Please remember that these were the first living breasts, within recall, that I had seen. Sam Hall’s collection of corpses had taught me what to expect in regard to shape but it had not prepared me for anything like so much movement. And those women were really throwing themselves around out there. Especially Mrs Flatman. In the whole time I had watched her I had never seen her do so much gardening. She ran the whole length of her lawn and back again behind the mower; she stood on her toes and cut back roses; she sat in the wheelbarrow, she balanced on the roller, she put the watering can between her legs, she raked, she hoed, she scythed, she pruned, all the while shrieking with laughter and throwing back her head and saying ‘Cheese!’ as if it were a preposition, into Elkie Lisberg’s clicking lens. Is it any wonder that I needed to let the air circulate around my normally muffled parts? Will it surprise you to learn that my eyes began to smoke with the speed of their own shutters as they clicked away like little cameras themselves, recording everything, storing up treasures – momentoes and memoranda – for penurious times?

But what was I doing bothering to store up anything? I was thirteen; I was seeing things I had never been privileged to see before; I should have been having the time of my life, not going shopping for souvenirs, not dying like a party of Japanese for the trip to be over so that I could be back home enjoying it in retrospect through my photographs. Wasn’t the actuality good enough for me?

How can I say this? No, it wasn’t.