emotion: January 2008 Archives
"This was one of the few truly happy moments we ever had, Gemma and I. We were trying to make a salad - Christ knows why, I think it must have been when that detective show was really popular. You know, the one with the lettuce. Inspector Iceberg. Brilliant stuff.
"Anyway, after about three hours you can see that we'd got as far as slicing a pepper in half, and chopping the end off a cucumber, and we stopped and looked at each other and thought, 'We're doing pretty well, aren't we?' And so we rewarded ourselves with a little drink.
"I'm not sure who took the photo. I'd say Gemma, but I don't think it can be her, because there she is sitting next to me. And it can't be me, I wouldn't know what to do with a camera. I'd just smash it.
"It's a mystery, it really is.
"It looks great, doesn't it, those tomatoes and the glass with leaves in it and everything, but we didn't get any further with making that salad. We just drank and drank and drank - that cupboard behind Gemma would have been basically stuffed with wine - and then we were sick, side by side, into those two sinks. We laughed together then, through the sick, because we'd always wondered what anyone could possibly want with two sinks in a kitchen.
"Shit, is that a fish slice hanging above my head? So that's where it got to!"
"I remember when this photo was taken. Kenny's wearing his captain's hat, so he must have been in the Navy for at least five years. Shore leave was always a special time. You can see he's on the verge of nodding off - no doubt he'd been drinking and whoring for at least 48 hours straight before he finally showed his face at home!"That's one of Dad's spells that he's showing us on the scroll. They never really worked too well. All day long he'd be in his alchemical laboratory, grinding up wasps, boiling our milk teeth in soy sauce. A lot of noise and smells were produced, but never that golden SNES. Although invariably the day's potion would become 'dinner' - that was one piece of magic that did work, I suppose.
"Look at me pushing my hair back. This was before Alice bands, of course.
"I remember that sweater of Dad's, too. When Mum would come back from work and scream at him for spending all the housekeeping on iron filings, he'd just stand there in the kitchen and slowly roll up that polo neck, right up over his face. You could see the circles of his glasses poking through. I think he genuinely believed he was invisible.
"I'm going to burn this photo now, if that's all right with you."
