, Jake?”

“Oh, I can sit on a coffee table,” said Jake. He'd just located the source of the rose smell. It was a large blue-and-white bowl, big enough to bathe a baby in, half-filled with dried rose petals.

“No, I mean, what's your house like?”

“Ordinary,” said Jake. “It has, you know, furniture. It's not as bad as Stella's, but it's not as good as this.”

“Ah, the golden mean,” said Mrs. Kennedy, nodding.

“Are the pictures yours?” Jake asked.

“Most of them,” she said.

“And they let you hang them up?” said Stella.

“They're lucky to have them,” said Mrs. Kennedy with a sniff. “I used to live in my own apartment, but my son thinks I can't look after myself, so he moved me in here—and then he went off on his holidays! I like it here, I'm not complaining, but I'm not used to stairs. I have a terrible job remembering to bring everything down in the mornings, so I won't have to go back up again later in the day, but I always forget, so I do have to go back up. Which reminds me, Jake. Would you run up and get my handbag for me? It's on the chair in the back bedroom. It has my artificial sweetener in it, and I can't take tea without it.”

“Could you not just take sugar?” asked Stella.

“Not allowed,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “Diabetic.”

“Oh!” said Stella. “I thought you were just slimming.”

Mrs. Kennedy laughed. “Old people have different problems from the young,” she said.

Jake took the stairs two by two. The beautiful young girl watched him all the way, and he watched her. The stair wall was covered in paintings as well, but he didn't stop to examine them. He was too interested in the girl with the candlestick.

“I know someone with diabetes and she's only seven,” Stella was saying when he returned with the handbag.

“Different kind,” said Mrs. Kennedy.

Women! Jake thought. Always discussing illnesses.

“Now, I did ask you to tea, but you'll have to make it yourselves. I need to just sit here for a little while and recover. The kettle's boiled, the tray's set, it's all in the kitchen. And the tea is in a caddy by the tray. Indian, I take it?”

“What?” asked Jake.

“Indian tea,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “I imagine that's what you like. Children don't seem to like China.”

“I've got nothing against China,” said Jake, puzzled. “But I'm sure whatever tea you have is fine.”

“And there's cake, of course,” said Mrs Kennedy. “Two kinds. Battenberg and porter.”

Jake shrugged. Stella was yanking her head furiously at him, encouraging him to come on—she was obviously dying to see the kitchen.

“Battenberg and
porter,
” giggled Stella as they went down the hall to the kitchen. “It sounds like the army or something. The captain and his manservant. ‘Bring me my gaiters, Porter!' Would you think she was in the army? Gaiters is a nice word, I think, but it's not beautiful enough for the wall of honor.”

“Don't be silly,” said Jake. “There were no women in the army in her day.”

“Were there not? How do you know?”

“I know a lot, I keep telling you. I read stuff.”

“Look at this!” said Stella excitedly, pointing at an extraordinary wooden construction, heavily carved. “It's Indian. Where the tea comes from, though I'd say that's a coincidence. There's one for sale in the Oxfam shop, but it costs a fortune. It's the only thing in the whole Oxfam shop that costs a fortune. Isn't it beautiful? There's a pearly bit here, look.”

“Mother-of-pearl,” Jake said.

“Is that a swear word?” asked Stella.

“No, it's what you call that pearly bit. It's the lining of oyster shells.”

Jake looked behind the screen, which stood in front of the space under the stairs. Behind it were coats and umbrellas and the kinds of things you expect to find under the stairs, but they were obviously a bit too untidy for the Kennedys so they'd put this wooden screen up to conceal them.

“Come on,” he said. “She'll be wondering what's keeping us.”

He opened the door into the kitchen, and an extraordinary smell hit his nostrils. Fruit and spices and toffee and butter and olives and sugar and wine and marzipan and lemon and tea.

He breathed in. “Smells glorious,” he said to Stella, who was behind him. She rested her chin on his shoulder and took a deep breath of the kitchen aroma.

“Oh!” she said. “Maple syrup, roses, mmm, apples.” She sniffed again. “Rum, cinnamon, raisins, nutmeg. Our kitchen always smells of onions and raw meat.”

Jake didn't say anything to that, because it was roughly true. Though sometimes it smelled of worse things.

Even in the kitchen there was a rug, but only one, in the center of the flagged floor. A huge scrubbed table stood on the rug, and the chairs around it had deep seats that seemed to be upholstered in a sort of carpet, with thick brass studs. There were pictures here too, in frames, but they were all drawings and cartoons.

“It's King Arthur's kitchen,” said Stella, pointing at a big deer's head looming out of the wall, as if the deer had stuck his great antlered head in for a look.

“His table was round,” said Jake.

“Oh, that was just his business table. His kitchen table was probably rectangular. Though it might be the table of the High King of Ireland at … where was it?”

“Tara,” Jake said. “Ta-ra-ra boom-dee-yay, I am the king today!”

He switched on the kettle to bring it back to the boil.

“Oh, look, that's Battenberg cake, isn't it,” he said, pointing at a plate of colored slices, “the one with the harlequin squares?”

“Oh yes, and the marzipan icing. It's the brightest yellow I ever saw in a food. I bet it's full of food dye. Yippee! We're going to have a feast! Hi-cockalorum, cockalee!”

“Egg yolks are that color,” said Jake. “I like her.”

“I like her too,” said Stella.

“No, I mean, I
really
like her,” said Jake. “She's special.”

“Yeah,” said Stella. “Sure.”

“Were you in India yourself?” Stella asked, when they got back up to the drawing room with the tea tray.

“No,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “I've never been farther east than Hull. Except for two weekends in Paris. And once I went on a day trip to Amsterdam. Can you imagine? Eighteen hours in Holland.”

“Hull? That sounds terribly …
dull!
” said Stella with a sudden screech of laughter at her rhyme. “Maybe I will be a poet after all, Jake,” she added.

“Oh, it's not dull,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “No place is dull when you get to know what's going on in people's lives.”

“And do you do that?” Stella asked her. “Get to know what's happening in people's lives?”

“I seem to have the knack,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “And now I'll have a piece of that porter cake, if you don't mind, young Stella.”

“I don't think so,” said Stella. “You're supposed to be diabetic.”

“I'll only have a small piece,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “Just a nibble.”

CHAPTER

27

In a dream that night, Jake thought, “Poor Daisy, only got one dad.”

Next morning he remembered the dream thought.

What rubbish!

He didn't have two dads. He had half a dad at best. The one who'd run away didn't count, and the one he'd got wasn't the real thing.

CHAPTER

28

“So tell me about this stickleback,” said Jake's dad. They were washing up together after dinner. This was a new rule in their house, to give Mum time to feed Daisy in peace. Quite a lot of things had changed since Daisy had arrived.

“What stickleback?” asked Jake, though he knew exactly what Dad meant. He remembered the conversation they'd had a few weeks ago. It seemed a lifetime ago now. He was just playing for time, trying to decide what Dad was getting at.

“The one that goes blue in the face. Like me, trying to talk to you.” Dad coughed a nervous little laugh.

“It goes
red
in the face,” Jake said, “and blue in the body. Some books say the body has a bluish tinge; others say it goes brilliant blue. I suppose there must be differences between the species. There are lots of species, ones with three spines, ones with ten spines, and I suppose some with the numbers in between. And the eyes go bright, bright blue too, electric blue.”

“Three spines!
Ten
spines! You'd be crippled if you had ten spines. You couldn't walk—or swim.”

“Not that kind of spine,” said Jake, suppressing a sigh. There was no doubt about it, his dad was slow on the uptake. “It means a little sticky-up bit, a stickle, on the back. Like a thorn on a rose. They're a sort of armor, and weapons too. They get very fierce when they have babies.”

“Oh. So they take fatherhood very seriously, do they, these sticklebacks?”

“Yep,” said Jake, letting the water spill slowly out of the washing-up basin into the sink. The water was pale gray and greasy. He was going to have to wash the basin, to get the film of grease off it. He hunkered down to get the detergent from the cupboard under the sink.

“Well, go on,” said Dad. “I'm all ears.”

Jake laughed. It was a family joke, because it was true that Dad had rather large ears. Not like Jake's, which, thankfully, were small and lay back neatly against the side of his head. He had his mother's ears. His mother often said so. He didn't know what his father's ears had been like. It wasn't the kind of question you asked your mother, somehow.

“I hope Daisy doesn't inherit your ears,” Jake said, standing up with the squeezy detergent bottle in his hand. “You should have thought about that before you had her.”

“What! Not have a baby in case her ears stick out! I don't think that's very sensible, Jake, now, is it?”

Dad was riled, Jake could see. He smiled to himself and rubbed the detergent around the inside of the basin.

“But go on about the stickleback,” Dad said. “I want to know.”

“Well,” said Jake, “he builds this nest, see? And then he entices the female sticklebacks into it. They are brown, like female ducks, dull, but in the mating season, he is all in his bridal colors. That's what they call it, don't laugh, I'm just telling you.”

“I'm not laughing,” said Dad. “I'm listening.”

“He does this zigzag dance, it's called a courtship dance, and she watches, and if she likes it, and she likes him and all his colors, and she likes his nest, then she goes in and lays her eggs, and then she swims off.”

“The hussy!”

“Yeah, well. So, he keeps on doing this, getting all the females he can to lay eggs in his nest, and he fertilizes all the eggs of course, so they're all his, genetically—that's the whole point, you see, he
wants
them to have sticky-out ears, you could say. And then he looks after the eggs and he fights off all the predators and, like I said, he is terribly fierce. And even after they hatch out, he looks after them until they are fully independent and able to mind themselves.”

“My word! So that's the difference between sticklebacks and humans, then.”

“Yes, they're better fathers.”

“No, I mean, in humans, it's the female who wears the bridal dress. And all because she wants to pass on her lovely pearly conchlike ears to her offspring, but of course, she doesn't know that's why she's doing it.”

“That's not it at all,” said Jake. “That's not the point.”

“Well, it's
one
point, Jake,” said Dad. “And another point is that sticklebacks are interesting
because
they're so unusual. They're not some sort of good example for the rest of the species of the planet, you know. It's just one little corner of evolution, the stickleback school of child maintenance and education.”

Jake didn't know what Dad was on about; but he knew he didn't want to continue this conversation. He felt it was getting all twisted.

“So that's your bedtime story for tonight,” he said, turning the basin upside down in the sink to let it drain.

“Speaking of bridal dresses,” Dad went on, “you know there's going to be a christening soon?”

Jake hadn't known, but he nodded anyway.

“So we thought … your mum and I … we thought…”

Jake kept his eyes glued to the upturned bottom of the washing-up basin. He couldn't look at Dad.

“We thought, Jake, that we might get married, make one big celebration of it. What do you think, Son?”

“What!”
Jake spun around from the sink to face his dad.

“Well, you know, we are a family, after all. And we're planning to stay being a family. Wouldn't it be nice, Jake, to sort of announce it?”

“But then, everyone will know you weren't married to start with.”