Pictures in the Park

I’m in London (although there’s nothing I recognise), walking through a park made up of large squares of grass separated by cobbled paths and bound on at least two sides by some huge old stone buildings. The path is marked with mould in green, white and yellow, like ancient gravestones. The park goes on for as far as I can see behind and in front of me, so I just keep walking. I’m a photographer and occasionally stop to take identical pictures of the park.

Ahead of me is a young black kid standing on his own in the middle of one of the grassy areas. He seems like a good subject so I ask him to wear a hideous brown and orange jumper and put on a brown hat with tassels dangling from it. He seems much closer to the walls around that side of the park, and they are huge and feel like cathedrals.

After a couple of shots we continue to walk through the park, across the grass squares. We reach a crowd of young teenage lads circling another boy who is doing remarkable trick with a football. I get in close and start taking dozens of photos. He’s doing jumps and impossible horizontal spins in the air. Not all of the pictures are perfect, but I must have taken hundreds before I realise the crowd has dissipated and I’m just left with the first kid I met.

We walk off towards the road (we’ve finally crossed the park). It’s very murky, everything seems brown and badly-lit. There are odd shops and closed petrol stations lining the street. We’re never passed by another person or car. The pavement is cobbled and very steep but it takes no effort to walk up it.

I explain that if I manage to sell any of the photos then I’ll obviously need to pay a percentage to the subjects, so I’ll need both of their contact details. The kid (he looks about 9) says he doesn’t know the football trickster; I’d assumed they were friends. I tell him that they’ll be on flickr.com as well if he wants to see them. We talk about what we do and I find out he’s actually 17 and is just finishing his A-Levels.

I’m heading for the railway station so that I can get home. When I reach it, after climbing up a cobbled wall on the corner of the street the young lad is gone and I’m in the car park. Louis and Carla are waiting for me there so we can all catch a train together. We recognise the two yellow cars nearest to me – they’re both Pete’s (a friend I work with) and we approach them. They’re both one-seater cars, pressed close together. One is quite sporty, the other looks like a futuristic Plastic Pig (three-wheeler). For some reason this is ‘typical’, so that Pete and his other half can be near each other even when parked.

Before I can stop them Louis and Carla have climbed into the cars and are rocking them from side to side, battering them against each other. I yell at them to get out of the cars for a while, take a photo and go off to catch the train; they follow after a few more shakes of the cars.