Snapshots (Travelling Edition: New Ireland)

This week, I have been concentrating – compacting memories with a squinched intensity, hard-pressured enough to push a shutter in my mind, and capture these things for you. So.

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At the far edge of the island, Mark, posed like an explorer – legs an intrepid triangle, balancing on the scribbled sharp volcanic splash of rock and pointing towards New Hanover on the horizon. He is holding a single beer bottle, which we have been passing between us with swashbuckling egalitarianism. Beside him, there is a small

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spotted white dog – damp and rakish, with a cheeky tilt to his head – he swam after our boat, and appointed himself our tour guide, leading us through

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thick-winding jungle, coconuts, vines like dark cords – shells and coral underfoot, where Japanese guns loom in secret clearings.

Here are some images of training:

an overhead view, perhaps, of a cluster of heads and hands and whiteboard markers, bent round a single sheet of butchers’ paper; and the mandatory group portrait – look-at-us-smiling-we-have-matching-t-shirts! – which in this case, is captured on a white sand beach – behind them, coconut palms, bending coy and conspiratorial and

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a stretch of sea, impossible, turquoise-bright – and way, way out, in the corner of the frame, an optical quirk: the dark figures of young boys fishing, one duck-diving, bobbing, the other standing on a submerged reef. From this angle, he is a parable.