A Picture Speaks

There’s a story behind every one,” she said, indicating the photographs.

 

So of course the first thing I did was to take the edge of a frame and peer at the wall behind it. She just laughed at that as she puffed at her fags. A dry, cackling sort of laugh like someone screwing old bits of paper into balls. I was six, a kid, but she… she was old, even then. She was my Great Aunt. Even that title sounds ancient. She lived in a poky, third storey flat with faded net curtains obscuring the sunlight, keeping the photographs as fresh as possible.

 

Those photos. They’re pretty much all I can remember from back then. She had thousands of them lining every wall, standing on every surface. She once told me she had a hundred photos for every year of her life. I’m not sure that was true at all, but in those days it was obvious. I asked her once why she didn’t put them all in albums, but she just laughed again, waving a cigarette butt at me. Said she didn’t like albums. Said she liked to be able to see them all the time.

 

But that was a long time ago. I grew up, got a job working for a magazine. A journalist. And as I began to collect the stories of others, I remembered my Great Aunt’s pictures and her “stories behind everyone.” So I started going to see her. Copying down a few paragraphs for the pictures. One per week. There were so many, I was beginning to lose sight of my task. But the readers liked them. Stories of nostalgia. Stories of the past. Wartime heroism. Peacetime gossip and peacetime friendship. People like that.

 

Then suddenly I was aware that time was running out. She started coughing. It didn’t worry me until it was blood coming out of her mouth. And after that…

 

They told us she had lung cancer. She’d done pretty well so far, considering. My old granddad shepherded me into the flat again. It smelt of sweat and blood and stale cigarettes. It made me sick. She was lying there, smiling slightly, and coughing as though her lungs wanted to escape. She grabbed my shirt and pulled me down level with her.

 

“There’s a story behind every one,” she said.

 

Her voice was as thin and dry as her skin. And she laughed again. Laughed until I felt ill and I ran out of the flat. My old granddad, her brother, found me sitting on the floor by her door. He sat down next to me, opposite side of the door, and he stared up the ceiling. I asked him what she’d said, but he didn’t answer. It was only when he started crying that I realised her coughing had stopped.

 

No one went near that flat for a week after they removed her body. But once the will was read, with that sort of dreary seriousness she would have hated, the thin line of relatives slunk inside to claim their prizes. She left me the photos. Every one. There were so many stories left to tell.

 

One of the frames had broken. The glass cracked across their smiling sepia faces, little indents and embosses underneath. It was only as I pulled the picture free I realised what had made the imprints. There was writing on the back of the picture. Little notes. A story.

 

I prised another picture from its frame. A folded piece of paper. Another little tale. And as I took the photos out I discovered what she meant.

 

There was a story behind every one.