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electricity too; a single bulb lights up the rafters. Wasps’ nests cling to the beams, their paper intricacy intact despite the owners’ long-since departure. But it is what lies beneath that draws out the gasp. I expected stacked boxes, the contents detailed in fat marker pen on the sides, shipping trunks, a rail of clothes. Even old furniture, a broken chair or a long-defunct cot. But instead there is a cavernous space, echoing with silence, and, under the spotlight of the bulb, a single unmarked box.
    I am sure then, in that second, that this was left for me, the rest of the junk cleared out months ago, in readiness for this moment. This is it, I think, a skeleton in a closet, or in cardboard. Maybe a real one. I knew my grandfather had been a doctor, a surgeon, after all. But when I open it, I see not the creamy yellow-white of a rib-cage, of a Yorick skull, but soft red leather, edged in gilt. Not a skeleton, I think. Not bones. Photographs.
    I flip slowly through the stiff vellum pages, peeling back the tracing-paper sheets in between to reveal the faces of this strange family, my family. At the table at Christmas, crackers held out in their hands, Will’s pointing like a gun at the lens. It is only the second picture I have seen of him; the first, a cracked, faded thing in a drawer at home, his name and a date in blue-black ink on the back. A school photograph, his teenage years belied by spots, his tie loosened just enough to know that the sneer isn’t an accident. A single memory, the others too painful, or too much to carry from here to London. Here he is a boy, seven or eight. Still playing cowboys and Indians, I guess. Or gangs, like Finn and his mates back in London, whooping round the street with lightsabres, until they see the real thing, or something like it.
    There is one of Will and another boy, the same blond hair and ruddy cheeks as him, flushed with cold and flanking a snowman. It actually has a carrot for a nose, and a pipe. At home they wore bandanas, before the snow melted in the city fug and turned to dirty slush.
    There is Mum. Aged five, aged fifteen, the same haunted look on her face. Not smiling; sullen.
    And this must be Eleanor. Her mother. My grandmother. She is beautiful, like Mum. But different too. Her hair straighter, swept back in a tight chignon, her face tighter. But her smile is as absent as Mum’s. I see the lips move in my head, form the words I heard on the answerphone: the clipped accent, the crisp consonants. And I wonder what she said to Mum. To make her scowl. To make her leave. Or was it him?
    There are just four photographs of the man I take to be her father; my grandfather. Two of him stiffly holding newborns; Will and Het. Then one of him in a surgical coat shaking hands with a man in a suit, both looking into the lens. A local newspaper kind of shot. I wonder if he’d won an award. Or retired. Yet he looks young still. His hair dark, his face unlined, yet severe.
    I turn to the last page, to a family shot, all of them posed together, lined up on the lawn. Eleanor smiling, her husband’s arm around her shoulder. Yet still she looks uncomfortable, strained. Next to her Will is pulling a face again, the collar of his rugby shirt turned up. Then Mum. Lost. Her face turned away, looking blankly at something in the distance, to the left of whoever was calling out “say cheese”.
    I look at the date underneath. It was taken the summer before I was born. I look hard at Mum’s stomach but I can’t see the trace of me yet. I wonder if she knows, if they know. If this is the last time they were all together. Before I came and put some unbreachable wall between them.
    This isn’t ephemera, I think. Not fleeting. Even though the bodies are gone, the bones buried or burned, the people are preserved. Captured in a single Kodak moment.
    I close the album, its heavy binding snapping and sending motes of dust whirling in the beams of light. But then something bigger flutters down,