Clues

At the very bottom of the box, beneath a jumble of Leeds United caps, was the signed photograph of Lee Chapman, which he had collected outside Elland Road in May 1992.

It had taken him a lot longer to find it than he had expected.

He had been distracted for hours by the array of school photographs which he had encountered on the way, re-familiarising himself with his sixteen year-old hair and his six year-old glasses, looking along the lines of classmates and wondering how he had lost touch with so many of them so soon, at the ones who had already died and the ones who had already married, at the ones whom he sometimes saw across the road at Holborn and at the ones whom he had not seen at all since he was eighteen.

He had been distracted by the mountains of old exercise books, by the volumes and volumes of exuberant but indecipherable drawings which he had produced between the ages of four and six, by the books full of strange stories which he had written, by the short clumpy sentences and inexplicable spelling mistakes which marked their ages, the errors like the rings of a tree trunk guiding him back to their birthdates.

He had been distracted by the fragments, by the UCAS forms and exam certificates and CD racks and cuddly toys and poems and songs, which were written on scraps of paper and stuffed underneath piles of socks and shin pads and boots, by the hats which he had bought when he was fourteen, by the posters of once beloved rock stars now long-forgotten, by programmes and fliers and badges and folders and tickets and boxes and letters and cards, all providing clues, all adding to and solving the mystery of the story of his life.