Grey felt as if his real life had been going on outside the cinema while he was inside watching the film … but that the memory of the film was an acceptable substitute.
This fragment of his confabulated past had another importance to him. It had sprung unbidden from his subconscious, a production of an inner need, a desperation to know. As a result it was now a part of him, even though it was not what had really happened. It dealt explicitly with his lost period, with the events leading up to the explosion. It gave him continuity.
And it excluded Sue, except as a secondary figure. It did not admit of her invisibility. The real Sue demanded a primary position, and insisted that he accept her claim to be invisible.
Thinking of Sue, Grey was reminded of the events of the night before. Since waking he had not thought about the visit to the house, although in a vague manner it had always been at the back of his mind.
Had he been suppressing it?
He had found it a profoundly disturbing experience, burdened with feelings of intrusion, violation, voyeurism, trespass. The sex with Sue, snatched from her frantic physical need, had provided only neurotic relief, lacking pleasure. He recalled the urgent undoing of clothes, of thrusting himself into her while they both still wore shoes, while their jeans tangled around their knees, while Sue’s blouse lay flatly over her half-bared breasts. Afterward the innocent woman, overweight and narcissistic, standing in her own room while strangers appraised her, and then their fear of being caught, trapped like thieves in someone else’s home.
This morning, while he stumbled around the flat in his early stupor, it had had all the quality of a half-remembered dream, as if the reality of it had been resorted symbolically during the night, encoded and dispatched to his unconscious. Grey thought of something that had happened a few years before: he had dreamed a friend of his had died, and for most of the following day he had felt a vague sense of sadness and loss until, midafternoon, he had realized that it was indeed only a dream, that his friend was alive and well. The feeling about their invisible visit was similar, although its cause was opposite: until reminded of it, Grey had remembered it in a dreamlike manner, his mood subtly affected by it, until the conscious realization that it had really happened.
It was curious that failure of memory surrounded invisibility.
Sue’s account of his lost period spoke of his own natural ability, his recognition of hers, the development of his skill at making himself invisible. But because of the bomb he had forgotten all this. Invisibility was a past, unremembered condition: Sue said that he no longer knew how, that her own talent had receded. Even Niall, supremely and terminally invisible, was not around any more.
And last night, intended to be Sue’s conclusive proof, had gone half forgotten until now.
Was amnesia inherently related to invisibility? Alexandra told him he had become invisible to her and Dr. Hurdis … but this was during the period of hypnosis he could not remember. Then there were the lost weeks of his life, invisible to him now, which he had replaced with spurious, confabulated memories. Was this not exactly the way in which ordinary people accounted to themselves for the presence of invisible people? Sue’s parents, bringing up a child they hardly saw, accounted for the mystery as a difficult daughter growing up and moving away. The unseen Niall, selfishly disrupting Sue’s visit home, was afterward given the benefit of the doubt and thought to be a nice young man. The soccer fans, deprived for a few minutes of their televised match, agreed among themselves that the game must have ended. The woman in the house acted as if the kitchen tap had somehow turned itself on, and later failed to see two strangers fornicating on her bed.
Sue had said that invisible people were made invisible by the people around them, their failure to notice: spontaneous amnesia, followed by confabulation to explain the inexplicable.
There was one experience of invisibility, though, that he could remember clearly, and this was the way it had sometimes helped his filming. But even this was in doubt.
Film crews feel vulnerable in dangerous circumstances. They are weighted down with bulky and valuable equipment, and they generally draw attention to themselves. People are always aware of the presence of cameras. Grey remembered that for a time there had been a problem with the security forces in Northern Ireland, who tried to discourage crews from visiting trouble spots because, it was claimed, the arrival of cameras often created or worsened an incident. Filming at night sometimes meant that lights had to be used, although high-speed stock had to a large extent averted that problem. Cameramen are usually in the thick of whatever is going on, because otherwise there is no point their being there, and if the story involves illegality or political dispute, the crews frequently become the targets of abuse or violence.
When Grey thought back to the reality of news filming as he had known it for several years, the idea of a cameraman working unnoticed was incredible. Yet the fact remained that there had been times when he had obtained footage in extreme situations. Sue’s interpretation had an odd plausibility, one that touched an inner instinct in him.
He simply did not know what to think.
After lunch Grey went for a walk by himself. Exercise for his hip was still essential, so he drove his car up to the West Heath near Hampstead and walked for a couple of hours through the oak forest. It was a small but attractive area, often neglected by visitors in favor of the more open main part of the Heath.
While he was there he came across a film crew from the BBC who were shooting some exterior action for a play. He recognized the cameraman, so he walked over and talked briefly between takes; Grey was now actively seeking work, and was not afraid to let it be known. The two men agreed to meet for a drink in a few days’ time.
He watched the unit at work for a while, wishing he were a part of it. The story was an episode from a thriller series, and the scene they were shooting involved two men chasing a blond actress through the trees. She was wearing a flimsy yellow dress, and between takes she stood with her boyfriend, shivering inside her coat and chain-smoking. She looked, off camera, utterly different from the frightened and vulnerable character she was playing.
Walking on, Grey thought about the one incident from the night before that had fundamentally affected his outlook. This was his discovery that Sue, when she thought herself invisible, became sexually highly charged. Because he had been there, had seen the change coming over her, had felt it too, he responded. He could still recall the urgent need. But it was an insight he had not expected; what he found attractive about Sue was what he had always thought of as her shyness, her modest dislike of being stared at, her physical neutrality. Sometimes in the past her lovemaking had been uninhibitedly coarse, and he had always believed that this was something he had brought out in her. Sexual knowledge is frequently revealing. But she had never been assertive in that way before. He was not repelled sexually, but it made him feel that until then he had perceived her wrongly.
That actress back there was in real life unlike the part she was playing. Sue, thinking herself unseen, switched from the role she habitually played to another character. She was two people: the woman he usually saw, and the one he had never seen until last night. In her invisibility, her concealment from the world, she had revealed herself. To Grey, it felt as if his other doubts coalesced around this. If the revelation had come earlier it might have made no difference, but at this late stage he felt unable to cope with yet another reversal.