Old Photographs

I never liked going into my parents’ loft.  It was always hot and stuffy, lined with fibreglass like lethal yellow candy-floss.  Everything was caked with dust and age. Once a sparrow flew into the loft through a hole in the eves and my father was unable to catch it.  In the end we sadly lowered the trapdoor and let it careen around the low space until it bashed itself to death on the beams.  Then my father grimly went back up the ladder and carried it down, cradled reverently in a  tea towel.  It looked much smaller dead.

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Decades later I think about that sparrow when I have to go up into the loft the week after my father˙s funeral.  He hadn’t been able to go up there for the last few years of his life.  The loft was always the storage place for the past, the archives of our family life. Climbing into it is like ascending into an ancient cranial cavity, full of forgotten memories.

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I rattle the ladder into place and climb up to the trapdoor, lifting it with one hand and the crown of my head and shifting it over to the side. The smell that comes down through the hole is like old books, mould and animals’ cages.  I climb higher, slightly dizzy and realise that, for the first time in my life, there is no one else in the house if the ladder falls away beneath me and I am left there, dangling alone. 

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I put the thick black rubber torch on the floor as I clamber up.  The small window in the far wall casts a weak light, and the noise of the passing trucks outside ploughing through the rainwater reverberates off the beams before being deadened by the insulation.  Across the floor are boxes, stacked like discarded toy bricks.

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I make my way, crouching, across the loft towards the window, strewn with cobwebs and dirt, where I know the boxes with the photographs are.  I tread carefully as I know that this space was never designed to have people walking through it.  The floor is made up of inexpertly constructed boards and is lined with bits of cardboard and old layers of carpet, all of which smell like they are thoroughly rotten.  

By the window, stacked, are four sagging Seabrook's crisp outer boxes full of our family’s photographs.  The boxes had been brought home from Morrissons.  Looking in the Worcester Sauce box I see holiday photos in their familiar dark green plastic album, and heaps of negatives stored in clear plastic slip cases.  There are shots of us in Benidorm and Tenerife.  Then earlier still are photos of us in a caravan in the Dales.  Then in a boat on the Norfolk broads faded to the same parchment yellow as if the dying sun has had all the brightness leached from it.  In the Crinkle Cut Prawn Cocktail and Cheese and Onion boxes are school photographs and an annual record of pictures of the diminishing pile of presents under the Christmas tree.

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The battery is dying in the torch so I drag the final box into the pool of thin light cast by the dirty window.  Through the window I can see the traffic through the dirt and cobwebs and spattering raindrops.  As I dig into the box I realise with surprise that there are photographs I am not familiar with.  In fact as I look on I realise I have never seen these before in my life.

Within the box, limp with damp, its corrugated sides ripping as I try to lift it by the handles, are plastic carrier bags full of photos, heaped randomly.  There are images from my childhood, some events I remember, and some I didn’t. Cooling towers in the canal basin leading into Bradford being detonated and folding down into themselves in clouds of fine dust.  A cold beach on the east coast of Yorkshire, my mother and I huddled against the wind.  A summer barbeque in the garden, my dad looking young and thin in a pair of shorts that were really too short for him.

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Looking at the images in the photos I can see my parents and me but also another figure with us.  The figure is that of a man, an elderly man.  He is always stood just behind me, indistinct, blurred.  He is always wearing the same clothes, a long dark coat and a hat.  And then I realise why I have never seen these photographs.

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I remember the creaking of the footsteps up the stairs at four thirty every morning. 

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I remember all the cupboard doors opening in my parents’ bedroom all at once, and I remember having the sheets pulled down off my sleeping body, leaving my bed-warm limbs exposed, as I frantically pulled my feet up away from whatever, or whoever had pulled them down.

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I remember a silent secret member of our family who we never saw.   My mother said he must be friendly, that there was nothing to be worried about.  I didn’t believe her.

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And there, in this old forgotten collection of photographs, he is. 

It is the shape in the darkness on a midnight visit to the toilet.  The tall man in the dark coat.  I realise that my father had unwittingly captured him on photographs and, realising what he was, hid them away from the mainstream of history in this separate archive, knowing that one day I would see them and know the truth.

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I sit back on my heels, feeling a trickle of sweat run down my back.  I try to lift the box but the damp cardboard disintegrates and I fall back.  The sky darkens outside as the heart of the storm passes overhead.  Another articulated lorry rumbles past, slooshing water as it goes.

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Then behind me, distinctly, I hear the sound of someone climbing the  ladder.