Free Double Negative by Ivan Vladislavic Page B

swung away on small hinges and closed into the eye of the camera with a bang. Patience, something is bound to happen. And if nothing does? That is unthinkable. We cannot be left here in this half-formed state.
    While my thoughts were elsewhere, Auerbach took the picture. For only the second time that day, the shutter fell through the moment like a guillotine. You can see the relief on Mrs Ditton’s face as she drops from the fulness of life into a smaller, diminished immortality. She looks grateful to have the air knocked out of her. Anticipating a paper-thin future, she floats free of the fat-thighed cushions and the sticky shadows, she levitates. It is there in the photograph, you have only to look.
    For a moment after the picture was taken, she was reluctant to leave the chair. Captured and released in the same instant, she was unsure of her will. She had two destinies now. One of them she still occupied, the other had stepped away from her; it was receding into the past, but with its face turned to the future. She hovered in the chair, unblinking, afraid to move a muscle, as if stirring would smudge that other body in the camera and she needed to match it for as long as possible to preserve a resemblance.
    For the first time since the game with the houses started, Auerbach’s spirits sagged. Some charge had gone out of him and into the camera, which stood there primed and ticking. Still, I heard him laughing as he chatted to Mrs Ditton and wrote in his notebook. Where do you come from? All these years, hey? What’s that Jimmy of yours up to? And Mr Ditton? Have you ever worked? Do you get a pension? With questions that opened into the rest of her life, into her complications, she was charmed back into the well-lit room of the present.
    I went on to the stoep and fired up my old man’s briar. Through the bay window, I had a new view of the lounge. Standing there alone, the camera looked like a detached observer, an expert on a fact-finding mission, with its chin up and its eye steady, drawing its own conclusions.
    Auerbach entered the picture and began to dismantle the device, while Mrs Ditton floated on the edge of the frame. Now that it really was done, the pose abandoned once and for all, she wanted us out of the house, that was clear, she was like a woman hurrying her lover from her bed, urging him to be gone before her husband comes home from work. Her eye kept flicking over the shelves and table tops, dusting and adjusting, measuring the spaces between knick-knacks to assure herself that nothing had been taken.
    Brookes came to perch beside me on the balustrade. Where had he been all this time? He had faded into the background like a song on the radio and now he became audible again, rolling his pen between his palms as if he was trying to start a fire.
    â€˜Well, I was right. That’s two out of two.’ When I gave no answer, he went on, ‘Did you pick up some tips?’
    â€˜Sure, I’ve learned a bit about talking your way in. Perhaps I’ll go into insurance.’
    â€˜It’s been an eye-opener, I must say.’
    â€˜More like a door-opener.’
    Next door there was no sign of life. The curtains were drawn, the rooms were dark. We would not be ringing that bell, I was sure of it now. When Brookes said he had an interview with a chap from MAWU, he had to get back to the King George – ‘The place has international status, you know’ – I was not disappointed. Nor that Auerbach agreed so readily. It had been a long day.
    Nothing more was said about the third house. Two out of two is good enough. Perfect.
    The car smelt of middle-aged men, of garlic, Brut and sweat, and thanks to me a whiff of pipe smoke, the finishing touch.
    I asked to be dropped off in Hillbrow, I would fetch my car later, and Auerbach obliged by sweeping up Hadfield Road into Berea. He did not ask what I had made of the day. To be frank, I meant to avoid that question at all costs.