With difficulty Turner turned full circle in the loft, trying not to exacerbate his trapped nerve, shuffled back to the entrance and peered down. His mother squinted up at him from the bottom of the ladder. Her expression was suspicious.

"Just trying to sort things out a bit, create more space, so I can perhaps move up some of your stuff up here out of the living room."

"But I don't want my stuff moved out of the living room. You're always moving my stuff around. I don't want it."

"Mother," Turner explained with as much patience as he could muster. "We have to clear some space. Else you'll trip over something and then what might happen? Eh?"

His mother grunted, shook her head, and went slowly back down the stairs, aided by her walking stick, returning to the roar of the television in the living room. He sighed. Everything he did for her was with the best of intentions. But she always made him feel guilty in some obscure way, as though she blamed him for something.

Ah well. You had to make allowances at her age. Turner returned with relief to his task of trying to impose some order on the chaos in the loft. As a boy he had had a Hornby trainset up there which had kept him occupied for most of his teenage years. But after a less than brilliant career at university he had felt Africa calling and departed to do voluntary work. He returned after a few years when his father died, reasoning that as her only child he ought to come back and keep an eye on his mother. But when he finally climbed the stairs to the loft again, the trainset was gone, given away to the nephew of a woman his mother had been befriended by at the church. She said. "You're a grown man. I thought you wouldn't want it anymore."

Turner suffered from trapped nerves in his back which gave him pains in his legs. He found it rather awkward in the loft, hitting his head a couple of times. His pullover became covered in dust; cobwebs lodged in his hair. At some point during the afternoon he discovered the films, reels and reels of old Super 8, at the bottom of a pile of boxes. He didn't remember seeing any home movies as a child. Unfortunately there wasn't an old projector in the box as well. Never fear. It was possible to transfer such films on to a modern format. It would give his mother a nice surprise to see them again. Get him back in her good books, at least for a while.

"I'll see you when I see you, I suppose," she said, as she always did

when he left just after teatime.

"I'll be round again next Saturday afternoon as usual," he always replied.

He had smuggled the films out with the bin bags of rubbish he had collected and would take to the council tip the next morning.

"It's your birthday soon, isn't it," he called out, getting into his car. "I'll have a surprise for you."

She shook her head vigorously."I don't like surprises."

Turner just smiled and nodded and waved goodbye.

The film spools had been unmarked, and consequently transferred on to DVDs - at not inconsiderable expense - in no chronological order. It had taken more than a month to get them back from the local photographic shop. After returning home from the monthly meeting of the canal preservation society, of which he was a keen member even though he was unaccountably afraid of water, Turner settled down to watch the first one, full of anticipation. He was sure his parents had never shown any of them to him as a child. Perhaps the projector had broken down, and they had meant to replace it, and had stored the films in the loft for a rainy day. He was disappointed at first to find large parts of the sequence were blank or partly obscured by flames licking at the edges where the film had obviously deteriorated. But there were snatches, fragments of clarity. The sky and sea seemed impossibly blue, and the faces either very white or deeply tanned. Suddenly his father appeared on the beach, a young, slim, surprisingly handsome man, laughing, gesticulating with a child's spade, mouthing silently at the camera. In those days his parents would have thought such technology was wonderful, even though you could not hear anything. Just like the old silent movies.

"The thing is," he explained to Clare, a former girlfriend at the office who he had lunch with every few weeks, "nothing I do for her is ever quite right. Do you know what I mean? I suppose all mothers are the same," he concluded.

"I get on very well with my mother," Clare said briskly. She had a kind of pull your socks up, get a grip man, attitude towards him that Turner found quite bracing, in small doses. She added: "The trouble is, you don't love her. You do it all out of a sense of duty."

Clare looked at him with affection and exasperation. Fifteen years ago she might have made something of him, but he had shied away at the vital moment. It was too late now. She knew that. Too late to extricate him from this tangled relationship with his mother.

Between mouthfuls of sausage and mash Turner told her about the films, including a snatch of his dad trying to teach him to swim in the sea that made him cringe. He remembered the taste of the salt water in his mouth as if it was yesterday. But worse was the smell of chlorine at the local swimming baths, which had used to give him nightmares. He could not bear to have his head under water. The very thought made him shudder. Clare was quite used to him confessing his weaknesses to her. Turner was good at his job but had never sought promotion; both he and she knew he could never be a manager.

"I've only had a chance to watch one DVD so far. Of course, there are some things I can't remember for the life of me. My mother is holding a baby. They've even got me in the act, touching its finger. I can't think who the baby might be. Maybe my cousin Frank in Scarborough. Lots of family there. The thing is, I don't remember her ever looking so happy."

As they were walking back to the office Clare asked him:

"Why did you say you were afraid of water?"

"I didn't like having my head under."

"Have you ever tried wearing goggles?"

Turner arrived at his mother's house bearing gifts; a cheap but simple to use DVD player, four discs containing the home movies he had found in the loft, although he had only managed to watch one, a birthday cake, matches and candles. He struggled out of the car with his burdens, almost tripping over and falling on the pavement. He remembered his family home as handsome, in a quiet, tree-lined street, a sensible distance from the city centre. A good selection of neighbours, who were friendly but lived their own lives; even the postman and milkman had been old friends. Now he tried to keep his mother's front garden tidy, but many others were overgrown, or littered with building materials, skips, wheelie bins. Beyond them the paving flags were jagged and uneven; parked cars churned up the grass verges.

But at least their house still smelled of Vick's Vapour Rub and pickled onions, as it always had done.

His mother blew out her candles. Turner made her a cup of tea and cut her a slice of birthday cake. His mother unwrapped the parcel containing the DVD player suspiciously.

"What do I want one of these for?"

"You know those films that come free with the Daily Mail? Well, now you'll be able to watch them. You're always saying there's nothing to watch on the telly."

"I won't be able to work it."

Turner gave his mother a short tutorial in operating the DVD. She proved surprisingly adept with it.

"And now, what's this?" she said in a slightly better mood, turning to the other parcel.

Turner could hardly contain his excitement. "It's the surprise I was telling you about. It's why I got you the DVD player."

His mother unwrapped the four DVDs.

"Films for you to watch. Shall we put the first one on?"

"If you like. What is it? One of those films from the Daily Mail?"

"Just wait. You'll see."

Turner inserted the DVD and then watched his mother's face as it began to play. The expressions he had expected to see were shock, recognition, pleasure. Instead, his mother appeared to have been struck dumb.

It was one Turner had not watched in advance. The film flickered at first, the usual orange flashes, flames at the edges. Then the picture cleared. He saw a young boy who was recognisably himself, dressed in a garishly patterned short-sleeved shirt, and shorts of an equally startling hue. He was waving at the camera, showing off in a way Turner could never remember himself doing. The boy was relaxed and happy, running up to kick a ball. The camera panned away from him, to a smaller, blond-haired boy staggering about, as if he had just learned to walk. He was wearing exactly the same clothes; same colour garish shirt, same colour bizarre shorts. And even odder, he bore facial similarities to Turner. Anyone would have thought they were brothers.

Thunderstruck, Turner looked at his mother. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

"Turn it off," she said brokenly. "Turn it off. Please, son."

Turner thought of everything that had happened to him in his childhood, and tried to re-interpret it.

"I used to make all your clothes," she said. "For both of you. We didn't have much money. You used to pretend you were in the same football team."

Turner wanted to embrace her, but could not. Not until she had told him what had happened.

"What was his name?"

His mother dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief.

Turner racked his brain for any memory of this. Impossibly-blue sky. Deep blue sea. Flames licking at the edges of the film. The screen going blank. A terror of water that had stayed with him for the rest of his life.

"His little body was found further down the coast five days later. You were meant to be looking after him!" she cried.

Turner shook his head

"You've always blamed me, haven't you? Deep down."

"I couldn't help it, son," she cried. "I couldn't help it. I knew it was wrong. But I am a mother, after all."

A proud mother with her new baby. All the family at the christening.

"You asked about Mark for a while, then you seemed to forget him. We moved house, to another town where no one knew us. The family were told you must never know. But I thought you would find out one day. I never thought you would find out like this."

"He seemed to be always smiling. I think he would have grown up quite different from you."

"Drink some tea, mum," he said.

"I can't talk about this any more today."

His father had always tried to encourage him, he remembered. But the school reports had never seemed to give his mother as much pleasure as he thought they would. He wanted to shout at her, to rage at her. An old lady wiping her glasses, staring into the distance.

After tea Turner offered to stay the night, but wasn't surprised or particularly hurt when she rejected the offer. He was relieved. He thought he might want to go out and get drunk, for the first time in years.

He said goodbye on the doorstep as usual, almost as if nothing had happened. He looked at his family home. Perhaps the paintwork had never been as spick and span as he remembered; maybe it had always been a little shabby.

"I'll see you when I see you, I suppose," she said. Her voice softened. "You've always been a good boy to me. I was always proud of you, you know. When you got to university, when you went to Africa. I just wasn't very good at saying it."

He had waited all his life for her to say such things. He nodded. "I'll be round on Saturday afternoon as usual," he replied.

"Silent Movie" by Greg Freeman