Daguerreotype

Had people really dressed in black-and-white then? Of course, it was so old I should have said brown and white. I found it shortly after – well, the usual thing. It was under a bottom drawer. That's right: under. Where boys used to hide a Penthouse or a Playboy before the internet made them as tame as a comic book. The frame was cheap deal or something, stained dark with fingerprints and dirt. It was a posed, portrait shot, the person in it stiff enough to have been shot dead by the, what, daguerreotypist?

I took the cheap frame apart, the picture was sealed in two plates of glass. Some kind of glue still held them together. The face above the monochrome clothes would be mine if I lost all my teeth and lived to be ninety or so. On the back of the paper, trapped in vitreous aspic, someone's hard-earned copperplate read 'Euphemia, aged 53.'

Downstairs, my brother and his wife were doing the tug of love with a biscuit barrel. Souvenir of Largs. A picture of a tartan-coated Westie on the side. They both let go when I entered the lounge. The clay monstrosity shattered on the table, A thick roll of notes nestled among the bourbons and custard creams.

'Ach, Ah wis jist...' Tam started.

'I don't want it. You take it.' I said.

'Why should ah no? Where were ye, answer me that?'

He was right of course. I'd been in Spain, or Cyprus, New York or Newfoundland: anywhere but there. Where our parents had lived – and died. Perhaps that's why his accent sounded so odd.

He took the picture when I held it out to him. Sheena was looking out of the window at the rain. Tam turned the glass over, grunted and handed it back.

'Who is it?' I asked.

'Effie,' he snorted a laugh.

'Who's that?'

'Ah dinnae ken, but it sez Euphemia oan the back, does it no?'

'It looks like Mam, though doesn't it?' I looked down at the drawn cheeks and the glassy stare in the picture. 'At the end, I mean.'

'Whit would ye ken aboot the end?' He asked this in a reasonable tone, as if he really expected an answer. Tam stepped toward me. He looked so much like our father had. I stepped back, held up the picture - a feeble shield against a ghost.

'It was hidden under a drawer.'

Sheena's back was to us both, her face close enough to the window to steam it up. Tam glanced over at his wife.

'Aye well, people hide things, Kirsty, that's aw.'

I wondered how much Tam had hidden, from Mam, from me, from himself.