The Match

by Romesh Gunesekera

  Sunny shrugged. ‘If you are happy to crunch numbers, that’s OK. We’ll find extra income.’

  Clara abandoned her sable brushes and sank into baby baths and wax crayons; Sunny took his camera and photographed mother and son, finding in each frame an escape from the mundane. While she clucked, he clicked, thinking about the other couples they’d met at their antenatal classes, and after Clara’s postnatal sessions. There were a lot of babies in the neighbourhood, and a huge desire among their parents to retain the baby-glow in glossy reproductions. Not many of them had the time or know-how to do really big, heart-plucking, high-quality pictures of their bundles of joy. The other mothers they met at the park seemed befuddled by any technology not directly linked to the life-support system of a Maclaren buggy. And their partners were apparently all too busy pedalling furiously between alcoholism and workaholism to discover any real pleasure in a viewfinder. ‘A perfect opportunity,’ Sunny explained to Clara in a rare moment of lucidity.

  He put a card on the bulletin board outside the children’s library with a pin-sharp photo of Michael, bright-eyed, rising like a fish to the surface of his mother’s attention. A brilliant lure. He framed the card with paper tassels giving his telephone number and the prospect of the best baby pictures in the world.

  His first client arrived while he was still pressing the thumbtacks into place. She was one of the librarians. A pleasant young woman with a freckled brown face and a lopsided afro. She was unusually dedicated to books, even for a librarian, and always had one open in her hand. She would read as she date-stamped, stacked returns or carried newspapers to the stands. When she left the library to go home she would read her way to the bus stop holding a torch to the page.

  She came up with a huge tome and coughed behind him. ‘I would like a photograph. Yes.’

  She didn’t look like a mother, although Sunny was beginning to realize that they came in all shapes and sizes and habits, and sometimes seemed most unsuited for the job.

  ‘Great.’

  She flicked a page over and took a quick glance. ‘You do cats, yes?’

  ‘Babies are what I’ve been concentrating on.’

  ‘She’s a kitten.’

  He wasn’t sure whether he should be diversifying so soon. On the other hand, the kiddies section in the library was a very busy one and she looked quite influential, even if she was probably not directly connected to the NCT coffee network.

  ‘OK. Where?’

  ‘You know that Palm Court with the Sphinx in Ally Pally? Do you? I’d like a picture of Kimmie there. She so adores the Sphinx.’

  The following week he managed to do two alpha kids. Requests trickled in after that, providing a modest turnover. He put adverts in all the branch libraries and in the windows of newsagents as far afield as Muswell Hill, Southgate and Edmonton. Black and white was the key. Everyone had their colour snaps, but a classic black and white 8x10 made new parents feel that they were still upwardly mobile despite the burden of fast fattening progeny, soiled nappies and shambolic wardrobes reeking of ammonia and Sudocrem.

  One evening, just before collapsing into a brief snatch of sleep, Clara sniffed at her baby’s eggy head and murmured that someone at the infants’ club had been talking about video cameras. Everyone had gone potty over the idea of capturing the first walk, the first words, the first birthday. She looked at Sunny, her tired eyes briefly flaring at the possibilities. ‘Maybe you should do filmings for special occasions?’

  ‘I am a dream merchant, my dear. I give them dreams about the future, glamour retouched. They look at their baby in my glossy pictures and they see Vogue around the corner. The video business is . . . documentary. Any fly on the wall could do it.’ He laughed.

  But it made sense. Not many people wanted to spend money on another Japanese gizmo. Sunny took Clara’s advice and invested in a state-of-the-art camcorder. He found he was quickly in demand. Every week there was some kid speaking her first words, or rising to his feet and taking those first astonishing steps. He’d get calls and repeat calls. Emergency calls. ‘Goldilocks is playing the piano! Come, quick.’ Those who had their son’s first steps on video were hooked. They had to have the hands-free walk, the Eureka rhapsody, the monkey-moment with the TV remote, the precocious delight in a note of Beethoven or the tinkling of The Byrds. He gave them raw footage, edited highlights, life stories. He was cheap and available at almost any time, day or night, like Govinder in his corner shop strewn with emergency supplies of milk, cigarettes and loo paper.

  Mikey was a model child, and Sunny practised on him, learning the speed and accidents of growth; using them to make the images by which childhood would be remembered for ever in the middle terraces of outer London.

  In time though, as Mikey’s third birthday approached, Sunny began to feel that baby pictures might have been another of his misjudgements. Business slowed down. Camcorders dropped in price and his customers began to do their own thing. It was also becoming clear to Sunny that something more important was going on around him, that he should be out on the streets, not in the front rooms and cluttered kitchens of north London. Even the day of the famous fatwa passed him by almost unnoticed; he was busy photographing a birthday party in Finsbury Park. He realized, too late, that 1989 was the year for political photography, not portrait pieces: Bradford, Tiananmen, Prague, Bucharest. And Sri Lanka, where beauty had been criminally debased, year after year, with a death toll nobody could have imagined. He knew from looking at the reporters on the screen, the panned shot and the quick zoom, that he was missing something vital. He had a son but had run out of adrenalin.

  Clara’s new job was not working out the way she had expected either. ‘I can’t do it any more,’ she complained one morning, scrabbling around for her flat black shoes.

  ‘Do what? The budget?’

  ‘Leaving him. Mikey looks so forlorn.’ She began to excavate a pile of plastic toys in the hall.

  ‘Leaving him with me?’

  ‘You are so preoccupied all the time. You don’t talk to him.’

  ‘How do you know? Does he tell you that? We talk a lot.’ He saw one of the nunnish shoes behind the rain-hood of the buggy and handed it to her.

  ‘Where was that?’ She looked at him as if he was the culprit.

  ‘Just here.’

  She slipped it on. ‘You only talk to get him into a picture. You are not really talking to him, you just tell him what to do. How will he ever learn anything?’

  She was right. He didn’t like chit-chat. How could he talk to the boy? What did a little person like that have to talk about? Sunny thought of his own childhood. He knew nothing and saw nothing in those early years. He had no images from the year dot to four, except for a bit of sunlight. A leaf on a red step. The hedge he used to put his hand into. A ball. Skin. The grey felt hammer on a piano string he did not want to hear. Big things happened even in those days: the Prime Minister of Ceylon had been shot dead not too far away from where Sunny was playing the lone Spitfire against a carefully imagined Luftwaffe, but it made no impression on him. There was no photograph in his head of that event. Only perhaps a vague memory of a shout from the kitchen. A worried conversation as darkness fell and Lester had ambled from one room to another, trying to find the right words with which to fill the front page, the correct point for a full stop. Sunny thought of his mother checking the scales, becoming increasingly unsure of everything.

  ‘It was only after I started at Harpo’s that I was able to listen to piano music again. I borrowed recordings of Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy from the library and worked my way down to Ravel and Tchaikovsky. My mother must have played their compositions every day when I was a child, but I don’t know . . .’

  ‘You must remember the Nocturnes.’ Clara closed her eyes, as if even she could hear the notes. She was exhausted.

  ‘All I remember are those pupils of hers, taking over her piano. And then, at night, the clatter of my father’s typewriter drowning everything out.’

&
nbsp; Clara responded with something between a sigh and a snore.

  Sunny took another sip of wine, and felt himself becoming too talkative. ‘She told me once – I must have reached the magic age of seven – that her piano had seven octaves and if she could find the right sequence in which to play the notes, she’d have the key to open any heart. Sometimes I see her fingers move in the photograph. Then everything becomes a blur.’

  He wondered whether he’d find her, or hear her music, if he ever went back to their actual house in Colombo. He glanced at Clara. She was fast asleep, her thin stretched eyelids barely able to keep her dreams in.

  ‘Give up the job if it is making you so tired and unhappy. I can do something more than baby photos. I could go into photojournalism. News.’

  ‘How can you do news?’ Clara asked the obvious question. ‘You never know what’s going on. You hardly even read the newspaper.’

  ‘You were never a mother, until Mikey came.’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘My father was once a journalist. I watch TV. I know there is a picture I will one day take. Our lives cannot be for nothing.’

  ‘One? What good would one picture do?’

  ‘A perfect picture, where the whole world holds its breath.’ The phrase echoed in his head. For a moment he felt that was all he needed. It might not change the world, but it would make all the difference to him. It would allow him to believe that somehow everything moves for a purpose. And that for once he might get something absolutely right and remove the doubt that never stopped growing inside, slowly, inexorably distorting everything in his life. He wanted it not only for himself but also for his son.

  ‘All I know, Sunny, is that we need to feed Mikey. We have to feed him every day.’

  The watchmaker’s shop opposite the kebab joint was on the verge of collapse. Mr Stan Ladek, the owner, had been cramped in it for years, growing awkwardly into whatever space his body could find. He had enormous hands with overgrown knuckles and stubby, square fingers that looked as though they might have difficulty gripping a crowbar, never mind a pair of tweezers. But, invariably, there were tweezers peeping out of his fist, or a jeweller’s miniature screwdriver twinkling under his anglepoise. He would often have an eyepiece lodged between his right cheekbone and his brow, but with the growing proliferation of electronic watches there was less call for his miniaturist skills; his days were numbered. Sunny first met him when he popped in for a replacement watch battery.

  ‘What’s that?’ He frowned. His shoulders were hunched and his immense balding head rushed downward to a small vanishing chin.

  Sunny showed him the dead battery.

  ‘Battery? No batteries. I don’t keep batteries. Why would I keep batteries? For real time, young man, you must put energy in manually and measure its release. Wind and watch it unwind. Or use motion, kinetic energy, to build up . . .’

  ‘Yes.’ Sunny nodded. ‘Yes, those are the watches.’

  ‘Timepieces.’ He glared. ‘My father made them. I am still learning only to mend them.’

  ‘Was this his shop?’ Sunny imagined a lineage back into the nineteenth century.

  ‘Pardubice,’ the old man replied. His free eye brightened. ‘He had a shop in Pardubice. Czechoslovakia, you know? Everybody else was at the factory. He made a watch that you could wear in the spring. The spa. You know spa? What it is? Not the shop. The spa.’

  ‘Yes. Spa.’

  ‘Could have made him a fortune.’

  ‘It didn’t?’

  Mr Ladek looked at Sunny with a strange protective kindness growing over his face. ‘No. And now, I don’t even have that little blighter.’

  Surrounded by old watches and small clocks, submerged in a sea of clicks and ticks, Sunny felt time stand still, as though Cartier-Bresson himself had captured them in his magic box.

  Mr Ladek watched him without a word. Then, as though making amends, said, ‘I’ve tried to make one like it.’ He opened a drawer and pulled out a silver timepiece. ‘The problem is the heat. Tepid is fine. But in a hot spa, the seal will go.’ He snapped a colossal finger.

  ‘Is that the only problem?’

  ‘Oh, no. No. But it is the present problem. The time has come for me to devote myself to perfecting this. It will do much more than tick in a teapot. It will undo time for me.’

  ‘What do you mean undo?’

  ‘It is a suspicion I have.’ He looked down at the dial on the table. ‘I think it is possible for some restitution. The time is close, I think, for me to give up this place and find some . . .’ He was suddenly at a loss. He plucked absently at his braces. ‘You know, this Havel’s velvet business. Who could have believed such a thing was possible? That a revolution would come from juveniles whose heads had gone soft with pop music? That you could go back to the beginning with such youngsters? You are a young man. That is very good.’

  Two months later Stan Ladek had sold the lease to Sunny and returned to Czechoslovakia. ‘I was born there.’ He quickly blew his nose on a voluminous red handkerchief. ‘I would like to see it again before I die. I’d like to hear my real name again, as it was. Stanislav . . . Why? I don’t know. Perhaps it is the foolishness of the old and lonely.’

  The lawyer was a friend of Stan’s and did all the paperwork. Sunny trusted him. The lease was long enough, he said, for anyone to get started, even selling second-hand cameras.

  Clara pulled at her mouth with her fingers, slowly pinching each lip in turn. ‘I must say I never saw you as a shopkeeper.’ She glanced around the kitchen. The windows needed cleaning. There were cracks around the door frame.

  ‘I am not a shopkeeper. This is more like being a teacher. I will be helping people create better photographs. Using skill, rather than just technology.’

  This alarmed her even more. ‘But you have to be able to sell cameras, don’t you? You’re not giving evening classes.’

  SNAP was to be the name. ‘Hopefully it might quicken the heart a little. Someone will see their dream machine and feel snap, there is the answer. Then they’ll snap it up – their bargain.’ Clara wasn’t bowled over, but Mikey loved the word and kept repeating it. Sunny liked the modern urgency of the name and the way it contrasted with the stillness of a photograph freezing a moment. He put up a sign and distributed leaflets around the area. Clara relented and helped organize a mailshot to his old customers. Within a week Sunny had sold two cameras: a reliable, solid Pentax Spotmatic and a ridiculously expensive Nikon that he had never quite got on with.

  ‘See.’ He showed Clara the cheques. ‘The beginning. You can give up that grumpy Gumbo.’

  ‘I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Maybe we should try for a second baby. A brother or sister for Mikey? Do you think . . .’

  ‘We can’t afford it.’ She hung up her long grey winter coat. The shiny lining was ripped around the sleeves. Two of the marbled buttons were missing.

  ‘You need a new coat.’

  ‘Not yet.’ She pulled a loose thread off the cuff. ‘I can wait for the sales.’

  Sunny started scouting around Holborn for second-hand stock and picking up mail-order bargains that he could pass on with real, valuable advice – a few choice historical anecdotes – to the growing arty community of their up-and-coming neighbourhood. It wasn’t exactly a lucrative business, but it was a reasonably honest and pleasurable one. He took fewer and fewer pictures for the sake of the shape, the line, the pattern of the image, and more and more simply to check out the equipment. There was more satisfaction to be found in the turn of a knob, the pressure of the button, the click of a shutter, the smooth flip of the internal mirror, than in composition. His attention completely shifted from the end result to the mechanics of photography.

  When the Gulf War started, he realized he had no desire to be out in a desert capturing the effects of a falling bomb. He preferred to stick to things that he was beginning to understand – the history of optics, steel, precision, the story of light, smart lenses. He wanted t
o shield Mikey’s childhood from the bullying world around and tried to concentrate on domestic survival skills.

  Clara tried parenting manuals but preferred intuition. She’d read out a passage or two of some Dr Quack and then toss the book into the bin. ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that . . . You’d think we were all born with bullet points up here the way they go on.’ She abandoned everything to urges in herself. She’d say she knew what her child needed, dismissing the cowpats of the over-opinionated, much in the same way as Sunny ignored the instruction pages that the new breed of camera producers offered in a dozen translations of gobbledegook.

  Social life was agreeably non-existent. Nothing had weight, nothing mattered but the chores, the schedules, the trappings of the moment. To him it was like taking a photograph, when the world is reduced to a measurement of light, a balance of shape, an existence in the space of a mind – not quite in the skull and not quite outside. Like composing or playing music, or football, or cricket. Solving an equation or riding a bike. Finding a solution for one thing, while excluding everything else. In a sense their lives were settled, but he knew something was not quite right. Not just out in the world, but in himself. And in Clara. And between them. Something had gone, slipped out along with the baby oil and the bath water. The bond they had forged was being worn away by the grit and grain of passing days and piles of plastic toys. Very occasionally she would try to sketch Mikey sleeping; it seemed to frustrate her more than assuage anything. Sometimes a blustery red bill would arrive and induce a panic, but Sunny kept his mouth shut. Words had been no good for his mother, and in the end they had failed his father.

  Their annual holiday was always brief and British: up to Liverpool to see Clara’s parents and then a few days in Wales. The motorway journey this time was easy; an audio tape of The Secret Flight kept Mikey hooked until Chorley and after that he slept the rest of the way. Clara offered to drive and then fell asleep too. Both of them were fighting a losing battle against a school-borne cold. Sunny gripped the steering wheel and tried to stem his growing sense of inadequacy. He was not even providing vitamins for his unconsecrated family.