Afraid of waking it

Featured in

  • Published 20151103
  • ISBN: 978-1- 922182-91-3
  • Extent: 264 pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

HE SET THE camera up by the wall in the space he used as his studio. It was one of the many rooms in the too-big house he didn’t need. It was mostly empty – the wallpaper left to peel away from the walls, the plaster to crack and the dust left undusted. In the light that came in elongated grids through the barred windows I watched him move around the room beneath me, holding up the light meter to gauge the exposures.

I was wearing wings sitting high up on the rafters. He had gotten me up there with an aluminium ladder propped by the window. That afternoon he’d found a pair of glittery fairy wings abandoned outside the Woolworths on Illawarra Road. He cleaned them off and asked me to put them on. He had fixed the camera to the tripod. The light was getting away from him. I swung my legs, to watch the shadows ripple across the room like deep water.

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

Contending with a blank page

InterviewTIM WINTON IS arguably Australia’s most widely read contemporary novelist. His books have been translated into eighteen languages, adapted for television, stage and film,...

More from this edition

Quarry

FictionNow from the dark, a deeper dark…Elizabeth Coatsworth, ‘Calling in the Cat’  LUKE CROSSES HIS arms against the bluster and stares out across the grey....

Papercuts and bloodlines

Picture Gallery

To see more of Jacqui's work, visit www.jacquistockdale.com.

Cargoes

FictionThe first time we were here it was just the two of us, Lindsey and me. We stayed at the Chelsea and I got my hair cut there by a hairdresser who had done Dee Dee Ramone’s that morning. Nothing unusual in that. She’d cut his hair for years, she told me. I never discovered if it was true or not. I wanted it to be true. Dee Dee’s hair was no fixed thing though.... Johnny’s was the iconic Ramones hair, so that’s the cut I got. No one at home had that. And Johnny threw his hair forward when he stabbed at his guitar, as if hair could be another weapon.

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.