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trace of their pasts. They may not remember the moment, but it will represent them decisively, and they will see themselves thus. There was such a moment, such a scooping of space , even if now it lies encrypted in all that has happened since, in all the boisterous life that rushed afterwards to capture and engulf them.
    The photograph of an astronaut pretends to exist in the future. Initially, its dazzling foreignness, its supernatural shadows, made the astronaut a figure beyond time itself. Now we know otherwise. Now this double-sized man, this cumbrous puppet, is almost antique. He is so much of his era that, no less than a uniformed Prussian soldier, or Queen Victoria, or the hippie Beatles, he is lodged so directly in past time thatno amount of gadgetry unfixes him, or propels him forward.
    The photograph of catastrophe halts us. Or it ought to. If there is a necessity to this technology, it is to abet troubled remembering and to drive us to other futures. Shadows infiltrate as surely as light. Do I need to describe these images? They are bleak and indelible. They are detonations. We carry them like tattoos that say ‘twentieth century’.
    The photograph of someone one loves, as a child: folded time . The present is given adorable density; in the face of the beloved rests an earlier face. A boy, leaning cheekily, wearing a beret. Lanky, unpredictable, verging into the tall man who will step forward to embrace you. A girl with freckles and uncontrollable hair. Standing in full sunlight on a white sandy beach, awaiting with eyes open an adult embrace.

    Stephen once showed Alice a remarkable photograph. It was an image of his father – an official picture of some kind – standing on a whale. When he was a child, he said, his father had worked at the whaling station, slicing into the huge beasts with the blades of giants.
    â€˜I hated my father,’ said Stephen blankly. ‘He was a drunkard, and stank of beer, and would pass out in the kitchen on the linoleum floor. My mother and I would drag him across the diamond shapes – red and black diamonds, I can never forget them – to the living room to heave him onto the sofa. He seemed filthy. Despicable. He dribbled onto his shirt.
    â€˜We never got on. My father found my bookishness incomprehensible, but bragged about me to his mates. Egghead, he called me. I was embarrassed, but I was also desperate for hisapproval. I remember smiling pathetically as I recited the entire periodic table of elements to a group of blokes sitting around in a pub. There was a round of applause, and I bowed, like a concert pianist. My father clapped loudest, and I was proud, and appalled. When he was working at the whaling station, he always stank of blood and raw meat. My mother endured for a while, then suddenly, like that, she just up and left. Just disappeared, leaving me with her sister’s address and a brief note of apology. So I was left alone with this dreadful man to whom I had nothing to say. One day, for some reason, I rode my bike out to see him at the whaling station. I had never been there before. The stench hit you from almost a mile away – it was disgusting – viscera, slime, boiled-down flesh. When I approached, I saw the carcass of a whale in mid-slaughter. There were sluice trails for the blood and great saws carving the flesh. Everything looked wet, internal. It seemed to me then the most compelling sight – such a creature, so huge, so complex in its dismemberment. There was a man standing on the very top of the whale, waving. It was my father. I immediately waved back. For some reason I felt a great surge of love. My father, atop a whale. Like a myth. Like a god. After he was killed in the accident one of his workmates gave me this photograph. It brings back that moment. The only moment in my life I can ever remember loving him.’

    Alice was thinking of Stephen’s story as she walked home with her groceries. He had