What Not to Do If You Turn Invisible

2 Cleansers And Wipes. They just mean that my spots are shining out like beacons from a really clean face. I sometimes wonder if it actually makes them worse.

3 Cutting Out Fats. That was a horrible month. This theory is based on the fact that my skin is sometimes quite oily (and there’s an understatement to frame and hang on your wall). So if I didn’t eat butter, or cheese, or milk, or fried stuff, or salad dressings, or – as it turned out – anything delicious at all, then my face wouldn’t be greasy. Didn’t work. And I was hungry.

4 Garlic And Honey. Every morning, chop up three cloves of garlic and mix with a large spoonful of runny honey. Gross. And ineffective.

5 Spot Cream. This involved rubbing a cream into my face at night. Oddly, it’s quite an oily cream, which you’d think would make it worse, but it didn’t. Nor did it make it any better.

6 Good Old Fresh Air. Another one of Gram’s. Goes with Good Old Soap And Water. The only one to benefit from this was Lady, who for about a month got extra walks, until I noticed that my face was no different. Sorry, Lady.

7 Homeopathy. There are about five homeopathic medicines in Holland & Barrett that say they work for acne. None of them worked for me.

8 Nettle Tea. Tastes as bad as it sounds. Worse, actually.

9 Vitamin B5. All over the internet as the ‘miracle cure’. Next.

10 Antibiotics. This was what Dr Kemp finally recommended on my second visit, after showing him the list above. One Septrin tablet daily for a grand result of … no difference at all.

11 The Latest One: Dr Chang His Skin So Clear. An internet purchase. Gram said it looked dodgy and refused to buy it for me so I had to resort to subterfuge. Dr Chang, like Elliot Boyd, plays a big role in how I came to turn invisible.

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Gram tells me that Mum had acne when she was my age yet she grew up to be ‘such a beautiful young lady’.

She was. In the picture in my room she has shortish, reddy-blonde hair and these massive, slightly sad eyes. It sometimes makes me think that she knew she would die young, but then I look at other pictures where she’s laughing and I think she wasn’t really sad at all. Just – I don’t know – a bit … manic?

I hardly remember her, in case you’re wondering if I’m upset about it. She died when I was three. Cancer.

My dad had already left by then. Gone, disappeared. ‘And jolly good riddance too’ was Gram’s verdict. She can hardly bear to say his name (which is Richard, though to me he looks more like a Rick) and the only picture I have of him is a grainy snap taken shortly after I was born, with Mum holding me, and Dad next to her, smiling. He’s skinny, with a beard, hair longer than Mum’s, and dark glasses on, like some sort of rock star.

‘He turned up at the hospital drunk,’ said Gram during one of our (very) occasional conversations about it. ‘It was his usual state.’

Mum and Dad were not married when I was born, but got married later. I took Mum’s last name, Leatherhead, which is Gram’s too. It’s there on my birth certificate:

Birthday: 29 July

Birthplace: St Mary’s Hospital, London

Mother’s name: Lisa Anne Leatherhead

Occupation: teacher

Father’s name: Richard Michael Malcolm

Occupation: student

And so on.

I’ll give you the brief version. It’s pretty much all I have ever had anyway. Gram is not keen to talk about it because I think it upsets her too much.

Gram moved to London when she was little, and she grew up there. She and Grampa split up some time in the 1980s. He now lives in Scotland with his second wife (Morag? Can’t remember). Mum was twenty-three when she had me. She and Dad weren’t planning a family, Gram says – I just kind of happened.

My dad disappeared when I was little. It wasn’t a disappearance that involved the police or anything. There was no mystery. He just ‘left the scene’ and was most recently heard of in Australia, according to Gram.

The last time we talked about him was a few weeks ago.

We’ve always had tea, Gram and I, when I come in from school, ever since I was about seven. I know: most seven-year-olds are drinking juice or milk, but not me. Tea and cake, or biscuits. And none of your mugs: it’s all in a proper teapot, with china cups and saucers, plus a sugar bowl even though neither of us takes sugar. It’s just for show. I didn’t really like tea at first. It was too hot. I love it now, though.

In school, we had been talking about careers in Mr Parker’s PSHE lesson. I was at the back, keeping quiet as per, when the talk came round to what people’s parents did and how people sometimes follow their parents’ careers. All I knew about my dad was that he had been ‘a student’, according to my birth certificate.

I had been planning this for a day or two, how to bring it up. I asked Gram as she poured the tea why Dad had disappeared as a lead-in to what he had been studying.

Instead of answering me directly, she said, ‘Your father led a very wild life, Ethel.’

I nodded, without really understanding.

‘He drank heavily. Took far too many risks. I believe he wanted to live without responsibility.’

‘Wh … why?’

‘I really do not know, darling. I suppose it comes down to weakness of spirit. He was weak and irresponsible. Some men are not equipped to handle the demands of fatherhood,’ said Gram. Her glasses had slid down her nose and she looked at me over the top of them as she spoke. ‘I think perhaps your father was one of those.’

It was the nearest she ever got to saying something kind about him. It was rare for her to mention him without also using the words ‘drunk’ and ‘childish’. Her shoulders always stiffen, and her lips go tight, and you can tell that she’d rather talk about anything other than my dad.

We never got as far as what he was studying, because Gram changed the subject by telling me how she had told off a young man that morning who had his feet up on the seats of the Metro.

So anyway, now it’s just Gram and me, back where Gram was born, on the blustery north-east coast in a town called Whitley Bay. According to Gram, though, we don’t live in Whitley Bay – we live in Monkseaton, which is a slightly posher bit that most people would say started at least three or four streets further west. I still think of it as Whitley Bay. So now we happily live in the same house, but apparently in different towns.

Well, I say just Gram and me. There’s Great-gran too, who is Gram’s mum. She’s not exactly here very much. She’s very nearly 100, and ‘away with the fairies’, says Gram, but not in a mean way. She had a stroke years ago, which is when your brain bleeds; there were ‘complications’, and she never properly recovered.

Great-gran lives in a home in Tynemouth, about two miles away. She doesn’t ever say much. The last time I visited her, my spots were really bad, and she lifted up her tiny hand from under her shawl and stroked my face. Then she opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if she had said something. Would it have changed what happened next?

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He was with me. Again. Making three times that week.

This was just a couple of days before I turned invisible, so we’re nearly back to that.

‘Awright, Effow?’ he said. ‘You headin’ home? I’ll walk wif you, eh?’

It’s not like he gave me any choice, appearing just as I was shutting my locker as if he’d been lying in wait.

(I’ve looked up ‘bumptious’ by the way. It means ‘full of yourself’ and that’s a good description of Elliot Boyd. There are plenty of other things that annoy me. ‘Effel’ is one, or as he says it, ‘Effow’. I know it’s just his accent, but, stuck as I am with a name from 100 years ago, it would be nice to have it at least pronounced properly.)

So we walked home, Elliot Boyd keeping up a near-constant commentary on his current favourite topic: Whitley Bay lighthouse. At least it was a change from him trying to show me card tricks, which was last month’s obsession.

The lighthouse is there at the end of the beach. It doesn’t do anything, apart from appear on postcards. It doesn’t light up or anything, and this fact really bugs Elliot Boyd. (And only him, so far as I can tell.)