Blue Eyes, but her face stays the same: neutral, like the colours in this room. Warm beige with a hint of encouragement. Again, I’m not sure what I’ve said and what I haven’t, what she can hear, what she’s picking up by instinct or police training. Over sixty per cent of communication is non-verbal. I read that in… oh, somewhere or other.
‘So, you made a cup of coffee for yourself and Mark, your husband?’
‘Sorry, yes.’
I carry on. Carry on regardless, carry on camping, carry on up the Khyber. How Katie had asked if she could have a do and I’d said no more than ten because our house is small. I said I’d chip in for the booze – I’d already given her a cheque towards her holiday in Ibiza so I thought that was fair enough. We used to get the neighbours over for barbecues all the time, and our mates from the pub, and Lisa and Patrick, of course, before they split up. We used to put ice in this big plastic frog bucket we had for camping trips and put all the beers in there with a bottle opener tied to the handle with string. Funny the little details that come back to you, but my heart’s not in anything like that anymore. And anyway, when I was growing up, you had your eighteenth and that was that. Katie’s eighteenth cost me a month’s wages. She wanted to hire out the cricket club off Moughland Lane so she could invite the best part of a hundred mates. She’s very sociable, is Katie. Anyway, it was a good do; Kieron DJ’d for it. He played all the old tunes and every single one of us danced the night away, so I’m not saying I regret it. It’s probably the last time I can remember feeling properly happy, although that could have been Kieron making me do a J?gerbomb. But even now I know Katie’ll be angling for another big bash for her twenty-first, because they all do now and if you don’t give them something decent, you’re a tight-arse.
Blue Eyes is making a note. I have no idea how much of that lot made it out of my mouth.
‘Mrs Edwards.’ A warm but businesslike smile from dark red lips. ‘If we could get to the moment you say started things… the moment you say you became invisible?’
Sounds like she’s prompting me. Mark says I drift off topic or off altogether. Get on with it, woman, he’s started saying lately, and I’ll realise I’m either rattling on about something or I’ve stopped halfway through a sentence. He’ll be there going, what? And I’ll have literally no idea what I was talking about. Sorry, I’ll say. It’s gone. And he’ll shake his head like I’m beyond hope. Which I am. I don’t suppose he’ll be shaking his head at me anymore. Not now.
‘Sorry,’ I say to Blue Eyes. ‘I was in the hallway, wasn’t I?’
I can picture it as if it were last week, so I don’t forget everything, apparently: I can see Katie and her mates through the finger-smudged glass panel of our kitchen door. The music is throbbing against the walls. Clouds of cigarette smoke. There are about twenty kids in there, not ten as we agreed, but it’s too late to make a fuss now, so I just stand there like a robot with dead batteries, one hand on the door handle. They’re laughing and shrieking the way young people do. The French doors are open to the back garden.
Next thing, I’m panting away, both hands pushed to my knees. I’m burning hot. I feel sick, really sick. I get them, these… attacks, I suppose you’d call them. Raging heat and jitters that flush in from nowhere. I’ve been getting them more and more, along with the where-the-heck-am-I moments, what Lisa calls my fugues. One minute I’m all right; next thing I’m not sure if I can go through with even the smallest thing, in this instance, opening my own kitchen door. My chest is tight. I take deep breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth like they tell you to, then reach for the door handle again and pull myself upright. With the hem of my T-shirt I wipe the sweat off my face. A few more seconds and the attack passes, dragging bits of me with it like the tide pulling loose pebbles from the shoreline.
Meanwhile, oblivious, the kids are looking beautiful by