Vanishings

I don’t remember much about being five. I remember I was in ‘baby infants’, the first year of school. I remember bits of the classroom. The tatty alphabet poster on the wall beside the blackboard, the top left corner drooping sorrowful, its pinch of blue-tack having peeled away from the sweating concrete painted a nauseating colour - not quiet yellow, not quiet green.

Sammy Snake, the ‘S’. Wilma Witch, the ‘W’. ‘A’ was an apple with a worm peeking out from it inexplicably.
Put me off apples for life.

I remember Paul Brophy, even if nobody else does, for he was the first one I vanished.

Paul and I sat together at the second from last desk in the short row of six. It was bad enough that I was the only girl made to sit with a boy, but he was constantly trying to steal inches from my side of the desk. I even drew a line, though it shivered, down the centre of the wooden sloped surface, over the rounded edge to where the shelf underneath for keeping copybooks was divided in two. Still his elbow intruded. He was a mass of angles, longer and pointier than the rest of us, though he was a few years older.

My mother had told me to be nice to him because he was special. He had mild cerebral palsy, though at five years of age I didn’t have much understanding of what that was, nor much tolerance for his antics – he’d drive me mad taking my pencils, my rubbers, purposely scribbling all across my carefully crafted alphabet exercise in my copybook. The day he took my raspberry Petit Filous was his last.

As the classroom emptied out into the yard for the eleven o’ clock break, I couldn’t get the yoghurt back from him. Despite his jerking hands, he had a clamp-like grip. I remember the little pot denting and contorting, the thin peel-back lid bulging and my pale pink lunch oozing out under the sides of it. I was furious. I wanted to hit him, but I knew I mustn’t, my mother’s instructions to be nice taken seriously.

I remember wishing he wasn’t there, that he was gone. And, just like that, he was. Vanished.
To this day I wish I had hit him.  

I sat alone in the classroom, not able to make sense of what had happened. I felt panicked, my shaking hands clutching the injured pot. Mrs. Connolly, our teacher, stuck her head back in the doorway as she passed on her way to the staffroom. “Vanessa, go on outside and play, get some air, good girl”. She didn’t wait for me to express my perturbation, so I simply stood up, went outside, and carried on as normal.

The next morning there was no sign of Paul at our desk. Mrs. Connolly conducted the rollcall as usual, starting with our baby infants’ row from the last desk.

“John Joyce.”

“Here.”

“Alan Dermody.”
"Alan Dermody."
"Alan..."

“Here.”

 “Vanessa Nugent.”

“Here”, I answered, waiting anxiously for Paul’s name, hoping the teacher would explain his absence.

“Niamh Kavanagh.”

“Here.”

“Danielle Gor…”

“You forgot Paul”, I interrupted.
“Sorry, Vanessa?”, Mrs. Connolly asked.
“You forgot Paul Brophy”, I said, standing up so she could better see me pointing to the vacant seat next to me.

“Who?” Mrs. Connolly asked.
“Paul, the boy who sits here”, I explained with the candour that only a five-year-old could possess in such a scenario.
I remember the entire classroom erupting in laughter, a smile creeping across Mrs. Connolly’s mouth before she reassumed her authority - “stop the laughing.”

“A boy named Paul, Vanessa? There’s no-one named Paul in your class”, Mrs. Connolly stated.

“Yes, there is, he’s special and my mammy said I have to be nice to him, even when he makes me mad. He sits here but he’s gone.”

The laughter started again. I remember that, alright. It was heavy laughter, heavy enough to press down on my head and shoulders and seat me again.

“Well, maybe your mammy knows where Paul is”, Mrs. Connolly suggested, “but you’ll let me know if he comes back, won’t you? Okay, good girl. Now, Danielle Gorman.”

“Here.”

I did ask my mother that day if she knew where Paul was. She hadn’t a clue who or what I was talking about. So, I remained perplexed. I never forgot, though gradually I thought less and less about it as the months and years passed. I even started to doubt it ever happened myself. For years, my mother regaled anyone who’d listen about my imaginary friend named Paul, either to embarrass me, or in nostalgic affection for the years of naivety she wished I’d had more of.  

It was almost eleven years later when I became certain there had been a Paul Brophy.

I was incredibly careful to not wish anyone away in those years; whether or not Paul had been a mere concoction of my vivid five-year-old imagination, the trauma of making him vanish certainly felt very real, and I did not want to feel it again. That is, until the second vanishing. I was fifteen, and this time it was entirely intentional.

I had grown used to the arguing, the plates smashing and doors slamming. It wasn’t all one way, my mother gave as good as she got when it came to shouting and cursing at Rhodri, her boyfriend. It wasn’t constant; they got along perfectly fine fifty percent of the time, each content to have someone, though neither was any good for the other.

Rhodri was never cross with my mother in front of me, I never saw him angry. My image of how he looked when he was loosing the rag was painted by snarls through the walls – temporal arteries and veins bulging in his gaunt face, skin the colour of his Benson & Hedges butt-ends flooding red, crooked teeth gritted in clenched jaws, beads of sweat trickling down from what remained of his receding hairline.

I never reacted outwardly to the way he’d look at me, his leering at me when I’d come in from camogie training still in the skirt, the ageing pitch-side prefabs were deemed too unsafe to change in. I didn’t know how to react. He’d even stopped trying to be coy about it, wanting me to notice - though he was always careful not to be seen to do so by my mother.

One evening, he was more brazen. My mother in the kitchenette scooping steaming spaghetti onto three plates, Rhodri and I around the corner sitting at the table. In our intimately sized apartment, the small table was pushed flush against the wall to maximise floor-space, meaning only three chairs. Though it was all we needed, it meant sitting uncomfortably close to Rhodri, close enough for his yellow-tipped, tobacco-infused fingers to creep up my thigh. The bang of gin and fags was suffocating as he leaned closer to me, steering his head into my field of vision to force eye-contact. And then the wink. That wink infuriated me. It was the last thing he ever did.

As I heard my mother’s footsteps approach, I wished him gone. And so, he was. Vanished. So too the bruises on my mother’s neck and collar bone, and the futile layers of make-up she had tried to hide them with.

“You alright, love? You look shook”, my mother asked as she relieved each hand of a plate of spaghetti on the table, one in front of me and one where Rhodri had just been stretching across.
She felt my forehead with the back of her hand as she sat in the chair of the very recently departed.

“You don’t have a fever, pet. You look flush, though.”

“I’m fine”, I assured her, “just tired from training so much.”

“Well, eat up while it’s warm and we can snuggle up and watch EastEnders then”, she said through a smile I had not seen in many months.

It was then I knew for sure Paul Brophy had not been an imaginary friend. I had always known it. The second before I decided to vanish Rhodri, I knew it was going to work. It was a moment of clarity - not an awakening, but an affirmation - a distinct awareness and certainty of my ability and I wished him gone with absolute purposefulness. It was as if he never existed. Eradicated from the world and our lives, and both were the better for it. 

I still could not explain it, but I had no regrets, no sense of panic. I was suddenly comfortably at ease with myself and the power I had been reluctant to acknowledge.

Of course, I spent the next days trying to understand this strange phenomenon. I yoyoed in my self-assessment, from considering myself a freak cursed with an affliction, to a ‘chosen one’ blessed with a super-power, a potential danger to society to a possible saviour. Ultimately, I settled somewhere in between; a good freak with a dangerous ability which I vowed to harness, only to be used again if entirely necessary.

I told no-one, not even my mother. This was all my own.

Pure as my intentions were, though, my control over the ability would prove less certain. It was as if becoming wholly aware of it made it too easy to unleash. It had been accepted, and thus refused to lay dormant without an incredible amount of self-control. It was particularly unpredictable when I was physically or mentally tired, and those occurrences became worryingly frequent in the following couple of years.

The first such incident was just two months later - the camogie school’s semi-final. The girl I was marking was a nasty bitch in fairness, digging the handle of the hurl into my ribs, grating her studs down the backs of my heels, craftily pulling my jersey to steal a march when a ball broke our way. Not only that, she stole two frees by ducking low into tackles and going to ground with embarrassing exaggeration, fooling the referee – the second earning a yellow card against me.

I was at tipping point, and when she clattered the bas of her hurl across my knees in the fifty-sixth minute, that was it. Were I able to stand I’d have laid into her, but I was stretched out being tended to by the coach. And I was furious.

Frustrated, I wished her gone, but only half-serious. Not meaning it really, and I instantly took it back as soon as I’d wished it. Too late. Suddenly, the pain in my knees was no more and neither was my opponent. I was upright, the sliotar whizzing in motion and the referee checking his watch. I quickly counted fifteen white jerseys to our fifteen green, my marker now an entirely different girl, nursing a stitch in her grass-stained side as if she had run every one of those fifty-six minutes.
It was the last game of Camogie I ever played.    

That was just the start. There was Alfonso, the cantankerous café owner who barked at me when I couldn’t decide what I wanted to order; what should have been an inconsequential swell of annoyance in me had him vanished before I could overcome it. Damien Cassidy turned from the cash register to take my order as if Alfonso had never been - the tired, flickering neon light on the wall now reading ‘Cassidy’s Café’.

There was Mags Hyland who ratted me out to Mr. Collins for copying my friend Louise’s math homework at lunchtime one afternoon. I should have accepted my punishment, but the smug smirk on Mags marching to her desk was too much for my weak will that day. She never made it to her seat.

And there was Brendan O’ Toole who incessantly tried to shift me at the Halloween bonfire despite my politely rebuking his advances. He was a nice enough fella but getting with him would have scuppered my chances with his best friend, Adam Mcloughlin, who I’d fancied madly since I was twelve. Brendan hounded me a moment too long. Like the bonfire sparks and wisps of smoke spiraling into the darkness, he too was vanished - another accidental lack of control on my part.

Adam did not know I fancied him, nobody did except me and Louise Hegarty, my best friend. So, when she sat on my bed one Saturday and told me she’d been field-drinking with him the previous night and they’d shifted, you can imagine the hurt, heartbreak, and fury I felt.

“I’m so sorry, Vanessa, babe, I messed up, I know. He asked me to shift him and I said no because Vanessa is mad about ya. And he told me he doesn’t feel that way about you, babe, I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have, but…it just happened, like…it was only twenty seconds, like max! I’m so sor….” She didn’t get to finish her rambling.
I’d collapsed in a heap on my bedroom carpet. It smelled of recent hoovering. My eyes welled warm and overflowed as I wished her away.

I lay there sobbing for what must have been the guts of four hours. With closed eyes, I clutched the end of my duvet to aid the heave to my knees. I wanted more than anything for it to be taut with the weight of Louise still on my bed. It wasn’t. I opened my eyes to a darkened room, the daylight having already given way to night. She was gone. The devastation I felt a few hours previous paled in comparison to the despair and suffocating anguish that overcame me then.

I didn’t want to believe it. I rushed out of my bedroom, storming past my mother who was approaching in response to my alarming yowls. I rushed out the door of our flat and spilled down the stairs, my mother following, anxiously calling my name to no avail. I raced across the green to Louise’s estate and knocked frantically on her door. Her mother answered.

“Is Louise in?”, I demanded.

“Eh, Vanessa Nugent, isn’t it?”, she replied, as if I hadn’t spent as much time in her home as I did my own over the years.

“Louise, is she here?”, I shouted, not waiting for an answer as I barged in past her and careered up the stairs to Louise’s room, Mrs. Hegarty hurling expletives after me in shock and surprise.

Louise’s room was nothing like Louise’s room. A neglected treadmill where her bed ought to be. A dart board, framed by punctures in plaster where years of misplaced darts had landed, now the only object adorning the walls where bookshelves, Backstreet Boys posters, and photos of Louise and I should dwell.

I wailed and flailed and crumbled, clutching my knees to my chest as I curled into a ball on the floor. Mrs. Hegarty ceased her clacking tongue as she turned in the door, followed swiftly by my mother who wrapped her trembling arms around me, unknowingly cocooning me from the tragic mistake I had made.
 
I was committed to the nut-house, under sedative, that same night. Talk of my vanishing a Louise, a Rhodri, an anonymous camogie player, an Alfonso, a Brendan, and poor Paul Brophy, and my ludicrous intrusion to the Hegarty household, more than enough to convince my mother that I was in serious need of psychiatric help.

When she said the doctor was coming to help me, I knew what she meant. It pains me to think of it now, but then and there I tried to vanish her. It didn’t work, I can only assume because doing so would mean that I’d cease to exist too.
I tried to vanish myself, confronting the mirror and wishing stronger than I had ever wished a vanishing upon anyone. That didn’t work either, obviously, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this.

I awoke the next morning in the psychiatric facility. Ellen, the psychiatrist who attended to me, didn’t say she didn’t believe me, but I knew she didn’t get it. Her tact was asking questions like “why do you think you didn’t want Louise around any longer?”, or “If you could speak to Louise again, what would you want to say to her?”

Every so often, I’d get hysterical and they’d sedate me. After a few days of sessions with Ellen going in circles, I vanished her. Her chair then occupied by Karl. He was nice, but ultimately had no intention of taking my claims seriously either. He vanished too. I didn’t care where they went, besides, nobody would miss them – once vanished, they never existed.

I vanished fifteen of them over the course of two hours before I gave up. It was an endless cycle of professional cynics, convinced my burden existed only in my head.  I was defeated, and gave in. Institutionalised.

The daily dose of medication dulled my mind enough to keep me calm and receptive to the process at play. Indeed, the meds relaxed my mind to such an extent that vanishing people became decidedly effortless. I no longer needed to be infuriated. My indifference to it prevailed. I started doing it for the hell of it, for practice, vanishing doctors and patients with impunity and ease, honing my ability. 

It was nine weeks later that my mother died. Brain haemorrhage. Massive. I was too medicated and dissonant to feel much about it at the time, though it saddens me deeply now, sixteen years on. I became an orphan the moment the blood flooded her brain, a ward of the state. I didn’t attend the funeral.

I feigned the desired effects of treatment enough to be declared fit to live independently in my nineteenth year, completed my final school exams remotely, and attended university to study journalism and communications. I am now an editor for an immensely popular international online publication. Life is good.
I’ve only vanished eight people in the years since leaving the psychiatric hospital, and that was all in one go – a gang of teenagers I witnessed savagely beating a man who disembarked the Luas mere seconds before me.

Though, I must admit, I did try to vanish Donald Trump a few days ago while watching him on television. It didn’t work. I guess I need to be physically in the would-be-departee’s presence. Maybe some day.

I did think about contacting the CIA at one point, they surely have plenty of use for my ability to vanish people. Then again, I’d rather not sell my soul to that shower. Besides, maybe they have people like me already. I mean, there’s no reason to think there aren’t more out there with a similar ability – how would we even know?

I also considered offering an underground service for those wanting an out – the terminally ill, those suffering incurable, untreatable pain. I could travel the world as a merciful assassin of sorts. There is assisted euthanasia available in Switzerland after all. Ultimately, I decided against that notion as I have no idea where those I vanish end up, or in what condition.

I no longer try to make sense of the vanishings. I’m much happier to sit with it, knowing I’ll likely never know. Though I do entertain myself with theories from time to time.

Perhaps they never vanished at all, maybe I just, somehow, switched to parallel timelines in which they simply never existed. Or perhaps I am merely a glitch in the simulation we call life. Or perhaps we’re all laying in a petri dish in some higher powers’ lab, our universe expanding around us under their microscope, and I’m some kind of experiment they’re working on. 

Or maybe it is just in my head after all, those I vanish mere figments of my imagination - perhaps everything is - all that I see and hear, feel, and think about, everything I know - all my own creations.
Perhaps even you, dear reader, are a figment of my imagination. Or, indeed, I of yours.

Anyway, it hardly matters much. We’ll all vanish some time.
 

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