^{_{Photo credit: Natalie J Watts}}

He Was Saying Inconceivable Things

After leaving you at drama class, I find myself each Saturday in the same street where I was stopped by a man when I was 14. He spent half the week in Covent Garden, he said, and I clocked his jacket, his charisma and because I watched The Clothes Show and knew scout meant possibility and because I never wore make up or heard such words spoken about my face I followed him to his studio, where I didn’t quite settle on a sofa and he stood before me like a teacher from school, holding up a copy of Vogue, the supers clustered shoulder to shoulder, caught does looking directly at me from the cover, while he was saying inconceivable things and I never spoke, took his card home to my parents and still can’t recall any shouting for following him as I did, only my dad saying the name of his photographer friend who made a lot of money from school portraits, who had probably captured my own uneasy beam above a gingham collar at some point, and he checked the Covent Garden guy out on my dad’s behalf, reported back that he was bona fide, the real deal, genuinely in the business, and I’m thinking of you in drama class, same age, dismayed that I followed a man into a room with just him in it, that I let him close the door, that his intentions were not harmful but I never even thought they might be. I must have written down my number, because there was one phone call in the kitchen, my family at a frenetic peak in the background, my mother wrangling young sons, watching me write down details of a shoot for leather jackets when her own job had been just that, her portfolio a thing to show off to my friends, the black and white angles of her body, the see-through Biba vest I still have, and we’ve never spoken about her lack of encouragement, if she knew it was best to set me in another direction and I walk around town thinking about that until it’s time to wait in the car park, watch you skip out of drama class, the long straight hair I gave you, my mother gave me, half-concealing your face, eyes shuttering, girl of motion blur.