The Camera

A real camera with film and everything is not something you see very frequently these days. Everyone takes pictures with their phones, don’t they? Or with DSLRs.

But at the festival they were selling real cameras at the stall where they sold face paints, ponchos to protect against the inevitable English rain, blankets to set out on the grass to sit on.

She said ‘Let’s buy a camera.’

‘Why’ you asked

‘Because it will be special. Because then we will have special pictures of us together at this event.’

And so you bought the camera, along with two blankets. The money all adds up at these things. Fish and chips costs £15 or something ridiculous like that. But you don’t think about the money because all you are thinking about is this special time with her.

Do you remember when I filmed you in the hot house house in Berlin? You were walking in front of me, looking like  little girl in the oversized puffa jacket you bought especially for the trip as you pointed out this plant and that, the ones you liked best?

The trip had been impromptu, organised with a scramble at the last minute, but now, with the difficulties that later ensued, when you looked back it seemed like a golden age. When we bought pizza from the Arabic Diner over the road and ate it in the apartment. When we lazed around in bed and very nearly didn’t go to the club that night. When I very nearly didn’t want to go because, well, I’m over 40 and bed often seems like the better option, and you’re under 30 and aren’t as enamoured of the whole club thing as I was at your age.

But we went anyway, and saw all of the strange, decadent people on their leather and black latex, and we fucked by the stage to the techno and Blue Monday.

I think you surprised yourself that night. You hadn’t done anything quite like that before.

Winter mornings in Berlin taxis driving back to the apartment are the best. The cold blue gleam of the city. A sullen mystique in those anonymous city blocks. There is sexual promise in the concrete. And tiredness makes my vision blurry, and overlaid with a blue filter, and everything seems dreamy and unreal.

So at the festival I bought the camera, along with the blankets, and we posed with it in the bar, which they’d made to look like a club from a movie set, and took selfies like they had to back in prehistoric times when mobile phones hadn’t yet been invented, and there was no screen to look at yourself in, and we took photos of the bar, and we got a woman to take photos of us together, and I took one of you and you took one of me.

It was teenage stuff, fun. And that’s what I love about you, the way you make me feel young. The way your energy penetrates me and shows me what it is like to have that boundless energy, that willingness to reach out and grasp life. That’s what you’re meant to have when you’re young, after all (I’m not sure I ever had it).

But then there was that difficult time, in Budapest, when you cried, and I tried to sleep, knowing you’d got up and gone downstairs, and not knowing what was wrong, but knowing that something was wrong and that it was almost certainly my fault.

And then, after that, not a severing as such—nothing so brutal as that—but a drifting apart. Prolonged silences where once there had been lively chatter. An absence more than a presence. We met a couple of times, but your messages became fewer and further between. Well, things were changing in your life too—a new job, new responsibilities and all. Perhaps it was all easy to explain away.

I carried the camera up to the Boots on Oxford Street, where I asked for two sets of the photos, one for you and one for me. Well, we both have a right to the memories, yes? I felt a little pathetic as I did so since I have no way of knowing whether you’re even interested in keeping them or not. But it felt important, somehow, like I was honouring something that was real in the past, and—you never know—perhaps still is.

The story of our lives is incredibly complex and incredibly simple all at the same time, and none of us can know for sure in advance the full extent of the role we will play in someone else’s life.

If we play a significant role at all.

I suppose the only thing that really matters is that we are kind to one another. But since we will all be dead in a few decade’s time, does even that matter very much?

I will pick up the photographs this Saturday.

I wonder how they turned out?

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