Her Version: One
The festival had been great. Straggly-haired, sad-eyed earnest folk singing along to violins and playing bodhrans - just what I like. I'd worn a singlet I tie-dyed myself, and an ankle-length velvet skirt. My hair hung long and limp over my shoulders with a couple of braids I'd woven glitter thread into, I had henna tattoos spiraling over the backs of my hands, and I was wearing sandals that showed off my toe-rings. I looked like all the other girls.
I didn't really know any of these these people too well, but a notice had gone up on the board at uni about tickets to the Sun Festival, and I'd put my name down. We got a special deal on the coach for transport, and on accommodation, and here we all were.
We were staying at "The Chalets" as they were called in the brochure, which were separated from the beach by a thick band of trees. Beachy trees - piney things, tall with a warm foresty smell, not that I'm a botanist, clearly. There was undergrowth too, providing density along with all the treetrunks between us and Neptune, so effectively we could hear the waves but not see them.
In the evening there were a bunch of us sitting round ejoying the great outdoors, and some guy skinned up a jay and gave it to the girl sitting next to him. He rolled up another, and another, and before anybody knew it, between twenty people there were about a zillion joints. I'm not sure that's mathematically correct or possible.
And now here I was with a bunch of like-minded individuals, earnestly discussing the boycott of sushi and Sony because Japan was still catching minke whales for so-called scientific purposes.
The joints got lit, and the joints got passed around, and the mood got more mellow as people's systems responded in their own particular ways. Some of the group were quieter and contemplative, some wandered off on verbal tangents that didn't require response. One guy produced a guitar and someone else had a harmonica, and the sweet strains of Hey Mr Tambourine Man drifted in and out of the burnt herbal smell and we all of us then had a soundtrack to our mental meanderings.
We'd cleared a large area out in the open, dragging branches and twigs and piling them up, and in the middle of our circle a bonfire crackled. Flame-spell caught me - my gaze held by the ever-changing, ever-consuming, all-renewing licks of gold escaping from gravity. I was working up a theory that vulcanism is the catalyst that engenders life itself, because flames have movement, and they feed and they grow and they propagate, and are they pure energy? Are they? It seemed like a plausible idea and a profound one, but I wasn't sure who to express it to. What if it was dumb? What if somebody had already said it, and been argued down? What if the scientific community at large already knew the catalyst, and it was sulfur, or - um - nitrous oxide or something?
They would all look at me, all these fellow-travelers, and think I was stupid. I was enrolled in an arts degree, with a journalism major and I'd learned a lot of people considered that was the easiest thing to study - the soft option. Journalism is so competitive that only the brightest and the best get jobs - and most of the time their degree isn't journalism-related to start with. I'd even heard science and engineering students call the type of course I was doing "Marriage 101", meaning that girls studying for a Bachelor of Arts degree were only at University to meet "men with prospects" who they could walk up the aisle with a few years later once everyone had qualified. The husbands would by then be lawyers or doctors or engineers and their wives would be university-educated women with the time and the income to wear high fashion while organizing charity events to benefit those less fortunate. I couldn't remember anything about any of these other happy campers, but none of them had coughed the way I'd coughed when I'd taken a hit on a couple of jays. Well, probably six or seven jays. I had no idea. Could have been more. Maybe I hadn't coughed that much - no-one had whacked me on the back or called an ambulance. Maybe the rest of them had forgotten I was even there, because I hadn't had anything noteworthy to say.
It was hot near the fire, and my eyes were being irritated by the heat as well as the smoke. Despite being in no mood to cry, tears were pooling. All my body parts were separate and distinct, and I knew a lethargy in my limbs with a racing heartbeat. My throat hurt. On my bare shoulders cool fingers of ocean breeze coaxed me and lured me and urged me, and I got to my feet and turned blindly, into the origin of the light wind and the cool, cool scent of the sea. Charcoal and ashes would occupy this space tomorrow, after the last spark had fled to the sky. The fire lived, the wood died, in an inexorable play, but the ocean went on and on and on, and would go on until the sun was fit to burst.
I couldn't tell anybody that either because it was too naively poetic and wrong, and the evaporation of the earth's water would probably predate the death of the sun by millions of millennia. Any science student would know that - even anybody who could read a newspaper.
I turned my back on the fire and the people lauding Dylan and I dived through the wood and the air towards the surf.
His Version: Two
Edward Cullen, widely regarded as the most promising of this year's crop of emergent photographers ... I'll fill that gap in later ... is attending this year's Salute the Sun to turn his eye/display his talent/showcase his abilities ... to add to his already impressive portfolio of candid and often revealing shots of concert-goers and performers alike...
God - the words "pretentious" and "loser" spring to mind - firstly for imagining newspaper articles about myself, and secondly for not being able to write them. Yeah, well my gift is visual, not verbal.
Salute the Sun happens in Port Angeles annually on the closest Saturday to Jun 30, and I attend and take pictures. I've done pretty well the last three years, getting them published in the local paper, but I want to go further afield. I want to get them into magazines, and newspapers of credibility, not just the Forks Inquirer - as if there was anything worth inquiring into in Forks.
I shoot five rolls of film, both black and white and color, and some girl called Jessica latches on to me and wants me to take shots of her. She poses a bit and tosses her hair around and I click away a few times, and she writes her e-mail address on a slip of paper so I can send them. Before I tuck it into my pocket I notice there's also a phone number, but I don't mention it. She's cute, but a little vacuous, and I'm not looking for a girlfriend. Tonight I'm not even looking for a quick fix because I have a ride home lined up at eleven, and I don't particularly fancy sleeping rough if I miss my lift. And I don't particularly fancy waking up next to airhead Jessica tomorrow morning and having to worm my way out of her bed without giving the impression of being an asshole.
"I'm down here with a group of friends, we're all staying at the beach, it's really nice, there's going to be a huge party there later, you should totally hang out with us ..." she says, and manages to not register me trying to extricate myself gracefully.
"Thanks Jessica, it's been really nice meeting you, I'll be in touch," I nod.
"We're going to have a bonfire and cook sausages, there's a whole coachload of us and we booked this entire hotel, they've got twenty bungalows and ..."
What's that condition where people don't listen called - preferential hearing? Selective deafness?
"I've got my own room. Maybe you'd like to take some other kinds of photos of me? I'm very open-minded..."
From what I can see - which is a generous amount of cleavage - her tits are great, but I'm not into that sort of photography.
"Er, no," I reply, which is all I get in before Jessica sweet-but-dumb tucks her hand through my elbow and says, "OK, sure, fine - you know someone said to me once that you should never do anything you wanted want your own daughter to talk about at a ten-year old's birthday party - very wise, don't you think? What shall we do now?"
It's time for affirmative, though negative action.
"Jess, thanks for keeping me company like this, but I've got friends here I need to meet up with, and I should be getting along. I'll email you the pictures over the next day or two, okay?"
"Hey - here's some of the people I came with! The guy's Mike - he's so interesting - he's doing commerce, but he already knows it all because his parents own a sporting goods store, and that girl - you've got to meet her - she's cool! And you know what - she's studying journalism, and you're taking pictures, right? She could write the bylines or captions or whatever they're called for you. You two could do stuff together..."
This time I'm the one practising selective deafness. After one inadvertent glimpse in the direction Jessica's indicating I've tuned poor Jessica out altogether. The girl she's gesturing towards looks exactly the same as every other girl here, but somehow different. So different.
There's a tribal uniform apparent, so that people can be identified easily for their political or philosophical stance without anyone having to ask them twenty questions. This girl has the whole Gaia thing going, so she's into earth power and animus shit and let's all be vegans and absolutely, capitalistic hegemony is really evil, so I bought this shoulder bag made of hand-dyed Peruvian alpaca wool from these really great women who run a collective. Am I being too judgmental? Yes I am, far too judgmental, because I don't know what it is, but there's something.
For a start, she is so fucking pale - she's alabaster, while all the other hippy girls are golden. If we're celebrating the sun today, it must be the one day of the year she's been outside without darting from shadow to shadow - she's like a ghost.
But she's a ghost who looks actually substantial. I want to speak to her, although I have no idea what I'm going to say. Jessica is burbling away to her companion, Mike of no account, and uncharacteristically I find myself not knowing where to start.
"So which was your favorite band?" I say, in lieu of anything else, although it's probably a fair enough opener.
"Oh, I liked pretty much everything," she answers.
Please lovely girl, have an opinion.
"They all kind of blend into one another after a while. No-one really stands out, because no-one's really doing anything different. It's like the organizers stipulated everyone has to crochet their solar panels to the same specifications, you know?" she adds, and it's the bizzarest thing anyone's said all day. And the most honest. I'm intrigued. I think I like her.