See Through Me. Kevin Brooks

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