‘ON CLOSER INSPECTION’
Claire Powell ’s winning entry from this year’s short-story competition
Well this is something – a strip of two passport photos, the size of an old bus ticket, right here, in the cupboard beneath the stairs, hidden inside a worn-out sandal.
Erin’s on her hands and knees. She’s been searching all morning for the set of Winsor & Newton oil paints she received as a gift a few years ago. Though she had no use for the paint at the time (she’d only just had Freddie), she has a vivid image of the green Paisley tissue paper the box was wrapped in, a memory of storing it somewhere safe. Now she’s combed through the dresser in the hallway, and the top cupboard of the wardrobe, and the jute baskets at the bottom of the bookcase – but she’s found only greetings cards, cheap candles, CDs and photo albums.
Behind her, Jasper beats his tail against the carpet. The sandyhaired Labrador has been following her from room to room like it’s some kind of game, and is impatient for a walk.
I know, I know, Erin calls to him. I’ll take you out in a minute. She’d planned to finish her self-portrait this morning – or, if not finish it, at least try to correct the eyes, which are too flat at the moment – a dull khaki circle ringed in black, with just a blob of pupil inside. She’s been painting at the kitchen table with a mirror propped before her but she’s run out of Titanium White and can see no way to continue without it. It’s the first self-portrait she’s attempted in a while, a commission from her husband, Dennis – he asked that she paint him one for their wedding anniversary.
You’ve not painted yourself in years, he said. Do one for me, for old time’s sake.
Old time is thirty years ago, when they were both at Goldsmiths. Then, Erin was a brazen young art student, well known for her self-portraits – tall and confrontational at an easel or slouched nonchalantly across an armchair. In recent years the only art she’s produced has been handmade Christmas cards sent to family and friends – small watercolours, or charcoal line drawings. She’s flattered that Dennis wants her to paint properly again, but it’s a pressure – it must be right.
Paint what you see, an old art teacher used to tell Erin, not what you expect to see.
She’s thinking of calling it Self-Portrait at the Age of 49. This is partly a joke and partly an homage to Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait at the Age of 63 (she keeps the National Gallery postcard stuck to the fridge, as though he’s part of the family). Like Rembrandt’s, her painting style has taken on a darker, more pensive quality the older she’s got. Yesterday she worked on the sloping lines that triangle
between the flare of her nostrils and edge of her lips, and she feels she’s got close to something here – some truth about her face – though her daughter called it unflattering.
The cupboard has a musky, leather aroma. Just the faintest whiff of those luminous cheesy crisps that coat Freddie’s breath when he returns from birthday parties. When the family go walking in the woods – which they do the occasional Sunday – Erin insists that at home everyone leaves their hot, soggy boots outside to air. Freddie’s feet, however, are unlike the others’. Delicate and odourless, with tiny toenails as smooth as clam shells; Erin wants to dip them in gold and make ornaments of them.
There are two people in the photos and one of them is Dennis. What do they call this kind of picture? It isn’t strictly passport as the face has changed in the bottom photo. A moment has passed. Currently stuck to the fridge (along with the Rembrandt, old holiday snaps and an invite to a friend’s fiftieth) there’s a strip of Georgia’s passport pictures – four identical faces – that she refuses to use for a student card. Erin’s argued with her elder daughter about the strip being stuck there.
You’re doing it to embarrass me, Georgia says. Dad, tell her. It makes Erin laugh, though she’s surprised (and somewhat disappointed) by the vanity of her daughters. Both Georgia and Gwen, teenagers now, prefer iPhone photos of themselves. Posed pictures that make their skin appear luminous, their eyes a brighter blue. They’ve even started taking selfies that add special effects to their faces – flower garlands and puppy-dog ears. What Georgia hates and Erin loves about the passport strip on the fridge (it was taken at a booth in the local post office) is the very same thing: the photo is truthful. It’s what Georgia’s face actually looks like.
Here, in the photos of Dennis, he has an unselfconscious smile, his eyes squinting, teeth bared. It strikes Erin as being a somewhat unfamiliar expression. She squints her own eyes to look closer. But, of course, it’s the beard that makes him appear different. It’s the beard that changes the shape of his face, gently distorting his features.
Erin had forgotten about the beard. Dennis must’ve only had it a short while as there are very few photos of him with it. He shaved it off just before Freddie was born in the hope it might make him look younger. Erin and the girls were witness to the removal – they all crammed in the bathroom and watched as Dennis lathered his face up like Father Christmas, before slowly, carefully, swiping it away.
Magic! Gwen had said to Erin’s protruding stomach, as though Freddie had a front-row seat.
At first, Erin assumed that it was Gwen in these photos with Dennis. Like Gwen, the person has a curtain of long straight hair, though it isn’t clear in the photo what shade the hair is because the picture itself is black and white. In the top photo, the head of hair is turned to face Dennis, and only the edge of profile is visible. But in the bottom photo – three, four seconds later? – the face has edged slightly toward the camera, chin dropped, and though the hair still flops over one side of it, there is now an eye, the bridge of a nose, the corner of a smile, teeth. Erin had thought it was her fifteen-year-old daughter Gwen, but no – on closer inspection – it quite clearly isn’t.
On closer inspection – Erin hears herself think this. There’s currently a joke between the girls and Dennis that Erin has become a private detective around the house. Frost, they call her. Murder She Wrote. It began when she found an empty box of bikini wax stuffed into the bathroom bin. Then it was cigarette butts in the gravel at the front of the house, and more recently she discovered a Topshop receipt (eighty pounds!), yet no sign of the bag, or the shoebox, or indeed the new shoes.
On closer inspection.
You can’t get nothing past Poirot, they laugh.
Quite.
Erin brings the photo nearer to her eyes. Usually she’d use a torch to go this far into the cupboard, or at least the one on her phone. The fuse box is on the back wall, so it’s always an obstacle trying to climb over everything during a power cut. One day she’ll clear it out and throw away anything that isn’t claimed (one day, one day… she’s been saying this for years). She drops her elbows so they rest, lopsided, on a pair of scuffed white trainers and a tent roll mat. Her bottom sticks further into the air, which Jasper takes as a sign. She hears his slobbery panting at her feet.
Not now, she says. Go away. Shoo. In fact, the woman looks nothing like Gwen. Laughable that Erin should confuse the two. For one thing, she is twenty years older, maybe even more. She’s younger than Erin, but not by much. Late thirties, possibly forty – it’s difficult to judge in the dimness of the cupboard. Erin would be better off climbing out of it and standing beside a window, in the sunlight, examining the photograph properly, but something inside her resists this instruction. She stays where she is.
Flicking through faces in her mind, Erin is reminded of the board game Guess Who?. She tries to summon images of old friends and distant relatives, people and hairstyles she may have forgotten. She reminds herself that the picture must have been taken four years ago, and for some reason she tries to picture herself at the time, as though – ha ha! – it’s actually Erin in the photos and God, hasn’t she changed?
But four years is not such a long time, and Erin’s appearance has never altered greatly. Her hair is still long, red, wavy (hippy-style, the girls say), and though her skin is noticeably thinner and more lined than the other mothers at the playground, she has a strong face – a broad Roman nose and high cheekbones, dark green eyes beneath a thick, bushy brow. Though she’s rarely been described as pretty, her face is, unmistakably, her own.
Also: a photo booth. Erin hasn’t been inside one for years. She understands they’ve come back into fashion recently – used for office Christmas parties, weddings, that
sort of thing. But Dennis is a carpenter, he doesn’t work in an office. The last wedding they attended was Erin’s cousin’s, which was held in a pub in Cork and certainly didn’t have a photo booth. In fact, Erin remembers using one only once in her life. It was on a pier when she was a teenager. She was with a boyfriend who tried to grab at her breasts as the photos were taken, and afterwards ran off to the arcade. Erin waited alone for the strip to drop down, but she remembers finding something incredibly romantic about it – those brief, unposed moments of flirtatious horror and joy. She kept the photos folded in her purse for months.
She’s surprised now to feel her heart thud a little faster, that way it does during the Wheatsheaf pub quiz, when the question’s been asked and the room goes quiet and she knows the answer – Erin knows the answer – she just can’t recall it. She turns the strip over in her hand, as though it’ll be written on the back – Ta-da! The name that slipped her mind. The face, the date, the time, the explanation. Of course!
But there is nothing.
Dennis is grinning at the camera and the other person – the other woman – is looking at him. She’s laughing too – that’s clear in the bottom picture – though what it is they’re laughing at, Erin doesn’t know. Is it possible that she’s a stranger? An accidental intruder into the booth? That might have been funny at the time in a kind of funny-if-you-were-there sort of way. There is that possibility. Because why else would Dennis, with his beard and his grin, have shared a photo booth four years ago with this woman Erin has never seen?
She moves her thumb across the bottom of the strip, feeling the tiny fibres where it’s been torn in half.
You can’t be, he said, when she first told him about Freddie. How can you? You’re too old. We’re both too old, it’s not possible.
He stroked his hands over his beard, massaging his cheeks and opening his mouth in silence, like a fish underwater.
I know, she said. But I am. We are.
They were in the bedroom. The girls were away, sleepovers with friends, and the house felt strangely quiet. Earlier that evening, Erin had convinced Dennis that they should take advantage of the time to themselves and go for dinner. They caught the train up to town and wandered aimlessly around Soho, trying to find a table. While Dennis became increasingly stressed (Why does nobody take bloody reservations?), Erin had felt the announcement on her lips like a delicious secret. When they were eventually seated in a small Italian, she sipped slowly on a Pinot and feigned a headache, checking her watch and her phone regularly. She had a sadistic urge to irritate Dennis, to make him feel fed up, despondent, like the whole trip had been a waste of time. She was even prepared for an argument. Because it was important that his eventual surprise (his elation, goddamit!) was as great as possible. It was necessary for her to make him feel terrible, before she made him feel wonderful. This private sense of anticipation – of readying herself to tell him the news – made Erin feel powerful, euphoric. She felt so much better than she had a week earlier, alone in the bathroom, pissing on a stick.
Dennis was sitting at the edge of the bed and she was standing in front of him. Instead of her usual towelling robe, Erin had changed into an emerald green vintage kimono (a fortieth-birthday present), and she was aware of her resplendent torso – red curls against green silk – in the mirror’s reflection to her right. She imagined it like a photograph, wanting Dennis to store this image of her in his mind forever.
I didn’t think it was possible either, love, she said, But… well… apparently it is.
This isn’t a joke? Dennis said. You’re not… This isn’t…?
She bit her lip and smiled. We’re gonna have a baby.
Dennis opened his mouth as though to say something more, but instead he released a heavy breath. He dropped his chin to his chest and pressed his hands together, as if he were praying. Erin watched him closely, expectantly, waiting for him to look up and meet her eye, for him to stand and embrace her, like he had with Georgia and with Gwen. But Dennis stayed sitting on the bed, and after a long, strained moment he brought his palms to his bearded face and he fell backwards onto the mattress.
Fuck, he said, staring up at the ceiling. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I know, she said, laughing, shaking her head. It’s fucking ridiculous, right? I know.
A hot sensation swarms into Erin’s face, burning her cheeks, and she feels suddenly light-headed. Trying to suppress the feeling of nausea, she urges herself to think carefully of what happened next, as though searching for vital clues. She wants to play the memory out, to watch it all back like a film, but she can’t remember if she lay down beside Dennis and looked into his face, or if she simply remained standing there in the silk kimono, laughing like a lunatic, saying – I know, it’s crazy, I know!
But what did she know? It occurs to Erin now – a sharp realisation, a moment of clarity – that she knew nothing. Knows nothing. Behind her, Jasper makes a high-pitched whimpering sound. How ridiculous. Trying to find an old box of paints amid a pile of useless junk. She’s probably already thrown the box away, or given it to somebody as a gift with one of her crude little Christmas cards. Soon, she’ll chuck everything else out too. She’ll don yellow marigolds, tear off a heavy-duty bin bag and she’ll scream up the stairs that if anyone wants anything they must come and get it now, or it will be gone, gone, forever.
Erin will scream it, and they will laugh.
She turns the strip over and inserts it back under the strap of the sandal, as though it’s a tag fallen from a jacket. Clumsily she clambers backwards into the hallway, dusting down her carpet-pocked knees as she stands.
There, she says, and as she shuts the cupboard door and leans her back against it, something on the opposite wall makes her gasp. Erin had not forgotten the mirror was hanging there (the girls can’t pass it on their way out of the house without looking) but she didn’t expect to see her reflection, or she didn’t expect the reflection that she sees.
Yes, she says, as Jasper sniffs eagerly at the hem of her dressing gown. I know, she says, almost a whisper. And she clasps two hands together, holds them tightly, stops them from shaking.
Claire Powell’s story was chosen by a panel of judges including Justine Picardie, Erica Wagner, Lydia Slater, and Sarah Chalfant from the Wylie Agency.