Pictures of Jemima

Steph spent three days driving around with her camera on the passenger seat beside her and the debris of travelling on the floor around her feet. Paper bags, and empty plastic wrappers, and a pile of water bottles that got bigger as she drove.

She was on holiday, in a stretch of national parks along the coast, in the off season, and most of the towns had closed up for the winter. There were service stations, and camping grounds, and for-sale signs on holiday houses. All the houses had pineapple-like palms on grass lawns, and all the towns had and monkey-puzzle trees along the main street.

Other than towns, there were trees. Trees, spreading into the distance, pushing up against the road, covering the hills, filling every gap. She was over trees. She’d never liked photographing them. They made complicated patterns, were usually too tall and thin compared to a camera frame, and were much harder than they looked to photograph. Beaches were only slightly better. Dull, no matter what you did. Sand and waves and pretty little headlands. Sometimes white sand, sometimes yellow, always pretty. Eventually pretty irritated her.

She’d thought sunset and sunrise would give her something, vivid orange light flooding through the trunks, dappling some and shadowing others, but even that didn’t work. It was still a tangle of trees, just a different color.

This was supposed to be her creative break, her time to get away and refresh herself, to see everything in a different way and get herself ready for another year of models and catalogues. In winter because dark and brooding was her thing, not happy sunshine. She wanted to do the part of photography that was art, not just making a living. Instead she was getting increasingly annoyed by trees.

And by her neighbor.

There was one house in the whole street which seemed to be occupied, and that house had been playing loud music and having parties every night.

Steph had seen the woman who lived there, had driven past and caught a glimpse of youth and tangled dark hair and annoying beauty. Beauty annoyed Steph. Especially the kind she dealt with all day, enhanced and added-to and created by people like her. Make-up annoyed her and hair-stylists annoyed her. Sometimes she just wanted people to be who they were, and let her discover what was attractive in their faces.

Steph spent her day on tangled trees and pretty beaches and frustrated self-torture. She spent two hours at a gap where pylons cut through a forest, trying an industrial-meets-nature contrast of straight steel and soft trees, but it didn’t really work.

Then she went home. She turned off her car’s engine, and heard music again, and decided that enough was enough.

Steph was staying in a shack. It had lino floors and plywood walls and décor from the seventies. There was a trickle of hot water in the shower and a funny little gas heater that switched itself off at random times just when it was getting warm. It belonged to a friend, had been in his family for years, and Steph had borrowed it because it was free, and she knew Thom well enough to know he wouldn’t try and make her go unless there was a pizza place open, and a café down the road to get coffee each morning.

She had a shack, but the place next door was a house. A new, big house, with decks and view windows and two stories high. The area seemed to be being redeveloped.

She went next door and knocked.

She waited at the door for a while, then knocked again. Someone opened it, a man, not the woman who lived there. He looked at Steph and said, “Can I help you?”

“I’m the neighbor,” Steph said. “I was going to ask you to turn the music down a bit.”

“Why not just come in?” the man said. “Then it won’t matter.”