Natalia’s house is overwhelming—lush cream and beige everything, carpet that’s pillowy underfoot, abstract art on the walls—but at least her bedroom is relatively ordinary, if you ignore the fact that she has her own en suite bathroom.
It’s awkward at first, of course, in the way that it’s always awkward when you first go to someone’s house. Natalia hasn’t been to school for weeks, and the last time I saw her was standing up at the pulpit for Yin’s memorial service.
The light is good in her room, and it’s the archetypal teenage girl’s bedroom—bed, desk, wardrobe, ruff les, posters, lamps—which is exactly what I want.
Natalia shows me on her laptop how easy it is to find out where someone lives. We sit at her desk and gape.
‘How did you found out this guy was a suspect?’
‘He was mentioned in this thing called the Echo Files, under a fake name, but then these web sleuths found out his real name.’
She takes me through the steps, his crimes, the court documents, the phone directory.
‘And then I went to his house,’ she says.
I’m so shocked that I hit her on the arm, harder than I intended.
‘Ouch! Abusive, Cardell.’
‘What the hell? Are you joking?’ But I can see from her face that she’s not. ‘When? Why? What happened?’
‘Shh, calm down. You’re the first person I’ve told.’ Natalia snaps her computer shut. ‘I need you to be more chill, Chloe.’
I inhale deeply, summoning the type of fake inner calm I use when Sam is being a brat. Natalia wears a deep scowl so I tone it down. ‘When was this?’
‘School holidays.’
‘Why did you do it?’
Her eyes dart about; she swivels back and forth on her computer chair. ‘I just wanted to do something. I felt an unbearable itch that I needed to scratch.’
I try not to let any dread creep into my voice.
‘What happened?’
She puffs out her cheeks and lets a long whoosh of air go.
‘He was there,’ she says. ‘He saw me scoping out his house and he confronted me. I’ve never seen a creepier man in my whole life, and that’s saying a lot.’
‘Did you talk to him?’
‘We yelled insults and accusations at each other a bit and at first it felt good to tell him how evil he is, but then I woke up and realised the madness of standing metres away from a predator and a convicted criminal and I got out of there quick smart.’
She looks pale even talking about it.
‘And when you saw him, did you think that he could be Doctor Calm?’
‘No.’ She fiddles with the edge of her desk. ‘I don’t think they’re gonna find him, are they?’
You’d think the reward or Yin’s death would have ramped things up a bit, made things happen, but it doesn’t seem that way.
‘I don’t think so, or maybe not for a long time,’ I admit. ‘And so that means he wins, and in a way we lose.’
Natalia watches me silently, her eyes deep and dark as rock pools. It’s hard to know what she’s thinking.
My phone beeps. ‘It’s them. They’re almost here. They took the wrong tram.’
Natalia rubs her hedgehog hair.
‘I’ve been thinking about not wasting my life,’ she says eventually. ‘How we have to make it count. Maybe that’s how we win.’
Bochen and Cherry arrive in a flurry of bags and perfume and exclamations over how nice Natalia’s mum is and how hard her street was to find. They carry their shoes in their hands, because there’s nowhere to leave them at the door, and bring a bag of vacuum-sealed bubble cups. I can tell Natalia hates her herbal jelly drink but she drinks it anyway, to be polite. Maybe some of the things I’ve said to her have gotten through.
I show them some reference shots, some famous, others maybe not so much. The famous ones are Ai Weiwei flipping the bird at famous monuments around the world, and most controversially, sticking his finger up at the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Tiananmen Square.
‘I like the spirit of rebellion,’ I say. ‘I want to capture that.’
‘You know he’s a friend of Bochen’s parents,’ Cherry says cheerfully.
Bochen shoots her a dirty look. ‘Not friends. Perhaps they are in the same scene.’
‘Her parents are artists.’ Cherry is oblivious to Bochen’s discomfort. She points. ‘She’s supposed to be an artist too, she’s meant to be going to the Central Academy, but she’s a bad girl so they send her here.’
Bochen grabs Cherry’s finger and squeezes it to shut her up. ‘Don’t ruin my reputation. What’s the next photo?’
‘It’s a video.’ I cue up Cao Fei’s Cosplayers video on Natalia’s computer. The video starts with young cosplayers acting out action or fantasy sequences in a range of busy city environments. Gradually, though, they’re shown hanging out in the city like normal teens, riding the subway, walking down the median strip of a busy highway, looking out at water, bored. Eventually they’re shown at home, still in their costumes and doing mundane things like scrolling on their phone or eating dinner in front of the TV.
It’s a combination of how they would like to be seen in their best fantasies, together with the bare reality of their lives.
‘Do you recognise any of those places?’ Natalia asks Cherry.
Cherry gives her a pitying look. ‘I’m not from Guangzhou.’
I turn away so Natalia doesn’t see me smirk. When we get going on the shoot everyone starts to get along a lot better.
I’ve asked Bochen and Cherry to bring their own costumes and direct us on how they want to be portrayed. It’s a lot more loose and random than what I did with Natalia, but I’m hoping it will capture something truthful.
Bochen wears a tiger onesie, stripes and ears and tail and all.
‘I’m a lazy tiger girl,’ she says. ‘I’m too lazy to do my homework, I’m too lazy to think about the future, I sit in my bedroom and do nothing all day.’
Natalia sets Bochen up on her bed and piles textbooks and stacks of paper around her. She finds her old Nintendo Playstation in a box under her bed. She brings up donuts and dirty plates from the kitchen and we arrange them around the bed as directed, along with our empty plastic cups.
I was worried that she was being kind of withdrawn once the others arrived, but Natalia is surprisingly meticulous when it comes to creating the set and she seems to enjoy being in the background for a change.
I start clicking and Tiger Bochen slumps on the bed with the Playstation controls in one hand and a half-eaten donut in the other. She looks hilarious.
‘Feels so gooooooooooood.’ She pretends to cram the donut in her mouth.
‘We got it!’ I say, after I’ve shot enough. I have no idea what Adut is going to think of these photos, or the other proper grown-up artists, but I’m having enough fun not to care. Yet.
Cherry has spent most of Bochen’s shoot locked in Natalia’s bathroom getting ready and when she emerges she is in full Snow White costume, Disney-style, with blue bodice, yellow skirt, puffy sleeves and bobbed black hair. The sanitised pretty movie version, not the disturbing Grimm’s version I’ve always liked.
‘I look pretty, don’t I?’ is the first thing she says and I immediately go into freefall about how we’re going to make this work. Natalia wears her scepticism plastered right across her face.
Cherry and Bochen tip out the seemingly dozens of bags they brought with them; plush animals of every colour and size and condition tumble out onto Natalia’s bed.
‘We got a bulk deal,’ Bochen explains.
Cherry pulls a giant pair of plastic novelty scissors out of the last bag.
‘I’m Snow White,’ she says, ‘if Snow White hated all the animals and chopped their heads off.’
Natalia looks like all of her Christmases have come at once.
For Cherry’s shoot we set up in the spare bedroom that Natalia’s sister has been staying in. Plush toy carcasses pile up around the room, mixed in with Olivia’s mess of black clothing, piles of novels, cigarette packets and old coffee mugs. Fairytale Cherry sits in the picturesque bay window holding up a severed rabbit head triumphantly. She is truly, truly scary. I don’t know how I missed this fact at school.
The more Cherry smiles the scarier she looks.
‘Don’t mess with the princess,’ she keeps saying.
Bochen is almost asleep in a pile of leftover toy limbs, while Natalia holds up a circular gold reflector to get the light on Cherry’s face. She’s biting her lip in concentration, working her arms hard to ping the light just right.
I take a moment in between clicks to check on Natalia, her dark under-eye circles, her bare head. She doesn’t look like she’s been eating much, but her focus is strong, the misery isn’t hanging over her so thickly as before. She might have even laughed a few times.
I’m going to find a way to do the photography elective next term. And maybe we’re all going to be all right.