Tourist, Fiction by Rob Yates
Tourist
Rob Yates
A few years ago I appeared in a photograph taken by a Japanese lady.
We never knew each other.
She had travelled to London for one week, with her husband, sightseeing.
They had been married almost twenty years when the photograph was taken.
He'd always promised to take her to England one day. They'd spoken of it ever since he started work at his father-in-law's firm. Something to do with engines, or turbines.
What they never spoke of was the affair he had been conducting with a British trade envoy. She was two decades younger than his wife and possibly the main reason he finally decided to make good on his promise to book those flights. There were no more overseas business trips on the calendar and, since he could only take five days off a year, he decided that his family holiday would need to include some extrafamilial romance.
He’d met the woman who wasn't his wife in Manchester the previous autumn. He’d been there to sell turbines, or engines. When they'd first hooked up she had even taken a photograph of them both together, lying in bed in a hotel that was more expensive than he could really afford. They were wrapped up in a dark red duvet which seemed not so much to conceal their nakedness as to declare it.
He paid for most of the affair with a credit card his wife never knew about. The rest he had to cover using a short-term loan from a business associate. The associate never asked him what the money was for.
I didn't appear in the photo of the lovers in the hotel bed. I appeared in the wife's photo, when she was sightseeing.
In that photo my face is slightly blurred.
I must have turned my head just as it was taken, because I tend to walk slowly along the Southbank and can't imagine I was moving fast enough to escape being accurately captured.
I appear neither happy nor sad.
The Thames behind me can be made out as a soft, grey fuzz. Like my head, it is out of focus.
I am close to the edge of the frame. If she had taken the photograph a moment later I would not appear there at all. Her husband still would since he is the main subject. He is standing off centre in a prim, awkward stance, unable or unwilling to smile properly.
He's holding an empty plastic bottle with no label, meaning you can't work out what it may have once contained.
When they looked at the photo after their trip he didn't like it because he rarely likes how he looks, but he likes the fact that Somerset House can just about be seen in the background on the other side of the river. This allows him to describe the architecture of that building to anyone they show the album to. He tells everyone it is his favourite building in London.
The Japanese lady preferred the Tate Modern to Somerset House, although initially she thought the gallery was a factory. She took four photographs of its facade, capturing whichever sculpture was looming outside without realising it was a sculpture.
The couple never went inside. Neither of them had ever given much thought to art, contemporary or otherwise.
I do not appear in her four photographs of the Tate Modern. That was later in the afternoon, I would have been a long way away by then.
I can't remember where I was going the day I appeared in her photograph.
It was the second day of their trip. On the third day, the husband told his wife he had received an email from his company asking him to conduct some urgent business whilst he was in the UK. His wife believed him. She was furious with the company.
She had never viewed her husband as someone capable of lying in a way that mattered. He took her out for a seafood dinner on The Strand then left her to tour London on her own for the rest of the week whilst he conducted business elsewhere.
Plenty of other people appear in photographs the Japanese lady took during that holiday, different people who don't know she exists, even though they might have seen her with their own eyes. They may themselves have taken photographs of her, without anyone ever knowing, without it ever coming into play.
***
A few months later I appeared in a photograph taken at a death metal concert.
It seems to have been shot using a wide, fisheye lens. It shows a cramped sea of sweaty, upturned faces stretching from one side of a cavernous room to the other, billowing forward. It looks like a wave of bodies tumbling up and out of a crypt. Half the people have their mouths open. Half the people have their eyes shut. Sometimes they have both.
The photograph was taken by the band's promotional team and used on their website to advertise the rest of the tour. Outside the gig there was a sign next to the security guards - 'Parts of tonight's performance may be recorded. By being here you consent to being filmed'.
It was freezing outside and everybody wanted to get in where it was loud and warm.
I am not looking at the stage, I am looking somewhere to my right, as if I've spotted someone I recognise.
A man in front of me has just thrown his head back. A knotted string of his black hair obscures part of my face. He was probably in the middle of headbanging.
He had seen the band four times over the past year. He prefers their older material, but doesn't mind the new stuff.
He works part-time as a delivery driver for a small furniture company and spends his evenings at a local technical school, hoping to be an IT consultant.
He has a child he doesn't know about. She is two or three by now but the mother never wanted him to know, not because he would make a bad father, but because they only slept together twice and the relationship went nowhere.
When the child grows up and asks who her father is her mother will tell her that she never knew him properly. She will have to explain how adults come together and move apart, sometimes so quickly that they never get to remember each other's names, but how it only takes a few moments to make a baby. This may prove to be a complex conversation.
The man took several photos at the gig, in between headbanging, but they were of the band onstage and I was standing behind him, trying to avoid getting his hair in my mouth, so I don't appear in any of them.
He has no idea I was there.
***
There is a very old photo of me holding my mother's hand. It was taken by another parent, meaning to capture only their own child, who is in the foreground. I am in the background, being pulled out of the frame.
The location, I believe, is some sort of petting zoo, although I can't remember going there. I can see the outline of small mammals behind me, possibly goats.
My face is turned away from the camera. You can only see the back of my head.
My mother is looking down at me. She is roughly the age I am now. In the moment of the shot she looks impatient, as if she is trying to whisk me away, as if I've been difficult. This is unfortunate because my mother was rarely an impatient person.
The child who the photograph was meant for has learned to pose from a young age. He has a stretched grin which he's inherited by watching adults around him. I suspect they take a lot of photographs in their family and that these photographs are often on display in the family home, so guests can see them, so the family can be reminded of who they are.
To the far right of the shot, a single forearm can be seen reaching towards whatever animal sits beyond the fence. It looks like the hand of god in that famous Michelangelo, except it isn't reaching out to touch a man, it's reaching out to stroke something in a farm yard.
The main child in the photograph will eventually die in a snowboarding accident. It is only the second time he has tried snowboarding and the statistics that say you are less likely to die from dangerous activities as a beginner are not shared with the grieving family. This would only make them feel worse.
The parent who took the photograph is unfortunate enough to outlive their own son.
****
When I was in Thailand a photograph was taken of a man falling from a cliff.
The man deliberately stepped off the cliff. It was a tourist attraction. There was water below.
It was not a suicide although at the time it reminded me of a suicide. It was a photo opportunity.
At the top of the frame you can see the cliff edge from which the man has just stepped. There are other tourists waiting to jump.
I am one of those tourists. I have no shirt on.
I don't like how I look. I seem overweight but I'd spent most of the holiday thinking I looked pretty good, or at least slimmer than I had done the month before. I look heavy, poorly conditioned, and you can't even see all of my body.
The man falling looks neither frightened nor excited. This is a strange feat to have managed given it was a thirty foot drop into a startlingly cold sea.
He is being watched by his wife and two kids, except one of his kids isn't watching because he's embarrassed to see his father acting like a child.
The kid who is watching has fallen for the daughter of another couple who are staying at the same hotel, but at that moment he is not thinking about her, he is thinking about his father in the middle of gravity, and how he never thought his dad would jump.
The man and wife will continue to have a marriage free from infidelity, although the man will come to believe later in life that his wife has been unfaithful, because she will come home one night smelling different to how she usually does.
No one is watching me in the photograph. My partner is back at the hostel with a stomach bug. She told me she wants me to enjoy myself, that she doesn't want to stop me from enjoying myself, that I need to put my own needs first, that you have to love yourself before anyone else can love you. I don't believe this is the case, or I hope this is not the case.
Hoping something and not believing something are sort of like bedfellows. They can make it difficult to sleep.
When I eventually jumped off the cliff I remember landing at an angle. The water boxed my right ear. It hurt for three days and after one day I felt I couldn't complain about it any more because the topic had become boring.
The man in the photograph already mid-flight did not land sideways. He managed to keep himself vertical, which meant he emerged from the ocean smiling. He did not need adrenaline to cover up pain.
****
There is a final photograph I would like to talk about. It is the only photograph where I was meant to be the subject, although my ex-partner's thumb is obscuring a third of the shot.
I am sitting at a breakfast table and she was trying out an old camera she had found. It is the breakfast table in her parent's house. It is the morning after our first date and the first time I'd stayed overnight. She would later tell her parents that we'd gone on more than one date before sleeping together.
Unlike the other photos I'm looking at the camera in this one. I don't think of myself as an ugly person but I've always known I'm not photogenic. There are crumbs on my shirt from the piece of toast I'm eating. I remember that I was very happy to be there, although it would take a few more months before feeling confident that I was in love.
I sat at that breakfast table many times after that, although that is the only time I was photographed. That photo is perhaps the only solid evidence I was ever in that house. I got on well with her parents, who look like they'll never get divorced. They have managed to raise a good family.
Several years later, towards the end, my ex-partner would say that she wasn't sure about me coming to her parents' house any more, that she would rather just come to mine. She said this wasn't personal, that it was about her and not me. I said that this felt extremely personal and she admitted that it was fair for me to feel that way. It was clear even then that this was a clear signal.
I imagine I've appeared in other photos since that time, although I've never been one to take them myself. I feel as if memories should be tested. Perhaps things that aren't remembered shouldn't be remembered. This is of course not true, but I feel we carry enough luggage as it is. There's no point taking more than you need.
Rob Yates is a young writer currently based in London and originally from Essex. He has released a small collection of poetry entitled 'The Distance Between Things'. He has also had work appear via Agenda, Envoi, Bodega, and other literary magazines. Some of his writing and recordings can be found through www.rob-yates.co.uk.
Inquiry
The following has been provided by the author:
The conceit of this story - a series of photographs considered one after another - emerged for me before the theme did. It seems apparent, now it’s finished, that the root of the piece is a break-up. If there’s any narrative to be found it’s one that moves towards a separation.
More broadly though, I think the story and the event that engendered it both had me thinking about the ways we flash in and out of each other’s lives and eyes. There’s something great and terrifying about this, our ‘tourist’ nature. We see and we’re seen in fleeting stubs. We don’t know what the next scene will contain, or how we will appear within it, if we appear at all.
For a long time I’ve been energised and spun-out by everything being wreathed in this shared impermanence. There’s also the seeming impossibility of ever knowing whether two people, or two events, or two anything, are linked. I suppose this short stack of visual cuts is one way of testing the hypothesis that things can be linked together, so long as we make them so.