Gilly MacMillan - What She Knew

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.

‘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 old-fashioned 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.

Another page. A different drawing: a picture of a bowling ball, a crowd of children. I went to Jack’s bolling party and Sam B won , he’d written.

Red ink: Brilliant!

Another page: trees and foliage again, a swing hanging from a branch, a child beside it, wearing red. Ben was a good artist for his age, the images were clear.

In the woods I went on a big swing and mummy went on her phone.

Red ink: That sounds like so much fun for you!!

A thud of understanding in my chest that was so violent it felt as though it was knocking the breath out of my lungs. It turned my lips and mouth dry and made me look again at the book, as if my eyes were attached to it by strings, and rifle the pages backwards and forwards until I was sure.

‘It’s somebody at school,’ I said, although there was nobody there to hear me. In response there was just a single thud from Skittle’s tail, an acknowledgement that I’d spoken out loud.

With shaking hands I picked up my phone and I dialled Zhang over and over again, but every time I just got a message telling me to leave her a voicemail.

A phone call from Emma woke me up. Fraser had sent me home to catch up on a couple of hours’ kip since I’d worked through the whole of the night preparing for the raid. The buzzing of my mobile dragged me up out of a deep sleep, where the disappointment that we’d wasted so much time and budget and were no nearer to finding Ben Finch was feeding me vivid, uncomfortable dreams.

Emma said she wanted to talk, said she would come over, wouldn’t say what it was about.

I was out of the shower and dressed by the time she arrived, about to call Fraser to check I hadn’t missed anything that morning. ‘I’ll come down,’ I said to the intercom. ‘Do you mind if we talk on the drive in?’