part | one
the photographer
He’s looking at her, but she’s not looking at him.
She sits on a flat stone bench in the corner of Golden Square, a sketchbook balanced in her lap. You wouldn’t guess that they are only a stone’s throw from the thrumming billboards of Piccadilly Circus, the scene kids shrieking in chorus outside the Oxford Street Topshop. Here, quiet. A pocket universe in the centre of Soho. Though everyone else is enjoying the late-spring sun, which filters through the trees and glints off high windows, she sits in a patch of shade as if she alone exists in a different season. He imagines that she lives like this: in opposition. She’d look like an Old Hollywood actress, if it weren’t for the hoodie and the leather jacket and the thoroughly modern scowl. The cable of a single headphone hangs from one of her ears. Behind the other, she tucks a few strands of white-blond hair. The hair, frazzled by bleach and just short enough to resist confinement, falls back over her face. She tucks it away again. It falls again. In her other hand is a pen. Or pencil. Her fingers are black with ink, or charcoal. He’s too far away to tell.
He plays with the zoom, the focus. His days are spent in an office, but everyone in this square wants to be someone else,and he wants to be a photographer. Through this viewfinder, he can see his whole life laid out before him like developing photographs hanging from pegs on a line. He allows himself to imagine her in one, her eyebrows darker than her hair, freckles dusting the bridge of her nose. Then someone shouts, and the light in his imaginary darkroom flickers. Two men in sleeveless fleeces slap each other on the back. The girl stares silently towards the centre of the square. A statue of some king or another. Covered in moss, its face eroded by the rain. It could be anyone. But she isn’t looking at the statue. She’s looking at the man beneath it.
There’s something statuesque about him, too, something that invites looking. He sits almost at floor level, on a low stone wall in front of the flowerbeds. From the angle of his knees, it’s clear that he’s tall. Broad-shouldered, too, with a tanned forehead over which falls a tangle of thick, dark hair. His eyebrows are just as dark, just as heavy, and his eyes are almost black. He wears a pair of black jeans and a band T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He has tattoos on his arms, hints of more where the neckline of his T-shirt meets his chest. Beneath a pair of heavy black headphones, his face is serious. His jaw is flexing. He’s eating a sandwich, thick and Italian, cured meat and sliced cheese squeezed between two towering slices of focaccia. For every bite he takes, he tears off another and feeds it to his dog. The small, scruffy creature is a mirror of its owner. Bushy black eyebrows over intense eyes. It sits by his side and licks its wiry chops, staring from sandwich to owner with an anticipation that vibrates from its whiskers right down to its softly treading paws.
The photographer sweeps his viewfinder back to his subject, finds a hint of humour in that furrowed brow, a smirk in one corner of those pursed lips. She’s enjoying the scene. So, she begins to draw, committing it to paper. Once her sketch is done, she’ll approach the man with the dog, cause him to lower his headphones. All that is to come. For now, the photographer watches her watching, one hand gliding across the page, the other tucking hair behind ear, hair behind ear.
He takes a breath. Then he takes a picture.
her boss
‘Some creep just took a picture of me.’
Clara says this, matter-of-factly, sitting down in front of her computer. She removes a can of Diet Coke from the pocket of her leather jacket and pops the ring-pull.
‘What?’ says Ren, who is sitting at the computer opposite, hammering the backspace button. ‘Like, from the bushes?’
Their too-small table has been divided down the middle into two de facto desks, the backs of their monitors pressed up against one another. Across the top, they paddle conversation back and forth, questions lingering like shuttlecocks in the air.
‘Yeah,’ Clara says, her lower lip pushed out. ‘Well, no. From the street.’
‘So, a street photographer?’ Ren says. She stops typing, black nails hovering over the keyboard. ‘Like a street-style thing?’
Elizabeth watches them through the open glass door of her office. ‘Crazy’ by Gnarls Barkley is playing on the radio, turned down to a level she mandates as non-distracting. Clara is supposed to be her PA, and these flights won’t book themselves. Elizabeth had even left a Post-it note on Clara’s desk, with words to that effect. She can see the can of Diet Coke resting on top of it.
‘No,’ says Clara. ‘Just some guy. He wanted to post it on his blog.’
Elizabeth watches Clara pick up her can and take a swig. The Post-it note, now wet, clings to the bottom. Clara pulls it off without reading it and discards it in the bin beneath her desk.
‘What did you say?’ Ren asks.
‘Absolutely fucking not,’ Clara says, proudly.
Elizabeth considers heading over there, reminding Clara and Ren that she doesn’t pay them to chat. But she doesn’t want them to think she’s fusty. She remembers what it was like to be a thwarted creative. Before they entered the world of ad production, Ren wanted to work in fashion, Clara in films. Or was it the other way around? Elizabeth can only half-remember their CVs, preferring to hire on general vibe. She tries her best to bring in renegades and right-brained thinkers, but they never seem the right fit. Ren had recommended Clara – and it would be the last recommendation of Ren’s that Elizabeth would take. She turns to her computer, now, and types out an email.
To: Clara.
Subject: Flights.
She adds a word: URGENT.
Ren sighs. ‘What were you doing when he took it?’
A pause. ‘Drawing.’
‘What were you drawing?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
God forbid Elizabeth gets out of this godforsaken country. God forbid she gets an assistant who actually assists her, rather than one who makes it her mission every lunch break to get as far away from their Belgravia office as physically possible.Clara says that she walks to ‘clear her head’, that she only draws ‘on her own time’. But it’s called a lunch hour, not a lunch hour-and-twenty-minutes. Clara’s ‘art’ is an aimless habit for restless hands.
I’ve been there, Elizabeth wants to say. I grew up.
