by Cate Kennedy
He’d have to speak to Sandy, there was no escaping it. When had the last time been? That misguided afternoon meeting in the Botanical Gardens, when Sophie would have been seven or eight. Excruciating. Big mistake. He’d wondered why he’d done it, what had compelled him. The way Sophie had looked nonplussed and skipped off uninterested when he’d given her that handwoven billum from Papua New Guinea, and Sandy’s scornful, triumphant smirk that said don’t you know ANYTHING about children?
Somehow eight years had fallen through the cracks since then, nearly a decade he’d lost without really paying attention. God, you had to watch that; had to learn to steel yourself each year on your birthday so it didn’t hit you like a ton of bricks.
Like the ten years that had inexplicably run through the tap before Sophie was born, the decade he and Sandy had spent doing ... what, exactly? Pleasing themselves. Wasting time. A few good holidays, that blissful long drive up the coast to the Daintree, a trip or two to Bali. Going down to the city for film festivals and both of them working part-time in the food co-op that had run for a while in the town, and suddenly he was thirty-three years old and a father, and Sandy was nagging him about buying a better car and couldn’t they get another loan, and Rich had felt like some middle-aged buffoon, that his prime years had somehow, impossibly, slipped from between his fingers. He’d been marooned there in Ayresville, pushing a pram back and forth over a bump in the rug to get the baby to sleep, seething with restlessness.
One night he’d come across his passport in the filing cabinet and he saw with a jolt that it had expired the year before and he hadn’t even noticed. That’s what had set it off, really; the talk of a trip somewhere, all three of them. Sandy had gone off the deep end as though she was just waiting for an excuse.
It was him who’d jumped off the real deep end, though, down and away. Hardly time to take a breath, just pushed over the edge. Resurfacing spluttering fifteen years later to just gape, sometimes, at the thundering progress of all that time, the stop–start rush of it, the illusory slowing down then swirling on, the way it careened you greedily forward.
Because just last year, it felt like, he was in his early twenties and knew all the chords to ‘Moondance’ and the world was undisputedly, gloriously, his oyster. Now he would be hard-pushed even to remember the second verse to the song, even if he could find the cassette, and even if he could find a cassette player to play it in.
Or he’d experience a moment like today, at work, hearing some scratchy kind of blurting discordant static going off like a distant car alarm and glance up in annoyance to see, to his utter bewilderment, that someone was listening to that sound by choice, through tiny bulbs embedded in their ears. Through a portable device the size of a stamp. You’d need a pair of surgical tweezers to program it. An iPod. That’d be right. For pod people. Everyone under the age of thirty seemed to have one implanted permanently in their head.
‘I know that the time will be just right, and straight into my arms you will run,’ he hummed to himself. That was a bit of it.
He gazed at the video screen blankly, letting the tape roll, waiting for the ad’s start point. He could hear the recorded voices of the floor manager and director in the gallery, over the talkback. Flat voices, bored.
‘Just bang, bang, bang through one and two and have two ready for the close-up on her hand when she gets out the brush,’ the director was saying. ‘If it looks too sparkly, just keep going and we’ll cut away to the footage of what’s-her-name.’
‘Cara St James,’ muttered a woman’s voice. The assistant director.
‘Never heard of her.’
‘She was in that soap in the US. The hospital one.’
‘And we’re all meant to know that, are we?’
‘Total D-list.’
‘Anyway, keep going and we’ll fix it in post.’
Well, it was A minor to start with, for sure, Rich thought, watching the digits run on the clapper graphic, waiting. A minor, E minor, then some kind of bar chord in the bridge part. He’d never mastered those, though. Mind you, all he’d have to do would be find his guitar and it would all come back to him.
The Eagles, now. ‘Hotel California’, he had that one down pat. Verses in minor, then major for the chorus, just like the Police always did. Mind you, there were a lot of verses in that song. Better to stick to ‘Desperado’, probably, or ‘Take It to the Limit’.
He’d ring lunchtime Saturday, definitely. Five days’ time. Tell her about the walk, what his plans were, ask her if she felt like getting to know her old man after all this no, wait. Not ‘old man’.
‘OK, roll record.’ On the tape the guy stuck on the lounge suite in front of a fake wall unit leaned forward to his co-host, his voice filled with sudden animation.
‘We’re hearing so much about mineral make-up,’ he said. ‘What makes Glowing Wonder, with its radiant sheer coverage, so different?’
Rich had done a photography course when he was twenty-one, where he’d learned how to process film in the darkroom and slide those pages of expensive light-sensitive paper into the chemical baths, watching them develop. It had never ceased to be a miracle to him, watching those images darken and form in the swirling liquid. The sharp smell of fixative, a smell always on his hands later because he couldn’t help reaching in with his fingers even though you were supposed to use tongs, the little rim of dark sediment that would eventually develop in the solution like fine black sand in a wave.
He loved the secrecy of the safelight, people’s faces bathed in red, the irrevocable snap as the timer went off. It wasn’t anything like messing round with digital, manipulating mistakes with the computer, faking it. There was nowhere to hide in the darkroom, it was just you and your skill, everything you’d caught on film revealed to you.
He’d had a girlfriend who shared his passion for photography and one afternoon they developed a bunch of photos with low-gloss paper, and it was hard to tell under the safelight sometimes — after you’d withdrawn a sheet carefully from its black plastic packet and sealed the box again — which side was light-sensitive and which side was just the back.
And the girl had grinned and said, ‘Don’t tell anyone but I’ll show you a little trick’, and had taken his page from him and tested a corner with the tip of her tongue, to taste which side had the coating of chemical emulsion. Just one small exquisite touch. That moment was still the most erotic memory of Rich’s life.
The photographer he most admired, after this girl introduced him to his work, was Henri Cartier-Bresson. HCB, they called him. That photo of a man frozen in mid-air as he jumped over a puddle, everything in the world perfectly poised around him, hanging there. Foot over the water. Capturing the second when it all hangs suspended. The defining moment, Cartier-Bresson called it. Everything just an extension of your own eye.
Rich believed in that. Getting that moment seized and in the box. That’s why he loved his Olympus, and refused to buy a digital. The defining moment spoke for itself, it didn’t need any Photoshop trickery later, didn’t respond well to technical tweaking. It separated the purists from the pretenders.
He’d had photos in exhibitions, a few dozen in magazines over the years, and even a couple selected for compilations. The Year in Pictures — four years in a row there, that looked pretty good on your résumé — until that particular publishing house went bust in the early nineties. A couple in Fine Print, the good quarterly. His negatives and contact sheets were stacked along his bookshelves next to the compilations, the only ordered thing in his life.
He kept his favourite prints framed on the walls, just a few from each exhibition — the Guatemalan series of women in doorways, and the south-east Asia collection, a couple of black-and-whites of the prayer wheels from the Kathmandu trip. One bookcase of books, mostly out-of-print stuff worth hanging onto. Contained within those few shelves and on that wall, he often thought, was the only evidence of what he’d spent two entire decades dedicated to. He looked at the places and the d
ates like swells and troughs; a long exasperating game of trying to coast a wave, beginning with that headlong flight to Borneo after he’d left Ayresville, where he’d taken some of the best photos of his life of those orangutans and laboured over the article till it was perfect. And he’d got the envelope returned to him from Natural World magazine, the transparencies and pages stuffed back inside. With a note saying nice piece and lovely shots but we just did something like this six months ago. He’d stood there at his post-office box, incredulous. That was typical of this business. You had to be prescient about the Next Big Thing. Be ready to jump at the chance to sniff out some quirky corner where nobody else had been, and aim your camera and make it your own, find the defining moment.
That’s what he should have been doing in that ten years before Sophie was born, instead of letting the whole decade drain away like dregs in a beer, treading water in a place like Ayresville. Letting the ease of it numb him into a pleasant oblivious stupor, instead of being out there making a name for himself, before the backpackers and the gap year Eurotourists and this whole generation of restless rich kids started colonising every unexplored inch of the planet till all of it felt like one big overrun strip mall. God, he hated them — pointing their hand-held digital recorders at everything, every second, and racing to upload it onto their Facebook pages. Sitting at the breakfast tables in the backpacker hostels with their laptops open in front of them, nobody talking to anybody else. He’d seen one German guy once, sitting in an internet café in Istanbul drinking iced chai and reading The Rough Guide to Vietnam, and that just about summed up the whole sorry shebang.
After he finished his shift he found himself, back at home, running his fingers along the spines of the negative folders, and wondered about putting all this stuff into storage somewhere. His fingers rested on a big soft-cover book wedged in tight, its spine turned in. You’d have to be looking for it to even notice it.
The People Who Saved the Franklin. Its cover had been everywhere once, before the print run sold out to the people who’d been there. Sometimes, lately, he’d see copies at markets and garage sales, as people culled it from their lives. There it would be out the front of the thrift shop stacked incongruously in a bin next to all the old well-thumbed copies of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Chariots of the Gods and Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs and Lobsang Rampa, that old charlatan. Lobsang Rampa and Nag Champa: there it was, the whole era, defined in one rhyming couplet, strummed on A minor and D minor on a nylon-stringed guitar
Leave it, he told himself. But it was like a scab.
He pulled the book from the shelf and flipped to the page that mattered, the photo opposite the text on page 29. It showed a grainy black-and-white image of one of the very first protest marches against the dam — the big ones held in each state capital city that made the Tasmanian government really sit up and start sweating.
He’d been in it, and here was the evidence. In the photo a line of people strode along defiantly, the front line of the march, a huge billowing banner over their heads. It was easy to see why the photographer had chosen this one split second as the defining moment. They all looked so young and resolute, ready to meet any resistance head-on, all eyes focused straight ahead into the future.
Everyone except the guy at the end, that is, who at that crucial defining moment had stopped chanting, just for that one brief second, mind you, and been caught in the act of raising a salad roll to his mouth with both hands — and wasn’t that just so typical of this shitty world? The historic picture captured him mid-bite, a flap of white paper flattened against his cheek, one eye blurrily half-closed as if he was drunk, but still recognisable if you really studied it. Still identifiable.
Rich flipped the book shut with a disgusted snap and replaced it, spine first, back into the bookshelf.
Then his mobile rang, jolting him out of reverie, and when he answered it distractedly, he heard a voice he didn’t know. A woman. Young.
‘Sorry, who is this again?’ he said flirtatiously, then his heart dived and wallowed like a boat as he realised.
Her. Sophie.
Five
The plumber frowned down into the cistern. ‘How long’s it been leaking like this?’ he said.
Sandy grimaced. ‘Oh, a little while. Usually I take off the lid and jiggle the float and it stops.’
She watched it brimming, feeling a flutter of anxiety. People would be here in an hour or two. They’d know she’d wasted all that water.
‘Thanks for coming over on a Saturday,’ she added.
After he’d repaired it she showed him how she wanted a fixture to let a hose run from under the house to let the grey water onto the front garden. As they stood on the verandah, the plumber tipped his head and checked out the big tree towering over everything else in the front garden.
‘Tassie blue gum,’ he observed laconically.
‘Yes. And don’t tell me it’s taking over. I hear that from everyone.’
‘Well, not just taking over. Sucking all the ground moisture out for ten metres down as well. That’s why nuthin’s growing underneath it. Didn’t they tell you when you bought it, how big it would grow?’
‘No. I put it in for ... sentimental reasons. I’ve got a special connection with Tasmania.’
When Sophie was born and they’d come home from the hospital, Sandy had realised with dismay that they’d totally forgotten to bring the placenta home to bury in the garden. They’d meant to plant a tree in the spot, something that would flower on Sophie’s birthday in years to come. Instead the whole thing slipped her mind in the crazed and sleepless few months that followed, so that it wasn’t until the following spring that she found herself standing at the native tree stall at the market one morning and deciding that what she should plant was, obviously, a Tasmanian blue gum. It was part of Sophie’s heritage, after all, how she and Rich had met in Tasmania. Part of what had brought them together. At home she selected a spot not far from the house, in front of Sophie’s window where she envisioned the tree might provide some deep and welcome shade in the future, and dug a hole for it.
God, she couldn’t believe how fast that tree had grown. It was like a triffid. By the time Rich had left it had doubled its size and within three years it was higher than the house. Rather than flowering on Sophie’s birthday, it sent a shower of leaves, gumnuts and dried crisps of curling bark onto the roof all year round, debris that slid into the guttering and clogged it until Sandy crawled up there shakily on a ladder and cleared it all out before winter each year, swearing to herself.
‘It’s really taken off,’ she said now, and the plumber nodded sagely again, commiserating, so she pressed on. ‘At least it’s a native.’
‘Not really,’ he said, and she stopped and looked blankly at him. ‘I mean,’ he went on, choosing his words, ‘it’s a native in the Tassie forests, sure, but it’s really an invasive species here, don’t you reckon? It’s not’ — he searched for the word — ‘actually endemic, so it may as well be an introduced tree. Like a pine or elm.’
Sandy pushed her hair behind her ear, annoyed. ‘It’s providing ... um ... habitat,’ she said finally.
‘So does the cypress hedge at my place, though. You see my point?’
‘It’s still a native Australian species.’
‘Bet it sheds a heap of crap onto the roof.’
She sighed resignedly. ‘Yeah. It really does. It’s just so ... tall.’
He gazed up at it speculatively. ‘I’ve got a mate who could come and cut it down for you.’
‘I don’t want it cut down, though. Just trimmed, if anything.’
‘Pollarding. That’s what it needs. They take out the middle trunk there and the tree springs up again, only smaller and more manageable. Less wood and more green growth.’
‘So it doesn’t kill the tree?’
He laughed humourlessly. ‘I don’t reckon anything could kill one of those trees. Even if you cut it off at the base a whole lot of suckers woul
d come back again. They’re indestructible.’
She hesitated doubtfully, torn in her loyalties, gazing at the tree.
‘And what if it fell on the house?’ he added.
She snorted. ‘Thanks a lot.’
‘I’m just saying.’
She chewed her lip, staring at the window to the verandah and Sophie’s bedroom beyond the tree. ‘OK,’ she said finally.
‘I’ll put him onto it. He’s looking for work at the moment, since he got laid off.’
‘What was he?’
‘A logger.’
She felt her smile stiffen on her face. ‘A logger. I thought he’d be a tree surgeon.’
The plumber gave her a look. Muffled a disbelieving snort behind a cough before continuing. ‘He’ll have to hire a cherry picker too, obviously. Or a scissor lift. Do it properly. But this bloke, he’s got one of those on-site chippers, so he could turn all the offcuts and debris into woodchips as he goes. It’d save you some money; you wouldn’t have to pay someone else to come and remove it.’
‘It seems so brutal somehow,’ she said, grimacing.
She felt his eyes taking in the loose planks in the verandah, the way it dipped off on the western side of the house where she still hadn’t gotten the restumping done. The row of spider ferns in the hanging baskets she’d forgotten to water.
‘Well, you planted the thing. I guess,’ he said finally with a dismissive gesture, ‘you have to deal with it.’
Implying she was irresponsible, obviously. Or just stupid. ‘Pollarding, is it?’
‘That’s right. That’s my advice. Take the bastard out at head height before it comes through your roof in a storm.’
She stood there for a while after he left, leaning on the flaking verandah post, trying to work out whether he’d been having a go at her or not. Then she shook herself, irritated. Of course he was having a go at her. They all were.
Sophie kept her iPod on, reading a textbook, as her mum’s friends began to show up. She waved casually, keeping her face preoccupied, as they entered bringing plates and dragging their unwilling children with them. She felt a small surge of satisfaction surreptitiously watching their faces drop as they realised they’d have to keep an eye on their own kids for once.