Snapshot #2
Photo booth format, black and white. A teenage girl with bleached, shaggy, layered locks and a back-combed fringe is squashed into the frame beside a thin-faced young man with smooth dark hair which almost entirely obscures his right eye. The couple appear to have collapsed into a fit of giggles.
Sean sits and stares at the photo. It is five o’clock on Sunday morning and he has just abandoned his attempts at sleeping, pulled on a dressing gown and come down to the kitchen. Beyond the window, the garden is dark and cold.
Sean feels shattered. His first few days at work have groaned by. He has found himself totally unable to concentrate on his work and has had to mentally prod himself tens of times every hour to think about the balconies he was supposed to be designing rather than the images constantly springing up in his mind: Catherine gasping for air. Catherine pressing the morphine button. Catherine in pain. Catherine’s body, no longer in pain but no longer Catherine at all. On Wednesday, though, something blessed had happened. Just for an hour, he had managed to lose himself in his work. Just for one hour, he had managed to forget everything and think instead about the tensile strength of reinforced concrete, about the shock resistance of sandwiched glass and chrome plated brackets. On Thursday, he had managed it twice. And by Friday, he was dreading the weekend, dreading a rainy Saturday in front of the television. A rainy Saturday in that oh-so-empty house. So he had brought work home with him. He had managed to survive Saturday by pretending, simply, that it was Friday all over again.
Now, it’s Sunday morning and Sean is surprised that he managed to sleep at all. This second message has been playing on his mind all week – so much, in fact, that he has handled the envelope repeatedly before relenting and returning it to the box. Yesterday evening he even started to peel back the flap. But he can’t help but wonder if Catherine isn’t somewhere watching him. He couldn’t stand the idea of being a disappointment to her.
The photo is from the summer of 1982, the day that they met. He and three college friends, Tracey, Theresa and Glen, had travelled to Margate for the weekend. Tracey had invited them to visit during the summer holidays. Her mother ran a slowly disintegrating guesthouse in down-at-heel Cliftonville and was letting them all stay free of charge in exchange for their help with wallpapering one of the bedrooms.
Catherine was the prettiest girl that Sean had ever seen. He isn’t quite sure what it was that first caught his eye, perhaps her lion’s mane of hair, or maybe her makeup, which was bold, verging on punk. Looking at the photo now, it’s surprisingly hard to see what the all-consuming attraction had been. Her hair had been a mock-Bonnie-Tyler mess. Her earrings had been huge, vulgar hoops. He remembers a twinkle in her eyes, though. They had always somehow looked as though they were smiling, as if, perhaps, she was in on some private joke.
Whatever it was, he had glanced across and spotted her filing her nails while manning the turnstile to the hall of mirrors. He had turned back to Glen, who’d been spouting forth about something (most likely the Falklands war, which he opposed with a vengeance), but then something had made Sean turn to look again and the girl had glanced up and winked at him. She’d pointed towards the interior with her nail file and said, “Go on. You know you want to. It’s only 10p.”
So Sean had dragged the others, in varying states of willingness, into the maze of mirrors and they had stumbled around laughing at their reflections. Glen had complained continuously how “naff” it all was. But even Glen had laughed at the “alien head” mirror.
Sean had made sure he was the first to reach the exit.
“That was quick,” the girl had said. “I hope you don’t want your money back.” Slapping the top of the turnstile with one hand, she’d added, “This thing’s got a counter in it, so there’s not a lot I can do.”
“No,” Sean replied. “No. I just…” He could feel himself blushing.
“You wanted to invite me out for a drink or something?” the girl asked, grinning cheekily. “Is that it?”
“No, I…” Sean spluttered.
She had pouted with exaggerated sadness and Sean remembers noticing her lips. They were plump and shiny. She had applied two different shades of lipstick, both pink and purple. “Oh, well…” she had said.
“I mean, yes, then,” Sean said bravely. He was imagining kissing those multicoloured lips.
Her mouth then slipped into the broadest of grins. “I don’t get off till nine,” she said.
“Um. OK.”
“But I get twenty minutes for lunch. At twelve-thirty. We could go get a hot dog or something if you want.”
At that moment, Glen, Theresa and Tracey had lurched from the maze. “Well that was shite,” Glen was saying.
“Oh, it was OK,” Theresa insisted. Theresa believed in seeing the positives in everything. She studied the girl’s face for a moment, then checked out Sean’s expression and frowned before addressing her. “Hello. So who are you, then?”
“Me? I’m Catherine.”
“I’m Theresa. Pleased to meet you. And this is Glen, Tracey. Oh, and Sean, who you seem to have met already.”
Sean hadn’t had the nerve to return for their lunch date. He had fully intended to have the nerve: he had even managed to ditch his friends on the other side of the funfair before speeding back to the hall of mirrors. But when he got there, his courage had failed him. Sean had never considered himself attractive, that was the thing. His mother had spent most of his childhood telling him that his face was as long as a “rainy Sunday” which probably hadn’t helped. So why, he had wondered, would Catherine possibly be interested in him?
Instead of walking up to her and inviting her for lunch, he had lingered, instead, outside the postcard shop opposite, praying that Catherine would notice him there.
He had gone inside to pay for the cards he had chosen – tacky images of people in kiss-me-quick hats on Margate seafront – and by the time he came back outside, she’d been replaced by a tall, skinny lad whose acne was even worse than Sean’s. Feeling panicked and remembering her mentioning hot dogs, he had jogged to a nearby stand he had spotted. And there, at the front of the queue, had been Catherine.
“Oh, you made it then,” she had said, on spotting him. “So come on,” she had added, slapping her thigh, inciting him to jump the queue. And he had felt as if he had known her forever.