His father’s razor

Text 1: The Velvet Bed, by Owen Treharne

An original short story extract.

The razor lived in a leather case in the bathroom cabinet, on the top shelf, behind the cough medicine. Nobody had moved it in fourteen months. Mum dusted round it, lifting the case an inch and setting it down again in exactly the same place, as though it were holding something down.

He waited until she had gone to work. Then he locked the bathroom door, which they never did in this house, and stood on the edge of the bath to reach.

The case smelt of the stuff Dad used to slap on his cheeks afterwards, a sharp green smell that made Ollie’s eyes sting before he had even opened it. Inside, the razor lay in its shaped bed of faded velvet like a tool in a museum. There was a hair caught in the blade. One short dark hair. Ollie looked at it for a long time.

He did it the way he had watched it done a thousand times from the doorway, when he was small enough to be allowed in. Hot water. The brush going round and round in the soap until it foamed. The foam on his face, white and thick and faintly ridiculous, so that the boy in the mirror looked like a bad Father Christmas. He almost laughed. He did not.

The first stroke was too careful and did nothing. The second went down from his ear to his jaw with a small dry rasp, and left behind it a pale clean stripe, and something in Ollie’s chest went tight and strange. He had seen that stripe before, on another face, in this mirror, through steam.

He kept going. Cheek. Chin. Under the nose, pulling his lip down the way Dad used to, making the same face, the same stupid face, and now he could not stop his eyes from running and he told himself it was the soap.

When it was done he rinsed the blade under the tap and watched the foam and the tiny dark specks spin away. The hair had gone too. For a moment he stood there with the empty razor in his hand, not breathing.

Then he dried it, very carefully, and put it back in its velvet bed. His face in the mirror was raw and pink and smooth. It was not Dad’s face. It was not quite his own either. It was someone in between, someone new, and he looked back at Ollie as if waiting to be introduced.

Explore how Owen Treharne uses language and structure to convey Ollie’s feelings as he shaves for the first time.

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