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up because he’d never owned them on vinyl. Sarah took hers away when she moved out. And there was the Beatles box set, shaped like a writing bureau. He’d bought that out of his homegrown money, along with those Atlantic soul CDs. When Nick was inside, Joe offered to bring in some with a CD Walkman, but HMP didn’t allow CDs. The silver discs, so easy to crack, made good weapons. In prison, the cassette was still king. Nick had given his small ghetto blaster to his cellmate, Baz, when they let him out.
    Nick’s SLR camera was there, too, tucked into a box which also held old T-shirts and jeans that, since he’d dropped a waist size inside, would no longer fit him. Most of the T-shirts had politically related slogans: People’s March for Jobs , Think Global, Act Local , Bushwhacked! There were more clothes, but Nick’s chest had expanded while his gut declined. Oxfam for them.
    Then there were the boxes of books. The English teaching ones were a waste of space. Nick would never be allowed back into the profession. He should have told Joe to dump the politics, too. The densely packed paperbacks ranged from Tony Benn’s diaries to the complete speeches of Lenin. He’d bought half this stuff to keep up with Sarah, but soon found that she had even less patience with political theory than he did. They were idealists, not ideologues. Saving the world was a possibility when they were in their twenties. At thirty-five, Nick had to concentrate on saving himself. He had to put prison behind him and think about his time there as little as possible. Most of all, he needed to find work, any kind of work.
    Box after box of books. Why did people collect them when they could visit a library? He could have used some of these inside. Outside, who had the time to read whole books once, never mind a second time? Nick looked in each box anyway. There was his collection of Giles Annuals, most of which used to belong to his father. Two Posy Simmonds books that were his mother’s. At least Mum and Dad had both died before he was sent down. He had been spared that shame. Paperbacks of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen : his, though he was surprised Joe hadn’t nicked them. Graphic novels made ideal late night, stoned reading.
    There were lots more comics, stored in individual plastic bags, some of them maybe worth a few quid. Dr Strange . The Silver Surfer . In the big house, Nick used comics to teach reading. The Beano and football comics, anything he could find. Half of the men he met were illiterate. They liked the pictures and could be teased into deciphering the words. Nick wrote letters for people, too, but that was a sadder job. When you were inside for years, relationships on the outside faded away. The guys he wrote letters for tried to hang on to relationships that were tenuous before they went down. No chance. Inside, it was hard enough to keep a marriage going.
    Friends had fizzled out on Nick, too. There was one former teaching colleague who wrote to him, but she never visited. Two mates did come regularly early on, but not after he was moved from Nottingham prison. Only his brother came then. He’d learned that family counted for more as you got older. Only family had no choice but to stick by you.
    What else was up here? Rock posters of dubious historical interest, a framed Picasso print and a few photographs in clip frames: Sarah, Nazia, his parents, Joe on the pitch at Meadow Lane. Last of all, an ancient sheet music case in cracked brown leather, filled with letters and postcards. Nick dipped into the letters, most of them from the 1980s. Nazia’s strained yet poetic syntax, Sarah’s cramped handwriting, every page full of events and ideas. There were postcards from each of his parents. His mother, in a letter written just before her death, talked about how much she missed his father. He put the letter down quickly, before he welled up, then closed the case. It held too many missing people.
    ‘Joe?’ a