Perfect Picture

• Lisa Le, Grade 9, Sefton High School
• Short Story
• 2011

Excellence Award in the 'Step Write Up 2011' competition

My last $30 ... which CD ... which band, I agonised. The store manager stared.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“Nah, I’m alright,” I mumbled as an automatic response, not letting the manager disrupt my thoughts. After much dilemma, I grabbed the punk rock album and brought it to the counter only to find something else which caught my eye. There it was on the wall behind the counter, a wanted poster with a familiar face on the front. The criminal’s face could only belong to one man, my father.

In disbelief, my hand lost grip of the album and it came crashing to ground. “Oi! You’re going to have to pay for that you know,” growled the manager, giving me an icy stare. But I ignored him as he observed me staring at the poster. “You know that punk?” he asked, “He’s from around here, people are saying.”
“Yeah... I mean no,” I replied a little too quickly, “I’ve seen him in the newspapers and stuff.” Then briskly I walked out of the store and broke into a run.

The photograph on that poster of my father had been taken on one of the most memorable occasions in my life. He had left his hair messy and wild and had grown a rough beard, an image that anyone could have mistaken for a cold blooded criminal. Yet, the reason he looked scraggly was that this picture had been taken when he took me out camping one weekend.

I turned the corner and passed a couple of houses to a high rise apartment block. The fifth floor was where my dad resided, after he and mum split, and where I came to stay every weekend. Dad was very orderly with his clothes, books and stuff. Even though he worked from home, he always wore a business suit in case ‘important’ people came. He never really told me what his job was. I headed for the elevator, which took me to my dad’s floor and let myself in with the key he had given me.

The floor was scattered with papers and photographs, an unfamiliar and shocking sight for me. Paranoid by the possible presence of another being, I crept silently to my Dad’s office- slash- bedroom. Seated at the desk was Dad, staring blankly.

Later that day, Dad took me round to the music store. “Have a closer look,” he chuckled. Eyes wide I gaped in embarrassment. Had I read the poster correctly, I would have realised that this poster was advertising a new album by the name ‘Wanted’. As it turns out, Dad’s job involved things like designing album covers (particularly for some of the most well known bands) and since this band liked it so much, they decided that Dad’s face would feature on the front.

This explained the scattered photographs; Dad must have been going through them to pick the perfect picture.