I look slightly worried, which tended to be my default setting as a child. The eighties was an era of ‘proper’ cameras, and getting your picture taken was more of a big deal – my father was a stickler for not wasting film, and spent about ten minutes preparing me for each shot. No candids in this family – just a stressed-looking toddler.
I feel sad for baby me – frowning away in her frilly swimsuit, as though she has a vague premonition of all that is to come. I move on, flipping through pages of photos: my mother, my father, never together as one of them was always behind the camera. Me on my first day at school, still with that same borderline tearful expression.
Michael produces other albums from the same cardboard box, shaking each one off and whipping up a whirlwind of dust. He provides an amusing commentary as he proceeds to take a second-hand journey through my childhood, delighted by my disastrous teeth and gawky build and continuously strained expression.
‘You look like you need a really big poo in every single one of these photos,’ he says, as he turns the pages. ‘Were you a constipated infant?’
‘Yep,’ I reply, ‘pretty much a poster child for laxatives. It was … well, they were different times. We didn’t live our whole lives on social media back then. Nobody took pictures of their dinner and showed it to their friends. Nobody did selfies. These are snapshots, not a 24-hour monitoring device like your phone.’
‘Thank God!’ he exclaims, placing a hand on his heart in mock-horror. ‘This stuff would single-handedly close down Instagram!’
He begins a new album, and I see the teenaged me: nineties combat pants that looked really cool on TLC but less so on my skinny legs, a khaki vest top, red and black flannel shirt hanging over it. As soon as I was out of the house and away from my parents’ watchful gaze, I completed the ensemble with big hoop earrings and badly applied make-up.
I was trying to look fashionably edgy, but only looked confused – hoping people would think I was into grunge because the Seattle scene seemed cooler, but knowing my secret love was the Spice Girls. I was the kind of kid who yearned to have adventures like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but was actually a bit scared of getting on the bus.
At least I’m actually smiling in this one, though – a genuine smile, not the mouth-twisted semi-grimaces I’d tried to force for previous pictures.
I remember that photo being taken – my first day at sixth form college. My first day away from the girls’ grammar school I’d attended for too many years, my first day out of the hideous green uniform and pleated skirts. The first day I decided to recreate myself as someone funkier, hipper, generally more awesome.
The day I decided I would be Jess, not Jessica, and that I would have a secret life that was rich in wonder. The world was mine for the taking, and this was the first step along a road that would undoubtedly be paved with amazements and magic. No surprise I was smiling.
I had to fight long and hard to escape that grammar school, and those pleated skirts. My parents were horror-struck at the idea of me going to the college – a big brick and concrete building almost an hour away on the bus, on a circuitous route which snaked its way through our village and two other small towns before arriving in the outskirts of Manchester.
It wasn’t even in Manchester itself – but close enough for my parents to see it as a den of iniquity, where I could potentially meet drummers from bands or men with tattoos or girls who wore choker chains or many other Satanic forces that might pollute their baby girl. Looking back, I have more sympathy with them – I’d led a sheltered life, and what I saw as stifling and controlling, they saw as protective.
Fighting wasn’t something that I did often, but that summer I was ferocious and determined and stubborn in a way that I’d never been before. Either they let me do my A-levels at the college, or I wouldn’t do them. They eventually relented, a decision I immediately gave them cause to regret – the ‘we told you so’ to end them all.
A lot of things happened to me after that first day. After that photo being taken. Everything changed, and nothing was ever the same. My whole world spun out of control, into the best and then the worst of times.
I take the album from Michael’s hands and gently close it, whooshing dust up towards the dangling light bulb, where it does a polka in the pale yellow gleam.
I’m not ready to revisit that part of my life. I might never be – but most definitely not on the day of my mother’s funeral.
He looks at me, frowning as he tries to figure out why I’ve drawn a halt to the nostalgia trip.
‘Long story,’ I say, simply. ‘For another time. Plus I don’t want you to see me when I went through my fake hip-hop phase.’
Michael nods, but I can tell he understands that there is more to my decision than bad fashion choices. I bite my lip and look at him pleadingly, willing him to let it go, to skip ahead, to let me wriggle off the hook of my own past.
‘OK,’ he says, putting the album back in the box. ‘We can laugh at that another day, Queen Latifah.’
He closes the box again, and I reach out to touch his hand in gratitude.
We both pause, awkward and almost embarrassed – we’ve been raised in the same way, and casual tactility is not included on the list of socially acceptable behaviours. It’s like we’re teetering on the edge of a deep, dark well, and neither of us quite knows how to react.
Michael responds by moving on, coming up with various treasures, which he displays and we examine together.
There’s a framed picture of my parents’ wedding in the seventies, both of them stiff and subdued, Michael’s mum Rosemary surprisingly young and pretty in her bridesmaid’s dress.
My dad’s hiking boots, still coated in dried mud so old it could bear fossils.
A collection of cookery books, pages turned and notes scribbled on various recipes in my mother’s neat handwriting, stains and splodges on the paper testifying to long kitchen use.
A small wooden chest, crammed with costume jewellery that I never saw her wear. A carrier full of candles, some intact, some half burned, the once-dripping wax frozen in hardened globules. Old Christmas decorations stored in an age-tattered binbag, their glitter faded.
‘It’s all been very tame so far,’ Michael says, ‘and frankly so sad I feel like watching Les Misérables to cheer me up.’
He reaches out to lift a heavy burgundy velvet curtain with gold tassels that seems to be being used as a drape to hide another pile of clutter.
‘Though I suppose if there’s anything good in here, it’s bound to be behind the red velvet and the gold rope…this must be the VIP section!’
He throws the fabric to one side with a dramatic ‘ta-da!’, and we stare through the ensuing dust cloud together, waiting for it to clear. Behind it, we are rewarded with a profoundly disappointing display of two broken lawn chairs with mangled metal legs folded up on themselves, a mismatched set of dinner plates, and one old shoebox.
The shoebox is one of my dad’s – I recognise the brand; he wore the same formal brogues for work every day of his adult life. Always black, never anything as outrageous as tan or brown, always from the same expensive shop in London. He hardly lived the life of Oscar Wilde, but he did like to buy nice shoes.
Michael scoops up the box, and opens the lid. Inside, we both see something wrapped in faded pink tissue paper. I can’t tell what it is, but it’s definitely not brogues.