Tiny Paper Rectangles
Photographs from an old Kodak instamatic camera stir up memories and stories from the 1980s.
Instamatic picture from the 1980s of two friends on a canal boat somewhere in the UK. Photo: Tanya Clarke
The photographs sitting in my hands are small and fuzzy.
The film grain is unforgiving. Nothing is sharp, the flash is wild and explosive, my friends captured in a smudge of muted colour. I still have the negatives for some of these photographs. Tiny rectangles of amber colour film - 13mm x 17mm - each one made with a Kodak Instamatic given to me by my grandparents on my 13th birthday.
The pictures poke at something buried deep; old and distant memories of my years at a girls’ boarding school in the 1980s. Some of the memories are blurred and foggy, not unlike the quality of the photographs, the thin papery collection that lures me back in time. I become eager to hook them into my waking conscious like someone fishing in a large still lake. I watch them in my hands as they wriggle and flap, gasping for air. The truth is my memories are slippery devils. They vanish through my fingers like water, leaving behind a faint, tenuous image that lingers.
I search for something more in my mind. I find an ouija board and write from there.
Talking to The Dead
On the small bedside cupboard, Monica places twenty-six torn up pieces of paper in a circle, each with a letter from the alphabet written in her large loopy handwriting. She adds ten more with the numbers nought to nine and then another two with the letters Y for YES and N for NO. She finds a pen and tells us this is what we will use as a pointer.
"What're you doing?" I say in a low conspiratorial whisper. “What is this?
I am 13 years old and in my dormitory at school. It's night and the boarding house is quiet and warm. The sash window next to my bed is slightly open. The pieces of paper tremble in the breeze.
"It's a ouija board," says Monica.
Her hair is short and spiked. I think she knows a lot about many things. I listen to her.
"What's a weejee board?" I say.
I've never heard of it before.
"We're going to speak to the dead," she says, raising her hands in a comic spooky fashion.
I laugh but the fine hairs on my arms prickle and I pull my dressing gown further around my body. Someone says they're scared and gets back into bed pulling the duvet over their head.
Monica lights a candle. She drips the hot wax into a jam jar lid before holding it upright and pressing the bottom in, waiting for the wax to cool, waiting until the candle's stuck fast. The flame flickers with our breath and lights our young faces in the gloom. Monica tells us if we hold a torchlight under our chins and look into a mirror we'll see the devil dancing right behind us.
We stay quiet. We don't want to be found out. The housemistress has already done her rounds making sure we're all in bed and turning out the lights. The four of us sit around the cupboard. Monica instructs us to place a finger on the pen.
"Is anybody there?" she says, trying not to laugh.
She says the pen will move and spell out the name of whoever is haunting the room. My heart is thudding hard in my chest. Someone starts to giggle and someone else says she needs the loo. I'm wondering with excitement who we're going to see.
Filling in the gaps
I’m looking at the photographs again, the pictures I took with my first camera all those years ago. The memories swim and slip between my fingers. A week-long biology field trip, teenagers on canal boats, smuggling alcohol and cigarettes onto the boat in our bags. No one thinks to check us.
There are photos I remember but can’t find. My friend flicking her long hair up in a swoop, the flash stilling the movement in a grainy blur. Another, a group, the sun is out, it's warm, it's our last few days of term after our exams. Some will stay and others will move away. The headmistress tells my parents I will fail my A levels if I leave and do them elsewhere.
Snippets, thoughts, I check some with a friend. Our memories are different. The art teacher, Mr Potter, who could aim a piece of chalk or a board rubber (or sometimes a chair, so the story goes…) to land right in the middle of your art piece if you didn't raise your head and listen immediately at his command.
The plastic pens and rulers we melted in a bunsen burner flame sitting in Chemistry, bored, trying to understand the periodic table, trying to read the writing of Miss Beattie as she scribbled equations on a plastic sheet lit by an overhead projector onto a board behind her.
My friend can’t remember the name of the sewing teacher who nearly threw her out of class. I can't either. I do remember the French teacher, Mrs Wiggins who separated us saying that my friend was cleverer than I and didn’t need to work so hard for good results. I, however, needed to try.
She was right, by the way, the teacher. My friend is far cleverer than I.
I pack the pictures away, sliding them into their funny, old-fashioned paper packets with TruPrint emblazoned across the front, a picture of a mother and child splashing about in a pool, posing and smiling back out at me. I wonder for the umpteenth time, why I keep them. I have no answer, only that I do.
