about it. He should have been able to see right through me.’
I meet her eyes again but my smile dies on my lips. She’s right to look at me like that. There’s nothing to joke about. And why I said sorry to Mark for having a nosebleed, I can’t fathom, but as I keep saying, this is where I’d got to in life – apologising for myself while doing everyone else’s bidding. It’s no wonder I was invisible. I’d done that to myself. I didn’t realise it then, obviously. But I do now. I’d done it to myself.
‘So, you left the room?’ The eyes flicker with… is that frustration? Was I talking out loud or have I been sitting here catching flies?
Actually, there’s a fly in the room. I can’t see it but I can hear it buzzing and tapping against the window pane. It’s fallen quiet now. Must have given up. What did Blue Eyes say her name was? Angela. Andrea. Alison. Something that starts with an A.
I try and think what I last told her. I’d run out with my nose bleeding, hadn’t I? Yes, yes, I had. I carry on from there, tell her how I sat on the edge of the bath and held a tissue to my nose. So far, so normal. I held up my hands one at a time and turned them over and over to check that I could see them – not so normal. They were definitely there, my hands. I was there too, in the bathroom mirror: straggly grey hair badly in need of a cut and colour, glasses in need of a clean, flab pooling over my elastic waistband and a face full of bloody tissues. I was shaking. I looked knackered, as in literally fit for the knacker’s yard. Gaze off-focus, like an NHS poster for the devastating effects of… oh, something bad.
All of that, yes – but not invisible, surely? I could see me. I existed. I blew onto the palm of my hand. My breath was hot, which meant I was alive. Another trickle ran from my nose. I thought it had started bleeding again, but it hadn’t – it was running clear. As were my eyes.
‘At least I was in the bathroom,’ I say to Blue Eyes, tears running in the then and the now. ‘Plenty of loo roll and I wasn’t bothering anyone.’
She passes me a tissue from the box on the table. ‘It sounds like you were very sad.’
Her kindness is confusing under the circumstances.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’ve not cried in front of another person in a very long time.’
That night, Mark switched the bedside lamp off, muttered goodnight and rolled away from me as per. I lay there blinking, making stars. Can’t remember what I was thinking about. Composing a shopping list, probably. A list of some sort, anyway. Actually, no, I was thinking about how Mark and me first got together. How he walked me home from the community centre disco one night because Lisa had gone home with another lad. We’d stopped at the end of my mum and dad’s driveway, unable to say goodnight, and just stood there in the dark, talking and talking about our dreams, life, God, the universe and all that stuff you talk about when you’re in those fragile years between youth and adulthood and you’re figuring everything out: who you are, what you want, what you don’t. Even though we’d known each other as kids, that night it was as if I saw him for the first time. It was the first time I realised that a proper conversation that runs true and deep is one of the most intimate things there is. We carried on talking like that through our first date, when I bought a can of Bass shandy from the Spar and we sat on a bench and ate Hula Hoops and it seemed like our conversation would never end. By the time there was anything physical between us, I thought I was going to pass out with excitement. It was just a kiss, that first time, his hand resting softly on my waist. And just like a conversation, when a kiss is deep and true, it can change the course of your whole life.
I must have dropped off eventually, because I woke at quarter to five, which you could attribute to stress but actually it wasn’t unusual. I’d been waking up with the covers thrown off for a year