The Image

Tomorrow a photographer is coming to Susie's house to take her picture to go with the migraine article that will be published on Monday. She's in a bad mood already, because she detests almost every photo of her taken in the last 10 years, especially the ones by press photographers, because they do it all very nicely and technically and stuff, but they don't actually know her face in her different moods (this is what she's been explaining to me all day) so when they take them to the picture editor to choose one they just go "right, well her eyes are open and there's enough light and the background's okay, and she's half-smiling, that'll do fine" whereas Susie would look at them and go "No, no, no, my hair is mental and my shirt collar is wonky and that smile is fake and my nose looks funny because of the light from the left, and if he'd told me to lift my chin or look down or look left a bit it could all have been much much better, none of these is good." And then she'll go into a state of gloom and frowning and pessimism as if the world was ending.

And each time, before and after, I'll say to her "but listen, it's only one image, it's not YOU", and she'll say "Yes, precisely, it's NOT me, it's just someone with a face that looks like me on a bad day, it's a fake version of me," and get all stressed out. I think it's also something to do with getting older, her seeing now how her eyes crinkle up if she smiles, or the big frown line between her eyebrows. She's got a kind of Catherine Deneuve complex; that's the French actress, from the nouvelle vague etc, who's blonde and very beautiful, and must be nearly 60 by now but has no visible lines or pores in her skin, it's dead smooth, as if her life had never caused any problems, or at least not ones that couldn't be sorted out with a quick Gauloise and a glass of Dubonnet and a sharply witty comment, followed by stalking off down a long marble corridor in a long swing coat and fabulous high heels. In black and white, probably. I think Susie wishes life could be like one of those old Godard and Truffaut films she watches, where the script is very intellectual and fast and full of deep meanings, and at the end, you drive away in a fast car wearing a Hermes headscarf, with a suitcase of money and/or a handsome man's hand on your knee (Crikey, I hope she doesn't read this one, she'll kill me) instead of the end being a shot of you standing in a wee kitchen of a flat in Edinburgh doing the washing up under a skylight that lets dust in, worrying about frown lines and grey hair.

I like her hair grey anyway. And she always looks pretty okay in photos, just ...not like she did in her 20s and 30s. But she's got to face it, time changes you. I mean, it changes you inside as well, and on older faces you can see the changes inside showing outside in the lines and frowns and grey hair and stuff. And that's good. I'll just keep telling her that.