Chapter Text
It was under the scorching summer heat, hidden among bushes and horse muck, that he found the polaroid camera. He’d never seen one before, not in person, at least, and only after wandering up and down the dirt track a couple of times, satisfied that no one was coming back for it, did he decide to take it home.
"Some passerby must’ve dropped it," his mother reckoned, peeling potatoes with an old, blunt knife while Graham fiddled with the camera. "Do you plan on using it? We could always sell it if not."
“Yes please,” Graham replied simply, still working out how to get the thing to function.
"Well, that's fine then," his mum replied as she stood up and headed to the sink, with the heavy bowl of peeled potatoes clutched in her arms. "Call it an early Christmas present."
He quickly realised that this was probably rather convenient for his mum’s wallet, and that despite her easy, nonchalant response, it had likely taken a weight off her shoulders, so he silently thanked whoever had been careless enough to drop it. Between chores on the ranch, he spent his days fiddling and experimenting with the camera.
Mrs. Coxon watched him from the kitchen window, observing the careful way her son positioned himself among the tree branches to photograph the yellowhammers that nested around the fields, his nose scrunched in concentration: click, click, click.
By Graham’s third trip into town, coming back with another box of colour film, she had begun to understand that her son had something special. Graham didn't usually show her his photographs, either out of embarrassment or because 'they're not that good, Mum, and my finger got in the way of three of them.' One afternoon, however, she had a rummage through a chest he kept under his bed while he was having a bath and, among other things, found something interesting.
In between images of birds and wheat fields was a portrait of herself. It was difficult to look at, at first (God, when had she aged so much?), but perhaps that was the point: to make her see something through the eyes of someone else— and once she understood that all those pictures were, in a way, a small window into how her son (the only other person she had in this world, her little boy) saw the world, her heart filled up with a tenderness she hadn’t felt in a long while.
"You should send some of these to a magazine," she murmured, tucking the portrait into the pocket of her dusty skirt. "With that money you could start saving up for when you find work in London. Can’t ride your bike everywhere forever, you know… we’ll need a car eventually."
"I don't think anyone would want them, mum," he replied, drying his hair, and even without looking at him, she knew his ears were going red. "They're just little birds."
“I won’t force you, Graham,” she said, “But you’d be wasting your time if you don't at least try. It’s not easy finding work in the city, and it’d do you no harm to arrive with a bit put away.”
The next morning he woke up before the cockerel and off on his bicycle into town. It was a forty five minute ride to the edge of London and a little over an hour to the photography shop, and when he got there, he rode slowly past it at first, trying to peel his shirt away from his sweaty back, before locking his bike up somewhere safe and heading inside. He was greeted by the shop owner, an old man named Harold, whose twin brother, Ronald, had a glass eye that Graham always unconsciously found himself staring at.
"Coming back for more, are you?" Harold asked, lifting his glasses from the bridge of his aquiline nose.
“My mum wants me to sell these,” Graham explained, scratching the back of his neck as he laid some of the polaroid pictures out on the counter, and after looking through them, Ronald insisted he should take his mother’s advice. “I don't think they're that good,” Graham replied.
"Well, maybe not these ones," Ronald said, glancing at a particularly blurry photograph, "But you’ve got a camera— A good one, at that, which is a start. So you should make the most of it."
Before he left, Harold offered him a piece of advice that he couldn't get out of his head as he made his way through the busy streets of London. 'Do you know what’s the strongest drug there is?' The old man had begun, and before Graham could tell him he’d rather not know, he continued: 'To see oneself from the outside, through someone else’s eyes. Feeds the ego like nothing else.’
It had seemed daft to him at the time, and apparently to Ronald too, judging by the way he rolled his eyes (or maybe just the one), but the further Graham walked into the heart of the city, the more he realised the truth behind those words. It was there on billboards, in the magazines propped in shop windows, on posters plastered across brick walls: perfume adverts, the face of Twiggy and the deceased Elvis wallpapering entire buildings. If he ever saw himself on that scale, he thought, he'd be sick as a dog. What if everyone noticed his eye bags and his bunny teeth? What if they found it funny that, despite being seventeen, he still couldn't grow any facial hair?
On the ride home, with too much time to think, he arrived at a conclusion that made sense: some people are born to be cameras, and others to be subjects. Graham had decided that the reason he wouldn't waste film on himself was because he simply wasn't born to be a subject, and that was something fixed, written into his destiny or somewhere deep in his DNA. And although his mother found it quite ironic, given the absurd number of girls who slowed down on the dirt track alongside the ranch to watch him weed, she understood, all the same, that he was better off behind the camera than in front of it.
He decided he was fed up with photographing birds and wheat fields, and that it was time to graduate to people, when, while looking through the polaroids from his eighteenth birthday, he realised he’d only taken two poorly lit pictures of his mother holding a carrot cake. That had been the week before, and lying in bed, he’d imagined himself as an old man with nothing but a glass eye and a morbid collection of bird photographs, and the idea disgusted him so much that the next morning he legged it back to the shop to buy more colour film.
He had overlooked the fact that the shop would be closed for St Patrick’s day. Living on the ranch was a bit like being inside a time bubble: they only celebrated birthdays and, when the vegetables sold well enough to justify it, Christmas dinner. This had never bothered him at all; it was the life he knew, and he couldn't imagine living any other way, though it did have its inconveniences, such as now.
Still, he couldn't help but feel curious about the disco across the road from the photography shop, blasting music so loudly that Graham could feel the bass thumping in his chest. He wondered what it would be like to be one of the vivid, glittering characters who spilled periodically out through its doors: gleaming clothes, backs glistening with sweat, and a light gait, like walking on clouds. He caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the shop window, standing on the pavement like a lamppost, tense and dull, and felt, for the first time in his life, ashamed of the plainness of his existence. He stood there in silence for what felt like an eternity, stealing glances into the club whenever the doors swung open.
"You going in?" a voice asked beside him: a woman with dark curls and an unlit cigarette dangling between her thin lips, her eyelids the colour of a pigeon’s chest.
"No," he hastened to reply, before pulling himself back just as quick. "Maybe."
She let out a raspy laugh as she lit her cigarette. “If you're going to go in, just go in. Hang about out here too long and you’ll spend all night wondering.”
"So what's going on in there?" Graham asked, but before he could say anything else, the girl turned and walked off in the opposite direction, her heels click-clacking on the wet pavement.
For a moment, he entertained the idea that she was some sort of employee of the club, paid for every unsuspecting person she left wondering. 'I'm not that naive,’ he thought, and yet, his feet were already carrying him across the road and pushing open the heavy doors.
He had barely stepped inside when the smell of tobacco, sweat, and hairspray filled his lungs, and he felt so out of place that for a moment he considered legging it back out and never allowing himself to be so impulsive again, and he would have listened to that instinct had it not been for the unexpected beauty of the place.
The smoke, suspended in the enclosed space, made the light seem to hang in the air, like sunbeams frozen in time. The mirror ball turned slowly overhead, casting light across the serpentine bodies of the people on the dance floor, and without thinking, he raised the camera and took one picture after another.
That night, he would leave the place with his arms sprinkled with glitter and his hair stuck to his sweaty forehead, and after sneaking into his room through the window (his mother was a very heavy sleeper), he would lie there, thinking about that small and lively place, and he would fall asleep buzzing with excitement at the thought of seeing those people, cheerful and fluorescent, reflected back at him on photographic paper.