Photographic

by elfin


 caps



Stephen

I found the photograph on his desk. I was dropping a file off, and maybe I'd deliberately waited until he was out on the main floor having yet another in a long line of heated conversations with Lester about the meaning of life. Or possibly the meaning of 'politically correct'. It was just on the metal surface, off to one side, a photo of the three of us - him, Helen and I. It was taken just before she disappeared, at a garden party held by the university. He was there under duress, I was there because there was free food (at the time I was broke) and because he was there, because despite everything I was after the coveted job of Professor Nick Cutter's lab assistant, a job not many people knew would soon be available. I don't know why Helen was there, I wouldn't like to have hazarded a guess. The photograph captured a perfect moment in time - the afternoon I met him.

What surprised me most wasn't that it was there, that he'd searched it out, or had been looking at it, but that it was in tact. Nick's a balanced person when it really comes down to it - he wouldn't have cut her face out or gouged out my eyes with scissors or even drawn horns on either, possibly both, of us with a red marker pen. But in a fit of frustration he might have ripped it apart, torn it into tiny squares. And if he had he'd probably have fitted them all back together again to recreate the photo like a puzzle. That's how I would have expected to find it, destroyed and temporarily fixed, waiting for a waft of air to send the pieces flying again.

I picked it up, stared at it. What could have been going through his mind I had no idea. Not now - I could take a wild guess at what he'd been thinking when it had been taken and at least two of the words would have started with an 'f'. His smile was fake. I knew a genuine Nicholas Cutter smile - it lit up his eyes and make the lines around his eyes wrinkle. The last time I'd seen it… was when those poor infected Dodos had come through the anomaly. Made his day - his week, possibly his month to see a Dodo. One of the best sights of my life was watching him kneeling on the floor of the catering office with three of them around him, all as fascinated by him as he was by them. He'd looked… happy, genuinely, simply, happy.

I wasn't sure I'd ever see that smile again and there and then I decided I wanted to. More than anything else in the world, however much I didn't deserve it.

I dropped the photo. Suddenly I was back in the clearing, staring at Helen as I realised in horror what she was about to say, about to do. And why? Because he'd turned her down, pushed her away? Because she's a bitch. She knew I wasn't about to go with her. She knew I hadn't told Nick I'd slept with her. I hadn't even known Nick back then - not personally. I knew him by reputation, and his reputation is so utterly apart from who he is. I fell for her lies, believed the picture she'd painted of an aloof, uninterested, uncaring husband who put his career above everything else and lived his life for the fossils dug up from the ground. When I finally met him, when I got to know him, I realised how much I'd been taken in. Nick may love his work but he loves the world around him more. He is fascinated by fossils, but give him a living, breathing dinosaur and he's happy even when it's chasing him down a pre-historic hillside.

I've watched him risk his life to save Abby. Connor drives him crazy but still the occasional physical gesture of a hug or… or that moment after the kid had saved us from death by raptor and Nick just put his head on Connor's shoulder, pressed gently into his neck… it made my heart clench to see it. I slept with his wife, yet still I think of Nick as somehow mine; I was there before Abby or Connor and that somehow gives me some sort of claim on him. What could be further from the truth? I gave up any claim I might have had on him before I even knew what there was to claim.

In that clearing I'd just reacted to the terrible hurt in his face, the pain in his eyes. In a matter of an hour he’d watched a close colleague mauled to death by a predator from the future, found out his best friend slept with his wife 9 years ago and, by the way, had just changed the past so that his girlfriend had never actually been born. That’s what I call a bad day. Watching him as Helen spoke, I think I saw the actual moment his heart broke in two. I'd so badly wanted to fix it, to mend the damage she was causing with every word out of her mouth. I watched him cross the clearing, stop some way from us and drop his head, humiliated in front of his team, in front of Lester and his soldiers. How could she? How dare she?

Nick's the best person I know and I gave his witch of a wife the most devastating ammunition she'd ever need against him.

At that moment I'd hated myself almost as much as I hated her.

Somehow I had to set things right. I just didn't know how. Then I remembered Egypt. After Helen's disappearance Nick became depressed, swinging between sober grief and drunken misery. I did everything I could to cheer him up, to bring him back to himself. And when I thought I'd made progress, that maybe he was starting to see that life wasn’t over, I booked us two tickets to Egypt.

I don't know why I did it. I was walking passed a travel agent on my way home one evening and they had an offer in the window - flights, hotel, airport transfers, £799 per person if you could fly within the month. I bought the tickets there and then, didn't ask Nick, just went back to the university, found him in his office, dropped the tickets on his desk and told him to pack. Took him three days to find his passport. But find it he did, and a week later we boarded the plane and when we landed it was the first time I'd seen him smile since Helen had gone missing.

For two weeks we played tourist, taking the tours, arguing with the guides, basking in the history and magnificence of the place. We spent long nights drinking, sometimes talking, sometimes not. I was comfortable with him, relaxed despite the tears that sometimes leaked through his slowly easing façade. Nothing happened between us although there were moments when I thought that they might. I wasn't even sure back then I wanted anything more from him. Now though….

No need to find a travel agent nowadays. Just needed to find a PC and my credit card.

#

AN HOUR EARLIER

Nick

Prof N Cutter - Field Notes - Jan 99 to -

Picking up the journal I thumbed through the first hundred or so pages of chicken scratch scrawl - my handwriting that my students are constantly complaining they can't read - followed by another hundred blank pages. As I reached the end, a photo fell from between the last empty page and the back cover, dropped to the desk facing away from me. With one fingertip I turned it around and stared at it; Stephen, Helen and myself staring back at me across the years.

I remembered it being taken at one of those God awful university garden parties the head of the department used to force us to attend; threatening everything from budget cuts to loss of mainframe computer time to get those of us for who such social events were a chore and not a pleasure to turn up.

As an undergrad I'd once gate crashed a charity buffet dressed in a lion costume. I think that was the first thing I told Stephen, the afternoon we first met. The afternoon the photograph was taken.

Picking it up I stared at he and Helen, looking for what I'd missed all that time ago. But there was nothing, no hint of an affair, no meaningful sideways glances or physical touch where there shouldn't have been. I hadn't bothered torturing myself with 'how many times', 'where', 'when', 'had they fucked in the bed she and I had shared as man and wife'. What would have been the point? That way lay madness. But I couldn't understand why she'd married me; I don't think I ever will. Just as I don't think Stephen can understand why she slept with him, why she used him.

I remembered that afternoon, being introduced to Stephen, his asking me about whether I'd rather be at one of those soirees or back in the Jurassic being chased by raptors. I told him it was an unfair question, because no one ever came to my office at seven in the evening to threaten to withdraw research funding if I wouldn't go with them on a dinosaur hunt. He laughed at that. We hit it off immediately, taking a liking to one another, spending the afternoon together, quietly taking the piss out of those members of the faculty desperately licking the arses of the invited businessmen.

Stephen was so much younger than me - one of Helen's post-grad students - but I've never thought of myself as getting older - I keep as fit as possible, my only vice is the odd expensive whiskey - and it was easy to talk to Stephen. Maybe I even realised then that I was attracted to him, although it wasn't a conscious realisation, just that warmth I get around some people, the people I know I'm going to get on with. The attraction… I never do anything about, except when it came to Helen. I chased her until she stopped running, I proposed to her in the Natural History Museum and she said 'yes' between the primates and the aquatic life.

When I met Stephen it was like a door opening in my head - one I hadn't even been aware existed. It opened slowly; drinks in the union bar, meals in the refectory, field trips, hours of research in the library, late nights in the computer labs. He became my assistant over a matter of months, never actually applying for a job that wasn't ever advertised. He just fell into it when my previous assistant left. And when Helen disappeared he became my friend too, putting up with long periods of depression punctuated by bouts of drunken maudlin. Stephen was the one to pull me out of it, to remind me what life still had to offer.

He took me away to Egypt for a fortnight and we spent the time soaking up the sun, the history, the amazement of the place. We spent our days as tourists and our nights as friends, sampling the local alcoholic offerings, falling asleep late in the heat of the nights in our shared hotel room. Nothing happened between us that shouldn't have done but when I look back on it I wonder if it could have done.

The question I had to ask myself was what about now, now I knew what he'd been keeping from me for all those years of friendship, how did I feel about him now?

Back in the clearing, when Helen had revealed the secret she and Stephen had hidden, I already knew that Helen no longer loved me, if she ever had. I couldn't find it within me to feel betrayed by her, but I thought my heart was breaking anyway. And Stephen didn't take his eyes from me, looked scared to death of what I'd say, what I'd do, of my reaction. Then in the shopping mall he thought I'd tried to kill him - not personally, but by way of letting the raptor rip him to shreds. Did I? The gun jammed but then… did I try again like he had when the monster was coming after me? The last thing I wanted was him dead, the very last thing. I didn't hate him - so far from it. I just wasn't sure I could trust him, as much as I wanted to, as much as I needed to.

#

TWO HOURS LATER

"…and you'd better hope the next time we encounter a raptor I don't bag it and release it in your office!"

I said it so loud I caught Connor's head turn down on the atrium floor out of the corner of my eye, through the wall-to-wall glass. Out in the corridor Lester didn't turn back, apparently didn't feel the need to have the last word and I grudgingly respected that. So when there was a knock on my door a couple of seconds later I knew it wasn't him. I looked up to see Stephen and assumed he'd heard the argument and was here to find out what he had to smooth over this time.

"He's an arse," I told him by way of explanation. But by his expression I realised he didn't have a clue what I was talking about, but he could guess who. He glanced over his shoulder into the corridor but Lester was out of sight.

"What?"

"Sorry. Nothin'. Professional disagreement."

"With Lester?"

"Who else?"

He shrugged, and held out the A4 papers he was grasping. "I was going to leave these… on your desk." He looked embarrassed and nervous and when I took what he was offering me I realised why.

"Egypt?" So both of us had been remembering the past.

"I thought it would be for us. Give us time to… fix some things, to talk. To just… share again." I had an inkling of how hard that had been for him to say. I don't think I could have said it, or done what he'd done. I looked at the papers he'd handed me, read the date on the tickets.

"These are for tomorrow."

"I know."

"But if we get an anomaly…."

"There'll always be an anomaly, a creature, a world-threatening incident. They can handle things for a few days. Lester has soldiers with guns, I'm sure they can look after Abby and Connor. You and I… we're just as important. Aren't we?" I wanted to hug him. Maybe kiss him. And not in the same way I'd wanted to kiss Connor. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak right at that moment. "So we're going?" I nodded again.

"Good. You'd better start looking for your passport. It took you three days last time."

Three days? Hadn't I always kept it in my desk drawer? "Stephen, last time we went… nothing happened between us, did it? Nothing…"

Stephen smirked. "Believe me, if it had you'd remember." For a second we stared at one another, possibilities hanging in the silence. "I'll pick you up at five. And don't forget to tell Lester we're taking a holiday."

"Whoa, why is that my…?" But Stephen and his smirk were already out of the door.