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TAMSIN

by Peter S. Beagle

To the memory of Simon Beagle,

my father.

I can still hear you singing, Pop,

quietly, to yourself

shaving.

One

When I was really young, if there was one thing I wanted in the world, it was to be invisible. I used to sit in class and daydream about it, the way the other kids were daydreaming about being a movie star, being a big basketball player. The good part was, if I was invisible, Mister Cat—my cat—Mister Cat would always be able to see me, because invisible doesn’t mean anything to a cat. As I know better than anyone, but that comes later.

I used to let Sally see me, too—Sally’s my mother—in the daydream. Not all the time, not when I was mad at her, but mostly, because she’d have worried. But I really liked it best when it was just me and Mister Cat drifting along, just going wherever we felt like going, and nobody able to tell if my butt was too fat or if my skin had turned to molten lava that morning. And if I got my period in P. E. , which I always used to, or if I said something dumb in class, nobody’d even notice. I used to sit there and imagine how great it would be, not ever to be noticed.

It’s different now. I’m different. I’m not that furious little girl daydreaming in class anymore. I don’t live on West Eighty-third Street, just off Columbus, in New York City—I live at Stourhead Farm in Dorset, England, with my mother and my stepfather, and I’m going to be nineteen in a couple of months.

And I’m writing this book, or whatever it turns out to be, about what happened to all of us—Tamsin Willoughby and Sally and me, and Evan and the boys, too, and the cats.

It happened six years ago, when Sally and I first got here, but it seems a lot longer, because in a way it happened to someone else. I don’t really speak that person’s language anymore, and when I think about her, she embarrasses me sometimes, but I don’t want to forget her, I don’t ever want to pretend she never existed. So before I start forgetting, I have to get down exactly who she was, and exactly how she felt about everything. She was me a lot longer than I’ve been me so far.

We have the same name, Jennifer Gluckstein, but she hated that, too, and I don’t mind it so much. Not the Gluckstein—what she hated was the damn stupid, boring Jennifer. My father named me. He used to say that when he was a boy, nobody was called Jennifer except in a few books, and Jennifer Jones. He’d say, “But I always thought it was a really beautiful name, and it actually means Guenevere, like in King Arthur, and why should you care if everybody in the world today is named Jennifer, when they aren’t named Courtney or Ashleigh or Brittany?” His name is Nathan Gluckstein, but his stage name is Norris Groves, and everyone calls him that except Sally and me and his mother, my Grandma Paula. He’s an opera singer, a baritone. Not great, I always knew that, but pretty good—semifamous if you know baritones, which most people don’t. He’s always off working somewhere, and he’s on a couple of albums, and he gives recitals, too. He’s sung at Carnegie a couple of times. With other people, but still.