by Cherry Potts
The days are long. I climb a thousand stairs to get to the top of a tower where I live. It seethes with bad odours and gives home to large defiant rats. Children smoke strange substances, tormenting each other with knives. There is often dried blood on the concrete steps, hardened stinking shit and suspicious rags curled into tortured flesh bundles that no-one owns.
Through my glass window I stare at the siren moon and ache to be released to him, to flee into the distant forest. A thousand steps below, the other world exists. Its noise and its clawing, its lost people, tied to burdens and tasks, and tiny aimless hopes. I was one of them once, a time ago, before the wolf claimed me with his glare and his intangible commandments to follow.
At least I can see the sky. In the corner, grandmother rocks towards the shattered wall. She rolls in a skein of wool and a thousand spiders come out to unwind it, before her hands begin again. In a soft voice she crows, pulling it back, speaking in tongues of fractured memory. Tells the air secrets, whispers to the ghosts of fate and danger. Her eyes look to me and she always cries.
I hear him in a dream and bathe myself before I go to his call. I dress plainly in a velvet coat. Grandma puts a winter violet in my hair and a pomegranate in my hands, murmuring to beware the seeds.
Near the bottom of the steps an old man leans against the angry concrete. His beard knots in snarls of dirt and grey. I did not catch his gaze but as I move, he grabs my wrist, his bone fingers scarring my skin.
He chants. ‘Don’t give yourself to the likes of him. Those sorts ruin you. Take you, eat you. He’s done it to many. Don’t give yourself to the likes of him.’
‘Leave me alone,’ I cry as I wrench from his fear and his aging flesh. ‘You just want to hunt him because he is wild and different, because he frightens you.’
‘Yes, he frightens me. He should frighten you. His kind cause nothing but hurt and destruction, and take us to places we should not go.’
‘You don’t know him like I do.’ I smile as I run, not looking back. ‘He won’t harm me.’
I run and I run, and the other world flees. The dirt and the noise, the machines in motion, the frenetic petty actions of those strayed from the old path, where they once belonged with the wolf and the owl, the bird and the fox, the oak and the yew.
I skip into the forest and dance with my love. He rolls me around, pricks his ears, growls out love and desire. His teeth are sharp but I cry in pleasure. He mounts me and the pomegranate splits into slick fragments, the violet crushes from my hair.
The moon shivers and turns red. I howl. I roll my eyes to the stars. My love looks at me, his ears down.
I do not know myself as I roar. Teeth snap from my mouth with a deadly cut. Into his throat I bite, and I bite. He yelps softly and I see the sad, accepting glow in his eyes.
My coat is thick with his blood, I shake it, swing it back onto on my shoulders.
A while later I race deeper into the woods.
Over my head, a proud trophy, and one of love. There he is, his fine pelt hanging over my shoulders, his ears pert, his eyes staring, forever staring. We are one now, always.
I draw back my lips.
It is time to howl, it is time to smile and time to call out for another.
Flick’ring Shadows
David Mathews
‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the gallery and to pictures by one of our favourite photographers. Smith is sorry that he can’t be here himself, but he has asked me, as the show’s curator, to introduce you to a few of these ‘low lights’, portraits and scenes he has shot after sunset, mostly outdoors, all without flash.
‘So, if you’ll follow me, I’ll introduce you to my personal favourites.
‘My number one is also Smith’s choice. A schoolgirl, seen as she wished to be, looking straight at the camera, slight pout, ribbons loose in her fair hair, tie half way round her neck. Not, you guess, how her mother envisaged her portrait. And notice the light: pale pink sky above the trees graduating to the deep blue of evening higher up. The face with barely a shadow, but it’s lit enough to show freckles.’
Josie age 7, November 2009. C-print
Josie came to my studio with her mother, after school. She knew her mind. She arrived at my door on her bike, mum trailing, and asked me right away if we could do the shoot outside.
‘In the park or by the river?’ I said.
‘Ooh, by the river.’
Josie wanted to look like a gypsy. Which bit of being a gypsy, I needed to know. She showed me her best sultry, brooding look. Mother frowned, but I laughed, and Josie did a sulk so profound that it might have been the best picture I never took.
Trouble was, the light was going. We were meant to be in the studio, not beside the river, ducking bats as they chased their supper. I suggested we let the dark do the gypsy thing, and Josie got my drift. She was great. We played tricks in the half light.
A magazine bought two shots, and my phone went berserk.
I wish I had had a daughter. I never quite managed that.
‘Here we have Smith, by himself. Yesterday I went to see him in hospital. He’s doing OK. He’s lost a bit of weight since he took this picture five years ago, but even here he’s long and lean. He describes himself as an apprentice wraith, and he certainly looks like he’s not seen sunlight for a while, for all that he’s dark skinned. But not many ghosts wear specs.’
Self-portrait, 2011. Giclée print
I did not plan a self-portrait. I had done a few moody shoots in low light with a clear sky, at the end of what we call the blue hour. I even had a couple where you could see Venus. But what could I make of an overcast sky after sunset? I took the tripod outside, and was going to ask passers-by if I could shoot them, when my neighbour who runs the takeaway said that if I did some pictures of him, he would do me. I set up the shot. He said, ‘Left a bit – no I meant right, my left,’ and pressed the button. Strictly speaking, this is not a self-portrait at all.
‘I puzzled over this picture for an hour. What do you think that is top left, a bat? It’s scarcely more than a blur. And to the right, out of shot, must be a streetlamp, and somebody making the shadow that takes up half the picture. The river is there, bottom left, but how far away I can’t tell, so deceptive is the light. Maybe the elusiveness is the point.’
Just a Song at Twilight, 2012. Giclée print
As well as shooting pictures of people in this intriguing light, I have tried to record the tricks that dusk plays on our visual perception.
‘I can’t add anything to what Smith says about this next one.’
Women Playing Bowls by Torchlight, 2011. Giclée print from mobile phone.
I have had a fondness for evenings since I was a child. In Port of Spain we would play cricket until it was too dark to see the ball, and even then we would try to carry on by the light from a doorway. I was Gary Sobers. When I came across these beautiful ladies playing bowls in near darkness – they must have all been in their eighties – it took me back to those evenings. Brilliant; except the only thing that really was brilliant was the white jack that Doris was shining her torch on. It was their last outdoor match of the year, and they were going to finish it if it took till midnight. I felt they should be called in for supper.
‘A few years ago we hosted a show called Life before Death, 24 pairs of portraits by Walter Schels. In each pair the subject is shown in the days before their death and shortly after they died. It was dignified and uplifting. Sandra, who you see in these two photographs, was much taken with the show, and asked Smith to do the same for her. I think it’s fair to say that he did not do it as an obligation, but as an act of love. As you can see from the light in the window behind Sandra’s chair, these are evening shots; evening in a figurative sense too.’
Sandra Before and After her Death, 20 and 21 May, 2014. Digital C-print
I did not relish shooting these pictures, but I am privileged to have done them. We never completely made a couple, Sandra and me, but we
never completely broke up either. Maybe we should have had our own little Josie (Picture #1). My fault, if fault must be allocated. When Sandra’s illness came, and she asked me to photograph her in those last days and after her last breath, I thought it ghoulish. But she talked me round, and it became a joint project to which, you have to say, Sandra contributed more than me.
‘This could be a still from a black and white movie, couldn’t it? It is colour, but so washed out you barely notice. The stone doorway could be in Palermo or Naples. The man? Slicked hair, designer spectacles, immaculate grey suit, handmade shoes. Half in shadow he seems furtive, not quite legit. But he’s not the godfather, more – what do they call them – more the consigliere?’
The Cabinet Minister, 2014. Giclée print
I knew him from the papers as a solid technocrat of a minister, not one to inspire a following or rouse an audience. Others, however, had ambitions for him, seeing him as fitted for one of the great offices of state, even PM the election after next, once the tedious referendum was done with. He needed a new look, they thought, needed to be seen in a new light by the public and, especially, party members.
The shoot was appalling. Brian tried hard, but was unable to ignore the camera or to pose to good effect, his face and body unfamiliar to him as tools of politics. I felt desperate for him.
Then the light went. He told me his favourite film was The Third Man. It was mine too, so I got him to skulk in a doorway, and shot this. He relaxed then. I was able to do a couple of decent promo shots, but he and I liked this one best. We discovered that we had more in common than movies – but everyone knows that now. The official line was that they needed a cabinet reshuffle, but his sacking was bigotry really. Brian is a lovely man and a dear friend.
‘The last picture I want to show you actually is in black and white. A middle-aged woman by a tea and coffee kiosk, the light from which has caught her cigarette smoke. You can barely see anything else. It made Smith nostalgic for his fags, and he gave me this updated text yesterday.’
Bajan Woman in a Park, 2012. Digital C-print
A proper smoker, she was. Should I go for black and white to show off the smoke, or colour to focus on the glow of the ciggie in the gloom? I went for the smoke, for old times’ sake as much as anything. Until 10 years ago, I was a fifty a day man. Loved my Pall Malls. Enid is holding a Dunhill. I miss smoking, and when they told me I had cancer, I wondered why I had bothered to give it up. The hospital told me today that they think they have cut it all out, and that the real benefit from having quit is my heart. My consultant wants me to die of old age, so I asked her, if I make 21 years and get to 80, how would it be if I took up smoking again? She asked me if I was a betting man.
Here
Samuel Wright
Witchcraft here was a thing of bone and gristle, and nails. Thick nails, square headed. On a barn, an owl, wings wide and bloody, nailed to the beam to ward off storms. In the chimney breast, a toad, thick with soot and pinned with thorns. Under the bedstead, behind a brick, a bullock’s heart studded with iron.
But here, sheep die, stones fall, nothing changes unless you heave it into place with your own hands. And if you love something you grip it tight.
On a clear day, you could see him in the top field from the village. A speck, moving slowly. His sheep, his dog, his wife. But there weren’t many clear days. Mist hung in this valley, and the fields he owned were the last green patches under the scree.
When you could see, you might guess what he was doing. If he was still, hunched by the wall, he was replacing tumbled stones. If you watched you would feel it in your own rough hands. The grit on palms. The weight tested, the dirt brushed. The grut and scrape, a sharp push with the heel of the hand. Leaning, pulling, feeling the pieces lock together. Everyone built walls, with stones piled generations back and then placed and replaced year by year.
If he moved, an energetic bend to his back, his wife beside him in a corner of the field, he was digging the earth dry. And when you watched that you too felt the freezing mud, the cold blade of the adze, the trickle as the drain began to flow and the drenched field began to release the load of water that rolled down hills and caught in the folds and hollows and bred flies and sickness in the flock.
And if he cornered a sheep, and bent over it, he might be doing many things. He might be holding the bucking head with a knee against the neck, feeling the horns scraping against the stone wall, gripping the oily wool and pulling up a hoof to dig the rot out. He might be pulling a dazed animal up, trying to make it stand as sickness staggered and blinded it. He might be turning it to see the pink, distended uterus that hung down, torn by panicked hooves. And then he might be taking out his knife to slit its throat and let it bleed out on the mud before he slung it on his shoulders to carry home.
When you watched that, you smelt the oil on your fingers and the blood under your nails, and you knew, as everyone does here, that the things we know are the things we can hold.
A farmer’s wedding is a thing of coarse jokes and slapped arses. When you breed sheep, you need sons, and sentimentality is for those who don’t have to hold the knife. But love can still come, and come strong. Maybe it is the heart under the bed, or maybe it is the night when some space opens up, for a moment, and you touch without pressing.
Or maybe it just takes some people. People like him, with eyes that puzzle over moss, and a rock loose and rattling in his heart.
She followed him always, beetling across that top field. Early days it was close, so close they sometimes touched, and stopped, while the dog circled them. But stony men are stony men, and it came that she lagged and lagged while he lost the way of her in the mud of his fields. The dog looped further and further. It was a huge, loping animal, more than half wolf, they said.
In those times they still talked of wolves. They were gone, but their memory remained, and it was easy to believe they might remain in the dark on the far side of the old walls. When they talked of them they talked of sheep torn open, children taken, dogs bitten and rabid. On the older farms, when their dogs died they sometimes took a paw and nailed it to the gate of the field, a charm to ward off the wolves that weren’t there.
But he said he’d seen them. At auction, after he’d sold his sheep, he’d have a drink at the Bear. He said he heard them at night, and he’d seen their shadows slipping under gates. The others laughed gently, touching him with hard, friendly hands, but he shrank back.
‘That dog would see off any wolf,’ they said.
When he placed his glass back down, the bottom rattled against the slate bar.
The next auction day the only sheep he brought was dead.
In the village they watched him, hunched, his wife trailing behind. She stopped at the gate, and he walked on down to the village, the carcase across his shoulders. By the time he reached the valley floor the blood from it had pinked his neck, and the smell where his sweat had slicked the butcher’s stink of the gut was rank. He threw it down, and part of it fell out of a torn hole in its side.
The village stared.
He turned and walked back.
When he was gone, they touched it with the toes of their boots. The flap of belly skin was ripped in a wide swathe.
He stayed up there for months. All winter they only saw him toiling across the white. His wife trailed further, and his dog circled slowly.
She disappeared in spring. The dog went first, and then her.
He came to the Mayday auction. His eyes slipped back and forth across his face. He had no sheep to sell, but spent the day at the Bear.
‘They took the dog,’ he said. His voice was shivered, a splinter of half sounds.
One of the old men drew near. ‘Wolves?’
He nodded. His hands held the glass. Long scratches ran down the back of them.
‘Or men?’
He looked up. The old man had aged past all expression, but his eyes were sharp. There was enough animal in everyone round here to believe that shapes
might shift, and natures turn in the dark.
‘Do you have the body?’
He nodded.
‘Take the paw.’
If you had watched, you might have seen him hammer something to a gate high on the stony back of the hill.
When the men of the village were boys, the tales of wolves had been more than just lost sheep. They had heard the cries at night, the howl that sounded half human, at least to an ear primed to hear it. Full moons, bright nights where a girl might grunt against a back wall and the hand that held her shoulder had nails that came close to claws. When a kiss was close to a punch, and you carried a dead lamb like a wet sack, the thought of turning fully, of being the wolf that most were halfway towards was not so strange.
Everyone here knew the taste of blood, and the thinness of skin.
So when he came down one last time and said that it had changed, there was enough to make five men go. They walked in the half-light to the gate in the high field where he’d nailed the dog’s paw.
In June, the hills still held cold glimmers of sun past ten o’clock. At midnight, when they reached it, the rocky crest of the hill was a blue grey shadow against a lighter sky. And yes, the moon was full and round.
He walked with them, stiff and strange. His eyes were fixed now. He’d looked mad before, but now he just looked afraid.
He stopped twenty yards back. They could see where he’d nailed it. It had been there for weeks now, but the air was still cold this high up, and there was enough left to see that it was no dog’s paw.
The five stepped closer to look. The nail was struck neatly through the palm. One drew back, but the others looked closer. Sometimes you found a sheep in a crevice, higher than this, and rather than rotting away, the skin would dry over the bone, pulling back to reveal teeth, hardening and blackening into leather. This hand had dried, into the thinnest of black gloves. The wrist bone beneath shone white. A gold wedding band sparkled loosely at the base of the ring finger.
And now they all drew back. They looked at him. He touched the long scratches that ran down the backs of his wrists.