Invisible Girl

My heart thumps in my ears. I glare at her through the swirls of black smoke. My room is none of her business.

“I like it in a mess,” I say. “I know where everything is and Dad doesn’t mind.”

She moves towards me, her shoes clip-clopping on the kitchen floor, her waggling finger pointing. “Well, young lady,” she says, pushing her face so close to mine I can see the streaks of fake tan on her cheeks, “things are about to change round here. I’m the boss now. So you’d better get used to it.”

My legs are trembling. “But it’s not your flat, Amy,” I say. “It’s ours. And Dad’s the boss. I like my room how it is.”

“This place is a disgrace,” she snaps. “The council would slap a health warning on it if they came for a visit!”

I wish Dad would charge forward and pull her away from me. I wish he’d tell her I can have my room how I like. Instead, he pulls a can of lager out the fridge, snaps it open and takes a long cool sip. He pours a glass of wine for Amy that reminds me of blood, and looks at her and then at me. He sighs, handing me a wodge of cash. I glare at him.

“Dad!” I say. “We can’t afford takeaway—”

“Gabriella,” he interrupts, “don’t be boring. Be a good girl and go and get the food.”

“And make sure you get my order right, Miss Flappy Ears,” says Amy. “I want beef with black bean sauce.”

I’m glad to leave the flat. The air outside is warm and the sun’s turning red in the sky. I stare at it for ages, watching it sink lower and lower. I wish I had some paints with me. I wish I were a proper artist with a real easel and proper brushes and a little stool and an actual canvas. I would really love to paint that sun.

The queue at Chang’s is long. But I don’t mind. I sit and watch the fishes swim round and round the tank, in and out of a little blue castle that’s nestled in the gravel. Round and round and round, weaving through the plants. I wonder if they ever get bored?

I feel like a fish sometimes, going from home to school and back again. Round and round, to town or the park or Grace’s. Dad and me never go anywhere fun. We never do anything special. If Grace invites me on one of her famous expeditions my tank gets a little bit bigger for the day, but it doesn’t happen very often. Zoe and Elsie from my class have amazing lives full of glitter and lip-gloss shimmer, full of popcorn and pony trekking and soft pink leotards with white net tutus for ballet dancing.

I like Friday afternoons when the Play Rangers come to our estate and make us hot chocolate and we toast marshmallows on a fire. We build camps from blue plastic and rotten wood, and run around playing games, squealing at the top of our lungs. But I can still see our flat from the green. I can still see Mrs McKlusky’s tartan slippers fringed with the soft tufts of cotton, shuffling about. I can still hear her mumbling words rude enough to make your ears sting.

Grace came to Play Rangers once and thought it was the best thing ever. My tummy felt warm then, that I had something special to share. Dad keeps promising he’ll come and watch us one day. He keeps promising to fix us a rope swing in the tree on the green.

I order crispy duck for Amy and wish I could tell Chang to put poison on it. But I don’t in case Dad eats it or me. I worry in case one of us dies or if Amy dies and Dad gets sent to prison. Sometimes my heart burns hot with worry. My tummy gets in tangles because who would care for me if Dad was gone? Grace is lucky. Grace has a nice mum and a nice dad. She has two grannies and a grandpa and all sorts of special aunties and uncles and cousins who send her things in the post. Things wrapped in shiny paper with ribbons so colourful I just want to snip them up and make beautiful patterns with the scraps.

When I get back home the flat is quiet with a note on Dad’s bedroom door saying, DO NOT DISTURB. I push my ear against the cold paintwork to listen. Dad’s laughing, Amy’s squealing, their music is blaring.

I grab a fork from the kitchen, shut myself in the front room and put the telly on so loud I know that Mrs McKlusky will bang on the wall with her broom.

I don’t care about Dad and Amy. I’m glad they’re not with me because I can stretch right out on the sofa with my feet up and all the cushions are mine. I can watch my favourite hospital programme in peace. There’s been this big car crash and people are dead, but some are still alive, groaning. My favourite paramedic girl with the soft, kind voice is coming to the rescue. I watch carefully, trying to work out how the make-up artists make all the gashes and bruises look so real.

When I’ve finished my chicken chow mein I lick my fingers and slide my tongue across my lips to keep the taste going on for a little bit longer. I dig into the mountain of prawn crackers, dipping them in the sweet chilli sauce, cramming them into my mouth, tasting them prickle and melt. Dad’s sweet and sour pork smells so good I can’t stop myself from dipping my fingers in its sticky red juice and licking them like lollipops.

And I know he won’t mind because you could easily lay my dad on the floor and wipe your muddy feet all over him and he wouldn’t say one thing. You could slap him round the face, like Mum used to, and he’d just slide off into the bedroom to hide. Like I’d slide under my bed and get as close to the wall as I could. As far away as possible, so she couldn’t get to me with her sharp slaps or see how much the big purple bruises they left on my skin hurt.

I can’t stop fretting that Dad’ll miss his tea and be starving. Amy’s food is sitting on the edge of the coffee table, staring at me, daring me to touch it. I won’t eat it. I’d never do that. But this idea starts swimming round and round my head like Chang’s fishes, pressing in on my skin.

I write ‘beef in black bean sauce’ on the lid so it looks like Chang made a mistake with the order. Then I peel off the lid and rest it on the side. I breathe in crispy duck dare. I put my face close and let spit dribble out and melt into the sauce. I stir my fork round and round then put the lid back on so neat that unless Amy is a detective she’ll never find out.

When my favourite lady on the hospital programme has finished crying into her boyfriend’s arms because she didn’t save the people in time, I watch this other one about cooking in Italy. They make this yummy red sauce and powdery cheese pasta with green basil sprigged on top. They show you the sights and it’s so real I feel like I’m actually in the car with the man with the rusty beard. I’m driving down the avenues of tall trees, past golden fields. I’m drinking the cappuccino hot milk froth with chocolate. Like it’s me, far away from here.

And when we get to the art gallery, in Florence, I hold my breath because the paintings are amazing. There’s one that’s so huge it’s impossible to work out how you might even paint it. It has this woman standing in a big shell and all these other people swooping and swooshing around her.

The marble sculpture of someone called David is the best. Grace would’ve laughed her socks off if she were watching because David’s naked. Imagine having a huge chunk of cool white marble in front of you, all the chisels and hammers you need. Imagine chipping away until you’re covered in white dust and your hands are sore and the person inside steps out and stops waiting forever for someone to find them.

Later in bed, my duvet is tangled and I’m hot, sticky and sweaty with sleep, when I hear Amy in the kitchen. I hear the microwave ping. I hear her fork clink, clinking on the plate.

“Chang’s rubbish at getting his orders right, but this crispy duck is gorgeous, Dave,” she says. “Totally gorgeous!”

I snuggle into Blue Bunny and stroke the soft silky label on his ear, the bit where Beckett wrote his name in red biro before he left.

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I hate my room. It’s so tidy because of Amy. She does this inspection thing every day, checking round the flat, making sure no germs are lurking like swamp monsters in the shadows. I wish they were. I wish armies of them would creep out of their hiding place and eat her. I wish they’d pull her down to their dark red cauldrons and mix her up to make poison. There are so many words on my lips for Amy. Bad words that would scorch your ears and make the lady in the sweet shop shoo the big boys out. But I’m not stupid enough to say them, so my tummy makes a big fist around them and holds them safe inside. When Amy’s done her inspection I close my bedroom door and mess things up again.

She’s mean to my dad too. I feel sorry for him. Last week while I was on the green drinking creamy hot chocolate with Grace and the Play Rangers I caught him staring out of the window with this pale face, looking so lost and sad.

After, I made him a coffee and we sat quietly together listening to the football results on the telly. And I loved him smiling when Arsenal won. I loved that we did a high five and I felt the warmth of his hand for the first time in ages. But then Amy came in and threw us off the sofa so she could plump up the cushions and put them neatly in pairs.

Before Amy, we only ever vacuumed the floor on special occasions. Now she makes Dad push the vacuum cleaner around every day and do all these stupid exercises at the same time. He looks stupid in the pink rubber gloves and plastic muscleman pinafore she got him for when he does the washing-up.

“Dave!” she says, inspecting the sink. “You haven’t even bleached it yet, have you? We’ll all get salmonella at this rate.”

And then she sprays the whole world with Spring Breeze air freshener that stings our eyes and chokes our throats.

When Amy’s out at Zumba class I get the chance to sit close to Dad and watch the telly and feel like it’s just him and me again. And I want to tell him everything. I want to say it all out loud, all the words twisting through me, getting tangled up inside. But I don’t know where to start. I’m too scared of making him cross or upsetting him.

“Do you like Amy, Dad?” I whisper. “Like, really like her?”

Dad sighs and stares at Top Gear. He snaps open his next can of lager and I watch the foamy bubbles fizz up through the opening and dribble down the sides.

“I mean, we don’t really need her,” I say. “Do we? I think we were much better without her. And I’m worried about money. The landlord said if you miss the rent again he’ll evict us, remember, Dad?”

Dad flicks the TV from channel to channel. He sips and sips and sips.

“Don’t you start on at me as well,” he says, without looking at me. “It might be hard for you to understand, but I don’t just like Amy, Gabriella, I love her. I’m a man possessed by a beautiful woman. I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but I can’t help myself.”

His words fly at me like a football in the park, punching me with a cold hard thud in the tummy. I think I might be sick. He’s never said he loves me. He’s never said anything that nice about me, ever. I rub my face. I bend over to re-tie my laces.

Dad pats his wobbly tummy and peers at me from under his fringe. He sip, sip, sips his lager. “I reckon…” he says.

Then he stops talking. The air between us pulls tight and makes me hold my breath. Suddenly it feels just like the day he said Mum and Beckett were leaving.

“I reckon,” he says, “if I can shed a few pounds, Amy might even marry me. What d’you think of that, eh? And I promise you Amy’ll let you be a bridesmaid if you keep your room tidy and start doing the stuff she asks. The pair of you could dress up all posh and lovely. Don’t worry about the rent, Gabriella. I’ve got it all under control. You just have to learn to trust your old dad.”

He rummages in his pocket then pulls out a small square box and opens it up. “And when she sees this little baby,” he chuckles, holding a diamond ring between his fat finger and thumb so it glitters in the light, “she might not even care about my tummy!”

I fly into my room, slam the door and bite back the sour tears that are rising in my throat. I can’t let myself think about what Dad’s just said, so I pull out my box of art scraps and scatter them across the floor.

I cut and rip shiny sweet wrappers and bits of paper, making them into tiny bricks. I draw the outline of a house on a fresh clean page and glue the shiny bricks on one by one. I make little red roof tiles out of material I found at a car boot sale and a trail of grey smoke coming from the chimney out of a pair of Dad’s old pants. I colour in a bright blue front door and put loads of sunflowers in the garden like in the Italy programme. I cut a girl’s face from a magazine and stick her on the picture so she’s looking out of the window at the flowers.

I pick up my little photo of Beckett that lives on my bedside table with the special book I won in the school art competition about famous artists. I stare at his face and wish he would leap out and talk to me.

“I wish you were here, Beckett,” I whisper. “Where are you?”