There are so few people, Kate thinks, who actually see her. Not physically, of course, that's not what she means. But really see her for her, no filters applied.
Her father, certainly, never did. He saw a child, a possession. A thing of clay to mould and shape and fire into a true servant of God. When he thought of her, his only daughter, he saw only the 'good' she could do, the souls she could be trained to save. Kate thinks that in his eyes, she was like those paintings of St Agnes that always adorned her grandmother's walls – pious face upturned to Heaven, hand raised in prayer, holy lamb clutched close to her breast. And so when she broke that image, even with the most innocent transgression – singing too loudly, watching strangers too long in the street… Well. She carries the evidence of what happened then on her back.
She's thought, recently, that she should wear those scars with pride. A badge, almost, that she survived, that she escaped. She should stand tall in the factory showers, unflinching under the other girls' gaze. Who knows what they see, when they look at the lines cris-crossing her skin, but she knows it's not anything they aspire to.
Even at the end, right before his very end, her father couldn't her clearly. To him, quite clearly, she had no will of her own. No will but his, or His.
She wakes sometimes in the night, a feeling of strength pushing through her arms, and even as she opens her eyes to the room's darkness, she sees her father fall. His coat billows out around him, hat tumbling slowly through the air. And when he hits the floor, when she hears the soft thud of his life breaking against the tarmac, that feeling of strength multiplies into something she can only call joy.
Those nights, she's frightened by how happy being a murderer makes her, how such a mortal sin can feel like the highest blessing. So she hides it, from everyone, including herself. When her heart pounds with excitement, she calls it fear, and when she's driven by relief to drink, she labels it grief.
It fools people, for the most part. The policeman couldn't see her, see the way her heart leapt and twisted with joy at the sight of her father on a slab. Her friends can't either – they see the drinks and the dancing as terrible omens, warning of inner turmoil.
But she hasn't got any inner turmoil – at least none that she admits to herself, even in her head – and so she stops, and blends once again into the background of their lives.
She's getting better at blending, she really is. Those first few weeks at VicMu, Kate felt conspicuous all the time. She didn't know the right jokes, or the right songs. She didn't have the right kind of stories to tell, or dresses to wear. She couldn't talk about boys or books, and she wasn't very good at the job. Mrs Corbett saw a thief and liar, instead of a girl running for her life. Mrs Corbett looked at her, judging the book by its cover, and saw a trouble maker.
There were girls like that at every school she'd ever been to, that teachers thought were hard and tough. They'd stand there, hips cocked, uncaring eye rolls firmly in place, through yet another dressing down. Kate was always frightened of them, nervous, taken in by that protective shell. One day, though, she caught a particularly intimidating classmate crying in the locker rooms, the mark of the cane still livid against her palm. She'd let Kate hold her through the worst of her sobs, let Kate offer awkward psalms and passages in an attempt to be comforting, let Kate press kisses into her hair, and then disappeared into behind a toilet door. When she came out her face was dry, and her eyes were guarded again. A day or so later, as Kate walked home, the girl flicked cigarette butts at her from a wall as Kate passed, laughing as one smouldered against the serge of her coat.
I'm like her now, Kate thinks. There's a wall between me and the world, a cataract, blurring their vision like custard.
They say, don't they, that love makes you complete. I was in pieces, and now I'm whole. Lost and now found, blind but now I see. So surely, of all people, Kate's lover should be the one to see her clearly. But Ivan! Well, he wasn't excused from active duty for poor sight, but he really should have been.
He likes her to look like a farmer's daughter, when that's the last thing she is. He'd like her to be a family girl, with aunts and cousins and babies all around, but that's really the very last thing she is. A girl like that – a homemaker but not homely – that's who he wants Kate to be, and so that's exactly what he sees when he looks at her.
That's alright, though. It hurts less than it should. It hurts less than Kate would like it to, in some ways. It's easier, you see, to wear that softer mask. It's so much easier to just be a fragile, female thing in his eyes than a survivor, an animal with a kill-or-be-killed mentality. She doesn't want him to see too closely, and there's something telling in that, although Kate never allows herself to linger too long on why that might be.
Really, there's only one person that Kate has ever thought saw her clearly. In the old days – in what Kate thinks of as before – she thought Betty could see her. There were times when she'd sing, or dance in the corridor, and Betty would look at her in this way she had, that said quite plainly: I see you. I see you, and I like it.
It started that very first day. Betty paid her no more attention than she did the lock on her door, just fixed the problem and disappeared, fag still hanging carelessly from her mouth. Kate might have been intimidated, but she remembered a girl crying in a locker room, and thought she understood. Then, just a few mere hours later, she was the one crying and Betty looked at her, really looked at her, and gave in.
Kate knows, now, what that really look means. She's seen it on other people's faces, on Ivan's face as he turns to her in the darkened picture house, hand sliding carefully across her shoulders and down towards her breast. She's seen it between strangers as they press and sway against each other on the dance floor. She sees, still, on Betty's face, but now it's when she looks at the bond girl, waiting for them in the corridor. It was never a look of understanding, except of Betty's self: it was a look of lust – of sinful, perverted desire, and the way it set Kate's pulse racing was only because she'd misunderstood.
That look on Betty's face still affects Kate, it sets her jaw tightening and teeth grinding together. She no longer misunderstands, but she doesn't approve either. She loves Betty, she does – it's her Christian duty to love her fellow men – but that look sets her on edge.
It saw things, you see, that Kate would rather it hadn't. And missed things: giant, glaring, very important things – she's just not that way – that should have been obvious.
So few people see Kate for who she is, no filters or distortions. Some of the time that's a blessing, and at others a curse. But she can't really blame them. Not when she stands, alone in her room, listening to excited, gasping laughter that she knows Betty is trying to muffle – they really are very thin walls – and the face in the mirror is that of a stranger. Her eyes are dark, brows pulled down in a frown and her lips pressed thinly together in disapproval.
She stands like that, in the gathering twilight, watching the shadows lengthen across her face. Betty and her friend have been in there hours, door firmly shut, and Kate knows that it should mean nothing. Kate has a boyfriend of her own, now, and she could be – should be – getting serious about him. It should mean nothing, but she can hear them, standing by the door and murmuring to each other, low and quiet. There's a moment of silence, and even with her eyes screwed closed Kate can just see what else their mouths are doing, and then the door opens, and heavy footsteps retreat down the boarding house corridor.
She opens her own, moments later, to find Betty stood staring forlornly down the corridor, looking at the place where Teresa – and Kate before her – disappeared from view.
"Had a good afternoon, did you?" She meant it to be light, conversational, but her voice is hard and bitter, words clipped into angry syllables. Her hand is white as it clenches the doorframe, wood buckling under her grip. Strength flows down through her arms, and for a moment she thinks she sees a man falling, again.
It's only as she speaks that Betty's head turns towards her, and an expression that Kate has never seen crosses her features.
Betty laughs, slightly, almost silently, more an audible exhalation of breath, and twists her head to the side.
"Kate," she says, and suddenly Kate understands. Betty is looking at her, and seeing.
"Kate, I –" The door slams shut on Betty's words, and she doesn't try to follow them. Kate leans against the door, head thrown back against the wood, heart pounding in her chest.
There are so few people, Kate thinks, who really see her. And, actually, that's exactly how she wants it.