door for a moment. “The subway, queues, you know. I’ll put the film away.”
Evelyn has lived in the apartment below for most of her life; she keeps this place as her workspace, her studio, her retreat. Aoife goes into the room they use for storage: what would once have been a bedroom is now filled with shelves, cabinets, cupboards. Pigeonholes stretch from floor to ceiling, along the windows, up and over the lintel. And every single one has a label: FILM B+W , reads one, FILM COL , reads another; FILTERS, LENS CAPS, SPARE STRAPS . Aoife doesn’t even glance at these labels, tightly typed by some predecessor or other, because she memorized the contents when she first arrived. She drew a diagram of the pigeonholes when she got home, standing up beside the covered bathtub, drawing arrows and writing what she remembered in her own sometimes backwards, mostly left-handed scrawl. The result, incomprehensible to anyone else, she’d pinned to the shuddering skin of the refrigerator, until she had it committed to memory.
Along the other wall are cabinets containing Evelyn’s archives—boxes and boxes of negatives and contact sheets, drawersfilled with lists of whom she has photographed and where and how much she was paid and by whom. Files and files of contracts, tax returns, letters from fans and non-fans.
This whole side of the room, Aoife stays away from. Which is becoming a problem with every passing day. She has begun to dream about this side of the room; it has started to invade her nocturnal life. It pops into her head, unbidden, as she stamps bees on the skin of music-lovers, as she clunks whiskey sours down on the bar.
She has got away with things so far. But she knows, this side of the room knows, that it cannot be for long.
Other photographers’ assistants she has talked to have said they never do anything other than filing or dealing with contracts or answering mail or raising invoices: they are, they grumble to Aoife, nothing more than an administrative assistant. That Evelyn takes Aoife out on shoots is incredible, they say; Aoife doesn’t know how lucky she is.
Lucky is not how Aoife sees it. She feels herself to be cursed, like those people in folktales who are singled out for the random cruelty of some higher being, condemned forever to have a wing instead of an arm or to live underground or to take the form of a reptile. She cannot read. She cannot do that thing that other people find so artlessly easy: to see arrangements of inked shapes on a page and alchemize them into meaning. She can create letters, she can form them with the nib of a pen or the lead of a pencil, but she cannot get them to line up in the right order, in a sequence that anyone else could understand. She can hold words in her head—she hoards them there—she can spin sentences, paragraphs, whole books in her mind; she can stack up words inside herself but she cannot get these words down her arm, through her fingers and out onto a page. She doesn’t know why this is. She suspects that, as a baby, she crossed paths with a sorcerer who was in a bad mood that day and, on seeing her, on passing her pram, decided to suck this magical ability from her,to leave her cast out, washed up on the shores of illiteracy and ignorance, cursed forever.
On her first day in the studio, Evelyn had handed her a contract and asked her to check it over, then fill it in. Aoife had taken it and laid it on the table and, when Evelyn left the room, Aoife had bent over it, one hand held over her left eye. There was a sudden, crushing weight on her chest and it was difficult to draw breath into her lungs.
Please
, her mind was saying, she wasn’t sure to whom,
please, please
. Let me get through this, just this once. I’ll do anything, anything at all.
Contract
she could recognize, right at the top of the page. That was good. Evelyn had said it was a contract. Or did it perhaps say
contact
? Was there an
r
there? Aoife pressed her left eye hard with the
Evelyn has lived in the apartment below for most of her life; she keeps this place as her workspace, her studio, her retreat. Aoife goes into the room they use for storage: what would once have been a bedroom is now filled with shelves, cabinets, cupboards. Pigeonholes stretch from floor to ceiling, along the windows, up and over the lintel. And every single one has a label: FILM B+W , reads one, FILM COL , reads another; FILTERS, LENS CAPS, SPARE STRAPS . Aoife doesn’t even glance at these labels, tightly typed by some predecessor or other, because she memorized the contents when she first arrived. She drew a diagram of the pigeonholes when she got home, standing up beside the covered bathtub, drawing arrows and writing what she remembered in her own sometimes backwards, mostly left-handed scrawl. The result, incomprehensible to anyone else, she’d pinned to the shuddering skin of the refrigerator, until she had it committed to memory.
Along the other wall are cabinets containing Evelyn’s archives—boxes and boxes of negatives and contact sheets, drawersfilled with lists of whom she has photographed and where and how much she was paid and by whom. Files and files of contracts, tax returns, letters from fans and non-fans.
This whole side of the room, Aoife stays away from. Which is becoming a problem with every passing day. She has begun to dream about this side of the room; it has started to invade her nocturnal life. It pops into her head, unbidden, as she stamps bees on the skin of music-lovers, as she clunks whiskey sours down on the bar.
She has got away with things so far. But she knows, this side of the room knows, that it cannot be for long.
Other photographers’ assistants she has talked to have said they never do anything other than filing or dealing with contracts or answering mail or raising invoices: they are, they grumble to Aoife, nothing more than an administrative assistant. That Evelyn takes Aoife out on shoots is incredible, they say; Aoife doesn’t know how lucky she is.
Lucky is not how Aoife sees it. She feels herself to be cursed, like those people in folktales who are singled out for the random cruelty of some higher being, condemned forever to have a wing instead of an arm or to live underground or to take the form of a reptile. She cannot read. She cannot do that thing that other people find so artlessly easy: to see arrangements of inked shapes on a page and alchemize them into meaning. She can create letters, she can form them with the nib of a pen or the lead of a pencil, but she cannot get them to line up in the right order, in a sequence that anyone else could understand. She can hold words in her head—she hoards them there—she can spin sentences, paragraphs, whole books in her mind; she can stack up words inside herself but she cannot get these words down her arm, through her fingers and out onto a page. She doesn’t know why this is. She suspects that, as a baby, she crossed paths with a sorcerer who was in a bad mood that day and, on seeing her, on passing her pram, decided to suck this magical ability from her,to leave her cast out, washed up on the shores of illiteracy and ignorance, cursed forever.
On her first day in the studio, Evelyn had handed her a contract and asked her to check it over, then fill it in. Aoife had taken it and laid it on the table and, when Evelyn left the room, Aoife had bent over it, one hand held over her left eye. There was a sudden, crushing weight on her chest and it was difficult to draw breath into her lungs.
Please
, her mind was saying, she wasn’t sure to whom,
please, please
. Let me get through this, just this once. I’ll do anything, anything at all.
Contract
she could recognize, right at the top of the page. That was good. Evelyn had said it was a contract. Or did it perhaps say
contact
? Was there an
r
there? Aoife pressed her left eye hard with the
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