Shutterspeed (4 page)

He drinks water in the kitchen. With the light on above him, he can see his tall figure reflected in the window. He doesn't need this. It's just a dream, he reminds himself, why can't he push it away like everything else? He swallows the memory down.

Looking at his reflection, he wonders if he should get his hair cut. The ends are curling at his shoulders. It's probably been pissing off his dad for ages.

He puts the glass into the sink and decides to let his hair grow longer.

Jasmine's not in art and Mrs Blackler pauses when she marks the roll. ‘Dustin, do you know where Jasmine is?'

‘No,' he answers, suddenly self-conscious. Students turn to look at him, hoping to catch him out. Why did Mrs Blackler ask him? Why is it
his
responsibility to know where Jasmine could be? He's not her babysitter, or her boyfriend. ‘How should I know?' he says, too abruptly.

There's a snigger from someone at the front of the room, as some smart-arse thinks she knows everything. He feels himself getting pissed off. Why should other students give a shit about his life when he wouldn't give a shit about theirs? The eyes burn into him.

‘I thought the two of you were friends, Dustin,' Mrs
Blackler answers calmly, ‘that's all. It's not like her to be late.'

Mrs Blackler continues calling out names on the roll while the room rises and falls with whispers. This isn't anything new. In high school ‘love' is the disease of the masses. He overhears it in the canteen queues — who likes who, and who snogged who at whose party. Junior girls, especially, gather and giggle with the novelty of it. Letters are written:
I think you're nice. Do you want to go out with me? Tick yes or no
. Relationships are tainted with this crap, even though he and Jasmine aren't like that and never have been.

The three of them — Dustin, Jasmine and Nugget — had originally found themselves together in the same detention room each Wednesday afternoon in Term Four of Year Eight. Jasmine's crime was not as violent as the boys' spectacular punch-up in French class; her detention resulted from telling Ms Tartufo exactly what she could do with the sautéed garden snails she was forcing everyone to eat. But Jasmine's ethical protest had cut to the heart of the patriotic Tartufo, resulting in six weeks of detentions with her new buddies in rebellion.

They made the most of each Wednesday afternoon, with Nugget and Dustin feeding their obsession for motorbikes with whatever magazines they could get their hands on.

Jasmine would either take the piss out of them, or listen in to their debates with a mild curiosity. Conversation about other topics — TV shows, parents, music, films, holidays — was easy, and this spilled over into lunchtimes too, with the three of them hanging out under the big peppermint tree.

Nugget would make them both laugh, retelling his dad's dirty jokes. ‘What do elephants use for tampons? … Sheep.' They'd go mental; Nugget's laughter was infectious.

Over the next few years their magazine titles had expanded to include
Cleo
,
FHM
,
Surf's Up
, and even
MAD
for a brief period. It didn't matter. Life was uncomplicated, just the three of them. But this year, Nugget's rising testosterone levels have made it impossible for him to sit still, instead spending his lunchtimes kicking a ball around and tackling whoever he's allowed to. He makes the occasional visit, but it's not the same.

So now it's just Dustin and Jasmine by default, and that's okay. At least they're separated from the rest of the school population, who are still preoccupied with popularity and feeble attempts at flirting. Life is simple with Jasmine, that's all.

He stares at the graffiti on the desk —
Josephine for Craig, Sam fucked Steph, Laura is gay
— and tells himself to calm down.

He wonders where she is.

He'd known of Jasmine before their first detention together in Year Eight. She was the short tanned girl with brown hair — who looked like every other girl with brown hair — in his science class in Term One.

He remembers the day Mr Shelton put a white bucket onto the front desk and encouraged the kids to come and stick their hands in it. There were frogs inside, cold from being refrigerated the night before. Their green heads, bellies and limbs were squished up against each other in contorted positions. The bucket stank of formaldehyde.

Dustin dropped his hand in, took hold of one and lifted its floppy body out of the mess of frogs. He carried the limp thing back to his bench where he nailed its feet with thumbtacks to the polystyrene square, as instructed. Its body was elongated, its pearly translucent belly gleaming. The eyes were closed, as though in pleasure of having such a lovely full-body stretch.

Jasmine fainted. She fainted even before Dustin had pressed the scalpel into the frog's soft throat. She fainted from the sight of it lying there, with its webbed little hands and sticky fingers, and belly still bloated with swamp life. Her fall to the science lab floor was silent and swift. Other
students were so engrossed in their straight-line incisions from mouth to anus that no-one but Dustin saw or heard her fall. She lay beside the base of the bench, right at his feet.

On other benches, bellies of frogs were split and peeled back; slippery innards were liberated from the tight restriction of skin. Guts bulged and squirmed on polystyrene boards. Hearts were prodded into short-lived pulses, and lungs were inflated with straws. Hundreds of slimy eggs were scooped into teaspoons.

Dustin wished he could just carry on but she was a distraction at his feet. She lay there as though sleeping, with brown hair across her face and her grey school skirt up around her pants. Her pants were white cotton with red vertical stripes, like the pattern of a Christmas candy cane.

He knelt down, and using the back of his school shorts wiped the frog guts from his stinking hands. She had three strands of hair in her mouth. From this close he could smell her fruity breath, and he could see the outline of her white singlet underneath her school top. The upturned hem of her grey skirt had pink zig-zagged stitching. It lay across the top of her undies. Her legs were tanned, all the way to the top.

Gently, he lifted the edge of the skirt from her belly and moved it carefully down her legs, back to her knees. He held his breath. To his relief, she didn't stir at all. Her mind was
still somewhere else, unaware of a crouching thirteen-year-old boy observing her with something resembling affection.

‘Jasmine,' he said to her closely. ‘Wake up.'

He was aware of background shouts and squeals as students carried on, engrossed in their messy dissections. But how long would that last?

‘C'mon, wake up quick.'

She looked so peaceful he almost felt bad about it. ‘Quick, the bus is coming!'

‘Mum?' she stirred.

Dustin stood up fast, back to the heady reality of frogs' guts. Soon Jasmine was standing next to him, her face flushed. While Dustin pretended to be occupied with his specimen, Jasmine walked over to an open window, pulling hair strands from her mouth.

The following week their class dissected rats and Jasmine was excused with a note from home. She sat outside the room colouring in the periodic table, and Dustin was only mildly distracted by the memory of red-and-white stripes.

‘I've borrowed the cameras from Mr McLeish,' Mrs Blackler explains, putting one on each desk, ‘for our new topic of photographic portraiture. They're old, but they're expensive, so be careful. I'm trusting you.'

Mrs Blackler's bangles clank as she sets a camera on each desk. As she moves past Dustin, the smell of sandalwood drifts with her.

The camera is black and chrome, with more knobs and dials than it really needs. It looks like too much effort so Dustin's attention wanes once more, swinging out again to the distant harbour.

‘What are you looking at?' Mrs Blackler asks, her closeness surprising him. Other students play with their new toys, squaring up each other's feet, lips, eyes, their creative genius suddenly unleashed.

‘Nothing … sorry,' he says, as though his disinterest might be interpreted as an insult. Mrs Blackler's nice, he reminds himself. It's not her fault she has to teach him.

‘Really, Dustin, what are you looking at? What's more interesting out there than in here?'

‘Nothing, I don't know,' he stumbles. ‘The real world?'

‘Where?'

‘I don't know … out there,' Dustin indicates, with an indiscriminate glance toward the harbour.

‘Why are you always looking out, then? What's so good?'

‘Shit, miss, it doesn't matter.'

‘What do you see that's so appealing?'

‘Stuff … things … you know, things that do stuff like … bikes … boats … people maybe.'

‘What kind of people?'

‘People. Ordinary people, I guess. I can't see them from here.'

‘What can you see?'

‘The sea.' It looks safe from this distance. ‘The harbour. And the sky.'

‘And that's important?'

‘Of course the sky's important!'

‘So take a photo.'

‘A photo of what? Blue?' he laughs. ‘What's the point?'

‘So you remember it. That's why we take photos, Dustin, so things don't get forgotten.'

‘The photos I process in Dad's lab are crap,' he says, from a lifetime of experience. ‘People take them because they're vain. Or bored.'

‘They're important to your customers, Dustin. Think about the family photos you have at home in albums and on
your walls. As soon as you see them you're transported back to that time, and those people stay real.'

‘We don't have any photos,' he says, straight on, and she believes him. There are no photos of him as a child and none of his parents, not even a wedding photo.

‘What about of your mum, when she was alive?'

He shakes his head. The walls are clean of memory, as though his mother had never existed. He looks out to sea again, to steal himself some distance.

‘Dustin, have you used a camera before?'

He shrugs.

Mrs Blackler leans against the wall beside him and speaks gently. ‘Mate, whether you want to or not, you'll have to use one for this assignment or you'll fail. You've got to look through a viewfinder and press a button. I promise it won't hurt.' She nudges the camera towards him and pushes on. ‘You'll be surprised how different things can look. I was ten when I borrowed my mum's Polaroid. I remember how small things suddenly became bigger, or … more important. I used a whole film and Mum went ballistic when she saw all the photos of my dog's face. When you start seeing the world through a viewfinder you realise everything is made up of parts. Surprising parts. The little things matter, Dustin. Don't forget the little things.'

‘Is it digital?'

Mrs Blackler laughs. ‘The other class need the digitals, so we're stuck with these. But don't worry, I've given you the best one. It's a foolproof automatic. Those dials are optional, and here, look at this.'

She digs in her apron pockets to retrieve a lens, which she attaches easily to the front. ‘A Minolta Super Telephoto, 250mm, only 250 grams. It's made of mirror lenses so the light reflects rather than refracts. Amazing, hey?'

‘Dunno.'

‘Trust me, you'll like it. The barrel's smaller and the focal length is longer than anyone else's. It's for the extremists amongst us … and those who can't be bothered to move their feet much.' Her long skirt swishes as she moves away to tell Travis off for photographing the T-bar at the top of Shania's jeans.

The camera's a mystery to him. Spending his teens in a photo lab has done little to inspire Dustin to take photos for pleasure. Besides, neither he nor his father owns a camera, so he's managed to make it to sixteen years of age without ever using one. He watches the way the other students use theirs — playfully, like toys — then brings the viewfinder up to his right eye to look through.

When the jetty eventually sharpens he's amazed by how
close it looks, like he was right there. He sees individual wooden beams, side by side, held together with heavy bolts that reflect the sun. Beneath the jetty, silver water ripples. With this zoom, the water's no longer a lazy backdrop of blue — it's liquid again, rocking and sputtering.

His right elbow rests on the desk, keeping his hand and camera still. He pans the scene, testing out the zoom's ability to bring the outside world closer, all without being noticed. There are tourists waiting for the next ferry, and two people further along fishing from the jetty, but the zoom isn't powerful enough to make them out clearly.

‘On Friday we'll be going into Fremantle so you can pick up some outdoor portrait experience, not just studio shots,' Mrs Blackler tells the class. ‘We're lucky, you know. Freo's such a colourful backdrop you'll have plenty to work with. Think especially about the elements of colour and movement. You'll have fun.'

‘Friday? Oh, what a shame, miss. I have choir on Friday.'

‘Well go now, Dustin.'

‘To Freo? Now?'

‘I'd hate for you to miss choir. Take this permission slip. You're supposed to have maths next, right?'

‘But Mrs Blackler, Dustin isn't in choir!'

‘That's all right, Shania. I believe him. Would you like to
go with him to get some shots too?'

‘I can shoot her?'

‘I value my safety too much, miss.'

‘So go to the harbour,' Mrs Blackler tells him. ‘See what's worthy of your film. You don't have a partner today, so I guess you can practise on the public, without being intrusive, of course. Do I need to tell you about photography etiquette?'

He shrugs.