The Best of Friends by Alex Day (english novels to read .TXT) 📗

came from – Greek Myths, a guide to an exhibition at the Royal Academy, a map of Cornwall that I must have kept thinking it would come in handy one day. I put them all to one side. Beneath them lie two or three heavy tomes that I heft out, one by one, and place next to each other on the threadbare carpet.

There they are, my course textbooks, the works that should have helped to furnish me with a degree in Pharmacy and Toxicology. I’ve never been entirely sure why I’ve kept them – some kind of nostalgia, I suppose, for what might have been. I’ve forgotten nearly everything contained within them, but the sad fact is that I should know it all. If I’d completed my degree, I would do. They hold the keys to what I needed to know, before, when I had a career path in mind, a future, prospects. Before everything changed forever.

The course has long been discontinued, the toxicology element discarded. If I had completed it, I would be one of the few people in the country to have such a qualification.

If.

Chapter 17

Charlotte

The photographs are good. I’m pleased with what I’ve got so far. Once I’ve put them all through Photoshop and fiddled around with them, they’ll be perfect. At least something is going well. The last foraging trip was horrendous, what with the car turning up, passing us on the road, deliberately slowing down to get a good look at me and making sure I got a good look at it – though of course it was impossible to see inside. This was not a figment of my imagination. This was real. Thank God I wasn’t alone out there, on that deserted country lane. But assassins don’t care, do they? They’d shoot in front of a few women and children, run over, plough through anyone who got in their way. Who or what would stop them?

I’m suddenly struck with the thought that they might have mistaken your two boys for mine, who weren’t with us that day. What if they’d … Oh God, no, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

My mind is running away with me and I force it to stop. I haven’t been out for days. The only place I feel safe is at home, inside my own four walls, with all the doors and windows locked. It’s summertime and hot, and Agnes and the au pair are always trying to fling the windows open and let in the fresh air but I firmly forbid it.

I can’t dispel the fear that it’s not just the breeze that might enter.

I go back to my pictures. I’ve captured details precisely as I wanted them. They’re exactly the kind of glossy images that I imagined when I first had the idea for the foraging book. It almost feels too easy, using a digital camera and a computer programme, but that’s technology for you. Sometimes I think back to the old days of darkrooms and developing fluid. Those shadowy images that had to be so carefully nurtured if they were to come to fruition. It felt like real work, then. Work that needed expertise and dedication and perseverance.

I developed photos with my father. He was an amateur photographer in the old sense of the world, someone who probably knew more about lenses and films and shutter speeds than half the professionals. That’s what it used to be like, to be an amateur. When I think of my dad, I try to only think of that, of the quiet of the darkroom and the smell of developing fluid.

Smell is the most evocative of the senses. If I smelt álcool, the sugar-cane fuel that all Brazilian cars ran on when Dan and I lived in São Paulo, I would be immediately transported back to the chaos and noise and bustle and traffic jams of that giant megalopolis. I would see the piles of cashew fruits, orange, yellow, and red, looking just like peppers, and recall their bittersweet taste with the acidic burn at the end. I would hear the rhythms of samba and merengue and lambada and remember how we danced, Dan and I, to whirl all our troubles away. And the scent of jasmine will always take me back to Greece, to Athens, where the cloying, honey smell was a blessed relief from the traffic fumes and the insane summer heat.

So that chemical aroma, if I were ever to experience it again, would put me straight at my father’s side in the makeshift darkroom he would conjure up in the bathroom. The rest of the family had to make sure they went to the loo before we got started, because once underway, nothing could be allowed to interrupt the process.

Imagine that! Only one toilet in the house. Not like my incontinence mansion, where every bedroom is en suite and there’s a separate guest cloakroom and bathroom too. Not to mention the sauna in the basement and the facilities in the pool house. It cost a fortune to do all the plumbing and electrics in a Grade I listed building, but as I said to Dan at the time, it has to be right. If we’re going to do it, we might as well put everything into it and do it properly. It makes sense.

But I digress. These days, there’s hardly any barrier between the professional photographer and the hobbyist. Anyone can upload their work to iStock or Shutterstock or wherever and sell it and have it used on websites and magazines. But in the old days, by which I mean twenty or thirty years ago, everything was different. You could enter competitions, or send your photography away to magazines and wait months with bated breath to see if they wanted it. The answer would come by post – either the photo returned in an envelope marked ‘do not bend’ or a cheque for a fiver. Dad didn’t submit his work very often, though, despite how passionate