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‘These are just beautiful,’ she said.
I was lost in the pictures myself when she said it, and her sincerity was unexpected, and felt
unfiltered.
‘You’re the first person outside the family to see them,’ I said.
‘Truly? I’m honoured. I really am.’
Her voice caught. She had to take a moment to compose herself.
‘I tried to learn photography when I was younger,’ she said. ‘My dad bought me a camera, an oldfashioned
one. It was a film camera. I was fifteen years old. He set me a project. He told me to go out
and take photographs. He drove me to a place called Old Airport Road, in Singapore, where I grew
up, because he was in the army you see. Anyway, on Old Airport Road there’s an old-fashioned food
court, so you know what I mean, lots of stalls selling street food of every different kind, a
photographer’s dream really. My dad told me to take photographs of the food. I had to ask permission
from the stallholders and my dad sat and watched while I spent ages preparing my shots and looking
at the different angles and shapes, and after two hours I’d taken my twenty-four photographs. We
dropped the film off to be developed and I couldn’t wait to go and collect it the next day, I was so
excited. I had one of those ideas you have when you’re young, you know: I’m going to take one roll of
film and be a famous photographer. I was that excited. But when I went back the next day and the girl
in the shop gave me my packet of photographs, I pulled them out, and every single one of them was
black.’
It was the most I’d ever heard her talk. ‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Well, I looked at my dad, I had the same question on my lips, and he said, “That will teach you not
to leave the lens cap on.” I was so angry with him for not telling me.’
‘Did he know? While you were taking the photos?’
‘He did. That’s what he’s like though. He believes you should learn things yourself, do things the
hard way.’ She smiled wanly. ‘It worked. I never did it again.’
‘That’s what I was trying to do for Ben,’ I said. She kept her eyes on the photographs. ‘In the
woods, when I let him run ahead. Because I thought that being independent would let him feel life, be
enchanted by it, not fear it, or feel that he has to follow a set of rules to get through it. Because it’s
tough.’
She said nothing. She turned away for a moment and the silence was awkward. When she turned
back her eyes were red and she put a hand on my arm, and said, ‘I’m so sorry, Rachel. I really am.’
Once Zhang had gone I went back into the house, driven by the need to be near the landline in case of
news. The silence was hard to bear and I tried to console and calm myself by looking at Ben’s books
again. I revisited the page where he’d drawn himself spending the whole day in bed, before I turned
over to see what he’d written next.
The following page was startlingly colourful by comparison. Greenery filled every corner: trees
and plants in strong confident lines, and a dog that was obviously meant to be Skittle. Short straight
lines slanted across the page, over the other images, as if somebody had spilled blue hundreds and
thousands across it.
On Sunday Mummy and Skittle and me walked in the woods, he’d written. It was raining all the
time.
I turned another page. The next week’s drawing was very similar. Ben had written: We walked in
the woods agen on Sunday. I found a very big stick and brung it home.
There was a comment in red ink: Your walks sound lovely, Ben. Excellent drawing.