The Photographer's Wife

by Nick Alexander

  Barbara crouches down and helps Diane, still fighting with her hair, to brush it behind her ear. “Jesus, Diane,” she says. “How much have you had?”

  “No mush…” Diane says. “Some vodka. Maybe. An some wine. Where’s Tony?”

  Barbara sighs. “I told you. He’s gone. And he won’t be…” She lets her voice fade away. Because Diane’s chin has dipped to her chest. She looks as if she has fallen asleep.

  Barbara rubs one hand across her brow, then mutters, “Oh God,” and attempts to lift Diane to standing position. But it’s impossible. It’s like trying to manoeuvre a huge block of Chivers jelly.

  Out of other options, she heads back indoors and beckons from the lounge doorway to Jonathan. “Just stay there, Sophie. Just watch the television. STAY, I said!”

  Once the door is closed again, she explains quietly to Jonathan. “I’m really sorry but she’s blind drunk. Can you help me get her upstairs? I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Sure Mum,” he says with a shrug. He’s seen drunken people before. He knows the score.

  Together they manage to lift Diane to her feet and slowly but surely, one under each arm, they succeed in hauling her upstairs as well.

  “Why are drunks so heavy?” Jonathan asks, once Diane has flopped, with surprising elegance, onto the bed.

  “I don’t know. The weight of all the beer?”

  Jonathan grins at her. He enjoys these little jokes they share sometimes. It makes him feel grown-up. He folds his arms, then looks back at Diane and wrinkles his nose. “I’m never going to get drunk.”

  Barbara realises, out of the blue, that her son has become a man. It’s something in his stance. It’s so strange the way you notice these things, as if the change was sudden rather than progressive. “We’ll see,” she says quietly.

  “I won’t.”

  “Well good. Now, I’m going to have to stay with Diane a bit to make sure she’s alright, OK?”

  Jonathan nods.

  “So can you go and keep an eye on Sophie for me?”

  Another nod.

  “And be nice to her, OK? She’s your sister and she’s only ten. I think you forget that sometimes.”

  Jonathan pulls a face, suddenly a child again. “Hey, I’m always nice to her. Even if she is a dipstick.”

  Barbara watches him leave and then turns back to see that Diane has dribbled a little vomit onto her pillow. “Honestly woman!” she says. “Look at the state of you!”

  She goes to the bathroom for a towel and then returns to clean up the mess. As she wipes Diane’s mouth, she unexpectedly speaks. “Lasangeles,” she mumbles. She could be dreaming. “Los Angeles!” she says again, more clearly.

  “Yes. You’re leaving soon. Tony told me.”

  “Yesoon,” Diane says.

  After a pause where she closes her eyes and her head lolls anew, she opens them again and adds, “He won’t come. The bastard.”

  Barbara’s hand freezes in mid swipe. “Who won’t come?”

  Diane almost smiles as she struggles to focus on Barbara. “To Los Angeles.”

  “Who won’t come to Los Angeles?” As far as Barbara knows, Diane is single at the moment.

  “I love you but you’re stupid,” Diane says. “You should leave him.”

  Barbara stands sharply and steps backwards, like someone moving away from a snake. She covers her mouth with one trembling hand. She realises that here, in this instant, she can let this thing that’s been lurking at the back of her mind surface. She can ask Diane here and now if she wants. With the state that she’s in, she can probably even make her reply. She stands there quivering as she hesitates.

  “Where’s Sophie?” Diane asks, sounding about five. “I want to see Sophie.”

  Barbara shakes her head. She can’t do it. She just can’t deal with all the ricochets of finding out, one way or another. What would she do anyway? Leave him because not enough of him was hers? That’s like turning off a tap because it’s not running fast enough to quench your thirst. She’d end up with nothing, all over again. And what would be the point of that?

  “Tomorrow,” she says, icily. “You can see her tomorrow when you’re sober. And then you can go and live in bloody Los Angeles.”

  She turns away from the bed but then glances back at Diane, already snoring again, her mouth wide open. People can die if they’re sick while asleep. Barbara knows this. She should move Diane onto her side the way she does with Tony, just in case.

  She observes her body failing to act. She sees herself not do this. She watches as cold-hearted Barbara walks from the room, closing the door behind her.

  She thinks, I am a terrible person. She glances up at the ceiling. “It’s up to you,” she says. “You decide.”

  Back in the lounge, The Good Life is on the television. The TV audience are laughing heartily.

  2013 - Bermondsey, London.

  When Sophie arrives at the gallery, she pauses in front of the building and stares at it from a distance. It seems barely possible that her images, next to her father’s, will be hanging here by tonight. She taps one foot nervously and wonders if she drank too much coffee this morning. But no, that’s not it. She’s actually fighting the urge to jump up and down like a ten-year old.

  It’s not the White Cube of old, of course. It’s not the fabulous twenties building in the centre of Hoxton that she loved so dearly. That White Cube is gone now.

  No, this is the new, much larger White Cube in Bermondsey, a vast concrete, Germanic building from the seventies divided into a whole array of galleries. Does being in one of the galleries of the new White Cube have as much cachet as being in the old White Cube? Perhaps not. But it’s still one of the most prestigious private galleries in London. It’s still one hell of a result.

  “Cheers Brett,” Sophie says quietly, as she heads across the forecourt to the entrance.

  Inside, a pretty, bearded, tattooed hipster in bright yellow chinos and a denim shirt crosses the lobby to meet her. “Sophie?” he says, running a hand through his heavily coiffed hair.

  Sophie nods. “You must be Paul, right?”

  “That’s me. Paul Jelly, at your service,” he says. “I’m here to help with the hanging.”

  “I thought I was here to help you.”

  “Huh!” Paul Jelly says. “You wish. Come through!”

  Sophie follows him past the bookshop (she imagines their book in the window) and past a couple of current exhibitions, a sculptor, a painter, another sculptor.

  As they approach a blanked out door beyond a sign (Hanging in Progress) she can barely breathe.

  “So,” Paul says, pushing open the door. “We’re in here. All day!”

  “Oh my God!” Sophie exclaims as she steps into the room. She twists her head to take in the bright vastness of the space. “It’s huge!”

  “It’s the biggest one we have,” Paul says proudly. “But from the size of the crates, I’d say you’ll have no trouble filling it. Am I right?”

  “They arrived, then?”

  “Sure. They’re un-crating now. Come.”

  He leads her through another door and down a corridor to a delivery area where two more stunningly good-looking young men are working. Oh, to be twenty again! Sophie thinks.

  “Hey guys,” Paul says. “This is Sophie. Sophie, Jake and Joe.”

  Sophie waves. “Hi Jake. Hi Joe.”

  “Sophie here is the artist,” Paul tells them.

  “Only of half of the works.”

  “The colour ones, right?” Jake/Joe says.

  “Exactly. The others were taken by my father. He only really did black and white.”

  “I don’t suppose they had colour back then, did they?” Joe/Jake says. “‘Cos they’re, like, really old, right? Like, before I was born.”

  Sophie smiles and nods. “Yes, um, some of them are almost as old as me,” she says.

  It takes all day to hang the exhibition. One by one Jake and Joe uncrate and haul the prints through
to the South Gallery, and one by one Paul and Sophie hang them.

  On the square southern wall, they put a four meter self portrait of her father and, on the opposite northern wall, an identically sized self portrait of Sophie.

  Hers is colour, taken in the harsh light of a five-hundred watt studio lamp. It’s not a flattering photo by any means and it’s certainly not a fashion shot. But it is beautiful. It does, as she had hoped, ooze reality from every wrinkle, humanity from every pore.

  Along the side walls, they alternate Tony’s sombre news photos with Sophie’s brightly coloured images. Grimy children play with a hosepipe in a black and white image and right next to it a joyous little girl flies through the air above a fluorescent green bouncy castle. The famous woman-on-a-beach lies next to row upon row of lobster pink foreigners lined up on a different beach in Benidorm. A grey queue of miserable commuters stand in the London rain waiting for a double-decker bus while, next door, a blurred river of humanity streams down the aggressively modern escalators of Canary Warf.

  The space is perfect and the photos look as good as they can but slowly, surely, like the bubbles of a glass of Champagne going flat, Sophie’s excitement vanishes into thin air.

  With each image hung, a voice in her head becomes a little stronger, a little louder, a little more forceful. With each comment that Paul makes, “Wow I love the colours in that, Sophie,” or “Gosh, that’s one happy picture,” she feels a little less centred.

  By the time they hang the final images, a three-by-three matrix of smaller photos, she finds that her self confidence has almost entirely vanished. She feels like an impostor here, like a child playing an adult’s game – like a girl playing a boy’s game. She feels, when it comes down to it, like a daughter using her father’s very real talent as a smokescreen.

  For isn’t that the truth? Isn’t she here merely because she is the Great Anthony Marsden’s daughter? Isn’t any interest White Cube may be showing in her, little more than contractual? Isn’t she simply the price they are having to pay to be allowed to host what everyone really wants to see: her dad’s pictures?

  She regrets her choice of images now. She should have done black and white. She should have chosen images with more clout, with more heft, with more misery. It’s all too gay (in the old sense, not the Paul Jelly sense of that word). It’s all too colourful. It’s all too bright and light and downright jolly. And as she hangs the final image, she knows exactly what everyone will think: What a waste. What a shame she’s not as good as her father was!

  She walks to the centre of the room now, and sinks onto the hard white bench. She palms her eyes in the hope that when she reopens them, something will have changed, in the hope that when she reopens them, this won’t all still be nothing more than a ghastly mistake, perhaps the biggest mistake she has ever made.

  Paul – lovely, friendly, supportive Paul – comes and sits beside her. “I think it looks fabulous,” he says. “Don’t you?”

  Sophie un-palms her eyes and looks but it’s even worse than before. Her pretensions of grandeur leap from the walls in pyrotechnic colour. She can see nothing else and wants suddenly to cry, to scream, to run amok and rip all her pictures from the walls and stamp on them.

  At this precise moment, the door to the gallery opens and Paul stands urgently and heads across the room to turn away this precocious visitor. “We’re hanging in here, I’m afraid. You can’t come–”

  “It’s OK, Paul,” Sophie says. “He’s my boyfriend. Hi Brett.”

  Brett moves a few feet into the room and performs a double take. “Wow!” he says. “Just… like… wow!”

  “It’s cool, huh?” Paul says.

  “Oh, it’s very cool. So you got it all hung, huh?”

  “I think it looks great,” Paul says. “I’m not sure about Sophie though. I think she’s not happy with something.”

  Brett glances at Sophie with a puzzled expression, then, ever the professional, instead of joining her, he starts to walk around, pausing for a few moments in front of each image pair. When he reaches the far side of the room he looks at the two portraits on the end walls and then, finally, joins Sophie in the middle. “So, what’s up?” he asks.

  Sophie bites her lip and shakes her head. Brett can see that her eyes are glistening.

  “Paul – was it Paul? Yes, Paul. Do you think we could–”

  “Sure,” Paul says. “I’ll give you two some space.” He’s happy to escape.

  Once he has gone, Brett slides onto the bench and puts one arm around Sophie’s shoulders. “Is it your dad?” he asks.

  Sophie shakes her head and wipes away a tear, then says, with difficulty, “They’re just not up to it.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “My images. They’re the best ones I’ve ever taken but… they’re still just… just girly bubbles of fluff next to Dad’s. I tried so hard, Brett, but look. Just look.”

  “I think you’re–”

  “I want to take all mine out. I really want to do that, Brett. Can I? Can I do that?”

  Brett laughs at this, genuinely, heartily.

  “I’ll take that as a ‘no’ then,” Sophie sniffs.

  He gives Sophie a squeeze and snorts again. “That’s not why I’m laughing, babe. I think your images look awesome.”

  Sophie glances sideways at him. She starts to cry freely now. She pushes Brett away so that she can fumble in her bag for a tissue. “But they don’t Brett,” she says through fresh tears. “They look like pretty magazine pieces. And next to Dad’s, they look even worse. People are going to think that I’m taking the piss.”

  Brett rubs her back briefly and then unexpectedly stands. She wonders if he’s going to simply walk out. He’s not always that good with her girly moods.

  Instead, he parks himself in the middle of the floor and stares at one wall. After about a minute, he turns ninety degrees and studies the next wall. Only when he has finished his three-sixty scan of the room does he turn back to face Sophie, who is by now watching him with all the terror of the executioner’s next victim.

  “Look, I see what you’re saying,” Brett says.

  Sophie starts to cry again.

  “Hey stop. I haven’t finished. Gee, Sophe! Stop! For God’s sake!”

  Sophie manages to stem the tears and looks up at him again.

  “I see what you’re saying but you’re wrong. That’s what I was gonna to say.”

  Sophie rubs her nose on the back of her hand. “You think?”

  Brett nods. “If the world was grey…” he says thoughtfully. He glances around the room and then starts again, speaking more slowly. “If the world was black and white and all grime and misery, then you’d be right. But it’s not, Sophe, it’s not like that. It’s also colour and life and joy. It’s grinning kids on play castles and perfectly contented old-folks with ices. And the juxtaposition that you’ve created here, between each of your father’s images and each of yours, is just so… so joyous Sophe. That’s the only word I can think of. The world moves on and things do get better. It’s uplifting. It’s brilliant. I wasn’t expecting this. But I’m stunned. I’m… I’m moved, actually. Really. That’s it. I’m moved.”

  Sophie bursts into tears for the third time but these are tears of relief. She stands and drops her bag to the floor and runs into Brett’s arms. “God, Brett,” she says. “You have no idea what that means to me. I’ve been feeling so scared all day.”

  Brett hugs her and then pushes her away so that he can stare into her eyes. “You silly, silly girl,” he says. “You’ve done everything you wanted, here. And some. You’ve got nothing to be scared about. They’re gonna be blown away.”

  “You really think that? You’re not just saying?”

  Brett shrugs. “Hey, come on. You know me, babe,” he says. “When did I ever just say.”

  1982 - Hackney, London.

  It is Sunday morning. Tony and Sophie are seated at the dining table awaiting the cooked breakfast which Barbara is busy f
rying.

  “Why don’t you open it, Dad?” Sophie asks. Sophie, like Barbara, doesn’t much like unopened letters but she considers an unopened parcel an affront to all humanity.

  “I’ll open it when I’m good and ready,” Tony says, glancing nervously at the package on the sideboard.

  “I think Sophie’s right,” Barbara says, taking her life in her hands. “If you open it today, you can take it to Portsmouth with you.”

  “Huh!” Tony says. “I’m not going to something as important as Portsmouth with a brand new camera. That’s for sure.”

  The package is from Pentax. It contains a camera, an amazing whole new kind of camera which knows how to focus itself, a camera which calculates its own exposure and sets its own shutter speed. Unfortunately, Tony doesn’t much like amazing new things and his tension around the package has been palpable for days.

  “Please open it,” Sophie pleads. “It’s been there for years.”

  “I’ve told you a million times not to exaggerate,” Tony jokes.

  “OK, weeks then.”

  “Days,” Tony says. “It came on Saturday.”

  “It actually came last Saturday, so that is more than a week,” Barbara comments, from the stove. “Why don’t you let Sophie open it? She’ll enjoy finding out how it works.”

  An unspoken decision has been made to allow Sophie to follow in her father’s footsteps. Barbara did everything in her power to push Jonathan in a different direction. Photography had seemed such a dangerous way to attempt to earn a living back then. It had seemed to offer little more than the promise of yet another generation of hardship. But having saved Jon from the flights and fancies of the art world (he’s at college, right now, training to be a quantity surveyor) the world changed. Photography suddenly became important. It became a proper job that could provide a living wage. The brand new kitchen around them, the eggs, the bacon, the mushrooms in the pan, the refrigerator beside her (stacked full)… Yes, these are all proof of it.