2
‘How’s this supposed to help, exactly?’ Marina grumbles at my side, while holding up a small branch for my camera.
Peering through the lens, I adjust the aperture until the bark blurs just enough to soften into the background, while the twigs frame the storm clouds beyond.
‘It’s the moment right before something breaks,’ I say. ‘The sky is holding back a scream, the branch wants to snap. Everything is caught in that last breath before the collapse.’
I imagine he might understand it. A man who chooses words as carefully as Crane might see what I see without me having to explain it.
The image freezes as the shutter clicks.
‘So ominous,’ Marina grumbles, more to herself, as she lowers the branch with a scowl and tosses it onto the sodden path.
I’ve never had a thought like this cross my mind while working, but suddenly, I wish I were more like her. A photographer who finds beauty in softer things like laughter, sunlit fields, all other hopeful things people write poems about.
But I never have.
Her lens follows the last red flower in the meadow. Mine turns towards a tree split down its centre.
I’ve always been drawn to what remains after the impact: the silence, the damage, the shape grief leaves behind when no one is watching. That’s what I know how to capture.
The evidence that pain leaves behind.
In the body. In choices. In everything people can’t say aloud. Perhaps that’s why I trust it. Perhaps that’s why I think he might too.
And right now, it’s the only thing I know how to offer him. Clouds and lightning.
‘I’m not giving him the darkness,’ I muse aloud. ‘I’m giving him what comes at the end of it.’ Something that feels both like relief and freedom. Or the closest thing to it.
‘Right,’ Marina says, but her tone disagrees. ‘I’m sure he won’t take one look at the dead bark and clouds and say you’re weird.’
I consider that for a moment.
‘I’ll write on the back what it’s meant to say.
’ I’m aware I don’t yet know Elias Crane well enough to gauge how he’ll take this, and that most people wouldn’t see beyond the bark and the clouds.
And if books are the one place he bares his teeth, I can start with that – pair the right quotation with a printed photograph, see if it causes a change. Ride the next wave from there.
Because I can’t stand silence for long; it starts to feel like failure.
I hate that my mind turns things into a challenge, hate even more that part of me wants a reaction simply to prove I can get one. But if I make him respond – even a little – perhaps it will ease whatever presses down on him. That is the generous version of the excuse, anyway.
With her signature irritation, Marina tugs the cuffs of her bubblegum-pink jacket back into place.
‘Why are you trying so hard, anyway?’ she drawls, glancing skywards as thunder growls somewhere beyond.
‘What do you mean?’ I blink at her, genuinely taken aback.
Because she’s an artist too – granted, one who does weddings and happy stuff, but still… I hadn’t expected this kind of cynicism from her. ‘It’s not just for my portfolio. It’s volunteer work. Why would I do it if I wasn’t all in?’
She’s shaking her head before I even get a chance to finish.
‘Because this isn’t one of the shelters, Leah. This is a prison. Proper dangerous men.’
I don’t deflect. I don’t defend him. But I also don’t apologise for the choice.
Most people wouldn’t think to volunteer at a prison unless they were chasing redemption themselves. Or punishment. Or to run away from other broken things – like I am. My best friend’s voicing what plenty think but never say.
Still, those inside the prison are there for a reason. And Crane’s reason, while scary, isn’t enough to make me step back.
‘The thing I keep chasing—’ I say aloud, my eyes trained on the path, because if I look at her, I’ll have to admit she’s right. ‘Something powerful had to have driven him as far as to do something horrible. I want to frame it.’ Understand it.
Because it might help me understand myself too.
‘Sure.’ She crosses her arms as we start along the path skirting Burrator Reservoir.
The air smells of damp earth and woodsmoke that tingles against the back of my throat. Leaves skitter across the ground in gusts of bronze and blood-red before they find themselves beneath our wellies. Behind us, the lake lies still like a sheet of tarnished silver under the clouds.
‘I don’t want to undermine your art. I’m asking why you’re driving nearly four hours for a man who kills people – who, by the way, you don’t even know.’
‘One person,’ I correct, hating how absurd that sounds as soon as it’s out. ‘He killed one person. Or… he is accused of it. He hasn’t been convicted.’
Marina snorts. ‘Oh well then, it’s fine! Let me just adjust my moral compass – only one body, folks! Worth the fuel!’
A chuckle escapes me.
The reasonable part of me agrees with her.
Crane hadn’t seemed pleased to have me there, either. Yet the more I think about him folded over the table, staring at his hands as though holding himself together, the less convinced I am that his boredom was what drove me out of there.
He’d applied to the programme, after all.
Was it me, then? Was it just the fact that he didn’t want me to be his civilian contact?
Rejection isn’t a good feeling.
I trail its gloom along the path, staring at the tips of my navy wellies until I stop and decide to capture this moment that bleeds through me.
The lens doesn’t care that they’re filthy. Or that they’ve taken me into that filth.
I can’t help thinking of the silence he left me with.
I frame the shot low: mud-caked tips in the corner, autumn leaves scattered around them; the navy stark against the dull browns and washed-out golds.
Some of my pictures are for my own personal portfolio.
And this one goes straight in there. It’s more like proof that I have left a mark, even if some people had already decided I didn’t matter.
Crane included – which is ridiculous considering I’ve met him once and shouldn’t care what he thinks of me.
‘My offer still stands.’ Marina drags me out of the mental cave I’ve slipped into.
When I lift my head, she is watching me with that soft, assessing look that makes the back of my neck itch – as if I were a bruise she keeps checking for change of colour.
She’s crouched over another flower. Her camera fires off a series of clicks and she returns to staring at me.
Tugging at my woollen scarf to rid myself of the sensation, I raise my camera and take a picture of her face.
She lifts a hand to shield herself, but the shutter has already snapped. I’ve become very good at catching moments people don’t mean to give me. Dark ones especially.
I’m also trying to avoid the topic, but that’s beside the point.
Thunder grumbles again overhead, closer. I squint towards the battered clouds.
‘Would you mind giving me a little more time to think on it?’ I mumble. ‘My head’s not in a place for wedding photos.’
Definitely not wedding photos.
She’d asked me to work with her, shooting clients, editing portfolios. Marina and her fiancé run a cosy little studio at home in Crawley. And while Oswald helps out at his dad’s dairy farm, he swings by to lend her a hand when she needs one.
I shake the cold from my fingers, imagining it’s the bite of jealousy I’m flinging away.
Ron and I were together for ten years, but I cannot stop wondering whether something shifted when he completed his medical degree and moved back to Colchester.
Up until a few months ago, I’d convinced myself it was the two-hour drive that put the cracks in everything, not something else. Not someone else.
When I finally moved to London, thinking we’d deal with the distance properly, he took a job at a nearby hospital and for a while the doubts quieted. Life just carried on.
Until it collapsed into mud and ash.
‘It’s been a year, Leah,’ Marina reminds me.
That timeframe is already saturated with too many echoes without her needing to add to them.
‘What if I introduce you to someone? Oz has some nice friends.’
I roll my eyes hard enough to feel the sting. ‘If you say the words blind and date in the same sentence, I will scream.’
‘I just worry about you, love!’ she calls, hurrying to catch up as I barrel down the footpath, eyeing my red Ford – cruelly parked too far. ‘You’re a thirty-two-year-old beautiful, smart, talented woman! And you’re acting like you’ve already checked out of the human race!’
‘I’m doing okay,’ I insist, tugging my sleeves over my fists. ‘I need to understand why I ignored what I ignored before I jump head-first into a relationship again.’
The hush that follows isn’t hostile. If anything, it’s a kind of truce, but I can hear the cogs spinning in her head even from here, still plotting my emotional rescue.
Then she halts abruptly and throws out a finger like a weapon. ‘Listen here!’ She’s five foot one but built like a storm when emotion takes her. I take another snapshot of her – finger and all. ‘Your mum and dad are arseholes!’
I blink, lower the camera. My brows go up, but curiously enough – I don’t argue.
‘They should’ve backed you when you left Ronald – not spun it ‘round like you’d done something wrong. Cheating’s out of order. Full stop! No excuses! If he wanted out, he should’ve ended it first before he went and shagged that paediatric nurse!’
The words from his phone lance through me. A hotel address. Her name. His promise that he would end it with me soon. Marina’s voice gives them sound, and my next breath fails halfway in.
Turning on my heel, I make a beeline for the car, boots splashing over mud, but it doesn’t drown out the riot of memories in my head. I’m trying – failing, hoping – to banish the relentless surge pulled from the pit of my mind where I keep all things I don’t want to examine too closely.
Darting after me, Marina huffs and puffs, trying to match stride for stride.