Walking with Guido #5
A story.
I had the camera on, which already felt like a mistake. It hung from my shoulder at an angle that altered my posture slightly, pulling me forward into rooms a fraction of a second before I intended to enter them.
The café had a linoleum floor, pale green, scuffed to white near the counter. The tables were formica, edged with aluminium trim that had dulled to the colour of old teeth. I took the seat by the window. From there I could see the gallery entrance, the noticeboard with its overlapping flyers and the strip of pavement where people paused.
The smell reached me slowly. I shifted my foot under the table.
Guido was sitting opposite me. The chair had been empty, and then it wasn’t.
“You seem encumbered,” he said.
“I’ve got shit on my shoe.”
He considered this.
“Also the camera,” I said.
Through the window, a woman stood reading a poster for an exhibition that had closed weeks ago. The glass behind her held a pale reflection of the street, a bus shelter, a bollard, the tremor of branches. She leaned closer to the poster, as if distance was the problem.
“I was thinking of stopping,” I said.
“Stopping what?”
I gestured. The camera. The window. The way I’d been moving through the city for months, accumulating.
“Everything ends, eventually,” Guido mumbled.
Outside, the light had shifted, flattening the shadows, turning the paving slabs the colour of cardboard. A pigeon landed on the bollard, stayed for exactly the length of time a pigeon stays on a bollard, and left.
We paid. The gallery door was locked, a handwritten sign taped to the glass: CLOSED FOR INSTALLATION. The tape had yellowed. Someone had written “again??” in pencil beneath it, then partially erased the word.
I wiped my shoe on a strip of grass along the edge of the building. The smell thinned but didn’t disappear. It had attached itself to the day.
Guido waited on the path. His shadow fell across a crack in the concrete where a weed had pushed through, its leaves already dusty.
“This would be easier alone,” I offered.
The bookshop was cooler inside. The shelves were grey metal, packed tight with spines in various shades of fade. A strip light buzzed. The floor was concrete, painted and repainted. You could see the layers at the chipped edges, a stratigraphy of previous decisions. Maroon, cream, then grey.
I pulled out a book at random. The cover showed a photograph of a wall. I turned to a page somewhere in the middle, read a sentence without taking it in, and put the book back.
“What are you looking for?” Guido asked.
“Nothing.”
We left. The path curved toward the park, narrowing where the trees began. Their bark was mottled, silver-grey and black, marked with the scars of branches that had fallen or been cut. The light came through the leaves in shifting patches, printing and reprinting itself on the ground.
A man sat on a bench ahead, his coat folded beside him. His hands rested on his thighs, palms down, fingers spread as if feeling for vibrations. He was looking at something, or at the place where something might have been. As we passed, he turned his head slightly. The movement was minimal, almost involuntary, like a plant tracking the sun.
I reached toward the camera, then didn’t.
“Why not?” Guido asked.
“I don’t know.” This was true. “The angle was wrong.” This was also true. “And I didn’t want to.”
A squirrel ran along a branch above us, stopped, ran back. The bark where it gripped was worn smooth and dark.
The path opened into a clearing. A group of children were playing something that might once have been a game. A ball rolled toward us across the scrubby grass, orange, slightly deflated, and stopped a few feet away. A boy ran over and collected it without looking up. His trainers were caked with mud. One of his laces was untied.
Near the far edge of the clearing, a woman stood beneath a big tree, holding her phone at arm’s length. She was angling it upward, toward a knot of branches where something moved. A bird, perhaps. Or the tremor of light on leaves.
She took a photograph. Adjusted her position, one step left, a slight crouch. Took another. Checked the screen. The crease between her eyebrows deepened. She raised the phone again, held it steady for several seconds, and then lowered it.
She stood there, looking up. Her phone hand dropped to her side. The branches moved.
After a while, she put the phone in her pocket and walked away across the grass. Her shoes left faint impressions that sprang back slowly, one by one.
I watched the tree. The light moved through it in the way light moves through trees, patient, indifferent.
Guido stood beside me, or near me.
“She might have run out of storage.”
“She might.”
A blackbird landed on the grass where the woman had stood, pecked twice at nothing, and flew off toward the denser trees.
We walked on. The path divided and rejoined, leading us through parts of the park that felt both familiar and unvisited. The light was lower now. It caught the edges of things, a railing, a bin, the peeling paint on a bench slat, and gave them a thin brightness against the gathering shade. The smell from my shoe had faded, or it had been absorbed it into the general texture of the afternoon.
A cyclist passed, too fast, his tyres hissing on the tarmac. A dog appeared from a side path, nosed the air, and trotted on. Somewhere behind us, a child shouted something that dissolved into laughter.
“Does this end?” I asked.
“Walks end,” Guido said.
I waited for the rest of the sentence, but it didn’t come. Ahead, the path curved out of sight. The gravel had given way to packed earth, dusty and pale. Someone had scratched something into a wooden signpost, but the letters had worn down to grooves.
The camera bumped against my hip. I left it where it was.
This post is part of a series entitled Walking with Guido. Guido is my AI photography guide. You can discover the backstory to this cautious experiment by reading (and listening) to the posts below:
These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.
Lovely, I really enjoyed reading that
Is this the breakup? I may have to go back and listen with more attention to the talks to understand how it got to this point or maybe simply as Guido says ‘things end’…