23. Excavations

2nd draft of a story included in my end-of-year portfolio.

I have the photographs before me. They are spread out, like an ornate Japanese fan. Night came on some time ago, and I did not stand and switch on the light. But I can, for my sins, still see.

I do not know where or when I recovered them. They are already coated with dust again from sitting on my desk for weeks. Nonetheless, they do not show any age: the dress of the girl whose photo occupies the centre of my desk is as vividly scarlet, the flowers around its hem as white, as I imagine they were when first taken. She sits in a field, patches of daisies scattered behind, an acoustic guitar by her skirt, which sits placidly on a leg brought up to her body, thin as a switch. Her arms loop around her knee as if she were holding a dog. This is her only photo: there is nothing of her other than that smile, perturbing in its reserved curve, its flash of utterly white teeth, like the opening of a bean pod. I knew her, after then – we talked, sometimes, I’m sure. But the only extant information of her is that rictus. She is with others, whom I knew, also after these first days. In the other photos, they are gathered in twos or threes, the camera sometimes tilted at a crazy angle, the frame perhaps severing away half a face – for some, that is all I have. Some instinct other than that of survival draws them together, touching, clasping. No matter how long I look, it remains unknown. Skin, hands and hair blur into incomprehensible geometries. I pick up one, dust it off, scrutinise: a young man and his lady friend, slightly off-centre, almost compacted into one slithering shape. Their eyes are arrogant and supplicating: they know that the camera makes them, just as without them, there would be no photograph.

I stand, my body cracking out of inertia, and shuffle to the kitchen. Its unlit corners, crowded with black heaps, are a foreign territory. It is the places that come back, again and again: a palm tree, strung with fairy lights, people surrounding it in the background, the lit vectors of the city spilling away over the wall surrounding it. In one of the photographs, a young man plays rough-trade with it, his girl companion half-heartedly joining in. A slash of black hair frames her eyes, lit by the flash like a cat’s. I feel in these photographs, I am always just off-frame – in this one, sipping miserly at a Corona. But of course, I know I am not. If there is one fact they testify to, it is that. Everything else is supposition. Looking through the open kitchen window, down at the city, I know that this tableau of lights will have disappeared by morning. To have it set down in chemicals, unchanging – that is the thing. Everything else is tawdry imitation.

Standing over my desk, I glance down at them. When I try to remember, they come back, frozen and projected from that time, as if through a magic lantern. The geography of a face, certain senses of personality, affection. Where did they go, who were tied to these things? Where did I, to lose them? Of course, these are not my memories. I look at the arc of an arm, the tautening of skin around a cheekbone raised in smiling, the red cavern of a shout, and wonder where I was when all of this was happening. Dead? Dreaming? Some other world may have harboured me, but I do not remember it. The only, ignominious one left me is this, where the only voice is the October wind battering my window. They are the surface traces of everything that was never mine, like the coils of a sea-ammonite in chalk, the strata going down and down. When I try to remember these things – the heat of a hand around a shoulder, breath-explosion in another’s face, the ambience of beings – the only thing that comes is the heather blazing into colour on the scrubland, in the late sunlight, a fieldfare’s song whistling down from the distance.

There are two more photos of them in the fields. In one, three of them – two young men with scraggly hair, and another girl with the guitar – are sat around a fire of dead logs and ivy, more smoke than flame. In the other, the guitar-case lies by it, a copy of Shelley’s The West Wind and Other Poems sitting on its lid. Outside, I can feel already the evening’s coming frost preparing to seep in. They are saints, pasted into the gold frame of an icon. For them, it was the summer.