What Not to Do If You Turn Invisible

I have learnt – without ever even wanting to know:

1 It was built in eighteen-something-or-other, but there’s been a lighthouse there for ever, practically.

2 It was once the brightest lighthouse in Britain. I suppose that is sort of interesting.

3 You can get up to the top via a back door that’s never locked.

There’s something a bit touching about his enthusiasm. It’s probably because he’s not from around here. For everyone else, it’s just the disused lighthouse at the end of the beach, you know? It’s just kind of … there.

For Elliot Boyd, though, it’s a way of getting people to like him. I have a feeling he just pretends not to care what people think, and secretly cares a lot, and he hopes that taking an interest in something so local could be his way.

I may be wrong, of course.

He may be:

a) Just a tiresome nerd. Or

b) trying to hide something behind his constant blethering. I have noticed that he never talks about himself or his parents: it’s always about some thing. I could be wrong. It’s just a hunch. I’m going to test it soon: ask him something about his family and see how he reacts.

Anyway, I’d kind of switched off and I was just letting him chunter on because there was a shop coming up on the right that I’d had my eye on for a couple of weeks.

Whitley Road is a long strip of half-empty coffee shops, charity shops, nail bars (‘rather common’, according to Gram) and – next door to each other – two tanning salons, Geordie Bronze and the Whitley Bay Tanning Salon, which wins the prize for the least imaginative shop name on the street.

It was the window of Geordie Bronze that I was looking at. There was a huge handwritten sign saying, CLOSING-DOWN SALE, and if shops could smile there would definitely have been a smug one all over the face of its next-door competitor.

I just didn’t have the heart to tell Elliot Boyd to shut up/go away/stop bothering me about the lighthouse and some plan he’d got, but I was wishing he’d give it a rest.

Who. Cares?

‘Honestly, Effow, it wouldn’t be ’ard! Get a few of us togevver, make a little campaign website, an’ that. Call it “Light The Light” – you know, like in the song?’

He started singing. In the street, and not under his breath either.

‘Light up the light, I need your love tonight! Dee dee something something … love tonight!’

People turned to look.

‘It’s a landmark, innit? It should be shinin’ out – a beacon to the world. Otherwise what’s the point of havin’ it there? …’

On and on he went. He’d done this ‘Lighthouse Facts’ thing at school during form time a few days ago. No one had paid much attention. The general opinion was that he is/was nuts.

Most of the lights were off inside Geordie Bronze, but there was a woman sitting at a reception desk reading a magazine.

‘I’m going in here,’ I said and I moved to go in. ‘You don’t have to wait.’

‘Ah, I’m all right, fanks, Eff. I’ll just wait here for you. It’s … you know, it’s a girls’ place, you know?’

I knew what he meant. Tanning salons, like nail bars and hairdressers, are not the natural habitat of a teenage boy.

As for me, talking to strangers is one of the things that Gram thinks is really important. She has never said that she considers shyness ‘common’, because she’s not that mad, but she definitely thinks it’s ‘not to be indulged’.

‘Anyone above the age of ten,’ she told me on my tenth birthday, ‘should have learned to hold their head up and speak clearly, and if you do that you are equal to anyone.’

So, I straightened my back and pushed the door, which tinkled a bell as I walked in, making the girl at the desk look up from her magazine.

She had extra-blonde hair extensions and she was chewing gum. She had on a white(ish) tunic that buttoned down one side, like dental hygienists wear, and its colour made her tanned face seem even darker.

I smiled and approached her desk.

‘Hello,’ I said.

(Incidentally, Gram always recommends ‘How do you do?’ on first encounters, but she’s in her sixties and I’m not.)

According to a badge on her tunic she was called Linda. Linda nodded in acknowledgement and stopped chewing for a second.

‘I see you’re selling off your equipment,’ I continued.

She nodded. ‘Aye.’

A short conversation followed, during which I managed to learn that three all-over, walk-in tanning cubicles were being sold off because Geordie Bronze had fought a ‘price war’ with the salon next door and lost. Geordie Bronze had gone out of business, or something like that anyway.

The cubicles could be mine for ‘two grand each’. Two thousand pounds.

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’ I turned to leave.

‘Hang on, pet,’ said Linda. ‘Is it for yourself, like?’

‘Umm … yeah?’

‘Is it for the …?’ And she made a sort of circular motion with her hand round her face, meaning, ‘Is it for my spots?’

I nodded, while thinking, What a cheek!

She gave a little half-smile, and it was only then that I noticed that, beneath her thick make-up and tan, her cheeks were pitted like the skin of a grapefruit.

Acne scars.

‘Aw, pet. You’ve gorrit bad, haven’t you? I had that when I was about your age.’ She paused, then looked again, head cocked on one side, and added, ‘Mind you … not quite as bad as that.’

Gee, thanks. She beckoned me to follow her to the back of the shop, where she pulled a sheet off a long, white sunbed, and lifted the lid.

I’m guessing you’ve seen a sunbed before? You lie on it, and then pull the lid down, and you’re sort of encased in this giant sandwich toaster. Brilliant UV tubes come on above you and below you and, well, that’s about it.

‘It’s knackered an’ old,’ said Linda, rubbing at a scratch on the lid. ‘But it still works. We’re just norrallowed to use it commercially any more. New regulations. We cannit sell it, neither. It’s gonna go to the dump tomorrow.’

Long story short, she let me have it for free (I know, right!), and five minutes later, me and Elliot Boyd were carrying it up Whitley Road, one end each.

Halfway home, we stopped for a rest. He was panting much more than me.