Charles flips the lights on, and the apartment sprawls. It’s huge. For real, you could probably fit our flat four or five times inside it. Correction: Mia’s flat.

Even though it’s big, it feels…

Cramped.

And the air is like the air outside. Hot, damp, pushing down, down, down on us, from all directions.

Charles strolls through the space slow, eagerly sucking every minute detail of the place in through his eyes.

Open plan, sleek, shiny. The kind of place where the owner has no taste and no ideas and chucks wads of money at an interior designer to get them to deck it out for them. All the bells and whistles.

Charles walks up to the white sofa, one of those L-shaped ones, and lowers himself onto it. He puts his feet up on the matching footstool. He tilts his head back. His eyes are closed.

This is how my father used to look when he got back home from work.

It was usually late, around 9 or 10 pm. He’d come into the living room where I was watching a film on TV. Demolition Man. Or Terminator 2, maybe. My mother didn’t really care what I watched, as long as I’d done my extra homework for the day. Nothing was more important than homework and full marks.

Man, that bit when Arnie gets lowered into the molten hot metal. That bit still haunts me.

My dad would drop his briefcase, loosen his tie, place his hand on the back of my neck for a couple seconds. Then he’d flop down next to me. Head back, breathing out slow, like he’d spent the whole day sucking in toxic fumes, holding it deep in his lungs, and was now exhaling it all out.

Who is this stranger? I thought. Drifting his way through life with a wife and a kid he only really saw at the weekends. Sometimes, barely even then.

I remember the sickly-sweet smell of his Brylcreem, left behind in the greasy dent of the sofa cushion next to my head, when he finally got up and plodded up the stairs to bed. This was when I was doing GCSEs.

Maybe that’s when a few cells started growing weird in his body.

Charles gets up.

He says, Time to work.

He says, Here’s your brief: I want you to shoot everything you see in this apartment – as if you were documenting it for a story.

I don’t have my light meter or tripod on me, but using Sunny 16, I figure what with the abundance of light sources in here, I can get away with an aperture of 8, at 1/200th of a second. No blurry pictures.

I raise the camera to my face, and shoot.

I shoot the living room.

I shoot the roof garden.

I shoot the kitchen.

I shoot the dining area.

I shoot the cinema room.

I shoot the bathroom.

I shoot the five bedrooms and their en-suites.

I shoot a bunch of trophies in a cabinet.

In the master bedroom, Charles walks over to a chest of drawers and opens one up.

His fingers pick through the contents, and out comes some women’s underwear.

Black, lacy, the kind bought from an expensive lingerie place. The kind bought to excite.

Then, what he does is he fishes out a matching bra and stockings, laying them all on the bed like he’s leaving them out for someone to put on later.

At this point, I’m thinking this is kind of weird behaviour. I’m thinking, is he gonna strip off and put those panties on?

I’m thinking, do I even care?

To tell the truth, I’m excited by it. I can’t even remember when I last felt like this, and it feels… good.

Like the last year I’ve been a brain-dead zombie, shuffling my way around an abandoned shopping centre.

But now – now I’m alive.

All I do, is I ask, Do you want to be in the shot?

No, says Charles. He says, Make sure you get a close-up of the lingerie.

I raise the camera to my face, and I shoot.

N

INE

In this room, the light is red and low.

The vinegar smell of the stop bath bitch slaps my brain awake, on account of it being 2 am and I’m practically falling asleep.

In the tray in front of me, submerged under chemicals, I’m looking at a picture I shot earlier tonight.

The other thirty-five images from the roll are pegged to a line to drip dry – all of them shots of the apartment me and Charles Hu were just at.

This one in the tray, though. It’s the last frame from the roll – a picture of Charles.

I know he told me he didn’t want to be photographed. But this picture I took, he’s got his arms crossed over his chest, staring at something on the wall.

If I remember right, it was a picture of this glamorous-looking couple. An Asian man, a white woman. They were at some sort of red-carpet event. A tuxedo and black tie for him, a sparkly gown for her. For sure they must be some kind of Taiwanese ‘It-couple’. Around the shoulders of the man, the arm of another, older man, a slight distance away, face beaming.

The weird thing about this picture of Charles I’ve developed though, is how he looks. In person, he’s all shot cuffs, easy smiles and sunbeams shooting out of his face.

In this photo of him, he’s unrecognizable. His face is all tight. You can see his jaw busting out of his skin because he’s clenching his teeth so hard. His eyes are all narrow. Dead eyes. And even though his clothes are sharp, the way he’s standing makes them look like they don’t fit right, like they’re too big for him, like he bought them off the rail instead of getting them tailored on Savile Row.