Snap

It’s the best thing ever. Our Jo pulls the rickety table on Mum’s side of the bed away from the wall, with its metallic-gold statue of the Virgin Mary with a bashed silver nose and an ashtray stinking up the room and bends back the matted pile of the carpet. Sudden sunlight slants through the closed Venetian blinds exposing the dust of disorder. Phyllis standing at the door beside me and Our Jo bring their own picnic of perfumed smells to the caged dullness of the room. The door to the triangular cavern underneath upstairs’ stairs is sprung. The light has no bulb, but the treasure she seeks is hidden beside the push lawnmower missing a wheel and lies on the Formica table with three legs. It’s partially hidden beside an old-fashioned timepiece from our other house with a hand missing that is bound to be clock full of spiders. I’m already giggling when she brings it out and flings it down on the sunbeam-yellow rayon of their top sheet. Stephen appears at our backs, pushing through and past us, as he's won’t to do when he thinks he’s missing something.

Our Jo rummages through mum’s snider of a too shiny looking black bag, the one with the broken handle, the one with gold clasp that holds apart the compartments of people’s lives. Photos are piled up higgledy-piggledy on the bed and trump each other in their awfulness. I grab a colour photo of me standing against the brown sandstone tenement wall wearing a blue-green anorak, grey short trousers and feet turned inward as if they want to hide. My smile is counterfeit as Monopoly millions and my eyes squint and say don’t do it, but the photograph sits in my hand evidence that nobody listens to me. Stephen makes a grab for it.

‘Look at the hair,’ he shouts brandishing it for others to see.

Nobody is much interested. Phyllis sits and sinks the yellow bedspread around her knees. Her long hair makes a booth and her face shines in its reflected glory as she works her way methodically through the photos on her lap. She does not smile, the quiet part of her on show, as she discards one coloured-in self, the other part of her seems to leave the room, caught in the act of living; picking up another life and putting it face down on the bed, setting it apart.

Our Jo’s hand stirs and shuffles through the cycloram of the photos on show. Her cheeks blow out and she yelps with laughter. ‘Look at the state of me there.’ It’s a photo of her and Nona, wearing some kind of black hats, as if they are going to be appearing in a shoot-out.

She pulls out another of Bod making his first communion. His haircut is not long, nor short, but straight as a hat, a red sash cuts across his light-blue shirt buttoned at the neck and his grey-green eyes are slightly squint as the pyramid of intertwined hands joined in prayer, but his mouth is a bottom-lipped bow of his own devising.

Stephen grabs the photo of Emily his girlfriend out of Our Jo’s hands. With her long black hair and Mediterranean features and smiling face it’s impossible to take a bad photo of her, even wearing a Bay City Roller shirt with tartan cuff and collar. She’s under five- feet tall, but very friendly and beautiful. He looks at it for a minute. I bet they’re having sex, but I hope they aren’t and she goes with somebody else. Stephen wanders out of the door, away from us, with her in the back pocket of his Wranglers.

Dr Who is on soon. I sit on the bed, a knee apart from Phyllis, sifting through the hard edges and it’s all getting a bit boring. There’s black-and-white of Da looking at the camera wearing his good suit, as if saying ‘is that the best you’ve got’, and Mum, smiling as usual, wearing some jacket and something stripey as a deckchair for her blouse, with her hair ballooning out like a cartoon fuzz taking over the world-- my eyes colour her hair in red and I smile back at her.

‘Who’s that?’ Phyllis holds a small snap, a grainy black-and- white photo of some woman between thumb and index fingers, with an indent mark, as if it’s been folded countless times. She flicks it onto the bedspread, where it lands face down.

I take no notice. We have several battalions of smiling aunties and frowning uncles. Their children make infrequent appearances in our lives but we are related through celluloid. But Our Jo picks it up and begins to giggle. She can’t stop herself. She puts her hand out and hangs onto Phyllis’s shoulder.

‘What?' Phyllis's laughing too, even though she doesn’t know what she’s laughing at.

I’m bending over laughing too. ‘What?’ I make a grab for the photo.

Our Jo pulls it away holds it over the yellow horizon of the bed sheets away from me. Her cheeks blow out and her eyes pop. ‘That’s Dessy’s bird.’ That starts her off again.

‘What?’ I say.

‘What?’ Phyllis says.

We both grab for it at the same time. I tug it out of Our Jo’s hand and Phyllis tries to pinch it from me, but I squirm away and hold on before she gets it off me, getting a good decko of the photo.

‘That was Dessy’s bird before he met our mum.’ Our Jo sticks her chest out, mimicking Dessy telling Mum to get herself dolled up before they go to the Singer’s club. ‘Right! Goin’ beautify yourself - like Marilyn before we go out.’

We collapse onto the bed with sniggers. That’s just like him. And Mum could be no more like Marilyn than he could be like Cassius Clay. But it’s the photo that really rips us up. The girl looking at the camera has long thick black hair held back and up like a crown by a white headband. She wears a dark patterned blouse and a dark cardigan.

‘Jesus,’ Phyllis catches her breath. ‘She’s completely cross-eyed.’

‘What did he keep that for?’ I ask.

‘What did Mum let him keep it for?’

Our Jo has all the answers. She sticks her chest out and thumps it with the palm of her hand. ‘Dessy will be Dessy.’