I loved that picture. I looked at them, the two blurry figures in the near distance, and I told myself that sometimes people get noticed and remembered and appreciated without doing anything heroic or extraordinary, without knowing anyone’s watching them at all.
The stuff that Bee hauled out of various cupboards was a big sort of microscope, a red light bulb, three trays like you’d plant seeds in, a torch, a pair of tongs and a couple of black bottles. She was setting things out the whole time she was talking to me, laying the trays in the bath, pouring out stuff, screwing the shower head off the bath taps so it ran like a hose, swapping the red bulb for the one that hung bare in the ceiling. She pulled down the blind and closed the wooden shutters, dropping the bar down to keep them closed. Then she bolted the bathroom door and turned on the red light, which took all the colour out of us and the room, apart from itself. Everything went soft around the edges and the whites of Bee’s eyes became the same colourless red as her hair and her lips and her skin.
She said, “Where’s the negative?” and while I was getting it from my bag, she put her hair up with two pencils. I handed it over and she slid it into the top of the big microscope which she’d balanced on a piece of plywood over the sink. Then she flicked a switch and my negative, nobody’s negative, shone A4 size on to a white board below.
I should have recognised it then, but I didn’t.
Bee was sizing it up, blocking bits out and squaring them off. “It’s so damaged,” she said. “We won’t get all the scratches out of it.”
It was the only source of white light in the room. She was adjusting things, bringing the image in and out of focus so it waved, one minute hazy, the next sharp; like an apparition, like the ghost of a photo, or a photo of a ghost. I couldn’t stop looking at the eyes, like those plasma globes that spark inside with lightning when you touch them. Bee was all business, making noises to herself about the quality of the shot, the aperture, stuff that went straight over my head. She said she was going to do a strip test to work out the best exposure time and she started counting, “One, two, three, four – one, two, three, four,” four times altogether before she poured some of the liquid into the trays and put the paper into the first tray with her special tongs. The room stank, a sharp sour toxic smell my lungs didn’t want to let in.
“Watch this,” Bee said, and the paper began to darken and cloud. “It’s only a slice of it, maybe a bit of cheek or chin.”
She picked it up and dipped it in tray two, trailing it through the liquid again. “That’s the fixer,” she said. “That stops the photo from disappearing on you later.”
I nodded, but she wasn’t looking at me. She unlocked the door and slipped out into the bright hallway for a moment. “Ten seconds,” she said on her way back in. “Ten seconds should do it.”
The ghost came back on and Bee counted to ten, and then the paper went into the developing tray again and I held my breath. I guess I counted to twenty before something started to appear. Bee was right about the waiting bit, the anticipation. My chest was tight and I was taking these quick shallow breaths because of the stench, and everything was focused on this white paper, about to change in the red light.
When it happened, it happened way too fast.
Suddenly, there he was, looking straight up at us with his hand on his throat and his eyes shining and his mouth wide open in a laugh.
Jack.
The fluid lapped and rippled over his face as it moved in the tray. He looked like he was drowning in it. I was on my knees with my cheek on the cold edge of the bath. I wasn’t sure how I got there. I was swallowing and swallowing and my mouth kept flooding with water.
Bee picked my brother up with the tongs and slid him into the fixer. She didn’t say a word. Jack looked at me and laughed. He laughed until the fixer was done and while she held him under running water to wash the chemicals off. He laughed while she cleaned up around me and switched the light bulbs back and opened the window.
He laughed the whole time, pegged up on the clothes line, dripping into the bath.
When Stroma was smaller, she used to try to see round the corners of things. Every time somebody read her Babar the Elephant she’d stop at the page where his mother gets killed and tie herself in knots for a look at the face of the hunter who shot her. I never told her that you can’t see all the way round on a flat piece of paper, but she must have found out somehow because she stopped looking.
I reminded myself of Stroma, holed up in Bee’s bathroom, searching Jack’s photo for things that weren’t there. His eyes were pale and glassy, the irises ringed with black, the pupils like pinpricks. They looked like mirrors in the grey of the print. I thought I might see something reflected in them, the way you see things in the back of a spoon or in someone else’s sunglasses, but there was nothing there of any use, only the shadow of my own face peering into the shine of the paper.
Bee’s dad got me out of there in the end because Sonny needed the loo and he really couldn’t wait any longer or things would get messy. Leaving the picture was like leaving a cinema on a sunny day. I didn’t know what to do with my eyes because they weren’t looking at Jack any more.
Stroma grabbed me in the corridor and talked at a million miles an hour about how she’d rolled out pastry and used special cutters and put only half a spoon of jam in each one and did I want to see them cooking, did I, did I? But I didn’t.
Bee gave me a glass of water and sat with me in the sitting room. She looked out of the window, hands in her lap, back dead straight, jaw held tight shut like she was forcing her teeth together. It must have been awkward for her.
I said, “Do you know who that is?” and she nodded.
I said, “How come? From pictures at school?” and she nodded again.
I guess she didn’t know what to say either.
I wouldn’t have listened if she had. Every sound was suddenly too loud for my ears and I couldn’t get my breathing right and I had this overwhelming need to be on my own in the dark, seeing and hearing nothing.
Sonny came into the room with jam all over his hands and his face and his T-shirt. He started to use me like a climbing frame, like I was just more furniture.
“Sorry,” Bee said, and she picked him up by his waist and twirled him around and kissed the jam on his nose. “Go and find Papa.”
I was numb all over.
I left the negative behind and I took Jack home in an envelope. Mum was in bed and if she heard us coming in, she didn’t show it. I opened a tin of soup for Stroma and skipped the bath and read her the shortest book I could find. I promised I’d ask Mum to go and kiss her if she got up. Then I took my brother to my room, sat against the door so no one would get in, and I looked and I looked and I looked.
I’ve thought about it a lot, how much Jack changed in the time after he died. Don’t ask me how, but he wasn’t himself any more.
So what if you couldn’t move for school photos and team photos and brushed hair and smiling? None of them were the real him. Jack would never have let Mum get those photos out to show people. He’d have burned them if he could. They had fights over it. And his room was the same, but totally different, like a stage set of itself, like a piece in a museum, a fake boy’s room. I don’t think I ever saw his bed made when he was alive. He let plates and cups collect and fester on his desk for weeks. He stashed food under the bed and he smoked out