Charlie’s Polaroid photos of Fern

Charlie’s Polaroid photos of Fern are both records of an intimate encounter and objects over which the couple do not share the same sense of control. Fern worries that a photograph will outlast the moment and expose her; Charlie treats the pictures as temporary and entertaining. When she later becomes angry with him, she tries to get them back, only to find that they have disappeared. Their uncertain fate gives the camera’s promise of permanence a troubled counterpoint: the images may fade, but the experience of having been photographed continues to matter to Fern.

The Session and Its Setting

The photos are taken in Charlie Treadaway’s bedroom after he has eaten the flapjack Fern Woolbright brought him. Fern would rather go to her own room, where the sheets are clean; Charlie’s bed is a mattress with a stained duvet and no sheets. He calls it “The Charlie nest.” The contrast between Fern’s preference and the untidy setting makes the session an encounter on Charlie’s terms, even as she participates in it.

Charlie is excited by his new birthday gift, a Polaroid camera, and loads a fresh cartridge of film. He announces, “Just ten shots,” then urges Fern to take her clothes off. The limited number of exposures gives the session a defined, countable shape: each picture uses one of only ten chances. The photos are not presented as formal portraits. They arise from a private sexual encounter in the bedroom, after Fern has already done life modelling, but the camera changes what that exposure means to her.

The session also has a performative dimension. Fern later recalls that Charlie made her touch herself in front of him and liked her to beg in her poshest Tillinghurst Girls’ School voice because it amused him. Her account links the photographs to a wider pattern of sexual behavior that she comes to resent, rather than isolating them as a harmless photographic game. The pictures preserve a moment in which Charlie directs the performance and enjoys it, while Fern later remembers the acts as things he made her do.

Permanence, Appearance, and Disagreement

In the morning, Fern asks Charlie to promise not to show the pictures to anyone. He does not understand why she is making a fuss, reasoning that she had already posed as a life model. Fern distinguishes the two experiences: “There’s just something more permanent about a photograph.” She adds that some of the images are “quite rude.” The concern is not simply that she has been seen; it is that a private image can remain available to be seen again.

Charlie answers by telling her that “Polaroids fade.” In his account, the images’ physical decline makes the promise unnecessary: eventually, he says, no one will really be able to see what she was doing with her legs. His reassurance does not meet Fern’s concern. He treats fading as protection, while she sees the camera as making an intimate act more durable than the act of modelling itself. The photos therefore expose a difference in how each understands the object: for Charlie, a novelty and a joke; for Fern, a record whose circulation she cannot control.

Fern’s attention to the photographs is also sharply bodily and specific. She frets that her pubic hair looks too red and stands out in some of them. Charlie responds with delight, calling it “the burning bush.” The exchange places his amusement against her self-consciousness: he treats a feature she worries will be conspicuous as a joke made possible by the new camera. The pictures draw Fern into judging how her body appears, while Charlie enjoys both the images and her reaction to them.

The Attempt to Recover the Pictures

Later, Fern gets home and finds Charlie gone. She has not yet given him her birthday present; she thinks he was too excited by the camera and let himself get carried away taking the pictures. Her anger extends beyond the photographs. She resents spending money on a boy who, in her view, plays her off against Fabiana, and imagines him wearing Fern’s necklace while with her. The photos become part of a larger realization that the encounter has left Fern feeling used and exposed.

Wanting the pictures back, Fern goes to Charlie’s locked bedroom. She persuades Rob to reveal where Charlie keeps the key: on top of the fuse box in the cupboard under the stairs, attached to a key ring with a miniature wooden Pinocchio. The object’s hiding place makes the search concrete, but obtaining entry does not restore Fern’s control over the images. She remembers that Charlie had spread them across his pillow in order of preference that morning; now they are nowhere to be found.

Fern begins pulling open drawers, and Rob stops her, saying she cannot rifle through Charlie’s personal things. Jill Miller, ashen-faced, agrees with Rob in the moment, although she later admits that she was firmly on Fern’s side. The disagreement leaves Fern’s effort suspended between her claim to retrieve intimate images of herself and the household’s insistence on respecting Charlie’s privacy. The evidence does not say where the Polaroids went or whether Fern ever recovers them. Their disappearance, rather than a resolved return, is the outcome of her search.

The Object’s Continuing Significance

The photos matter because the same material quality that makes them attractive to Charlie makes them troubling to Fern. They are tangible images produced by a limited cartridge, displayed on Charlie’s pillow, and potentially kept or shown after the encounter. His confidence that they will fade does not undo the fact that he has taken them; Fern’s request for secrecy registers the difference between posing for a life drawing and having a private image that can be retained.

The sequence also changes the camera’s meaning. At first, it is Charlie’s exciting birthday gift and the instrument of an encounter that Fern allows to continue. In the morning, it becomes the reason for a promise and a disagreement about how long a photograph lasts. After Charlie is gone, the missing pictures turn it into the focus of a search that strains Fern’s relations with Rob and Jill Miller. The images are never described again as recovered or displayed. Their unresolved whereabouts leave the central tension intact: Fern wants the permanence of the photograph acknowledged as a risk, while Charlie’s response minimizes that risk without giving her control over the photographs themselves.