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cancer himself. The whole family, wiped out by that disease.’
‘How did he know about Ben?’
‘He saw it on the telly, recognised John, and he thought it was a chance to get back at him. That’s
all it was, a spiteful act. I’m sorry. We’re not back at square one though. We’ve got other avenues to
pursue.’
Her words were reassuring in themselves, but I could see that it cost her an effort to arrange her
features into an expression of optimism.
As she stood up to leave, my photographs caught her eye.
On the wall above my desk was a collage of pictures I’d taken over the years, and almost without
exception they were portraits of Ben. They were my best work.
They were mostly in black and white, and mostly taken on old-fashioned film and developed and
printed by me, in a dark-room I’d rigged up in the garage of our family home. John had been happy to
hand the garage space over to me. He wasn’t a DIY man.
My camera of choice had been a Leica M20, given to me by Ruth and Nicholas. I processed the
films myself, and spent hours poring over the negatives, deciding which ones to print.
The printing process was a joy: the murky red light in which images of Ben emerged from the
chemical soup, a kind of alchemy, painting with light, bringing something from nothing. It was a
wobbly, unreliable, unpredictable process, yet it yielded images of such beauty and power, and I
never tired of it.
The photographs I took weren’t the brightly lit studio prints that are ubiquitous now, where families
are pictured against glaring white backgrounds, mouths agape, dental work on show, in poses they’ve
never before adopted. Artifice, all of it.
I preferred to work with light and form, with what was there already. I started with the idea that I
would be lucky to capture just a scrap of the beauty of my child.
Once, when Ben was about five years old, I came downstairs very early one summer morning to
find a dawn light so softly crystalline that it seemed to have an ethereal presence of its own.
I roused Ben gently and before he was fully awake I asked him to sit at the breakfast table. It had
been a hot night and he wore just pyjama shorts. He sat and gazed at the camera with a frankness that
was perfect. In the finished photograph, it’s as if you can see into his soul. His hair is messy, his skin
has the texture of velvet and the contours of his slender arms are perfect. There are no harsh lines in
the picture. Blacks fade into greys and into whites, and shadows draw the features of his face and
torso. They describe sleepiness and innocence and promise and truth. Only deep in Ben’s eyes is
there a glint of something that is of its moment. It’s a flash of light, a white pearl, and although nobody
else could tell, I know that the pearl is the reflection of the window, and of me, taking the photograph.
It’s the best photograph I’ve ever taken, and probably the best I ever will take.
Zhang stared at that photograph for a very long time. She held her coffee and stood in front of it and
in time steam stopped curling above her hands. Then she looked at the others too, the various
manifestations of Ben, of Ben as he was to me.
He was a toddler examining something on a summer lawn, with a lightly furrowed brow just
visible under a sun hat; he was a close-up of two chubby baby feet and a study of hands with tiny,
fragile fingernails and knuckles that had new-born wrinkles but not yet any solidity; he was his
profile, the softness of the skin on his temples, the crisp curls of his eyelashes just visible behind; he
was a distant silhouette jumping a rock pool on a spectacular cliff-edged winter beach.
There were so many and Zhang studied each one. Occasionally her radio made a sharp noise, a
crackle or static or a voice. She ignored it.