See Through Me Read online

  ‘You’re going to keep thinking about it anyway, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Yeah, but at least I’ll know what I’m thinking about.’

  She smiled at me, but it was the kind of smile that’s too fragile to hold, and by the time she’d turned to Dr Reynolds it had disappeared without a trace. She didn’t say anything to him, and he didn’t speak either. He just nodded, then looked back at me.

  ‘We’ll do it gradually again,’ he said. ‘Just like before. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll ask Dr Kamara to start turning up the lights. We’ll begin with the small one on the wall, and if you still want to keep going when it reaches full brightness, we can start fading up one of the main ceiling lights. Is that all right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We can slow things down or stop completely whenever you want.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Are you ready to start?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He signalled Dr Kamara to go ahead, and the near-darkness of the room slowly began to lift.

  It wasn’t anything like I’d imagined . . .

  It wasn’t anything like I could have imagined.

  It was infinitely worse.

  Unimaginable.

  The stuff inside your body doesn’t look anything like those see-through illustrations of the human body you see in biology textbooks, or those plastic anatomy models with their nice neat innards, all in exactly the right place. That’s not how it is. In reality, it’s just a jumbled mess of soggy red stuff and thick globs of meat, all shoved together in whatever way they’ll fit. And it’s not inanimate either. It’s a living thing, a mess that moves – pumping, pulsing, throbbing, twitching . . . keeping itself alive.

  I know it for what it is now.

  But back then . . .

  All I could see was a repulsive stew of guts.

  Entrails . . .

  Sickening coils of intestine, knotted together, fold upon fold, like parasitic worms . . .

  Tubes, greyed pink, the colour of rotted meat.

  Foul things.

  Too much.

  ‘Stop,’ I said.

  8

  I came very close to putting a stop to everything then. I’d had enough. My brain was too scrambled to think anymore, and all I could feel – physically and emotionally – was a numbing cold sickness that felt like the end of the world.

  I wanted to be left alone now. I wanted to lie in the darkness and not think or feel anything at all. I wanted to empty myself of everything and float off to a place where things were still all right.

  But I knew that I couldn’t.

  Not yet anyway.

  Not until I’d seen the skull in the mirror.

  ‘I’d strongly advise against it,’ Dr Hahn told me. ‘You’re already highly distressed – understandably so – and another major shock to your system now could have very serious consequences. On the other hand . . .’ She paused, her eyes fixed on me, her lips pursed in thought. ‘I completely understand why you need to do this – if I was in your position I’d feel the same – and it doesn’t make any difference what I say to you anyway, does it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve already made up your mind.’

  I nodded.

  ‘And if we don’t do it now, you’ll find a way to do it on your own later on.’

  ‘It’s my face . . . my head. It’s me. I can’t not know it.’

  The only time I cried during the whole revelation was when Dr Kamara told me that I’d lost all my hair. And by lost she meant lost. Not just transparent, but gone . . . every last bit of it. For some reason – which they still didn’t understand – it had all fallen out when I’d been half crazy with sickness and pain.

  Dr Kamara told me this before I’d looked in the mirror, and I know it might seem like a strange thing to warn me about – that having no hair should be the least of my worries – and from the look Dr Reynolds gave her when she told me, a puzzled frown, it was perfectly clear that he didn’t get it. But Dr Kamara knew what she was doing. She knew that the shock of losing my hair wouldn’t be the same as the shock of everything else. Everything else was extraordinary, impossible, unbelievable. Losing my hair was real. It was something I could understand, something I could have real feelings about . . . feelings that actually made sense.

  If Dr Kamara hadn’t warned me in advance, those feelings would have got mixed up with all the unbelievable stuff, and I would have missed the chance to have some true sadness and grieve a little for what I’d lost.

  My hair . . .

  My lovely, stupid, midnight-black mess of hair.

  All gone.

  I loved that hair.

  I really did.

  But even as I sat there crying my eyes out, I couldn’t help wondering how my tears must have looked as they streamed down my skinless face.

  They must have planned to show me my head – or at least planned for the possibility – because Dr Hahn just went into the little bathroom and almost immediately came back out again carrying a medium-sized frameless mirror. As she walked back over to the bed, she kept the reflective side facing towards her, and as Dr Reynolds stepped aside to let her stand next to me, she held the mirror close to her body, clutching it almost secretively to her chest, as if my reflection was already in it and she didn’t want me to see it yet.

  I know she spoke to me then – I remember seeing her lips move – but I have no idea what she said. All I could hear as she stood there talking to me was a surging roar inside my head and the deafening thump of my heart. Everything else was just a distant drone.

  I don’t remember how the mirror came to be in front of me either.

  I don’t know if Dr Hahn just gave it to me, and I held it in front of me, or if she positioned it for me and held it herself . . . or if it was all done gradually, revealing my reflection bit by bit, or if there was no hesitation at all, just a straightforward no-nonsense revelation . . .

  I have no recollection at all.

  I remember the roar in my head . . .

  I remember the fear in my heart . . .

  And then suddenly I was back home again . . . standing at the bathroom sink, my head crashing with electric madness, staring at the nightmare vision in the mirror.

  A skull, skinless . . . white bone, grinning teeth . . .

  Eyeless . . .

  Faceless . . .

  Hairless . . .

  A skull, pocked with grey stuff and schemes of blood . . .

  A thing of death.

  It was me.

  I could see the tracks of my tears running from the holes where my eyes used to be, the holes looking back at me like caves of bone. I knew my eyes were still there, but it’s hard to believe in something you can’t see.

  I closed them.

  Something might have flickered in the mirror, just the tiniest shimmer of unseen movement as my invisible eyelids closed . . . but nothing changed. I still couldn’t see the things I was seeing with.

  It was too much.

  I didn’t want to see anymore.

  I covered my eyes with my hands, desperate for the sanctuary of darkness, but all I got was a blurred transparency of finger bones and muscle and blood. The skull in the mirror was still there, still grinning at me through the glaze of my see-through hands . . . and I knew that I didn’t have to keep looking at it, that all I had to do was turn my head and look away, but no matter how much I wanted to – and in that moment I’d never wanted anything more – I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t feel, couldn’t speak . . .

  Kenzie?

  A voice from a million miles away.

  Kenzie!

  Your face is who you are. It’s your identity, the thing that makes you you. It’s how you see yourself . . . which is kind of strange, if you think about it, because your face is one of the few parts of your body that you can’t actually see, and the only way you know it is through the second-hand imagery of other things – mirrors, photographs, videos . . .

  But it’s still how you see yourself. And it’s how everyone else sees you and knows you too. Your face is you. And because you see it so many times every day – and you’ve been seeing it every day for most of your life – you know it more intimately than anything else. You know every millimetre of it – every line, every turn, every shape . . . the way it all fits together. You know it so well, and it means so much to you, that if it changes in any way at all, you’re instantly and intensely aware of it. And if that change is enough to disturb the familiarity of your face – and it doesn’t take much to do it – the effect can be staggering.

  The thing that’s you, and has always been you, has suddenly become something else. It’s not you anymore . . .

  That you has gone.

  And now you’ve become this . . .

  This fucking thing.

  I hit it.

  My head cracked.

  And then I was nothing.

  9

  They kept me in the special care room for another two days – the lights permanently dimmed, my body covered up, a sleep mask for sanctuary when I needed it.

  ‘We’ll move you to a recovery room soon,’ Dr Kamara told me. ‘You’ll be a lot more comfortable there. We just want to make sure there’s nothing else wrong with you first, so we need to keep you hooked up to all the equipment in here for a little while longer.’

  I think there was probably a bit more to it than that. I think part of the reason they wanted to keep me under observation in the special care room was so that they could monitor and assess how I was coping – or not – with the shock, and they didn’t want to move me until they were sure I was relatively stable.

  I don’t know how I was coping with the shock, to be honest. I
remember bits and pieces of the days after the revelation, and some of the memories are all too vivid, but a lot of that time is completely lost to me. I don’t know if I’ve blocked it out, or if I was so traumatised that I never even registered it in the first place. It’s also quite possible that the reason I don’t remember much is that I spent most of the time asleep.

  Reasons . . .

  Reasons don’t matter.

  ‘We think it’s best if you don’t have any visitors just yet,’ Dr Kamara said. ‘You need as much peace and quiet as you can get. We’ve talked this over with your dad, and although he’s very keen to see you as soon as possible, he understands that the only thing that matters at the moment is doing what’s best for you. So we’ll give it a couple of days, then hopefully get you into a recovery room and see how it goes from there.’

  ‘So when will I see Dad?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. We’d like to keep you fully rested for at least another three or four days –’

  ‘What about this?’ I muttered, indicating my head, my face. ‘I can’t let Dad see me like this . . .’

  ‘He’s already seen you, Kenzie. He knows –’

  ‘When did he see me?’

  ‘The day after you were brought here.’

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘You wouldn’t. You were in a bad way at the time – you weren’t really aware of anything – and your dad didn’t stay long anyway. He had to get back to look after your brother.’

  ‘Was I like this when he saw me?’ I asked. ‘Was I . . . you know . . . ?’

  ‘The transparency hadn’t fully set in at that point. It was still fading in and out, so you weren’t permanently affected when he saw you, but he knows what’s happened to you, Kenzie. He’s seen how you are. He knows –’

  ‘I’ll have to cover my face when I see him . . . my head . . . all of it . . .’

  ‘You don’t have to hide anything from him. He’s your dad . . . he’ll understand.’

  ‘Some kind of veil might do it . . . a niqab maybe, or even a burqa . . .’ I looked at Dr Kamara. ‘Are you allowed to wear stuff like that if you’re not a Muslim?’

  She sighed. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Could you find out?’

  She just looked at me then, and for a moment I sensed a slight coldness to her.

  ‘I think you’d better get some rest now,’ she said.

  ‘But what about –?’

  ‘I’ve got your clothes here,’ she said, holding up a bulging carrier bag. ‘Burgess Park General just sent them on to us. You need to keep your gown on for now though. You can get changed when you move to the recovery room. Your dad’s going to bring you some more things when he comes – clothes, toiletries, books . . . whatever you need. Is there anything in particular you want him to bring?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Well, just let us know if you think of anything.’ She leaned down and placed the bag of clothes on the bottom shelf of a monitor stand just to the right of the bed. ‘I’ll leave this here, okay?’

  I nodded.

  She studied me for a few seconds, and I thought she was going to say something else, but she didn’t. She just turned round, went over to the door, and left.

  Reasons . . .

  The why of things.

  One of the things about dressing the same way nearly all the time is that you can always be pretty sure what you were wearing on any given day. It’s a fairly useless thing to know, and all it really meant that day was that as I lay there staring at the carrier bag, I automatically knew what was in it. The clothes I’d been wearing on that rain-sodden Sunday night would have been the same kind of clothes I always wore – black leggings, black skirt, black T-shirt, black hoodie, my favourite silver and black pumps. I also knew that when I was taken to BPG my phone was in the pocket of my hoodie. Whether it was still there or not was another question, and at first I couldn’t have cared less. What did I want with a phone? I was hardly going to take a selfie and post it on Instagram, was I? And whatever anyone might be saying about me on Snapchat or yapTee or Facebook . . . well, I was feeling bad enough as it was. Why would I want to read a load of stuff that was guaranteed to make me feel even worse?

  Was there anyone I wanted to call?

  No.

  Not even Finch?

  I felt tears in my eyes then.

  Of course I wanted to talk to Finch . . . there was nothing I wanted more. But I knew what would happen if I did. I knew I’d start sobbing my heart out the moment I heard his voice, and that once the tears had begun to flow, I wouldn’t be able to stop them. And all that would do was make us both feel worse. Finch would be upset because I was upset, and that would make me more upset, which in turn would make Finch more upset . . .

  No.

  I couldn’t speak to him . . . not yet, anyway.

  But maybe . . .

  I gazed down at the carrier bag.

  Could I text him?

  I thought about it . . .

  It’s Finch, I told myself. You don’t need to think about texting Finch. Just do it.

  I thought about it some more . . .

  There was a good chance my phone wasn’t in the bag anyway. Someone could have found it – a nurse, a doctor, a paramedic – and put it away for safe keeping, or it could have just fallen out of my pocket somewhere . . . and if the phone wasn’t there, there was nothing to think about, was there? So I might as well have a look . . .

  As I reached down for the bag – taking care not to pull out any of the tubes and wires attached to various parts of my body – I knew in my heart that I wanted the phone to be there, and I knew that I was going to text Finch if it was.

  It was.

  And I did.

  When I opened the phone I saw that there was a message from Finch from three days ago.

  hey kez, i’m here if you want to talk, but don’t worry if you don’t. i’m here for you anyway xxx

  Even that was almost enough to break my heart.

  I waited for the tingle to leave my eyes, then wrote back.

  hi finch, how’s it going? sorry i didn’t write sooner, didn’t have my phone. are you ok? xxx

  He replied almost immediately.

  kenzie!! ha! my favourite big sis! i knew i’d hear from you this morning, I just KNEW it. i could feel it in the air

  Then me.

  how are you? everything ok?

  Finch.

  everything’s fine. but what about you? what’s going on, kez? are you all right?

  Me.

  not really

  Finch.

  is there anything i can do? do you want to talk about it?

  Me.

  not yet. maybe later. is that ok?

  Finch.

  no prob. whenever you’re ready. i’ll be here

  Me.

  thanks. i’ve got to go now. tired

  Finch.

  ok

  Me.

  love you xxx

  Reasons . . .

  I shouldn’t have sent that last message. Finch never liked it when I told him I loved him. He thought it was a bad omen, like saying a final goodbye. It made him think he was about to die.

  Reasons don’t matter.

  10

  I’d kept myself covered up since the revelation – gown, long gloves, long socks – and I hadn’t looked at myself once. I hadn’t even taken a quick peek at anything in the hope that the transparency had gone and everything was back to normal again . . . I knew it wasn’t. I could feel it. And I knew that not looking at it wouldn’t make it go away, or make it any better . . . in fact, it might even make things worse.

  But I just couldn’t do it.

  I couldn’t face the hideous reality of what I’d become.

  So for two days I just lay there in bed, cocooned in white in the dim grey light of the room, letting myself drift into a mindless nowhere. But then on the morning of the third day – I had no idea what day it actually was – everything became real again. I was told I was being moved to the recovery room, and that it had been decided that Dad could visit me today. It seemed a bit sudden – I was sure it was sooner than Dr Kamara had led me to believe – and I was a bit surprised that I hadn’t been asked if it was okay with me, but I didn’t say anything. Dad was going to be here at twelve o’clock, and while he was here Dr Reynolds would be sitting down with both of us to discuss my condition in detail. And that was that.