with curiosity and a hint of suspicion...
I forced a soft calmness into my voice. ‘Oh, it’s um, well, it’s Christmas, I’m trying to show a bit of Christmas spirit. Look, it’s been really rough lately - for both of us – I just thought we could try and take a step back for a bit. Get on an even keel. So, let’s just try and have a relaxing day, we both need it, don’t you think?’
Graham sighed and his shoulders dropped, sloughing off some of the weary tension he was holding there. ‘Okay, okay, I’ll have a bath, and a drop of wine. And maybe, as you say, in the spirit of things, after that we can try and find a film that we both want to watch.’
‘Okay, yes, good, good, I’d like that,’ I said. Graham began to undress for the bath as the clock continued its circuits.
The police would be here soon.
Tick tock tick tock tick tock.
Chapter 1
I killed a man tonight. Not intentionally. Well...I’m fairly sure I didn’t mean to, but then I haven’t really been feeling quite right lately. Been a little bit out of sorts. But anyway I think it was an accident...yes, it’s true, it was an accident. One thing is for sure, though, he’s definitely dead. Brown bread, that’s what we used to say at the Garter Home when someone had died. We thought it sounded cool, I guess, as if death was something we should be cool and nonchalant about. We probably thought it made us sound tough.
Recently I have come to realise that I am invisible. It’s been like this for a while, I think, but it’s only recently that I’ve become fully aware of it. Invisibility, it’s a strange thing. The man at the petrol station who takes my credit card without raising his head and waits for me to enter my PIN doesn’t see me. The supermarket cashier who swipes my shopping with a series of monotonous beeps doesn’t see me. The shopkeepers, the cashiers at the bank, the people who push past me in the street, the retired grey people who smash their trollies through mine in the supermarket, the man who fills the heating oil tank, the man who reads the electric meter, my husband, my children; none of them see me. The man I killed tonight certainly didn’t see me. Because I am invisible.
Okay, okay, I don’t have an invisibility cloak, I know that I’m not truly invisible. I do still have my marbles, I’m not some crazy fruit loop, I’m not some delusional Harry Potter fan. Though I have read some of the books.
My name is Andrea Halston. I am forty-four years old, but I feel older. I am a...well...I’m not sure what the modern term for it is, but I am what used to be called a housewife. I don’t go to work, I haven’t had a job for quite some time. I had a part-time job for a few years, when Simon, my youngest child, was at secondary school – I was a book-keeper at a building firm, but the firm went bust. Not surprising really, the boss spent more time on holiday than at work, and not with his wife. When she divorced him, he drank too much and worked too little, so the building firm went belly-up. I saw him in town once, a few years later, he looked like a shell that had been hollowed out, like a walking skin.
I don’t need to work, we don’t need the money, Graham’s salary is more than enough. Graham, my husband, is five years older than me and he is having an affair with his secretary. Or Personal Assistant, as she likes to call herself. It’s a cliché, I know, for someone in his position – Graham is an audit partner – to be sleeping with his secretary, but I suppose she’s attracted to what she sees as his power. Or his Porsche. I very much doubt that she is attracted to him on a physical level; his ever-expanding pot belly makes him look a little like a bowling ball with legs, rather than cuddly, and he is balding in a bad way. She- the PA - is twenty-something, and I think she is quite pretty, although it is difficult to tell under all the makeup.
He doesn’t know that I know about the affair. I also know that it is hurting him more than it’s hurting me. I can see it on his