But then their friends arrived—some were people Dom knew, others had studios in the same building as his—and the awareness passed, moving off behind him and into his wake. They stayed and drank and talked. No-one felt they needed to say anything complicated or profound. They spoke of things they had spoken of before and would speak of again. There was a simplicity to their conversation, a warmth and an ease.
When they left the gallery a rain had started, icy wet drops that weren’t quite snow, falling on the ground around them with a lisp, thsst, thsst, thsst. Later, in bed, they slept naked together, sharing the warmth of their bodies against the chill of winter that was slipping through the gaps in the blankets.
•
The next morning, he drove Dom to the Hauptbahnhof in the old car she’d had since she was twenty-five. It was a small car and they sat with their knees pressed up against the dashboard. They were quiet together. In these moments after waking, his thoughts took some time to catch up to his movements.
It was 7 am and Berlin was still dark, the streets empty. He didn’t park at the train station, but dropped Dom at the entrance. She leant across to kiss him and her mouth was warm on his.
‘The next two weeks will be a bit full on, but I’ll call you whenever I can,’ she said, extracting herself from the small car.
As he drove away he watched her in the rear-view mirror as she wheeled her bag into the station, until she got smaller and he turned out onto the autobahn and could no longer see her.
•
He drove straight to his studio in Mitte. The large room was still and cold. He turned on the heating and sat down with his back to the wall, listening to the trickle of oil. He stayed there for what must have been an hour, but his mind was no longer on Dom and Berlin. He was thinking about Kirsten and Sydney. He had been born in Sydney and had lived there for most of his life, but he hadn’t been back to visit in almost two years, not since his last exhibition. He hadn’t seen his mother in as long.
It was a city that belonged to a different era of his life, a period of struggle. It was a time in his life characterised more by failure than by success, when he woke each morning and told himself, Keep going. Those were the words he repeated to himself in the face of every adversity, of failures and setbacks that would have caused most people to quit.
There were successes. Enough at least, to make him persevere—the sale of his work to important institutions, grants to fund the making of new work—but the more success he had, the more the rejections burned. Five years ago, an influential gallery in Melbourne had scheduled an exhibition of his work, but when they saw the photographs he’d taken, they politely declined to show them. It was the greatest disappointment of his artistic career, the only moment he’d stopped and wondered whether he could keep doing this. It took him about a year before he could think about making new work. And now he suffered from the anxiety that the gallery in London would do the same thing.
Around him, his studio looked temporary, furnished only with what was necessary. He had taken over the lease from a Canadian painter who had moved back to Montreal shortly after Andrew arrived in Berlin. There were only a few personal items in this space: an old aluminium lamp he’d bought second-hand at a market and now used as a reading lamp. And there was the old Rolleiflex his father had given him for his tenth birthday: the first camera he had ever owned. It sat on a shelf, the lens cap lost, its eye permanently open. He took that camera with him wherever he went, although it was old, scratched and dented and no longer of any real use to him, not for the type of photographs he took now. It took the world and flattened it; in its lens the world lost its depth. But the Rolleiflex was his one tangible record of his father. And it reminded him of the things in life he wanted to hold on to, of the camera’s ability to take the world, collect its images and store them securely in its black and airless cavity.
In his studio that morning he could do no work. He was too distracted by his thoughts about Kirsten. Even after they’d stopped living together, their relationship had continued, on and off, for almost ten years. In those years he’d told himself that what was happening between them was only sex and that he could end it whenever he wanted. It wasn’t until he’d left for Berlin that he really understood her power over him. She was a woman who, as long as he had known her, had had a flicker of panic in her eyes, the look of a person who fears they are drowning. He wanted to understand what had happened to her and, sitting there in his studio, he realised that he would have to return to Sydney in order to do so. In fact, it occurred to him, the timing was ideal. His mother had been dropping hints recently about wanting to see him again. He could visit his mother and find out what had happened to Kirsten without having to involve Dom in the whole messy business of why he’d left Sydney. He could be back in Berlin by the time Dom returned from Cologne.
•
He left that afternoon, packing his suitcase with all his clean clothes and his camera, just in case he saw something in Sydney that appealed to him.
At the airport, while he was waiting at the gate for his flight to be called, he called Dom’s mobile. It was late in the afternoon and the light was becoming thin and metallic. She would have arrived in Cologne by now. But the call went straight through to her voicemail. He opened his mouth to speak then closed it again and ended the call. He wondered how Dom would react when, later, she heard this empty message on her phone. He imagined her pressing the phone to her ear and hearing nothing but static, like the sound inside a shell.
3
In the aeroplane, he had no awareness of movement. With the window shades down and the lights dimmed, the plane felt still, as though suspended from a cord in mid-air, like a mobile over a child’s bed. Time was distorted around him. He slept deeply most of the way to Sydney and woke before they landed to find his breakfast laid out on the tray in front of him, sealed in plastic and foil.
He had used his frequent flyer points to buy the flight, which meant a four-hour stopover in Bangkok between connecting flights, during which he’d managed a snatched conversation with Dom. He’d told her the reason for his trip and that he’d be back in Berlin the day after her. She had wanted to know why it was so important for him to find out about this woman. But he wasn’t sure he could explain it yet, even to himself.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘Ich dich auch,’ she replied.
•
When the plane landed in Sydney, he shuffled along behind the other passengers. He moved awkwardly through the customs hall, teetering forward as he took the escalator down to the baggage carousels. After so long on board the plane, sleeping and flying against time, it took him a while to become aware of his own edges again.
After being out of the country for so long, hearing the Australian accent again made him bristle, the way the voices floated, uninvited, into his head. Two women behind him were discussing whether or not to go back and buy another bottle of duty-free vodka and the man beside him was asking the customs officer whether he should declare the chocolate he’d brought back with him from Switzerland. People became an amplified version of themselves when they travelled, their good and bad qualities turned up a few notches.
He queued for a taxi. When he got into the car, talk-back radio blared from the front, the honeyed tones of a voice that seemed to be coaxing the world into outrage.
‘Leichhardt, please,’ he said as the car bumped over the speed hump and turned a corner to drive out of the airport.
Along the expressway, the nature strips divided the lanes of traffic in two. Gymea lilies, their flowers already black, sat like ravaged nests on stilts and the kangaroo paws had turned a dirty orange from exhaust fumes. Houses backed directly onto the road and through breaks in fences he caught glimpses of yards and swimming pools, small and private views of other people’s lives.
As they drove towards the city in the late summer light, everything around him looked unreal. The light was brighter than it was in Europe, sharper and somehow cruel
ler. He hadn’t prepared himself for it.
•
Along his mother’s fence purple hydrangeas bloomed, their round heads like old women’s swimming caps. The first sound he heard after he knocked on the door was the squelch of her rubber-soled shoes on the wooden floor. As long as he could remember, his mother had worn flat shoes, like most nurses.
‘Andy,’ she said as she opened the door, and she walked straight into him, wrapping her arms around him. She was the only person who continued to call him by that name. He wasn’t sure, exactly, when people had stopped calling him that and started, instead, to call him Andrew. It had happened gradually, the further away he travelled from childhood, as though the innocence that went with the nickname had thinned and faded and was now finally lost. He rested a cheek on her head. She still used the same shampoo.
After a moment she let go, took a step back and held his shoulders. He saw that a patch of hair near her temple had turned completely white, although the rest of her hair had remained dark, like his.
‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Why are you home all of a sudden?’
His mother went through her life assuming the worst. And he knew why. She worried that he would die young, as his father had; her greatest fear was outliving him.
He’d only had time to send her a quick email before he left Berlin. Don’t worry about collecting me from the airport, he’d written, though he knew she wouldn’t. She hardly drove anywhere, anymore. She hadn’t been into the city in years, though it was barely six kilometres away. Sometimes he wondered why she stayed in Leichhardt. If she wanted to live quietly, why she didn’t move to some small coastal town, or to the mountains where her sister lived? But part of him knew exactly why she stayed. Living in the same house for so many years had always been about holding on to the memories of his father.
•
Andrew was eleven when his father died. That day, he came home from school to a silent and empty house for the first time he could remember. All he could hear as he opened the door and walked carefully down the hall were echoes of his own movements. Even before he learnt of his father’s death, he knew from the silence that something had been irreversibly lost.
His mother had never told him how his father died; the knowledge remained inside her sunk deep like a stone in a well. As a child he kept thinking that one day, when she stopped feeling sad, she would sit him down and explain everything. But a year had passed and then another year. And he hadn’t been told a thing about it. Nor had he dared to ask. From overheard telephone conversations, he had gleaned two facts: ‘collapsed’ and ‘the garden’. Those words were all he ever knew about his father’s death.
His mind, though, had filled in the blanks. The absences in his knowledge were transformed into pictures, a sequence of images that ran together in his head. He replayed those scenes so often they had become as real to him as if he’d actually witnessed them. His father stood in their backyard, surveying his vegetable garden. Then, abruptly, he toppled, like Marlon Brando in The Godfather.
•
His mother made him a pot of tea in the same striped teapot she’d always used, though the pattern grew more faded each time he sat down to drink from it. He’d once brought her back a new teapot from Delft, hand-painted blue and white, the porcelain so fine it felt soft in his hands. His mother used the things she owned until they had served their purpose. This was what losing someone you loved did to a person: it made it difficult to let go of other things. She would be serving tea from that teapot until the day it broke apart in her hands.
‘How’s Dom?’ she said, sliding onto the stool beside his. His mother’s movements had become smaller and more horizontal as she’d aged.
‘She’s fine, Mum,’ he said, not quite meeting her gaze. ‘I had to see to a few things back here before my exhibition next month. It has nothing to do with Dom and me.’
‘So everything’s okay then?’ Her tone was tentative, as if she was aware she was asking for too much. His mother had never met Dom and he tried to keep their relationship to himself. He wanted to hold on to this new privacy he’d acquired from living abroad. His mother had lost her husband at a young age and seemed determined, since then, to know everything she could about Andrew, as though knowing the details might prevent another loss. He couldn’t bring himself to speak to her about Kirsten straight away. He’d always felt he could not mention death to his mother without reminding her of the death they both lived by.
‘When’s your opening?’
‘Mid-March. I have to send the galleries all the images by the end of the month.’
‘That soon?’
He nodded and they both looked at the calendar on the wall. It was the third of February; he’d lost a day in transit.
She sighed heavily. ‘How long are you staying?’
‘I’m flying back next Saturday. Is that okay with you?’
‘That soon? Of course,’ she said.
They spoke easily about other things: his mother’s sister, the walk-in wardrobes she’d recently had installed. He told her that the tenants in his apartment in Darlinghurst were moving out in two weeks and the agent would be advertising for new ones. Though he couldn’t always be open with his mother, he felt at least that around her, he never had to pretend; he didn’t have to project the air of confidence that the rest of the world expected of him. He felt the same way around Dom.
4
He arranged to meet Stewart the following afternoon at the Nag’s Head in Glebe, the pub they used to drink at when they were students. If he had someone he could call a best friend, a friend who had travelled with him for life, Stewart was it, though they saw each other rarely now. When they were still at school, Stewart had lived on the other side of Parramatta Road in Petersham and for many years they had spent the afternoons together, until Andrew discovered photography and it changed the way he related to the people around him. He always made a point of seeing Stewart when he was back in Sydney, even when he had very little time. Their lives had run at parallels and seeing Stewart each time he returned had become a way of measuring himself.
He walked in through the front bar, hearing the familiar sound of glasses shuddering together as the barman lifted a tray of schooners onto a stack, and took a seat at a small table near the beer garden. On the wall above the table was a picture of an English hunting scene, men in red coats riding horses with beagles trailing at their heels. Ahead of them, foxes ran with their heads turned back towards their pursuers, gaunt flashes of red, the whites of their eyes holding an awareness of their fate.
Stewart arrived wearing a business shirt with the top button undone; a tie dangled from the left pocket of his pants. Since he’d graduated from university, Stewart looked to be permanently straining; the muscles around his neck were thick, giving him a top-heavy appearance, and he walked with his head down, as though peering over a ledge. Over the years his hair had turned slowly and prematurely grey. Stewart lifted his satchel over his shoulder and they hugged awkwardly, patting each other forcefully on the back.
‘I wasn’t expecting you to come home so soon,’ Stewart said, when he came back to their table with two beers.
‘How was the wedding?’ he asked without meeting Stewart’s gaze. Stewart had been married six months ago and Andrew had not flown back for the wedding. Instead he’d sent an email apologising. Break a leg, he’d written, as though the whole thing were a performance for Stewart’s family and friends.
‘Oh, great, man. It was just a big party. You know, an expensive party,’ Stewart said, and laughed. ‘It would have been great if you could have made it.’
Andrew had explained at the time that he was too busy preparing for his upcoming exhibition, but the truth was he didn’t want to risk bumping into Kirsten, not after he’d left Sydney without any explanation. He couldn’t bear facing the accusation in her eyes.
‘And how’s . . . your wife?’ He couldn’t believe it; as the sentence left his mouth, he couldn’t recall her
name, although he’d known her since they were in their twenties.
There was a part of him, some pocket deep inside, that envied people like Stewart—people who had fallen in love young and who’d given up other things in their lives in order to remain that way.
‘Louise is great. You know, we’ve been together forever, so nothing really changed for us, but we did buy a house in Stanmore.’
This was what happened to people like Stewart and Louise: their lives followed a certain pattern and it never deviated from the path other people expected them to take. There was a feeling that often took hold of him when Stewart and he were together now, that their lives had veered too far apart and what they were doing with these dinners and drinks was trying to restore something they’d already lost.
‘Good for you. Property is expensive here. It’s much cheaper in Berlin. I’m thinking of selling my apartment in Darlinghurst so we can buy something there.’
‘Really?’ Stewart’s eyes were alight at the mention of Berlin. ‘I loved Berlin, when we visited. You don’t find the language a barrier?’
‘Oh no, not really. I know enough to get by.’ He knew the names of things, but he had never learnt how to fit those words together into sentences and the truth was that being around Dom made him lazy about learning. When he was alone, he moved through the city, pointing to what he wanted in shops and speaking in nouns and he didn’t mind not understanding the things being said around him. It afforded him a quietness in which he could be alone with his thoughts.
‘Do you think you’d ever come back here to live?’ Stewart asked, his voice scooting higher suddenly, wanting some sort of reassurance from him.
‘I don’t know. There are a lot more opportunities for me to exhibit over there. Europe is a much bigger market. Also my work sells better there.’ He watched the disappointment trickle through Stewart’s expression.
Where the Light Falls Page 2