Timestamp
By Noo
- 3242 reads
2010-06-23 Weds 18:53:36
What the camera shows is a car park outside a shopping mall with people coming and going. They’re parking cars, taking out buggies, holding babies. They’re carrying their purchases in bags and they’re walking together back to their cars. Sometimes they’re alone.
The air seems still and the road surface looks like it could be shimmering with a heat haze. There’s a sense of dust.
A small, white car comes on to the car park from the left of the camera and it takes a few attempts to get it straight in its space. A girl gets out, maybe seventeen or eighteen. She looks an athletic build and she has long, dark hair worn loose. She’s dressed in shorts and a vest top and she puts her bag over her shoulder as she shuts the car door.
The girl appears to forget something, opens the door again, takes something from the back seat that she puts in her bag and then the camera shows her disappearing through the sliding doors of the mall.
*
What the camera doesn’t show is that she’s happy to her heart. She’s thinking about her college place for next year and about the vacation to LA she’s taking with her parents next week. She’s come to the mall to buy her mom a birthday present – she’s not fixed on what yet, but she’s got some ideas. She doesn’t think she’s got time this evening to look for clothes for herself, but hey, you never know.
She’s thinking too about the Plath poems she’s been reading in class. They’ve got under her skin. She walks into the mall, stepping to the rhythm of “You do not do, you do not do, Any more black shoe.” She’s meeting her parents and sister for dinner in about forty minutes, so she’s got to hurry. She’s got to be quick and decisive.
2010-06-23 Weds 18:58:19
What the camera shows is the inside of the mall’s home-ware store. The girl from the car park is looking around. She has an air of confidence and purpose in the way she walks. She stops by the wrapping paper and picks up a roll and then she slows by the greeting cards, but picks none up. In the next aisle, she takes a vase off a shelf – it’s squat and bulbous – and she holds it up the light.
The camera shows other customers too. The big guy pushing a cart full of cushions, a couple walking round, close to each other, both with sad faces. A tired looking woman, dragging a reluctant, small child by her forearm.
There’s also a young, thin guy in a dark vest and shorts. He’s matching the girl’s pace round the aisles. He stops when she stops, but he doesn’t seem to be looking at anything on the shelves. What the camera shows he’s looking at is the girl.
Next, the camera shows her at the checkout, paying for the vase and wrapping paper. As she holds out her card, she talks to the clerk and the camera catches her smile. It would surely say she was beautiful if a camera could discern beauty. She puts her bag back on her shoulder once she’s put her card away and she carefully carries the vase in the bubble wrap the clerk has wrapped it in. The roll of wrapping paper sticks out the top of her bag and it moves from side to side precariously as she leaves the store. Minutes earlier, the camera showed the thin guy in the dark vest leaving too. It showed he had bought nothing and was carrying nothing, and that he was moving quickly, as though he had somewhere important to be.
*
What the camera doesn’t show is he’s thinking about her legs. How muscular they are, supple and brown. How they make the burning feeling inside him rise, so the store feels too damned hot. Although the camera does show how he wipes the sweat off his brow, it doesn’t show how, under the store’s stark light he has the impression that the snake tattoo on his forearm is writhing.
He catches his reflection in the mirror at the end of the one aisle and he momentarily loses his attention on her. In the glass, he sees how pale and ill he looks. Then he sees the movement of her hair as she flicks it over her shoulder. He wants to get under that hair, into her skin. And he’s watching her again, following her again, feigning interest in the dried flowers on aisle eighteen, the candlesticks on nineteen.
His breath catches in his throat when she walks past and he thinks she smiles. But it’s not at him, it would never be at him. The bitch is smiling at the clerk. Girls like her never smile at him.
And is it lust he feels? Not even. It’s something else. It’s what Faulkner said in one of his crazy shit books. What he feels is he needs a shape to fill a lack.
2010-06-23 Weds 19:13:07
What the camera shows is the car park again and the girl walking back towards her car. She’s moving quickly and even in the black and white world of the camera, you can see the light has changed in the fifteen minutes or so she has been in the store. She checks her watch and stops for a car that reverses out of the space three down from hers.
She goes round the back of her car and the camera is unclear for a few seconds. If you can make sense of it at all, there seems to be a flash of dark that rushes at her. Like a shadow across the sun, or the enveloping cape of Nosferatu in the old, silent movie. And then it’s gone and the camera shows her car driving away.
*
What the camera doesn’t show is the thin guy in the dark vest waiting for her behind the SUV next to her car. It doesn’t show him rushing at her, silent movie vampire-like. It doesn’t show the gun he presses under the back of her ribs or the wild white of her eyes. It doesn’t show him pushing her into the driver’s seat and him climbing over into the passenger seat. Even if there was audio, it couldn’t catch the words he whispers to her or her scream.
It also couldn’t show the itch he’d woken up with that morning when he’d left his wife asleep beside him, or the plan he’d made to make sure that itch was scratched. It certainly couldn’t show that she was ultimately irrelevant to him, beautiful but irrelevant. Finally, the camera couldn’t show he almost felt sorry for her. No one should have to come across a man like him.
2010-06-23 Weds 22:03:42
What the camera shows is the car park again. Security lights on right through it, a lot less full than earlier. Empty car parking spaces look like gaps in a jigsaw puzzle.
Suddenly, there is a small, white car weaving round the main road in, its headlight causing glare in the camera’s face. The car stops for a cat or even maybe a fox to cross its path as it trots off in the direction of the trash bins. A thin guy in a dark vest gets out of the car and there seems to be no one else in the car with him.
The camera shows him stretch as he gets out. Then he takes something out of the pocket of his shorts and puts it under the car. A glint in the light the car is parked under suggests the something is metal, possibly keys. No one else is around and the guy walks diagonally towards a black pickup and gets in it. There’s a delay of around a minute and then the pickup drives off, headlights full and steady in the dark.
*
What the camera doesn’t show is the nothingness inside him - the sense of appetite sated, or of an itch scratched. It doesn’t show the scratches on the inside of his arm, or on his face. Or the semen crusting on the inside of his thigh. Or the mud from the creek on his sneakers, and the crushed pieces of pinecone from the woods in their tread.
The thought of the woods and the creek and what he left there makes him hard again. He’s a man made of nothing with nothing inside him. He’s a man not wanting to think about himself.
2010-06-24 Thurs 18:01:21
What the camera shows is two people, middle aged, already years older than they were twenty hours ago. They’re sitting at a table and there’s a cop at the side of them. The woman doesn’t speak, she just looks ahead; but she doesn’t look like she’s seeing the camera or the eager, terrified camerawoman behind it.
The man is speaking a careful mantra of facts - when he last saw his daughter, what she was wearing, that she means the world to them, that she’s a sensible girl, that she’d never not stay in touch, that this is completely out of character. That he’s sure there’s an explanation and she’ll be in touch soon. He’s a cop and he knows the first few hours make or break things. He exudes trust and optimism and the camerawoman gives him a smile and thumbs up as he pauses.
*
What the camera doesn’t show is what the woman is seeing. She’s seeing a baby, tight and safe in her arms and a little girl in a teal blue dress on her first day at school. And an older girl, more beautiful than the sun and after that, a shadow across the sun. Then she sees nothing and she’s brought back to the hot now of the TV studio by the sound of her husband’s voice.
The camera doesn’t show he’s talking shit. Behind the confidence of his voice, the professional assurance of a cop and the hope of a father, he knows this only ends one way. In one place only. Under the strip lighting of a tiny, cold room in a morgue, where he’ll see his little girl again and only then if they’re lucky enough to find her.
What the camera doesn’t show is the chasm that’s already forming inside him – the cavern of cracked, black ice that will slowly become what he’s made of.
*
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Comments
The palpable tension you
The palpable tension you create by filling in what the camera doesnt show and the heart stopping pace is really brilliant, Noo. The camera's time stamps are true horrors of all the lost people and you draw on all elements of that.
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Such a clever structure,
Such a clever structure, horrible to watch the unravelling and to imagine the unseen. Taut and disturbing.
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structure is superb
but the psycho is revealed irredeemably a tad too early all snake tatoo and stereotype The last line brings me back to the excellence of the structure and the power of the writing. Very good of course
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This brilliantly haunting
This brilliantly haunting story is our Facebook and Twitter Pick of the Day!
Get a great reading recommendation every day.
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Harrowing read. Very cleverly
Harrowing read. Very cleverly conceived. The writing lives up to the concept. The use of cameras adds to the chilled detachment of the narrative. Makes it, in fact.
Parson Thru
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A really well-constructed
A really well-constructed story - very filmic description. Brilliant pick!
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This is our Story of the Week
This is our Story of the Week - Congratulations!
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works for me. There was a
works for me. There was a murder in Clydebank last week. Fifteen-year old girl. This is like a presentment.
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chilling... the gaps in time.
chilling... the gaps in time... the awful things in the ellipses but this guy is going to get caught
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Very well told
Unfortunately, it's a story that happens far too often.
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