At the centre of the clearing is the studio. Its hybrid construction is evident immediately. One end of it is an old stone cottage, its windows still there but all black, boarded up from inside. Expanding from the stone structures is a large, modern square, its sides made almost entirely from huge slabs of glass.
The setting and construction of the whole thing immediately make Amber think of another building. She almost says it, like the reflexive jerk from a hammer to the knee. It reminds her of the cottage by the sea.
She clenches her jaw to stop the thought, and Genevieve fills the silence. She talks about how they had to fight the local Council about the design because the original cottage was listed, and about how Benny used to love the seclusion of this spot. Genevieve talks about Benny almost as if he passed away at a great age a long time ago.
They go on inside. The glass box houses a large digital editing suite and a living area with seating, an enormous television, and a small island kitchenette. It is mostly well ordered, but on one side there are rows of cardboard boxes, stacks of mounted prints waiting to be hung, and a chaos of paperwork and old folders. It is very bright, and Amber sees the glare of light falling on the large computer monitors. As if reading her mind, Genevieve touches a switch on the wall, and the glass becomes in an instant opaque, diffusing the excess light.
‘Smart glass — a little Bond layer, don’t you think?’ says Genevieve, laughing. She switches it back, then waves at the digital editing suite with a few words of explanation. She walks to the back of the glass square to a large door that must be the original front door of the old cottage. It is a heavy wooden thing, with a big iron lock, from which a large key protrudes. Genevieve twists the key — it gives a satisfying mechanical clunk — and opens the door. In front of them is a short white corridor with a narrow slatted wooden staircase and another door at the end.
‘We completely redid the innards,’ says Genevieve, walking ahead and opening a door at the far end of the corridor.
Through this doorway, Amber can only see perfect darkness. Genevieve hits a switch by the door, and the room flickers into existence. It is clinical in its whiteness, the absent patient attended only by the big umbrellas of studio lights in softboxes. There are stacks of reflectors in one corner, a trolley with a computer, and a shelf of various photographic paraphernalia. There are no windows, and this is the only way in. Sealed for perfect light control.
But Genevieve has flicked the lights off as quickly as she turned them on.
‘He never used this much, but it seemed a facility to have,’ she says flatly. ‘No one goes in there these days,’ she adds and closes the door, as if this had been the site of some terrible act and she doesn’t want to dwell in here.
Get a grip, Amber tells herself. Stop jumping at shadows, stop examining everything for deeper meaning.
‘And upstairs,’ Genevieve is saying now, ‘is why you’re here.’
Because of how they are positioned in the corridor, Amber climbs the stairs first. She opens the door, again into darkness. She feels around and finds the lights. This time they don’t flicker on brightly, rather fading up gently, pushing the darkness away. The room is bathed in a dim yellow light, revealing row upon row of shelves that stretch to the back of the room. Each shelf is jam-packed with box files, envelopes, metal canisters. They are shoved in at every angle, piled on top of each other. There are even what look like tubs of film, still undeveloped.
Amber steps between two rows of shelves, feeling now how cold the room is. It is that draughtless dry chill of careful temperature control. She pulls down a box file. It is laden with layers of envelopes. She takes one out and opens it: stuffed with strips of negatives.
‘Is this room all negatives?’ she asks. A film negative is not a large thing — an inch by an inch and a half. Amber cannot imagine how many thousands — tens of thousands — there must be in here.
‘Some contact sheets, a few prints, a lot of slide film for his colour work. And yes, a great number of negatives.’ Genevieve looks almost embarrassed. ‘I’m afraid Benny was a bit of a hoarder… never very good at…’ A change comes over her, a moment of frailty crossing her face. It is as if a crack has opened and her grief is leaking out.
Amber remembers something Benny always used to quote at her. His little mantra about not missing the moment. To never flinch from the shot. Because that vanishing moment can become eternal.
Life is once, forever.
And now, looking at this chaotic glut of an archive, she realises she only ever half understood what he meant.
It was as if, for Benny, nothing could be thrown away or be allowed to die. Everything must be kept. Every shot, every frame, forever.
7
Benny
Friday, 9 November 2001
We wrapped ourselves in all the layers we could find and took our chairs out onto the deck beyond the windows to enjoy the last of the day. We didn’t care that it was cold. It was too beautiful an evening to sit behind glass.
We both had cameras with us. I had the Nikon I carried everywhere. Amber was fiddling with an Olympus that was at least five years older than she was. It was an all-manual beast. When I first saw her with it, I told her using something so antique came across as a bit of an affectation. She told me it belonged to her father. That shut me up.
Amber finished a cigarette and stamped it into the sandy ground. She raised her camera and pointed it south-east along the coastline. The sun was setting behind us, but its last bits of light caught on the tips of the low waves, and the red-yellow ripple of the sky reached like tendrils towards the darkening sea. She must have caught my expression out of the corner of her eye.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Thousands of pictures of sunsets, all of them irredeemable clichés.’
She lowered her camera, looking put out, but she still let me lean over and kiss her. As I uncoupled from her, I reached down to my camera at the base of my chair.
I’d loaded the roll of film into the camera earlier. It was black and white and a fast film — one for low light. I had that type of film in because I already knew the pictures I wanted to take tonight.
I held my camera up and pointed it towards Amber. Her skin still gave a glow in the dying day. I squeezed the shutter, but as I did, she moved her hand up in front of the lens.
‘I’d rather not be an irredeemable cliché, thanks.’
I lowered my camera. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Maybe not as many as my sunsets, but I don’t suppose I’m the first or last in your collection.’
‘My collection?’
‘I’m not fucking you because you’re Benedict Raine, you know.’
‘Well, I hate to disappoint you.’
‘You know what I mean. I’m not another groupie who…’
‘You think I have groupies? Should I be flattered or insulted?’
‘Look, Benny…’ She tailed off, but I knew what she was trying to say. She wanted to ask again if there was more to this than hotel trysts and clandestine weekends. Part of me wanted to be able to say there might be more, could be more. In fact, what that part really wanted to say was that I hadn’t felt about anyone like this since I met Genevieve. But, no, she knew the deal. This was what it was.
‘I don’t just bring anyone here,’ I told her.
‘Anyone?’ she came back at me with. ‘No one in particular springs to mind?’ It was if she was daring me to say my wife’s name. But there was so much we couldn’t say to each other.
My glass was empty, and so was the bottle at my feet. Amber’s glass was still almost full. I got up to get more wine, my camera still dangling from my shoulder. I slid open the door to the deck and left it that way as I went into the kitchen. As I fished out another bottle, I turned to see Amber perfectly framed in the open door. She was looking down the coast again, towards the colour in the sky, her profile against the waves beyond. I put down the bottle, raised my camera, and took a quick picture.
I don’t think she registered it.
She wasn’t entirely wrong in what she had said. She was very perceptive. Collection wasn’t the right word, though. That sounded so sterile and sinister. But she was right that I liked to capture these moments. I liked to hold onto a little bit of time I wouldn’t ever get back, with people who wouldn’t or couldn’t stay with me. I could tell myself all I liked that I could find a way to keep Amber forever, but really I knew that any time I saw her could be the last.
I took another frame. If I couldn’t keep all of her, I could keep a tiny piece.
8
Amber
Amber comes blinking down the stairs from the archive. She and Genevieve were there for some time discussing the extent of the work. Amber has agreed to at least spend some of the weekend getting a feel for what is there and deciding if this is a job she can do. This seemed enough to satisfy Genevieve.
They emerge back into the glass box to find the digital editing suite now occupied by a man staring intently into the monitors. He has a mop of white-blond hair, like a lamp above his black skinny jumper. Amber thinks immediately of Andy Warhol. He has earbuds in and barely moves as the two women enter the room. One monitor has photo editing software open, displaying a catalogue view of rows and columns of images. The other monitor is a mess of folders. The man’s mouse is jumping between the two, selecting folders and scrolling through the catalogue as if he’s looking for something.
‘I see Mika has joined us,’ says Genevieve to Amber loudly in a way that feels more closely directed at the man than her. But he still doesn’t look up. Genevieve goes on, now talking about Mika as if he isn’t here. ‘Mika is… was Benny’s assistant. He hasn’t been with us long. I’d hoped you’d be able to work together on some of this, but unfortunately he’s decided not to stay with us.’
Mika finally cracks his shell and swivels round on the chair. The sense of Andy Warhol evaporates immediately. He is boyish, handsome, tanned. He has a light brown stubbled goatee. His eyes are a piercing blue.
‘Hiya, sorry, just finishing something,’ he says, and gives Amber a quick smile.
‘I’ll leave you two to it,’ Genevieve says, and Mika says nothing else, swivelling back to his work.
Mika brightens once Genevieve has left them. He makes Amber a cup of tea in the kitchenette and pulls a Diet Coke out of the fridge for himself. As he delivers the tea, he slides a crisp business card across to Amber. It prompts her to pull one of her own out of the back of her phone case. It is old and tatty, and she feels a little embarrassed by it as she hands it to Mika.
Mika wanders off towards the sofa by the big TV, and they start to chat. He’s young, in his mid-twenties. He was only hired as Benny’s assistant a few months before his death. He seems like the soul of indiscretion.
‘Yeah, I was pretty surprised to get the gig,’ he is saying. ‘I mean, Benedict flipping Raine, right?’ He sucks in some air.
‘You say that like there’s a but?’
‘Man, there’s always a but. I’ve worked for some massive butts.’ He laughs at his own bad joke. ‘Seriously though, I was, like, his third assistant in two years. He’d been going through them.’
‘How so?’
‘Quit, fired, resigned. Divorced, beheaded, died for all I know.’ He laughs again, a juvenile little snort. ‘I’m here for just another week, then I’m off to work for someone a bit more, y’know, not dead.’
‘You should be kinder to Genevieve. She’s just lost her husband.’
He looks admonished, like a schoolboy. ‘Yeah, I guess. But man, she spends all day breaking my balls, and she expects me to stick around for the rest of my notice.’ The chided look gives way to a sadder one. ‘Truth is, I liked working for Raine. He was a dude. Look…’ He hauls himself up from the sofa. ‘I’ll show you what I’ve started.’
He gives Amber a tour of the digital editing suite and hard drives. It’s almost as packed as the negative archive, but unlike the hard copies, it’s all perfectly and logically ordered.
‘This was a bat-shit crazy mess when I got here,’ says Mika. ‘Like, what the hell did the last dude do all day?’ He goes into the editing software and navigates to a folder. ‘I even made a start scanning in a few negatives.’ He gestures at the big, slightly ancient scanner set up a few feet away from the screens. It’s a model Amber has used before. It’s old and obscure, but she knows you can get consistently great results from it if you know what you’re doing.
Mika clicks a folder, and a grid of images pops up on-screen. Even at that scale, the look of film is distinctive in colour and tone.
‘Can I take a look?’ Amber asks.
Mika jumps up from the seat, and Amber slides in. She double clicks an image, and it fills the screen. Then she zooms in, moving the cursor around to examine the detail. She does this a few more times with some other photos in the set.
‘Okay, most of these are all right, but have you checked the hypertone settings on some of the more contrasty ones?’
‘Say what?’
‘Look.’ She gestures, and Mika leans in. ‘That weird halo effect on the highlights.’ She points to a bright part of an image. It’s subtle, but there’s a slight banding round a bright area of the image where it meets a darker shade.
‘Oh… uh… is it? I thought that was the film.’
‘No, not the film — it’s across a lot of these. See.’ She points at a zoomed-in portion of another image to show him in detail. ‘I’ll have to rescan some of these.’
‘Sure, if you think so.’ Mika makes a sharp breathing noise and goes back to the sofa and his Diet Coke in a low sort of sulk. Amber doesn’t say anything, just smiles to herself. Boys with tech, never as clever as they think they are.
It’s a slow morning, moving boxes and sampling strips of negatives. Mika helps half-heartedly, but seems more interested in his phone.
Amber lays out the negatives in rows on a large lightbox embedded into a table next to the computers. She starts to pick over them with a magnifier. She can barely see the wood for the trees, but every now and then she finds an image of Benny’s that reaches out and pulls her in. The praying soldier before a battle — then the same face hours later, shattered and hopeless. The scramble of protesters running from tear gas, their eyes streaming. A small child holds a handgun up against their own face.
A little after midday, Mika says he’s going into the local village, Radlow, for his lunch. He pulls himself into some motorbike leathers that have been sitting in the corner and grabs a helmet. He reads the look Amber is giving him.
‘Yeah, I know. Sometimes I think it’s why Raine hired me, so we could talk bikes.’
‘Yours is the bike out front? Or the scooter?’
‘The scooter? C’mon.’ He flashes a cocky smile. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll ride carefully.’ And he leaves Amber alone in the room, thinking again about Benny’s last hours.
Her mobile buzzes with a message. It’s not a number she knows, but it’s signed off as Sam. There is lunch ready for her in the kitchen.
As she goes back towards the house, a strong wind is blowing, and the dense stripe of beech trees shudders.
A quicker, more definite movement catches her eye. Something is running, small and low down. Then it stops and looks up at Amber, eyes shining. It is a small deer. She and the animal are locked together for a moment. Then the deer tears off, leaving just the wind in the leaves.
There is no one in the kitchen, just a spread of sandwiches and salads laid out under plastic hoods like a corporate buffet, and a note from Sam saying she should help herself. So she sits and eats in silence, taking in the kitchen, which does not seem to have a mark of Benny anywhere in it.
As Amber is finishing her lunch, Yvey comes in. She doesn’t say much, but Amber can feel her eyes on her, as if she wants to say something but can’t pluck up the courage. Sure enough, when Amber gets up to go back to the studio, Yvey follows a little distance behind through the door into the garden.
‘Mind if I tag along?’
‘Sure.’
Yvey runs to catch up, a darting quality to her movements. She reminds Amber strangely of the deer. She is pretty, and she will be very beautiful like her mother, but there’s an uncertainty to her slightly elfin face, as if she’s not yet comfortable in who she is.
‘I’ve followed you for a bit,’ she says. Amber doesn’t quite get the phrasing, and the mental image unnerves her. Then Yvey holds up her phone. It clicks into place.
‘Oh, I see. On Instagram?’ She laughs.
‘I really like your work.’
Amber pulls out her own phone from her pocket. She doesn’t post very regularly on Instagram. She should do a better job at it. She should be better at social media all round. She should have a YouTube channel like all those men who rabbit on for hours with endless unboxings and tech reviews of the latest gear. It would make her more money than her actual photos.
She opens her own Instagram account and flicks to her followers. Then another piece falls into place: she remembers the strange way Yvey insisted on how her name should be said. She scrolls through her followers and finds the account: @_e_v. ‘Oh, you’re EV.’ She laughs again. ‘I follow you too. I like what you do.’
‘Really?’ Yvey sounds disbelieving. ‘You’re not just saying that?’
‘Honestly.’ It is the truth. Going on the average teenager, Yvey’s Instagram should be a wall of selfies and party videos, but it’s not. It’s full of video art: short clips and loops of abstracted shapes and patterns; minimalist hyperlapses of racing shadows and changing skies; stuttering, horror-inflected crawls through the undergrowth.
All Your Lies: A gripping psychological thriller that will keep you guessing to the very end Page 4
