A Kind of Vanishing (38 page)
Read A Kind of Vanishing Online
Authors: Lesley Thomson
T
HE THIRD
reason I take pictures is to discover what I did not see through the lens.
In
Blow Up
, Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 thriller, a photographer roaming a London park unwittingly witnesses a murder. He only sees this when he enlarges his picture. As he ‘shoots’ a couple around corners, down steps, from behind fences, the only sound is the rushing of a breeze in the trees. I had not particularly noticed this before I saw the film. Now I hear it and I am in the film.
I enlarge my images and I see what I was meant to see.
The Leaning Woman,
a sculpture by Karel Vogel, was erected beside the Great West Road in 1959. She sits on a plinth beside a churchyard, three minutes’ walk from the river where the woman’s body was found. As I examine the shot, I discern marks on the pockmarked concrete. I click the magnifying glass icon until the screen is a mass of grey and brown pixels.
Chalk lines have been scrawled over the woman’s body, an attempt to erase them unsuccessful. I am told that these segments represent a butcher’s jointing of a carcass. My photograph has connected two realities: the actual and the invented. My murderer has been here at night when there is no one around and drawn these lines.
T
HESE ARE
images from my characters’ points of view. They are snatches of their lives. They contribute to their back story. To take these pictures I have entered my characters’ lives. I sip a cup of coffee and eat pancakes with syrup in a McDonald’s in Earl’s Court before getting into the cab of the first District Line train of the day. As I eat I avoid the eye of other drivers – they know to leave me alone – I am my character. I know what it is like to clamber over the flint wall, trampling on nettles and rough grass before crouching down. If anyone looks over the wall they will see me. I have to assume they will not. I rest a bunch of flowers against a headstone, seeing for myself that the engraving on the stone is almost obscured by lichen. As I sit on a hillside with my notebook, I ponder the best cleaning agent for removing lily stamen stains from silk.
My characters are based on real life. I am the actor.
This scrap of beach by the Thames is revealed as the tide ebbs. A woman contemplates the spans on Hammersmith Bridge, they seem to shimmer in the heat. Her husband, a civil engineer, has told her that the bridge was designed by the man who created the London sewers and opened by the Prince of Wales in 1887. Her thoughts lead her to the present Prince of Wales. Charles is getting married today.
I look at this photograph and forget that I took it. The point of view is not mine.
A man with the mind of a murderer prefers darkness. He drives a London Underground train, working the Dead-Late shift on the District line. Many tunnels have not changed in over a hundred years. Always walking, always driving, he is never in one place.
He is always absent.
Twenty-nine years on, a retired detective obsesses about an unsolved murder. Parked by the sea, he takes stock of what he has just learnt. He drinks coffee from his flask and, given to snacking, eats a Kit-Kat. He has a lead and imagines telling his daughter, but, grown up and grown away, she is a stranger. Absently he writes her name in steam from the cup on his windscreen. His daughter will never know her Dad did this.
As I slowly sip the scalding liquid, I am the detective.
A three-year-old boy studies ants scurrying to and fro across the path and positions twigs that are tree trunks to divert them. He likes the twig’s curve in relation to the square border stones. The lines in between are paths, they are short cuts, escape routes. People are not as clever as ants, he ponders. Unlike ants, their behaviour makes no sense to him. Alive with possibility this landscape is his.
A man comes out of the Co-op in a seaside town. It is eight-thirty-five am. He carries two soft ham rolls and a tin of coke in a plastic bag for his lunch. He has a massive heart attack. This picture is his last conscious sight.
As I gaze at this snatch of pavement I see a life passing before me.
These images are part of my process of writing novels. I have taken reality for use in my fiction. Using photographs such as these I believe my fiction is reality.
Then I begin to write…
Lesley Thomson is the author of
Seven Miles from Sydney,
a crime thriller set in Australia. She also co-wrote actress Sue Johnston’s autobiography
Hold on to the Messy Times.
She grew up in London and now lives with her partner in Lewes, East Sussex.
First edition published in 2007
This ebook edition published in 2011 byMyriad Editions
59 Lansdowne Place
Brighton BN3 1FLwww.MyriadEditions.com
Copyright © Lesley Thomson 2007, 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.ISBN: 978–0–9565599–9–9
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GREEN CARNATION PRIZE
‘An ambitious work in which he aims to “give voice to the voiceless”. Fast-moving and sharply written.’
Guardian
‘A thoroughly absorbing and pacy read. A fresh angle on gay life and on the oldest profession.’
Time Out
‘An interestingly equivocal and quietly questioning début.’
FT
ISBN: 978-0-9562515-3-4
