I bought it because I wanted the frame. It has taken nine months and four attempts to get rid of the photograph.
I bought it because I wanted the frame.
It was two pounds, in a charity shop on a high street I don't normally use, in the corner by the electricals where they put things nobody has priced properly. Dark wood, quite heavy, about the size of a sheet of A4. The kind of frame that costs eighteen pounds new and looks like it costs forty.
The photograph inside it was a school photograph. One of those very wide panoramic ones where the whole school stands in rows on the field, printed long and thin, so the frame had been cut down to fit it, badly, with a mount someone had made themselves out of grey card and a scalpel.
There's no school name on it. No year. There's a strip along the bottom where a name would normally be printed and it's blank. Not cut off. Blank. The paper is white there.
Maybe a hundred and forty children. Black and white, but not old black and white; the clothes are eighties, the haircuts are eighties, and one of the teachers at the end of the back row is wearing the kind of enormous glasses that dates a photograph to within about four years.
I put it on the kitchen table, took the back off to get at the frame, and then I did the thing anyone would do. I looked at it.
I want to be careful here, because this is the part where I know how it sounds.
There is a boy in the second row, fourth in from the left.
He is out of focus.
Everyone else is sharp. It's a big-format camera and a bright day, and the depth of field on those photographs is enormous. You can read the buckle on a shoe in the back row. The boy in the second row, fourth in from the left, is a smear. Not motion blur, which you do see in these things, kids who moved during the exposure. Motion blur has direction. This has no direction. It's as if he is at a different distance from the lens than the ground he is standing on.
His shoes are sharp. His socks are sharp. From about the knee up he is a blur in the shape of a boy.
And every child in the two rows behind him is leaning very slightly away.
Not obviously. Not enough that you'd see it in a glance. But once you've noticed it you cannot un-notice it: there is a gap in the packing of the rows, a widening, like the space around something you don't want to touch. The girl directly behind him has her head turned about fifteen degrees toward the camera, but her shoulders are square to the boy on her other side.
I looked at that photograph for about forty minutes on the first night, which is longer than I have ever looked at a photograph before or since.
Then I put the frame in the cupboard, put the photograph in the recycling, and went to bed.
Attempt one. It was on the kitchen table in the morning.
I'll give you the boring explanation first, because I chased it for weeks. The recycling in my building is a communal bin in the yard, and I hadn't taken it out. I'd put the photograph in the blue bag under the sink. So the sequence I have to accept is that I put it in the bag, and then at some point I took it out again and put it on the table, and I don't remember doing it.
That is genuinely possible. I was tired. I'd been staring at it for forty minutes. People do worse.
So attempt one doesn't count, and I've never claimed it does.
Attempt two was the following Saturday. I put it in the communal bin in the yard, under two other bags, and I watched the lorry take that bin on the Tuesday.
On the Thursday it was in my post. Not in an envelope. Just the photograph, rolled, with an elastic band around it, pushed through the letterbox of the building's front door and sitting on the mat with the pizza leaflets.
There's a lot I could say about attempt two. What I'll say is this: the elastic band was the flat brown kind the Royal Mail drops all over every street in this country, and my first thought, I remember it exactly, my first thought was *oh, someone's found it and assumed it was mine.* Which requires that a person opened a bin bag, went through it, found a school photograph with no name on it, and then correctly identified which of eleven flats it belonged to.
I put it in the cupboard with the frame, because I had stopped wanting to touch it and the cupboard felt like a decision I could postpone.
Attempt three was a proper one. I want credit for attempt three.
I drove it forty miles. I put it in a public bin at a motorway services on the M1, at eleven o'clock at night, in a bin already three-quarters full of coffee cups, and I stood there for a minute like an idiot making sure it went all the way down.
Nine days later I came home from work and it was leaning against the skirting board in my hallway, on the inside of my front door, at about the height of a child's shoulder.
Nothing was taken. Nothing was disturbed. The door was locked, and both windows on that side of the flat haven't opened since 2011 because of the paint.
That was the night I stopped sleeping properly. It was also the night I did something I'm not proud of, which was to take it out into the yard and try to set fire to it.
It didn't burn. And I know how that reads, so let me be precise, because this is the detail that eventually made me go and talk to somebody. It didn't burn *because it was damp*. Cold and damp, evenly, all over, on a dry night in June, after nine days in a services bin and twenty minutes in my hand. Photographic paper that's been out in weather goes wavy and stiff. It does not go uniformly cold and damp like something taken out of a fridge.
I got the corner lit twice. Both times it went out.
Attempt four is why I'm writing this. Then I'll stop, because I don't actually have an ending.
I gave it to a museum.
There's a county records office about an hour from me that takes donations of local photographs. I filled in their form, and I drove it over in a stiff envelope, and I handed it to an archivist called Ruth, who was genuinely delighted by it. She said panoramics like that are hard to date and lovely to have. She asked whether I knew the school. I said no.
She looked at it for a while on the counter, under a lamp.
And then she said, "Oh, that's a shame about him," and pointed at the second row, fourth in from the left.
I asked her what she meant.
She said, "It's a known fault. You get it on the very wide ones. The camera pans, so it isn't one exposure, it's a slow sweep, a few seconds, sometimes longer. Children work it out. They stand at one end, and then once the lens has passed them they run round the back and get in again at the other end, so they're in the photograph twice."
She said it happens constantly. She said in some school photographs the same boy is at both ends of the back row, grinning, once at each.
She said, "And when one of them mistimes it, you get exactly that. Half in, half moving. Blurred from the knee up, because the legs stopped and the rest of him didn't."
So I said: right, so he's in it twice. Where's the other one?
And Ruth moved the lamp closer and went along the rows with the tip of a pencil, not touching, the way people who handle photographs do. She went along all six rows. Then she went along them again.
Then she put the pencil down and said, "That's odd."
Because if he ran, he ran *from* somewhere, or *to* somewhere. That's the whole trick. There has to be a second one. A duplicate. That is what the blur *means*. It means he is in the frame twice and one of the two is a smudge.
He isn't in it twice.
He is in it once, halfway through leaving, and there is nowhere in that photograph that he arrived from.
Ruth accepted the donation. It has an accession number. It's in a box in a strongroom in a county records office with the humidity controlled and a card in the catalogue. It isn't mine any more. It has been eleven weeks, and nothing has come back through my letterbox.
I still have the frame. It's a good frame. There's a picture of my brother's kids in it now.
I check the back of it more often than I'd like to admit.