Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [24]
'Do you love him?' my shrink asks, and I feel angry because it's so obvious, and is this really what I'm paying for? But I don't have a coherent response. I love his ferocious confidence, the way he charms strangers, so they flock to him like tame little birds to peck at the compliments that drop from his lips. And the way you know it's only crumbs, and long for more.
But I have a greater sense of his physicality. The image I have of Jonathan, one of the first, which I have tried to document on film countless times, but also keep in my head, are the lines that crease the corners of his eyes in bright sunlight when he smiles. Why this and not any of the other details – the triumvirate of moles in the crook of his arm; his lips, slightly too plump, too voluptuous for a man; his giant hands with knuckles like the knobbly skulls of little animals – or the whole, I don't know. But then Jonathan says that's just like me, to take in the partials rather than the composite.
The shrink doesn't even bother to make notes. When he gives me the bill, I include it in my expenses, and Jonathan pays it without comment.
'Hey, dreamy girl,' Jonathan waves impatiently from the other side of the room. 'This is your exhibition, you want to pay attention?' I set down the print and drift across the room. Not telling him about the branding feels like my counter to the Stacys, to all the times he doesn't answer his phone. An amulet of protection.
'Babes, you can't be serious about this,' he says, tapping one of the photographs, already mounted and leaning against the wall.
It is my favourite.
'It's really childish.'
They are both waiting for my reaction, Jonathan irritable and Sanjay polite, but evaluating at the same time, like he already has the measure of my work, but not yet of me.
'What do you think?' I ask him.
'No ways. You're deluded if you're making that the centrepiece, sweetheart. It's not right.' Jonathan interjects, but Sanjay gives me a little nod of approval.
It's like the night dive Jonathan and I went on in Malaysia. It was only my eighth dive, and I wasn't qualified for it, but for five hundred bucks, qualifications can mysteriously be overlooked. In the boat, over the nasal whine of the engine and the oxygen tanks clanking against their restraints, Jonathan teased me about being scared, winding me up about how claustrophobic, how suffocating it would be.
And it was terrifying when I rolled off the boat backwards, and the shock of water engulfed me, but not because the darkness closed in. Because it made the sea wide open.
Visibility limits your imagination of the ocean only as far as you can see, ten metres, fifteen at a stretch. But it's only in the utter black that you can feel the true scale, the volume and weight of that gaping unknowable drift between continents.
The photograph is called Self-Portrait. It is a print from a rotten piece of film. Two metres by three and a half.
It came out entirely black.
Toby
I'm stoked with my stash, kids: new illicit phone that's immune to defusings and capable of reading illegal downloads (let's try not to spread that around too much), and a spiffing VIMbot to restore my swivel to the state of superclean it hasn't seen since my old lady first picked it out of the catalogue. Not that I've ever been especially bothered about fighting the good fight against creeping entropy, but it'll make for a change.
I spill the VIMbot out of my pack onto the bed and it goes zooting between my Pumas, breaking for the corridor and nearly gets away. Luckily the door has already started to rotate away. A lot of people don't like this whole cog system of floors, the