‘You don’t look quite disconsolate enough.’ Muses the
photographer, fag in mouth, rising from his crouched position and stretching
out his back, scrunching his face as he does so.
‘What do you want me to do?’ Asks the woman on the bed in
the bare room. She sits up straight and flexes her wrists. She aches from
resting her elbows on her knees, arching her back and cradling her head in her
hands.
He runs his hand through his hair, unconsciously prompting
her to mirror and brush hers from her forehead.
‘I just think you need to look more…’ searching for a word, ‘bereft.’
The sun has rounded the wall of the adjacent building and
filters through the blind to her left, his right. Now, the crisp spring light
should juxtapose nicely with her affected despair. She intuits that this is the
moment to try again, stretches and returns to her pose.
His gaze, via the lens, is a funhouse mirror image of what
she is used to: desire is warped into pity which carries with it its own
eroticism. The shutter clicks and she is incarcerated – ready to have the
fantasies of the viewer, the writer, the editor layered over her, complicit in
her own manifold abuse. Rather than a demonstration of power, this is its
post-coital calm, it reclines, relaxes and admires. This is the tropical lagoon
after the hurricane and she has become the island – still, essentially, the
same shape but somehow irrevocably different.
And now a template, a byword, a symbol – a graphic
replacement for understanding.
He packs up his equipment. She hops off the bed, stretches
again and considers where to have coffee – she has to remain in town as later
she is excitedly presenting a graph to the board, then relaxing in the park
with a girlfriend and then teaching maths.
