When he was not reading he was writing. He filled innumerable notebooks with his work, writing slowly in his ornate and flamboyant handwriting. I was never allowed to see what he had written, nor did he read it to me, but I was supremely impressed.
This was Niall when I first met him, and I fell under his spell at once. He was a few months younger than I, but in every other way he was wiser, more exciting, more experienced, more stimulating than anyone I had ever known. When I finished at art school and came away with my diploma, I no longer had any doubt about what I wanted to do. The glamour had become a sanctuary from the hard world, and I fled into it.
The sheer excitement of being with Niall swept aside any doubts. Everything we did was enhanced by irresponsibility, and because I admired him I tried to impress him by being like him. We brought out the worst in each other, his amorality satisfying my wish for a better life.
I became thoroughly assimilated into the glamorous world. We lived nowhere, and drifted from one overnight stay to the next; we slept in the spare room in someone’s house, or went to a department store or hotel. We ate well, having nothing but fresh food stolen as we needed it. When we wanted cooked food we went to the kitchens of hotels or restaurants. We always had as many new clothes as we wanted, we were never cold, never hungry, never forced to sleep outdoors.
It was Niall who showed me how to break into banks and steal from post offices, but money was something we never needed. A bank robbery was always a dare, done for the sheer fun of it, entering the staff area in full view of the employees, taking a handful of bank notes from the cash drawers, riffling them unnoticed in front of their faces. Sometimes we would steal only a few coins or a note or two, just to prove we could do it. We were never silent during a robbery, talking to each other as we went, sometimes laughing aloud or singing with the glee of being unseen and unheard.
I feel guilty about this now, looking back. I was easily impressed, and Niall was awakening the restlessness in me, the last stirring of immaturity.
In time I grew less dazzled by him. I saw that he was not so original after all, that many people in the real world affected bright colors, unusual hairstyles, French cigarettes. Niall was different only in comparison with the other invisibles, and they no longer mattered to me. His interest in books and in becoming a writer was still admirable, but I was always held at arm’s length from this. I continued to find his personality attractive, but with increasing familiarity I realized most of what impressed me was superficial.
Even so, our reckless life as invisibles carried on for about three years. It all runs together now in my memory, blurring into what I would like to think of as an adolescent escapade. But I still often remember specific incidents, when the heady feeling returns to me of how clever and superior we thought we were. It was an ideal life; everything we wanted was literally within our grasp, and we never answered to anyone.
Internal changes were taking place too. Because of my constant closeness to Niall, I drew strength from his cloud. I found it increasingly easy to move into visibility, and it was this that started to erode our relationship.
Niall hated it when I was visible. It gave me an advantage over him. If he ever saw me visible, and he always knew when I had made the change, he would claim that I was endangering us both, risking discovery. The reality was that he was deeply resentful of his condition, and his bravado was a front. He was jealous of me, and my ability to move in the real world was a freedom from him.
Or that’s how he saw it. The paradox was that this very strength came from him. I needed to be close to him to gain the normality I had always craved, and which he so feared, but the closer I drew the more dependent on him I became.
Other needs were surfacing. As I grew older I began to develop a conscience about the money and goods we were stealing. A culminating incident occurred in a supermarket: as we were leaving I saw an open till full of cash, and on an impulse I took a handful of five-pound notes. It was a foolish and needless theft, because money was superfluous. A few days later I found out that the woman on the checkout had lost her job as a result, and this was the first time I realized that other people were being hurt. It was a sobering realization, changing everything.
More subtly, though, I was hungering for an ordinary way of life; I wanted the dignity of a real job, the knowledge that I earned what I lived by. I wanted to pay my way, buy food and clothes, pay to see movies, pay to travel on buses and trains. Above all I wanted to settle down, find somewhere I could call home, a place that was mine.
None of this was possible unless I was prepared or able to be visible for substantial periods of time. While I lived the rootless life with Niall, that was out of the question.
Then these stirrings took a positive shape. I wanted to go home, see my parents and sister, wander around in places I remembered. I had been away too long, because I had not been back since meeting Niall. My only contact with home was the occasional letter I wrote to my parents, but even this had been taken by Niall as a breach of our compact of invisibility. In the last twelve months I had written home only once.
I was growing up at last, and it was taking me away from Niall. I wanted something more than he was giving me; I could not spend the rest of my life in the shadows.
Niall sensed the change, and he knew I was trying to break away from him.
We reached a compromise about my parents, and one weekend went to see them together. I cannot imagine what I had hoped this would achieve, because I knew in my bones that it would lead to disaster.
Everything started to go wrong from the moment we arrived. I had never before seen at close hand how normal people react to the presence of an invisible, and the fact that these were my parents, from whom I was already partly estranged, only added layers of emotional complexity. I was visible throughout my stay, able to maintain it without much effort because Niall was there, but Niall remained unnoticed. I was trying to cope with three different problems simultaneously: I wanted to behave toward my parents in a natural way, relax with them, tell them something of my life in London without revealing the truth; I was constantly aware that they could not see that Niall was with me; and Niall himself, no longer the focus of my interest, began to behave badly.
Most of all it was Niall. He callously exploited the fact that they did not know he was there. When my parents were asking how I lived, who my friends were, what work I was doing, and I was attempting to answer with the bland lies I had been using in the few letters I had written, Niall was beside me, talking across me, giving them (unheard) the answers he felt they should have. When we sat down in the evening to watch television, Niall, bored with their choice of program, started touching my body to distract me. We drove over to see my sister so that I could meet her new husband, but Niall, getting into the back seat beside me, whistled loudly and talked across my parents, infuriating me but leaving me helpless to do anything about it. All through that weekend I was never allowed to forget Niall was there: he stole drinks and cigarettes, yawned boredly whenever my father spoke. He lounged around, used the toilet without flushing it, objected to every suggestion anyone made about where we could go or who we might see—in short he did everything in his power to remind me that he was the true center of my life.