Kim’s meeting would take about an hour, and so I made good on my promise to decamp to the nearby café—an establishment that would’ve been a greasy spoon in London, but down here had just enough seashell adornment to masquerade as a tearoom.
The fried-egg sandwiches came with a giant pot of tea, and after loading up on HP sauce and sugar respectively, I was set to keep my vigil.
Thankfully, I’d thought to grab my laptop before we left my place. Not because I had any desire to work, but because without something to occupy my tired brain, there was no doubt that Kim would emerge from the church to find me snoozing on my dirty plate.
I opened my MacBook and tapped in my password. In my bag was the external hard drive I always carried with me, stuffed full of unfinished personal projects. Feeling brave, I plugged it in, and was unsurprised as a bazillion shots of Kim filled the screen. Most of them had been taken at my old flat on that fateful trip last month, but I had quite a few from before and after that time.
Curious, I lined some up in chronological order, starting with the clandestine shot I’d taken of him that day I’d met him, and finishing with a playful pose he’d struck for me the day before I’d gone to Bristol. I studied the images closely, searching for any sign of the deterioration in Kim I’d missed, but found none. The first shot was of his alluringly slender back, and in the last, his grin was as easy and bright as it had ever been.
What had I missed? Kim claimed there was nothing, but how could that be true? Was addiction really so fucking illogical?
As I thought it, I realised I’d inadvertently hit the nail on the head. Logic played no part in this horrible disease. How could it, when Kim had been so happy when he’d called me that last time? Thoughhappywas a relative term, because what the hell did it mean?
I had no answer to that, and the images of Kim filling my screen with his grace and beauty hurt my heart. I shut them down and opened up a folder I hadn’t looked at in years—a file that was a decade old.
The individual images opened in the sequence that I’d taken them twelve years ago, growing progressively more horrifying with each shot. I poured over them with the morbid fascination only a photographer could have with images like these. As usual, I got lost in them, making little tweaks here and there, and wondering what had become of the bloodied, soot-smeared faces I’d captured that day. Wondering if the bewildered horror in their eyes had ever faded.
“That’s real pain, eh?” Kim slid into the seat beside me. “Puts things in perspective.”
“I hope you’re not about to tell me that you have no right to have problems.”
Kim shrugged, but I could tell my gruesome screen was distracting him. My hand itched to close the laptop. I stewed on it, like I’d sat on most of the images all these years. Kim leaned closer, his shoulder brushing mine. “What on earth are all these? It looks like a war zone?”
“Close. I took these at Edgware Road twelve years ago.”
Kim missed a beat, then his tired eyes widened. “Seven-seven? The bombings?”
“Yeah. I was on my way to uni when people started to come up from the tracks. I tried to help at first, but there was nothing I could do.”
“Fuck. I remember watching it on the news with Brix. How old were we? Nineteen? Yeah, something like that. It didn’t seem real to us, though. City life never did until Brix took up with it.”
“It didn’t seem real to me, either. Without these, I wouldn’t really remember it.”
“What did you do with these after? Did they go to the papers?”
“A few.” I enlarged the images I’d sent to theTimesall those years ago. “I didn’t let them pay me, though. The fees went to the memorial fund.”
Kim pointed at a bloodied young woman, her face burnt, her long hair stained a dark, mottled red. “I think I’ve seen her before.”
Of all the images he could’ve picked out. I closed down every file except that one, and retrieved two more from a different folder. It clearly took Kim a moment to realise the photographs were all of the same woman. He frowned. “I don’t get it.”
“Fate,” I said. “I’d been at Kings Cross early that morning, shooting some buskers for a uni project. I caught her by chance as she headed underground, and then again an hour later, when she came up at Edgeware. I tracked her down when I found the first image and asked if I could photograph her one last time, so I had all three images—before, during, and after. Mad, eh? She keeps all three in a drawer at her office. Says it reminds her how fragile life is.”
“She ain’t wrong.” Kim’s eyes remained fixed on the young woman.
Knowing how much time I’d lost to staring at photographs that made my nerves itch, I closed the laptop. “How did the meeting go?”
Kim shrugged. “Good, I s’pose. I feel calmer, which helps, though it freaks me out to see so many pissheads in one place. Reminds me how far I can fall, you know?”
“There must be people who are doing well too, though?”
“A few. I tend to hover near them, absorb some of their willpower.”
“Does it work?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Are you hungry?”
