Made of Parts

Jake is toasting sesame seeds in a pan to make his own tahini. Just thinking about the little grainy, skin-coloured seeds skittering over the teflon coating is setting off my trypophobia. My body goes rigid from jaw to fingertips, so much so that my baby daughter, Scarlett, registers the change in my physiology and twitches slightly in my arms. With some effort, I relax my shoulders and for the thousandth time today I tell myself I’m doing this wrong.

I’m trying to feed Scarlett before the photographer arrives. Keep her awake for at least one hour prior then give her a bottle of formula, was what we were told. She needs to be really sleepy so she’s easier to manipulate into the various poses, but right now she’s squirming in my lap and trying to pull away from the bottle, dribbling warm, sour smelling milk down her chin. All the clattering from the kitchen isn’t helping.

“And you can keep it in the fridge for up to a month!” Jake shouts, pointlessly.

The tahini is for his homemade hummus. In a thrilling development he tells me his magical sesame paste is also a key ingredient in baba ganoush, so he’s making that too as he’s suddenly so fucking obsessed with dips. He spent an hour this morning blackening aubergines on the stove, setting off the smoke alarm and waking Scarlett in the process. He’s made baba ganoush before. It’s actually delicious but he likes to stud it with pomegranate seeds and pine nuts — or skin tags and blood blisters as they appear to me. I shudder, realising too late that Scarlett is now sucking air from the empty teat of the bottle and will be making herself gassy. 

The photo shoot was Jake’s idea. Two of his friends had one done and sent him a link to the company they used. The website had lots of sample work — sleepy babies arranged in cherubic poses — dreaming heads resting on tiny hands, curled up naked like little croissants or the more elaborate ones where they’re placed in an oversized teacup or martini glass. Or wedged in a fruit bowl between a pair of pineapples. Who knows, they may even truss her up with butcher’s twine, slather her in butter and stick her in a roasting tray with a fucking apple in her mouth?

I try desperately to erase this image from my mind as I hold Scarlett over my shoulder, trying to make her burp, while Jake lays out his “mezze platter” (as he insists on referring to it). He arranges humous, baba ganoush, sliced and toasted pitta-breads, falafel and crudités (chopped up radishes for God’s sake — who wants those?) all placed in decorative bowels and platters I didn’t even realise we owned. He also plonks a bottle of rosé in an ice bucket — a shiny lighthouse in a frozen sea —which technically I can drink but don’t want to, lest I appear in dereliction of my duties. I feel as though it’s there to test me.

The doorbell goes just as Scarlett lets out a loud belch which I hope is dry but suspect not. Thankfully she drops off to sleep, head lolling heavily against my neck as Jake answers the door. 

The photographer is called Chloë and she is, predictably, absolutely beautiful. Seven foot tall and stick thin, with hair like spun gold, hair that has actually been washed in the past week. She’s also Irish, which is surprising but I don’t know why and she has this gorgeous, lilting Southern brogue. She greets Jake with two air kisses and although she says, “Nice to meet you, I wasn’t sure I had the right house.” — I can’t shake the feeling they’ve somehow met before. 

In this moment I am painfully, viscerally aware that I haven’t showered, I’ve been wearing the same clothes for two days and Scarlett’s burp was in fact a bit of sick which has now soaked into my blouse. 

“I’ve done us a light lunch.” says Jake, ushering Chloë through into the living area, beaming with pride at his fucking mezze while failing to introduce me or Scarlett.

At Chloë’s suggestion we turn the lights down and the heating on to make it “nice and comfortable for baby” — but in reality all it does is accentuate the smell of the steadily warming dips. Chloë arranges her lights and instruments, and Scarlett, who is now fast asleep, is ceremoniously stripped naked and placed onto a velvet cushion, flat on her stomach with chin on hands and feet next to her elbows in what Chloë calls “frog pose.” We adorn her with a selection of woolly hats, it does look quite cute.

“Now Mum, if you want to come round here and hold her steady from behind,” says Chloë, who I suspect doesn’t know my actual name.

“Won’t I ruin the photo?”

She explains that most of the pictures will be “composites” in which two halves of two different photos are joined together. A “cut and shut” job which edits out any parents holding the child. All that’s left is an image of a perfectly serene baby. 

Once the photoshoot is underway, Jake starts hovering, keen to get involved. It’s not long before he sidles in and takes over the job of holding Scarlett. He has this way of using his body — his presence — to edge me aside. I don’t think he even realises he’s doing it.

Now redundant, I flop down on the sofa and feel my eyelids grow heavy in the dim, stuffy room, the constant sounds of the shutter-click from the camera and Jake’s inane chatter lull me towards sleep.

“What made you become a photographer then?” Jake asks, glibly.

“Well I’m not just a photographer.” 

[click] 

“I’m a portrait artist first and foremost, I work with lots of different medias but mainly painting. Photography is just an extension of that work.”

[click]

“Oh wow. Paintings as well.”

[click]

It’s too hot in here, it’s making my brain feel heavy. Why’s my baby’s bum sticking out of that teacup?

“I suppose I’m just fascinated by the human form really.”

[click]

“Sure, I know exactly what you mean. Are you familiar with the work of Richard Avedon?”

[click]

“Yes, I love his work.”

“Me too, I adore his work.”

Baba ganoush, that sounds like a dip made from babies.

“I suppose the interesting thing about babies as subjects…”

[click]

“…aside from being cute, is that there’s no pretence whatsoever. We all wear masks y’know? From a very young age we’re taught to hide how we’re really feeling, even if we don’t realise it…”

“Uh-huh. So true. So, so true.”

[click]

“I suppose as a portrait artist, what you’re trying to do is strip that away and see the person as they really are…”

Is she even breathing? She looks so still.

“…in that respect…”

[click]

“…babies are fascinating. Like when you see them do a little smile in their sleep…”

She looks like one of those photos Victorian people used to take of their dead children. 

[click]

“…she could be laughing at some deeply profound thought about this world she’s been brought into…”

So quiet and so still.

“…and we’ll never know…”

Asleep forever.

“…and she’ll never remember…”

Dead.

“…but as photographers we can capture the moment it happens and preserve it forever.”

“WAKE HER UP!” I hear the words before I’m aware I’ve opened my lips. I’m on my feet, don’t know how that happened. “WAKE HER UP! WAKE HER UP!”

Scarlett starts crying as I scoop her into my arms. Chloë jumps backwards like a startled meerkat, Jake says “Whoah” and holds his hands up like I’m wearing a fucking suicide vest.

I clutch Scarlett to my chest and run upstairs, carrying her to the bedroom. She’s still naked so I lay her on the changing table and try to put a nappy on her but my hands are shaking so badly I can’t get a grip on it and I fumble with the sticky tabs at the side. Scarlett is thrashing around, kicking her legs and screaming, I wonder why she’s getting wet — little streams of water seem to have appeared from nowhere —  trickling all over her purpling skin. For a second I think we must have a leak in the ceiling but then I realise I’m crying too, although I can’t remember when the crying started. I throw the nappy across the room and grab a blanket to wrap her in. I sit down on the bed with my knees up to my chest and my arms round Scarlett, rocking back and forth, trying desperately to soothe her, the voice in my head saying, do not shake her, do not shake her. I shush her and stroke her downy hair and wipe away my own tears and snot and after a few minutes that seem like hours, finally, we are both still.

In my near catatonic state, I vaguely register the sound of Jake politely but hurriedly showing Chloë out the house, making excuses for his hysterical wife, “just the hormones” he says.

“Completely understandable, not a problem.” says Chloë, as the door closes. Once again leaving only the three of us inside.

Jake’s heavy footsteps on the stairs, stomp, stomp, stomp. Their impact reverberating in my ribcage. He opens the door, looks us both up and down and asks, “Is she ok?”

I tell him, “yes she’s fine” and he shakes his head with an exaggerated, withering expression — a perfectly studied caricature of a man pushed to his limits. 

When I eventually go downstairs to make Scarlett a bottle he’s sitting on the sofa watching football with a glass of rosé, dunking pitta-bread fingers into lumpy hummus. He doesn’t look up.

I put a bottle in the microwave. And as the digital clock ticks down to zero I think of Chloë at her computer, speaking softly to herself in her lovely voice, pulling apart the photos of me and my daughter and sticking them back together to create the illusion of something perfect and untroubled. I wonder what she’ll do with the discarded parts. Will she look at them before she hits delete? The human form, stripped of artifice. Will she see me, exactly as I am in that moment — captured, forever?