Chapter 79
79
Drew
It’s eight at night and I’m stacking the dishwasher in my apartment in Surry Hills when my phone pings with the email from Sony. I can hardly bring myself to open it. I’d submitted an entry into the World Photography Awards—the most prestigious photo competition—and hadn’t heard anything back, so I assumed it was another rejection.
I collect rejections. It’s part of my strategy for success. Every time I enter something, or bid for an assignment, or take a risk, I write it down. I’m aiming for one hundred rejections in a year, which would theoretically mean a higher rate of success too. If you’ve got a modicum of talent, surely it’s a numbers game? I open the email.
Dear Mr. Kennedy,
We are pleased to let you know …
I have to reread the start of the opening sentence because I’m sure I imagined it.
We are pleased to let you know your photo series, Pictures of You, has been shortlisted from more than 170,000 entries from 171 countries and is a finalist in the documentary project category in this year’s award.
I sit back on the couch in silence.
This is it. The news I’ve imagined receiving ever since I started taking photography seriously in high school. So many photos. So much time spent learning how to improve. So many rejections and failures and setbacks. So many dreams and so much future career potential, even being placed as a finalist in this very competition.
Without thinking, I reach for my phone. I’ll call Mum …
And then it descends, again. That sinking realization that I can’t do that. That every good thing that happens to me now has this horrible flipside of loss. And she would be so proud of this.
“I always think it’s about the climb for you, Drew,” she used to say. “It’s the striving for something. You’re inspired by the gap between where you are and what you want. Getting there is almost an anticlimax, and then you want the next thing.”
She was right, in a way. It is the climb that I love. But this summit is one I never really imagined reaching. It feels pretty bloody good.
Although …
The other sinking flipside is that I never actually believed I would get this far in the award, so I skipped the bit where you’re meant to have permission from the subject of the images. I thought chances were slim. It wasn’t worth the angst of rekindling any kind of association with Evie. Every time we’re together it ends disastrously. I haven’t seen her since Harriet’s fifth birthday party, and what a mess that was. Harri clinging to me, “Watch me, Uncle Drew! Uncle! Look! LOOK!! ” Oliver fuming in the corner. Evie trying to be diplomatic. Him silencing her efforts with one glare. I gave her the gift—a toy camera—and left early in the end. Promised I’d see her another time. Hoped I wouldn’t see her dad and stepmum again for another year.
My photos are going to be printed and hung in the competition’s public exhibition at Somerset House in London. And I implied that I had Evie’s permission. I can’t imagine the photos are good enough to win, but I also can’t imagine the professional embarrassment of winning, only for it to come out that she hadn’t agreed to being featured. Such an inexcusable error.
Contacting her makes me feel sick, though.
“Pretend you don’t know me” had been the pre-Harriet instruction. Not “Blow up photos of me and broadcast them on the international stage.”
I’m going to have to withdraw—and implode the best career break I’ve ever had.
Or send her an email.