Prelude Two: Honeymoon

He hates the screen on the back of the camera, the new one they bought for this holiday. This honeymoon. He stands by a lighthouse under a grey Pacific sky and tries to smile. She shows him the screen. He looks too much of a shlub in this hoody, these baggy combats. He looks like the light hurts his eyes in every picture. He can't even defer his disappointment til the photos are developed.

He used to travel alone. Went to Paris on his own like the girl in that Tori Amos b-side, Bachelorette. And the first time he went to New York he was alone. He never photographed himself: just Wilde's grave, Isadora Duncan's plaque, Ground Zero. He remembers walking down a street in Paris, looking at a poster for some porno comics exhibition stuck in a shop window, a woman with long nails standing in a wrestler's crouch, and catching sight of his own reflection behind it. Stubble. Almost beard. He looked like a tramp, tried to step aside, get out of his own way.

In the wedding photos, cutting the cake, they both look amazing. She does of course, with her white dress and her hair up, smiling with all of her face; and him with the long hair and suit that makes him look like a lesbian, like this is some kind of butch/femme deal and maybe convention dictates they should both be in suits for a lesbian wedding but screw THAT, life is too short for femmephobia and who says dykes CAN'T get married in dresses, huh?

He loves looking at that photo.

On their first night in New York he watches a cartoon on the hotel room TV while she showers. Lying on the impossibly huge American bed he watches a child molester in a dress sing a parody of a song from Little Shop of Horrors. He doesn't know why exactly but this cartoon makes him feel unbearably sad. He seems so lonely, the man singing on the TV, even the audience are meant to see him as a joke. A sick joke.

Are you alright, she asks him, towelling her hair.

I'm fine, he answers. Just tired.