Bochen grabs Cherry’s finger and squeezes it to shut her up. ‘Don’t ruin my reputation. What’s the next photo?’
‘It’s a video.’ I cue up Cao Fei’s Cosplayers video on Natalia’s computer. The video starts with young cosplayers acting out action or fantasy sequences in a range of busy city environments. Gradually, though, they’re shown hanging out in the city like normal teens, riding the subway, walking down the median strip of a busy highway, looking out at water, bored. Eventually they’re shown at home, still in their costumes and doing mundane things like scrolling on their phone or eating dinner in front of the TV.
It’s a combination of how they would like to be seen in their best fantasies, together with the bare reality of their lives.
‘Do you recognise any of those places?’ Natalia asks Cherry.
Cherry gives her a pitying look. ‘I’m not from Guangzhou.’
I turn away so Natalia doesn’t see me smirk. When we get going on the shoot everyone starts to get along a lot better.
I’ve asked Bochen and Cherry to bring their own costumes and direct us on how they want to be portrayed. It’s a lot more loose and random than what I did with Natalia, but I’m hoping it will capture something truthful.
Bochen wears a tiger onesie, stripes and ears and tail and all.
‘I’m a lazy tiger girl,’ she says. ‘I’m too lazy to do my homework, I’m too lazy to think about the future, I sit in my bedroom and do nothing all day.’
Natalia sets Bochen up on her bed and piles textbooks and stacks of paper around her. She finds her old Nintendo Playstation in a box under her bed. She brings up donuts and dirty plates from the kitchen and we arrange them around the bed as directed, along with our empty plastic cups.
I was worried that she was being kind of withdrawn once the others arrived, but Natalia is surprisingly meticulous when it comes to creating the set and she seems to enjoy being in the background for a change.
I start clicking and Tiger Bochen slumps on the bed with the Playstation controls in one hand and a half-eaten donut in the other. She looks hilarious.
‘Feels so gooooooooooood.’ She pretends to cram the donut in her mouth.
‘We got it!’ I say, after I’ve shot enough. I have no idea what Adut is going to think of these photos, or the other proper grown-up artists, but I’m having enough fun not to care. Yet.
Cherry has spent most of Bochen’s shoot locked in Natalia’s bathroom getting ready and when she emerges she is in full Snow White costume, Disney-style, with blue bodice, yellow skirt, puffy sleeves and bobbed black hair. The sanitised pretty movie version, not the disturbing Grimm’s version I’ve always liked.
‘I look pretty, don’t I?’ is the first thing she says and I immediately go into freefall about how we’re going to make this work. Natalia wears her scepticism plastered right across her face.
Cherry and Bochen tip out the seemingly dozens of bags they brought with them; plush animals of every colour and size and condition tumble out onto Natalia’s bed.
‘We got a bulk deal,’ Bochen explains.
Cherry pulls a giant pair of plastic novelty scissors out of the last bag.
‘I’m Snow White,’ she says, ‘if Snow White hated all the animals and chopped their heads off.’
Natalia looks like all of her Christmases have come at once.
For Cherry’s shoot we set up in the spare bedroom that Natalia’s sister has been staying in. Plush toy carcasses pile up around the room, mixed in with Olivia’s mess of black clothing, piles of novels, cigarette packets and old coffee mugs. Fairytale Cherry sits in the picturesque bay window holding up a severed rabbit head triumphantly. She is truly, truly scary. I don’t know how I missed this fact at school.
The more Cherry smiles the scarier she looks.
‘Don’t mess with the princess,’ she keeps saying.
Bochen is almost asleep in a pile of leftover toy limbs, while Natalia holds up a circular gold reflector to get the light on Cherry’s face. She’s biting her lip in concentration, working her arms hard to ping the light just right.
I take a moment in between clicks to check on Natalia, her dark under-eye circles, her bare head. She doesn’t look like she’s been eating much, but her focus is strong, the misery isn’t hanging over her so thickly as before. She might have even laughed a few times.
I’m going to find a way to do the photography elective next term. And maybe we’re all going to be all right.
DAY 79
I finally go back to school and it’s not the big deal I thought it would be. The thing about the Balmoral prison schedule is that you have to keep marching to each class at the appropriate time and sit still and not talk and wear the regimental uniform of the regimented and that leaves no time for drifting, no time for wandering off in your head and slipping off the face of the earth.
By lunch it’s apparent that spring has sprung at least for one day and there is actual blue sky and swords of sunlight piercing the atmosphere. Instead of skulking in the quad like we did last term we bleed out onto the oval and you couldn’t make grass this green in a factory.
Our year level loll about in small groups, sunbaking, gossiping, filming each other, making daisy-chain headpieces and other childish pastimes, I kid you not, and exams and final assessments are so many weeks away and not a bother at all and the official memorialising is over which means we can be sad on our own timetable now.
In a satellite city clump by the trees are Audrey and Petra and Brooke and the other boarders. Chloe wants me to shake hands make up with Petra, but I won’t. Milla, Claire, Lisbeth
