In Tokyo there had been no need to carry his past with him but only his camera. When people asked, What are you, Who are you, he might say no more than his name, that he was English and a photographer, or an English teacher when he didn’t feel like saying that or the photography didn’t pay. There was a whole community of English teachers. Some of them weren’t even English but that didn’t matter because the Japanese who were their students generally couldn’t tell the difference. They were a travelling flotsam with identities that might or might not be true, with grand or less grand notions of themselves and stories they told or stories they didn’t tell. And if you liked to take pictures, you could do what you liked and take pictures of anything anywhere. Because you were gaijin, and nothing was expected of you.

You off on the hippy trail? his brother had said, before he went travelling. That was what some of their friends were suddenly doing, taking off in buses or camper vans, overland to India, coming back with long hair and chillums and ill-cured Afghan coats.

No. Not exactly.

That was when he first put a word to what he meant to be. A photographer. Though he didn’t say it to Richard but only to himself.

He remembered what it had meant when got his first camera. It was on his twelfth birthday. He had been asking for one all year. His birthday was in June, just before the end of the summer term, and all of the holiday that followed he took the camera about with him, photographing everything in sight. That was when it started. He took pictures of his mother, but she got cross when he took the pictures as she hated being photographed when she wasn’t prepared, so he took some of Richard, and dozens of Billy. Billy was great for pictures. Billy at work, with a spade or a barrow, with his cap and his whiskers and his old lined face looking like a countryman from any past time since photography was invented. It was great that he had the pictures, because Billy died that next winter. The best he took that September just before they were due to go back to school. He went with Billy and Richard when they went shooting. He took his camera along instead of a gun, photographed the two of them as they walked and aimed and shot, photographed the dog waiting, the dead pheasants close up with their red-rimmed eyes and fabulous feathers.

Richard liked those pictures but all the same he thought it was only a hobby. Like cricket, or shooting. It wasn’t something to do with your life.