Stella'd turned a bit aggressive, by that time. All the excitement had gone to her head. That was why I was taking the pictures. She kept lunging at the lens, and my sister (very wisely) elected to delegate rat-snapping duties to me. There was a little water splashed on the shelf--we'd been trying to get her wet again, so we could get more photos with her hair standing up--and her face was mirrored in it. That was her lapping up the water. It's all coming back to me now. Oh, dolcezze perdute; oh, memorie....

I can see every hair. She seems so real. Ah, to reach into the frame and lift her out! If she scratched me a thousand times, I wouldn't mind!

1) In ninety-nine photographs out of a hundred, I manage to be doing something completely bizarre. It's not something I do on purpose, either, like forking finger-antennae behind people's heads. It's--it's a subtle thing, a fundamental wrongness, that creeps in when I'm not looking. In that split second when the shutter snaps, a cruel zephyr wafts a lock of hair up my nose. It's out again before I have a chance to register its presence. Nobody knows about it till the film comes back, and then, bam: "Socar, why is your hair picking your nose?" Or a muscle twitches in my lip, or my left eye goes a-wandering, independently of the right. Gail took one, a while back, where my shirt was folded in such a way that it looked like I had no torso. There was my face (with a silly smirk on it), and then this...this scrunched-up bag, underneath, where my chest should've been.

That's bad enough, right? But then, there's reason #2:

2) Every time I'm stood standing in front of the camera, I'm acutely aware of old family photos I've seen (not necessarily from my family, mind)--turn-of-the-century photos, World War II photos; photos from the insides of book-jackets. I think of those faces, arranged, just like mine, into careful for-posterity smiles. And then I remember that all those people are dead. Soon, assuming it survives the trials of time, my photograph will be the same. People from future generations will look at it with mild curiosity. They'll see me smiling in my quaint clothes, and wonder what it might've been like to live in my world. It might even occur to them that I'm dead, and have been so for ages, and that they'll join me soon.

Worst of all, they probably won't even know who I was. They might turn over the print, or, in this digital age, check the file information: "Socar M, Christmas '04."

I'll be just like Peter S., from my grandfather's fifth-form English primer. Once, someone noted him down as a poofy cling on the inside cover of a schoolbook. Half a century later, a pre-teen Socar laughed at the inscription. And now, much like my grandfather, he's dead, and all. It's too late to find out who he was. As far as the world is concerned, he's just some poofy cling from Ayrshire.

Not, of course, that I mind these things all that much. I'm in plenty of photographs, after all. I just thought I'd mention it. Divert a bit of attention from my horrible hairdo, and that.

One more thing about dead folks: see that gaudy ornament I'm wearing around my neck? That's from my grandma on my father's side, who's also been dead these past couple of years. It's my inheritance. She didn't have much, but she left that to me, her favourite grandchild. And now I'm obliged to wear it all the time. (I secretly like wearing it--but not for its looks, that's for certain!)