When I Was Invisible (26 page)

‘What? No!'

‘He's the reason you do what you do with all those men: being with horrible men is all you think you're worth,' she said to me. ‘And he's the reason I can't feel anything any more except disgust. I hate myself so much – my body, my hair, the way I look in the mirror. I hate
everything
about myself … I can't take any more. I have to go to the police. I have to get it to stop. If I go to the police, my parents will have to believe me and they'll make him stop.'

I didn't know she hated herself. That she felt how I felt, because she didn't do the things I did, she didn't seem as broken as I was. I'd always thought she was strong, didn't need anything or anyone to make her feel better.

‘You have to come with me, Roni. They'll believe me if there's two of us,' she said.

Going to the police was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to pretend everything was OK. I knew it wasn't, but if I didn't think about it, then I wouldn't have to deal with it or do as Nika wanted to do and go to the police. ‘OK,' I said. ‘I'll come with you.'

The problem with not giving people your phone number but having them live in the same building as you is that they tend to turn up.

The
knock-knock
on my front door early Saturday evening pulls me away from sitting on the sofa, staring at the television. I wasn't aware of what was on, I was staring at the screen, running my fingers through my hair and thinking about where to go next. Not physically,
physically
, I am signed up to live in this building for another eight months or so, but I am trying to work out if I need to get help. When I spent months and years going to Birmingham Library, I would read books about the reasons for my death wish. I would read and read and read, uncovering the theories, discovering the reasonings, identifying with the behaviours. Theory, though, has nothing on reality.

If I decide to get help, I will have to first work out if I want to crack open that little box that is my mind and delve inside. It may well be embracing my past so I can face my future, but whenever I think like that, another part of me sneers at me. I deride myself for even contemplating the idea. Why would I put myself through all that pain? Why would I dredge up everything when for the first time in a long time I am on an even keel? I am safe, I am warm, I do not need to worry about money, I have my own space.

I need to worry about Judge finding me, I need to worry about trying to fix my relationship with my parents. I do
not
need to make more problems for myself by thinking about unearthing my past.

I slip on my tortoiseshell glasses and open the door.

‘Hi,' Marshall says with a smile.

Since the debacle with Eliza the other week, I have been very careful coming and going from the building so I can avoid the pair of them. That is a mess I do not need to step into then drag its entrails through my life. When I went over and told him that I was leaving but Eliza was sitting on the other side of the bar, he stared at me in surprise. He had been about to smile when he saw me, I think, but that was washed away on the realisation that he was being forced to spend a night out with Eliza.

The worst part is, I feel sorry for Eliza.
I
feel sorry for Eliza – she could do with some help, with a friend, someone to gently guide her away from this path she has clearly been careening down for a long while. But I can't do that. It wouldn't be fair on her, because I would be doing it for me, to feed that part of me that is addicted to helping others. Reese said it made me a
fucking liability.
He was probably right.

‘Hello, Marshall,' I say coolly.

‘I've been hoping to catch you this week, but you seem to have become expert at entering and exiting the building without being seen.'

‘It's one of my superpowers.'

‘What are your other ones?' he asks with a grin.

‘How can I help you, Marshall?' I say. My frostiness isn't strictly necessary, but I don't want him to charm me into forgetting he has a mad friend who is targeting me because of him.

His grin fades and he lowers his head, abashed. ‘I'm sorry about Eliza. She can be a bit full on. She has this habit of rabidly trying to befriend any women she thinks I might be interested in.'

‘I don't think she tries to befriend them if the other night was anything to go by. More like warn them off. Apparently you're not in the right place for a relationship right now.'

‘Jeez.' He rubs a hand over his eyes. ‘It's hard to believe, I know, but she's a good person. She's got a heart of gold but she can be so intense. She does this sort of thing and it pisses me off, but when I get to the point of wanting to tell her to do one, I can't. She seems too fragile.'

‘Fragile. Yeah.'

‘Anyway, the point of my visit was to apologise and also to ask if you fancied going to dinner one night?'

‘What about fragile Eliza?' I ask. Probably unnecessarily mean, but talk about a man in denial.

‘What about her?'

‘Aren't you worried about how she might react?'

‘No. Yes. I don't know. Can we not talk about it?'

‘Fine. When do you want to go to dinner?'

‘What, you're actually going to go out with me?' he asks. He's one of those men who doesn't have a mirror, clearly. What is not to like about him? Tall, handsome, a moral compass that is directed towards the good side – expertly shown by him speaking up in the meeting. Admittedly, he has a Rottweiler friend who would savage anyone rather than let them near him, but that doesn't negate most of the good things about him. ‘Most women who have had “the chat” with Eliza won't even give me the time of day, let alone go out with me. I usually get the chance to apologise and then things are awkward between us until we both pretend that we weren't interested in each other in the first place.'

‘I like to live dangerously. When are you free?'

‘Now?' he says, hopefully.

‘I'm guessing you're worried I'll change my mind,' I state.

‘Something like that.'

‘Now's fine. Come in while I turn the telly off and stuff. It won't take me long to get ready.'

He steps inside, his gaze immediately examining the place, searching for clues as to my personality, what I like, what I've got on display, where things are placed. He'll be disappointed since I haven't had the mental quiet yet to think of what I want and where. I don't have much, either. A sofa that is the flat owners', TV, ditto, and coffee table, ditto. In fact, the only things in this place I own are my guitar, my clothes, my shoes and my toiletries. And my music player, of course. I've thought of buying a CD player or a laptop, but both seem to cost a
lot
of money, and both are things I would probably really miss if I lost them. My only real non-essential item I own is actually my guitar.

As he walks past it, Marshall strums his fingers across the neck of my guitar, propped up at the entrance to my living room area. ‘Do you play?' he asks as the chord he's played filters away.

‘A little,' I say. ‘All self-taught so I'm still learning.'

A sudden coldness slips through my body: I've let him into my flat without thinking. I've simply invited him in without a second thought. He could be anybody, he
is
anybody, and I have just invited him in.

‘I'm always impressed by people who can play instruments.' He holds up his hands. ‘The owner of two left hands, that's me. Obviously ironic given my name and
Spinal Tap
, etc.'

I say nothing, but cross quickly to the television, switch it off. I was planning on changing, putting on jeans instead of these knee-length shorts, and another top instead of this double layer of vests, but since I've invited him in without thinking, it's best I get him out again as soon as possible.

I grab my cardigan from the sofa, slip it on, then make for the hallway, my heart pounding in my ears. I'm not scared of him – there is nothing about him that has set my radar going – but I am scared of myself. I am scared that I am still doing things that put me in danger without thinking. I push my feet into my battered white Converse shoes and pull on my jacket.

‘See, ready in no time,' I say.

‘That is seriously impressive,' he says with a laugh. He has a nice laugh, warm and genuine, just like him. He seems lovely, but still I leave a gap between us as he leaves to give myself enough room to slam the door shut if I decide to change my mind. I don't need to, of course, he's a perfectly pleasant person, we are off out for a perfectly pleasant early dinner. I don't need to worry about him. It's me I need to worry about. I really can be a liability sometimes.

‘Are you sure you don't need anything, Ace?' Judge asked. ‘It really will make things easier.'

I shook my head. Slowly I opened the clutch bag that Judge had given me money to buy, along with the gold cocktail dress I was wearing, and pulled out my music player. I unwound the headphones from around its black body, ready to shove each earpiece into its corresponding ear.

‘Are you sure now?' Judge coaxed. The three other women sitting with us in the expensive, almost brand-new people carrier, who, like me, were all dressed up in clothes he'd bought and ready to attend one of his parties, were listening to him speak to me. When I attended these parties, he talked to me much more than them on the journey out to whichever country house he had hired, because they knew him, he knew them, they did as they were told because he was their supplier of money and drugs. I was just along for the ride, to make up numbers, and I was sure he saw me as a challenge. The conversation was always the same: ‘I can sub you, if that's the problem?' he said. His voice was silky smooth, used to finding a way to lull you, calm you, make you so at ease you would always do what he wanted. I noticed sometimes, when I always gave the same answer – ‘No, thank you, but no' – a little pink would creep up his neck, his fingers would knit themselves together and his expression would briefly betray his desire to have me closer: I was a challenge in that in the six months I'd been doing this, I had never once taken him up on his offer of ‘something to make things easier'.

I sat on one of the backward-facing seats. Judge sat in the middle of the back seat, his legs wide open so the blonde to his left had to sit with her legs pressed tightly together, and the redhead to his right had squashed herself against the side of the car, her face almost flattened against the window. The brunette beside me sat very still, watching me from the corner of her eye. She was too scared to move her head to look at me in case Judge made eye contact with her and she wasn't immediately looking at him to respond.

‘I wish you'd let me give you a pager or even a mobile phone,' he said to me. His navy-blue gaze stared directly at me when he spoke. He knew how to unnerve people. He was expert at it. ‘It'd be so much easier for me to contact you when I knew one of my parties was coming up. I don't like leaving messages with Bernie – what if you miss one and miss out? Let me get you a pager at least.'

‘It's OK, I'm fine as I am,' I said. Since he'd sat down opposite me that night at Bernie's, I had been entangled with him, but I was careful not to owe him anything. When he gave me money for dresses and shoes, I would always take their cost off the amount he paid me at the end of the night. I always refused his offer of drugs, mobiles, pagers, and even a place to sleep. I knew that owing Judge anything was a dangerous position to be in.

When we had first talked, he'd told me about his parties. Rich men paid a lot of money to come to Judge's parties, to be introduced to women, to spend the evening chatting to them – ‘socially networking', Judge liked to call it. He was holding real-life dating parties, he'd explain to anyone who thought he was sailing a bit too close to the legal edge. He was paid to make introductions, to see if the people at the parties were compatible. If some of them sloped off upstairs to get better acquainted, that wasn't his fault since they were adults; if some of them decided they weren't that compatible even after becoming better acquainted, that wasn't his problem, either. He simply set up the parties, just like the legitimate dating agencies did, and he couldn't control what people did. He'd asked me if I was interested in coming to his parties, possibly earning some cash, and I had said I wasn't into that. Because I didn't owe him, he couldn't insist.

So, he allowed me to do what women like me, who weren't indebted to him, did – be part of the cover story. We mingled, we talked to people, we never went upstairs so if the police asked questions, we could honestly say we had never been paid to let anyone have sex on us, we weren't part of the people who helped Judge make money from immoral sources.

‘Have you ever tried taking something to smooth out the edges?' he asked me. I had been about to scroll through the music player, to search for something that really would take the edge off, pour a soothing elixir through my mind and sensibilities, but I had to talk to him. He put up with a certain amount of disengagement from me, but he had his limits, I knew that.

‘No,' I said to him. ‘Never had any need or inclination.'

‘You should try it,' he said. ‘You might like it.'

‘I might,' I admitted.

He liked that, and I was rewarded with a grin, with a flash of his ruby-embedded tooth. The atmosphere in the car jumped up a few notches: the other women were willing me from behind their extravagant make-up and overstyled hair not to do it, not to get myself to where they were. I'd agreed to go to his parties because I got paid. They got paid, but they also had a debt to him, the interest on which they could never hope to pay off.