Fully Automated Nikon
by Florence Roberts
Art by Florencio Campello
“Faced with a camera lens, hideously over-witnessed, I immediately start trying to impersonate myself.” – Sarah Manguso
She chose to wear her favourite bottle green skirt for work that day. Most days she would sit in the canteen amongst the other secretaries, but on Thursdays she liked to get out. She would walk around the park, loop it twice, pause on a bench to eat her carefully prepared sandwich and watch fat pigeons peck around her feet. The skirt had a gold zip and stopped just above her calves, and she paired it with matching tights, a crepe blouse and a plaid jacket. She liked the way the skirt hugged her waist, would twist in the mirror like a cheese straw and pretend she was Goldie or Mia or Julie Christie. On this particular day, she had loaded up her camera, slipped it in her handbag and restlessly chewed her fingernails until lunchtime.
At 12 o’clock, the secretary called for the lift to hold and thanked the man inside for doing so. He smiled at her through ad agency teeth and said “where to, sweetheart?” He smelled of peppermint and hair oil. “Oh,” she returned with a wave of the hand, “Ground floor, please.” She felt his eyes on the back of her calves until the first floor when he slid past her with a wink, out into the grey bustle of other men in suits and tanned skin and trouble with their wives. One of them halted the lift door and slipped in to replace the sweetheart guy. He was larger and did not smell of peppermint. He asked, “Heading out on your own?” but wheezed it and smacked her thigh. She smiled and sighed, “You better believe it!” – and crossed the lobby with a laugh that skittered and bounced off the cold marble floor.
Usually, the secretary chose a seat on a bench inside the children’s playground, and would pretend to be a mother. She’d always admired the air of the mothers at the playground; regarded their hawk-like surveillance with a kind of awe. They were inside something: a great, invisible dome separating the mothers from the rest of the world. The secretary would cross the threshold every Thursday, uninvited and blissfully ignored. She would perch on a bench inside the entrance, sandwich in her lap, and quietly choose a child who most resembled her. From there she would follow the child’s precarious voyage from monkey bars to slide and back again: poised, alert, protective. For that brief lunch hour, she had a benign sense of being inside something too, like cotton wool had padded out the loose air around her.
Today, the secretary knew she would not be entering that protective circle. The sky was cloudless, and the small, square bulk in her handbag bumped against her side. She skirted past the playground, past the hawks and their offspring, and settled on a bench under an oak tree at the far end of the park. She took out her sandwich, a copy of Dr. Wayne Dyer’s “Your Erroneous Zones”, and a flask of coffee. As she had expected outside the confines of her female refuge, she felt someone’s eyes on her.
“What’s that your reading?”
She didn’t look up, but instead unscrewed her flask, poured into the lid a small amount of coffee and sat, pretending to read.
“I said, what’s that your reading?” The man spoke from the back of his throat, raspy, like it might hurt.
“Eh?”
A brief pause, in which she took a small, decisive sip of coffee.
“Ah…” she heard him say. “Quiet one.”
The secretary felt him closer now, could smell tobacco on his clothes. The sun burned through her tights and she thought next Thursday, no plaid.
“You know,” came the voice again, “some people would call this rude. I’m on a walk in the park, spot a beautiful lady, ask a question…” She took another sip.
Then, louder now - “You gonna reply or what?” - and at this the secretary turned down the corner of page 76, bent as if to adjust her tights but instead pulled the camera from her handbag, pointed, aimed and fired.
The man stood blinking in the sun.
In the playground across the park, two children dangled from the same monkey bar.
“What you just do?”
“Oh,” she waved a hand in reply, “I took a photograph.”
He stood amazed.
“Of me?”
“Of you.”
At his feet, a pigeon pecked and nodded its head.
“Why d’you do that?”
The secretary laughed lightly.
“Why,” she replied, “you’ve such a handsome face.”
“I…” she heard him falter. “What d’you…”
One of the children gave up the fight and fell from the monkey bar; the other child still hung, furiously cycling his little legs in the air; the secretary returned to her book.
“Listen.” The man had found his voice again. “What place you got taking pictures of me?” She sensed him bend his head towards her; the shape of it threw a shadow over the pages of her book. The air between them smelled stale, like old, damp clothes left in the machine too long.
“You like what you see?” he asked softly.
The monkey child kicked wildly in the distance, stretched one arm out, made a leap.
“You want some, that it?”
She was quicker this time: point, aim, fire.
“What you-”
Point. Aim. Fire.
Later, the secretary studied the change in the man’s eyes from one photograph to the next. First bewilderment, then anger, now palpable lust - towards her, or himself, she couldn’t be sure. In one photograph, he visibly preened, hand on one hip and head at an angle. In this same picture the man in the grey suit was approaching from a distance. In the photograph, his hair seemed to have more oil in it somehow. He’d told the other guy to scarper, leave the pretty lady in peace – she didn’t want to be bothered by the likes of him. The secretary studied the photographs of the suited man, seconds after declining his offer for dinner; saw his appealing eyes change to alarm as she fired more, more, more. She saw now, with a wry smile, that he was rather handsome. She remembered his confused, stumbling pleas to make her stop. One photograph showed him laughing, a wild, dazed look in his eyes; another was just a blur of grey as he turned his back. In the final photograph, both men had gone, and the mothers stood in the far distance, watching from their nest.
Florencio Campello, Heading to the Protest,
