by Robert Stott
There have been times I wished no one could see me. I was once caught lying flat out sunbathing on the top of a huge 100,000-litre fuel tank when I was working at Caltex and was supposed to be in the office. An engineer saw me climbing up the ladder circling around the outside of the tank. He followed me. My excuse that I was inspecting the heat dissipation on the tank received a censorious snort. It was a time I longed to be invisible.
There are two types of invisibility. Both, of course, are not real but confined to film and books.
The first type of invisibility is a ghost, which can creep through doors. Its only physical sense is to manifest a noise, ventilating its sense of drama by going ‘whooo’. But it possesses no other sensory ability. It can’t touch anything, it merely passes through physical objects. For some reason it defies gravity. If it can go through a door, why doesn’t it go through the ground? If gravity acted on ghosts, they would all vanish into the ground, only to be dug up by astonished gardeners.
Ghosts don’t have a sense of taste either; they don’t eat, their mouths would not make contact with the food. If they did eat something and swallowed it, we would be able to see the food progressing through their transparent body, a most unfortunate imaginative image.
But ghosts can see. They know in which direction to aim to achieve maximum effect when performing their ‘whooing’, for if they entered the kitchen and stood there ‘whooing’ at the kitchen sink, the victim, rather than trembling in fear, could just as likely gurgle with glee at this incompetent spectre.
The best film ghost for me was Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. As the dead first wife she plagued the second wife wafting in through the curtains of the open window at the dead of night. The 1940’s film was far more engaging and eerie than the recent remake, which was overdone and lacked the necessary gravity and scariness.
A second type of invisibility is the magic cloak, as in the Harry Potter films. Don this cloak and no one can see you. Now this is a better solution for invisibility , not only because you can take it off and sit down to a good meal, but because it gives you choices. To entertain the children, you don the cloak, creep up on a little dog, lift it up and wave it around in the air. The children are in stitches at the vision of a flying dog. Another commendable trick is when you are driving to don the cloak at the traffic lights, become invisible and sound the horn to granny sitting in the car next to you. When she looks, you race off, invigorated by her horrified expression.
If I had a choice where nobody could see me I would definitely choose the Harry Potter invisibility cloak. That way I could still enjoy a good steak before entertaining the children by lofting the neighbours’ Pekingese dog in the air to leave the perplexed creature stranded in a tree.
Carindale Writers Group 