Wide Angle Perspective

The urn is shaped like a wide-angle lens. Leona can’t help but chuckle when the undertaker’s assistant places the alabaster thing on the spotless counter top. It’s exactly one week after the funeral ceremony. She already knew about her dad’s choice of urn, having seen the picture in the catalogue. Yet it looks more ridiculous than she had anticipated. A prop instead of the real thing.

It’s only fitting. Her dad always used to have his camera at the ready. He was a fervent amateur photographer and filmmaker, turning every family holiday in a collection of staged moments and clips. He’d give her and her mother elaborate instructions on how to stand, lie or sit, as well as how much to smile—teeth exposed or mouths closed. The lens looks as fake as the positions he put them in.

She laughs again. This time aloud.

‘Is there something wrong?’ the assistant looks at her with concern. The young woman is trained to deal with pain not laughter.

‘I’m fine. Just a memory,’ Leona answers, pulling what she hopes is a sad face.

She picks up the urn and tucks it under her left arm.

Ready to leave, her free hand already resting on the brass knob of the funereal centre’s front door, she turns around to say goodbye, ‘Everything has been paid for, right?’

‘Yes, your dad took care of it upfront. You don’t have to worry.’

***

Leona carefully places the urn on the smoked glass coffee table in her dad’s flat. He’ll have a good view on the room from there. She has systematically been working her way through his belongings. As the only survivor of their already small family, the task of emptying the apartment has fallen to her. She’s almost done, but she has been avoiding the photo albums and videos in the living room, afraid of the emotions they might unleash.

The woman from the housing company had sounded tetchy on the phone yesterday, crudely telling her off for not having cleared the apartment yet, while the lease ended two days ago. The woman spoke in a stand-offish, corporate plural while delivering her ultimatum. Because of the sadness of the situation, they would give her one more day. But after that, they would dispose of any possessions left and charge her with the costs.

Leona sighs and looks around. The photo albums and videos are arranged in open bookcases against the wall next to the TV. Her dad neatly labelled and organised them by year—Our Family 1980-part 1, Our Family 1985-part 2, Our Family 1988-final…a shiver runs down her spine. But there’s no time left to dodge them. She will have to face them today. Yet even with her dad by her side, she can’t force herself to open the albums. Every fibre in her body screams she needs to take her time. She quickly boxes them instead.

Maybe she’ll dare to look at them in her own house someday, curled up on her couch, with her dad in his preposterous urn and a box of tissues next to her. She’ll pour them both a drink first—the usual whiskey for him and a large gin with ice for her. Yes, that’ll be a proper way to end this.

Having got the albums out of the way, she focuses on the VHS tapes, eager to get them into crates as well. She’s about to sit down on the shaggy carpet to tackle the bottom shelf, when she spots the rounded corner of a tape sticking out from behind the book case. Its black colour contrasts sharply with the once white, now yellow wallpaper—her dad was a smoker, which is also what killed him in the end.

She bends over to take a closer look. The video is stuck between the outermost left bookcase leg and the wall. It must have fallen in between. Lowering herself prone on the dusty rug, she tries to pry it out, but it won’t budge. Scrambling back up, she manages to slide the bookcase forward just enough to dislodge the tape with some force. Unlike the other videos, it turns out to be unlabelled. Her curiosity stirred, Leona pops it in her father’s player. Initially, the screen remains black. Then white horizontal stripes appear, accompanied by soft metallic tics. It looks like it’s just a blank tape.

Leona is about to turn it off, when the stripes give way to an image. Bracing herself for her younger self, her mother, or who’d knew, perhaps even a glimpse of her father if he made use of the self-timer, she is surprised to see her one-time best friend Brent in the frame.

She hasn’t thought of Brent in decades. She definitely didn’t expect to see his eight-year-young face in her dad’s apartment. Brent is sitting in the middle of a sand box, wearing nothing more than shorts. They’re high-cut and made out of red terry cloth. There’s a white stripe along the side-seams, as was the fashion then. His sun-bleached hair is cropped short. Whenever her dad’s camera catches his blue eyes, they blaze with an energy, which Leona can’t readily identify. A strange mixture of anger and fear. There’s something accusing in it too.

It isn’t just any sand box for that matter, but the blue shell-shaped one. It had been on her birthday wish list for years. She’d never really expected to get it. Her parents told her it was far too expensive. Yet, her dad surprised her with it one day. It wasn’t even her birthday. That summer, she and Brent played in the sand until their knees were polished to a sore silvery shade.

As his chapped lips part, her friend’s voice travels across the room. He sounds different from what Leona remembers: thinner, higher-pitched also. Her legs already wobbly from days of grieving, the false memory almost knocks her of her feet. However long ago, she can’t cope with yet another loss.

***

She and Brent were inseparable once. One year older and living on the same dull suburban street, Brent had simply always been there. They’d walk in and out of each other’s homes, as if they lived in both. Leona liked it at Brent’s. His father and mother worked long shifts in the nearby hospital. They’d have the place to themselves. She loved how their bare foot soles would stick to the lino kitchen floor on hot summer days. A glueyness caused by the lemonade from the many overflowing glasses to which they would help themselves.

Brent, on the other hand, preferred the presence of her parents, particularly her father’s company. Brent was fascinated by photography too, or her dad at least got him to take an interest. To her annoyance, they would spend quite some time together in the improvised dark room underneath the gabled roof of their otherwise unused attic. How many times had she waited at the bottom of the retractable ladder for the dying of the red light?

Their friendship ended as suddenly as it must have started. One morning, Brent simply stopped hanging out with her. He just didn’t come over, although he had promised to. At his house, she found the back door locked, while normally he’d leave it ajar for her. From that day onwards, Brent didn’t play out in the streets anymore. In fact, he hardly left his house at all. He even switched schools.

Leona racked her brains about what it was she might have done. Had she perhaps hurt him when he’d dared her to test the strength of his abdominal muscles? She’d punched his stomach with closed fists until her knuckles hurt. He hadn’t even flinched. No, it must have been something worse for him to treat her this way. Although she didn’t know what it was, she gathered she must have been an awful friend.

Her dad kept telling her not to think about it, to let it go, to leave Brent alone. Leona didn’t get why her father wasn’t upset as well. He had liked Brent too.

***

She stares at the urn, as if she can find the answer there. Her father’s recorded voice draws her attention back to the screen. He is instructing Brent to rub the sand from his upper body. Her friend hastily strokes his upper arm. It’s apparently not what her dad is after—‘No, not like that. Much slower. And touch your chest, not your arms.’

What an odd scene. And where is she? She must have been there to play with Brent. Still, however close she watches or listens, she isn’t in the frame. Not even as a sound in the background. It’s just Brent and her father, who is giving her friend increasingly alarming instructions from behind the camera, zooming in closer.

Suddenly realising what she is about to witness, she leaps forward to turn the television off as quickly as possible, but instead bumps her shins into the coffee table. With a dull thud, the urn topples. As the pain shoots up through her legs, the air in the room thickens with Brent’s soft sobs. Unable to look at the screen, she watches some of her father’s ashes flow from the urn.

Leona waits until the white stripes have erased Brent and the mechanical ticking sound has replaced his voice, before moving again. Shaking from the shock and despair about what she has just uncovered, she looks at the cardboard boxes and plastic crates with photo albums and videos. No way is she going to take any of them with her. Let the housing organisation just throw it all away. Good riddance. She’ll gladly pay for that.

She is about to walk through the front door, when a wave of anger tugs her back into the room. Turning on her heels, she resolutely marches over to the coffee table and grabs the toppled lens-shaped urn. The sleek alabaster reflects her face. It looks so much like her father’s: the same wiry eyebrows, the same high forehead, which according to her dad gave them both an aristocratic look. She’d always been proud of her inherited features. As of now, they will be ugly reminders not only of what her father did, but of her own complicity as well. Sure, she was a minor and she played the role of groomer unwittingly, but that doesn’t make a difference. No one would condemn her. Yet she feels guilty nonetheless.

There’s nothing she can do to undo the past, but she can erase some of what’s left of it. She determinedly turns the urn on its head above the carpet and sweeps the previously spilled ashes from the coffee table onto the floor as well. With her jaws clenched and her eyes tightly closed, she starts to stomp on the heap, kicking and even jumping up and down until her calves hurt. Only then does she open her eyes again. As she intended, nearly every grain of her father is scattered over his soon-to-be-disposed carpet. Yet the ashes have smudged her black leather boots too. They were brand-new. She had bought them specifically for the funeral. A lace-up model, which she had chosen because her dad had once complimented her when wearing a quite similar pair. She takes them off with brute force, without even untying them properly, ripping the leather. Her socks are smudged too. She throws them down on the floor next to her boots. Carefully walking backwards on her bare feet to the front door, she keeps her eyes on the rug. From a distance, there is no visible trace left of her father. His deeds will continue to haunt her, but for now at least he is gone.

*****

Josje Weusten is a Dutch writer of fiction, living in Belgium. She has published various essays, short stories and poems in Dutch and English. A selection of these can be found on her author website: https://josjeweusten.com Her first novel Fake Fish will be released in autumn 2024 with Sparsile Books (Glasgow). She is a Faber Academy alumna. Next to a writer, Josje is an academic, teaching fiction, poetry, and creative writing at Maastricht University, the most international university of the Netherlands.