When I next looked back I was in the street, and the man had given up. I saw him by the entrance to the store, leaning against the wall, winded, watching me flee. Even then he was still utterly menacing, and I continued down the street, running until I could not keep going. I never saw him again.
These two encounters were my introduction to the larger shadow world of the invisibles. After the incident in Selfridges I began to notice more and more invisibles around London—as if seeing one or two had opened my eyes to the rest—but I kept out of their way. I learned the places where they generally gathered, somewhere that food could be stolen or a bed found or crowds tended to congregate. I usually saw at least one other invisible person whenever I went to a supermarket, and department stores were frequent haunts. Some invisibles lived permanently in large stores; others drifted around, sleeping in hotels or breaking into people’s houses to borrow unused beds or stretch out on furniture. Later I discovered that this underground network had a semblance of organization: there were known meeting places, even a particular pub where some of them gathered regularly.
Inevitably I was drawn to them. I learned that the man who had attacked me in Selfridges was not typical of them, but neither was he all that unusual. As male invisibles grew older they became loners, moving on the periphery of society, uncaring of how they acted. Normal friendships were impossible except with other invisibles, forcing abnormal behavior. Lonely outcasts, thinking themselves above the law, are dangerous in any form.
The typical invisible would be young, or youngish. He or she—the sexes were more or less evenly divided— would have had an isolated adolescence, and been drawn to London or one of the other big cities out of a need to meet others.
Collectively the invisibles were a paranoid group, believing themselves rejected by society, despised, feared, and forced into crime. They were terrified of normal people but envied them profoundly. Most of them were frightened of each other, but when in each other’s company would brag about their individual achievements. There were even some who took the paranoia to the other extreme, attempting to make claims for the inherent superiority of invisibles, the power and freedom of their condition being paramount.
The invisibles seemed to have two traits in common. In the first place, almost every one I met was a hypochondriac, and with good reason. Health was an obsession, because illness was incurable except by nature. Many of the invisibles had VD, and all of them suffered with their teeth. Life expectancy was low, partly because of the risk of illness and partly because of the vagrant lifestyle and irregular diet. A large number of them were alcoholics or incipient alcoholics. Drug taking was not, in general, a problem, because of the difficulties of supply. Most of the invisibles dressed well, because clothes were easy to steal, but few cared about their appearance. What they most cared about was their health, and many of them carried about with them large quantities of patent medicines, the only ones they could steal with any regularity.
The second unifying factor was the cloud. Meeting other invisibles, I began to understand what I had thought was Mrs. Quayle’s mysticism. Each invisible person is surrounded by an aura, a certain density of presence, and this can be detected by the others. It was what I had instinctively recognized in my first two encounters, and what Mrs. Quayle, in a different way, had noticed about me. Her talk of ectoplasm and spiritual auras had confused me, but I realized now that this was simply her way of describing it.
Interestingly, though, the invisibles had picked up the same vocabulary and incorporated it into their slang. They all knew about the cloud, and called it that. Ordinary people were fleshers; the real world was hard. To themselves, they were the glams. It was part of their defensive but bragging paranoia to think of themselves as glamorous.
IV
I was not one of them. I knew it and they knew it. From their point of view I was only half-glam, able to enter and leave their world at will. I was never trusted, never accepted, always betrayed by my clean clothes, my equanimity about illness, by my cared-for, unhurting teeth. I had an identity in the hard world, a place I lived in, a college course to attend. I went home to my parents at Christmas and Easter, escaping, as the invisibles saw it, to the world of the fleshers.
Even so, entering the glamorous world was important to me. For the first time since my early teens I was meeting people like myself. That to them my invisibility was a question of degree made no difference to me. I was more invisible than visible, and this constantly affected me. The glams tried to reject me, but only because for most of them there was no escape.
There was another attraction too. I had always found invisibility refreshing, making the next return to the hard world that little bit easier. Once I met the real invisibles—pathetic, frightening and isolated as I found them to be—I discovered that the option of visibility was more accessible. At first I was repelled by their hopelessness and paranoia, but later I found them a source of strength.
Contact with their clouds gave me the energy to reenter the real world, and knowing them gave me the thrill of the glamorous life. I was still very young, and I was attracted to both.
Then, in my last term at college, when I knew I was going to have to make new decisions, and when I was less certain than ever of how I wanted to live, I met Niall.
V
Niall was different from any other invisible I had ever met. He was profoundly glamorous, completely unnoticeable by anyone who was not another invisible, his cloud a dense screen against the world. He was more deeply embedded than any of the others, more remote from reality, a thin wraith in a community of ghosts.
But his separateness was also in his personality. While most invisibles lamented their lack of identity, he relished his.
He was the only invisible I ever found physically attractive. He was fit, handsome, elegant. He was at ease in his body, and worried no more about illness than I ever did. He dressed rakishly, choosing the most modern clothes and the most flowery colors. He smoked Gauloises cigarettes and traveled light; the average glam worried too much about his health to smoke, and carried vast amounts of belongings wherever he went. Niall was funny, outspoken, rude to people he disliked, full of ideas and ambitions, and completely amoral. While I and some of the other glams had scruples about our parasitic lives, Niall saw invisibility as freedom, an extension of normal abilities.
Something else I found attractive and different about him was that he was doing something. Niall wanted to be a writer. He was the only invisible who ever stole books. He was always in and out of libraries and bookstores, borrowing or stealing poetry, novels, literary biographies, travel books. He was always reading, and when we were together he would sometimes read aloud to me. Books were the only part of his life where he was not amoraclass="underline" when he was finished with one he would leave it somewhere it could be found, or would even return it. Paddington Library was the one he frequented, conscientiously returning what he had borrowed, and sometimes pretending guilt to me if he thought the book was overdue.