Invisible Girl: A Novel

“And then the police arrive, and Tilly’s mum arrives, and the night takes a strange tangent off into a place that Cate has never been before […] and a nervous energy that keeps her awake for hours after the police leave […] and the house is quiet yet she knows that no one can be sleeping peacefully because a bad thing happened and it is something to do with them and something to do with this place and something else, some indefinable thing to do with her, some badness, some mistake she’s made because she’s not a good person. She has been trying so hard to stop thinking of herself as a bad person, but as she lies in bed that night, the sudden awful knowledge of it gnaws at her consciousness until she feels raw and unpeeled.”

Here, Lisa Jewell uses the stream-of-consciousness-style narration of Cate’s inner thoughts to emphasize the toll that years of Roan’s gaslighting and emotional abuse have taken on Cate. Cate’s instinct is to blame herself and her own “badness” for the external situation of Tilly’s sexual assault. The abuse Cate has suffered within her marriage causes her to believe that she has somehow caused bad things to happen around her—a kind of superstition that stems from an eroded self-esteem and a heightened instinct around danger.

“I don’t know if it’s anything, but there’s a man, across the street. At number twelve. My daughter says he followed her home the other night. And she says he was staring at her and Tilly strangely on their way home from school last night. I don’t know his name. I’m afraid. He’s about thirty or forty. That’s all I know. Sorry. Just a thought. Number twelve. Thank you.”

Cate’s call to the police contributes to the cycle of gossip and misinformation in the suburban neighborhood, highlighting a pattern of distrust of people who appear different. Traditionally, the domestic noir genre incorporates elements of gossip and suspicion within a domestic community to fuel narrative suspense and create dramatic tension.

“As she passes the tube station her eye is caught by a poster for the local newssheet, the Hampstead Voice: SEX ATTACK IN BROAD DAYLIGHT. She stops, stares at the words, the adrenaline still fizzing through her veins. She wonders for a moment if the headline is from a parallel reality, where she stayed too long in the place that was telling her to go, whether if she reads the article, she will discover that it was her, Cate Fours, fifty-year-old mother of two, brutalized on a desolate 1970s council estate, unable to explain what she had been doing wandering there alone in the middle of the day.”

Cate’s morbid fantasy shows the depth of her preoccupation and obsession with the sexual attacks. Through Cate’s anxiety, Jewell highlights how Cate hyper fixates on the sex attacks in her area to distract herself from her marriage problems, adding to the suspense when these two plot points converge.