She Is Not Invisible

  It’s why I can touch my nose, and I assure you it’s not ESP.

  So really, people have an amazing set of skills to use, and very useful they can be, too, but trust me, if you’re blind, your other senses do not help you “see.”

  Take Luke Skywalker. Obi-Wan puts the blast shield on his helmet down when he’s training with the lightsaber.

  “I can’t see,” says Luke, sounding a little whiny as he so often does.

  “Use the Force, Luke,” says Obi-Wan Kenobi. “Reach out with your mind.”

  And Luke knows exactly where to wave his magic wand, but take it from me, there is no such thing as the Force.

  There’s more unsighted swordplay in a Japanese film about a blind samurai. He kills about fifteen people a minute. I say there’s one film; apparently there’s dozens of them, I guess because people love this stuff. People are fascinated by the idea of being blind. I’ve learned that. Fascinated, and scared, too. I think that’s where the blind hero comes in. Oh, wow, he’s blind but he still kicks ass.

  * * *

  Right then, I can confirm I didn’t feel like I was able to kick anyone’s ass, but to change the subject to the quickening of hearts, mine was doing just that.

  Sam left Benjamin to Daredevil and turned back to me.

  “There’s something cool about you,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really,” he said, making fun of me. I liked it.

  His arm was touching mine on the armrest between the seats. I wondered if he realized that, if he was doing it on purpose.

  “And what’s that?” I asked.

  “I dunno,” he said. “I don’t get you. One minute you’re a little weird, and the next you…”

  He stopped, and I think he might have embarrassed himself.

  “What?”

  “You turn that smile on me.”

  That panicked me. I often worry about the smiling thing. I was getting grief in class last year for “looking dumb.” That was the chosen vocabulary of Mr. Woodell. He told me I looked bored during his lessons.

  If you’re blind it doesn’t really matter if you have your eyes open in class or not. Sometimes I feel I can concentrate better with them shut. But to keep him happy I tried to put what I imagined was a sort of fascinated grin on my face. He told me I looked psychotic. You would think a teacher in a school of blind kids would have got used to it by now, but he’s new. I guess he’ll give up eventually.

  “Hey, now you’ve gone weird on me again,” Sam said.

  “Sorry. I don’t mean to,” I said.

  “Listen,” Sam said. “Benjamin tells me you’re going to meet your dad in NYC.”

  “He did…? Oh, look…”

  “So I was thinking maybe you might wanna get together with me sometime in the next few days? For a drink?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  I was thinking that there were probably two things he didn’t know about me. The first was my age. And the second …

  “There,” he said. “You’ve gone again. Listen, if you don’t want to, that’s—”

  “No,” I said. “Sorry. I’d love to. Only I’m not sure what we’ll be up to and…”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “Oh, I … Somewhere, somewhere in the … er … city.”

  There was a silence and I guessed he was thinking I was being odd again, or evasive, or both.

  “Do you know where you’re staying?”

  “We’re going to meet Dad,” I said.

  “And where’s he staying?”

  “Somewhere … in…”

  “In the city. Right.”

  I thought I’d definitely blown it by then, but Sam said, “Why don’t I give you my number and then if you feel like it, you can call me, okay?”

  I smiled. Then I thought about Mr. Woodell, and I toned it down.

  “Sure,” I said. I pulled out my phone. “What’s your number? Wait! I have to put your name in first.”

  And I guess I was excited because I forgot about my phone. I began swiping and tapping my way through to the contacts, and was just typing S-A-M into a new contact, when he spoke again.

  “Why’d you have your phone like that?” he said, and now he was the one sounding weird.

  I froze.

  When I use my phone I hold it up flat in front of me so the speaker, which is at the bottom, is easier to hear. Sometimes I use an earphone so no one hears it talking to me, but I was excited. I forgot.

  “Well, I…”

  “Why do you have it talking to you?”

  “It’s an iPhone,” I said. “I…”

  “I have an iPhone, too, but it doesn’t talk to me.”

  “But it could do, if you wanted it to.”

  “Why would I want it to do that?”

  “Well, you might,” I said. “If…”

  “If what?”

  That was it then. I’d backed myself into a corner. But we’d been getting on really well, and I knew he liked me. He was giving me his number, for God’s sake. I chastised myself for being so paranoid. So I told him.

  “If you were blind,” I said, quietly.

  He said nothing, and I wasn’t sure if the penny had dropped. I’d been working my hardest not to seem blind in front of him. I’d turned toward him when he was speaking. I’d even tried nodding when he spoke, which is something else Mr. Woodell is keen on, though I can’t see the point of it. I’d been careful not to touch my eyes, which I do when I get nervous, or scared. So I guessed it was possible he didn’t have the slightest clue, despite Benjamin getting me to shake hands with him.

  So I took my sunglasses off.

  There was a short silence, during which, I suppose, the penny was dropping.

  “Oh,” he said. “Hey. I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

  I wondered what he was sorry about.

  “That’s okay,” I said. I put my glasses back on. “It’s amazing what an iPhone can do. No one seems to know, but that’s not surprising.”

  “Uh, yeah. No,” said Sam. “Right.”

  “I can type into my phone. It tells me what key I’m pressing and then…”

  I typed S-A-M to show him.

  “Yeah. Yeah, that’s pretty cool.”

  “Isn’t it?” I said. “So, what’s your number?”

  There was a long silence, after which Sam said, “Listen, Laureth, I’ll bet Benjamin’s done with Daredevil now. He probably wants his big sister back. I need to go to the bathroom anyway, so we can swap back seats. Right, Benjamin? You done?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Benjamin. I didn’t tell him off.

  I let Sam get out to go to the loo, and when he came back he sat in his old seat.

  “Hey,” was all he said as he tapped me on the shoulder to get me to move and let him in. He brushed past.

  “Thanks,” he added, and then Benjamin snuggled in next to me.

  “I’m tired, Laureth,” he said.

  “It was an early start, honey,” I said. “Why don’t you curl up and have a little rest?”

  He did, and I felt Stan squash up against my cheek as Benjamin used him for a pillow.

  I let Benjamin snuggle into me and I felt worried. My mind drifted to a conversation Mum and I had had about him. He’s a loner, is Benjamin. He’s different from the other boys at school, Mum had said, and the Benjamin Effect doesn’t help. But that’s not the real problem. He’s very smart for his age and the other kids think he’s odd. He probably is and having a crazy father and a sister who’s away a lot of the time probably doesn’t help. He worships Dad. He tries to speak like him, uses his phrases if he can. He wants to be just like him.

  But then, we all sometimes want to be something we’re not, I guess. Mum’s tried inviting friends round for tea and so on, but it hasn’t really worked. And when I’m not there during term time, Benjamin just sits in his room and reads, and reads, and reads.

  “Stan’s tired, too,” said Benjamin. “Are you?”

  W
e started to doze, leaning on each other, and I thought about Benjamin for a while, and how he would be when he grew up. Then I wondered a bit about me, and what I would do when I left school. Whether I’d get to university. Whether I could get a job. Whether I’d meet someone, get married. That kind of thing.

  And then I thought about Sam, two seats away, and I thought about Mum’s theory, that what you learn hardest, you never forget. It definitely needs further thought, that theory—it needs further thought.

  “Yes,”I whispered to Benjamin. “I’m tired.”

  But Benjamin was already asleep.

  WHO KNOWS WHAT?

  Love this idea: put it in the book

  What should we make of the birthday problem?

  It tells us that it’s not so amazing to run into someone with the same birthday as you, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it show that we should stop getting so excited about coincidences? Because it’s all about the maths.

  Another school of thought on coincidences goes like this; yeah, sure, amazing things happen sometimes. But there are a lot of people in the world. There are a lot of things in the world. And there are an almost infinite number of ways that these people and these things can come together, by chance, so that occasionally, even the most unlikely things will happen, and when they do, we get all excited and call it an unbelievable coincidence.

  Like me on that train from Paris with that German woman and my copy of Jung.

  But really, this theory says, it would be more incredible if things like that NEVER happened. That’s what would really defy belief.

  That’s how some people would like us to think about coincidences, and the birthday problem proves it, yes?

  No. I don’t think it does.

  * * *

  Think again about the problem. It doesn’t show that it’s no big deal for YOU to meet someone who has the same birthday as you in a room of 23 people. What it shows is that the chance of ANY TWO people in the room having the same birthday is very high.

  But look: every time you meet someone new, the chance you share a birthday with them is only 1 in 365. And just how often do you even find out someone’s birthday? Apart from close friends, I mean. It’s not like you walk into a room full of strangers and say, “Hey, April 8th anyone?”

  Looked at this way, things start to change. I think it’s important to look at it this way, because if you look at it the way mathematicians do, then something very important is forgotten; and that’s the HUMAN element in all this.

  Yes, according to the maths, half the time in a room of 23 people, two of them will share a birthday. The maths tells us this, but the maths forgets that a) we don’t go around finding these things out, and b) the maths doesn’t know HOW IT FEELS when a coincidence happens to you.

  Maths doesn’t get a tingle up its neck. Maths doesn’t shake its head and say, Christ-on-a-bike! But we do. We know how it feels, and how it feels is that it MEANS SOMETHING.

  There’s a word for the feeling that we are in touch with something great, something powerful, something outside ourselves, and that word is NUMINOUS. It used only to be used in connection with religion; that feeling that you’re in touch with God. But not anymore. Nowadays, even atheists use it, when they want to talk about the presence of something mystical and powerful and unknown hovering within our reach.

  The numinous experience TELLS us that coincidences mean something.

  But who knows what?

  THE THIRD PAGE

  The question remained: was Dad obsessed?

  He was certainly curious about coincidence, fascinated even. But obsessed?

  * * *

  “What’s Sam doing?” I whispered in Benjamin’s ear when he woke up.

  “Who’s Sam?” he said.

  “Shh!” I whispered. “The man you were speaking to.”

  “Oh,” said Benjamin. “He’s watching a film on his iPad and he’s gone to sleep with his earphones in.”

  So then I got Benjamin to read the third page of the Black Book that Mr. Walker had emailed, once again with me holding the phone and zooming and swiping when Benjamin told me to.

  In it, Dad was writing more about the thing about birthdays and he talked about the numinous. Benjamin stumbled over that one a bit so it obviously isn’t used in comics very much, but I knew what he was trying to read because Dad—and then even I—tried to explain to Benjamin what it meant.

  I explained it like this: Dad says coincidences mean something to us simply because we feel that they do. They must. But I still wondered if that meant they actually did.

  And then I began to wonder about Dad, and what Mum calls his “state of mind” when I’m in earshot, but which I know is something he’s been taking pills for, because I’ve heard them arguing about it through my bedroom wall.

  The third page that Mr. Walker had sent had set me thinking, and there and then I wanted the book and to get Benjamin to read the rest of it to me, as soon as possible.

  I tapped my phone to get it to tell me the time.

  “Are we nearly there yet?” Benjamin asked.

  “Not long,” I said. “An hour, I think.”

  The flight had gone amazingly quickly. What with a couple of meals to navigate and some trips to the loo and making an idiot of myself to cute Americans, time had flown by.

  Sure enough, it wasn’t long till we were told to prepare for landing.

  As I was making sure Benjamin was strapped in properly, Sam spoke to me.

  “Er, excuse me,” he said. “Laureth?”

  “Yes?” I said. I tried not to sound cross, because I wasn’t, really. I was used to the way he’d reacted, or things like it, at least. And the way he’d changed when he’d found out about me was definitely not as bad as having abuse yelled at me in the street, or having some kid bully me. This happened all the time when I was in a mainstream school; from simple things like hiding stuff from me, to the stuff that can literally hurt like pulling my chair away, to the stuff that’s worst of all; being ignored. As if you’re not even there.

  After all that, it would be very easy to conclude that people are basically mean, but then there are kind people, like the man in the airport who’d helped us through security. People aren’t all the same. There are nice ones and mean ones and all other sorts. Dad says he’s only learned one thing in his forty-something years on the planet, and that’s this: people are funny. And he doesn’t mean in the hilarious way, either.

  For example, there’s even bullying at my school, although we’re all the same. This surprises some people. But we’re actually not all the same either; some of us are more blind than others, and in the kingdom of the visually impaired, the kid with partial sight is king. Or something like that.

  “Listen, I oughta tell you. It’s none of my business, but you don’t seem to know where you’re going, or where you’re staying or where you’re meeting your father.”

  “Just because—”

  “Hey, wait up. I don’t care. I think you can handle yourself. But that’s not the point. United States Border Control are kind of tough. You have to tell them at border control where you’re staying. Which hotel, and for how long. If you don’t know you oughta think of something. You have to put it on your customs declaration.”

  I didn’t reply for a minute. I guess I must have looked weird yet again, and I didn’t want that. I could see he was trying to help.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yeah, you need to fill out a customs declaration card. That thing they gave you when we took off.”

  Oh, I thought. Is that what it was?

  I got Benjamin to find it; we’d tucked it in the seat pocket.

  “Listen,” I said to Sam. “Could you help me fill it in? I’m guessing you might make a better job of it than Benjamin.”

  Benjamin started to complain, but Sam laughed.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’d be happy to. We just need to think of a hotel for you to say you’re staying in. Don’t worry
, it won’t matter what we put. They never check. Not unless they’re suspicious.”

  He began to get my details and fill them in on the card. Name, flight number, hotel, that sort of thing.

  “Hey,” he said. “About before. I—”

  I stopped him.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Really. It’s fine.”

  “Why don’t you take my number anyway? In case you get in a fix and need something.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but we’re okay. I have Benjamin. We’ll be fine.”

  ‘Yes,” said Sam. “I’m sure of that.”

  And then we landed in New York, and before I knew it, everything went freaky, and the last thing I was sure of was that we’d be fine ever again.

  ONE BLIND GIRL

  Blind I may be, but I think anyone could have got lost in the arrivals hall at JFK. The hall sounded enormous, sound drifted to me from a long way to my left and from high up, too. In the distance, someone shouted, telling people which queue to get in, only they called it a “line.”

  “Found you!” said Benjamin, grabbing my arm.

  As soon as we’d landed he’d announced that he needed the loo again and he’d left me standing in the hall by a pillar.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh,” Benjamin said. Then, “Yes, Laureth.”

  “I think there are different queues. For Americans and for us. That’s how it was last time. Can you see?”

  “It’s confusing,” Benjamin said. “There’s thousands of people. They’re queuing up for these little glass booths. It’s going to take ages.”

  “It’ll take even longer if we get in the wrong queue. Go and find someone to ask—someone in a uniform. I’ll wait here.”

  So he did, and while he was gone I started to fret about the time. My phone had changed to New York time already, and we’d landed around half past twelve. I’d arranged to meet Mr. Walker in the library in Queens at two, but it was already one o’clock and if the queues were as long as Benjamin said …