The Invisible Man from Salem (9 page)

‘He's never been this cheeky before.'

‘Cunts,' Vlad managed to force out.

‘And he's asking for it. He deserves to have it nicked.'

I heard them pulling at his clothes. Once they'd taken the wallet, one of them kneed Vlad in the stomach while the other one looked around sheepishly. Vlad collapsed on the loading bay, and the two of them jumped smoothly to the ground, walking away with calm, deliberate strides.

Next time he and Fred started on me, Vlad went completely white when I confronted him about it. I can't remember what I said — maybe something about him being a pussy.

Fred gave Vlad a look of complete surprise; in turn, Vlad just stared at me, blinked once, and started chasing me around the outskirts of Salem.

THIS WAS YEARS AGO
, but as Grim and I got off the bus and started walking up towards the school's goods entrance it all came back to me. Vlad and Fred had turned eighteen and had both moved away from Salem. That happened to lots of them. They just disappeared.

I tried to remember whether they'd got hold of me, the time I'd confronted Vlad and they'd started chasing me. That time merged with so many others. Maybe I got away that time; maybe not.

‘You look thoughtful,' Grim said, walking alongside me.

‘I just remembered something.'

‘Something bad?'

‘Why do you ask?'

He lowered his gaze and gave a quick nod.

‘Your fists are clenched.'

I didn't look at them, straining to relax them instead.

‘No they're not.'

He looked at my hands again, which were now exaggeratedly relaxed and floppy. We went over to the loading bay, and jumped up onto it. I leant against the bit of wall that Vlad had once been pinned against. We were waiting for Julia, who still had a while left at the middle school. I wondered how it was possible that I'd never seen her before. She'd started the year after me; we must have seen each other in the corridor. Julia Grimberg was the sort of person I should have noticed. Grim sat there swinging his legs. A click came from the big roller shutter to our left, and with a little creak it started to open. When it reached my thigh level it stopped, and out came Julia, in her light jeans and a black T-shirt with
THE SMASHING PUMPKINS
printed on it in soft yellow characters.

‘You can just go round, you know,' Grim said. ‘You don't have to sneak out this way.'

‘There's a supervisor just round the corner. She would have seen me.'

Julia sat down with Grim on the loading bay, and I sat next to her. I don't think Grim thought it was weird, but I wasn't sure. Her denim rubbed against mine. Grim pulled a big notebook out of his bag and flipped through to a blank page. As he was doing so, I saw that most of the pages were full of stuff that wasn't schoolwork: sketches and little cartoons; some had so much scribbled text that I couldn't decipher what they said.

‘What's this note about?'

‘I don't know,' Julia said. ‘Something about me going away.'

‘Are you going away?' I asked.

‘No, we're going on a class team-building trip. If you can't go, you need a note from your parents.'

‘Can't you ask them for one then?'

She shook her head.

‘Today's the last day to hand the note in, and I forgot. Anyway, they would never agree to it.'

‘Why not?'

Julia looked at Grim, who didn't say anything. He'd written a short note in handwriting that wasn't his own. The only thing left was the signature. He flipped through to an earlier, full page in the notebook. It was covered with this one pattern, three columns of what must have been a signature. A scrap of paper was glued to the page — what I later realised was the original. He studied it for a second, before flipping back through and, with a couple of deft hand movements, copying the signature. He ripped the page out and showed it to Julia.

‘Will that do?'

It was an exact copy of the original.

‘Perfect,' Julia said.

He folded the page across the middle and gave it to her.

‘They noticed that we were forging them,' she said, looking at me. ‘They even had a meeting about it in our class, so if you're going to get away with it now, it has to be really well done.'

‘Seriously?'

‘Seriously.' She got up and folded the note again and stuffed it into her back pocket. ‘I've got to go — lesson's about to start.'

‘See you at home,' said Grim.

‘See you round,' I said, attempting a smile.

‘Yeah, see you round,' Julia said, before disappearing back through the door.

HE SHOT BIRDS
with an air rifle, smelled his way to cash, and could forge his parents' signatures. And he was called Grim. He was more like a cartoon character or someone from a film. But he wasn't. He was completely ordinary and real.

‘Someone has to pay the bills and sign things,' he said once we were on the bus back to Rönninge High. ‘That's how it is in all families, including yours, I assume. It's really not that strange.' He shrugged his shoulders. ‘In my family it's me, because no one else remembers to do it.'

It had started when their mum forgot to sign a form from the welfare office. Grim had found it lying on the coffee table. Their dad was off sick at the time, and the form was about the family's financial support. Next to it lay another form, from Social Services, which was also missing a signature. Grim dug out a form with his mum's signature on it, and practised it a couple of times on a notepad before carefully reproducing it on the two forms and posting them off. After that, similar things had happened a few times, and Grim told Julia, who told their dad.

‘He was furious, of course. It was sort of illegal, really. I don't know. But before long I knew more about their finances than they did. Dad can't be bothered with it, and Mum's ill. The medication makes it hard for her to keep on top of things. I do it — I mean take care of the bills and stuff — for Julia's sake really, so that she can … I don't know. So she doesn't need to worry.'

The bus driver had the radio on, and the silence between me and Grim meant I could hear the song playing up front.

‘What kind of ill?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘You said your mum was ill.'

‘Hadn't I said that before?'

‘I don't think so.'

He sighed and stared out the window.

‘After Julia was born, she got depressed. Psychotic even, for a while. They said it was down to the birth. She was … she tried …' Grim hesitated, for a long time. ‘I was angry when she came along, when Julia was born. At least that's what I've been told; I'd only just turned two at the time. I got angry that she was getting all the attention. But one day, when the psychosis had started, I was sitting on the floor at home somewhere, and Julia was screaming. They say you don't have memories from that early, but I'm certain that I do because it's all so vivid. I came into the living room and it looked like she had been sitting there breastfeeding Julia. Suddenly she just put her down on the floor, or dropped her, or let her go; I don't actually know, and I don't really want to. Either way, she just left her lying there. Dad was at work, so I picked her up, and we sat on the sofa until she stopped crying. It took ages — at least that's what it felt like. I remember being so scared. When she'd finally stopped, Mum turned her head and said, “I can take her again now.”' Grim shook his head. ‘I didn't want to give Julia to her. It's fucked up; I could hardly talk, I was that small. Yet I had a sense that something was wrong. Eventually my mum got up and took her from me and carried on feeding her. But I stayed there the whole time, worried that something might happen. I don't think Dad ever found out.'

He seemed unsure of where to go from there.

‘Later, years later, I still didn't know whether she'd been dropped or not, so I started worrying that she might have been injured somehow. I started looking for signs of it.'

‘Signs of what? How?'

‘Well, if she had been dropped it could have caused brain damage, I thought. And I knew that certain types of brain damage aren't discovered for years, if at all. So I started looking for speech impediments, amnesia, whether she had any trouble learning.'

Grim told me that he was never ill as a child. He was born healthy and stayed healthy, managed to avoid all the normal childhood illnesses. Julia, on the other hand, got chickenpox, whooping cough, croup, the lot. She was always ill, and when she started school she was almost malnourished, so much so that the school nurse — old Beate, who smoked Yellow Blend and had felt all the boys' balls, including mine and Grim's, to check that all the junior-school boys in Salem had two and not one or three — had expressed concern.

‘I took that sort of thing to be a sign of it.' He laughed. ‘Crazy, considering Julia's the healthiest of all of us now. It was never really a problem, I suppose. Anyway, Mum's never got rid of the depression altogether. She has better days and worse days, but never good days, so it's hard for her to manage money and stuff. And Dad can't be bothered.'

And by the way, old Beate was now dead, Grim added. His dad had told him, because Beate happened to be the mother of one of his colleagues.

‘Right,' I said, not really wanting to change the subject from Julia, although Grim obviously didn't want to talk about it anymore.

I looked out the bus window, and the world swished past: green trees, grey skies, faded yellow houses.

LATER THAT EVENING
, the phone rang. We had three in our flat: one in my brother's room, one in my parents' bedroom, and a cordless one, which was never where you thought it would be. Wherever you looked, it was always somewhere else; Dad swore that that phone would send him round the bend one day.

There were phones ringing all over the place, and I didn't answer. I sat flipping through old yearbooks from Rönninge Middle School, looking for Julia Grimberg. I still hadn't found her, but it was a big school with lots of classes. Someone answered the phone, and, shortly after, there was a knock on my door.

‘Leo, it's for you.'

‘Who is it?'

‘Someone called Julia.'

I stood up, opened the door, and took the phone off Mum. I closed the door without saying anything, shut the open yearbook and put it on top of the others, then pushed them out of the way.

‘Hello?'

‘Hi, it's Julia.'

‘Hi.'

‘What are you doing?'

‘Nothing much.'

Beyond Julia's voice I could hear nothing but silence. I wondered if Grim was there, or if she was on her own.

‘Good,' she said.

‘What … has something happened?'

‘No, not at all.'

Has something happened?
Who says that? I wanted to punch myself in the face.

‘I just wanted to,' she went on, ‘I don't know. I saw your number in John's room.'

‘Do you ring all the numbers in his room?'

She laughed.

‘This is the first time.'

I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. We chatted for a while without really saying anything. I wondered why she'd rung, but was too scared to ask.

‘Are you watching telly?' she asked.

‘No.'

‘
Back to the Future
is on 3. Have you seen it?'

I hadn't. I switched the telly on, but put it on mute. Michael J Fox was busy avoiding a girl who fancied him.

‘That's his mum,' Julia said. ‘He's gone back to the future to make sure that she and his dad get together, so that he gets born. The only trouble is that his mum has fallen for him, her own son. But you know, she doesn't know that he is.'

We watched the film together. Julia laughed every now and then. It was a nice laugh; it reminded me of Grim's.

‘Where would you go, if you could travel through time?' she asked.

‘Hmm, I don't know, never thought about it.'

‘Would you go forwards or back?'

‘Back. No, forward. No, back.' I heard how Julia laughed. ‘I don't know, this is really hard. Do I only get one trip?'

‘Yes.'

‘Sounds like a shit time machine, if you can only go once.'

‘But if you can do as many trips as you like, it's pointless.'

‘Dinosaurs,' I said.

She laughed again.

‘Eh?'

‘They say they were wiped out by a big meteorite. But I don't know. I'd like to see if that was true.'

‘What fun, Leo. You can go wherever you want, see whatever you want, anything at all, and you choose to go and see some dinosaurs. Anyway, you might die yourself. Could you even breathe back then? I mean, that long ago, wasn't the air all poisonous and dangerous?'