The Last Photograph

Mara found the photograph three days after her mother’s funeral.

It was inside a biscuit tin at the back of the wardrobe, beneath birth certificates, expired passports and a bundle of letters tied with green ribbon.

There were cinema tickets from 1978. A pressed fern. A photograph of her father smoking on Brighton beach before Mara was born, looking impossibly young.

And then there was the Polaroid.

Mara almost put it aside.

It showed a woman of about twenty standing on a railway platform beside a tall, blond-haired man. Both were laughing. Not smiling for the camera, but laughing at something that had happened a second before the shutter clicked.

The woman was Mara.

She turned the photograph over.

Nothing was written on the back.

She looked again.

The man had one arm around her waist.

Mara stared at his hand.

There was an intimacy in it that unsettled her more than the impossible resemblance. His fingers rested lightly against her coat, as though they had done so a thousand times.

She did not know him.

She had never seen him before in her life.

Behind them stood an old-fashioned station sign.

ALDERING

She slipped the Polaroid into her handbag.

That night she dreamt of trains.

In the morning, the photograph had changed.

Mara discovered this while drinking coffee at the kitchen table.

At first she thought exhaustion had distorted her memory.

The couple were still standing together, but no longer on a railway platform. They sat instead on the steps of a narrow red-brick house.

Mara looked perhaps twenty-five.

The man looked slightly older too.

Between them sat three little children.

The boy was holding a wooden horse.

The picture was unmistakably real. The chemical gloss. The white border. A faint yellowing at one corner.

The woman in the photograph wore Mara’s face, only happy.

That was what disturbed her most.

Mara knew her own expressions. She knew the smile she gave colleagues in lifts and distant relatives at weddings. She knew the thin, brave smile she had worn beside her mother’s hospital bed.

This was different.

The woman in the photograph looked completely, serenely happy.

Mara called in sick.

She spent the morning searching online for Aldering.

There had once been a village by that name in Suffolk, she discovered, though most of it had been demolished in the 1960s to make way for a reservoir. The railway station had closed several years before that.

She found one photograph.

A black-and-white image from 1954.

A narrow platform. A bench. A signal box.

And the sign.

ALDERING

Mara closed the laptop.

The next morning, the photograph changed again.

Mara was perhaps thirty.

There were now five children.

They were standing beside the sea.

She began photographing the photograph with her phone.

Every morning she recorded its new image.

The pictures moved through a life Mara had never lived.

A life that seemed increasingly more real than her own.

Every morning she woke before dawn and waited.

At 6:17 precisely, something happened to the photograph.

There was no flash.

No movement.

One moment the old image existed.

Then another had replaced it.

Years passed inside a fraction of a second.

On the ninth morning, Mara was seventy.

She and the man were sitting on a bench beneath a huge cedar tree.

Their hands were intertwined.

Neither was looking at the camera.

They were looking at one another.

On the back:

Fifty years today.

Mara cried.

She sat alone at the kitchen table in her dead mother’s house and cried for a marriage she had never had with a man she had never met.

For children who did not exist.

For Christmas mornings that belonged to another woman with her face.

For fifty years contained inside a square of ageing plastic.

Eventually, anger replaced grief.

“Why are you showing me this?”

She threw the photograph across the room.

It slid beneath the refrigerator.

Mara left it there.

At eleven that morning she went into town.

Rain had polished the pavements black.

She wandered without purpose through shops and cafés, buying nothing.

Outside the station, someone collided with her.

“Sorry.”

A man caught her elbow.

Mara looked up.

For one impossible second the world became perfectly silent.

He was the man in the photographs.

“You all right?”

Mara could not speak.

He smiled uncertainly.

“Sorry again.”

Then he walked away.

Mara watched him cross the road.

Every instinct screamed at her to follow.

Instead she remained exactly where she was.

The man disappeared into the crowd.

She ran home.

Dropped to her knees beside the refrigerator.

Reached underneath.

Her fingers found the Polaroid.

She pulled it out.

The picture had changed.

Mara was perhaps seventy-five.

She stood alone beside the cedar tree.

There was no man.

On the back, in her handwriting:

You let him go.

“No.”

That evening Mara found herself thinking about the first image.

The station.

Aldering.

She opened the drawer.

The picture had not changed.

She searched again for the abandoned village.

Most of Aldering had vanished beneath the reservoir.

But the railway station building had survived.

Converted into a private house.

There was an image on an estate agent’s archived page.

Mara leaned towards the screen.

The platform remained.

So did the old station sign, restored as decoration.

It was the place from the photograph.

The following morning Mara drove there.

The journey took just over two hours.

Aldering station stood at the end of a narrow lane fringed with hawthorn.

The rails were gone, replaced by grass.

The platform remained.

So did the sign.

Mara stepped out of the car.

The world felt unnaturally still.

Someone was standing on the platform.

A man in a navy coat, with blond hair.

He turned when he heard her approaching.

They stared at one another.

He hesitated.

Then reached into his coat.

He removed something.

A Polaroid.

Mara stared.

“What is that?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

She approached.

His photograph showed the same railway platform.

The same moment.

Mara and the stranger standing together, laughing.

Except his photograph was slightly different.

The picture had been taken perhaps one second later.

In his, Mara was looking directly at him.

“I found it this morning,” he said.

“What’s your name?” she whispered.

“Daniel.”

She showed him her photograph.

For several moments neither spoke.

Finally Daniel said, “Mine belonged to my father.”

“Mine was my mother’s.”

“Did they know each other?”

“I don’t know.”

They stood on the dead railway platform while wind moved through the grass.

Daniel turned his photograph over.

There was handwriting on the back.

Mara recognised it instantly.

Her mother’s.

She took it from him.

The message contained only one sentence.

Some people need more than one chance.