I shift the position of the album a little and a Polaroid falls to the floor, which I pick up. It’s one I had slid between the long-unopened pages a few years ago, when it hurt too much to keep coming across it in my bedside drawer. It’s one that makes my heart give a hitch now. It’s a Polaroid picture of the man I once had to stop myself from loving. A friend of mine. Kemp. His nickname, a reference to brothers Martin and Gary from Spandau Ballet. His heart, something I could never hope to secure … as we were only ever friends. I went to school with him, many years ago. I’ve cried over him, to that particular Bonnie Raitt song. It’s a good photo, this one I took of him, despite him being an actual photographer, by profession, and me just being a general numpty. It’s out on the dark street outside our pub, the one we used to go to. He is laughing and handsome. He is wearing a green woolly scarf I gave him. I look at the photo for far too long then slip it back into the pages of the album.

Here’s the photo Angela wanted. Yes, she does have a crab on her nose but I’m pretty certain she put it there herself, for effect. I’m standing next to her and squinting into the camera. I peel back the plastic film and dislodge the photo from its sticky background.

‘This is the photo Angela asked for,’ I say. ‘Me and her when we were crabbing.’

‘I don’t really remember that one too well. Remind me?’

‘Angela has a crab on the end of her nose.’

‘A crab, yes.’ He looks like he is concentrating. ‘A crab on the end of her nose.’

I put it to one side, to take a shot of it for Angela. There are some teenage photos now – ones that Dad took, on our instruction. We are often off-centre, with parts of us chopped off, and a blind man taking photos certainly gave passers-by something to talk about. There’s Angela on roller-skates on the pavement outside The Palladian, dressed in neon, a laughing smile on her face; me, standing in the hall before a trip to a terrible nightclub, in a black minidress and trowelled-on make-up. Weren’t they always terrible? Standing in sticky-floored bars, nodding to music while sipping on a straw, catching men’s eyes and looking away again, though in my case they looked away first … And you’d think I would have escaped the old ‘You’re not going out like that!’, with Dad being blind, but he always felt for necklines and hemlines on the doorstep and made me get changed into less horrendous outfits, if deemed necessary.