I wanted our photos taken by another successful photographer, one who took those original, lifestyle photos. I envisaged Archer and me pushing Marla around the zoo in a pram, occasionally taking her out for a natural family photo in front of the lion enclosure. Or the photographer would take photos of us while we ate an organic breakfast at a hip café. Archer was opposed to the idea of natural photos; he told me he wasn’t going to waste his money on fanciful photo sessions, all he wanted was to go to a studio because they were the kind of pictures his mum liked to hang on her wall. In the end, we went to a photo studio that had bad lighting and came out with this picture of the three of us; a baby of six months, a not-because-of-pregnancy fat, blotchy-skinned woman that not even a beautiful pearl necklace could make look better and a middle-aged man, all front facing and smiling awkwardly. The moment the photographer showed us the photos I said to Archer, “I told you so” and we gave his mum a framed print of the photo to hang on her wall to match her outdated wallpaper.
Marla screams a demanding ‘I want to get out of here’ type of cry. She always interrupts such thoughts. I can’t wait until Wednesday evening when I teach my class of photography students so I can concentrate only on photography related business. Annoyed at myself that I am not famous in my chosen vocation and could hire a nanny to look after my child, I take Marla out of her high chair. “Let’s get you cleaned up and go out for those hot chips before your dad gets home. Before we go out though, Mummy has to send an email,” I say.
“No ewail!” she exclaims, shaking her head.
I place Marla down on her pink play-mat and sit at my computer on a bouncy red ball. Archer gifted me the ball for my 32nd birthday; it was supposed to be for exercising. Apparently you need to ‘lie across the ball, press your hips upwards, and form a straight line from your neck to feet’. I don’t do this. I enjoy bouncing on the ball while I scroll through endless social media accounts. I remember I was bouncing on the ball on a Monday two weeks ago when I came across the photo of Archer and Zody together; it was taken at the airport. She was stretched out on a couch in the premium lounge for frequent flyers, he was next to her, they looked like a couple on their way to a holiday together, and I could tell they were travelling business class. I pictured what the next moments would be like after Zody took the photo. She’d post ‘#airporthangs’ and my husband would realise she’d posted a photo of him on social media, he would stab the phone repeatedly with his index finger ‘you posted the picture of us together when I asked you not to. You know I’m supposed to be going to Melbourne for work by myself, take it down’.
That’s what I imagined happened. Because Archer would have been worried his wife might look at other photographers’ profiles and accidentally come across the photo, and then his wife would leave him. And what would my husband do without his wife? But an hour later the photo was still online. I refreshed my internet repeatedly, but she hadn’t deleted it. Maybe Archer didn’t threaten that he wouldn’t see her again as I expected he would. What Archer didn’t know was yes, I was looking at Zody’s account, but no, I never looked to find if my husband was with her. I followed Zody on her social media because I wanted to see her; I wanted to see her as much as he wanted to see her. I wasn’t angry at Archer being with Zody, I was jealous of Archer experiencing her. He has most likely been in her apartment, walked in the living room and the bedroom that I’d seen countless times on her Instagram. I’d always imagined what it would be like to be her, or to be with her.
I fantasised about what she looks like when sat at her computer writing emails to her clients; I wondered what she wrote to them. That’s why, when he got home from his work trip to Melbourne, I was calm. I smelt him to smell her smell. She smelt like a mint bush plant.
I pour all the destructive emotions I have within me into writing an email that is just two lines long. Then I mark the task as completed in my black moleskin notebook (which I must replace for a much trendier one) but the outcome is yet to be achieved.
***
Marla insisted a blow-up plastic pink flamingo had to come to the park with us. So I tuck the flamingo under one arm, loop the handle of my bag over my wrist, and push the pram with one hand – a neat trick. I hold Marla’s hand with the other and wonder whose idea it was to make a sandpit at the bottom of a steep hill. I’m already starting to dread the climb back. She wriggles her tiny fingers free and begins to toddle down the hill. I let go of the flamingo and the pram, which immediately starts to tumble down the hill. I catch up to Marla just as she loses balance and starts to fall. I pick her up and carry her on my hip to the sandpit. Sitting her down in the sand next to my bag, which I managed to hold on to, I go to retrieve the pram and flamingo.
I hear Marla giggle as I walk back to her. “Marla put sand in Mummy’s bag!” she exclaims, grabbing handfuls of sand and throwing it into my bag.
A posse of mothers sit on the wooden planks at the side of the sandpit. I listen to their conversation. I tip my bag upside down to shake out the sand. A mum with a shiny black bob is sharing stories with her friends: “…but even on nights when she does sleep longer she wakes five times to eat, and she won’t go back to sleep.”
I smile at the lady whose child has sleeping problems and give her an understanding ‘life with a two-year-old’ smile hoping to be invited to join the conversation. In that same grain of time, a gust of wind takes the sand that is falling out of my bag and carries it onto the mothers, distributing itself evenly amongst all three of them. Now they are looking at me; there are no smiles or invitations.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, embarrassed. But nobody speaks to me. Instead, the mothers share looks and murmur amongst themselves.
The sun begins to set as I start the walk back up that steep hill, with Marla crying over her separation from the sandpit and one broken promise of hot chips because the takeaway shop has already closed. I push the pram past two magpies on the grass, one holding a piece of stale bread in its white beak, and hitting it against the ground, while the other bird looks on. The portion of bread is too tough for the bird to break down, but at least the one with the food tries, while the other only watches.
Flustered both from covering perfect mothers in sand and the climb up the hill, I finally arrive at our street and pause to catch my breath. My thighs have been rubbing together, and I feel the dull burning on my skin telling me to head for home, but I decide to keep walking ahead. I walk past the church, take a short-cut through the grounds of a primary school and onto a lane with a continuous row of trees with large shiny green leaves. Marla had stopped crying, and she is asleep in the pram, so that buys me some stalking time.
Arriving at my coveted destination next to a large eucalyptus tree I look across the road at the apartment building. My gaze rests on the apartment on the fourth floor. I wish now, as I have wished many times when I have stood here, that she lived on the ground floor so I could look through her window and see what she was doing in there. I am imagining that she is sitting at her computer editing those millions of photos she takes. That’s fine; she can while she can, soon she won’t have any photos to edit, and she will be too busy stocking shelves in a supermarket. A gust of wind blows through the tree that I am standing next to, and two green blade-shaped leaves fall onto the pram. I bend down to check if the sound of the wind has woken Marla then turn the pram around and walk down under the shiny leaves now swaying in the wind, towards home.
Zody
The water in my tub has filled up a quarter of the way. I take the wooden lid off the bath salt container and sprinkle a dash of scented crystals into the tub. I dip my body into the warm water and stick out one leg. If I had my good camera with me right this moment, I would take a photo of the reflection that the moon is creating in the water; my professional camera is fantastic at capturing light, something that phone cameras will never be able to achieve.
Enjoyable contemplations in the bath, but too relaxing, it doesn’t feel right. What time is it? I pick up my phon
e from the side table and check the display; I don’t want to waste my time soaking in the bath. I put my phone down, press my fingers against my temples and try to balance thoughts that are swaying from one side to the other and I hope that a headache that started earlier this afternoon will be kept at bay. The headache is the result of returning home from the café to find another email with a threat waiting for me. The new message reads the same as the first: ‘If you continue to book your jobs, you will not know which job will be your last’.
I had started to receive hate mail roughly when I began to enjoy a flood of jobs. To stop me from feeling overwhelmed by hate, I started a Journal that I call ‘The Hate Mail File’. It helped me take some control of a clearly uncontrollable situation. I always close the Journal after I write in it and I never read over the comments. In the diary, I have a system. I divide the emails into two columns, the general cruel remarks ‘Your photography is so shit it’s not even funny’ and ‘Go fucking learn and get the basics right before you start charging people money’ and the other column is where I write the threats. The threats seem more severe and occur less often than the cruel remarks. Once a spiteful individual informed me they were planning to steal my photographs to use as their own, and if I tried to stop them, they would claim I was the photo thief (I thought it was sweet of them to let me know as usually photographers have their photos stolen on the sly). Every three months I burn the Journal. The threat I received today is the second in a short time period, but I presume that’s the last one.
I pick up my diary from the side table next to the bath and open to this month in the calendar. I nearly pat myself on the back when I see that this year, the remainder of June, July, August and September are booked out. If someone is serious about hurting me, I will have to wait three months to see what is in store for me. I take a deep breath and slide into the water to drown out the thoughts floating in my brain.
I am aware of the negative impact my success has on some people, but apart from the usual internet trolls who I suspect are wannabe photographers, people generally love what I do. Men, they are my biggest followers. At the beginning when jobs were still scarce, I was photographing many stiff company functions, which I hated with a passion. Men in suits would engage me in conversation; usually they started by telling me how much they liked my camera, then they told me how they were in urgent need of updated headshots, could they give me call? Finally, they gathered their courage and asked if I would be able to give them “head”, and could they give me a call?
My phone rings and I pull my dripping hand out of the bath water and answer the call from Polly who is my, I haven’t seen in the longest time, best friend.
“Zody Lane Photography, Zody speaking,” I say.
“Girl, it’s after eight pm, why are you answering your phone sounding so corporate?” Polly asks.
“Hi, Poll, it’s called being professional,” I reply.
“Well, you have to stop being so overly professional, Zody. By the way, what do I need to do to see you, organise a wedding for myself?” Polly laughs and continues to speak before I can reply. “Look I am visiting down your end of town tonight, can you come out for a drink at Simba’s On High, or if not tonight, how about we go out for coffee tomorrow morning?”
I bite my lip already anticipating Polly’s disappointment at my reply.
“Fuck, Polly, you are tempting me, but I can’t go out with you. I have a whole set of photos to edit tonight and tomorrow I have a meeting in the morning, and then I am shooting a wedding in the afternoon,” I say, poking my generous breasts out of the water. It wouldn’t have been possible to have them enlarged last year if I kept having pleasure breaks every time a friend asked me out for coffee. They cost me a lot of money and a lot of recovery time, but they were so worth it because if I am up against a guy photographer for a high-end client, the bride and her husband always end up choosing me. Who doesn’t want a big breasted photographer at their wedding – guests love it.
There is silence from the other side, and I am tempted to break this sad silence by telling Polly about my hate mail, but at the same time, I feel she would probably agree with whoever is sending me the threats. Stop taking on bookings, or I will kill you, spend some time with me, or I will kill you.
“Zody I’m not going to give up on hustling you to take a break, I will call you next week, and I won’t take no for an answer, I will come to your place personally and drag you out of that editing den,” Polly says, only half-jokingly I assume.
“You are an understanding bitch,” I say.
“Talk to you again sooner rather than later,” Polly says and hangs up the phone at the same time I realise what a miserable friend I am for forgetting to ask her how she was. Polly deserves better than that; this is the only one of my friendships that’s lasted past the turbulent High School days. If only I had time for Polly and her philosophies about achieving balance in your life through meditation and nutrition.
What time is it? I’ve been lazing in the bath for ten minutes. I step out of the tub, wipe myself, and wrap the towel around me. Clothing can wait. I haven’t had time to go grocery shopping, so all I have in my fridge is a pie and beer. I take out the cauliflower and mushroom pie and put it in the microwave. The instructions on the brown packaging say to microwave for ten minutes. Ten minutes, who has that long to wait for dinner to be ready for eating? I press five minutes which will have to do; it’s a pre-cooked meal, it isn’t as though I’m consuming raw meat. I stand in front of the microwave watching my dinner spinning on the glass plate. You are wasting time, I tell myself. I take out the pie at four minutes. It smells ready. The pie and I sit down in front of the computer. I sense my heart rate steady. I open my editing software. I exhale.
I open the set of photos from Natalie and Craig’s wedding I’d been working on this morning. The culling process complete, I can now begin to work on editing the photos. The first photo is one of the bride’s apartment, where she was preparing for her special day. I always take an ambient photo of the location where the event is happening in order to set the scene. It’s an impressive apartment by the way; I will live in one just like it when I move to New York, someday soon. Next photo, Natalie sitting in a chair wearing a pink silk robe having her long brown hair blow-dried, she really was a stunning bride which made up for her unfortunate inability to pose. I flick to the next photo at the same time I hear the email alert. I try to avert my eyes from the subject line, but too late, I’ve already read it. ‘DO NOT DIE FOR YOUR WORK’.
“There’s no way you will frighten me, you down-and-outer sending me these empty threats. Yes, I will die for my work, as a matter of fact, tonight I choose to die for my work by working through the night and not sleeping,” I say loud and clear.
Helena
I hold Marla’s hand through the wooden slats of her cot, while she struggles to fall asleep. The last three days she has found it difficult to separate from me. The moment I try to step out of the room she wakes to cry.
So I have set myself up next to her cot with my laptop, the blue light of the screen illuminating the room.
With my one free hand, I type ‘how to sedate a person’.
The search provides me with of a range of options from antihistamines to date rape drugs. I am confident that sleeping tablets wouldn’t be robust enough to make an adult sleep immediately and my lack of contacts with borderline thugs and ravers makes it nearly impossible for me to buy the date rape drug.
I scroll through to page twelve of the search where the words ‘poisonous plants’ grabs my attention. I feel like I’m getting warmer with my options and I return to the primary search and type ‘poisonous plants that grow in backyards in Australia’.
I am pleased to discover that I won’t have to go further than outside my own back door to locate poisonous flora, many lovely plants in Australia can kill when eaten. As I don’t intentionally aim to kill, I will keep the dose of a relatively toxic plant low, and I will mix it with plenty of
antihistamines to counteract the effect. If my experiment works I hope to achieve the effect of passing out, vomiting and an allergic reaction. If it doesn’t work, I might bring about death. I take out my phone and capture a photo of each of the plants on my screen then I close my poisonous plant search tabs and delete the history of searches from my computer. With death still lingering in my mind, I open my email account and copy the contents into a blank email. Send. I also delete all the emails with the iniquitous subject line; it was careless of me to leave a trace of those emails on my computer, I should have deleted them all immediately. I don’t plan to send any more of the same; I will move on to step two of my plan.
Marla stirs, but her breathing has become heavier, which tells me she has fallen into a deeper, calmer, sleep. I slip my hand from Marla’s and place her arm comfortably by her side. I close my laptop and creep out of the room, downstairs to the kitchen. From under the sink, I take out a pair of gardening scissors, a glove, a torch, and a plastic bag. Archer isn’t home, so I check the front door is locked then slip out the back door, leaving it open. I turn on the torch and follow the path to the back of the garden until I reach a wire mesh fence. Grateful now that Mrs Hinton never agreed for Archer and me to put a corrugated fence up; it’s painful to climb over the wire, but at least it’s not too high. I can see the light on in Mrs Hinton’s house.
No Reception Page 2