When I Was Invisible by Dorothy Koomson Page B

sewing.
    It’d been a big deal to me at the time. I had thought they would have something to say about me admitting that I had found God; that the thought of being closer to God was the nearest I had come to finding the silence inside. This, though, was my parents’ reaction. It was pretty much their reaction to everything: Dad would ask a couple of questions, Mum would avoid looking me in the eye, then everything would go back to normal. I was the last of their children at home: my brothers Brian and Damian had both fled to university as soon as they were old enough, rarely to be seen back at home again – not even for Christmas, Easter or summer.
    This evening, four of us are sitting around the dinner table and it feels small in the dining room. Small’s the wrong word – probably more close, snug, almost like we’re all sitting on top of each other.
    â€˜Your mother had far more faith in you,’ says Uncle Warren of my leaving to join a convent one hundred miles away from home. ‘I knew she believed you were gone for good when she celebrated by throwing a party for twenty of her closest friends to regale them all with the plans she had for your room.’
    After the time Uncle Warren left after Damian’s accident, I started to notice how mean-spirited he could be. He could be nice most of the time, but then he would see a small sliver of vulnerability and he would crack it open with a nasty remark. However, there’s more than a droplet of honesty in his meanness this time. The briefest of glances at my pink-cheeked mother shows he is telling the truth – the moment she and Dad waved me off through the iron gates of the monastery in the Coventry suburbs, she came back home and threw an ‘I’M FREE!’ party.
    â€˜I’m really grateful you threw that party, Mum,’ I say. ‘Thank you for believing in me enough to do that. When I first left, even though I’d been working towards becoming a nun for all those years, I wasn’t sure it was what I wanted, or if I could do it, but I must have known on some level that I wouldn’t have a place to come back to and that helped me to stay focused.’
    Across the table, my uncle seems uncomfortable with what I have said because I haven’t risen to his baiting either by biting back or bursting into tears.
    â€˜I hope you didn’t really think that, Veronica?’ Dad says. His forehead is knitted in a frown, his fork is paused halfway between his mouth and plate. ‘You will always have a home here. Won’t she, Margaret?’
    â€˜Hmm-hmm,’ Mum replies.
    It’s odd, being called Veronica again. I was Sister Grace for over eighteen years. And now I am Veronica again to these people. When I introduce myself to new people I automatically go to call myself Grace.
    â€˜At least you don’t look like a nun,’ my uncle says. ‘Those big penguin suits you all wear, used to give me the heebie-jeebies.’
    I’ve missed Vespers. For the first time in seventeen years, since I was a postulant (a nun-in-waiting), I have missed Vespers and I am unsettled. I said my final Mass this morning, I carried out Lauds, even though it meant rushing for the train down from Coventry, but I have missed having my mind and heart filled with the beautiful singing of Vespers and I do not feel right. This is what I have to look forward to, I know. Stretching out ahead of me is a long life without the order, the calming islands of prayer, contemplation and Mass in my day. I used to almost resent them, those obligations I had to fulfil no matter what I was doing, no matter where I was, but now, I miss them like the second skin they were to me. I miss them for the moments they drew me from here and left me there. Even though, if I am honest with myself, in the past year, there has been so much disquiet in my prayers, a constant nagging need to follow another path.
    â€˜What, are you praying or