If You Could See Me Now (7 page)

He couldn’t understand his fascination with her. He had been watching her since after lunch on Friday. Luke had kept calling him to play game after game and all Ivan had wanted was to be around Elizabeth.
Firstly it was just to see if she could hear him or sense him again, but then after a few hours, he found her compelling. She was obsessively neat. He noticed she couldn’t leave the room to answer the phone or front door until everything had been tidied away and wiped clean. She drank a lot of coffee, stared out to her garden, picked imaginary pieces of
fluff from almost everything. And she thought a great deal. He could see it in her face. Her brow would furrow in concentration and she would make facial expressions as though she were having conversations with people in her head. They seemed to turn into debates more often than not, judging by the activity on her forehead.

He noticed she was always surrounded by silence. There was never any music or sounds in the background like most people had, like a radio blaring, the window open to allow the sounds of summer—the birdsong and the lawn mowers—in. Luke and she spoke little and when they did it was mostly her giving him orders, him asking permission, nothing fun. The phone rarely rang, nobody called by. It was almost as if the conversations in her head were loud enough to
fill her silence.

He spent most of Friday and Saturday following her around, sitting on the cream leather couch in the evenings and watching her watch the only program she seemed to like on TV. They both laughed in all the same places, groaned in all the same places, and they seemed to be completely in sync, yet she didn’t know he was there. He had watched her sleeping the previous night. She was restless, she only could have slept three hours at the most, the rest of the time she spent reading a book, putting it down after
five
minutes, staring into space, picking the book up again, reading a few pages, reading back over the same pages, putting it down again, closing her eyes, opening them again, turning the light on, doodling sketches of furniture and rooms, playing with colors and shades and scraps of material, turning the light off again.

She had made Ivan tired just watching her from the straw chair in the corner of the room. The trips to the kitchen for coffee couldn’t have helped her either. On Sunday morning she was up early tidying, vacuuming, polishing, and cleaning an already spotless home. She spent all morning at it while Ivan chased with Luke out in the back garden. He recalled Elizabeth being particularly upset by the sight of Luke running around the garden laughing and screaming to himself. She had joined them at the kitchen table and watched Luke playing cards, shaking her head and looking worried when he lost a game of snap against himself.

When Luke went to bed at nine o’clock, Ivan read him a story of Tom Thumb, quicker than he usually would, and then hurried to continue watching Elizabeth. He could sense her getting more jittery as the days wore on.

She washed her coffee cup out, ensuring it was already spotless before putting it in the dishwasher. She dried the wet sink with a cloth and put the cloth in the wash basket in the utility room. She picked imaginary
fluff from a few items in her path, picked crumbs from the
floor, switched off all the lights, and began the same process in the living room. She had done the exact same thing the last two nights.

But before leaving the living room this time, she stopped abruptly, almost sending Ivan into the back of her. His heart beat wildly. Had she sensed him?

She spun around slowly.

He
fixed his shirt to look presentable.

Once she was facing him, he smiled. “Hi,” he said, feeling very self-conscious.

She rubbed her eyes tiredly and opened them again. “Oh, Elizabeth, you are going mad,” she whispered.
She bit her lip and charged toward Ivan.

Chapter Five

Elizabeth
knew she was losing
her mind right at that moment. It had happened to her sister and mother; her mother with her eccentricity and wild girl nature and Saoirse with her drinking problems and complete detachment from life. Now it seemed it was Elizabeth’s turn. For the last few days she had felt incredibly insecure, as if someone were watching her. She had locked all the doors, drawn all the curtains, set the alarm. That probably should have been enough, but now she was going to go that one step further.

She charged through the living room straight toward the
fireplace, grabbed the iron poker, marched out of the living room, locked the door, and made her way upstairs. She looked at the poker lying on her bedside locker, rolled her eyes, and turned her lamp off. She was losing her mind.

Ivan emerged from behind the couch and looked around the dark living room. He had dived behind it, thinking she was charging toward him. He heard the door lock after she stormed out. He sighed loudly, feeling a disappointment he had never experienced before. She still hadn’t seen him.

I’m not magic, you know. I can’t cross my arms, nod my head, blink, and disappear, and reappear on the top of a bookshelf or anything. I don’t live in a lamp, don’t have funny little ears, big hairy feet, or wings. I don’t replace lost teeth with money, leave presents under a tree, or hide chocolate eggs. I can’t
Fly, climb up the walls of buildings, or run faster than the speed of lightning.

And I can’t open doors.

That has to be done for me. The grown-ups
find that part the funniest, but also the most embarrassing, when their children do it in public. So I can touch a door, but I can’t open it? There’s no explanation for it, it’s just the way it is. It’s like asking why people can’t
Fly, yet they can jump and allow two feet to leave the earth.

So Elizabeth needn’t have locked the living room door when she went to bed that night because I couldn’t turn the handle anyway. Like I said, I’m not a superhero; I can’t see through walls or blow out forest
fires with one breath. My special power is friendship. I listen to people and I hear what they say. I hear their tones, the words they use to express themselves, and most importantly, I hear what they
don’t
say. Sighs and silences and avoided conversations are just as important as the things you do talk about.

So all I could do that night was think about my new friend Luke. I need to do that occasionally. I make notes in my head so that I can
file a report for admin. They like to keep it all on record for training purposes. We’ve new people joining up all the time and in fact, when I’m between friends, I lecture.

I needed to think about why I was here. What made Luke want to see me? How could he benefit
from my friendship? The business is run extremely professionally and we must always provide the company with a brief history of our friends and then list our aims and objectives. Naturally, I was very good at identifying the problem straightaway, but this scenario was slightly baffling. You see, I’d never been friends with an adult before and I’m not jumping the gun here, but whenever anyone can sense me in any way it means that they need me and that we’re supposed to be friends. It’s my whole meaning for existence, trust me,
I know
. Anyone who has ever met an adult would understand why I’ve never been friends with one. There’s no sense of fun with them, they stick rigidly to schedules and times, they focus on the most unimportant things imaginable, like mortgages and bank statements, when everyone knows that the majority of the time it’s the people around them that put the smiles on their faces. It’s all work and no play and I work hard, I really do, but playing is by far my favorite.

Take, for example, Elizabeth; she lies in bed worrying about car tax and phone bills, babysitters and paint colors. If you can’t put magnolia on a wall then there are always a million other colors you can use, if you can’t pay your phone bill then just write letters telling them. I’m not playing down the importance of these things, yes you need money for food, yes you need food to survive, but you also need sleep to have energy, to smile to be happy, and to be happy so you can laugh, just so you don’t keel over with a heart attack. People forget they have options. And they forget that those things really don’t matter. They should concentrate on what they have and not what they don’t have. And by the way, wishing and dreaming doesn’t mean concentrating on what you don’t have, it’s
positive
thinking that encourages hoping and believing, not whinging and moaning. But I’m veering away from the story again.

I worried about my job a little the night I was locked in the living room. It’s the
first
time that ever happened. I worried because I couldn’t
figure out why I was there. Luke had a difficult family scenario, but that was normal and I could tell he felt loved. He was happy and loved playing, he slept well at night, ate all his food, had a nice friend called Sam, and when he spoke I listened and listened and tried to hear the words he wasn’t saying but there was nothing. He liked living with his aunt, was scared of his mom, and liked talking about vegetables with his granddad. But Luke seeing me every day and wanting to play with me every day meant that I definitely needed to be here for him.

On the other hand, his aunt never slept, ate very little, was constantly surrounded by silence so loud that it was deafening, she had nobody close to her to talk to, that I had seen yet anyway, and she
didn’t
say
far more
than she actually did say. She had heard me say thank you once, felt my breath a few times, and heard me squeak on the leather couch. Yet she couldn’t see me, nor could she stand the thought of me being in her house.

Elizabeth did not want to play. Plus, she was a grown-up, she gave me butterflies, and wouldn’t know fun if it hit her in the face, and believe me, I’d tried to throw it at her plenty

of times over the weekend. So you’d think I couldn’t possibly be the one to help her.

People refer to me as an invisible or an imaginary friend. Like there’s some big mystery surrounding me. I’ve read the books that grown-ups have written asking why kids see me, why they believe in me so much for so long and then suddenly stop and go back to being the way they were before. I’ve seen the television shows that try to debate why it is that children invent people like me.

So just for the record for all you people, I’m not invisible or imaginary. I’m always here walking around just like you all are. And people like Luke don’t
choose
to see me, they just see me. It’s people like you and Elizabeth that choose not to.

Chapter Six

Elizabeth
was awakened at
6:08
a.m.
by the sun streaming through the bedroom window and onto her face. She always slept with the curtains open. It stemmed from growing up in a cottage; lying in her bed she could see out the window, down the garden path, and out the front gate. Beyond that was a country road that led straight from the farm, stretching on for a mile. Elizabeth could see her mother returning from her adventures, walking down the road for at least twenty minutes before she reached the bungalow. She could recognize the half-hop, half-skip from miles away. Those twenty minutes always felt like an eternity to Elizabeth. The long road had its own way of building up Elizabeth’s excitement, it was almost teasing her.

And
finally she would hear that familiar sound, the squeak of the front gate. The rusting hinges acted as a welcoming band for the free spirit. Elizabeth had a love/hate relationship with that gate. Like the long stretch of road, it would tease her, and some days on hearing the creak she would run to see who was at the door and her heart would sink at the sight of the postman.