The Gun Room by Georgina Harding

Author:Georgina Harding
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781408869826
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-12-17T10:35:21+00:00

The photographs she has taken of him show nothing of his dreams. The dreams must have passed with the night and now that it is morning he does not dream any more. He lies on his stomach and angled across the bed, taking up the whole of it so that it would seem that she had got up some time before and he has moved across and settled deeper into dreamless sleep since she had gone. He is naked – or possibly she has picked away the last of the sheet that covered him, and that is a part of the mischief he will see on her face when eventually he wakes. One leg is stretched straight behind him, the other bent as if in running, the rise of his buttocks catching light and giving shade (even in close-up their maleness evident by the flatness of them and the dents in their sides). His body is turned a little in the direction of the running leg, the left shoulder blade angled and raised, the left arm falling to the edge of the mattress, the hand loose as if something has just dropped from it, the right arm flat and bent above his head upon the pillow. His face is turned to the left, to the sunlight which in the first of the pictures has just touched his forehead but which by the end of the series reaches all of his head and his chest. He must have been sleeping very heavily at last if he has not been woken by the light.

He looks very young, even to himself when he sees the pictures developed. Perhaps it was the sleep. Sleep makes a person look younger. He seems strange to himself, like some boy he does not know. His body in repose seems that of a boy: the slight build, the tousle of brown hair, the defenceless back; his face in sleep a boy’s face, pouting into the pillow. He had taken pictures of her like this, and she was both girl and woman in them, but in these pictures when nothing in him is tensed, nothing closed, he seems exposed as no more than a boy.

For once she has been awake before him, and she has taken up the camera and taken pictures ruthlessly, not only of what she finds beautiful in him, his English profile or the line of his spine, or his blunt, dangling hand, but also of his oddities, the freckles and moles and marks on his skin, all the tidelines of sunburn on him, where his swimming trunks ended, where his arms and the back of his neck were burned above his T-shirt on the previous day’s walk.

He heard her moving, bare feet on tatami. He felt her shadow moving across him and heard the click of the camera. How long had she been doing this before he woke? For a moment more he indulged his passivity, abandoning himself to her eye as to the light. Then he reached for her.

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