Where the Light Falls (22 page)

‘Well, I hope I haven't disturbed you?' she said in the same breathy voice he had heard her use before. She paused. Everything about her was poised and timed for effect. She was a woman unable to live by impulse; she interacted with the world in a very calculated manner. ‘I wondered if you would have time for a coffee with me?' Her voice had a haltingness to it now; she knew she was asking him for a favour. ‘I could come to you. You needn't come back all the way back over here again, I mean.'

The overwhelming feeling he had was one of curiosity. What was it she thought he could offer her now?

‘Sure. What about tomorrow? Bar Coluzzi at eleven?'

•

He chose Bar Coluzzi because it was central and he thought it would be easy for her to find. But seeing her there before him, squatting on the small wooden stool so close to the footpath, he regretted his choice. She looked awkward with her legs bent up. He looked down the street and wondered if he should suggest they relocate.

‘Hello,' she said when she looked up and saw him standing there.

She was the sort of woman who was used to being in an environment that was familiar to her and he could tell that finding herself there in an unknown place caused her some unease. He sat opposite her. She wore pearls and pinched the strands between her fingers, pulling each one out and shaking it, as though they were making her hot. Her handbag was on the ground beside her and she wore tan stockings that seemed out of place—too demure for Darlinghurst.

‘You can put that on the table if you'd like. There's plenty of room,' he said, pointing to her handbag and moving the sugar sachets to one side of the small table between them. Behind them, a small white dog was straining on its leash.

‘No.' She shook her head. The skin under her eyes was dark, bluish, like the bruise left behind by a thumb. Their coffees arrived in small brown cups and she didn't speak straight away. She took small sips, holding her cup carefully, observing him over the rim.

‘Did it take you long to get here?' he asked. His feeling of responsibility for bringing her there clawed at him.

‘No. Not very long. I had to come into the city anyway.' Her voice sounded as though she was thinking of a faraway place. He wondered whether he should say something about the coroner's findings, if that was what she had come to discuss with him. He cleared his throat to speak.

Renee made a small movement, slipping her hand
into her handbag surreptitiously. She left her hand in her bag as she continued to speak. ‘I was on our computer last week. At home. It's my husband's computer, for work, and I don't use it very often. I found some photographs.' She paused, looking up, and he had the feeling that she wanted him to anticipate what she was about to say so that there would be no need for her to say it herself. He tipped forward on his seat.

‘I printed them out.' She pulled an envelope from her handbag that was large enough for building plans. She laid it on the table.

‘What are they of?' he asked. Their conversation seemed to be hovering on the border of strangeness.

‘Kirsten,' she said, holding her coffee over its saucer. ‘They're of Kirsten.' She spoke with her face down, her voice lowered, like some kind of admission.

‘Do you know who took the pictures?' He picked up his cup and sipped, but the coffee had already lost its heat.

‘I think she took them herself.'

‘Herself?' He still didn't understand why Renee thought he should see the photographs. It seemed there was some crucial piece of what was taking place before him that he didn't fully comprehend.

‘Yes,' she said and nodded towards them. ‘I made copies. They're for you.' She started sipping at her coffee more quickly. Hurrying. ‘I'd like you to have them.' She patted the envelope and withdrew her hand, as though from something hot.

He wanted to rip the envelope open immediately and see what was inside, convinced those photographs were the crucial detail that had eluded him, the thing that would help him to understand why Kirsten had acted as she did that day, why her life had taken such a wrong turn and whether it had anything to do with him. But the way they were sitting there, so carefully positioned on the small table between them, made him think he did not want to look at them in front of her. They sat together on their small stools, saying nothing and sighing, like two weary travellers crouched by a fire.

The silence grew between them and he wondered whether she was there because she wanted someone to talk to. He thought of his mother in the years after his father died, when he scuttled around the house quietly as a child, not daring to cry himself for fear of upsetting her. He thought of Renee's husband and how he had not looked like a man who was prepared to discuss things that were difficult. Maybe all Renee wanted was a witness to her grief. Someone, in other words, to cry to.

Before he could speak again she stood suddenly, the movement quick and awkward. She slipped her weight forward and stood with her feet apart, splayed like a weightlifter's.

‘Thank you for meeting me,' she said, looking down at him, and something about the way her voice changed made him think that she preferred this position, that she would rather he didn't look at her so directly.

‘Thank you for the photos.'

She nodded and he watched her walk to the car. It was dark and new. She was a woman who would always be driving cars that were new. She had arranged her life in order to make it that way.

•

In his apartment, he opened the envelope. The photographs had been taken at close range. Some of them didn't catch all of Kirsten's face and he thought she must have used a self-timer. They had been printed on paper and the colours were too strong, cartoonish, the ink bleeding out from the edges of her face. It was difficult to look at someone who was now dead depicted in such striking tones.

He laid them out on his kitchen table, standing over them as though he was examining a contact sheet, taking in the images one at a time, attempting to understand each photograph. He forced himself to look at her eyes first and then he moved to her mouth, the way she held it, looking for the words it was holding back. The differences between the photos were so pronounced he might have been looking at photographs of different people, except there was one thing that was consistent about each of the photos: Kirsten looked at the camera as though she wanted something from it. She wanted it to find the beauty in her.

He put the photographs back in the envelope Renee had given him; he felt that in giving these to her Renee was somehow reaching out to him. He thought of the last look she gave him, over her shoulder, a lingering look, and he knew she had something else to tell him, but it was something that was not easy for her to speak about.

26

The next day he decided to call Renee, to thank her politely for the photographs and ask her whether there was something else she wanted to say. He picked up his telephone on the kitchen table and scrolled through the recent calls to find her number. But he hesitated. He wasn't sure how to ask the question; he wasn't even sure he knew the right question. He held the phone in his hand, but didn't make the call. He watched the traffic move up New South Head Road; it was Sunday again and the cars were inching their way to the coast. He knew as he watched the cars he'd stayed here too long seeking answers; maybe there were no answers. He should book his flight to London.

Since he'd been back in Sydney he'd already visited all the galleries he used to see in Darlinghurst and Surry
Hills. He'd been to the museums, but he'd found nothing he could stand in front of and lose himself inside. What he would give now to see a Rembrandt. On his last visit to the Rijksmuseum, when he'd travelled to Amsterdam from Berlin for a group show, he had finally worked out what it was he loved about Rembrandt's paintings. It was his sparing use of light. He spent hours standing in front of paintings, perfectly still, allowing them to seep inside him.

The darkness of them, the paint thick, coating the canvas like molasses, the emphasis placed on people, on their expressions, the way they looked at one another and out of the frame. The artist had used light to illuminate people's faces and offer a glimpse into their thoughts. A painter he'd met at an artist's residency had said the reason Rembrandt's paintings had that darkness to them was because he primed his canvases with black paint. He wondered sometimes what Rembrandt would have made of a camera. He had the sensibility of a photographer, the same feeling for light.

•

In the afternoon he went swimming at a pool near St Mary's Cathedral. He walked down William Street against the tide of traffic, when the city workers were still sitting behind their desks in glass towers, shuffling their papers and tapping their keyboards. He had never known that sort of life, having to be in one place each
day and being accountable to others. In the way he had chosen to lead his life he was answerable only to himself.

Inside the pool complex, the air was warm and moist, touching his skin like a sultry fog. He sat on the benches and watched the swimmers slice through the water in straight lines. The lane closest to him was unoccupied and the water there was an unbroken blue. He sat there in the chlorine air, the tang in his nostrils, a sting in his eyes. Bodies lumbered up and down lanes, arms overhead; an old man with a short stroke moved like a wind-up toy.

Why were they always painted this same colour, these pools? The permanent blue of a shallow, tropical sea, the blue of holidays, of hot sand and palm trees. A blue that was not real, that spoke of a fiction, the glimpse of the cover of a travel magazine then lost in the tumble of life. He never swam in a chlorine pool without being conscious of this, the idea that stood behind it, the thing that most people had never actually seen but spent their lives wanting.

He dived into the pool, the cool water stripping his body of its warmth. Encased in water, breathing was an effort, but about ten laps in something in him changed. His movement slowed and he was more aware of each stroke as he lifted his arms over his head and silver bubbles parted around his hands, in his ears water gurgled each time he turned his head. The light through the moving water concentrated into curling strands on the blue tiles. He wanted to take those threads of light
and stretch them between his fingers. The water around him felt warm and familiar, like amniotic fluid.

When he had swum thirty laps, he emerged from the pool and showered, but the smell of chlorine remained with him, soaked into his skin. He walked outside and he was aware of the chlorine haze around him, moving with him like a personal cloud.

•

Afterwards, with the water from the pool still lodged in his ear, he went to the supermarket near his apartment. He stood in front of the olives, wondering which jar to choose. Dom would know which olives to buy. She was a person who lived her life that way, someone who took the time to enjoy what was good in life, who noticed which types of olives were best for a particular dish.

She'd never quite succeeded as a professional dancer, but she excelled in knowing how to live. These were the details in his life he had skimmed over on his way from one achievement to the next. This was what he'd never allowed himself time for. She had once brought home green olives stuffed with almonds from a delicatessen in Prenzlauer Berg. They ate most of them before they'd started cooking dinner, an assault of flavour that crept across his tongue. But he couldn't see any of those types of olives at the supermarket in Kings Cross. The stuffed green olives in jars had something bright and orange inside.

His phone rang and he fumbled for it in his bag, where it was lodged beneath his swimmers and wet towel. There was a delay after he'd answered the phone.

‘Hello, is this Andrew Spruce? It's Marten Smythe speaking.'

Andrew stood still. With the sound of that man's voice, he had been summoned to a place he'd been avoiding. He had avoided thinking about his exhibition in London. It was taking place at such a distance away, he'd let it shift to the periphery of his thoughts.

‘Hi,' he said. ‘How are you?'

‘Well, everything's fine here, we're setting up for your exhibition. There's just one thing. We're still missing the high-resolution files of the girl with the face. We received one USB stick with the other images, but the images of the girl weren't on it.'

‘Oh, really?' he said. ‘That's funny, I thought I'd included all of them.' He wondered if his words sounded as thin and gilded to Marten as they did to him.

‘No. And the thing is, we really need them soon to prepare for the exhibition.' Marten cleared his throat. ‘We're hoping to print the catalogue soon and obviously we'll need to hang the work in advance of the opening. We've already put most of the images on our website.'

‘Yes, I understand. Sorry, I'm not sure what happened.' He wondered if he should tell Marten now that he was having second thoughts about exhibiting Phoebe's photograph. That he would send over something else instead.
Perhaps he could find some photograph he'd taken but hadn't exhibited. He was sure he could find a substitute among the pictures he'd taken in the last few years, even if it wasn't as good.

Instead, he found himself saying, ‘Yes, I'll send them over today or tomorrow.'

‘Good, thanks. We don't have much time left. We've sent out the invitations too.' He paused, as if expecting Andrew to say something. When Andrew didn't respond, he continued, ‘I sent out a few thumbnails of your photos last week. I hope you don't mind. I must say, the response we received back was very positive, especially to the image of the girl with the face.'

So they had already shown the photographs of Phoebe to collectors. He looked at the back of the jar of Kalamata olives he was holding; they were marinated in balsamic vinegar.

‘An important collector asked to see the catalogue as soon as it is printed,' Marten said to his silence.