Chapter 1: The Memory Card

It all started on a Friday evening, I was just arriving home from work; rather later than I'd expected, because I was in the middle of some rather complicated negotiations on a bugger of a contract with some Yanks. They're several hours behind us, and now and again they tend to forget about the time difference; and that we have homes to go to.

"Dad, dad, it's gone wrong. I could only take seven photographs and it won't let me take anymore, what's wrong with it?" My tearful thirteen-year-old daughter Katie whined at me, before I'd even gotten out of my car.

It didn't take me long to discover that someone had removed the memory card from the digital camera she'd been trying to use for her school project. The camera was my old one, and I'd left it in the bureau for anyone in the family to use when they wanted to. Assuming that Jamie had removed the card, either because he wanted to wind his sister up, or —and much more likely for a randy little sixteen-year-old who was quite definitely a chip off the old block - because he - and his friends - had been taking some pictures that he/they'd prefer no one else to be aware of. I smiled to myself wondering just what kind of japes the little bugger was getting up to now.

Then I showed Katie where to find and how to put one of the other memory cards into the camera. Technology had moved on and - as is all too usual when you upgrade just about anything electronic nowadays - my new camera used a completely different type of memory card. I suspect that most people have been there at some time or the other, upgrade the main item and all of the little ancillary's that you've carefully accumulated over time are no longer compatible with state of the art technology.

Consequently, I'd been left with an assortment of different capacity cards that didn't fit my new camera; I'd put most (but not all, for nefarious reasons) of the spare memory cards for the old camera, in the bureau drawer with it.

I went further, we wrote my daughter's name on the chip and I told her it was her personal card and to keep the card safely away from her brother's grubby little hands. Panic over, I began to get the dinner going.

My wife Vivian was up country for the week, visiting her little sister again as she had just dropped her first sprog, so I was playing chef that week. Young Stacie had had a rough old time of it and Vivian had been (busy) running backwards and forwards to her house spending a few days with her every month for most of her pregnancy. Stacie who was ten years younger than Vivian — an afterthought their parents claimed, an accident I should really imagine — had had three miscarriages on the trot and during this fourth one she had been molly-coddled by the rest of her family in the hope that it would go full term. So Vivian and her other sister had been spending one week a month each with her since shortly after the conception.

The kids and I were old hands at surviving a week without Vivian by then and as usual we'd worked our way through all the different takeaways in town - well the near-by ones anyway - consequently that evening I was going to have to actually cook. Was I glad that Vivian was due back some time on the Sunday morning?

When the kids and I sat down that evening to risk our lives and eat my efforts, I tackled Jamie on the whereabouts of the other memory card. There should have been five altogether in that draw if you included one in the camera, but there was only three left in the bag.

"Haven't seen it dad. I borrow Frankie's camera nowadays when I want to take any pictures, it's far better than that old thing and it uses different cards anyway."

I wasn't too convinced about Jamie's statement, because I'd actually seen him with the old camera several times in the not too recent past. Although I had to admit that Frankie had been proudly showing off the new, all singing, all dancing technological wonder, that her father brought back from Japan for her some weeks previous. It must have cost her father a bleeding mint; the damned thing could do just about everything, but make coffee. I'd been quite jealous of the girl when she showed it off to me; it put my new camera really in the shade.

But then what would you expect? Frankie's parents had been divorced a few years back and like many divorced parents they were both vying for her affections. The little vixen was having a rare old time of it, playing the pair of them — and their respective new spouses - off against each other, the best she knew how. Between them, they had managed to turn the really nice little youngster that I remembered, into a spoilt little brat who could get just about anything that she desired, by playing one of them against the other.

Frankie by the way is actually Frances, the fifteen-year-old temptress that Jamie's whole life had revolved around for the previous year or so. Although she'd been living several doors away all her life. God, the girls didn't look like that when I was at school. Frankie was a great kid, if as I said, a little spoilt since her parents had broken up, and had really always been a bit of a tomboy. She'd grown out of the tomboy bit a little as she'd began to mature and was really turning the young men's heads, because she'd developed one hell of a figure - for a fifteen year old - and I foresaw Jamie having the same sort of problems that I had with his mother when we were young in a year or so's time. That's of course assuming that Frankie and Jamie's courtship - that they both adamantly denied was really happening - lasted that long.

Frankie and Jamie were still quite shy about admitting to Vivian and me that they spent as much time as I knew they did, snogging. Bit of a chip off the old block was my son Jamie! I had to wonder if my dad worried as much about what I was getting up to, as I did about what Jamie was doing; especially where Frankie was concerned.

The card was useless for my new camera, but it had cost me a fair old screw back when I'd bought it; prices have dropped a hell of a lot since then. But, yeah call me a "tight-arsed bastard" if you like, but all the money that was spent in our house had been earned with the sweat of my brow.

The other important point about the whole little charade concerning that missing memory card and in particular Jamie - the most likely candidate to have some knowledge as to its whereabouts - claiming that he hadn't taken the thing, was that it had set the "suspicious parent" part of my brain, off a thinking. Quite surprising what kind of scenarios my lecherous old brain conjured up.

Later that evening I had the bureau drawer out and emptied its contents onto the floor, but there was no sign of the card. Then I tackled the drawer below to see if it had been dropped over the back of the drawer somehow. Still no sign of it!

Jamie was one step ahead of me and promptly volunteered to turn the drawers in his own bedroom out, so that I could see that he didn't have the memory card tucked away anywhere.

I knew full well - because he'd volunteered - that should I search his room, the card was not going to be in there; well, nowhere that I would find it in a hurry anyway. So I told him that would not be necessary and the card wasn't that important; thanking him for his offer of assistance, I pretended to give up on the search. Well, I won't say I gave up completely; I just apparently gave up actively looking. If Jamie had the card tucked away somewhere I was wasting my time searching for it when he was aware that I was actually looking.

On the Sunday, Vivian came back from her sister's place full of stories of sleepless nights and shitty nappies. Yeah, just the kind of thing you need to hear about whilst eating Sunday dinner. Come on fellas we've all been there, at one time or another; well most of us have. Why is it that women seem to have much stronger stomachs than men when it comes to babies?

That first night back Vivian was all over me and demanded that we retired to bed early. Her excuse to the children was that she was tired from her journey, I saw no sign of that tiredness when we got into bed that evening and I could hardly keep my eyes open the following day in the office. We hadn't gone at it like that since the children had been born; or maybe since the last visit Vivian had made to her sister's place. She always seemed to come back from there feeling excessively randy.

Anyway, I'd almost forgotten about the memory card for a week or so; then one day when Katie had wanted to use the camera again, for some reason and she asked me what she should do with the card that was already in the camera. I told her to put it back in the camera bag with the other three.

"Four" Katie corrected me, "there's four of them in here now, dad!"

Not that I didn't believe that my daughter was capable of counting to four, but I broke off from watching the cricket on the TV and went over to check for myself. Sure enough there were four little plastic storage cases for the cards in the camera bag and each one had a memory card in it.

Curiouser and curiouser. I thought to myself, now I wonder what kind of pictures Jamie had taken that he hadn't wanted anyone to know about. And ... was there any chance that I could recover them?

"Mummy might have found the card in his room somewhere and put it back," Katie suggested, with a wicked smile on her face, "I told her that you were looking for it."

Possibly Katie was hoping to get her teasing elder brother into trouble. There was a possibility that she was right about her mother finding the card in his room, but I somehow doubted it; Jamie had been too eager for me to search his room that day.

But then again, had the little bugger been playing the infamous double bluff, and figured that I wouldn't bother to waste time searching? Figuring that if Jamie had been, the boy would have deleted any pictures from the card that he didn't want anyone else in the family to see. But then again, I thought, were they safely deleted from his cynical and cunning father's eyes? I knew I had to be careful how I reacted then. So I just shrugged my shoulders and told Katie not to worry about it; I must have miscounted when I was looking for the missing card the first time.

"Oh well they're all there now, so there's nothing to worry about, Kate." Then ostensibly I went back to watching the cricket on the TV.

But I'm going to admit that my mind wasn't really on the match. You can call me a dirty old man if you like, but I was curious about what kind of pictures Jamie had stored on that card that he hadn't wanted me to know about.

Come on, there's a bit of the voyeur in all of us, and even if Frankie was only just approaching her sixteenth birthday, she had the figure on her of an eighteen or twenty-year-old. And besides that, I had to ensure that my son wasn't breaking any age of consent laws, didn't I?

Well, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!

My chance to start the process of checking things out came later that same evening, after everyone else had gone to bed. I took all the memory cards into my study to find out which one of them I wanted - or rather needed - to examine closely. It was relatively easy to work out which one I was interested in, because it was the only one of the four that apparently had nothing on it at all.