One Winter's Night by Kiley Dunbar

Author:Kiley Dunbar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hera
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

‘O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out

Against the wrackful siege of battering days,

When rocks impregnable are not so stout,

Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?’

(Sonnet 65)

The courier van had only just pulled away from St. Ninian’s but Kelsey was already cross-legged on her bed pushing aside the clutter of books and catalogues all explaining the finer points of curating photographic exhibitions which she’d spent the morning poring over. She tore at the cardboard packages and pulled free the large glossy prints in their protective cellophane.

It had taken days for her collection of negatives and contact strips to arrive from her mum in Scotland and then she’d gone through the careful process of selecting the perfect images to send to the developers. She wouldn’t let herself think about how much it had cost; it was an unavoidable expense and an investment in her business. These images wouldn’t just be displayed in her new floating gallery; they’d be on sale too. The shots had to be perfect, and they were.

Every photographer has one; a list of those stand-out images where their skill, the lighting conditions and their subject come together to create something magical, the very best examples of their craft stretching back years. Kelsey had drawn her greatest hits together for the first time and the sight of them in her hands now made her heart soar.

The first out the packaging were old images from the only other exhibition she’d taken part in, back when she was in the university camera society, back when she had a group of happy, creative mates endlessly talking about f-stops, film-processing and double exposures, way back before she met Fran and let all her dreams slide, prioritising instead his ambitions.

These Scottish semi-rural landscapes, taken ten years ago now, captured where she was from, the very heart of her. A fisherman repairing his nets on the quayside near Mirren and Preston’s old flat; shining, striped mackerel in their iced trays fresh off the morning boats on the Firth; a combine harvester in the fields throwing dust and chaff into a clear August sky with the ruins of the Victorian pit head in the far distance. Then there was a black and white shot of a younger version of her mum standing in her kitchen behind Grandad in the chair, a towel around his shoulders, having his hair cut. Another taken in the little ice cream parlour at North Berwick she’d visited with her grandparents, the flavours laid out in their tubs like a pastel paint palette. Looking at it now she could almost taste the mint choc chip ice cream and feel the summer sun making it melt in her cone.

Photographs could always do that for her; send her right back to the moment they were taken, preserved forever. A lens makes everyone a traveller in time.

She was looking now at a shot of Mari pushing Calum in his buggy outside John Menzies on Princes Street and could swear she detected her mum’s Chanel No.

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