Each card will contain a message, an invitation – an opportunity to visit this bookshop, to visit this village, to spend some time in this world. Angus loved it here, and believed that others should have the same privilege they did. He might not be here to see it, but she is determined to make his wish happen.
She will write in every one of these cards, filling them with love and hope and kindness. Then she will hide each one inside a different book. Those books will be released into the wild, and she will do her best to get them as far and wide as she can. That was the spirit of Angus’s original concept – that somebody would find each book, each card, each invitation, and it might just change their lives.
Robbie had loved the idea, and joked that they should even make the envelopes golden, like inCharlie and the Chocolate Factory. She’d told him that would be plagiarism, though, and they couldn’t possibly steal from Roald Dahl, even if he did seem like the kind of man who would enjoy this type of thing.
Moira chews her lip, and picks up her pen, then one of the envelopes. A flash of inspiration comes to her, and she writes: ‘To the right person, at the right time.’
It’s a good start, and it opens the floodgates of her creativity. She sits and she writes, pouring everything she has into these precious messages – all of her pain, all of her hope, all of her emotional energy. She puts it all in, and feels better for doing it.
Will it work? She has no idea, but she hopes so. She believes so. Maybe not straight away, but eventually, it will. These cards will end up exactly where they were meant to be.
With the right people, at the right time.
PART TWO
THE MIDDLE
ONE
KATE
Present day, London
‘I’ve turned invisible,’ I announce to myself. ‘I’m Kate Daniels, the amazing invisible woman! I could rob a bank, or spy on my ex, or sneak into the cinema without a ticket…’
I’m pondering the exciting possibilities of my new state of existence as I stand at the side of a busy London street, drenched head to toe in filthy gutter water. It’s cold and yucky and everywhere. I couldn’t be wetter if I’d jumped into a canal and done the YMCA dance with all the actions.
I’m at a bus stop, trying to get home from my job as an office temp. The bus, however, had different ideas, and sped straight past me despite my very obviously upraised hand. It didn’t even slow down, just splashed. This morning, the coffee shop lady ignored me for five whole minutes, and a man I’d worked with for the last two weeks asked me if it was my first day. The only explanation for all of this is that I’m now invisible. I stare at my own trembling fingers. I can still see them, but that means nothing.
‘You could watch people’s PIN numbers when they go to the cash machine,’ says a voice from behind me.
‘Or move stuff around in their houses so they think they’ve got a poltergeist!’ adds another.
‘You could hang around in football changing rooms and try to look at Travis Kelce’s bum – he’s well fit, him!’
I whirl around, soggy hair dripping onto my just-as-soggy coat, and see a gang of teenaged girls in green and white school uniform. They’re maybe fifteen, and all now dissolving into fits of giggles. ‘Perv!’ one says, poking her friend in the belly. ‘Anyway, she’s old, she’s not interested in Travis Kelce’s arse!’
‘I very much am!’ I claim defiantly. ‘Or at least I might be… who is he anyway? Plus, I’m not old. I’m forty!’
‘You’re older than my mum,’ the belly-poker deadpans, meeting my eyes in a way that says she’s done a risk assessment, and decided she could take me in a fight. ‘And anyway, I suppose I can’t really tell how old you are, what with you being invisible and all…’
They snigger en masse, and I wonder what the collective noun for a group of teenaged girls is. Maybe a murder, like crows. Or a plague, like locusts. ‘An annoyance,’ I say, again out loud. The girls exchange looks, and one of them makes the universal fingers-at-side-of-skull gesture that implies someone has a screw loose.
‘Yeah, right,’ the ringleader says, and goes back to her phone. The rest follow suit, and all of a sudden I’m dismissed. Irrelevant.
Invisible.
I wring my ponytail out, and stare behind them at the timetable on the bus stop. Great news – there isn’t another one for an hour. I step a bit closer to the girls, just to prove that I’m not intimidated. I actually am, but it’s important to keep up the act. I remember being that age, hanging around with my pal Lucy, trying to look so much tougher than we felt.
‘Why don’t you piss off, you mental case?’ the alpha female says. Her face is set in a surly grimace, and I’m shocked and slightly scared at the venom in her voice. She’s probably called something hideous like Maud or Veruca, and it’s soured her from birth. ‘You’re dripping on my iPhone!’ she adds.
I glance down and see that she’s right. I shuffle back, and embarrass myself by uttering a weak apology.
There’s nothing else for it, I have to leave. I might get stabbed otherwise, or bludgeoned to death by an annoyance of iPhones. I’d be an urban legend. There might even be memes on the internet. ‘Be careful out there,’ worried mothers would whisper to their kids, ‘don’t get killed by the sharp corner of an Apple device like that poor invisible woman did!’
I briefly toy with grabbing the phone and running. I have a bus pass and can’t afford a cab, but she probably has an Uber account, and I could ride home in triumph. But then I might get arrested, and it would be a lame way to end up in jail. I’ll save that for something big, like stealing a Krispy Kreme doughnut from the display case in Tesco.
It’s early summertime in London, which sounds magical. Like something out of a musical filled with romance, cartoon bluebirds tweeting around our heroine’s hopeful face as she tap dances through Hyde Park. The reality is a bit less magical. It’s been raining for days now, grey skies blanketing out the sun, drains flooding and triangular warnings on the maps every evening. Nice weather for ducks, as my mum used to say.
