Month: December 2008 (Page 4 of 5)

The soft morning sunlight slowly trickled over the village like soft golden syrup as the sun came up that morning. From above the village, it looked to Peter as though someone had opened an unseen blind, slowly, and light had spilled across the landscape, like paint from a tin carelessly kicked over.

He was glad of the light; soon he would be in his bed and his younger brother would be about the task of watching the sheep. To many it might seem to be a dull existence, the life of a shepherd, but that night alone he ahd chased off two different wild dogs and less than a week before he had been required to face down a family group of wolves who seemed to want to eat his sheep. When not protecting the flock from the local fauna there was plenty of time to think and contemplate the world, and even to read. His father had been adamant that he learn to read and now he was almost never away from home without a book in his knapsack.

He could hear Tom coming up the hill, and so he got to his feet to greet his brother.

“Honestly, Sal, I don’t know what else to do.”

Her friend shook her head and smiled.

“Let me get this straight, you have made eyes at him, squeezed and hung on longer than the friendly hug, and even landed a kiss on the lips, rather than the safe cheek or forehead , and he hasn’t realised that you quite fancy him? Outrageous! What with men being such perceptive and frankly psychic creatures. He’s just toying with you Jen. He knows you’re panting for him and he just wants to see how hard you’re prepared to work!”

Sal tried to hold her serious face as she finished her analysis, but it only held for a moment before she collapsed onto the bed in peals of laughter.

Jen looked at her, confused, and started flapping her mouth like a fish, failing to come back with a witty rejoinder.

As Sal recovered her composure she saw this display of speechless frustration and nearly lost it again.

“Jen you need to talk to him. Do you know how many times most men get slapped for getting all those signs wrong before they get to thirty?”

What does this mean? She clearly enjoys being close to me, being held by me, even to kiss my cheek. Normally I can tell if the affection that a woman shows to me is sisterly or not; chaste or not. This woman I cannot decode. It’s as if she can only broadcast in NTSC and I am PAL, as if her messages are enigma encoded, but using tomorrow’s keyword and I only have today’s.

It’s fair to say that I am not confident at the moment; part of my uncertainty is a rather pathetic ‘are you sure? really?’ reaction to signals that in my youth I bolted at, without any concern for the potential awkwardness if I had misunderstood them.

Is she attractive, you ask? I find her very attractive. I mean to do her no disservice in saying that she is not the kind of attractive that ends up on the front of magazines or in music videos; in fact I mean to honour her by saying such. She is beautiful indeed, but more than that there is a spark in her eyes and a candour in her character that is intoxicating. I should just ask her? Kiss her?

The moments ticked by at a snail’s pace, time slowed down by the weight of realisation as we all saw the truth in what Philip had just said. It was still hanging there;

“You don’t have any rights, you fools. You’re all here trying to find a way to improve education and you haven’t realised that the people who really own our country do not want the vast majority to be educated, or liberated in any way. Who would run the machines, do the boring clerical work? Don’t you children realise that there is no power-block currently in the world that could survive an entire generation thinking for itself?”

We were all looking at each other, and then at the floor or desks or our hands, desperate to not make eye contact and find acceptance in the eyes that we met. It was too hard to imagine; surely none of us were prepared to be that cynical?

I looked up and allowed my gaze to find Amy’s. She was crying, silently. I let her see my own pain, hoping that this small act of solidarity, in hope, might in some way touch her soul.

“Do you hear my voice, Olivia? Is it familiar to thine ear?”

She stirred, her heavy eyes eventually yielding to her will to see. As she looked around she realised that she was not in her bed chamber. Not only was she not where she expected to be, but she was tied to this bed and that was definitely out of the ordinary for her. In the dim light she could see several indistinct shapes; were they people watching her?

“Have you remembered me yet, Olivia? Does my voice move your memory?”

She looked around, trying to find the source of the disembodied voice and her eyes fell upon Sebastian. She wondered why he was not moving, and the longer she looked the more she started to realise that something was wrong. He was not blinking,and his head was at an odd angle. She struggled against her bonds to get a better look;

“Ah you have spied your husband, I see. He screamed for you as I lifted his heart out of his chest, you know. Here, have some more light so that you can see.”

More light fell upon him and she screamed in pain.

“You have to help me get into his office. He’s hiding something, and I think it’s got to do with the disappearances that have been happening.”

I could not believe what I was hearing. My normally perfectly sane friend Sandra had clearly been abducted and replaced by a character from an Enid Blyton novel or a Nancy Drew tale. I raised an eyebrow;

“San, are you seriously telling me that you not only want me to help you break into the Head of English Literature’s office, but that the reason you want me to do that is because you think that he’s the one abducting cats, even though no one is willing to confirm that there is any evidence of cat abductions? Honestly, San, have you been drinking Red Bull again?”

She looked at me with that angry, stubborn stare and practically fizzed with frustration.

“Stop talking at me like that, okay? I know you think I’m crazy, but I saw him from the staffroom window yesterday. He thought that no one was watching, he was out by his car, and there were three dead cats in his car boot.”

So it’s not all glamour. When I tell people that I am a freelance photographer the first thing they ask is how on Earth I make money; to be honest I am very cagey about that, after all there are far too many of us already. Once we’ve talked briefly about the ins and outs of why it’s a lot of hard work and you’re only as good as your last shoot, then comes the question that they’ve been dying to ask. I should clarify that this question is not asked by everyone, but it is not exclusively asked by men, either.

“Do you fuck / sleep with / shag [delete as appropriate or add your own cliché here] loads of hot models then?”

Let’s clear this up once and for all; owning a camera is not a license to be an asshat. Sure I’ve had the odd tumble, but it’s been with people I’ve got to know, on long trips, not as a coda to a quick two hour shoot for Marie Claire. Let’s clear this up too; models are not whores. Some of them are promiscuous, some of them are not, just like people of any other profession; the women and the men.