The Lost

“God damn it son.  I told you to be careful didn’t I?”

The boy watched as his father drew his wrist across his brow, leaving a chalky grey streak at the corner of his temple.  A fresh bubble of sweat appeared above on his forehead and dribbled a snail trail through the dusty grime.  His father was covered in dirt and dust and his shirt was soaked through with sweat.  There was a pickaxe at his feet and the boy conjured an image of his father wielding the axe like some deranged horror movie maniac, but the image evaporated at appearance of his father’s warm, wide-mouthed grin.

“I don’t see any lost puppies down there son.  You sure you weren’t imagining things again?”

Seb stared down into the darkness.  Far down he could see a glimmer of light on what must be a puddle of water at the bottom of the drain.  A cold stream of air wafted up, gentle and inviting, offering sweet relief from the sun pummelling his back.

“I heard something Dad, it sounded like something whining.  It sounded scared.  I wasn’t imagining it I swear.”

His father peered down into the darkness again and then sighed.

“I’m sorry son but I don’t see anything.  And I’ve got to finish digging this drain or I’ll be even sorrier when you mother gets home and sees I still haven’t finished it.  Now step back I’ve got to put this cover back on.”

Seb moved reluctantly away from the hole and watched as his father slid the heavy metal disk back into place.

“Now why don’t you run on down to your friend Eric’s house and let me get on back to work.  And you make sure and be back and cleaned up for dinner before your mother gets home.”

Later that night after dinner was cleared and Seb had done the dishes and his other chores, he lay in bed wide-awake staring at the stars outside.  The moon was crescent shaped and bright, casting a soft blue light through the window.  The fan in his room shuddered from side to side, kicking up the bottom of the curtains as it moved.  He had turned thirteen just a few days ago and was disappointed by how everything felt the same.  Absolutely nothing had changed.  He wasn’t sure what he had thought would be different exactly, but when he woke up on the morning of his birthday he had sprinted into the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror and was shocked to discover the he looked exactly the same as when he had gone to bed aged twelve.  The disappointment had clung to him and he still couldn’t seem to shake it.  It gnawed at him, and left him feeling uncomfortable and on edge.  It made him act like even more of a jerk around April at school.  Today he had made a complete fool of himself in front of her again, and his skin crawled just thinking about it.

He closed his eyes and sighed, trying to clear his mind for sleep.  He rolled on to his side and then froze; and listened.  He sat up in bed and turned his ear towards the window.  Faintly he heard it again, a desperate whine.  He knew he wasn’t imagining it!  There it was again.  He shot out of bed and pulled on jeans and a t-shirt, then he crept to his bedroom door and opened it a crack.  The house was dark and silent apart from the low whir of the fan in his parent’s room.  He crept along the hallway and paused at the back door, listening.  Hearing no sound he gently tugged open the door and slipped out into the darkness.

He crept around the side of the house and grabbed the pick axe that his father had left leaning against the wall.  He scrambled through the gate and onto the road.  The crunching sound of the gravel under his feet seemed deafening but no one came running out to see what the commotion was.  He stopped at the manhole cover; pausing to listen.  This time he heard no sound.  He placed the tip of the pickaxe at the gap between the edge and the lid and he pushed down hard on the handle.  The cover came up and then slipped off the tip of the axe, crashing down with a loud bang that echoed up from the dark inside the hole.  Seb crouched in silence at the edge of the hole, staring at his house, waiting for his father’s angry face to appear at the bedroom window.  It did not.  Gently and slowly he used his heels to slide the cover away from the hole.  Seb reached to his side for the key chain that was clipped to his jeans, pulling at the small flashlight attached. He switched in on and pointed it down into the dark.

The light shimmered on the water at the bottom again and but he saw nothing else and heard no whining.  He called out quietly, straining to see through the black.  The same cold draft swelled up from below and made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.  He waited, listening to the dark.  He was about to give up and head back inside when he heard a sound crawl up from below.  It was so faint he could barely make it out but there was no doubt that something was down there.  Propping himself up on the edge of the hole he stretched his leg down into the hole tapping at the sides, feeling for a rung.  He touched it with his toe and then stretched out farther, placing the ball of his foot firmly against it and pressing it, testing it for weakness.  It was solid and he lowered himself down slowly, testing each rung as he went.  The air was cold and damp and had a metallic tang that tingled in his mouth.  Flakes of metal from the rungs clung to the palms of his hands and dug in uncomfortably.  Finally when he put his foot down for the next rung a rush of cold invaded his shoe, filling it with cold, dirty water.  He stood and turned around, shining the tiny light into the darkness.

The sewer was small, and the ceiling was low.  The highest part of the curve was about 4 inches shorter than him if he were standing tall, so he had to hunch his head and shoulders to move forward into the tunnel.  He looked up and saw that he had left the manhole lid partially covering the hole, leaving a crescent slice of the sky in view; shaped just like the moon.

Carefully he made his way forward into the tunnel, sweeping the light backwards and forwards across the floor ahead.  The ground was strewn with branches and rubbish that had been swept in to the sewer and become snagged on the ground or on other pieces of trash.  There was a sodden baseball cap, an old sock, and numerous coke cans and other unidentifiable bits.  He stopped and listened, calling out gently and shining the torch ahead.  He heard nothing and began creeping forward again slowly, calling out into the dark as he went.  When he had travelled a fair distance into the dark his torch began to flicker, throwing up only weak flashes of images in the dark.  He froze when he thought he heard movement up ahead.  He listened, his whole body tense in the dark.  The torch’s flickering became more regular, the light produced more intermittent.  It was as if the shadows were pushing against the torchlight, and gradually they won.

Seb did not immediately panic: he knew which way was back and roughly how far he had come.  He took a slow step back, intending to make his way carefully in the dark until he could see the light from the hole above.  He had taken a few unhurried steps when he heard a sound from behind.  He stopped to listen, his eyes straining and desperate to make out even his own hand in the blackness.  He could see nothing, but in the silence he heard a distinctive splosh of water coming from somewhere nearby in the dark.

“Hello?”

Silence again, and then a gentle, creeping splash, but closer this time.  Suddenly Seb felt the panic in his chest rise up and explode, sending fear in sharp bolts across his body.  Suddenly he thought again of the pickaxe-wielding maniac from the movies, but it wasn’t his father this time and there was no warm ray of sunshine or broad smile to help him shake it off.  He ran.  In sheer panic he ran, bouncing off the damp tunnel walls, pitching head first into the darkness.  Up ahead he could see the light from the manhole and he threw himself forward towards the safety of the light.  Then there was a sharp pain and a pop as his ankle was wrenched from underneath him, sending him plummeting into the cloying darkness, pushing filthy, fetid water into his face and down his throat.  He lay moaning in the darkness, the pain from his ankle excruciating.  Wrapped around it was some tangled fencing wire, that had caught on a heavy stone and pulled tight, cutting into the skin on his ankle, digging deep and drawing blood.  Seb lay in the dark, delirious with pain, and heard again the sound of splashing steps coming towards him, this time accompanied by a whine.  Above him the stars in the crescent-shaped sliver of sky shone.

Seb’s father awoke in the night sweating, and fearful.  He had had a nightmare, but he couldn’t remember what it was about.  He got up, and went to the window, letting the night air cool him down.  The sky was clear and bright, and a million stars winked at him across the sky.  He looked out to his neighbours’ houses, but the night was quiet and there was no movement.  He was about to return to bed when he noticed something in the street that didn’t seem right.  There was something lying in the road.  He squinted in the dark.  It was a pickaxe.  He felt a cold sliver of fear creep up his back.  Next to it he could just make out the shape of the manhole cover, but it seemed to be misshapen: open.  Terror washed over him and sent him flying for the door.  He screamed for his wife as he ran outside and into the night.

Low low down on my list is where you’ll find my favourites.  The weird and the wonderful.  In an ideal world I would have a portrait of each person next to their google search term.  I would ask these people to come forward and volunteer for this but I am more than a little afraid.

This week “Clara Maidment Gay” appeared on the list for the first time.  It’s my new favourite.  God bless you whoever typed in that one.

Here are some of my other favourites…

Yes that’s his BELLY.

Fly Catcher

One of my favourite photographers of all time Eve Arnold died last month.

I was 16 when I saw Eve Arnold’s In Retrospect exhibition.  It was the one that made me go “Fuck yeah photography is cool.  And it’s ok to be sad sometimes.  And look someone else sees what I see in the world.”  I saw it in Edinburgh who I had also fallen in love with.  A city that is such a mix of darkness and beauty.  Everything at that time felt like magic.  I miss 16 year old me.

In tribute to her and my poor lost camera here are some of my favourite images from her and others.  I need inspiration.  This year I plan to be better.

Eve and Marilyn

Marilyn by Eve Arnold

Joan Crawford by Eve Arnold

Bar Girl in a Brothel by Eve Arnold

Divorce by Eve Arnold

Diane Arbus

Albert Watson

Albert Watson

Ellen Von Unwerth

Mert and Marcus

Gratuitous hotness by unknown photographer

In case you missed them here are some of the images from the calendar below.  They can be purchased online here, and funds raised will go to the charity Wellbeing of Women.

Jenna Randall - Synchronised Swimming

Vicki Hawkins - Waterpolo

Francesca Snell - Waterpolo

I had a fabulous Christmas warring with convention, spent with my divorced parents and brother.  From what I have heard from other people’s reports about their family gatherings my parents are infinitely more civil to each other than many “happily” married couples during Christmas.  Perhaps then the ironic secret to a happy family Christmas is actually divorce…

Dogmas

Easy to buy for someone more interested in the wrapping than the gift...

It is a recently started family tradition that we go to the theatre over the Christmas hols.  This year as last we dragged my father along despite the fact that he rarely enjoys the theatre or the cinema.  He will proudly tell you that the last film he saw at the cinema was Men in Black circa 1997.  God knows what the last film he actually enjoyed was but most likely it was Clint; back in the days where the veins he spliced open were the jugulars on the necks of bad guys and not the varicose ones coiled thickly around his calves.  So what fresh torture to inflict on my mildly homophobic, spaghetti-western loving Daddy dearest this year?  How about Priscilla Queen of the Desert?

Oh yes it Christmas: the season of giving.

So on Boxing Day Mom, Dad, bro and I rock up to the bright lights of the Palace Theatre on Shaftsbury Avenue with Dad asking “What’s this show about” and Mom and I laughing to each other and saying “It’s a musical”.  Dad has to sit by himself in the row behind us as he was a late addition to Christmas this year and we bought his ticket last minute.  There’s a dead mouse on the floor in Dad’s row.  And it stinks.  I skip up to the usher to alert him to the rotting rodent aisle G.  Priscilla may be Queen of the Desert but said usher was undoubtedly Queen of the Palace.  He took one look at the mouse and shrieked in a high-pitched wail “Oh no!” and ran tripping and jumping up the aisle shrieking “Eww! No! No! Oooooh no!”.  Genius.  If only all theatre trips were as theatrical as this.

Minutes later he returned in rubber gloves and with a huge black bin liner.  There is more shrieking and jumping about but finally he manages to scoop up the mouse in metres of black plastic and, still shrieking, walks then jogs then runs up the aisle with dead mouse in gloved, plastic-wrapped hand.

Dead Mouse

As opening acts go it was pretty special.

Curtains up and as the scantily clad, muscled men sang and danced on stage (their bending over causing their precariously placed dental floss like thongs to wedge still further between their muscled cheeks) I am acutely aware of my father in the row behind me, nestled in his narrow seat between a balding bear (clapping and jiggling with delight) and a sleek looking queen with a peroxide blonde crop.  Yes Daddy it’s a musical and did I forget to mention that it’s about drag queens and there will be male nudity and lots of it?  Merry Christmas.

Anyway it wasn’t totally out of place with the Christmas spirit: the show featured a number swaddling robes just like they wrapped around baby Jesus.  Some of the tiny robes were even so tightly wrapped that I was sure I could make out the shape of a babies arm.

The toilet in our flat has been slowly becoming less and less efficient over recent weeks, gradually requiring more and more flushes to suck away even the most modest of bodily evacuations.  Then early yesterday morning I noticed that the loo roll seemed to be piling up and though the water was disappearing the wads of wet paper were not.  Then even the water was sticking around, taking many minutes to leave the bowl.  Fuck.  I spent all day flushing an empty bowl hoping that the problem would wash itself away.  It did not.  I started to feel the need for the toilet’s services.  I set out for Homebase.  They had a pathetic range of tiny plungers clearly not up to the job, and a ridiculously expensive air pump jobby that I was reluctant to pay for.  ”One Shot” recommended the shop guy.  ”It’s what the plumbers use, it’ll clear anything”.  So I set off to the pound store to get the good stuff.

The instructions said use a quarter of the bottle.  I started with half and then more for good measure and left it to stand as instructed.

Ten minutes later I flushed.  No change.  I stuck a wire hanger down there.  No improvement.  And now the water was rusty brown from the corroded metal hanger that the “One Shot” had dissolved.  Apparently it can eat through metal but not the fetid muck from 3 girls bowels.  Disturbing.

Flatmates got home and everyone was told to pee in the bath.  Flatmate Rose promised she would bring home a plunger from the studio she was at.  We waited.  By this point 2 of us really needed to do something that couldn’t be rinsed down the bath.

Rose got home after midnight and without plunger in hand.  I began to worry about damage to my internal organs but went to bed.  Left a note on the toilet to remind middle of the night toilet visitors not to use the toilet.

Woke up in the morning desperate for the loo and ready to have another go with the hanger or go buy a plunger.  The toilet was now full the brim of piss and loo roll.  Stupid cows.  Sent an angry text.

There was no way I could make it out to get a plunger.  Or out at all.  I discovered that dog poop bags can be used for purposes other than dog poop.

Rubber Ducky

It’s a tidy leap for me to go from this story to other happenings that have occurred in my last few weeks of absenteeism in the blogosphere.  The Russian has been getting us into gear to start proceedings for sexy calendar 2013 and that means castings.  So I spent a day going from agency to agency shaking hands with and then politely asking to strip, a great number of beautiful women.  Oh to be gay on a day like this would be heavenly.  When I was studying photography I managed to persuade one of my very attractive and ripped guy friends to strip naked in the name of art.  He kindly complied and I thought to myself “THIS is what I want to do for a living”.  Someone upstairs has a twisted sense of humour since somehow along the way I became the go-to girl for female nudity.  Ah well.

For those of you who feel cheated and disturbed by the introduction to this week’s “photography” blog, I have compiled a mini montage of some of the lovely models from the casting, that you might find your way back to finding ladies’s derriere’s sexy again.

For a straight girl these castings can be a bit of a bummer

So many things have happened these few weeks that I really need to filter lest I be here all night.  So in keeping with the theme here’s a little bit about what might have gone into the bag.

Lucky me that despite being a struggling up-and-coming photog I seem to have collected some amazing friends that allow me to occasionally live as if I were one of the already Up-ers.  My friend Toni has a cousin who works for a company that does restaurant reviews.  And she invited us along to a newly opened restaurant that was doing complimentary meals for reviews and to iron out the kinks.

No such thing as a free lunch you say?  Oh how wrong you are.

Novikov (Russian again: they seem to call to me) is a restaurant in Mayfair.  There is an Asian and an Italian restaurant in the same building.  It’s a chain and is frequented by the likes of Vladimir Putin and Naomi Campbell.  We dined in the Asian section.

The restaurant itself is gorgeous, the italian section is lit as if it’s an open air sunlit courtyard and is bright and fabulous.  There is also a ridiculously cool downstairs bar area where the rich, famous, and beautiful no doubt huddle together nightly.

We had the most amazing waiter ever: fun, courteous and knowledgable with impeccable taste in food.  We let him order everything for us and boy did he order EVERYTHING.  We started with Scallop, tuna and salmon sashimi.  California rolls.  Soft shell crab (OMG).  Pork Belly (tender and sweet).   Black Cod (rrp £40 per serving – how will I settle for anything else again?).  Singapore noodles.  Exotic mushrooms.  Morning Glory in garlic and chilli.  Followed by green tea creme brulee (incredible).  Coconut souflee with fruit.  Exotic fruit platter.  And something rich and chocolatey.

Heavenly Black Cod: with flower stamen (??!) dipper for the sauce

So you see having had the 5 star, A-list, Black Card treatment it was probably inevitable that I would have to come crashing back to earth with a dodgy toilet and a turd in a tub.  Karma’s a bitch, there’s no way around it.

Have to say despite having to rise at the hideously unforgiving hour of half past four in the morning, I had a blast filming the show.  Ex Model and Presenter Danila Polyakov is absolutely hilarious and may now be my 2nd favourite tall, red and handsome man.  Nicole looks absolutely ravishing of course, clearly the gene pool was full of the good stuff the day that family decided to take a dip.  Becoming a lingerie designer must have seemed an obvious career choice for her: if every man she met was gonna be picturing her in her smalls anyway they may as well be her own designs.

Me and red hot killa Danila Polyakov

I’m more than a little disappointed that my dubbed Russian voice here is less Bond Girl and more Bored Monotone Girl.  And would LOVE to know what the models had to say about me in their post shoot interviews…I think.

Bizarrely the magic of Russian editing appears to have turned my Hair Stylist Kieron into a hairy, white, Russian man in a Wella T-shirt.  Weird.  Guess it must have something to do with how they convert the colour pixels from Russian to European…  Mmmn.  Zoe’s hands doing make-up looking pretty hench too.  I thought it was bad that British cameras add ten pounds: Russian one’s appear to perform spontaneous race and sex changes.

Click the image below to view the final episode of Russia’s Next Top Model online:

I first appear approx 17 mins in…

Special? Me? Never.

These are the final images for each of the girls.  That radiator was the bane of my life.  (What radiator?  The one I spent ages retouching out)

Julia Vlasenko

Ekaterina Bagrova - RNTM Winner 2011

On a separate note 4 Music is currently re-running Dirty Sexy Things episodes and you can view the first episode featuring yours truly here on 4OD.  Or read my first blogs for the E4 Website here!!!!