Free When I Was Invisible by Dorothy Koomson

done with.
    Â 
Nika
London, 2016
    Wasn’t sure I’d see this place again. I didn’t think I’d ever come back to Chiselwick, let alone this part of it, and let alone this road. The house I grew up in is near the middle of a terraced street and it stands out to me because I spent seventeen years going in and out of it. The door is the same colour – a sombre black – as when I shut it behind me over eighteen years ago, when I was seventeen, but it’s newer paint. The whole of the outside has been repainted a few times and the windows look sort of new, like they’ve been updated in the last decade.
    My plan, hastily formulated when I left Birmingham last night, is to fix things with my parents. I’m going to turn up, talk to them, be humble, be contrite, see if we can find a middle ground. See if they will let me stay with them for a couple of nights so I don’t have to sleep on the streets. Their address was always my home address, because I could never be sure I’d get everything when I lived in a shared house. When I moved in with Todd, my sister used to package up my post and forward it to me at his address, even though she didn’t still live at home. My parents never spoke to me but apparently they accumulated all my post. My sister, who would clean up for them, still, would send on the post with a little ‘how are you?’ note, but nothing more. I’d guessed it was because she didn’t want to get in the middle of what had happened. I never explained to her the reasons for my exodus, and since we were never close – despite sharing a room – I didn’t feel the need to make her choose a side. Besides, I’d rather have an arm’s length relationship with her than one where she didn’t believe me when I told her one of my secrets.
    Our family had an odd dynamic: Sasha and I were never ones to share secrets or have each other’s backs but we always seemed to be waging wars against the rules our parents imposed – she being the older girl, getting the brunt of their control, me being younger, getting the best of their disinterest if I was doing what they wanted. Our brother, Marlon, was the golden child: first born, most loved, the one who treated them with the most disdain but seemed adored for it.
    I won’t think about that now. I got off the coach at Victoria with a plan: I will fix things with my parents as much as I can to let me stay and then I will get a job and then I will find somewhere to live. Saying all of this, it’s only really occurred to me now, standing in front of their door, that they might not live here any more. One or both of them might not be alive any more. I haven’t been in touch for so many years, I don’t know what fundamental and microscopic shifts have taken place in the Harper household.
    I have thought about them over the years, I’ve even thought about sending Christmas cards, birthday cards, etc. but I never got around to it. I could never bring myself to send them when it would all be fake – fake sentiments from a fake woman, who stopped signing her name Veronika or even Nika a long time ago. Every time I had the urge to get in touch with my family I would remind myself that I was Grace Carter and Grace Carter had no past and no family. That was all there was to it.
    Veronika Harper, on the other hand, raises her hand and presses the doorbell before she changes her mind and runs away, pulling on her Grace Carter protective armour as she runs.
    Immediately, there are sounds of movement on the other side of the door, someone getting up, a woman’s voice that doesn’t sound like my mother’s comes closer, and through the mottled glass in the door I watch the approach of a shape that is too tall and too slender, to be my mother. They don’t live here any more. Maybe they are both dead and I will have to deal with that news, too. I take a step back, ready to run