What the Five Boxes Held

Anouk lived above a shop that repaired children's bicycles. A small red bike without a front wheel stood in the entrance passage. Vera had to lift her bag to get past the handlebars. A door opened on the first floor.

‘He was supposed to have moved that,’ Anouk said.

‘I got past.’

‘You did.’

She waited for Vera to reach the landing and shut the door without another glance at the bike. In the room, a rolled backdrop leaned against the wall. A lamp on a stand was directly in front of a blue-seated chair. A thin white curtain covered the window behind it.

‘You're working,’ Vera said.

‘In a bit. First that thing has to come out of the entrance. My client won't get upstairs otherwise.’

Anouk sent a message to the bicycle repairer, then put her phone face down on the dining table. Two folders were ready. Not five boxes.

Vera hung her coat over her own chair. She asked whether to move the lamp and was told to leave it exactly where it was. Anouk had positioned the chair on a mark. She had cleared the table for them; a notebook and a closed laptop lay at the far end.

‘I've given up the studio,’ Anouk said. ‘You may have heard.’

‘I didn't know you were still taking photographs here.’

‘I can't do everything. A whole family and a dog don't fit comfortably. One person does. Or two, if they like each other.’

She took an envelope from the first folder. Vera saw copies written on it. Anouk laid the contents on a clean mat she had put on the table. It was the order for Dorus: their names, a sum of money, and underneath, the groups of material involved.

Storage and copying. Five boxes, each briefly described. Anouk turned the sheet so Vera wouldn't have to read it upside down.

‘I haven't taken a photo of this,’ Vera said.

‘You don't need to. Take your time and read it.’

The first two boxes held mounted prints. Seven words further along was a quantity. Fourteen in one, fourteen in the other. The third contained the negatives and contact sheets for the photographs of work at the station. The fourth held other negatives and contact sheets, family pictures mixed with smaller jobs. The fifth had working prints and papers. Each group had a cross beside it in the same blue ink. Two signatures at the bottom.

Vera followed the line above the names with her finger, without touching it. ‘Make copies. Temporary storage.’

‘I still had boxes everywhere here then. Dorus had room. He's made prints for me before.’

‘And the two hundred and forty?’

‘I paid that.’

Anouk took out the proof of payment and laid it alongside. There was a touch of impatience in the movement, Vera thought, as though she had explained it too many times already.

‘He did some work for that money. The small proofs in the folder are part of it. I'm not claiming I paid a bill and got nothing at all.’

Vera read on. Nothing about a sale, nothing about giving anything to a foundation. She looked up.

‘Now he says he gave it all back.’

‘Yes.’

‘But he hasn't said you gave it to him?’

‘Not to me.’

The kettle clicked. Anouk got up and filled two mugs. Whether Vera wanted tea wasn't a question; the mugs were ready, and Anouk slid over a box of tea bags. Vera took the top one.

A thump came from downstairs, followed by something dragging across the stone floor. Anouk opened the door and looked down the stairs.

‘Thank you,’ she called.

A voice said something about room in the workshop. Anouk shut the door. She put her tea on the clear part of the table by her chair, away from the papers.

‘You can't just put boxes like that in a kitchen cupboard. The negatives need to stay with their own sheets. You don't want to be working out later which strip went with which pictures.’

‘What is a contact sheet, exactly?’ Vera asked.

She had heard the term, but only had a vague idea of lots of little photographs. If she nodded now, she and Anouk would carry on picturing different things in the third box.

Anouk opened the little presentation folder from the delivery. She took two copies from the pile and put them side by side. In one, a handcart stood close to a doorway. In the other it had moved a little further back.

‘These are two selected frames. A contact sheet shows all the frames on the strip together. Including the four I haven't had printed here. You can see what happened before and after.’

With the blunt end of a pencil she tapped a white edge beside the first copy.

‘Someone could be standing just outside the picture here. A single print won't tell you.’

Vera leaned forward. Both copies showed the same door. She had looked at the poster and thought about the past as a spacious place into which everything fitted at once. Here someone simply had to move a cart.

‘So the whole sequence is on the sheet in the third box.’

‘Yes. With the strip of negatives. These are only small copies.’

Anouk put them away. She didn't leave everything out just because Vera was there.

‘And the fourth box?’

‘Pictures at home. A few small jobs that weren't for a newspaper. People wanting to give someone a photograph. It isn't all secret, but it isn't everybody's business either.’

‘Dorus knew that?’

‘He knew what was inside. We made the list together.’

Vera looked at the crosses again. Five distinct groups of material, not five anonymous cardboard boxes. Anouk had asked for things that needed to remain identifiable; on Monday Vera had seen only a small folder on the table.

‘What did you want to do with the large prints?’

‘Keep them together. Not put them straight on somebody's wall.’

‘Have they been shown before?’

Anouk nodded. ‘Years ago. That project about the people working behind the scenes at the station. Twenty-eight pictures. In the room where they have the language café now.’

There was no hesitation. Vera wrote the number on her own sheet, beneath five boxes. She didn't cross out one number to make room for the other.

‘The same twenty-eight as now, then?’

‘That selection, yes.’

Anouk drew the folder closer. A photograph of a waiting room showed beneath the sheet. She pushed it back and kept her hand on it.

‘They weren't all mine. Dorus took two. The rest were. He did a lot of the printing then. We spent evenings in that room. I'm not going to pretend he was just standing about.’

‘I'm not asking you to.’

‘Everyone will ask anyway. Who made them, who paid for the paper, who had them in the house longest. Before you know it, I'm explaining that a photograph of my mother is mine because I'm her daughter. When that isn't the point at all.’

Vera watched the pencil Anouk still held. She hadn't needed it to show her things, yet hadn't put it down. The end was chewed flat.

‘You want the photographs back,’ Vera said.

‘All of them. Including the things that never need to be in a presentation.’

Anouk sat at her laptop. Before opening it she glanced at Vera, who turned slightly away rather than immediately look on. Anouk found something, closed two windows and only then turned the screen.

A photograph of her old studio appeared. A rack of flat boxes, a chair beside it with a coat over the back. She had taken it as a record of how the furniture was arranged, she explained. Now she pointed just to the boxes. The top one's corner had been reinforced with another piece of cardboard.

‘The work material was in that one. I repaired the corner because the flap kept dropping to the floor.’

Vera saw it. She had repairs like that at home too, brown tape over cardboard, without ever thinking they might prove anything.

‘Can I make a mental note of that box?’

‘Yes. I can send you this bit. Not the whole folder behind it.’

She cropped her image to the boxes and sent it. When it appeared on Vera's phone, Vera labelled it from Anouk so it wouldn't end up among the supplier pictures.

Another message sounded. Anouk's client was at the station and would be a little early. Anouk checked her watch. Less than half an hour.

‘I can go,’ Vera said.

‘You don't have to run out.’

She did put the papers away. Proof of payment with the order, the little proofs in the presentation folder. The mugs stayed on the clear part of the table. Vera had barely touched her tea. She drank a few mouthfuls. It had grown so strong that she took out the bag.

‘What are you going to do now?’ Anouk asked.

Vera had been thinking of the foundation. She wanted to know how Sanne had come by those boxes, what the poster said, and why nobody had told her anything when she put the photograph in her own window. That last part had been her own offer. It was difficult to put it all into one question without sounding accusatory.

‘Ring Sanne. Ask exactly what she has, and if we can see it.’

‘You don't have to go demanding it all back tomorrow on my behalf.’

‘I wasn't going to.’

Anouk looked at her, waiting rather than suspicious.

‘I want to know how the poster happened,’ Vera said.

‘I understand.’

She gave Vera the number she had used for Sanne. It was the same one already on Vera's phone. Anouk asked if she could be there for an appointment, another time if necessary. Vera would let her know what they could arrange.

At the door Vera had to ease her coat from between two hooks. A scarf caught on her button. She freed it carefully and returned it to its hook.

Anouk opened the landing door. The red bicycle had gone. The space looked suddenly wider than when Vera arrived.

‘There,’ Anouk said. ‘It could be done.’

Downstairs the repairer came towards her with a wheel in his hand. Vera moved aside on the bottom step. He said the child needed the bike today. It had nothing to do with her, but he sounded as though he still needed to defend himself. She thanked him for clearing the passage.

On the pavement she rang Sanne. No answer. She left a message saying she and Anouk would like to see the boxes, tomorrow morning or afternoon if an appointment was possible. Halfway through, she heard how easily she had offered up Anouk's entire day.

‘I'll check the time with her,’ she added.

She sent Anouk a message straight away, then walked to the station. The shortest route was through the new underpass. On the lower steps it smelt of wet concrete. A boy walked his bicycle down, holding it at an angle that brought the handlebars against the wall.

Vera thought of the room above the bike shop, the lamp that had to stay where it was for the next client. She continued to the exit on her side without stopping to count the people going another way. Yasmin needed her for the usual break, and there was bread waiting that she herself had ordered.