Where the Light Falls

by Gretchen Shirm

  Gretchen Shirm worked as a lawyer for over ten years. Her first book Having Cried Wolf (2010) was shortlisted for the UTS/Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. She was named as a 2011 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. Her fiction, criticism and non-fiction has been published in The Saturday Paper, Best Australian Stories, Australian Book Review, The Australian, The Monthly, Art Monthly, The Sydney Morning Herald, Review of Australian Fiction and Southerly.

  www.gretchenshirm.com

  Praise for Having Cried Wolf

  ‘This collection is beautifully formed.’

  The Age

  ‘A major new talent has arrived.’

  Kerryn Goldsworthy, Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Wintonesque.’

  Sunday Herald Sun

  ‘Deep emotional truths.’

  Canberra Times

  ‘You’re in the hands of a born storyteller . . .’

  Cate Kennedy

  First published in 2016

  Copyright © Gretchen Shirm 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone:(61 2) 8425 0100

  Email:info@allenandunwin.com

  Web:www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 9781760113650

  eISBN 9781952534331

  Set by Post Pre-press Group, Australia

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Christa Moffitt, Christabella Designs

  Logo designs: Gabrielle Assaf

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  Acknowledgements

  Art is not about art. Art is about life.

  LOUISE BOURGEOIS

  1

  In winter, the dark was terrible. He walked into his apartment at six and already it was pulled down over the city like a hood. The night had a texture, a thick woven fabric, fine as knitted wool. He could never have imagined it: a darkness more bitter than the cold. When he came home at night, he pressed the door of his apartment closed, aware each time that he was performing an act of resistance against it.

  Inside their apartment, the light slanted upwards from lamps and bare bulbs. The wiring in the walls was old and the lights in the ceilings did not work. Still, it felt welcoming. It gave the room a staged effect. Moving through their apartment was like walking through a theatre production; the light threw his shadow in different directions and as he passed a lamp, his shadow jumped on a wall, crooked and threatening.

  It was always a relief, this moment of returning home, of settling back into himself after a day at work in his studio. An hour later, Dominique walked in wearing a woollen cloche hat. It was a crimson hat that she often wore in winter, its colour a cry of protest in the grey Berlin streets. She pushed her hair up beneath it and it kept her warm that way she said, because no cold air could sneak up inside it. She moved with the appearance of gliding.

  That night she cooked a Spanish omelette, large and yellow in the pan like the face of a sun, and he prepared the salad, removing the outer leaves from the lettuce, dismantling the heart and chopping the vegetables into strips. Dom poured the wine into two glasses big enough for soup.

  The next day was Dom’s last in Berlin before she left for Cologne for two weeks. She was teaching contemporary dance to a promising group of teenagers. When he saw her with her students, he admired the way she spoke to them, as though they were no less than her, that their love of dance made them equal.

  Dom no longer danced professionally. He’d heard it said that a dancer dies two deaths, and her first death had occurred before they’d even met. When she spoke about it, he saw the wound it had caused inside her, the sadness she felt at never having quite got the break she wanted. He admired her ability to speak so openly about failure.

  He’d seen footage of her, a film made of her last solo performance for a small company in Hamburg. She moved on stage as though possessed of another force and, at that moment, she was preoccupied only with her movements, her eyes open and her face clouded not with concentration, but with strain of the physical effort. He had seen the same look on her face when they were in bed together; as if she were searching for something inside herself that was just beyond her grasp. He had watched that film more times than he could count.

  He couldn’t help but think that the dancer he saw was different to the woman he loved—now her features bore the trace of a wound, the knowledge of defeat. He loved her because of rather than in spite of that. She had found the limit of her own ability, which most people never had the courage to reach.

  That night, before he went to bed, he checked his email. He had an exhibition coming up in London and he was still in the process of making new work. Models had to be found, photographic assistants hired for his shoots and props and equipment located. The exhibition was only six weeks away and no matter how early he began his preparations, the lead-up to a new show was always hectic. But there was nothing about the exhibition in his inbox.

  Instead, there was a message from his old friend Stewart Carey. He saw the name and an old life beckoned him. Stewart and he had been at high school together and Stewart was the only person from that former life whom Andrew kept in touch with. The subject line read: Kirsten. This name, too, belonged to a past life, a version of himself he had tried to leave behind when he’d moved to Berlin three years ago.

  Hi Andrew,

  I’m not sure if you heard, but just in case you haven’t, I thought you would want to know. Kirsten Rothwell is missing. It’s been three weeks now. They found her car beside Lake George. Sorry to tell you this way, mate.

  I hope things are going well in Berlin. Call if you get some time. Say ‘hi’ to Dom from us.

  Stewart

  Andrew read the message through twice. His eyes skipped over the words as if by reading them quickly he could reduce their impact. But it was too late. Missing, he thought. Perhaps that meant she simply didn’t want to be found. With Kirsten, something like that had always seemed possible. Maybe she had decided she needed some time away from the world. And yet there was a finality to Stewart’s tone; was he hinting at something more definite? He had the feeling as he read the words again of their immensity; he knew they meant much more to him than he was currently able to
grasp.

  He stood from his chair and his heart was beating fast, throbbing in a strange rhythm.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Dom asked.

  ‘I—I just received some bad news.’

  ‘What happened?’ Dom said, concerned. She looked up from the book she was reading.

  He looked at her and he did not want to tell her.

  ‘I just—I got an email from Stewart.’ She took his hand as he spoke and he saw it was shaking. ‘About a friend. An old friend of mine who I knew when I was at university. She’s missing.’

  ‘Oh no. What happened?’ Dom was looking at him with clear eyes, willing to absorb some of the hurt he felt.

  He had no words to explain it. His reaction to the news wasn’t even one of sadness, but shock. He walked to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water, which he drank in a few, quick gulps.

  ‘I don’t know exactly. Stewart didn’t say much.’ He moved from their kitchen to the living room and sat down at their table. In front of him was a pile of opened mail. ‘Just that she’s been missing now for almost three weeks.’

  On the wall of their apartment, he’d pinned an unframed photo he’d taken a few weeks before: the face of a young boy, looking up and smiling with his eyes closed. It was for his upcoming exhibition. It was an important exhibition for him—his first solo show in London—and he was running out of time to make new work. He hadn’t been able to think of a title for that image, but now the words Smiling Alone occurred to him. He’d asked the boy to smile that way, with his teeth visible, but sitting there with this new information yet to settle inside him, the image suddenly looked terrifying. The boy’s second teeth had just come through and they were still jagged and yet to be worn down to a smooth edge.

  ‘Were you close to this woman?’ Dom asked. She ran a finger along his cheek in an upwards stroke. Her face was close to his and open to whatever his answer might be.

  ‘We were, I suppose, while I was at art college. But I haven’t spoken to her since I moved to Berlin.’ He didn’t want to disclose to Dom that he had once loved this woman or that he had let it continue between them for longer than he should have. He didn’t want Dom to know that the reason he had fled Sydney, in the end, was to escape her.

  2

  The next morning was a Sunday and they woke slowly, waking and sleeping and waking again. They had bought the bedsheets together the week before; they were still stiff and folded around their bodies in pleats. Dom slipped out of bed first and made them coffee on the stove with the small espresso jug that fizzled as the water percolated. He watched her against the background of their kitchen, the white glow of the cupboards on her face.

  As she walked back to bed the floorboards gave under her feet with small clicks, the friction of wood against wood. She walked with her feet turned out and he loved the fact that dancing had permanently shaped her. Her body was sinuous and firm, still refusing to relinquish the strength that dancing had given it. Her breasts were the only part of her that was soft, her nipples large and mauve on her brown skin. Along her arms and shoulders, a dusting of freckles dispersed across her skin, speckled like a bird’s egg.

  She stretched on the floor while he drank his coffee in bed; she could still bend her body along her legs easily, folding herself in half like a soft doll to grasp her feet with her hands. In the middle of winter she cursed when her muscles tightened and she couldn’t sit on the ground in the splits.

  Watching her, he understood; was it for the first time? Or did the realisation grow, coming to him gradually, the words repeated in his head until it slowly became something he knew? He’d never thought it possible, to have this feeling of being in love without also feeling that he was also losing part of himself.

  She came back to bed and spooned him, her skin cold against his warmth. She had done this often at night when he lay awake, worrying. Lately that was often. He was thirty-seven and his existence was still precarious; he lived from exhibition to exhibition. The basic anxiety about whether he would make enough money to survive was constant, although there was more of a market for his work in Europe and his income more reliable since he moved to Berlin. On those nights when he couldn’t sleep, Dom talked him through his fears, reassuring him that, no matter what, they would find a way through. She was more generous to him than he’d ever been to himself.

  The upcoming show in London was causing him many sleepless nights. He still needed one standout photograph, an image that would make people take notice, and would bring him the important acquisition of his work he needed. He was so desperate for this exhibition to be a success that he was sure it was bound to end in failure. Things had gone badly before—he’d had exhibitions from which he hadn’t sold a single print—but if this show didn’t succeed he would have to reckon with failure at a whole new level. London was an important market and this was his first real break after almost a decade of trying.

  For many years in his life, he’d only had to worry about disappointing himself, but now, with Dom in his life, the stakes were much higher than they’d been before. Maybe he felt he could only expect her to love him when things were going well, that the successful version of him was worthy of love, but the failure would never be.

  Andrew rolled over and he was so close to Dom’s face that he could see the freckles on her nose, diffuse and delicate, although her skin was dark. Her father, whom he’d met many times, had migrated to Germany from Ghana before she was born, although her mother was born in Bremen and her skin was a bluish white. Dom was a combination of the two.

  He pulled the sheet up over them as they lay together and the light around them was gauzy and white.

  ‘Did you sleep okay last night?’ she asked, looking up at him. His arms were around her, one under her neck. Her body flush against his. When they lay together like this, he sometimes thought he could feel the faint throb of her heart through her skin. But perhaps it was only his own.

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  ‘You got up at one point and turned on the light?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, I couldn’t switch my mind off.’

  ‘Were you worrying about the exhibition in London again?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t that.’

  In truth he had been thinking about Kirsten, fighting off memories from the past that had no place here, in his life with Dom. But the more he tried to banish those thoughts, the more intrusive they became. There was something about his relationship with Kirsten that felt unresolved. In the years before he left Sydney, she had seemed increasingly troubled. Still he’d kept seeing her; he felt he couldn’t stop. Kirsten was more addiction than attachment. In the end, the only way to free himself from her was to leave Sydney, to cut her from his life. But he had been too afraid of hurting her to tell her this directly.

  ‘I was thinking about the friend from Sydney who went missing. There was something about Stewart’s email that made me think it must be serious. I don’t think he’d bother to contact me otherwise. I’m sorry I woke you.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry,’ she said and she pulled herself away a little, still looking into his face, as though this distance would help him too see how much she empathised with his concerns.

  •

  They rose and slipped into their jeans and took their heavy coats from the hangers. The fabric of his coat was stiff from being worn for too many winters and the material hung heavily from his body like the skin of a bear. They walked hand in hand to the café around the corner and slipped onto a bench seat, sitting side by side, their thighs pressed together. Over breakfast they hardly spoke. Their best exchanges, he often thought, were wordless, when all they shared between them was a mood. Dom sat absorbed in Die Welt while he flicked through Der Spiegel, seeking out the few articles in English. He ordered muesli and it arrived with gooseberries on top and they burst between his teeth, their flavour bright and unusual.

  Afterwards, they walked through Mitte together, down Alte Schönhauser Allee, drifting in and out of shops, the sa
me shops they always went into, a path they often took, following a set of footprints they had laid many times before. Around him were the familiar fixtures of concrete, a landscape of grey with sudden eruptions of graffiti on the walls. These streets and lanes had become familiar to him, a pattern that now held a shape in his brain and he walked through this area with the feeling that he belonged.

  •

  That night they went to the exhibition opening of a friend of his. Outside the cold had turned sharp. The severity of winter was always a shock, a long dark tunnel of black nights and scantly lit days. He reminded himself that it was the last day of January and in a month winter would start to lift.

  They took the U-Bahn to Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, walked past the Volksbühne theatre and the Babylon cinema, and waited on the street to be buzzed into the gallery. He looked down through the lower window and saw people already milling in the basement. The light was orange and sparse, as though the room was lit by embers. Berlin was a place in which you needed to know the right doors to pass through and it came as a sudden surprise, standing there, to find himself in a position of knowledge.

  Inside the gallery, Dom stood in front of him with her back pressed against his chest. The colour was the first thing he noticed about the paintings, thick reds, oranges and browns, autumnal colours across the canvas, warm but with the sense of approaching darkness. The images started to take shape, landscapes, loosely formed hills and trees, and the colours made them look burnt. They were scenes of a world that was ending.

  They moved between the canvases and other people in the gallery turned and looked towards them. He began to wonder if they were standing too close to the work, or moving against the current of people. It took him some time to understand that there was a sort of jealousy about their gaze, that Dom and he shared something between them that these people envied. There are occasional moments when you love someone and you are aware of it, and there in the gallery he felt that small, bright miracle taking place between them.