Where the Light Falls (15 page)

‘I'll give you my number,' he said. ‘I'd appreciate it if you called me, when you feel ready.' He didn't actually want to leave it up to her, but what choice did he have?

He handed her a piece of paper with his phone number on it and watched the door swing shut. Behind him the foyer had emptied.

19

That evening, he emailed the images to the gallery in London as thumbnails, including the photos of Phoebe. He hadn't heard anything from Pippa and it had been more than a week. He hesitated before he pressed send, wondering if he should call Pippa just to make sure she had no objection, but part of him didn't want to give her the opportunity to say no.

The gallery called late that night, while he was asleep.

‘It's Marten Smythe here,' a clipped voice said when he answered the phone.

‘Sorry?' He sat up in bed, his thoughts rushing back towards consciousness.

‘Marten Smythe, London Six,' the voice said.

‘Oh yes. I'm in Australia—it's late here. Could you
give me a few moments?'

‘Oh, you're back in Australia, are you? Of course, take your time.'

He walked to the kitchen with the phone and filled the upturned glass on the sink with water. Through the kitchen window he saw the moon glowing through a thin layer of cloud as though behind silk, light bleeding out around it. He picked up the phone again.

‘I'm sorry,' he said, still feeling foggy from sleep.

‘That's quite all right. I was just calling to talk about your photos.'

He worried suddenly that Marten was calling to say the images weren't what he wanted. That he was calling off the exhibition and everything Andrew had been working towards would be for nothing.

Instead, Marten said, ‘We're really excited about this work. We'd like to have the prints ready as soon as we can. Could you send the high-resolution images over on a USB stick? By courier, if you could.'

It took him a moment to readjust himself to this development and there was a sudden jerk of feeling, a leap from one place to another.

‘Oh right, wow. Yes, of course.'

‘Splendid. Also, the girl with the face . . .'
The girl with the face
. He wanted to tell this man that her name was Phoebe and that she was a lovely, complicated girl. That she was more than her face. Marten continued, ‘It's almost excruciating to look at, the level of detail,
it almost makes me want to look away. I have a feeling about it. It's unique. I think it will sell well. The photograph of the young boy with his eyes closed, too. I think you called it
Smiling Alone
. Very striking. Really, in my opinion this is your most sophisticated body of work yet.'

He didn't like to be reminded of the fact that art was a business and that, like any other business, in the end it turned on money. These conversations with gallery owners and curators stripped him of his naive belief that art was about art. And now he was acutely aware of how he was involving Phoebe in this fickle world of his. He thought of the images of Phoebe and started to worry that somehow they were too honest. They took advantage of her openness and maybe they were too exposing to be shown. Maybe if he exhibited those images, he would be putting on display a personal transaction that had taken place between him and Phoebe; an interaction that was essentially private and should not be shown to the world.

In the morning, he put the exhibition photographs on a USB stick but saved the photographs of Phoebe on a separate stick. He sent the first lot of photos, but the photographs of Phoebe he kept. He put them in a drawer in his apartment. He would take a few more days to think it over.

•

The next day he went back to his mother's house to collect some clothes he'd left there. It was just after one in the afternoon and he had chosen a time when he assumed his mother would be at work and he could slip in and out without seeing her. He didn't want to risk her trying to talk to him again about his father. He had gone too long without speaking about it and now his only natural response to it was silence.

But his mother walked in from a shift at the hospital in her black slacks and white blouse just as he was about to leave.

Since she'd brought up the matter of his father's death, they hadn't spoken properly. When he had seen her, the words that passed between them were reduced to what was necessary, they were quick and brief and spoken with no feeling.

She made herself a cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table. He sat down opposite her.

‘I thought you were supposed to be heading back last weekend?' his mother said, gently.

‘I was,' he said. He wasn't sure how much he wanted to share with his mother now. He sighed, trying to keep his lingering anger hidden from her. ‘But there was a coronial inquiry into Kirsten's death. It finished on Wednesday. I stayed for that.'

His mother looked up, eager for whatever words he was prepared to share with her. She might have accepted anything from him just then, even an insult.

‘She took some pills before she drowned.' He heard the hardness in his voice, and the callousness in those words as he spoke them was aimed at her.

He watched the words impact her.

‘Oh, Andrew. What happened?'

‘I still don't know exactly. The coroner hasn't handed down her findings.'

‘God, that's terrible,' she said. She went quiet, moving to the kitchen without saying anything more. He watched her closely in order to observe the effect his words had had on her.

Darkness passed across her face. ‘She was always so . . .' His mother hesitated. ‘She always seemed so troubled.' She blew on her tea and continued before he could answer her. ‘I could always see that about her—that she was too fragile for the world. Everything always seemed to affect her very deeply.' His mother's words were faint. She looked out into the yard without saying any more, but he could tell that Kirsten was still lodged in her thoughts. There was something about Kirsten that always seemed to linger, a mystery, and he understood by looking at his mother now that he wasn't the only one who had sensed it.

•

That night, he had just stepped out of the shower when his telephone rang.

‘Hello?'

‘It's Renee Rothwell.'

‘Oh, hello,' he said, realising abruptly he was speaking with Kirsten's mother.

‘My husband and I would like to invite you to have morning tea with us. Tomorrow if that would suit you?'

Morning tea
sounded very formal.

‘Okay, that suits me.' He spoke the words too quickly and tried to settle his own feeling of urgency.

‘Why don't we say eleven, then?'

‘Great.'

She gave him her address and directions from the train station at Gordon. He had the feeling of having been summoned and that night, he waited and paced and ate and slept like someone waiting to receive bad news.

20

On the way to Renee's house on the train, he realised that he should have brought something with him. Something to offer them. If he had thought about it earlier, he could have bought something from the sourdough bakery near his apartment. He thought of the pastel-coloured macarons in the glass cabinet, but they were too bright, playful. Or maybe he should have brought flowers, but he wasn't sure how he would have decided on the right colour.

The metal struts slid across the window beside him as he passed over the Harbour Bridge. The harbour was a broken blue, the uninviting darkness of very deep water.

Exiting the station at Gordon, he saw a small bakery. Inside it was warm and smelt of yeast and sultanas. The
bread was stacked on the shelves, loaves and loaves of it, the dimensions exact, pushed from the same mould, white, fluffy and lacking in nourishment.

He missed the German bread he'd grown used to in Berlin, heavy and substantial. He bought a fruit loaf that felt soft when he picked it up and light as he carried it from the shop. Further down the street, he slowed down. He was going to speak to these people about their dead daughter and what he had to offer them was a flimsy loaf of bread. He stopped and packed it into his backpack so it would be hidden.

The noise from the highway receded behind the lines of houses and he found himself on a quiet street. The wind jostled the trees around him, hostile. A crow flew past, its cry desolate and forlorn, three long pleas with no variation in tone.

There was nothing remarkable or grand about these houses. They were the sorts of red-brick dwellings that people lived in everywhere, but here, in these suburbs, they were spacious and well cared for—they said something about the wealth of the people who lived in them. They weren't like the houses in Leichhardt that had been added to and built on and threatened to burst from their lawns. They were houses that remained confined to the seams that contained them. In these driveways were new cars of moderate tones, the types of cars that slipped through the world and attracted no dirt. In the gardens were hedges and topiary plants and in their windows, the
curtains were drawn. The houses he passed were utterly still; they were houses from which all the children had gone.

When he reached Kirsten's old house, there was a poinciana tree in the front lawn that had shed its leaves and its trunk was as scaly and smooth as a reptile. The branches were bare and, against the red bricks behind it, the frame looked ghostly. It stood in the yard obstructing the front lawn and it took him a moment to notice the path around it.

‘Good morning,' Renee said when she opened the door.

The first thing he noticed was that she was wearing a knee-length navy skirt and stockings and he wondered what type of person dressed so formally on a Saturday in their own home. He walked in behind her and down a hall lined with photographs hung along the picture rail. It was as though these photographs constituted proof of what these people had accomplished with their lives, documentary evidence of a useful and productive existence. They were photos that asked no questions.

There was a photograph of a girl with dark hair, a toddler, sitting in the haphazard way of a child who hasn't learnt to walk and is yet to find her centre of gravity. She was sitting on the edge of a roundabout with her feet dragging in the gravel. The girl's nose scrunched up tightly and her hair was thin and wispy; there was barely enough to be pulled together in a ponytail. She
was wearing pink and the smile on her face was one that had never known sadness.

The young girl might have been Kirsten, it looked like her, but it might also have been her sister, who he had never met. He lingered there, but ahead of him Renee had disappeared into a room so he followed her. He didn't ask about the picture; it felt somehow impolite to ask about a dead woman in a photograph.

Inside, the furnishings were new. He had assumed that people like this, older people whose children had left home and whose careers would soon be ending, would hold on to the things they had collected over the years, that their furniture would accumulate in their house as they aged. But it was new and there was too much of it. It was placed too closely together and everywhere it looked to be in the way.

For a moment, he was distracted by the clutter and didn't see Kirsten's stepfather standing there. He was behind the couch so that Andrew could only see him from above the waist, like a puppet on stage.

‘Saul,' he said, holding out his hand for Andrew to shake.

His beard had turned completely white since they'd last met, but if he had any recollection of Andrew he didn't show it as he leant forward over the lounge and shook his hand. His hands were large and forceful like a boxer's. He wondered whether Renee had explained to her husband exactly who he was and why he was here.

On the coffee table Italian biscuits were arranged on a white plate, the china so fine the light passed through it. They were delicate biscuits laid out like ornaments. Some of them were shaped like horseshoes, covered with flaked almonds, others were pistachio green. He thought of the fruit loaf in the bag that he put at his feet when he sat down, glad now it remained hidden and that he wouldn't have to embarrass himself by offering it to Renee.

‘Can I offer you some tea or coffee?' she asked.

‘I'd love a tea,' he said.

She nodded and left for the kitchen and her husband stayed standing in the room. His features looked oversized, his nose and ears too large for his face; ageing had made his skin retreat from his features. His eyes were glassy, like the stuffed head of an animal on a wall. Those creatures had the same look about them as Kirsten's stepfather, of not quite believing where they had found themselves.

‘What is it you do with yourself?'

‘I'm a photographer.'

‘Oh yeah? I suppose you work for a newspaper or a magazine?'

‘Well, no.' He still found it hard to explain his occupation to other people. ‘My photographs are more like portraits.'

‘I see. I'm a salesperson myself. I own an office supply business.' He coughed on the back of his hand.

Renee walked in with a tray on which was a delicate teapot the colour of crushed bones. She put it down on the table in front of her, making the movement awkwardly, without bending her knees.

She poured tea then sat on the lounge opposite him, crossing one leg over the other and tugging her skirt over her knees with her fingers. ‘Are you working at the moment?' she asked.

‘I, well, I'm preparing for an exhibition that's opening next month.' A crease of anxiety unfolded inside him as he thought of the photographs of Phoebe he still hadn't sent to the gallery. What he was doing would threaten the professional reputation it had taken him years to build.

Renee sat in the corner of the lounge, holding one hand inside the other as though she'd been taught somewhere the proper way of sitting and had practised the pose until it became her habit.

‘Oh, I see,' she said softly, fiddling with the cross on her necklace.