Picture of me by Rachel Donohue
It’s the eve of the new millennium. It’s my first trip to Paris. It’s my first visit to the Shakespeare & Company bookshop. I look at her standing there, reading a book and I try to remember who she was. I know she reads endlessly and is obsessed with the idea of Paris. It is a long-planned trip and she imagines she will spend most of it in a street café, smoking thin cigarettes and discussing philosophy with random strangers. She is an existentialist, she controls her own destiny. Fate is for fools. She might move to Paris with the new man she has travelled there with. They could live in a small flat high above the city. There is everything to play for.
I believe she is thinking about romance, adventure and also, somewhere, buried silent and deep there is the dream of writing her own story. A shadowy, shapeless notion of creativity as an energy. A fire within that could erupt in a place like Paris. A city that makes you feel artistic and creative, even it is just for an afternoon. It is not original this dream, but it is a dream nonetheless. And it means a lot to her that sunny afternoon outside an old bookshop in a beautiful and great city. She doesn’t want to leave, could stay there reading but there are other sights to see. She drifts on, a tourist in the end.
I do know she likes to write but soon, very soon after this picture is taken, she will stop. Run far away from the desire because she thinks she is not valid enough. Her viewpoint on the world is limited. And there are other things to do, to achieve. She needs to get a proper job. This is real life. You put things away. And in all fairness, she probably didn’t have very much to say. The book she failed to write that summer would have probably been unoriginal anyway, like her dreams. So unsurprisingly she doesn’t move to Paris. The city and the bookshop become a memory, something to think about when stuck on a crowded train home from work on a wet winter’s night.
It will take her exactly twenty years to write the story she said she would that summer. And in this book, The Temple House Vanishing, one of the characters will look at a photo and comment that she thinks it is just as well that we don’t know what lies ahead. And this is true, freedom lies in mystery and possibility. It is the not knowing that defines us. You have to be brave, patient and hopeful. I might whisper this to the young woman in the picture. Life is random and chaotic, and your choices will not always be your own. This would have surprised her. She thought she was in charge. Because she didn’t believe in fate, or destiny.
She will write a book. It will be about memory, identity, desire and death. It won’t feature Paris, or anywhere famous. But instead a strange school, with a strange teacher and a long-buried secret. She will write it at home, to the sounds of children who didn’t exist when this picture was taken. The children whose father is the man she once thought about running away to Paris with. And she will send it out into the world using technology that was barely invented when she stood on a Paris street. You cannot read the future and nothing turns out as you might imagine.
She still doesn’t believe in destiny but does think there might be a beat and a pattern to your life, you just have to understand what it is saying to you. And photos are the link. They masquerade as windows on the past and promise memory but instead reveal more about who you are now, and all you have learned since. They are not just a record of something that once happened but a precious, visual loop. They are witness to who you once were and who you became. They help you make sense of things, all that you thought would happen and all that actually did. They are gates that you pass through again many years later, hopefully with some level of sympathy and understanding.
The Temple House Vanishing by Rachel Donohue (Corvus) is on sale now
