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Authors: Anne Charnock
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another. Her dad won’t ask their permission; he rarely does. He claims he’s not being nosy or rude. He calls these photos “celebrations of passing intimate moments.” Not that she believes everything her dad tells her.
She decides to explore the far reaches of the garden, follows a path through a stand of young green bamboo. She finds, to her complete bewilderment, the best thing ever to photograph. How unbelievable, she thinks, that she found it before her dad. She steps closer and inspects the bamboo. Chinese characters have been carved into the tall, woody stems. The characters are so clear—pale brown against the smooth, hard green. Absolutely bloody amazing. She takes out her phone and takes seven photographs. This is the most fabulous thing in the entire Master of the Nets Garden, and she found it.
He likes her photographs of the bamboo graffiti.
“What do you think the writing says?” asks Toni.
“Peoples’ names? ‘Toni was here,’” he says.
“It could be a line of poetry.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Well, this garden is special . . . and Chinese people are more respectful. They wouldn’t do gormless graffiti.”
“I’m not so sure about that. Anyway, these might be political slogans.”
“Or secret messages.”
“Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? If you exhibited this photograph in a gallery in London or New York,” he says, enlarging a section of bamboo on her smartphone screen, “people would ask exactly these kind of questions. Assuming they couldn’t read Mandarin. As the photographer”—he turns and raises his eyebrows at her—“ you’d have to decide whether you wanted people to guess what the characters say, or whether you should translate the words and then use the translation as a title for the photograph.”
Her dad says bizarre things like this all the time. It’s like he’s trying to make her brain think like his artist’s brain. She doesn’t know what he’s on about half the time, and she’s learned to just say hmm—without even rolling her eyes.
“Hmm. Well, I’d like a painting of the bamboo graffiti. Make me one, hey?”
“Why paint it? Make a big print from the photo.”
“You copy other peoples’ paintings. Why not copy my photograph?”
He pulls a face as though he’s smelling milk, suspecting it’s gone sour. There’s clearly some big artsy conflict going on in his head.
“Okay. I’ll do it.”
“Good. And I’ll tell everyone that the characters are coded messages.”
He laughs and puts his arm around her. “Come on, they’ll be closing soon. We don’t want to get locked in.”
Coded messages, Dominic muses as they leave the garden. The ways kids think . . . He recalls, momentarily, his own childhood excitement over a secret spy headquarters hidden at the back of a tailor’s shop, at a time when a coded message involved winding a strip of paper around a pencil.
There’s a more adult interpretation of coded message , one that’s taken on a mutated meaning. He feels a shiver of recognition as he hears again the police officer who asked Dominic to formally identify the body. It’s not a child-friendly environment. He was home with Toni at the time—she’d stayed home from school—and although he knew the morgue was an inappropriate place to take a child, the police officer correctly intuited that Dominic needed everything spelled out. He was in shock. And down at the morgue—the memory is always at the edge of his consciousness—a white sheet covered Connie’s body; her neck and face were uncovered. He couldn’t believe there was anything wrong with her. The morgue assistant left him alone, and Dominic wishes now that he hadn’t lifted the sheet.
Dominic takes a bottle of wine from the room’s minibar. It’s not surprising Toni has crashed, he thinks; she struggled to stay awake through their room-service dinner. They had an early start this morning, and everything here is different. That’s
She decides to explore the far reaches of the garden, follows a path through a stand of young green bamboo. She finds, to her complete bewilderment, the best thing ever to photograph. How unbelievable, she thinks, that she found it before her dad. She steps closer and inspects the bamboo. Chinese characters have been carved into the tall, woody stems. The characters are so clear—pale brown against the smooth, hard green. Absolutely bloody amazing. She takes out her phone and takes seven photographs. This is the most fabulous thing in the entire Master of the Nets Garden, and she found it.
He likes her photographs of the bamboo graffiti.
“What do you think the writing says?” asks Toni.
“Peoples’ names? ‘Toni was here,’” he says.
“It could be a line of poetry.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Well, this garden is special . . . and Chinese people are more respectful. They wouldn’t do gormless graffiti.”
“I’m not so sure about that. Anyway, these might be political slogans.”
“Or secret messages.”
“Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? If you exhibited this photograph in a gallery in London or New York,” he says, enlarging a section of bamboo on her smartphone screen, “people would ask exactly these kind of questions. Assuming they couldn’t read Mandarin. As the photographer”—he turns and raises his eyebrows at her—“ you’d have to decide whether you wanted people to guess what the characters say, or whether you should translate the words and then use the translation as a title for the photograph.”
Her dad says bizarre things like this all the time. It’s like he’s trying to make her brain think like his artist’s brain. She doesn’t know what he’s on about half the time, and she’s learned to just say hmm—without even rolling her eyes.
“Hmm. Well, I’d like a painting of the bamboo graffiti. Make me one, hey?”
“Why paint it? Make a big print from the photo.”
“You copy other peoples’ paintings. Why not copy my photograph?”
He pulls a face as though he’s smelling milk, suspecting it’s gone sour. There’s clearly some big artsy conflict going on in his head.
“Okay. I’ll do it.”
“Good. And I’ll tell everyone that the characters are coded messages.”
He laughs and puts his arm around her. “Come on, they’ll be closing soon. We don’t want to get locked in.”
Coded messages, Dominic muses as they leave the garden. The ways kids think . . . He recalls, momentarily, his own childhood excitement over a secret spy headquarters hidden at the back of a tailor’s shop, at a time when a coded message involved winding a strip of paper around a pencil.
There’s a more adult interpretation of coded message , one that’s taken on a mutated meaning. He feels a shiver of recognition as he hears again the police officer who asked Dominic to formally identify the body. It’s not a child-friendly environment. He was home with Toni at the time—she’d stayed home from school—and although he knew the morgue was an inappropriate place to take a child, the police officer correctly intuited that Dominic needed everything spelled out. He was in shock. And down at the morgue—the memory is always at the edge of his consciousness—a white sheet covered Connie’s body; her neck and face were uncovered. He couldn’t believe there was anything wrong with her. The morgue assistant left him alone, and Dominic wishes now that he hadn’t lifted the sheet.
Dominic takes a bottle of wine from the room’s minibar. It’s not surprising Toni has crashed, he thinks; she struggled to stay awake through their room-service dinner. They had an early start this morning, and everything here is different. That’s
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