“—no refunds, love, it says so on the sign.”
Denise hadn’t asked for one. She’d only picked the photo up to look at it properly, out of the plastic sleeve, and the woman behind the trestle table had said it anyway, quick, like she’d said it a hundred times that morning and would say it a hundred more before the field emptied.
The photo was of Denise. She didn’t remember anyone taking it. She was standing at this exact stall, in this exact anorak, her hand halfway to a shoebox of loose prints, and behind her, past the hatchback boots and the trestle legs, was the gap between the burger van and the portable toilets where nobody ever stood because the ground there was mud.
Someone was standing there. Small in the frame. Not looking at the camera.
“Fifty pence,” the woman said.
Denise paid it. Asking who had taken it, or when, or why there was a shoebox of nothing but strangers browsing a stall that sold pictures of themselves browsing, seemed like more trouble than it was worth. She put the photo in her coat pocket and went to find teacups. There was a good set going for two pound fifty near the wellington van, and she thought about that instead, most of the way home.
The second Sunday, Cattermole Field was half the size it had been. Three fewer vans, the rain from Friday still sitting in the ruts. Denise went straight to the trestle table without deciding to. The woman was there in the same fleece, same fingerless gloves, breath showing white.
“Fifty pence,” the woman said, before Denise had touched anything.
The photo she handed over was the same shot. Same anorak, same shoebox, same gap by the toilets. But the figure in the gap had a shape to it now. Shoulders. The suggestion of a head tipped slightly forward. It had taken one step out of the mud toward the row of boots.
Denise looked from the photo to the actual gap between the actual burger van and the actual toilets. Empty. Wind moving a crisp packet across it, end over end, until it caught on a tent peg and stopped.
“Is this today?” she said.
The woman was already serving someone else, an old man wanting fifty pence off a set of fish knives, and didn’t look round. “It says on the sign,” she said, to him or to Denise, it wasn’t clear which.
Denise put the second photo in her pocket with the first and didn’t take them out again until she was home, and even then only far enough to check they hadn’t changed. They hadn’t. Not sitting on her kitchen table under the light, next to the bill for the boiler she still hadn’t opened. It was only in the field that they seemed to move.
The third Sunday it rained properly, and only two vans turned up: one selling wellingtons, one the woman’s. Denise went to the table with her fifty pence already out, warm in her fist from being held the whole walk over.
The woman took it without looking up and passed the photo back face down, the way you’d hand someone bad news.
Denise turned it over in the rain, holding it under the flap of her hood so the wet wouldn’t get the surface. It was the same shot. Her anorak. The shoebox.
There was no gap by the toilets in it any more. The figure was standing directly behind her shoulder in the photograph, close enough that its breath would have fogged against her hood. Its face, tipped forward the way it always had been, was turned up now. Toward the camera. Toward her.
Denise did not look behind her.
She stood in the rain holding the photograph out at arm’s length, the paper going soft and translucent at the corners where the wet found it. She kept her eyes on the print. Behind her, close enough that she could hear the give of the mud under two feet that weren’t hers, nothing moved yet.