The Invisible Ones (17 page)

I must have sort of drifted off, because when I open my eyes, there’s a black Range Rover in front of me. The only person I’ve ever seen get into one of these cars is Katie Williams, but the windows of this one are
tinted, so I can’t see who’s inside. Then the driver’s window slides down with a slightly creaky electric hum. A woman with a nice face and an expensive-looking streaked hairdo looks out with a smile.

“Have you been stranded?”

Shocked that someone I don’t know is talking to me, I shake my head vigorously. Then the shiny head of Katie Williams leans forward from the ackseat.

“We’ll give you a lift, JJ. Get in.”

Katie Williams, who hates me—at least, I’ve always assumed so. Astonishing. It must be a joke. She must have something horrible in store, and everyone will laugh. It will be “Sausages” all over again.

“I’m waiting for my gran. She’ll be here soon. It’s all right. Thanks.”

“Oh, but you’ve been out here for ages! When I came to pick Katie up from her oboe lesson I saw you out here—that must have been twenty minutes ago.”

Mrs. Williams looks kind and concerned. She makes me feel like a small kid again and in need of looking after. I quite like it.

“She’s just a bit late. I’m sure she’ll be here soon.”

“You’re absolutely soaked! You’ll catch your death of cold.”

“I’m all right. Really. Not cold at all.”

“Your teeth are chattering. We can’t leave you here . . .”

There is muttering inside the car.

“Katie says you live just off the Eastwick Road. It’s not far out of our way. And if your grandmother’s been delayed . . . There may be a problem with her car or something . . . I’ll explain it. Don’t worry . . .”

The door is open, and somehow, although I keep saying that I’m all right, I seem to be getting into the back of the Range Rover, impelled by the power of money, or something. The seats are made of soft, squeaky leather, and I’m worried about ruining them. Once inside, I feel a hundred times wetter than I was outside. Katie, dry and sleek and smelling of strawberry lip gloss, stares straight ahead and chews gum and doesn’t look at me. How does she know where I live? Did Stella tell her? What did she say? The very thought of what she might have said makes me feel
sick and hot all over. But also, the thought that she talked about me at all is strangely thrilling.

Classical music plays softly on the car radio—a load of people are singing in a way that makes me think of an army marching with very measured steps, pausing between each one.

“You done your Jane Austen?”

Katie speaks without looking at me—I feel this rather than know it, because I am not looking at her, either.

“Um. No. Not yet.”

“JJ’s really good at English,” Katie announces suddenly, to my total and complete surprise.

Mrs. Williams speaks half over her shoulder.

“I wish you’d give Katie a few tips.”

I sort of smile, as the idea is so bizarre it’s funny.

“Why don’t you come back to our place? We can look at it together. You can get dry . . . and we’ll give you a lift back afterward—please, Mum?”

She leans forward, smiling in a toadying way at her mother’s ear. I’m so stunned I can’t speak. Katie Williams, strawberry-scented supersnob, asking me back to her house? What?

Mrs. Williams glances over her shoulder at me.

“Well . . . maybe that’s a good idea. You look so bedraggled.”

“Um . . . Mum will be waiting.”

“You can ring your parents and tell them where you are. We’re only a minute away.”

“I . . .”

I don’t want to say that I can’t ring Mum because we don’t have a phone. Katie must know this. Or maybe she doesn’t realize—maybe she can’t imagine anyone not having a phone. I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything, and this is taken for agreement, because a minute later the Range Rover glides down a long drive to a house that makes Stella’s house look like a garden shed (and our trailer like a dog kennel). It’s a mansion. I can’t imagine how many rooms there must be. Loads. It’s practically as big as the school.

. . .

Maybe Katie Williams is all right, really. We have mugs of tea, and cake— a really nice fruitcake that’s delicious and probably good for you as well. Probably made in the gigantic kitchen, which has a breakfast bar—which is literally a bar where you have your breakfast—as well as a big long dining table—presumably for lunch and tea, as there’s also a separate dining room where about twenty people can sit down at once. In a little room off the hall where the phone lives, I pretend to phone Mum. I mumble a bit at the
brr
, though no one’s listening, anyway. I can’t believe the phone has its own room. Katie doesn’t have any brothers or sisters, so there are just three people living in this enormous house. Ten rooms each, I reckon. I don’t think I could stand to live here, personally. It would give me the creeps.

Now we’re sitting in Katie’s study (!) with our books out and more mugs of tea. I feel like something’s going to happen, but I’m not sure what it’s going to be, or if I’m going to like it. She has a proper desk and a chair on wheels like in an office, and there’s a settee, and posters on the walls—some are copies of real paintings: there’s a ballet dancer, and a horse on its hind legs. There’s a poster of Tears for Fears, and another one of Madonna. And it’s not even her bedroom.

“How’s Stella?”

I have to break the silence somehow. Stella’s been off school for nearly a week with the flu.

“I don’t know.”

I’m surprised. Aren’t girl best friends supposed to ring up and gossip to each other every day?

Katie studies her fingernails, which have sparkly pink varnish on them, chipping off. Then she says, “You like her, don’t you?”

“Who . . . Stella?”

“Yeah. You were always hanging out together, last year.”

“Yeah, well. That was last year.”

Before you stole her away from me, I think. Although, to be fair, it wasn’t Katie but the visit to the trailer that spoiled everything.

“So do you still fancy her?”

“God! I didn’t fancy her! We were just mates. You know . . .”

This bursts out before I can stop it. I feel bad as soon as I say it, because I did—do—fancy Stella, quite a lot. Although I’ve sort of given up on her over the last few months.

“She likes Andrew Hoyte now.”

“Oh. Yeah. I know.”

Andrew Hoyte is old news. Most of the girls like him—he’s tall and blond, and looks about twenty. I think he’s got prematureaging disease. I say this, and Katie giggles.

It’s astonishing. It’s almost as though we’re friends. Encouraged by this, I start to talk about some of the other arseholes at school. Katie falls about at almost everything I say. She seems to agree with me. Amazing.

“Do you like The Smiths?”

She’s crawling toward a cassette player on the floor before I can even answer, and puts on the new album—the one I haven’t got yet.

“What’s your favorite song?”

How does she know I like them, unless Stella told her?

“Um, ‘Hand in Glove.’ ”

“Yeah? I’d have thought it would be ‘The Boy with the Thorn in His Side.’ ”

Actually, my real favorite is “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want,” but I’m not going to say all that in front of her. She might think it was some sort of awful clumsy pass.

“Why?” I say.

Katie is staring at me. Her eyes seem almost feverish and strangely brilliant, as though she’s about to cry.

“Because you are the boy with the thorn in his side, aren’t you?”

I try to laugh. I don’t know what she means. What has Stella been saying about me? Katie smiles a rather strange smile. I feel like she’s really saying something else, but I don’t know what it is. Like she’s speaking German, which she takes and I don’t.

Why would I have a thorn in my side?

I shrug, which probably makes me look stupid, but it’s the best I can do right now.

“So you don’t care that Stella likes Andrew?”

I shrug again. I seem to have a shrugging disease.

“No.”

Katie picks up her Jane Austen and slides closer to me on the little settee. She had said when we came in, very airily, “That’s where I do my thinking.” Like thinking is a specialized activity that you have to do in a special place, like a swimming pool. She wriggles around a lot and tosses her hair every few seconds. Gradually she seems to get closer, until her thigh is touching my thigh, but she doesn’t even seem to notice. Yet how can she not notice? I try to slide away from her, but very casually, so it looks accidental. But she only wriggles some more and ends up touching me again. Maybe she’s one of those people who is very casual about touching other people—and it is a small settee. She’s opened the book and is pointing at some passage or other. We’re sort of sharing the book, so maybe it’s normal to be sitting so close together.

“This is the bit we’re supposed to start with, isn’t it?”

“Um . . .”

I can’t remember what we’re talking about, or anything about the book at all, at the moment. She bends forward so that her hair falls out from behind her ear and hangs like a shiny curtain between us, and then she flicks it back. It must be deliberate; the hair flicks right in my face, but she doesn’t apologize. She has pretty hair—honey-colored, flat, and quite long. A piece of it brushes my lips, and all of a sudden, I have a tremendous erection. Panicking, I lean forward so she won’t notice, and pretend to be studying
Sense and Sensibility
, but of course I don’t read a single word.

I’m not even sure what happens for the next minute or so; I’m just clutching the book while trying to think about horrible, disgusting things, like the pencils-and-feet smell of the boys’ cloakroom, but then (how? why?) the book isn’t in my hands anymore. From being beside me, Katie is sort of kneeling and pushing her mouth against mine. Her lips
are hot and soft and lightly sticky, and then her tongue is in my mouth, wrestling with my tongue, tasting of tea and fruitcake. I don’t know if I respond, because every molecule of sensation is in my mouth, tasting her hot, wet tongue. I don’t know what my hands are doing, or any other part of me.

Eventually (after a second, ten minutes?) Katie pulls back. It turns out that her hands were on my shoulders, and mine were lying moronically by my sides. She looks at me through half-closed eyes, panting slightly. A strand of hair crosses her face at a diagonal, glued to her lip with our spit. Her lips look redder than they did before. It’s all I can do not to lunge at her again.

“Did you ever do that with Stella?”

“No.”

Surely she knows that—or maybe Stella didn’t tell her everything. Maybe she’s seeing if I’d lie and say we’d gone all the way, although the most we ever did was talk.

I try to kiss her again, but she leans back, her hand pressing lightly on my chest.

“You won’t tell anyone about this?”

“No. Will you?”

“No.”

“Not even Stella?”

“Why, do you want me to?”

“No. But you’re best friends, aren’t you?”

She shrugs in a very off hand way. If I was Stella, I’d be really insulted. However, I’m not.

“I don’t tell her everything. What I do is no one else’s business.” “Right.”

Just as I think she’s going to remove her hand from my chest and we can get back to snogging, that strange half smile appears on her face again.

“Do you want to see my horse?”

For a moment I think she’s joking—or that “horse” actually means
something else—but it turns out it doesn’t. She really does have a horse— her own horse, for God’s sake, out in a stable behind the house. The stable has electric lights, running water, and a heater. It’s got narrow yellow bricks on the wall, and bluish bricks on the floor. It’s a palace. I don’t know much about horses, although Katie seems to think I should. But I can see it’s a beautiful animal—apparently, it’s a purebred something or other called Subadar (“which means ‘captain’ in Hindustani,” she says) and “He has the champagne gene,” whatever that means. He has a really intelligent expression in his big dark eyes. Katie led me outside by the hand, although once in the stable she let go. I wonder if she’s going to kiss me again—I don’t think of trying to kiss her again, because she’s posh and I’m not, and what if she screamed? But anyway, instead, she flings her arms around the horse’s neck and kisses and caresses it in such an abandoned way that I feel instantly jealous. She croons endearments, rubbing her lips against the silky golden-brown neck—“Feel his nose, how soft it is”—and I obediently pat the horse while looking at Katie and feeling myself getting hard again, which is ridiculous as well as embarrassing.

I’m nowhere near stupid enough to think that suddenly Katie Williams is my girlfriend, because only complete spazzes think things like that. In fact, I would bet that tomorrow in school she’ll ignore me, the same as always. But right now, we’re here, stroking her horse’s beautiful chestnut coat, and there’s something strange but great going on, as though a magnetic current is buzzing through the horse’s body, shooting from my hand to her hand and back again, traveling right through me with a shiver of delicious excitement. It means I can’t take my hand off the horse’s neck, and neither can she. It binds us. The horse looks at us, detached but understanding. Maybe it’ll never happen again, but I want to remember it. Remember this.

I’m just thinking with wonder how her horse lives in a nicer place than I do—which seems fair enough: it’s such a prince of horses—when I remember what time it is—or must be. It’s nearly dark. Mum doesn’t know where I am. She’ll be worried. A sense of dread builds inside me. What if this isn’t great at all? How could it be? It’s wrong. It was never
meant to happen. This is Katie Williams, for God’s sake . . . The police are probably on their way right now!

“I’d better go. My mum . . . I said I’d be back soon.”

I can’t meet her eyes. Even the horse turns its head and looks at me like I’ve done something wrong and stupid.

“Okay, then.”

Katie lifts her hand off Subadar’s neck, breaking the circuit. The magnetic current is switched off, and I feel exhausted all of a sudden. Her tone of voice implies that I’ve missed out on one of life’s great opportunities.