You off on the hippy trail? his brother had said, before he went travelling. That was what some of their friends were suddenly doing, taking off in buses or camper vans, overland to India, coming back with long hair and chillums and ill-cured Afghan coats.
No. Not exactly.
That was when he first put a word to what he meant to be. A photographer. Though he didn’t say it to Richard but only to himself.
He remembered what it had meant when got his first camera. It was on his twelfth birthday. He had been asking for one all year. His birthday was in June, just before the end of the summer term, and all of the holiday that followed he took the camera about with him, photographing everything in sight. That was when it started. He took pictures of his mother, but she got cross when he took the pictures as she hated being photographed when she wasn’t prepared, so he took some of Richard, and dozens of Billy. Billy was great for pictures. Billy at work, with a spade or a barrow, with his cap and his whiskers and his old lined face looking like a countryman from any past time since photography was invented. It was great that he had the pictures, because Billy died that next winter. The best he took that September just before they were due to go back to school. He went with Billy and Richard when they went shooting. He took his camera along instead of a gun, photographed the two of them as they walked and aimed and shot, photographed the dog waiting, the dead pheasants close up with their red-rimmed eyes and fabulous feathers.
Richard liked those pictures but all the same he thought it was only a hobby. Like cricket, or shooting. It wasn’t something to do with your life.
Richard had begun to take the farm in hand the year he went to university. He worked with him over that first summer’s harvest, but he didn’t go back to university at the end of it. He took the money Richard paid him and bought the newest Pentax. He knew what to buy. He knew something about photography by then.
Great camera, Richard said. What did it cost you?
It cost him a lot. His travelling would have to be cheap because he had spent so much on the camera. He would have to earn along the way. The camera had to be a good one because it was to be his eye on the world. It would be the means to give what he saw physical presence. The evidence of his seeing – or of his being, if you followed the thought through. That, his grand notion. He was going to go travelling and take pictures. He would be what he did and not what he was. What he did would make him who he was or who he would become. He would become whoever he was at any moment, with a pack on his back and a camera around his neck. Seeing the world, whatever he saw. Would he then be what he saw? Or would he always be what he had seen? (Or when he came home would he be just the same?)
Richard wouldn’t get it, what he planned to do. A photographer, what sort of job was that? As if he didn’t know. It was being something, someone, other than who he had been until now. Richard wouldn’t know anything about that either. Richard had only ever wanted to be Richard, so far as anyone could tell.
When he first came back to England in December, he had laid out all of his pictures, a shiny mass of photos on the dining-room table. It looked like Pelmanism, all those memories laid out on the table to be sorted and grouped together, in the dining room where they had once played cards, the cards face down across the tablecloth.
Richard came in to see. Richard was never so good at cards. It was the one game that Jonny could win despite being the youngest, as soon as he could read the numbers. He could look at the table all spread with the blue-and-red-backed playing cards and know where the matching ace was, and the eights and the twos and the kings, pick them up in a run as the game went on and the pairs revealed themselves, tight with the excitement of knowing, watching his mother’s hand hovering close to the card he knew but then diving elsewhere and picking up wrong – or sometimes he suspected that that was only a ploy, that really she knew and it was only a ploy to allow him to win, once in a while, at something – then watching with glee when it was Richard’s turn and Richard’s hand moved blind, wrong and wrong again and right only by chance, because cards just wasn’t his sort of thing.
Now Richard picked up a black-and-white print of a street cramped between high-rise buildings, vertical shop signs bearing Chinese characters. Richard was sifting through his three years. Richard himself three years older.
That Japan?
Hong Kong.
One from the next pile. A wider street, figures made nondescript by rain, umbrellas above their heads.
That’s Tokyo.
Not my scene, Richard said, putting them down and looking further, restless, at one pile then another, flicking through the prints, the contact prints, the sleeves of negatives. Nothing for him there; not his turn now.
You took an awful lot of pictures.
Some of them aren’t worth keeping.
Pelmanism. What matched with what? Shuffle the memories, see what matches with what, what
