The Invisible Boy

My Dad named me after one of his footballing heroes, Ally McCoist. Dad is obsessed with football; well all sport really. He used to play in a minor league Scottish team when he was younger. His claim to fame was that he played and scored against Celtic Football Club in a pre-season friendly. When he had to give up the idea of becoming a professional footballer, due to a recurring knee injury, he became a PE teacher instead. When I was born, a few years after my two sisters, my Dad thought that he would be able to relive his football dreams through me. But sadly I do not appear to have inherited any of his skills for football, or indeed any other sport. I am clumsy, slow and uncoordinated, and not only that I absolutely hate sport.

Dad met my mum at Edinburgh University, where she was studying music. She wanted to play in an orchestra and become a professional musician, but she changed her mind when she met my Dad and finally ended up studying to become a music teacher. She sings like an angel and plays the piano, fiddle, cello, guitar and clarinet. She can probably play any kind of instrument. Me, I can’t seem to get a rhythm going on a tambourine. I can just about manage the triangle, but even then my timing is usually out.

They moved to Shetland not long after my sister Aimee was born. They thought that Shetland would be the perfect place to raise a family, and they are probably right. It suits my family very well, as music and sport are both very popular here. Two years after Aimee was born along came Abigail, and then three years later I arrived. My name is Ally McCarthy. Thankfully Mum could not be persuaded to give me McCoist as a middle name. Now, with hindsight, I think Dad is glad he didn’t try too hard to change her mind.

Aimee and Abi are both musical and sporty. Aimee does gymnastics and has a cabinet full of trophies from all of the competitions she has won. She has travelled all over Britain and even to some other countries to represent Scotland. She also sings quite well and plays the fiddle and the cello. She is tiny, blonde and pretty with big blue eyes, just like Mum.

Abi looks like a prettier version of our Dad. She is tall, strong and has long black hair, which is always tied back in a ponytail. She never wears dresses or skirts and has a huge collection of football jerseys which she wears all the time. Abi plays netball, hockey, football, cricket, golf or maybe just any sport with a ball involved. She hasn’t tried them all yet, but I bet if she did she would be annoyingly brilliant. She also plays the drums, on my drum-kit. The drum-kit that my desperate parents bought me three years ago, trying to encourage some small measure of musical talent. I was awful at it, and because my failed attempts to pick it up were so loud and obnoxious eventually even Mum stopped encouraging me.

I don’t really take after either of my parents. I am short and skinny like my mum, but my hair is a boring mouse brown colour, as if somehow the black hair from my dad has been diluted by my mum’s blonde hair. Even my eyes are a washed out paler version of my mum’s bright blue eyes. And I have freckles! It is not a great look, but frankly I don’t care too much about my appearance. Unlike Aimee who spend hours in the bathroom and always smell of some disgusting sweet perfume.

We live in a big house that my parents designed and had built for them around the year I was born. It is a lovely house. My sisters and I each have our own large bedrooms, and there are two bathrooms, a music room, a big kitchen-dining room and a large lounge. I have a computer in my bedroom and a huge collection of books. My bedroom walls are covered in maps, and posters of dinosaurs, rocks, the solar system and weather charts. I have a telescope set up at the window and it is a brilliant place to watch the stars at night during the winter when it gets so dark. There are no streetlights nearby so on a clear night the stars are perfectly visible. In the middle of the summer when it hardly gets dark at all I like looking out of my window and seeing how far I can see at midnight. I can see right across the bay to another island where you can sometimes see the twinkling lights of some houses over there. I love my room and I spend lots of time there.

We have a big garage, which is never used for putting cars in. Instead Dad has installed a gym, a darts board and a pool table. There is even an old television, stereo and a fridge in the garage. I hardly ever go in there, but everyone thinks it is a great place for parties. Our house overlooks a wide bay and almost every room has a sea view. There is a wide sandy beach that I like walking along. There are often seals in the bay and I like looking at the rocks, which jut out from the ground as if some violent volcanic action has exploded from deep down and turned them on their side. Which it did, millions of years ago. At the other side of our house there is nothing but hills and open moorland. Our nearest neighbours are out of sight from our house, which sounds quite lonely, but it isn’t really as everyone who lives near us are friendly and we always seem to have people visiting.

However, I sometimes feel as if I am invisible. My parents are great; don’t get me wrong. It is just that I never seem to be included in anything that goes on. Dad gave up asking me to watch or play sport with him. Instead he sits and watches sports programmes with Aimee and Abi, or takes them to the leisure centre for practice sessions and matches. Mum and the girls often practice their music together and Dad sometimes joins in as he has learned to play the guitar. I am relegated to being their audience. Mum always says that they need an audience or there would be no point in playing, but I don’t believe her, as she often sings and plays the piano when she thinks nobody is around to hear her.

But I am not totally hopeless. I am good at reading and maths and I have a brilliant memory. I read a lot. But perhaps I had better explain what I mean by a lot. I read on average at least one book a day. I could read by the time I got to Primary One. I read everything from newspapers, comics, children’s books, the back of the cereal box, anything I can get my hands on. I even tried to learn how to read music and to a certain extent I can. At least I know what all the notes are and what crotchets and semi-quavers mean. What I can’t do is translate that into any meaningful tune in my head, like Mum does when she sits and reads through a sheet of music and hums it out loud.

At first Mum and Dad were pleased with how clever I seemed to be, but after a while I could tell that it freaked them out. They didn’t really know what to do with me. I didn’t want toys for Christmas and birthdays; I wanted the Encyclopaedia Britannica or a subscription to National Geographic or the New Scientist. Science is my favourite subject. I can’t wait until I am in Secondary school so that I can do physics and chemistry. I also like archaeology, palaeontology and geology. Dad was pleased when I said I liked archaeology. He thought that I would do something adventurous like Indiana Jones in the Raiders of the Lost Ark or Lara Croft – Tomb Raider. He was upset when I said that these fictional characters were nothing more than vandals and treasurer hunters. Real archaeologists try to discover what ancient lifestyles were like, not just spend their time digging for gold, destroying valuable evidence and artefacts along the way.

Dad’s other passion is for old Western films starring John Wayne or Clint Eastwood. He once tried to get me to play cowboys and Indians with him. He showed me how to tie a lasso and we practiced trying to lasso each other in the garden. Needless to say whilst Dad always caught me, I couldn’t even manage to rope a pot plant. Later that day I did some research on the Wild West and discovered that the Indians, or rather Native Americans, were not the bad guys at all. It was the cowboys and other settlers that had stolen their land and killed many thousands of the original inhabitants that were the real bad guys. I tried to explain this to Dad but he didn’t want to know.

‘But Dad, you don’t think that Hitler was right to try to get rid of all the Jewish people in Europe, so why was it right for the settlers to get rid of the Native Americans?’ I asked.

‘That’s different,’ he tried to explain, ‘the Wild West all happened over two hundred years ago and the settlers were just trying to find a better life for themselves.’

‘Don’t you think that a genocide is a genocide whenever or wherever it happened?’

‘For goodness sake, you are only seven years old, what on earth do you know about genocide? What have you been reading?’ he had said, completely exasperated with me, but also knowing I was right.

I think it was right about then that my poor parents started to worry about me. One night I overheard them talking about me, and the words geeky and precocious were used to describe me. I realised that me being exceptionally knowledgeable was something that they were almost embarrassed about. Instead of being proud of me, like they were proud of Aimee and Abi, they were concerned about me. I was confused but decided there and then to try and pretend to be a bit more “normal”.

I started to read and study in secret. The only books I read in front of anyone else were sports books. Dad was really delighted when I took more interest in football. After a while my knowledge of the history of Rangers Football Club was almost as good as his. The fact that I didn’t particularly care much about the subject he did his best to ignore. I still couldn’t bear to watch a whole match on TV though, so I was still felt a little bit left out and usually slipped out to go and read in my room. It was my own fault. Perhaps I should have made more effort but there were more interesting things to do with my time. Like reading about global warming, or the unique landscape and geology of Shetland; wildlife; weather systems; human biology, or astronomy. Anything was better than watching some little figures on TV pointlessly kicking a ball around. When was that going to solve anything?

If my parents didn’t take much interest in what I did, my sisters took even less notice of me. They were both so busy in their own little high-achieving worlds and their busy social lives. Aimee had just turned 15 and lately there was always a steady stream of boys coming round to hang out with her. My parents were so welcoming to them all. Dad loved having young men around to discuss football with and as Mum kept up to date with all the modern music she was considered to be “way-cool”. Everyone loved my parents.

I often stayed out of the way, as sometimes Aimee liked to show me off to her friends like some kind of exhibit in a freak-show. She would get them to ask me random questions to see if I knew the answer. To their delight I usually did, but then it wasn’t difficult. They didn’t know enough themselves to ask me anything really hard. For example, one of them once asked me what was the capital of Timbuktu? I said that Timbuktu doesn’t have a capital city, as it is a town in Mali, West Africa. For some reason they didn’t believe me, so I had to get out my encyclopaedia and prove it to them.

Sometimes at the weekend I would spend hours in my room reading and when I came out to the kitchen to get a drink or something to eat I would find that I was alone in the house. At first it would bug me. My parents were teachers who should know better than to leave a child all alone. But then I decided that the peace and quiet was lovely and I would wander around the house doing what I liked. Sometimes I would try and play the piano or the drums. It was fun making lots of hideous noise without anyone complaining.

Once I was in the kitchen making some hot chocolate and mum came home from the shops with Aimee and asked me where Dad and Abi were. I said that I thought they were at a football match at the school. Mum was slightly embarrassed to realise that I had been left on my own, again. I reassured her by pointing out that I was not like an average child who might not be trusted not to do something dangerous. I remember that she nodded thoughtfully, or possibly even sadly.

One day during the summer holidays I was, just for once, getting bored of reading. I went outside for some fresh air and thought about going for a walk along the beach. Abi had just come back from riding her old Shetland pony and had left her tied up to the back gate, still with her saddle and bridle on. She was late for a barbecue party and rushed inside to get ready. I offered to take Jessie back to her paddock.

‘Make sure you take all her tack off and hang it up in the shed. And don’t do anything stupid like try to ride her. Remember what happened last time!’ Abi shouted at me from inside the house.

‘That was five years ago,’ I said out loud, but not loud enough for anyone to hear; remembering the time that I had fallen off five times in my one and only riding lesson. ‘A simple thanks for helping would have been enough.’ I said sarcastically. ‘Come along Jess, let’s get you home.’

contd/