PAPERCUTS

Howdy y'all.

Here it is, as promised - the full version of my newest short story, PAPERCUTS. 

Enjoy!

PAPERCUTS

Alan was a photographer, first and foremost. He lived/existed in his mess of a London loft apartment, trying his best to make a masterpiece. Alan's talent lied in photography; none of that digital bollocks mind, no sir. Not enough heart in that branch of the art – the shots are mere ghosts of what the eye had seen, soulless reproductions, assembled pixel by pixel on a 4.5 inch square screen by a computer chip. No, analogue was the future.

They'd all laughed of course. No one seemed to appreciate the appeal of an image made by the reaction of chemicals and light; it was all about “my telezoom is longer than yours” and “Canon is cleeearly more superior to Nikon; the clarity of image is just to die for!” The whole business gave Alan a headache. But, with megapixel ratios climbing higher every year, and film prices following suit, Alan had a hard time making any profit from his work – that is, if he ever sold any. No one seemed to be interested in fuzzy, grainy shadows rendered in tones that were never quite the starkest black and white – they said he was sloppy, his images full of drunken horizons and meaningless subject matter. This is what truly made his blood boil sometimes. So what if it wasn't the latest technicolour digital masterpiece, tweaked and poked and prodded in an editing suite until any soul it had had died screaming in the margins? To Alan, true elegance lay in the mechanical clunk of a shutter release, contact of light on film to create negatives, that feeling of wonder as an image slowly fades into existence, willed into being by the chemical wizardry of the development process. That was true art.

Alan didn't look particularly healthy. Most of his time was spent under the red safety lights of his darkroom, so his skin was pale and translucent under his scrubby, greying beard and messy head of dark hair. A diet of mainly ramen noodles and whatever he could get his hands on at short notice at the corner shops had given him a thin, pinched look; his face was drawn and his eyes were often bloodshot and accompanied by impressive bags for someone of only 35 years of age.

It was a Tuesday. As far as Alan was concerned, Tuesday wasn't a brilliant day; it was the day after Monday and quite frankly was just too far from Friday to be worth much effort. More to the point, the bins were collected on a Tuesday – meaning that no matter how much Alan wanted to sleep in, he would always be awoken at 7am by the clunking and grinding of the compactor units sent around by Hackney council. The hiss and whine of hydraulic rams pulverising his refuse into a pulp was relentless and, in a way, terrifying. These compactors, behemoths of steel and iron, would grind and pound his waste into super-compacted blocks. These would then be burned to feed the national grid in the offshore energy recovery plants... Not that there was much energy in 2 weeks worth of ramen packets, thought Alan to himself.

Knowing he would definitely not be going back to sleep while the college dropouts rounded up everyone's waste outside, Alan rose from his squeaky army cot, fumbled for a moment to get his glasses, and went straight for the coffee machine, negotiating the matrix of strings criss-crossing the ceiling of his kitchen-diner-living room space. Multiple prints were pegged onto these strings – some of Alan's trademark fuzzy, grey images, hanging like a kind of macabre bunting... the fruits of his labour, the half-resolved figures and shapes constantly seeming to stare at him from their lofty positions.

Alan examined one such onlooker whilst the coffee machine warmed up – one of the better prints he had produced, simply a white corridor with one or two people with a grey shadow smudged across it, a suggestion of a tall, curly-haired man striding across the shot; head down, on a mission. He went to pull it down, then recoiled sharply as a tiny cut opened on the side of his finger. Alan cursed; he hated papercuts. It bothered him that something so small could cause so much discomfort... just another of the numerous hangups his creative mind was hampered with.

Half an hour later, Alan was still worrying this papercut when his phone rang; a strident bipping that cut through the apocalyptic hissing and crashing of the compactors outside. He checked the caller ID to find it was Barry, his agent. Strange, he thought. Barry hadn't called in months.

Tentatively, Alan answered, a croaky and half-hearted voice he did not quite recognise as his own.

“Hello?”

An overly cheerful, tinny, cockney accent rattled through the phone's speaker.

“Alan! It's Barry, mate! Fuck me, you sound rough. How long has it been since you left that dirty ol' loft of yours?”

“Too long, I guess.” whispered Alan, trying to remember the last time he had actually gone out with something other than creative block or getting more filter coffee on his mind.

“Well Alan, I know its been a while, but I've found some silly twat who might actually be interested in your work. He wants to get you a job!”

Alan almost spat out his coffee. A job? A way out of this hellish half existence?

Surely not. It was too good to be true.

Barry registered the disbelief in Alan's silence.

“Oi! Earth to Alan! Do you want the job or not?”

“Yes! Jesus god, yes!” cried Alan, almost weeping with joy.

“Goody gumdrops. Now get your shit together; he wants to meet tomorrow. Don't be late now, or you'll be in a whole heap o' barney.”

The line went dead. Alan's elation evaporated as quickly as it had appeared. Tomorrow? That wasn't enough time. No way was that enough time. Alan could feel himself slumping back into misery.

But then one crystal clear thought sliced through the quagmire of self pity that threatened to overwhelm him; roundhouse kicked his panic in the face and told it to bugger off.

You can do this, the thought said.

How odd, Alan thought. This wasn't like him. Maybe it was the promise of finally making it which had caused this out-of-character thinking. But the thought was right. He could do this. He drank the rest of his coffee, now lukewarm, cracked his knuckles, and went for his chemical cupboard.

Since proper photo chemicals had gotten so expensive, Alan had started to make his own with his limited knowledge of chemistry. Alan entered a Zen-like state of calm, weighing out the ingredients he needed for his chemical wizardry: borax, sodium sulphite, hydroquinone, and countless other reagents with equally weird names. This was what he was born to do. Mixing the chemicals made him feel peculiar – after a minute he recognised it as the thrill of creation, an unusual singing which resonated through his body and made his nerves tingle. This was something he hadn't felt for a while. Once the chemicals were prepared, he checked all his equipment in the corner of the flat dedicated to printing, and closed the blackout blinds in his windows. The apartment was plunged into complete darkness, and a muffled silence descended, interrupted by the flick of a light switch. Red safety lights pinged and sputtered into life, and Alan exhaled. He was ready.

After hours of exposing, printing, and heaps of failed test strips Alan stood back from his work, and allowed himself a moment of brief reflection. For the first time in a long while, he was pleased with what he had achieved. This feeling of pride in his work filled him up and threatened to spill over into a smile, but this was halted by an unusual sick feeling in his stomach. In fact, Alan realised he really wasn't feeling quite right; he felt distinctly light headed, his eyes were sore and his hands were shaking. He figured he must be dehydrated and overdue a meal, but, desperate to finish the job, he carried on working. And working. It felt like he could print forever; despite a pain that translated as a low hum in the base of his skull, and that nausea growing stronger. But he ignored it. Must keep working, he thought. Soon he began to feel a little delirious, and almost fancied that the blurry figures in his prints were talking to him. The paper took on a life of its own, dipping itself in the chemicals and shaking itself off like a dog between each tray. Having observed all of this, Alan was not particularly surprised when the floor, normally reasonably pre-occupied with being under his feet, decided to rush up and smack him in the face for what felt like no reason at all. Alan briefly felt a bit miffed at the floor for being so needlessly confrontational, before blacking out.

Alan awoke in a cold sweat, lying spread eagle in the middle of the apartment floor. The red safety lights still hummed and flickered, making him wonder at first if he had gone blind. He struggled to the light switch, and turned on the white strip lights, cursing as the harsh white bulbs scored flaming afterimages into his retinas. Once he had recovered, a quick look around revealed damning evidence to back up what he already knew. He was surrounded by broken glass, prints of nothing, and – strangest of all - tiny origami sculptures, immaculately folded. He tried to remember the name of the form; his head felt like it was full of knives. The crane... that was it. He remembered his grandma teaching him all those years ago. He was the only member of the family that had inherited her creative flair – that same drive to create that had inspired him to take up a career in photography in the first place.

Things had seemed much simpler then.

His head was pounding and everything hurt; it was like the worst hangover he'd ever had had come back to haunt him. His hands were covered in tiny papercuts, and he winced in pain as he attempted to flex his fingers. All the pieces of photo paper surrounding him bore no image, simply a square of deepest black. Closer inspection of the origami cranes revealed that they had been made using his own photographs – a glance to the ceiling proved what Alan had already guessed; all of the prints that had once hung there were gone. With a growing feeling of horror, Alan realised that his entire portfolio had been ruined. But how? Could it have been him? It must have been – how else could he have sliced up his hands so badly?

Suddenly a more urgent, panicked question came to mind: how long had he been out? Shit! The meet! Alan pulled out his phone, noticing all the missed calls and messages – and the date. Alan had managed to lose two full days... not to mention the job, he thought miserably to himself. There was no point calling Barry – That ship had sailed. Even if he could be bothered to bring himself to call his agent, what would he have to show? Blank squares of blackness and some ridiculous origami that a 7 year old could make... No, this is the sort of crap that only the most eccentric rich twats would be interested in. Definitely not the sort of company that Barry kept.

It was now Thursday. Another of Alan's least favourite days – purely because it was the day before Friday, an ambivalent, unnecessary day that quite frankly could fuck off. Alan felt sick, and hot... he strode to his window and threw it open. A cool breeze played across his face, the sounds of evening London traffic infiltrated the loft, and the yellow glow of the arc sodium lamps in the street below reflected briefly in his glasses. 

Suddenly, in a fit of rage and self pity, he gathered up the origami cranes and all the prints he did not remember making – over fifty separate sheets, with nothing but a blank, abyssal square of black burned into them by the light of the enlarger lamp – and tossed them all out of the open window. As the blank prints floated slowly to the ground, for a moment the tiny paper birds appeared to take flight, only to be knocked awry and scattered by the winds that howled through the dim streets of Hackney.

- fin.

And that's it. I've been working on this for a little while now, not entirely sure where the idea came from except maybe a papercut I had whilst working in the darkroom myself a few weeks ago. Some of those chemicals sting like fuck when they get into small open wounds like that.

I've also been making a foray into photographing gigs recently, if you're interested don't forget to check out my Facebook page, www.facebook.com/this.is.patography

That's all you're getting for now. Check back again soon for your regular fix of visual madness.

Beware of this and that, yeah?

- Padfoot