Negative Impression

Terry hated posing photos. It didn’t matter if it was a wedding, birthday or extremely rare family reunion, Terry did her level best to be the one snapping the shot, or to be on an extended toilet visit when the picture was being taken.

Her mother Claire was obsessed with making memories. These memory-worthy moments ranged from the first days of school to being posed beside an unusually fat pigeon. Terry’s older sister Florence went along with it and flashed her crooked grin with the same warped enthusiasm that her mother had while Claire fiddled with the zoom controls to get the best possible moment. While most people relished the experience of having a spotlight on them and posed to make the best of it, Terry hated it. Strangers would turn and watch them as her mother arranged them and said embarrassing prompts to make them laugh and smile. It drew unwanted attention on her, and most of the shots turned out deeply unflattering, in her eyes at least .

Smartphones posed an even bigger headache. Now it seemed everyone wanted to document everything. Terry navigated her twenties and thirties dodging photo opportunities and grew out her fringe to make her less-visible. As her forties approached, Terry grew tired of the constant demand for capturing pictures that happened everywhere she went. She began to refuse invitations, and after a year or two of curt phone calls, some of her close friends stopped asking.

Her mother Claire’s illness was short, and she had a rather dignified passing. At her memorial service, the walls were bedecked with photos she had taken over the years. Florence had taken great care to avoid pictures of her younger sister Terry, so the posthumous exhibition looked as if her mother had one child only.

“Look at little Florence, the spitting image of her mum!

I know, like two peas in a pod they were

What about the younger one, what’s her name again? I can’t find her in any of the pictures”

Terry now carried the guilt of avoiding her mother’s photos much like a heavy camera dangling from a cumbersome strap. She managed to find a spot at the back of the room while her sister tearfully shared stories of how their late mother relished life so much, she ended up capturing nearly every day of it on film. In her final days, Claire sat back as her eldest daughter turned pages of countless albums for her and the woman sighed contentedly at the fullness of their pages.

Claire had promised most of her belongings to charity shops and had bequeathed small trinkets to both her girls. Terry was shocked to find the one item her mother had left for her was a set of three photo frames. There was a small note with the frames.

“You matter to me Terry, so while there’s still time, fill these frames with your memories”

They were beautiful pieces, with ornate patterns throughout. They were the kind of frames that highlighted the photos placed within their borders. They looked handmade, and even bare they made space look brighter and warmer. Just like her mother really. Terry chose a picture of her mother for the first. She was posed at the end of a pier, the light flooding through her outstretched arms. It captured her essence and made Terry smile. The second picture was of Florence. She had looked particularly well at their aunt’s wedding anniversary party recently. Her mother had caught her looking wistfully into the floral arrangement on the dinner table and managed to make her look, slimmer, younger, yet quintessentially still Florence. She hadn’t decided what to put in the third frame, which she left face down, positioning both filled frames on a coffee table as if they were a complete set.

The unusual events started not long after. She was in a typically long queue waiting to renew her driving licence, and the teller called the person queueing behind her. Terry herself had been daydreaming, and only noticed when the man, who had a particularly ripe odour, jostled past her to get to the kiosk.

“Excuse me. I was here before this man.”

The woman in the booth was busily taking the man’s details and didn’t acknowledge her.

“Excuse me!”

The man sitting in the next kiosk looked up as if into space, then locked eyes with her. He hadn’t seen her. Had the other woman seen her?

“I’ll take you here Madam”.

Terry shot a glare at the man whom she felt had taken her turn. He looked up at her blankly. He didn’t think he had done anything wrong.

What was usually a five-minute transaction took nearly thirty minutes, a senior supervisor and a technician. For some strange reason, the digital camera affixed to the booth would not process her image. She made sure to position her face in the parameters, she saw the flash, but nothing appeared on the screen. Eventually, the technician used his phone to take her picture. Her expression was haunting on the photo id, the face of a woman who wondered if she was visible at all.

The second and more jarring event occurred a week later. Terry had been messaging Phil, an Engineer living some eighty miles away. They had weathered the obstacle course of photo exchanges, textual intercourse and eventual phone conversations and were on the cusp of the inevitable awkward coffee date in person. Then Phil seemed to disappear off the face of the planet. Terry tried ringing and texting and eventually opened her dating app, which she joyfully had abandoned once Phil had sparked her interest. Curiously, it asked for a username and password, rather than automatically logging her on. After furiously typing in her email address, it declared her account as non-existent. The site had no phone assistance, so she was forced to set up another account. Phil’s profile was no longer visible to her, which meant he had either deactivated the account, or matched with someone new. Phil’s interest had sparked a hope in her she hadn’t felt in a long time, and its extinguishment felt cold and unusually cruel.

This growing deficit of human attention and contact drove Terry to desperate measures. Some months ago,  the call centre she worked for offered staff remote working which she gleefully accepted. The constant push to celebrate staff birthdays and any special occasion, then document it on any available online platform was nauseating to her. But now her pool of links to the outside world was evaporating she decided to brave the narcissism and lunacy and do a few days of work on-site. The company had pledged to keep their staff’s cubicles intact for the first year and then transition to hot-desking; the newest fad stating wherever you laid your pc, that was your work home.

The buzz of call centre business drifted through the doors of the elevator before they opened. Rows of heads facing screens greeted her and the smell of very strong coffee hung in the air like strong cologne. Terry’s desk was in the far-right corner of the office which enabled her to dream about escaping from the chaotic workspace she was forced to occupy. But as she approached, she could spot not one, but two people occupying her cubicle. Her colleague Jade had gotten promoted to supervisor, and she was overseeing a newer member of staff sitting in Terry’s old cubicle as they took a call. Jade raised her hand in typical traffic warden fashion to pre-empt any attempts to start a conversation. Terry’s looming shadow obviously bothered Jade as she removed her headset, then seemed to start blankly at Terry.

“Are you new here? Your desk is two rows over. Give me two minutes and I will get you sorted. I think Richard can take it from here.”

“Jade, it’s Terry. I thought my desk wasn’t going to be given away?”

Jade was taken back for a minute, then gazed purposefully at this stranger. Something about her was familiar; maybe they had been to school or some gym class together. Maybe she was an old hire who left and had fallen on hard times. You would want to be desperate to be starting with the company now. All new hires got sales roles, fielding calls from irate customers whom they were forced to upsell to. The woman seemed affronted and raised her eyebrows in a familiarly accusatory way.

“Jade come on! It’s only been 4 months. Has the new job fried your brain already?”

“Terry…yes that’s it, Terry!!! How did I forget??? Funny that. Did you used to sit here? Never mind, there is a desk near the elevator we can get you.”

“Can’t you move the newbie, I fought to get the prime real estate at the window?”

Jade looked quizzically at Terry, the look you give someone when you don’t know someone very well and they’re trying their luck.

“No can do;  I don’t have time to lose switching desks. Fridays are busy, you know that. We need to keep the wait time low.”

Terry sat down to her view of the elevator doors and an unforgiving draught which nipped at her ankles. The acoustics in the room were less forgiving in this quadrant. Waves of laughter, the company phraseology being rattled off to customers and the occasional bashing on a keyboard felt strangely comforting for once. It almost made up for the fact it took HR half the day to get her set up at her station as they had deleted her login details. Even Terry couldn’t remember hers as they were saved on her PC at home. She spent the afternoon staring at her profile icon which bore a big grey silhouette of a person, just like a newbie would. At the end of her shift, Jade passed her on the way to the elevator and didn’t stop to say goodbye. They used to trade war stories at the end of their shifts and occasionally head for wine and tapas at the café on the corner of the road. Jade did look over her shoulder as she passed Terry’s new station, with a gaze of unfamiliarity. Long after the lift doors closed, that looked haunted Terry.

She decided to call into Florence on her way home. Florence was bad to answer the phone at the best of times, and Terry needed a quick fix of tactile conversation. Florence took after their mum that way. Every question was preceded by a hand on the nearest arm, and every meeting proceeded with a warm hug. Florence was the sister people always asked Claire about, and Terry was left standing, if not living in her big sister’s shadow. No number of excellent grades and non-intrusive behaviour could compare with a big grin and a constant curiosity about people and life generally. Florence’s flat was studded with photo frames and canvases which chronicled her and her family’s lives so far. Terry especially appreciated the wall running up the stairs, which had recently been covered with pictures of their mother.

Terry let herself in with her key and shouted up hesitantly. What if her own sister couldn’t see or hear her?

“Come up T, just putting the kids to bed!”

Days and weeks of fear and apprehension dissolved with that one sentence. Terry flung her coat onto the bottom banister of the stairs and walked up the stairs, admiring the way her sister chronicled their late mother’s life. But as step led to step Terry could see an alarming pattern. She didn’t appear in any of the photos, not even one. Florence even had a group shot of her aunt’s anniversary up, which Terry distinctly remembered taking ten long minutes to stage. She quickened her step up to her nephew’s bedroom to test the waters. She did her usual rough-and-tumble play with her eldest nephew Theo, but the youngest, Kenny wouldn’t bite. He tucked into his mother and insisted she put him to bed.

“But Aunty T will give you a longer story boo boo.”

“No Mammy, you Mammy.”

“If Aunty T isn’t doing it then no story for Ken.

The little boy’s huge almond eyes did a sweeping glance at the rug under his soft toddler feet. It was a tough choice to make, but this strange lady was strange after all.

“No story Mammy, Night night.”

Terry backed out of the room and left Florence to settle him. Kenny always ran to his favourite and only Aunty. He would sit on her lap and bore her to tears with his unrelenting knowledge of “Paw Patrol”. Tonight, he had looked at her like she had broken into their home. He had looked at her like she wasn’t wanted there. This was the cruellest blow of them all.

Florence did her best to swat away Terry’s worries.

“He’s two T, that’s what two-year-olds do. He will be asking for you in the morning.”

“I dunno Florence, he has always come to me, even over you at times. And it’s not just him. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like people aren’t noticing I am here. It’s like I am disappearing.”

Florence’s laughter was booming like her mother’s. It reverberated around the room and then found the open living room door and escaped up the stairwell. She quickly put her hand over her mouth to stifle her mirth.

“Seriously T, you need to get out more that’s all. People have given up asking you to do things, you know? Aunt Gilly said she was worried about you. And you know Aunt Gilly, it’s a small miracle that she was aware of anyone else at that anniversary do, bar her perfect Husband and her. What’s the story with that guy Phil? You were all set to meet weren’t ye?”

“Ghosted me. It was like he forgot me.”

“Asshole. Not surprised. Some men go cold quick when the promise of instant gratification is taken off the table.”

“So, I’m being irrational?”

“Yes, a grade-A lunatic. I can see and hear you, Terry, you are here. I just wish other people could see you the way I do. You just seem hell-bent on blending in and staying hidden.”

They chatted about Claire and shared their fondest memories. Florence shared how Claire had come to her one day frustrated that her smallest child kept her bedroom door shut and the blinds drawn, and Florence had reassured her mother that little T would open that door when she was ready.

“You still aren’t ready I guess T. I hope for your sake you get ready soon. We don’t know how much time any of us have.”

Terry was putting her key in the door of her flat when she noticed a bulge under her doormat. An envelope was there with no writing on the front. She opened it and saw a bunch of keys like her own. Shaking, she tried one of the keys in the door. It unlocked the door. Too shocked to move into her flat she opened the note in the envelope. It fluttered to the floor and the keys followed, clattering as they landed on the tile floor. Terry let out an involuntary shriek which seemed to be swallowed by the long, disinterested hallway. Nobody came out to ask how she was, not even peep from the safe confines of their homes. The note was from a letting agent.

“Hi, Tess and Tom. Sorry, I won’t be there to start the viewing for you, but you can get started yourself. I will be along at 10.15. The place lets itself. The previous owner kept it spotless. We only have twenty minutes though as I have three other viewings to get done on the place before twelve. Best, Liz”

She staggered into her apartment to the unfamiliar smell of strong bleach. Her apartment had been through a clinical scrub-down, and all her belongings were gone. All the furniture had been rearranged and she found all her belongings in the hot press. Her whole life had been tidied away in less than a day. She saw her mother’s photo frames at the top of the box and reached to pick them up. Try as she might, she could not her hands to grab the frames. All the energy and strength were simply not there. She grabbed the frame of the door to steady herself as she could feel the support of her legs fading. The room around her began to pixelate as if she was part of a broadcast which was slightly out of frequency. She could not hold anything or focus clearly on a single object. Her breath seemed to echo in the space created in this vacuum. She yearned more than anything to be heard, seen or acknowledged, and yet the will to scream or wave her arms had gone. It had gone ahead into the void, and now this vacuum pulled her in deeper. There was no fall, no collapse, just blackness.

The flat was south-facing. Morning viewings showcased the compact but homely feel of the space while the sunlight made the dust particles look like floating glitter. Terry always loved this time of the day. She used to take her cup of tea to the window and watch the city wake up. She could no longer hold a cup, and she was powerless to stop the couple wander through her space while brashly declaring all the improvements they would make once they moved it. By the sounds of it, the place would look less like a flat and more like a giant window display. Ideal for two self-obsessed people who had brought a selfie stick to the viewing. They had posted a picture of themselves by the window proclaiming themselves new owners. No number of filters could get rid of a dark profile behind them. It looked just like a person’s shadow.