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Jenn AshworthTHE CURATOR or BETWEEN BEFORE AND AFTERThere’s a photograph of me at my wedding reception: nineteen, purple sparkly dress. I’m sitting on a step in front of a hedge; the colours are migraine-vivid. I wish someone had told me to sit up straight; the dress was backless and the white curve and slump of my shoulder-blades rise out of it like a turkey-breast. This one didn’t make the album because I was looking right at the camera, one eye closed like I was squinting against fag smoke, and scowling. I kept it because I keep everything, in case I forget. ...I'd grown up but he didn't, want to say it... Two weeks ago there was a party in Hebden Bridge to which I took my daughter. It was for my Aunt’s girlfriend; her fortieth birthday. Skye ran about and fell and cried and seemed to be happy. There were lots of cousins there, and I try to get her with other children as much as I can because there will be no brothers and sisters. My Mormon mother and her Mormon husband sat stuffing themselves with chicken legs under a gay pride flag. It tickled me, and I took a picture of them.The wedding photographer was a present from that Aunt. Teen bride and her groom, being poor and young, couldn’t afford one. She had a friend who could take photographs, asked him, and he did. My favourite photograph is the one where he turned to get a shot of everyone standing in front of the registry office waiting for us to appear, shutters cocked, confetti loaded. The guests are lined up like a firing squad and that is the only photograph I have which tallies with my own memory. Three years later it was decided that I would get to keep the wedding album, and it is in a basket under the cot with a first pair of shoes, some handprints, and the pictures from my (her?) first scan. So I won’t forget, and so she can look at a brief period of family she won’t remember when she gets older.  As well as taking pictures of things and keeping things, I write things down. In my wardrobe there is a big cardboard box with over fifty notebooks. I have written almost every day since I was thirteen, which is eleven years. Sometimes I consult them, but mainly I leave them alone. Those volumes are toxic, confusing. I remember things I didn’t write down, and don’t remember what I read there. I didn’t write on the day of the wedding, but later, in a café in Amsterdam, tried to catch up on the event I had missed. I was stoned and tired and I wanted to go home.I got back from the birthday party late. Skye was sleeping and she draped her head over my shoulder, limp legs banging my gut as I carried her to bed and deposited her there, coat on, teeth un-brushed. I remember fluff from her blanket clinging to the sticky patches on her cheeks. It looked a bit like a moustache. I wanted to touch her but didn’t dare in case I woke her up, so turned on the night-light and slipped away. I sat outside in the yard and smoked. My housemate had just bought a new laptop and he was up late playing with it. He’d found a way to record his voice and alter the sound to turn himself into Freddy Krueger. Remember three words! Knives for fingers! Knives for fingers! I went to bed, considered ringing Oscar, looked at the time and pulled out the latest notebook. I wrote: I met the man who did the photographs at my wedding tonight. I didn’t recognise him, but he knew me straight away. He asked where Ben was, and said I looked different. He said I moved differently, and then hummed and hawed because he meant I’d grown up but he didn’t want to say it. He had his camera with him and was taking pictures at the party. There should be before and after photos. I’d like to pinpoint the day when the growing up happened.I lay in bed, listening to Skye snuffle and overheat in her coat, remembering the car-ride home in the dark which I endured crammed between two child-seats in the back. I’d pretended to listen to music but had eavesdropped on my mother talking about the party, reminiscing about my Aunt’s other girlfriend (the one who was at my wedding) and arguing with her husband about the right way home. I tried to think about something different, or sleep, but I couldn’t do either and turned the light on to get the notebook. I made notes about how I would write about the party for Unmadeup but the story uncoiled into its context, and I realised it would be incomprehensible without the accompanying relics. Tipsy and dozing now, I imagined my story taking pride of place in a little glass cabinet: a mini museum. A scrap of purple material, primary sources from the notebooks, Fuji-film, measurements of how much my hair has grown and how, between before and after, a person appeared. This is Jenn Ashworth's third story for Un-Made-Up. Her previous ones were A Whale And A Stork At Windemere and Twisted. "They seem," she writes, "to get darker and darker..." Illustrator Joachim Robert lives in Bordeaux and is, like Jenn, a fastidious keeper of notebooks; see the evidence at his blog Le Moleskine A Beleg. It's a pleasure to have another story from Jenn; I love her stuff and it's great to have what looks suspiciously like a body of work evolving here... 9:02 AM - 10/9/2006 - post comment
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