How could my parents not have known he was there? It was the most uncanny and disturbing sensation because even setting aside Niall’s abominable behavior, it seemed impossible they could not be aware of him. Yet I was greeted and he was not; they spoke only to me, looked only at me; no place was set for him at mealtimes; I was given the single bed in my old room; even in the cramped confines of my father’s car, no acknowledgment was made of his presence. Trying to cope with this—the blatant contradiction between what I knew was happening and how my parents were reacting to it—was my major preoccupation. I knew how they had reacted to my own invisibility in the old days, but then there had always been ambiguities. This was different: Niall was emphatically there, but somehow they could not see him. Even so, I was convinced that on some deeper level they were aware of him. His invisible presence created a vacuum, a silent nexus of the whole weekend.
For me it made real the fact that my life in London was a rebellion against my background. I found my father dull and inflexible, my mother prissily concerned over details that did not interest me. I loved them still, but they could not see that I was growing up, that I was not, and never would be again, the child-daughter they had glimpsed a few years before. This was Niall’s influence on me, of course, and his sardonic interjections, heard only by me, were a continual counterpoint to my own thoughts.
As the visit progressed I felt more and more isolated—cut off from my parents by misunderstandings, alienated from Niall by his behavior. We had been planning to stay for three nights, but after a blazing row with Niall on the Saturday—invisible together in the bedroom, shouting at each other in cocoon of our protective clouds—I could stand the strain no longer. In the morning my parents drove me, us, to the station, and there we said goodbye. My father was stiff and white with suppressed anger, my mother was in tears. Niall was jubilant, dragging me back, as he thought, to our invisible life in London.
But none of that could ever be the same. Soon after we reached London I left Niall. I made myself visible, I integrated with the real world. I was escaping from Niall at last, and I tried to make sure he would never find me.
VI
He found me. I had been living in the glamorous world too long, and didn’t know how to survive without stealing. Niall knew our haunts better than I did, and one day two months later he was there.
I had had enough time, though, and something had changed. In my two months of solitude I had rented a room, the place I still live in. It was mine, and although it was not yet earned it was full of stuff I thought of as mine, it had a door and a lock, and it was a place I could be. It meant more to me than anything else in my life, and nothing would make me relinquish it. I was still surviving by theft, but I was full of resolve. I was slowly working up a portfolio of drawings, I had contacted one of my old tutors, and had already visited one editor in the hope of getting commissions. A freelance life, with all its difficulties, was my only real hope of independence.
But Niall walked back into my life assuming we would continue as before. He understood better than anyone what the room signified to me, but I made the mistake of letting him in. I showed it off to him proudly, thinking that he would have to accept that I had changed, that by showing it to him I was implying that he could be included in my new life.
What it really meant, I quickly discovered, was that he always knew where to find me when he wanted me. This was the worst of it: he would turn up at any time of the day or night, wanting company, wanting reassurance, wanting sex. My independence made him change, and I saw a new side of him: he became possessive, sulky, bullying.
I held on, knowing that the room and what it stood for were my only hope of a better life.
Through my tenuous contacts I started to sell a little work: an illustration for a magazine article, some layout work for an advertising agency, some lettering for a firm of management consultants. The fees were small to begin with, but one piece of work led gradually to another, and I became known for what I could do. Commissions started to turn up without my seeking them, I was recommended by one editor to another, I made contact with a small independent studio that gave me freelance work. I opened a bank account, had some letterheads printed, bought a proper desk, and by such tokens felt I was establishing myself in the visible world. As soon as I started earning money I cut my stealing back to the absolute essentials, and when the checks began arriving with reasonable frequency I stopped altogether. It became an article of my faith in myself that I would never go back, and although there were difficult times I never weakened. I derived real pleasure from making myself visible to cash a check, to line up with everyone else at supermarket checkouts, to try on dresses in clothing stores and produce my checkbook for payment. As a final gesture I took driving lessons, and passed the test at the second attempt.
The strain of being visible was also less. By working at home I could relax inside the glamour as long as I wished, only becoming visible if I went out. I achieved an emotional stability I had never known before.
Even Niall began to accept that it was permanent. He knew that the old days were gone for good, and he adjusted to that, but he also had a claim on me he could always exploit. Only I understood the profundity of his invisibility, how impossible it was for him ever to become normal. He played on my sympathy for this, blackmailing me with it. If I tried to cut myself off from him, he pleaded with me not to abandon him. He pointed out the advantages I had over him, the stability I had achieved, hinting at the misery and loss he had always to endure. I invariably capitulated. I saw him as a tragic figure, and even as I knew he was manipulating me I let him get away with it.
He would not let me grow away from him, and used his invisibility against me. When I started a tentative friendship with one of the young illustrators at the studio and fixed up an evening with him, Niall put on such a display of recriminations and wounded jealousy that I almost canceled the date. I had never had a real boyfriend, though, and was determined to stand up for myself. I went on my date, an evening of total innocence, but it was ruined by Niall. Niall followed, Niall hung around, Niall interfered. It led to a furious row that night, back in my room, and the seedling romance was crushed. I never tried again.
This was the worst of Niall, but it was not all of him. So long as I remained sexually faithful to him and was available whenever he chose to see me and did not make any more overt gestures toward the hard world, then he left me to live and work as I chose.
He was not always around me; sometimes he would vanish for a week or two at a time, never explaining where he had been. He told me he had found a place to live, although how he managed it or where it was I never discovered. He claimed to have friends, never named, who owned property where he could come and go as he pleased. He told me he had started writing in earnest, and was submitting his work to publishers. He dropped hints about other women, presumably hoping to arouse my possessiveness, but if they were true nothing would have pleased me more; anyway, in Niall’s amoral world view, sexual fidelity was a one-sided matter, and I had always assumed he slept with other women when he felt like it.
Above all, he allowed me to work, to live on the fringes of the real world, to develop self-respect. In my distorted life, cursed by natural invisibility, it seemed to be the best I could hope for.
Then, that night in the pub in Highgate, I saw you.
VII
After the excitement of talking to you, my preoccupation was Niall and what he would do in revenge.