Like This, for Ever

away.
    Four boxes later, he found the albums. He lifted the first, a faded crimson colour, out of the box and sat with it on his lap. This was it. It was like exam results, or waiting to hear if you’d been picked for the cross-country team. Just a second away from information that would change everything.
    The first page had nothing on it but three Polaroid-style pictures on thin, shiny paper. Each was in black and white and showed a hazy mass of nothing. Black space, grey shadows and something that might just, if you screwed up your eyes, resemble a human face. They were of him, photographs of an unborn Barney, in his mother’s stomach.
    ‘Not quite what I had in mind,’ he muttered, turning the page.
    Oh God!
    It was as if someone had hit him hard in the chest. How could a picture cause so much physical pain? He couldn’t even see her faceproperly. She was in profile. The picture was mainly of him as a tiny baby. But she was so beautiful. That was obvious, even in what little he could see of her. Her hair was short and a shiny dark brown, the colour of conkers. It curled around her chin, showing off her long neck. Her hands and her wrists looked large for a woman’s and she was holding him close to her face, smiling down at him. He was looking back up at her, as though her eyes were the most fascinating thing he’d seen in his short life. They looked like they might be the only two people in the whole world.
    ‘Barney, you alright up there?’
    For a second, Barney didn’t trust himself to speak. He gulped, tried to sniff without making a sound and ran his hands over his eyes. He had no idea how long he’d been in the attic. He’d turned the pages of the album, watching tiny baby Barney turn into bigger baby Barney and eventually toddler Barney. Most of the pictures had been just of him, but his mum had been in several and his dad in one or two. Her hair had got longer, sometimes she’d worn it pulled back in a ponytail. He thought she looked less happy, even less pretty, in the later photographs, but she always seemed to be smiling at Barney. She always seemed to love him.
    ‘Barney!’ Steps on the ladder. His dad was coming up.
    ‘Coming!’ Barney managed, shoving the album back into the box and turning to face the hatch. His dad’s face appeared.
    ‘What’s up?’ he asked.
    ‘Nothing,’ Barney replied, hoping his dad couldn’t see past him to where the boxes were disarranged. ‘Just the dust up here. It’s been making my eyes water.’
    ‘I see you found it,’ said his dad, who was looking at the Lego. ‘Shall I carry it down?’
    His dad climbed back down the ladder and Barney followed. Next time, he’d take a couple of the pictures of his mum out of the album. He’d learn them, until his mum’s face was as familiar to him as his own, and then he’d go out looking for her. He’d go to supermarkets and busy shopping centres on Saturday afternoons. He’d let his focus drift and concentrate on finding his mum’s face. He could do it, he knew he could. In any crowd, he could find that face.

26
    ‘ FOUR PROPOSALS OF marriage, six death threats, two job offers and five churches claiming eternal salvation will be mine once I embrace Jesus and join their flock.’
    Lacey nudged her chair further under the table, closer to the slim young woman on its opposite side. All around her in the visitors’ suite people were making the same effort to give their conversations an outside chance of privacy. Trouble was, given the noise levels in the room, at times they invariably had to shout to make themselves heard. ‘And is that this week?’ she asked.
    The woman smiling at her across the table looked nothing like the photograph that had appeared, not quite a week earlier, in a Sunday supplement about female serial killers. The photograph had been taken several weeks after her arrest, when the strain of incarceration and the slow grinding of the legal system were taking their toll. This woman – face free of make-up, hair grown longer and its natural toffee brown – didn’t look much older than twenty. She was slim and strong and had great posture. Her skin glowed and her eyes shone. She looked as if she’d never had a sleepless night or a bad dream in her life.
    She gave a half shrug, as though conceding a small defeat. ‘Since you were last here.’ Then she grinned. ‘I’m still in the lead though.’
    Impossible for Lacey not to smile back. The woman serving a life sentence for