Page 106 of Little Wing
She looked through the other prints. ‘Your photographs are beautiful, Dougie,’ she said. ‘It’s like your eyes see things differently.’
‘Shall we go and eat?’
‘And that box, though – is that more photographs?’
Dougie regarded the box that he’d brought back from Harris. Energy seemed to vibrate between it and him. His head was full and his appetite had gone. Here’s my can of worms, Nell, he thought. Here’s Pandora’s box. Open it at your peril – and mine.
But Nell was looking at him intently, affection criss-crossed with a little confusion at his sudden silence. And Dougie thought then that it might just be safe now, to lift the lid on what had been.
‘The box is what I was talking about earlier,’ he said quietly. ‘This is what I need to show you. What I want you to see.’
He brought it back to the sofa, placing it on his knee, his hands gentle and protective but holding the lid down firmly. And just then, Dougie thought that it wasn’t a very big box to contain such monumental contents, undisturbed for so many years.
‘At college, my tutor used to bang on about Caravaggio. She believed the artist invented cinematic light. She taught me to look, to really look, to elicit the inner light of a subject. I always remember her telling me tofind the hidden darkness and illuminate it.’ Dougie glanced at the box and looked at Nell. ‘I was good, Nell. I was bloody good, aye, so I was. I won all the prizes at college and when I left, that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to photograph significance meaningfully and beautifully.’
Nell’s eyes were wide. She sensed this was a prelude.
‘Really, a camera is just a gadget,’ Dougie said. ‘It’s inanimate, it’s designed to work, not feel. In essence, the camera is just a fancy, clever conduit between the photographer’s eye and the subject. Click – and there you have it. The truth be told for all to behold year after year after year. Like Frank’s beautiful photographs, Nell, in his old black album – as relevant and vital today as the day they were taken. That’s what the camera should do.’
Dougie breathed deeply.
‘But the eye – the eye is different. The eye should detect, draw to the surface the very essence for the camera to blink-capture in its mechanical moment.’ He looked at Nell and then he looked at the box. ‘It’s just that Daisy is in here – and I haven’t looked at these photographs for over ten years.’ He paused. ‘But three weeks ago, when I was leaving, finally, for the airport, I told myself it’s time. So I brought this box back with me. Because I saw the way you dealt with pain and it had an impact on me.’ Dougie took his hands off the lid and cupped them around Nell’s face. ‘And I’ve thought of you so much, so much,’ he said quietly. ‘So I know it’s time.’
Nell took Dougie’s hands away, kissed them and held them in hers. Then she took the box and placed it on her lap and slowly, tenderly, lifted the lid.
Daisy.
Nell smiled at her.
Hello, Daisy.
Daisy was just a normal pretty girl with late-1980s hair and clothes almost identical to those Nell had worn back then. She was smiling for the camera, smiling for her boyfriend who was probably calling outCheese!There were no snapshots, just beautiful portraits printed eight inches by six. There were eleven of them. Five in colour, six in black-and-white. Four were indoors, the rest were outdoors mostly in calm weather, two in the wind with Daisy’s hair whipping around her face. Nell didn’t recognize the indoor location but she knew where the rest were, she knew that light, she knew that wind, she knew the fuzz and suck of the moors slapped hard every now and then by the blunt bulk of primordial rock.
Nell looked at the photographs carefully, compassionately, smiling at the girl who smiled emptily back at her.
‘But can you see it?’ Dougie asked, his voice hollow and wretched and suddenly Nell was aware he was focusing directly ahead, that he hadn’t looked at the photographs at all.
‘See what?’
‘In her eyes?’
Nell looked at the photograph of Frank that was to her side. His eyes drew her down deep into the soul of the man. But Daisy – her eyes were shallow, they had a flatness, like a footfall on concrete rather than on sand.
‘Dougie,’ Nell said gently, ‘there is little to see in her eyes.’
‘The distress,’ Dougie said, ‘the helplessness, the terrible knowledge she had of what she was going to do.’
‘No, Dougie,’ Nell said. ‘It’s not there.’ What Nell saw was a girl not hugely bothered about having her photograph taken or by the man taking it. Smile! Say cheese! Come on, Daisy. Fuck’s sake, Dougie.
‘But I should have seen it,’ Dougie said. ‘That was meant to be my skill, my gift. That’s what I won prizes for. What I trained to do. When I looked through the lens at her, I should have seen it.’
Nell looked at him closely. Carefully, she turned Dougie’s face towards her, insisting that he look at her. ‘It’s not there, Dougie. You could not see what really wasn’t there. And never mind the naked eye, even a camera with the most powerful lens in the world could not capture what was not there.’
‘Why did I not know? My stupid fucking eyes!’ he whispered. ‘Ten days later, Nell. Ten days later she was dead.’
‘And you’ve spent every day since wondering – torturing yourself – why you didn’t know and what you could have done?’
‘Not every day,’ said Dougie. ‘There were six months when I was so off my face I didn’t have a single viable thought – and another six months when I was a monosyllabic lump being cared for by my father.’
