I don’t like photos.

by Jesse

No-one in my family does. I don’t like having shots taken of me. I don’t like it when people put up photos on the wall. (I don’t know whether to look at them or if that’s awkward.) I don’t like photos when they don’t have anyone in them, like some of my dad’s photos. He reckons he’s a photographer. Whenever I go to his place these days he has all these arty shots up in the kitchen, just a bunch of photos of empty rooms. I can’t stand them. They make me think of those movies where a character is deleted from existence and that person fades from all the photos. When I see my dad’s photos I want to take him by the shoulders and shake him and scream, Who has been erased from your memory, dad. Remember. Remember.

My mother never liked photos. Whenever anyone tried to take a photo of her – at a party, anywhere – she would always twist away from the camera, suddenly as slippery and bendy as an eel. Once, Mum was sitting on a roller-coaster seat before a ride, immobilised by the bar pinning her waist down, and someone tried to take a photo. My brother maybe. Mum just put her head between her legs. She sat like that until the ride had scraped to a start and taken her slowly away.

I never liked photos either. When I was little, if my class went to Dreamworld at the end of the school year, I would always abandon my friends on that day and tag along with the beautiful girls. I would bob up and down behind them as they strutted around the theme park; I would go on roller-coasters with them – always without a partner, in front of, or in back of, the party, too timid to speak up. And as the roller-coaster went past the camera at the end of the ride, the girls would give the PEACE sign to the camera and my hand would always be sort of meekly half-raised in mimic and then the photo would get developed and my hand would inevitably find itself directly in front of the face of the prettiest, meanest girl in the gaggle. And don’t get me started on school photos.

I don’t like photos. Never have. Neither has mum.

People tell me I look like her, though. Mum.

When my mother died I really regretted her hatred of photos. She’s dead, and all I have are a bunch of blurry action shots of her scrambling up trees and down manholes to get away from the camera. She’s been dead so long that’s how I remember her now. Forever running away, like she was terrified of me. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t even picture her face anymore.

Sometimes I dream that I’m twelve years old, crying about having no friends and searching all around the house for Mummy and every time I turn a corner I see a glimpse of a shoe, slipping away, rounding another corner. And it doesn’t matter how hard I run or how loudly I sob. She doesn’t stop. And then finally I round the last corner and there she is, hanging like a ghost from the roof, with her horrible jutting-out eyes and black protruding tongue. That’s how I remember her face.

Not that the dreams upset me that much any more. I’m in my mid-thirties now. I’m over Mum’s death. I just wish I had one fucking good photo of her. Just one fucking good photo.