-a vision by Louisa Owen
She slips on the wedding ring she found in a pub toilet and checks her bags. With her backpack and shoulder bag half-on, clinging to one arm, she rushes around the tiny flat, checking doors and windows again, again, and again. Her flatmate is passed out in her room but even when awake shows little regard for their safety. She locks their door and tests the handle repeatedly until she hears someone coming down the corridor and has to leave it. She doesn’t have much of value in there anyway.
Sunday always feels like a bad day to travel, like everyone should have the day off, even the trains. It annoys her that tomorrow she will be right back in work, like her weekend has been stolen from her because of this Sunday excursion. But it’s the only day she can put aside to visit her dad. She doesn’t go often.
It’s an hour’s train ride outside the city into a dead suburb. He always waits for her in the same way: his arms behind his back and a resigned expression on his face as if life has dealt him a grim hand. But then he sees her struggling through the ticket barrier and his eyebrows bounce, a tight smile – the only way he can smile – is pushed out and he claps his hands together, just once. They hug, quickly, neither wanting to let on how much they’d missed each other. And from then on, they could be any two people, unremarkably together.
This day, this Sunday, this end of the week, she remembers the wedding ring as they walk to his car and slips it off and into her raincoat pocket. Despite not talking for over half a year, they have little to really say to each other. She asks him what he’s watching on TV and he complains about biased journalists.
When they turn into his driveway, it’s like she’s never left. She feels a strange, sweet warmth, and then a sickening clench in her stomach. It’s always the same. The same furniture, just sagged, the smell of table polish and steamed carpets. He’s a surface cleaner, her dad, he polishes and buffs and scrubs what you can see but if you move anything, if you look inside, it’s filthy or broken. So many things don’t work in here but are never replaced. And it’s always so dark. It wasn’t like that when she was small. But the hedges and trees all along the sides and back haven’t been cut in years and they block out every window and the backdoor. Vines have grown across the glass, curling inwards at the seals, penetrating the brickwork. At this point, if you cut the green away, the house would probably crumble.
In the kitchen, she takes out all the sweet things she’d bought at Tesco the day before. This is what they do when together: they gorge. Her dad preheats the oven and starts pouring crisps in a bowl. She sits in the same, scratched white, wooden chair she always does, even back when her small, thin legs could only dangle above the garishly-yellow linoleum floor. Now it has scuffed and faded so much, especially the section under the table, its colour is more like an adequately hydrated person’s piss. She sometimes imagines what will happen when he dies and she has to sell the house. She can see the young couples, perhaps with small children, or just the hint of them, judging the owners, lamenting the work needed but excited about the prospect of ripping her family history out of here and plastering their own over it. Or maybe she can rip it out all on her own first.
As her dad unwraps the frozen pizzas, she nods her head in the direction of the toilet. He nods back and she leaves the kitchen. The radiators are always on low, a stifling warmth that makes her head feel thick and slow, unable to fight anything. She glances back at the empty kitchen doorway before moving past the toilet door to the stairs. Her practiced feet, even after all these years, find the silent sections of each step as she creeps up to her old bedroom. It hasn’t changed, hasn’t even got dusty. She bends down to the skirting board in the furthest corner of her room. She’d marked it back then with a sticker of a cartoon mouse living happily in a hole, as if her room was so big she might lose her way, or ever forget the only thing she’d properly hid. Of course, there’d been razors and period pads, things she was inexplicably terrified to ask her dad for back then, but those had been hidden under the bed. Amateur. This though, he could never find this.
She picks at the edge of the carpet. She hates long nails but having them is a necessity for these visits. Pick, pick, pick along the edge until she finds a section slightly looser than the rest and then she sinks her nails into it and pulls it up, just a tiny bit. The gold glint of a delicate chain is enough. She pats the carpet down quickly and methodically. Pat, pat, pat. She smooths her fingers over it and pats it again. And repeat. And repeat. Sometimes she is left buffering because of her stupid brain’s inability to trust its own memory.
The smell of cooking salami pizza has already filled the house by the time she creeps downstairs.
“Thought we’d lost you,” her dad says.
She laughs, her brain scuttling. What was her usual excuse for how long she took to do absolutely everything? But her dad is looking down at his phone, ignoring any and all problems that don’t really need solving. She always wondered if he knew about her touching problem. Her speed problem. Whatever you call it. Her inability to leave a scene. She assumed he knew, everyone who lived with her knew – her flatmate said she needed a therapist – but if he did, if he knew, he would never have given her the necklace that day. He never would have given her any of those bleached items, never would have scrubbed her own hands raw before layering them gently in blue, surgical gloves, and telling her to take a new route to school, dropping each item in a different bin, and not just normal, public bins. She went behind restaurants to the big four-wheeled ones, she snuck into people’s front gardens and shoved a driver’s licence into their lawn clippings. But she took her time. She dawdled, she loitered, she lingered at every one, trying to leave the item but never feeling like she really had, feeling like she was still connected to each one, like a strand of her skin was caught, unravelling her and her life the further away she walked. And then there was the necklace. A gold chain with an H. Fake diamonds inset along the letter that her gloved thumb thudded over repeatedly, pushing the edges of the H into her plastic skin until it had pierced it. She had stood in shock before realising an old, grey man was watching her. Her hands scrunched into fists she shoved into her pockets, and she turned on her heel and stormed out of the park towards school, for which she was late. Another failure. She didn’t know what to do. She fingered it in her pocket all day with her gloveless hands, wondering what name the H signalled. She brought it home and hid it.
And so there it lies, under her carpet. And here she sits with her dad, this afternoon, this Sunday, this day of rest, as if nothing is wrong. Both sit where they always do. As if they could meld all the days into one flat line and nothing remarkable had ever happened in this kitchen.
The oven pings and her dad shoots up to turn the knob, as if the noise might disturb someone. He opens the oven and the heat coats her face, making her feel sick again. She almost throws her glass of coke in her face.
When they eat, they eat noisily, without words. The slick sloshing of the chewed food all they can hear as they stuff in more and more, forgetting to breathe, forgetting to swallow. A snort sounds here and there, when they do remember. Her drink glass has smudges of tomato sauce all over it. She tries to wipe them away but only makes it worse. She shovels a handful of crisps into her mouth, the vinegar burning her chapped lips.
As she chews she looks down at her feet, blue socks, resting on the pale yellow linoleum floor. With a shock she sees her feet back then, dangling in sky blue socks with tiny squirrels stitched on them. The socks were brighter, the floor was brighter. Her blue feet twisting and turning over the small pool of red expanding on the yellow floor. And the woman, half under the table, a shocking white. She remembered staring at the unmoving body, studying it. Did she want it to move? Did she know it wouldn’t? She will never know what she really felt or saw then, and what came in the days, weeks, years since, overlaying it all. But she remembered feeling cold and trapped on this white, wooden chair, she remembered seeing the blood like raindrops on one of its legs, and she remembered the woman’s pale, puckered flesh with its dark threads of varicose veins, so knotted and vivid, she could have tangled them up in her fingers.
She opens the box of doughnuts and the box of small, chocolate cupcakes, and they both continue feeding. She licks the sugar dust off one finger. His cheeks are finely coated. It takes them seconds to demolish it all. She traces the corner of the doughnut box, the poorly-cut plastic leaving shallow lines in her skin. Proof she was here and proof it felt her too.
“Shall we see what’s on?” her dad asks.
She nods.
They clean up quickly and efficiently. Dishes in the dishwasher, crumbs swept off the table into dry hands. She can sense him scouring the floor, mentally preparing himself to hoover once she’s gone.
They find a football match on TV, one neither of them cares about all that much. Two poorly matched teams with only one outcome. They make fun of the hair, tattoos, passes, and shots of all the players before switching to a film they both know well. She is checking her watch, willing time onwards. Eventually, it is reasonable to ask for the lift to the station. He knows she is a stressed traveller, that she hates the in-between.
At the station they hug, barely touching, and she heads towards the barrier.
“Wait!” he calls.
She turns, surprised at his outburst. She hurries back, patting the back of her rucksack to check it’s closed.
“Do you still wear the wedding ring?” he asks.
She pulls it out of her pocket. “You remembered.”
He nods. “You always were a smart one. You never know who’s looking.”
She slips the wedding ring back on her ring finger, smiling at the perfect fit. “Thanks, Dad,” she says. A wave of nausea swells, everything she’s eaten has found its whole inside her stomach, poorly-chewed, partly-digested, deformed bodies climbing on top of one another. She swallows so hard it hurts. She hugs her dad again and this time there is a slight squeeze before she leaves him, knowing she won’t visit for a long time.
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