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“We all know Anthony’s work. His portraits have been in the most read magazines, the biggest galleries. He has met Prime Ministers, Presidents, Princesses and Pornstars. He’s captured them all. But tonight is not about the awards or the plaudits. Tonight we go back to where it all started, walking the streets of Birmingham, camera in hand, showing life to the world. Life on the other side, life in a moment. Laughter, tears, fists and beers. On show back in Brum for the first time in five years, I give you the new retrospective, Anthony Holland: A City in Forty Frames.”
Sophia turns to gesture to me, then around the walls, arms out and sweeping. There is polite applause and the clinking of wine glasses. I see a bead of sweat descend the back of her neck, slow, idle, and wish I had a camera to freeze it in time.
“Please,” she says, “enjoy the evening.”
Other voices cut in, the captured audience released. The band in the corner strikes up what sounds like the opening bars to All Along the Watchtower – the Hendrix version, of course, though it is a trick and it dissolves into music written to be ignored. The chords drift between the chatter and movement of bodies as they inspect images I made ten, fifteen years ago. I am too warm and regret the jumper I dragged on last minute.
“Here, Tony, wine,” Sophia says.
She passes me a glass of red. I lift it to my nose but cannot smell it over the incense. Sandalwood, I think. I am relieved to have had nothing to do with the arrangements. Just the images.
“Thanks for the introduction,” I say.
People pass me by, congratulating me, though I am not sure what for. I am not the same person who took these photos. Their faces swirl into a multitude of colours and shapes. I try to slow them down, pick them out as if they were sitting for me but nothing stands still and the wine is warming my head, radiating through my chest.
“Which is your favourite?” A swirl of white and pink asks.
“What, sorry.”
“Your favourite photo?”
The swirl resolves into Sophia, though I was sure she had dispersed into the encroaching tide of people.
“Oh, I don’t think I have one.”
“Really? They are all great, though I must admit I really like Slap. Really like it.”
Slap hangs in a corner, printed large. A man and a woman framed by a canal and the towpath wall. She is reaching up to him. On first impression it could be caring, could be blessing, touching. But the blurring of the hand gives away the intention. The bare skin of her arm a beacon of light against the dark night. Her concentration is palpable in profile. The man’s eyes just beginning to widen as he recognises what is happening. A couple of guests are looking up at it, an arm pointing towards this and that. It was not staged, but it looks as if it might have been. It is somehow too composed for street photography. I tug at the neck of my jumper, desperate for a breeze and hunt for a place to put the empty glass. I am being watched by a woman in blue, she is still and distinct amongst the others. For a moment our eyes meet and I feel my skin burn. I turn away.
“It was your beginning, wasn’t it?” Sophia says.
“Was it?”
“I mean yeah, wasn’t it picked up for some big campaign? Broken Birmingham, Battered Britain, things like that? It was everywhere. That and Paltry of course. Which we couldn’t get.”
“Couldn’t you?”
My agent Jane thought it was so clever, naming it that. It was untitled when I showed it to her. Some chickens loose on Broad Street, outside nightclubs as the sun is coming up and drunks staggering home. I was one of them.
“But at least we got Slap.”
“Great work Mr Holland, nice you could have a homecoming.”
The stranger does not pause for my thanks and I watch their back retreat to find that the staring woman has not moved and is still fixed on me. Her dress is out of place. This is not a big gallery nor a formal event. Her necklace glints above a plunging neckline and again, I turn away. The band is playing Hendrix now, Hey Joe, though less discordant than he would have liked. A captured beast.
“Are you alright? You look a bit pale,” Sophia says.
“I’m fine, this is not really my thing.”
“What is?”
“Studios, sitting rooms, bedrooms. Me and a subject.”
I am not lying. Though perhaps the streets are my favourite place. I am invisible there. Apart from when I got mugged in Reading. That was on a towpath too. My vision has lost focus. It is probably the sweat I can feel running, sprinting, across my forehead away from my hairline. I need to escape for a moment. Breathe.
“Hiding behind a camera, you mean,” Sophia says.
I shrug and say that I am going to find some water.
Of the eighty guests who came only a few remain . I sit on a chair under Cannon Hill Road. It is not one of my best, a road littered with cardboard boxes and a couple of strained faces glancing towards the park, which is behind where I took the photo. There was a cricket match happening at Edgbaston, a couple of hundred metres away. When I pressed the shutter, a cheer went up. As though it had been for me, I thought it a good omen and was excited when developing the image. It sold modestly.
I am searching, in my peripheral vision, for the woman in blue. My hand is shaking a little, though the cool of the glass and the water it contains has steadied the rest of me. The sweat is now dry and my fringe sticks to my forehead, the jumper damp and rubbing. I try to move as little as possible. I catch the blue. Still here then. I slow my breathing and run through my head. Do I know her? Is she a model, a minor celebrity? Did we fuck? Why is she staring at me?
“We’ve done well.”
Sophia stands next to me. She is flushed. Her glass never seems to be empty.
“And look at you, on your throne, holding court,” she says.
“My courtiers aren’t paying me much attention.”
She laughs and her teeth are stained red. She puts a hand on my shoulder and her smell, almonds, overpowers the sandalwood. The touch pushes the damp wool against my skin and I shiver though she does not seem to notice.
“You’ve done alright from behind your lens.”
“Lucky.”
“You’ve got a good eye. What did Slap sell for? Forty? Fifty?”
I sip the cool water.
“More than some people make in a year,” she says.
“I don’t know.”
“Oh you don’t have to be coy, we’re all in the same business here. You create and sell, I show and sell.”
“Show and sell?”
I cannot see the woman in blue and I want to escape but Sophia still has her hand on me. It pins me. I know she has not said her piece. Jane would be furious if I left now, before the guests. The ice in the water is freezing my fingers and running up my arm. Maybe I’m not well.
“I mean we’re both rags to riches aren’t we?” She says.
“Are we?”
“You a postie’s son from King’s Heath, me daughter of a Sparkbrook painter decorator.” Sophia is leaning closer. “All I’m saying is, it’s nice to meet someone else who has found a way to make a bit out of all this.”
She waves her free arm around the room. A couple of droplets of wine escape and one lands on the white of her blouse, though she does not notice. I am surrounded by strangers looking at pictures of yet more strangers taken at a time that is a stranger to me.
“It’s not like we’re hurting anyone. You know, if people want to pay for this—”.
Her grip has tightened on me and it is as though her hand is on my throat and not my shoulder.
“Anyway, your agent will be happy with tonight, I think we’ve sold about half.” She lets go and does a pantomime wink. “Lucky she persuaded you this was a good idea.”
Sophia locks the door behind me and I am ecstatic to have a pane of glass between us and the night air on my face. Cars pass at the end of the cobbled section. I wonder if I can find my way back to New Street from this hidden corner behind Victoria Square. The School of Art is nearby, galleries dotted around it like parasites, hoping to suck up any saleable talent whenever it manages to escape. The number of little sale dots next to my photos show that the market is booming, though I want to run into the School, bang on the doors and shout, rant, rave about what one has to go through, has to give, to lose. My whole body is tense. The fear of being pulled back into the gallery behind me charges through my head. I empty my chest and suck in the air of my escape. The kids are on their own. I look left and begin to move right.
As I begin to walk through the shadows, there is the glow of a cigarette in a doorway across from the gallery. It illuminates a glinting necklace. The woman in blue steps out from her cover and is still staring at me. A jacket now shrouds her shoulders but it is unfastened against the cool air. Again I ask myself if I know that face. But I’m not sure and I am tired. The cold is eating at the almost dry patches of my jumper. I nod at her and begin to walk.
She intercepts me. The jacket is worn, patched, a hole at an elbow, the leather worn back to stitching on one shoulder. The dress and her face are both lined, age wearing them in the opposite way to the smooth cobbles beneath us. She turns her face and breathes out a trail of smoke through her nostrils and it smells a little of sandalwood. Her profile. I do know her.
Before I can speak, to apologise, to beg forgiveness for whatever luck I have had in the last decade, she has closed the distance between us. Her hand raises.
Bio:
Matt Winkless graduated from the University of Kent with an MA in Creative Writing in 2021, having previously studied philosophy and law in London and Birmingham. Since then he has been juggling working for the NHS with writing the first draft of a novel. He lives in Canterbury and works in Thanet.