“Text me when you get home, stay safe,” Alice said as she hugged her friend goodbye at the train station and watched them a moment as they walked towards the high street.
“Stay safe!” her friend called back.
Alice smiled and waved as she turned in the opposite direction to make her own way home.
As usual, Alice was taking the long way. The wide expanse of the main road makes you visible to the intermittent traffic but it’s lonely this time of night. The thick smoggy fumes of the all-day rush hour have left no trace. The only sign of life is the green and yellow light of the BP station. Everything is far back, the looming skyrise flats, the old Edwardian villas, far back and unreachable. The sleepiness of the big city was eerie. As she turned the corner into her little side street lined with picture-perfect railway cottages, Alice couldn’t help but lose her breath for a moment as she clocked a car parked suspiciously, its engine still running, windows blacked out. The break-ins from the south side have been creeping in; everyone is on edge.
Alice realised she had been holding her breath, the way people do when they are waiting for something to happen, never knowing if it actually will. It feels like excitement, and it feels like dread, it feels like if you could just let yourself fall it would come to a head and maybe you could take a different path. That frightened her even more than staying in this limbo, because at least in this seesaw life, she knows what she’s getting. Alice took one last look at the suspicious car when she made it to the front door, and with a sigh of relief realised it was Penny inside, next door’s daughter and who she could only guess is the new boyfriend engaged in a face-eating teenage snog. She couldn’t hold back a smile, although it quickly turned downward and her eyes prickled with tears.
Alice turned her key in the lock, slowly, clenching the rest of her keys in her other hand so they wouldn’t rattle, trying to muffle their sounds, trying to muffle herself. In her head she repeated to herself, keep your doors properly locked, make sure you put the Banham on. It’s much more important to stay safe inside. Stay safe, stay safe.
“Why are you dressed like that?” came the familiar voice. A shape began to rouse from the sofa in the dark corner of the front room when Alice closed the door to the porch behind her.
Alice tried to keep in her sigh. She had heard this before so many times it didn’t even mean anything anymore. Feeling almost relieved, she mumbled something incoherent and turned back to check she had locked the double bolt – to keep the burglars out; stay safe, stay safe.
The house was lit with a golden glow coming from strategically placed lamps in a brassy bronze lifting out the sunset tones of the dark wood floor, cosy and comforting. Even their furniture, a colourless spectrum of grey, was given a wave of nostalgic sepia. It was like a freshly constructed stage set, hopeful that a different story might play out if only the props were arranged just so.
“You should see the state of yourself. You know that dress makes you look pregnant, don’t you? Look at yourself.”
Alice did as she was told and went to look at herself in the mirror of the downstairs loo. It’s a strange thing not to recognise who you have become. Her dress felt frumpy and reminded Alice of grandmothers in war films, her dishevelled waist-length hair, how had it gotten this long? tangled and thinning, her face puffy from too many nights in Amanda’s world of binges, too many nights crying into the sofa, too many nights of not enough sleep.
Amanda’s voice got closer yet her eyelids weighed so heavily in their sockets that she was barely even looking at Alice, her face scrunched into a knot of red.
“Your stomach is not normal. You need to sort yourself out,”Amanda said. They stood together outside the downstairs loo that provided the break in space defining the kitchen from the front room, but Alice could make out their blurry reflections in the bifold doors from the kitchen beyond in their not quite open plan newly renovated two-up-two-down terrace.
Alice smoothed her dress down self-consciously as if she could soothe away her offending parts. Then, as if someone had flipped a switch, Amanda widened her eyes, blond brows raised, as she put her hands over Alice’s and it made Alice go cold.
“You’ve ruined my life being stuck here with you,” Amanda whispered.
Stay safe, stay safe, don’t react. Inside her head, Alice imagined herself taking a deep, long breath. She just had to wait it out.
“Stay in there,” Amanda commanded.
Alice stayed motionless, shrinking herself, becoming small, becoming invisible.
“I’m going to bed. Don’t follow me,” Amanda said with a vacant, serpent smile as she reached for the handle and closed Alice inside the windowless space.
Alice wondered which end of the seesaw would fall, how many more jibes Amanda would throw at her. Just because she said she was going to bed did not mean it was the truth.
Everything went black. Pitch black. Amanda had switched the light off from the outside and Alice could hear her climbing the stairs.
Alice panicked.
Had she remembered to double lock the front door?
It’s not safe out there these days.
References and further reading
-
Butler, J., (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge: London & New York.
-
Crenshaw, K (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. The University of Chicago Legal Forum 140:139-167.
-
Filax, G., Sumara, D., Davis, B. and Shogan, D., (2005). “Queer theory/lesbian and gay approaches,” Research Methods. In (Eds) Somekh, Bridget, and Cathy Lewin, (Eds.). Research methods in the social sciences. Sage.
-
Jagose, A., (1997) Queer Theory: An Introduction. Melbourne University Press: New York.
-
Russell, L. (2000). Dog-Women and She-Devils: The Queering Field of Monstrous Women. International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies,5,177–193. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010128813369
Exegesis
The core underlying theoretical approach of my story is a “queering” approach. The story examines gender-based violence from a queer perspective. It plays with assumptions about gender, sexualities and safety in public and private spaces with the aim to “trouble” how gender-based violence (GBV) is constructed and who might be invisibilised in mainstream discourses.
I’m wary of “over-interpreting” the details of my story, as what I wanted to do with it is open up spaces for questioning, for readers to challenge the discourses available to us and how our available discourses construct meaning. What I will focus on here is the underlying theory that drove me to write this in the first place. Stay Safe is also one of a number of stories in a collection I have been writing over the years broadly about queering spaces and loosely playing with the idea of “domestic horror” as a type of subgenre.
Queering approaches to knowledge, including writing, emerged through queer theory to challenge heteronormative assumptions, norms and roles. By taking a queer approach to the issue of GBV, I wanted to challenge heterosexual norms and readers’ possible assumptions and play with the intersection between gender and sexuality.
The story engages with the concept of queering where everyday heterosexual assumptions are explored as norms: a woman walking home at night and questions about her safety alongside the problematic distinction between the “unsafe” public space and the supposed safety of the private. In this piece, I wanted to look at the story of a lesbian woman whose experience of GBV is placed outside of normative and traditional expectations so that we can begin to redefine and expand meanings.
I wrote this story using an explicating queer feminist lens, inspired by the works of Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson and Sarah Waters who have “queered” traditional literary and genre fiction. All can be said to “trouble” notions of sexuality and “ queer female heterosexuality”. In my story, I wanted to trouble the idea of the home as a safe space and visibilise queer relationships to retell a familiar type of domestic violence story where the characters are not who the reader might imagine. Queering then takes normalised representations of sexuality and rereads, reperforms and reimagines them with the explicit purpose of “troubling” the status quo. Queering can be linked to the way that feminism sought to make trouble with gender, in reference to Judith Butler’s famous text, Gender Trouble.
I hope that readers are able to think through their own norms, discourses and assumptions. For me, I wanted to explicitly play with the assumptions of stranger violence and the streets as a dangerous place for women, and that these women who are in danger are always constructed heterosexual. During my writing journey I also challenged my own discourses through thinking through an intersectionalities lens. For example, whilst their sexuality is revealed, you know little else about Alice or Amanda, which has made me rethinkthe importance of considering race, ethnicity, dis/ability, class, affluence and a spectrum of processes and identities that serve to silence or invisibilise. By raising their sexuality, I hope to also encourage the reader to challenge normative understandings of victim/survivor of GBV as well as unpack the psychological aspects of GBV that do not necessarily involve overt physical violence.