And he’s a mumbler, a swallower of words. Despite spending the last six years in a perfectly nice part of Berkshire, he speaks in a bored cockney drawl because God forbid anyone should think his father has done well or worked hard, God forbid anyone should think that he’s comfortable and cared for and loved, loved equally by both of his parents even if he only seems to desire and require the attentions of one.
In short, my son makes me feel like his step-father.
I have had some experience of unrequited love in the past and that was no picnic, I can tell you. But the unrequited love of one’s only living offspring has its own particular slow acid burn.
But now the train had finally begun to move, and Albie had switched the fearless truth-telling eye of his camera lens from his untied laces to the walls of the tunnels under east London, because you can never have enough pictures of dirty concrete.
‘I hope you’re going to take lots of pictures of the Eiffel Tower, Egg,’ I said, in an affectionate, teasing tone. ‘Me and your mother standing in front with our thumbs up?’ We demonstrated. ‘Or — another tip — I can put my hand out flat like this, so it looks like I’m holding it …’
‘That’s not photography, that’s holiday snaps.’ It seemed the tendency to wilfully misinterpret jokes was contagious. Connie winked at me and squeezed my knee beneath the table.
My son was soon to study photography on a three-year course which we were financing and although my wife, who knew about these things, insisted that he had talent, an ‘eye’, the fact of it filled me with an anxiety that I fought daily to suppress. At one point he had been intending to study theatre — theatre! — and at least I had managed to nip that in the bud, but now it was photography, the latest of a long series of temporary passions — ‘street art’, skateboarding, DJ-ing, drumming — the abandoned detritus of which cluttered cellar, attic and garage, alongside the optimistic chemistry set that I had bought and he had tossed aside, the hopeful microscope that had never been unpacked, the dusty box that offered an opportunity to ‘Grow Your Own Crystals!’
But there was no denying his enthusiasm. Albie with a camera was something to see, crouching and contorting his long body into a question mark as if playing the role of ‘photographer’. Sometimes he fired off frames at arm’s length, in what I believe is called ‘gangster style’, sometimes on tiptoe, back arched like a toreador. Initially I made the mistake of standing and grinning when the camera was produced, but soon realised that he wouldn’t actually press the shutter until I’d stepped out of the frame. In fact, in all the thousands of shots that he had taken, many of them loving portraits of his mother — her eyes, her smile — alongside his usual repertoire of wet cardboard boxes and badgers hit by cars, etc., there was not a single photograph of me. Not of my face, anyway, just an extreme close-up of the back of my hand, black and white in heavy contrast, part of a college project that I later discovered was called ‘Waste/Decay’.
Albie’s passion for photography had been the cause of tension in other ways. I had a printer in my office, a top-of-the-range colour model whose features included glacial speed and shocking running costs. Consequently, I was more than a little annoyed to return from work one day and hear the printer grinding away. Irritably, I examined the top print of a sizeable pile of 8x10s. It seemed to be a high-contrast, minutely detailed black-and-white print of some kind of dark moss and only when I peered more closely did I realise that this was in fact a photograph of a naked female form, shot in profile so to speak. I dropped the photograph, then gingerly examined the shot beneath. In washed-out black and white, it might have passed for some sort of snowy mountain range, were it not for the pale dimpled nipple that crowned the peak. Meanwhile, a third image was rumbling its way out of the machine and from the section that was visible, there seemed every chance that buttocks were emerging.
I called Connie in. ‘Have you seen Albie?’
‘He’s in his room. Why?’
I held up the photographs and predictably, her response was to clasp her hand to her mouth and laugh. ‘Oh, Egg. What have you been up to?’
‘Why can’t he just photograph someone’s face for once?’
‘Because he’s a seventeen-year-old boy, Douglas. This is what they do.’
‘I didn’t. I photographed wildlife. Birds and squirrels and iron-age forts.’
‘Which is why you’re a biochemist and he’s a photographer.’
‘I wouldn’t mind so much, but does he have any idea how much the cartridges cost for this thing?’
Connie, meanwhile, was peering closely at the buttocks. ‘My money’s on Roxanne Sweet.’ She held the photograph to the light. ‘I think they’re rather good. Of course he’s pinched it all off Bill Brandt, but they’re not bad.’
‘Our son, the pornographer.’
‘It’s not pornography, it’s a nude study. If he was painting nudes at a life-drawing class you wouldn’t bat an eyelid.’ She pinned the print to my office wall. ‘Or at least I’d hope you wouldn’t. Who knows any more?’
Soon after, Albie announced his intention to devote his life to a hobby. Why, I asked Connie, could he not study a more practical subject and do the things he enjoyed at weekends and in the evenings, like the rest of us? Because that’s not how an arts-based course works, said Connie; he needs to be challenged, to develop his famous ‘eye’, learn to use his tools. But wouldn’t it be cheaper and quicker to just read the manual? I could understand if people still used darkrooms as I had as a young man, but all of that know-how was obsolete, and how could Albie hope to excel in a field where anyone with a phone and a laptop could be broadly proficient? It wasn’t even as if he wanted to be a photojournalist or a commercial photographer, taking pictures for newspapers or advertisements or catalogues. He didn’t want to photograph models or weddings, athletes, or lions chasing gazelles, photographs that people might pay for, he wanted to be an artist, to photograph burnt-out cars and bark, taking pictures at such angles that they didn’t look like anything at all. What would he actually do for three years, apart from smoke and sleep? And what professional job could he hope for at the end of it?
‘Photographer!’ said Connie. ‘He’s going to be a photographer.’
We were pacing around the kitchen, furiously tidying up, by which I mean tidying up, furious. Wine had been drunk and it was late, the end of a long, fraught argument that, as was his way, Albie had provoked then fled from. ‘Don’t you see?’ said Connie, hurling cutlery at the drawer. ‘Even if it’s hard, he has to try! If he loves it, we have to let him try. Why must you always have to stomp on his dreams?’
‘I’ve got nothing against his dreams as long as they’re attainable.’
‘But if they’re attainable then they’re not dreams!’
‘And that’s why it’s a waste of time!’ I said. ‘The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.’