Another denim jacket

Another Gaultier denim jacket, bought in Paris in April 1989, probably from the Junior Gaultier shop on the rue du Jour.  It was stiff, raw denim, and as I wore it to rinse it in the shower of a one-star hotel, the indigo stained my legs on its way to the drain.

Somewhere there is a photograph, taken two years later, of me and my then-girlfriend standing by her parents’ house in Sussex.  I watched it being slipped under plastic in one of her mother’s albums; perhaps it is still there, unlooked-at since.

We would have been 21. I remember an awkward smile, a quiff, and sizeable sideburns; and being struck that I looked younger than I thought I did.  I looked a boy; unprepared for the future.  

How painful it would be to see it now: the faded, youthful past carried forward to a middle-aged present, with everything that was to happen loaded invisibly in that image-object; a trail of loss in front of, and behind, it.  The unavoidable truth: every photograph is replete with death.