Free The Scrapbook by Carly Holmes Page A

curtains closed. I stand still in the centre of the room for a moment, enjoying the dusky drape of semi-darkness in the middle of the day and the accompanying thrill of the illicit. She’s snoring before I’ve reached the top of the stairs.
    Every shelf of her bookcase is packed with bridal magazines. Too many to count. I can follow the trends of decades as I leaf through them, shake them upside down over the rug and then put them aside. Hazy young women, frothy with lace, gasp and clasp their hands in delight at this fulfilment of their life’s dream. The pages are brittle from years of licked thumbs. Scraps of paper mark certain articles. I imagine mum sitting patiently through years of perms and trims, empty carrier bag folded in her pocket, the petty thief’s flush on her cheeks. And then hurrying home with her latest acquisitions and poring over them for hours, studying the section on wedding etiquette and deliberating between a veil and a head dress.
    Tucked into one of the pages, covering a dress that must surely have been The Dress for mum, is part of what looks like a spell, scribbled onto a sheet of creamy writing paper. A love spell? My mother’s writing but definitely my grandmother’s words.
    â€¦ Take in your cupped palms two flaming pieces of fire opal and two gentling pieces of rose quartz. Linger a while with sweet thoughts …
    Had she written it from memory? From years of stolen peeks at her mother’s Cooking Book ? I wondered if she’d ever cast the spell. It clearly hadn’t worked, if she did.
    On the bottom shelf of the bookcase, buried beneath the last pile of euphoric smiles, I see an envelope, stiff with photographs. Photographs of my father.

    My father walking away from the camera, towards our gate, with me in his arms.
    My father asleep in a bed, in a room I don’t recognise.
    My father leaning over me in a wood, one huge hand engulfing each of mine.
    My father sitting behind the wheel of his car, staring down at a map.
    My father cradling a sleeping me to his chest, a book propped open on my back.
    My father naked, towelling himself down, framed in an open doorway.
    My father…
    I sit and look through them, again, and again, and again. There must be ten or more and in none of them is he looking at the camera or holding himself with the self-conscious poise of the observed.
    I run downstairs and throw them at mum, scattering him over her. ‘Look at these. So much for having nothing. What else are you hiding?’
    She jerks awake and holds her hands up to her eyes, blinks down at the photographs, up at me. Down again. ‘How did you find these? Have you been going through my room?’
    I’m too angry to feel any embarrassment, too shocked by the images of my father, naked, vulnerable, captured and committed to paper without his knowledge.
    â€˜I knew you were lying to me, hiding things. Look at him. He didn’t have a clue that you were taking his picture.
Do you know how weird that is? Like you’re his stalker rather than his lover; the mother of his child. No wonder he left.’
    She starts to gather the photographs up and push them into the pocket of her cardigan. She won’t look at me now. Her movements are hesitant and graceless.
    â€˜Don’t say things like that, Fern, don’t be cruel. These are private. They’re mine.’
    I bend to pick one up which had spun to the floor unnoticed. It’s another picture of my father and me together, my toddler-self walking, penguin-like, on his feet. We’re laughing.
    I sit down on the rug and stare at it. ‘Look at him, mum. He’s laughing. He’s having fun. With me. He looks like a proper dad. He looks like he loves me.’
    She stays silent. I try to retrieve my anger. ‘Anyway, you can’t decide what’s important and what isn’t. There could have been something in one of these that could help. What else are you