The Photographer's Daughter

I'd been at the bar for about forty minutes and was getting a little fuzzy. A fat man three stools along was hunched over his drink and droning on to the barman about some gallery in Amsterdam when the girl came in and fainted.

I'd come to the Arts and Leisure Centre to attend a meeting of the Arts Forum but as usual had ended up propped against the bar. From the bar I could see across a spacious, dark blue carpeted foyer to a well lit activitorium hung with photographs, and beyond that a steel stairway suspended on thin wires that sliced high into the building. Despite the architectural trickery my attention continually returned to the centre of the blue carpet where stood, stock still, an actor, hair, face and hands painted in pure white, dressed as a cricketer bending down to pick up a paint brush.

I'd arrived earlier in a pleasantly floaty mood and gone straight through to the private photographic view which was awful. The further I got and the more photographs I saw the less floaty I felt, until in desperation I headed for the drinks trolley. The atmosphere around the trolley was brittle. A group of amateur photographers hissed on about f stops while taking mean little sips at the razor sharp wine and the only irritant besides me to their cosy huddle, was when two tall women came in with a hairy dog. The thinner of the two had lurid blue wrist bands and masses of black hair piled up to look wild, (but she wasn't), and her friend, all in black, had a tanned, cement fondue face and big red lips. Later I saw, through a trio of bobbing heads, the woman with the wrist bands sitting cross legged on the floor sorting through postcards of her work. Most of the others wore coats with scarves, had big brown shoes and were painters.

Our chairperson, a stately fifties something woman, wore a creamy silk outfit that flowed and shimmied and she smiled and nodded and carried a clip board. I was about to be fossilised by a minutely detailed description of the mechanics of a Russian S.L.R. when she waved the clip board towards the stairs. "Everyone up to the meeting room please, we're running late and we've lots to get through," then she turned on her heels, smiled triumphantly and swept up the stairs with the hem of her skirt billowing and fluttering like a flock of gulls around the backs of her knees and ankles. No one moved, we just watched as she fluttered higher and higher and shimmied and fizzled and was absorbed into the chromium luminescence of the upper atrium.

All of the anoraks straggled up behind her, but a few of us, like the cowards we were, stood stock still, wine glasses to hand, until we heard the meeting room door thud shut, then we dumped the acidic wine and headed for the bar, where we could still see the photos and to my mind, and from that distance, the images seemed more relaxed.

I was turning to my neighbour when the main entrance door swung open letting in a belch of street noise. It immediately shut again leaving a smudge of sound that rapidly evaporated and out of the evaporation emerged a desperately pale girl who took two steps then fainted.

We all rushed over, sat her up, pushed her head between her legs and the barman fetched a glass of water. Someone wiped her lips with a moist cloth and I noticed she smelt faintly of onions. She wore thin clothes and carried a cheap camera and three photographs in a grubby plastic bag. All three photographs were of the same man with a box camera slung around his neck.

When she came around she told us they were photos of her father and that he was a photographer and she hoped he might be showing at the exhibition. He wasn't. She'd been searching for him for three years and told us how on the night before he left he'd swung her over his head, given her a ride on his back, read her a story and kissed her good night and that in the morning he was gone and she hadn't seen him or heard from him since but could still see his smile and hear his rasping voice and feel his kiss on her cheek.

She asked if anyone was going to Birmingham as she had to visit a dozen photographic exhibitions the next day. None of us were but we gave her some crisps and some money and watched fascinated as she edged, with fingers nervously spread, around the walls towards the activitorium. For some time I watched as she drifted aimlessly about in front of the photographs, then I lost interest and turned back to the womb like warmth of the bar and my glass umbilical of amniotic best. I don't know what made me turn around, but some time later I did and was just in time to see the kid walk silently to the door, open it and dissolve out into the night. I stared absentmindedly at the back of the door for a while and was about to return to my drink when I froze rigid. An icy chill ran down my neck. The gleaming white cricketer, who had stood so rigidly in the middle of the blue carpet, now sat, legs outstretched beside his paint brush in the middle of the foyer. His lips were tinged blue and he had a surprised look around his eyes. There was an old box camera dangling below his chin and in the dimly lit foyer his fidgety fingers feebly plucked at the leather strap wound tightly around his neck.