Family Walk…
She walks ahead. Bejewelled hands held out, clasping padded paws in each. Ice cream squelches into the grooves of their hands. Lifelines will be illegible until antibacterial blue has scrubbed deep.
The river is calm, green, and dark, ponderous in the weekend sun. He notices ugly cracks in the pavement, his mind consumed with brutalist references. The Tate Modern comes to mind. But as he begins to talk, she beats him to it:
“Isn’t it so beautiful here, by the river!” She says, posed as a question, meant as a fact.
“Yes, it is.” He lies, fitting himself into a more risk averse slot. His darker truths will remain unspoken, growing thicker like Japanese knotweed, more deadly with every year that passes.
Their Boy and Girl unclasp from She, running ahead. Rotund pigeons cause them to giggle hard and audibly, above the buzz of sleepy bees and human chitter. They force the fat birds to fly upwards. She & He watch on as their young quickly shift focus from the pigeons. They become fixated, wrenching sticks from the ground to prod something they have uncovered as they stand beneath a weeping willow. Their prods become stabs. He swears to witness a sociopathic air swirling above his offspring.
He & She walk side by side, but at a marked distance. They occasionally glance sideways, half-moon smiles balancing upon chins, born from polite nerves rather than breathing love.
As they approach, Girl is crying suddenly. Boy is yelling at her:
“Why are you scared? You are such a baby.” Boy bulldozes. Boy’s voice is gruff, square-edged like red bricks.
She approaches to comfort crying Girl. He thinks to himself how She loves Girl the most, more than anyone else, more than herself. He thinks also, to himself, that Girl doesn’t deserve it, that she will grow up and fly off, kicking mud in She’s face as she ascends, like the fat pigeons. He feels guilty for a moment at thinking this of his child. But then he raises his shoulders to himself and thinks:
Why do I feel guilty? It’s the truth after all.
He saunters forwards, deliberately in the direction of Boy. He looks down at where the stick keeps prodding. The stick is twisted inside the spilling torso of a dead rabbit. Entrails seep out onto the grass beneath the tree. Boy squeals with glee. He is feeling what it is to feel. This is a rarity in their home world. Real feelings are always tamed, watered down to nothing. She likes to play life safe. So safe, it becomes a series of motions as opposed to anything close to divine.
She comforts Girl, scolds Boy before offering to buy tea & cake at the cafe in the distance. He can’t be bothered to protest, to say they just had ice creams. It begins to drizzle. He watches She & Girl saunter off, pulling their raincoat hoods up.
Boy continues to twist. He looks down at the glassy onyx of the dead rabbit’s staring eyes. He recalls then feeling incandescent with an unsavoury desire when He was a Boy himself, whilst watching Deliverance. But dead rabbits don’t squeal like pigs. Disappointment seeps. He looks up and ahead:
“Come on son. Let’s catch up with your mum & sister.”
“Do we have to?”
“Yes, afraid so,” He says.
They begin to walk. He doesn’t pull his own hood up. He lets the drizzle wet his head, hair, drip down his neck. He waits to feel it. He notes it when he does, the feeling of knowing the end is now. The squeal breathes. She turns in fear. But there is nothing there. Only family. On their weekend walk.
Anna wrote Family Walk after wondering why the tradition behind it is always portrayed as positive. Family walks are painted on postcards, used in advertising, curated in TV & movies as montages depicting joy, positivity, and the pinnacle of what it is to live, more often than not. Time and time again people going through sad times, difficulties, feeling alone may well have passed a family on a walk and looked upon it with jealousy or longing. A family on a walk have quite possibly made many an onlooker feel shit, on a sunny afternoon. Anna was intrigued with the concept of the unnerving, of unknown secrets. She wanted to explore the essence of the unsavoury weaved into a middle class, seemingly perfect scene. English Family life on the exterior, for Anna, seems always so desperate to appear like an elixir, like the adults involved have arrived at the top of a mountain. Anna wanted to research the atmosphere of smugness she has sometimes comes across in families. Playing with family life as a piece of horror fiction was also a fun creative process to work on. Anna hopes you are left feeling uneasy, left re-examining the way we look at scenes presented to us at first glance.
