Tin Man(43)

In the front bedroom, propped up amongst the books, is a colour photograph of three people, a woman and two men. They are tightly framed, their arms around one another, and the world beyond is out of focus, and the world on either side excluded. They look happy, they really do. Not just because they are smiling but because there is something in their eyes, an ease, a joy, something they share. It was taken in spring or summer, you can tell by the clothes they are wearing (T-shirts, pale colours, that sort of thing), and, of course, because of the light.

The location of the photograph was not glamorous, not a holiday destination, or a once-in-a-lifetime visit. It was taken in the back garden of Ellis and Annie’s house. The photographer wasn’t a photographer at all but a wood merchant. He had just delivered the oak floorboards that Ellis had planned to lay in the back room, a job he never got to start. He came into the back garden and music was playing, the three of them sprawled on a blanket on the grass. The woman, Annie, had a camera and she asked him, Would you? And he took the camera from her, and he took his time because he wanted to get them right. He thought they looked so happy, and he thought they were family, and he wanted to show that in the photograph. They were all that mattered on that hot sunny evening in June 1991. And in the fleeting moment in which he met them, he realised that it wasn’t the woman, Annie, who held this small group together, but the man with scruffy dark hair. There was something in the way the other two looked at him, and that’s why he was in the middle, his arms tightly around them. As if he’d never let them go.

The shutter clicked. The wood merchant knew he had got the photograph and didn’t even take another to be sure, because he knew. Sometimes one frame is all it takes.

See you later, said the man to the other two. What are you going to see again? he asked.

Walt Whitman talk, said Annie. You can still come.

Nah, he said. Not my thing.

Love you, they said.

The wood merchant got back in his van pleased with himself. He never told anyone about the people he met or the photo he took, because why should he? It was a moment in time, that’s all, shared with strangers.