Before Everything — Her Şeyden Önce

Can bought the photograph for two pounds at a Sunday market in Edinburgh, from a box marked "Assorted Memories" that sat between a crate of vinyl records and a stall selling Peruvian hats. It showed a young couple on a pier, squinting into the sun and laughing at something outside the frame. The woman's hair was blowing across her face; the man had one hand raised, as if to catch his hat, which had already gone. On the back, in blue ink, someone had written: "Brighton, August 1974. Before everything." It was those last two words that made him buy it.

He was in the third year of a doctorate in sociology, which is to say that he was very good at finding meaning in things that did not necessarily contain any. Before everything what? A marriage, an illness, a quarrel that had never been mended? He propped the photograph against the lamp on his desk, where it watched him write, and within a week he had invented a whole life for the couple. He called them Alan and Ruth. He decided that they had separated soon after the picture was taken, and that one of them had kept the photograph for fifty years, until a careless relative cleared out a flat and sold it by the box. It was a sad story, and he liked it very much.

His flatmate, Isla, who studied history and had no patience for fiction, told him to stop romanticising strangers and actually find them. "Somebody wrote that note," she said. "Somebody is either alive and missing it, or dead and owed a little attention." So he began to investigate, with the thoroughness he had so far reserved for avoiding his thesis. He posted the picture on a local history forum for Brighton. He wrote to the market stallholder, who remembered nothing. He examined the paper under a magnifying glass and learned, from an enthusiastic man online, that it had been printed by a large commercial laboratory in London.

The forum produced several theories and one genuine lead. A retired schoolteacher in Hove wrote that she was almost certain she had seen the same couple before, "though I can't for the life of me think where." Two days later, a second person said the same, and then a third. Can began to feel uneasy, as though the couple were not quite as private as he had imagined.

The answer came, in the end, from his own mother. On a video call home to Bursa, he held the photograph up to the camera and told her the whole story, expecting sympathy. Instead, she began to laugh. "Canım, that couple used to hang in our hallway," she said. "Don't you remember? The frame came with them." He did not remember, but the moment she said it, he did: a gilt frame from a shop in the bazaar, and two laughing English strangers whom nobody had ever bothered to replace. Alan and Ruth, it turned out, were a stock photograph, the kind that are slipped into picture frames to show customers how happy their own families might look. Thousands of copies must have been printed and sent all over the world.

Can felt foolish for about a day. Then he picked up the photograph again and looked at the back. A stock photograph, he reasoned, does not usually come with a handwritten date, a place and two mysterious words in blue ink. The mystery had not been solved; it had merely changed shape. With Isla's help, he traced the photograph to an agency that had closed in the nineties, and from there to the name of the photographer, a man called Dennis Fairley. Dennis Fairley, astonishingly, was alive, ninety-one years old, and living in a care home in Brighton.

Can took the train south in April with the photograph in an envelope inside his coat. The old man received him in a sunny lounge that smelled of tea and furniture polish. When Can handed him the picture, Fairley held it very close to his face for a long time and then turned it over. "Well, well," he said quietly. "So one of them got away." The couple, he explained, were not models at all. The man was Dennis himself, at twenty-two, and the woman was June, whom he married that winter and lost to illness in 2009. He had set the camera on a timer to take a picture of the two of them on the day he proposed, and later, needing money, he had sold it to the agency for eleven pounds. "June was furious," he said, smiling. "She said I had sold our engagement to every frame shop in Europe."

"And the writing on the back?" Can asked. "Ah. That was June, too." For years, he said, whenever she saw their picture in a shop window, she would go in, buy the frame, take the photograph out and write those words on the back. Then she would give the frame back, with the photograph inside, to some charity shop or market stall. "She said that if strangers were going to look at us, they ought at least to know we were real." "Before everything," Can repeated. "Before what?" The old man looked out of the window towards the sea, where the pier still stood in the bright, windy afternoon. "Before the children, the mortgage, the arguments about the washing-up, the forty-odd years," he said. "Before all the good things, young man. She meant it kindly."

Can offered to leave the photograph with him, but Fairley shook his head and pressed it back into his hands. "June would want it to keep travelling," he said. On the train back to Edinburgh, Can took out a pen, hesitated, and added a line of his own beneath hers, in small careful letters: "Found in Edinburgh, returned to Brighton, still true."