it was her turn. For the last few days she had felt incredibly insecure, as if someone was watching her. She had locked all the doors, drawn all the curtains, set the alarm. That probably should have been enough but now she was going to go that one step further.
She charged through the living room straight towards the fireplace, grabbed the iron poker, marched out of the room, locked the door and made her way upstairs. She looked at the poker lying on her bedside locker, rolled her eyes and turned her lamp off. She was losing her mind.
Ivan emerged from behind the couch and looked around. He had dived behind it thinking Elizabeth was charging towards him. He had heard the door lock after she stormed out. He slumped with a disappointment he had never experienced before. She still hadn’t seen him.
* * *
I’m not magic, you know. I can’t cross my arms, nod my head, blink and disappear and reappear on the top of a bookshelf or anything. I don’t live in a lamp, don’t have funny little ears, big hairy feet or wings. I don’t replace loose teeth with money, leave presents under a tree or hide chocolate eggs. I can’t fly, climb up the walls of buildings or run faster than the speed of light.
And I can’t open doors.
That has to be done for me. The grown-ups find that part the funniest but also the most embarrassing when their children do it in public. I don’t laugh at grown-ups when they can’t climb trees or can’t say the alphabet backwards because it’s just not physically possible for them. It doesn’t make them freaks of nature.
So Elizabeth needn’t have locked the living-room door when she went to bed that night because I couldn’t turn the handle anyway. Like I said, I’m not a superhero; my special power is friendship. I listen to people and I hear what they say. I hear their tones, the words they use to express themselves and, most importantly, I hear what they don’t say.
So all I could do that night was think about my new friend, Luke. I need to do that occasionally. I make notes in my head so that I can file a report for admin. They like to keep it all on record for training purposes. We’ve new people joining up all the time. In fact, when I’m between friends, I lecture.
I needed to think about why I was here. What made Luke want to see me? How could he benefit from my friendship? The business is run extremely professionally and we must always provide the company with a brief history of our friends and then list our aims and objectives. I could always identify the problem straight away but this scenario was slightly baffling. You see, I’d never been friends with an adult before. Anyone who has ever met one would understand why. There’s no sense of fun with them. They stick rigidly to schedules and times, they focus on the most unimportant things imaginable, like mortgages and bank statements, when everyone knows that the majority of the time it’s the people around them that put the smiles on their faces. It’s all work and no play, and I work hard, I really do, but playing is by far my favourite.
Take, for example, Elizabeth; she lies in bed worrying about car tax and phone bills, babysitters and paint colours. If you can’t put magnolia on a wall then there are always a million other colours you can use; if you can’t pay your phone bill then just write letters telling them. People forget they have options. And they forget that those things really don’t matter. They should concentrate on what they have and not what they don’t have. But I’m veering away from the story again.
I worried about my job a little the night I was locked in the living room. It’s the first time that had ever happened. I worried because I couldn’t figure out why I was there. Luke had a difficult family scenario but that was normal and I could tell he felt loved. He was happy and loved playing, he slept well at night, ate all his food, had a nice friend called Sam and when he spoke I listened and listened and tried to hear the words he wasn’t saying but there was nothing. He liked living with his aunt, was scared of his mom and liked talking about vegetables with his granddad. But Luke seeing me every day and wanting to play with me every day meant that I definitely needed to be here for him.
On the other hand, his aunt never slept, ate very little, was constantly surrounded by silence so loud that it was deafening, she had nobody close to her to talk to, that I had seen yet anyway, and she didn’t say far more than she did actually say. She had heard me say thank you once, felt my breath a few times, heard me squeak on the leather couch but yet she couldn’t see me nor could stand me being in her house.
Elizabeth did not want to play.
Plus she was a grown-up, she gave me butterflies and wouldn’t know fun if it hit her in the face, and believe me I’d tried to throw it at her plenty of times over the weekend. So I couldn’t possibly be here to help her. It was unheard of.
People refer to me as an invisible or an imaginary friend. Like there’s some big mystery surrounding me. I’ve read the books that grown-ups have written asking why kids see me, why do they believe in me so much for so long and then suddenly stop and go back to being the way they were before? I’ve seen the television shows that try to debate why it is that children invent people like me.
So just for the record for all you people, I’m not invisible or imaginary. I’m always here walking around just like you all are. And people like Luke don’t choose to see me, they just see me. It’s people like you and Elizabeth that choose not to.
Elizabeth was woken up at 6.08 a.m. by the sun streaming through the bedroom window and onto her face. She always slept with the curtains open. It had stemmed from growing up on a farm. Lying in her bed she could see through the bungalow window, down the garden path and out of the front gate. Beyond that was a country road that led straight from the farm, stretching on for a mile. Elizabeth could see her mother returning from her adventures, walking down the road for at least twenty minutes before she reached home. She could recognise the half-hop, half-skip from miles away. Those twenty minutes always felt like an eternity to Elizabeth. The long road had its own way of building up Elizabeth’s excitement, almost teasing her.
And finally she would hear that familiar sound, the squeak of the front gate. The rusting hinges acted as a welcoming band to the free spirit. Elizabeth had a love/hate relationship with that gate. Like the long stretch of road, it would tease her, and some days on hearing the creak she would run to see who was at the door and her heart would sink that it was only the postman.
Elizabeth had annoyed college room-mates and lovers with her insistence on keeping the curtains open. She didn’t know why she remained firm on this; it certainly wasn’t as though she was still waiting. But now in her adulthood, the open curtains acted as her alarm clock; with them open she knew the light would never allow her to fall back into a deep sleep. Even in her sleep she felt alert, and in control. She went to bed to rest, not to dream.
She squinted in the bright room and her head throbbed. She needed coffee, fast. Outside the window a bird’s song echoed loudly in the quiet of the countryside. Somewhere far away a cow answered its call. But despite the idyllic morning, there was nothing about this Monday that Elizabeth was looking forward to. She had to try to reschedule a meeting with the hotel developers, which was going to prove difficult because after the little stunt in the press about the new love nest at the top of the mountain, they had people flying in from all parts of the world willing to share their design ideas. This annoyed Elizabeth; this was her territory. But that wasn’t her only problem.
Luke had been invited to spend the day with his grandfather on the farm. That bit, Elizabeth was happy with. It was the part about him expecting another six-year-old by the name of Ivan that worried her. She would have to have a discussion with
