Richard wouldn’t get it, what he planned to do. A photographer, what sort of job was that? As if he didn’t know. It was being something, someone, other than who he had been until now. Richard wouldn’t know anything about that either. Richard had only ever wanted to be Richard, so far as anyone could tell.

When he first came back to England in December, he had laid out all of his pictures, a shiny mass of photos on the dining-room table. It looked like Pelmanism, all those memories laid out on the table to be sorted and grouped together, in the dining room where they had once played cards, the cards face down across the tablecloth.

Richard came in to see. Richard was never so good at cards. It was the one game that Jonny could win despite being the youngest, as soon as he could read the numbers. He could look at the table all spread with the blue-and-red-backed playing cards and know where the matching ace was, and the eights and the twos and the kings, pick them up in a run as the game went on and the pairs revealed themselves, tight with the excitement of knowing, watching his mother’s hand hovering close to the card he knew but then diving elsewhere and picking up wrong – or sometimes he suspected that that was only a ploy, that really she knew and it was only a ploy to allow him to win, once in a while, at something – then watching with glee when it was Richard’s turn and Richard’s hand moved blind, wrong and wrong again and right only by chance, because cards just wasn’t his sort of thing.

Now Richard picked up a black-and-white print of a street cramped between high-rise buildings, vertical shop signs bearing Chinese characters. Richard was sifting through his three years. Richard himself three years older.

That Japan?

Hong Kong.

One from the next pile. A wider street, figures made nondescript by rain, umbrellas above their heads.

That’s Tokyo.

Not my scene, Richard said, putting them down and looking further, restless, at one pile then another, flicking through the prints, the contact prints, the sleeves of negatives. Nothing for him there; not his turn now.

You took an awful lot of pictures.

Some of them aren’t worth keeping.

Pelmanism. What matched with what? Shuffle the memories, see what matches with what, what begins, what follows. Go back to the beginning.

It had been strange to see it all here, out of the envelopes, here in the red-papered dining room with the carriage clock ticking on the sideboard and the dull Norfolk winter outside. An American called Jim who was his friend in Tokyo. Jim with two girls in the forest. One of the girls recurring in picture after picture, in the park, by the river, on the shore.

Who’s the girl?

He held up a print of the girl smiling beneath a red umbrella; fine drops of rain on the lens.