The photograph in the wallet

Text 1: Love from Karen, by Glenys Arkwright

An original twentieth-century memoir.

The photograph was in the part of my father’s wallet where the money did not go, behind his union card, and I would never have found it if he had not sent me to the newsagent’s with the whole wallet because his hands were black with engine oil.

“A quarter of mint imperials and the evening paper,” he said, “and don’t go through my things.” So of course I did, on the wall outside the shop, swinging my sandals in the slow heat of an August afternoon in 1976.

It was a school photograph, the kind with a mottled blue background like a sky that has not made up its mind. A girl of about my age looked out of it. She had a gap between her front teeth and a cardigan buttoned up wrong, and she had my father’s eyebrows. I knew those eyebrows. On the back someone had put: To Daddy, love from Karen, aged 10.

I read it four times. The words did not change. A bus went past and blew warm grit into my face and I did not blink.

I did not know anyone called Karen. I was ten, too. For a long moment I sat on the wall and tried to make it mean something else, the way you turn a jigsaw piece round and round over a space it plainly does not belong in: a cousin, a neighbour’s child, a joke. None of it would go in.

When I got back he was under the van again, only his legs showing, one boot tapping to the radio. I put the wallet on the step beside him and stood there.

“Good girl,” said the legs.

I wanted to say her name. I had it ready in my mouth, round and hard as one of the sweets. Instead I watched his boot tap against the kerb, and I thought of the photograph lying in the dark again behind the union card, and the girl in it smiling with her cardigan done up wrong, and nobody, nobody at all, putting it right for her.

I went indoors. My mother was ironing. She asked if I was all right, and I said yes, and picked up a tea towel I did not need, and stood very close to her for the rest of the afternoon.

I met Karen thirty-one years later, at his funeral. She asked whether I had known, and I said, “Since I was ten,” and she said, “So had I.”

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