Low Visibility

Low Visibility is a short story written by Margaret Murphy in 2008. The story is about a married couple, and their names are John and Laura. The story is about how it is to be the victim of a broken and violent relationship, and how Laura brakes free from the chains of fear.
The story takes place in their city apartment, in Liverpool, at the same time as a riot is going on. The two main characters are the married couple Laura and John. As mentioned before Laura and John are in a broken relationship, as John tends to be violent towards Laura. For example, when they are sitting on the couch watching TV, he’s hand is grabbing her thigh. He is holding it so hard that it bruises. Ad every time he – for some reason – lets go, and puts the hand back, he moves it higher up her thigh. This is what he considers foreplay, and it indicates that there is no romance what so ever, in their relationship. Therefore Laura has become submissive. She barely speaks, and has become full of fear. She was a completely different person before she met John – “Once, she was a girl who could set a room to laughter”. And it was because of her good spirits that John wanted her; he thought that he himself would become happier if he was with a happy person, but instead he smothered her happiness and joy. He “held her too tight” and she became a hostage in her own life.
The riots in the streets are very violent. The people throw bricks and Molotov cocktails at the police, and every time they hit their plastic shields, and the police have to shuffle back, the crowd roar in triumph. There was also an incident with a delivery car. It came down Upper Parliament Street, but when the driver saw the mob, it set in return. It hit a pothole and lost control, causing it to smash into a wall. The driver was then dragged out of the vehicle and started beating him up, while some other set his car on fire. And on Lodge Lane the riots has turned into looting. People walk around with trolleys, taking what they need and what they can – basically everything they can get their hands on. In an interview we hear that the shops are empty; a journalist asks a woman if there was anything left at the shop she was just in, to which she sarcastically answers “I think I saw a packet of sausages on the meat counter,”
The narrator is third person because we know what Laura and John are thinking. Furthermore, the story starts in medias res, because we just get thrown into the story without any further introduction. The structure lets us jump between two settings: the living room and the streets where the riots are. The story also switches back and forth between the narrators storytelling, the TV-journalist, the looter and John.
I have decided that the ending starts from line 137.
Whenever someone feels oppressed, or feels that they are being treated unfair, it is human nature to fight back. And as it was the case with the rebels in the riot, so it was with Laura. Laura’s confrontation with her husband is a parallel to the riot in the streets – her own riot, just on a smaller scale. The ending also has some kind of religious touch to it. A parallel can be drawn to the mythical creature, the phoenix: the creature that, when it gets old and dies, rises from its own ashes, and starts life on anew. Also, the end is the only place where the narrator calls Laura by her name. The rest of the story she was addressed as “Her” or “John’s wife”.

The title “Low Visibility” plays on the fact that Laura tries to stay “under the radar” – John’s radar that is. In fear of what might happen, she rarely speaks and does nothing but sit and breathe. It is also mentioned in the last part of the text, which Laura returns to the invisible people, the people of low visibility, after walking away from her husband John.

703 words