The Girl Behind the Camera

Imani sent the photograph at two seventeen.

I was standing in the kitchen, trying to decide whether a bowl of cereal counted as lunch if you ate it resentfully. Sam had gone out again, this time to speak to Dex. He had promised to return before Mum. I no longer found his promises particularly informative.

In the photograph, I stood in the service passage with an extension cable looped over one arm. I was looking away from the camera, towards a doorway out of the frame. My hair had escaped its clip. There was a dark mark under one eye that I hoped was a shadow and suspected was mascara.

It was a good picture. That annoyed me. I would have preferred to look incompetent at a time when I had been incompetent.

Thanks, I wrote. When was it taken?

A minute later: 9.16, according to the camera. It was set right. I checked against my phone before the event.

I put the cereal down.

I had told Adebayo Sam stayed in the balcony until the band started at nine seventeen. I could perhaps have explained one photograph of myself downstairs. People went downstairs. They fetched cables. But Imani remembered me looking for him, and the camera remembered me alone, and at some point the effort of keeping those things apart would become impossible.

Did you give this one to the police?

Yes. All the originals.

Then another message.

Is that a problem?

I typed No so quickly that it looked like a problem.

There was a longer pause.

I'm printing some contact sheets at college. Delaney's there for the exhibition. You can come if you want to look through them. Looking alone is getting a bit strange.

I checked the time. Mum would be home at four. The college was a fifteen-minute walk. I could go, look, come back, and have the conversation I'd been postponing.

I wrote that I would come.

Then I washed my bowl because doing one small useful thing felt preferable to admitting how many larger things I was avoiding.

The art building smelled of paint, warm paper and something sweet somebody had spilled months ago and never fully cleaned. On weekdays it was the only part of the college where people didn't seem to mind if you were making a mess, provided you could offer a reason for it afterwards. On Saturdays, with half the lights off, it felt like a place we had borrowed from another life.

Ms Delaney was standing on a chair, pinning up a painting of a dog that looked disappointed in its owner.

“Bea,” she said. “Could you tell me if that's straight?”

“It depends whether you're looking at the dog or the paper.”

“The paper.”

“Left side up a bit.”

She adjusted it.

“The dog remains beyond help,” I said.

“The dog's an accurate portrait of my feelings about this exhibition.”

Then she climbed down and looked at me properly.

“Imani's in the print room. I've told her she can stay until three thirty. Have you heard anything new?”

I shook my head.

“Keep your phones on. And don't feel you have to turn this into work.”

I said okay, although I wasn't sure what else to turn it into.

Imani had spread paper across the long cutting table. Each sheet held a grid of small photographs, with file numbers printed underneath. There were wine glasses, the donation thermometer, a child attempting to eat a bread roll larger than her fist. Judith appeared in three consecutive frames, each expression less suitable for publicity than the last.

“I could ruin a lot of Christmas newsletters with these,” Imani said.

“Use your power carefully.”

She handed me a sheet and moved her water bottle away from the prints.

“I haven't found anything dramatic. Mostly people holding cups.”

“That's what fundraising is.”

“People holding cups?”

“And feeling better about themselves.”

She looked at me over the table. “Were you always this cheerful?”

“It's an ongoing project.”

Her mouth moved at one corner. I looked down before she could see how much I wanted her to do it again.

The pictures were in order. I followed the evening through them: volunteers arriving, Val pointing at something overhead, Finn carrying a stack of chairs. Rowan stood behind the donation desk with a roll of raffle tickets in his hand. He was not smiling, but he didn't look unhappy either. He looked like a person doing a job and wondering when he could stop.

I touched the edge of that photograph.

“Can you make this one bigger?”

Imani slid it towards herself. “What are you looking at?”

“I don't know yet.”

“That's not a particularly reassuring answer.”

She opened the file on the computer anyway. On the larger image, I could see that Rowan had drawn a tiny face on the cardboard ticket box. Two dots, a flat mouth. His own expression, simplified.

Behind him, Finn was speaking to a woman in a cream jacket. He had one hand on the back of Rowan's chair. Both boys wore gold wristbands. I'd forgotten those. Judith had ordered them for people who needed access to the office corridor and the donor room. The rest of us had black paper bands, except the kitchen staff, whose orange ones were supposed to help the caterers identify them quickly. Nobody had been particularly consistent about checking.

“What?” Imani asked.

“The wristbands. Did you get one?”

“Gold. Because apparently a camera turns you into a trusted member of society.”

“I got black.”

“You were upstairs.”

“So I wasn't trusted downstairs?”

“Perhaps they knew you.”

I looked up. She was watching the screen, but she was smiling.

I remembered then that we had nearly had this sort of conversation before. In February, she'd asked about a short film I'd made of the bus station at closing time. I'd assumed she wanted help with an assignment and spent ten minutes explaining frame rates. She had listened very politely. Later, Esme from our class had said, with the exhausted patience of someone watching a slow animal negotiate a gate, that Imani had probably just been trying to talk to me.

I hadn't known what to do with that information, so I had done nothing.

“Do you always print them?” I asked.

“Not always. It helps me see what I've actually taken.”

“Can't you do that on a screen?”

“On a screen I keep making things bigger. Then I convince myself a small part matters more than the whole picture.”

She said it without looking at me. I couldn't tell whether it was about photographs or my hand hovering over Rowan's face.

I took my hand away.

At the next table lay a half-finished exhibition print: the empty interior of a late bus, lights reflected in its windows. A single glove sat on one seat. The picture was blue and yellow and unexpectedly lonely.

“Is that yours?”

“Mm.”

“It's good.”

“You don't have to sound surprised.”

“I don't.”

“A little.”

“My face does that.”

She came over to straighten the print, which had been straight already.

“My dad drives the late route twice a week,” she said. “I went round with him after his shift. He said if I made the bus look depressing, he wasn't showing it to anyone.”

“What did he think?”

“He said the seats looked cleaner than usual.”

“That is high praise from a professional.”

“It is.”

We stood beside each other looking at the empty seats. It was easier than looking at each other.

“What are you doing next year?” I asked.

“Hopefully a foundation course. Maybe Manchester. Maybe somewhere I can afford to live.”

“Those can be different places.”

“Yes.”

I liked that she didn't rush to assure me things would work out. People who said that usually meant they hadn't yet encountered a form with a box marked household income.

“Are you still applying for screen arts?” she asked.

“Thinking about it.”

“That sounds like applying very slowly.”

“I have a method.”

“Does it involve deadlines arriving and you looking offended?”

I laughed. It surprised both of us a little.

For a few seconds, I had forgotten why we were there. Then the printer made its starting noise, and another sheet of Friday night slid into the tray.

Imani picked it up.

“These are later. Mostly dancing.”

On the first row, Finn stood near the exit with his jumper sleeves pushed back. On the second, Judith spoke to Councillor Tarrant. On the third, Rowan appeared at the very edge of a picture, walking away from the donation desk with the blue folder tucked under his arm.

“What time?” I asked.

“Eight forty-six.”

“That might matter.”

“Then the police have it.”

“I know. I just meant—”

“I know what you meant.”

She laid the sheet flat.

I looked at her. “You think I'm turning it into a film.”

“I don't know what you're doing.”

The answer wasn't unkind. It was worse than that: reasonable.

“I used to know him,” I said.

“I know.”

“You don't know what happened.”

“Between you?”

I nodded.

Imani folded her arms, then unfolded them. “I was at the screening.”

Of course she had been. Almost everyone had been. It was a small enough college that your mistakes could fill a room without requiring much publicity.

“He asked me to take out the bit about his dad,” I said. “I thought he meant the part where he got upset.”

“Did you ask?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Because I thought he'd say yes, take it all out, and the film would be weaker. Because I was seventeen and already capable of recognising the right question and choosing not to ask it. Because I'd wanted a stranger on a judging panel to think I understood people.

“I wanted it to be good,” I said.

Imani nodded slowly. “It was good.”

That was not what I'd expected.

“It was also his dad.”

I looked at the contact sheet again.

Rowan's father had died when Rowan was nine. In the film, Rowan had said that sometimes he couldn't remember his voice, and sometimes he could, but only when he wasn't trying. He'd been embarrassed afterwards. He hadn't wanted his mother to hear him say it on a screen in front of people who knew her.

I had put a gentle piece of music underneath it. That was the detail I hated most now. I had made a choice about how other people ought to feel while Rowan said something he had trusted me to hear.

“I took it down,” I said.

“I know.”

“He didn't really forgive me.”

“He didn't have to.”

“No.”

The print room became very quiet. From outside came Delaney's voice telling someone not to lean a painting against the fire extinguisher.

Imani sat on the edge of the table.

“You can feel bad about that without deciding you have to solve this.”

“I wasn't—”

I stopped. I wasn't sure what I'd been going to deny.

She gave me the original photograph she'd printed, the one of me holding the cable.

“That's yours. The police have the file. This isn't evidence you're stealing.”

I took it carefully by the edges.

“Thank you.”

“And Bea?”

I looked up.

“If something in these pictures worries you, tell them. Not me first. Not Finn. Them.”

My face must have changed, because she added, “I mean any of us. People keep asking me whether I've found something. I don't want to become the person who decides what counts.”

“I know,” I said.

But I already had.