Read Online Like it Matters by David Cornwell - Free Book Online Page B

every fucking photo he ever took.
    She paged quite quickly through the album, and it was strange but if I glazed my eyes and looked loosely at the pages, it was like I could see it all as a sort of wash—this blurry montage of a kind of life in this country I could imagine pretty well. They spent a lot of time at the beach, they went camping, she had her birthdays at the Wimpy, they traded cars a lot and always looked delighted with the new one, whenever any of them got new clothes the camera came out
    And then all of a sudden the fact that most of the photos in there were duds wasn’t a problem anymore, it was part of it—actually, it made it perfect. I was squeezing her hand and I think I wanted to tell her I loved her, I felt protective and nostalgic about this childhood she’d had and I was going to
do
something about it, kiss her or something
    But then she said, “Ha, finally. I knew it was this album. Here’s the cat I had for a while.”
    “Cool. What’s going on over here?” I said, pointing at one of the pages.
    “What’s it look like?”
    “Well, it looks like the cat’s wearing a cape.”
    “Hey? That was Pumpkin’s cape. I made it.”
    “The cat wore a cape?”
    “Ja.”
    “Shame.”
    “Please, man, she loved it. Look at her.”
    “What happened to Pumpkin?”
    “My mom was allergic. We only had her for a couple of months.”
    “That sucks,” I said.
    Then, even though I was sure I knew already, I guess I needed to witness it and I asked her, “What’s the deal with the white albums? I saw there was a whole stack of them there in the cupboard.”
    “These,” she said, and she brought the white one into her lap, “these were like a project me and my dad did together. Well, mostly it was him, but I helped.”
    And obviously it was just pages and pages of portraits of her mom, except this time most of them were good photos, and if it was a really good photo, you’d get twelve of the same one staring back at you from a double-page. She was gorgeous. She had country-singer hair—pulled back and bouffant and dark, almost red, the colour of sun shining through a bottle of Coke
    And while Charlotte kept turning the pages, I was fixating on that face, not just because she was beautiful, but because there was something else, something dark there. In every picture, you could see her trying more or less to hide it, but there it was—this interrupted absence, these impatient eyes, almost like she blamed the camera for bringing her back from somewhere far away and so much better.
    Then Charlotte turned the page again and there was a spread of dark photos, clean shapes backlit by gold-green light, a silhouette in the middle. It looked like someone praying in an ancient temple, but then I recognised it was the lounge, that was probably the morning sun on the curtains, that was her mom, naked, in these poses that were much more like yoga than porn.
    “Woah, sorry,” I said, and I looked away.
    She laughed and closed the album.
    “That’s okay,” she said. “She took those herself, with a timer. We never knew about them. I’m sure she’s delighted you got a look.”
    Before I could stop myself I blurted out, “So she’s gone, hey?”
    “She left. A week after I turned nine.”
    I didn’t know what to say.
    I sort of just gave her my hand, and nodded.
    “Mozambique,” she said. “She ran off there with some guy.”
    “Wow.”
    “Ja. I remember my dad showing me on the map—it was so far away. It felt like she’d died. But then soon after that, I got this idea that one day I’d show up at her door there and we’d live together again, like the first big idea about my life I’d ever had, you know? I don’t think I’ve had another one since.
    “And my dad,” she went on, “he wasn’t crazy before all that, I promise. The beard, right? That’s a mourning beard, it started the day she left. The god stuff, that
happened
, that wasn’t just there. And me too. I also wasn’t always