Something Invisible (4 page)

When you went through the back kitchen, which smelled unpleasantly of onions and rubber, and out into the garden, it went on and on too. You couldn't call it a yard, exactly, because there were quite a lot of things growing in it, like apple trees and grass and cabbages, but there were also a lot of things that didn't belong in a garden—a pram with one wheel missing, several window frames and a rusty washing machine. At the end of the garden was a large shed with a flat roof. This was the studio, Stella said. Her parents were photographers, it seemed, and this was where they worked. There were windows, but black blinds were drawn over them.

Stella's mother appeared at the door of the studio. She was short and sturdy and wore a denim skirt and shirt and had the same no-color hair as the children, only it was short with bubbly curls.

“Yes?” she said, looking inquiringly at Jake.

She had a bright-red necklace on, one with shiny red beads. It made her look businesslike and jolly at the same time. She looked like a mum in a picture book. Jake thought disloyally of his own mum, with her wild hair and still in her dressing gown at lunchtime.

“It's all right, he's for me,” Stella said.

“Okey dokey,” said Stella's mother. She gave Jake a smile and went away.

That was a bit
too
jolly, Jake thought, but he'd give her a second chance if he met her again. She might be all right.

It turned out that the doorbell was wired through to the studio, and Stella's mother had thought it was a customer ringing.

“You should put a sign on it,” Jake said, “so people would know not to ring unless they're on business.”

“Can't,” said Stella. “The neighbors don't like the studio being here at all. They'd have us up in court if we put a sign up about it.”

Jake looked over the walls. On either side, the gardens were perfectly tended, with white-painted garden benches poised under artistically draped apple boughs and little gritted paths edged with white-painted stones. The lawns looked as if they had been shaved and the edges trimmed with nail scissors. In one there was a square wooden archway, festooned with very thorny-looking roses, with flowers as big as cabbages. In the other was a small kidney-shaped pond with a concrete heron standing guard over it and a lot of water lilies.

“I see,” he said.

“Daisy murderers,” muttered Stella fiercely.

Jake barked a laugh. She meant the kind that grow in the grass, of course, and follow soft the sun.

“Mrs. Peacock,” he said darkly, “in the Garden, with the Lawnmower.”

Stella stared. “Oh,” she said at last. “That's a game, isn't it? Detectives or something. I'm not much good at cards.”

“Mm,” said Jake. “It's a board game, not a card game. Do you think there might be fish in that pond?”

“I never saw any, but then you wouldn't, would you? Unless you had a telescope.”

“Will we investigate?” Jake suggested.

“Why?” asked Stella.

“I like fish,” said Jake.

“We will, then,” said Stella gamely.

The wall was rather high and smooth for climbing, but at one end of the garden, growing almost against the wall, on Stella's side, was a muscular-looking cherry tree, so they climbed that first, and stepped off it onto the wall. From there it was a steep jump down into the next-door garden. Stella closed her eyes and held her nose, as if she were jumping off a diving board, and over she went. Jake watched her folding herself into a comma shape in the air, and landing all curled up on the lawn next door.

Not to be outdone, he leaped off the wall, arms flailing, and landed in an untidy heap beside her.

Giggling softly, they rolled onto their bellies and started to work their way, using their elbows and their knees, like ungainly lizards, over the lawn toward the pond, keeping low and out of sight.

When they got to the edge of the pond, they stared into the water. It was green and opaque and insects buzzed quietly over its brackish surface. It smelled old, like hundreds of years.

Something moved in the dark and greeny water and Jake screwed up his eyes. Something orange, he thought, the merest flicker of brightness in the murk. Yes! A goldfish, a large one, drifting slowly in the shade of the water lilies.

“Fish are boring,” Stella hissed, after a while. “They do nothing except wiffle around.”

“That's the whole point of fish,” Jake said. “That's why they're so great. They don't bother with humans, just get on with … wiffling around. But anyway, that's not what I call a real fish.”

“Of course it's real. You can't get fake fish. Can you? Why would anyone want to?”

“Listen!” Jake said.

Shuffle, stomp.

They froze. The sound was distant, but it was coming nearer. Shuffle, stomp. Shuffle, stomp.

“It's a hippopotamus,” Jake whispered. “Coming back to the waterhole.”

“Or a water buffalo,” Stella breathed.

Their bodies shook with laughter.

“It's Mrs. Peabody,” hissed Stella, “the serial daisy murderess.”

“Mrs. Peacock,” Jake corrected her. “The people are all called after colors in Clue.”

“Peacock is a bird,” whispered Stella, “not a color.”

“It's a color too,” said Jake. “Like orange, only that's a fruit, of course.”

“Of course,” snorted Stella, and stuffed her fist into her mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

Shuffle, stomp.

They were going to be caught, whoever it was, but they couldn't think of anything to do except lie there and wait.

“It's a grampus,” said Jake wildly.

“A geyser,” said Stella, spitting grass out of her mouth.

“It's a walrus,” said Jake, louder than he meant to. The sounds were very close now, but he couldn't help himself.

“It's an old lady with arthritis,” said a voice from above them, sounding very like an old lady with arthritis.

Slowly Jake and Stella turned over and looked up, blinking into the light.

“You're from the bus stop,” said Jake, when he finally managed to focus.

“I'm from Cork,” said the old lady, and leaned on her aluminum walking stick with three funny legs with rubber feet on the bottom. “A bus stop is no sort of a place for a respectable person to be from. Stand up, the pair of ye. I can't talk to a couple of snakes in the grass.”

Sheepishly, Jake and Stella stood up and halfheartedly brushed themselves down.

“That dress is ruined,” said the old lady with arthritis, lowering herself carefully onto a convenient garden bench. “Grass stains don't come out. Your mother will be cross.”

“She won't,” said Stella. “She doesn't get cross. Anyway, she has a special magic soap.”

“Remarkable,” said the old lady with arthritis, and rested her chin on her hands, which rested on the top of her aluminum stick.

“He says your goldfish is fake,” Stella said, to fill the silence.

“I don't mean fake, exactly,” said Jake. “I just mean, not natural. Like my tropical fish. It's as if they're in costume. Pretending to be fish. Acting.”

“I see,” said the old lady with arthritis. “I quite follow. So what kind of fish do you consider to be real?”

Jake thought for a moment.

“Silvery ones,” he said at last.

“Ah, yes,” she said. “Yes, that's good. Very good. And who, by the way, might you be?”

“I'm Jake,” Jake said, and then, thinking that sounded a bit blunt, he added, by way of extending the introduction, “I'm going to be a fish painter. That's why I was looking in your pond.”

“A fish painter, I see. When you grow up?”

She was the first grown-up who had ever seen. Jake looked at her admiringly.

“Yes,” he said.

“I'm Stella. I live next door. I'm going to be a lexicographer.”

“I know your face. I know your mother.”

“But you don't live here,” said Stella, “because this is Mr. Kennedy's house, and his wife is young. For an adult, I mean.”

“Indeed,” said the old lady with arthritis. “As you can see, this is not a garden that is tended by an old lady with arthritis. My son lives here, he and his wife. He is Mr. Kennedy, though I do not usually think of him like that. I think of him as Seán. I live here now too, but I've only just moved in. The new girl, you might say.”

Stella and Jake didn't say anything to that. They were wondering if they could reasonably leave sometime soon.

In the end, the old lady closed her eyes and seemed to want to sleep, so they just tiptoed away, climbed over the wall—with some difficulty, since there was no helpful cherry tree on this side—and launched themselves back into Stella's garden.

CHAPTER

16

“What's a lexic … that thing you want to be when you grow up?” Jake asked Stella. They were in her room, and he was staring at her word collection. The words were all written out in large black flowing letters on strips of plain white paper, and they were pinned to the walls. The whole room was covered in them, like fluttery wallpaper.

“Oh, that's just a dream,” said Stella. “I don't think there will be any by the time I grow up. It'll all be done by computers.”

“But what is it?”

“Making dictionaries,” Stella said.

“You could always be a poet,” Jake said. “If there are no jobs for lexithingies.”

“No, I couldn't,” said Stella. “I only collect them. I can't make them rhyme.”

“You don't need to make them rhyme,” Jake said.

“Of course you do.”

“No, you don't. Lots of poetry doesn't rhyme. Rhyme is out of date … some people think … so I hear.”

“How come you know so much about poetry?” Stella asked.

“I know about lots of things,” said Jake. “Do you like fishing?”

He only asked to change the subject, but that was just the right question, as it turned out.

CHAPTER

17

Jake's mother loved it when people came to admire Daisy. She threw open the front door and made wide gestures with her arms when she heard why Stella had come. She looked a little less enthusiastic when Stella's siblings suddenly appeared out of nowhere, in that startling way they had, and started to fill the hall with their murmelings and squawkings and the soft patter of their flip-flopped and sandaled feet.

“I thought she was supposed not to be your friend,” his mother hissed at Jake.

“That was last week,” Jake said. “But I found out she likes fishing.”

“And what about the others? There's millions of them!”

“They'll be OK,” said Jake, sounding surer than he felt. The younger ones hadn't been part of the deal. The deal was, first a quick visit to Daisy, and then they were going fishing—he and Stella, as far as Jake was concerned. It hadn't crossed his mind that it was going to be a family outing. But he wasn't going to let on about this to his mother. “They mostly play quietly together.”

He hoped that was true, and it was. Roughly.

They trooped into Jake's kitchen and they sat under the table, and, for a little while, there wasn't a sound out of them. Then suddenly the table started to rock, and muffled sounds came from under it.

Jake's mother looked alarmed as some stray cutlery that was lying on the tabletop started to slither about, but Stella lifted the brightly patterned oilcloth that Jake's mother liked to cover the table with and asked them, in a calm voice, what they were playing.

“Boats,” said one.

“Tents,” said another.

“OK,” said Stella, “but hush up a bit, OK?” She let the tablecloth fall again.

That seemed to settle them. It was amazing the effect Stella had on them.

“They're just playing,” she said. “They'll be good as gold.”

“I hope you're not taking all those children fishing with you,” said Jake's mother in a worried voice. “They might fall in.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Stella. “Of course not.”

Jake's mother looked relieved.

CHAPTER

18

Jake's idea of fishing was to put a worm on a hook, sling it over the pier and hope for the best. Stella had more complicated ideas. She squinted at the horizon, licked her finger and held it up in the wind and squinched her face into a monkey's snout while she appeared to smell the tide.

Jake stared at her, and then he stared at the younger children, who all sat in a row on the pier and worked quickly and quietly, untangling Stella's fishing gear. There was masses of it, things called spinners and bobs and flies—all things Jake had never even heard of—bundled into a biscuit box.

“How come they're doing that?” Jake asked, nodding toward the working children.

“I promised them ice creams if they're good.”

“That's bribery,” said Jake.

“Fair exchange is no robbery,” said Stella, whatever that was supposed to mean.

“Where's the small one?” Jake asked suddenly, looking around. “Did we leave him on the DART? Oh, my God!”

“No,” said Stella. “He's Fergal. He stays at home. He's too young.”

“For fishing?”

“For me,” said Stella. She was gouging a limpet out of its shell with her penknife. Then she sliced it in two and gave Jake one piece, for bait.

“I don't do small ones,” she said. “I mean, I love them to bits, but I don't mind them until they're old enough not to fall in. Or nearly.” She nodded toward the youngest one she had with her, whose name seemed to be Joey, only it was wearing a dress, which didn't seem quite right.

Jake looked dubiously at the children who were supposed to be old enough not to fall in. He didn't for a moment think they were all that specially trustworthy, even if they had played quietly—fairly quietly —under his kitchen table for a good half hour. They pranced about a bit too much, in his view. Their feet seemed to be on a level with their ears more often than he was entirely happy about.