The Wildlife Photography Competition

Content Warning:

Strong language, horror

Transcript

The Wildlife Photography Competition

I had risen early that morning. It was still dark when I boarded the Elizabeth Line train into London. I got to Victoria, left the Underground, and smoked a cigarette outside the coach station, guitar in hand. Actually, I put my guitar down while I smoked, I think. Not sure about that. I was booked to lead the worship band at Our Lady of Sorrows, Beckenham, the ten o’clock contemporary mass. By the day promised other delights besides: mum and dad were planning to join me later on, for a trip to the Natural History Museum.  

I got into Beckenham Junction and took the tram towards Croydon. The Wimbledon service was already waiting at the little tram stop when I arrived. The sky had brightened. There were a very old, very large raven on the roof of the tram, right next to the antenna (what I now know is called the “pantograph”). It sat there, in grim satisfaction, huddled, like an old, dark hermit. The raven barked in hoarse, infrequent Caaaahs, its inky vestments ruffling with each cry. When the tram rang its bell, when the hunched, faceless figure in the driver’s booth gonged his warning- a sound which rattled the entire car- the raven leapt into flight and flapped away arrogantly towards the light-soaked sky. Littler, kinder birds joined the raven in its suave, airborne scamper. The tram jerked into life and trundled smoothly out of the diminutive platform.

I got off where I knew I was meant to get off, guitar in hand, and I walked to the church. I didn’t know the way but the spire of the church was immediately obvious. It reached, like a pale, obelisk-shaped spectre, high above the crowding rooves of the houses, lowly and many in its stern vicinity. I was able to plot a way to the church without difficulty. The short, green tram waited about a minute and then slid off. 

I arrived at about twenty minutes to ten. I stood outside the locked church for at least an hour, guitar in hand, waiting for something to happen, waiting for someone to come and let me in and explain why the mass was so late starting. A laminated notice nailed to the left of the two front double doors offered no explanation. It said simply that all visitors were most welcome to Our Lady of Sorrows. Mass times: 6pm (Saturday Vigil), 10, 12, and 7 on Sundays. Please see weekly newsletter for weekday masses. I noticed then that the permanent, marmalade-coloured noticeboard, bearing the name of the church in golden, serifed lettering had had all its Os removed, leaving the church’s name strange and unpronounceable. Sacrilegious really. 

Between twenty and a quarter to eleven I gave up and trudged back to the tram stop, guitar in hand.

I smoked a cigarette at the stop, can’t remember what it was called, and an old, severe woman in a shawl, who arrived after me, pointed soundlessly with her walking stick to the standard No Smoking symbol, which was right next to the standard No Open Containers of Alcohol symbol. I let the cigarette fall from my lips and contritely extinguished it with the toe of my shoe. 

Instead of going back towards Victoria, I decided to go on towards Croydon, in the same direction as I had travelled from Beckenham Junction. The rails produced a treble rumble and hissed with quiet imminence. The tram arrived and the doors opened. I tapped in before getting on, guitar in hand.

Good thing too. After seventeen minutes or so, the tram left behind the embankment at the side of the road and swerved sharply, almost lunatically, onto the road, joining the steady traffic. I didn’t understand what was happening at first. Of course I quickly understood that from this point on the rails were laid in the surface of the road rather than to the side of the road in their own separate track.

At the first stop after we joined the traffic, following a much busier influx of people, two ticket inspectors got on the tram. They were already mid-argument with a young couple, a black man and a mixed-race woman. The mixed-race woman had a digital camera around her neck on a lanyard. She had thick, almost impressive, almost Rubenesque or Dionysian curly hair. The black man was dead-eyed, his gaze couldn’t be found. The woman was wild-eyed. She was filming the tram inspector, a light-skinned Indian man. He repeatingly, almost mechanically, asked to see her and her partner’s tickets, or passes, or cards, again and again. They refused. She fabricated, at first, that it was the inspectors stepping onto the tram before they had had a chance to get off that meant she was without a valid ticket. When the inspector grew more insistent, the black man accused the inspector of picking on black people. They knew they had no choice except to get off at the next stop. They waited, begrudgingly, by the sealed doors. The tram slowed with the thickening traffic. 

The couple stood right in front of me, the man lost and hidden in his hoodie, the woman alert, hyper-present. She then looked at me and I looked at her. Her eyes had a wayward, over-animate, addled look, an unhinged glisten. She had a large, red, jagged scratch down the left side of her face. 

“Do I know you?” she said. 

These words are usually uttered in hostility. But she was genuinely asking the question.

I didn’t reply. For whatever reason, I was scared of her.

“I do know you. Yeah. Yeah, I do.” She muttered the name of the man partnering her- I didn’t catch it- and I was briefly, eyelessly surveyed by him. This facilitated the sharing of a private joke. She pointed the camera at me. The inspector walked slowly down our half of the car, inspecting all tickets and scanning all bank cards with a device to check that contactless payment had been made. The woman patted my hair. Three sure, appreciative, patronising pats. She was still pointing the camera at me, like she was recording. Maybe she wasn’t recording. Maybe she was photographing, or merely making it seem like she was recording. The ability to record moving images is a key weapon in the fight against systemic injustice.   

“Don’t record, please,” the same inspector said. 

“Whatever, racist,” the woman said. 

“I’m not joking. Off at next stop,” the inspector repeated.

All too soon, the tram slowed to a standstill with a gentle squeal and the doors automatically opened.

“See you later,” the inspector said, with a note of sarcasm in his voice, a little bright, a little triumphant.

There was a sudden commotion. I didn’t even see what happened next.

“Fuck you, you prick!”  

The black man, who had been standing sedately by the curly-haired woman with the camera, lunged at the ticket inspector and floored him. Whether it was a strike or a push, I couldn’t be sure. 

The two of them scampered away. Shouts from the tram followed them. Tram users helped the inspector to his feet. They spoke to him in a tone of unusual formality, the formality that comes of emergency. If “Emergency” is the right word. It isn’t quite but it’s near as I can get. Once he had been helped to his feet, he struggled to remain on them. He was assisted to the tram stop where he sank down, shocked and nauseous-looking, onto the little green bench.

***

Later that day, (guitar still in hand), when I met up with mum and dad outside the Albert Hall and we walked the several streets to the Natural History museum, I didn’t mention the incident. I kept it myself, like anything shameful. I kept thinking about it though, kept returning to it. And what the woman had said, her claim to know me, the private, whispered quip she and the assaulter had shared, just prior to the assault. This too I revisited repeatedly. 

Guitar in hand- since the cloakroom was deemed an unnecessary expense, I wandered the museum, my parents always one or two display cases ahead of me. Stuffed things. Everything under the sun, stuffed. Mammals, aquatic invertebrates, reptiles, birds. A still, lifeless zoo, a zoo stopped in time, its inhabitants perfect in their stasis. The pangolin was my favourite, stooping, clawed, muddy. Like the mud stood up and became an animal.           

The vast blue whale hanging from the ceiling was an apt reminder of something- I couldn’t be sure of what besides sheer scale- but the section which most intrigued and enchanted me was the annual wildlife photography competition.

The framed, back-lit photographs were often merciless in their vividity. The green and blue scenes, the nights and mornings, the plasm-glitter and tawny fur and wings and horns and claws and bestial hungers and the wide, inhuman eyes, they interested me, and they hurt me. A hyena, lunar and lonely, outside an empty house. A web- footed and fingered frog, inspecting his rippling twin in a small pool of water. A shrimping vessel overwhelmed in a vengeful blizzard of gulls. Many dark fathoms down, there were bioluminescent foams, phallic and alluring. A sloth. Simply, a sloth, clinging to a single, slender tree trunk for dear, lazy life. 

And then. A surprise. A great surprise.

In a little room all to itself, giant, almost as big as the deep-red wall on which it was hung, was the winner.

It was some kind of monster. A naked, squatting, humanoid ape with a wearied, cruciform face and an enormous nose. The cranium and the chin really were two distinct points, and each cheek bone came to a similar point. The creature, who seemed larger than his homo sapiens size, had been captured rather than composed in what looked like a cellar, caught in the act of some subterranean defecation or perhaps ingestion or maybe even parturition. As I stared into the image, as I traced the irregular, buboed landscape of the creature’s back, as I took in and grew repulsed by the mix of fearsomeness and pity in the image, as I began to glean a startled, frightened look in the creature’s eyes, I felt my heart breaking. Breaking with…recognition. It was as I beheld the face of the winner, photographed and framed and hung beside her dwarfing, winning entry, that my hand unclosed and, locked in its black, hard case, my unstrummed guitar fell to the floor with a quick, chorded complaint of its strings.

I recognised immediately the winner’s thick, curly hair, her light biracial skin, and the red, lightening-fork scratch down the left of her face.