Wolves by Simon Ings

trouble at school. One of his community service clients had phoned up to complain.
    In an effort to stem his voyeurism, the school had told his mother. Now Michel was without a camera and lived with the constant threat of having his photographs discovered. ‘I’ve got them hidden.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘I’ll show you sometime. They’re wrapped in plastic. They should be all right.’
    ‘I mean, it’s not as if you were taking photographs of them in the bath or anything.’ I wanted to show willing, to be outraged on his behalf.
    ‘I did, once or twice.’
    ‘For fuck’s sake, Michel.’
    ‘I’m joking,’ he said.
    Now Michel spent his Thursday afternoons helping out the school caretaker. Of course it was impossible for the school to impound every photograph he had taken. He still had his collection, buried away: ancient faces caught unawares, flesh rilled against the bone, and how the weight of life and time bore down on every dusty room.
    I led him round by a crumbling brick path to the conservatory. Sunlight bleared over panels of dusty glass, framed in dark green wood. When the hotel had regular guests, this had been our breakfast room. Now it was Dad’s workshop. The heating was turned off. The pipe that ran around the circumference of the room was no longer the scalding-hot hazard it had been. (We’d lived in terror of a guest’s child one day getting a hand stuck behind it.) Now Dad was getting by with a bottled gas heater that made an obscene lapping sound whenever the bottle started to empty. Three cement stairs led to the house proper. Dad’s vests were hung up on pegs beside the door. A black padded chair sat in the middle of the room. A medical examination lamp leant over the chair, perching on shiny tripod feet. A workbench ran along the long wall.
    The floor was strewn with explicit magazines. Dad had been cutting pictures out with scissors and sticking them on pieces of A4 card. A plastic bulb of paper glue had been left to harden in the sunlight.
    ‘I should explain.’
    ‘This’ll be interesting.’
    ‘They’re for our guests to stick up over their beds.’
    ‘Uh-huh.’
    Erotics were a part of the visual world Dad worked to restore. The trouble is, below a certain resolution, the most explicit image loses its erotic charge. Dad’s vests offered his soldier-patients, at best, a twenty-by-twenty pixel field of view. ‘Then there’s the edge detection problem.’
    ‘Keep going. You’re funny.’
    ‘One serviceman complained that Dad kept showing him pricks.’
    ‘You really think you can talk your way out of this?’
    ‘Oh, what’s the use?’ I threw up my hands. ‘We’re a family of pornographers. Dad straps schoolgirls to his desk and I violate them with this.’ I waved an ophthalmoscope around.
    Dad’s researches into prosthetic vision – a spin-off from his constant tinkering – had brought him into contact with a loose, international network of hobbyists and junior researchers – men and women he met only as stuttering ghosts on his computer screen. For them, or for the brand they represented, he stitched fabric and webbing and copper lugs into visual vests for blinded servicemen.
    Michel and I tooled around with Dad’s kit. Michel took off his shirt and put a vest on, and a pair of black goggles to hide the world from his eyes. The camera mounted on the side of his goggles plugged into the vest. ‘It needs turning on . . . There.’ I reached to touch the switch. It was hidden by a curl of hair over his ear. ‘Okay?’ I drew away, fingers tracing his temple. I went to the switch by the door and turned off the conservatory light. It was just about dark enough, a summer evening. The setting sun had fallen behind a line of trees. There was a torch in Dad’s desk drawer. I swung it around a few times in front of Michel’s goggles.
    ‘I can’t make any sense of this,’ he complained, his vest chattering, his eyes hidden behind the big, blacked out lenses of his