Where the Light Falls

by Gretchen Shirm

  He didn’t break up with her straight away; he didn’t have the courage. Instead he became quieter, withdrawing into himself until what they had was no longer a relationship but two people who had the appearance of one, eating meals at the same table and sharing a bed, lying quietly together each night as though there were tombstones at their heads rather than pillows. Kirsten recognised what was happening before he said a word.

  On the day they split up, he came home late. Kirsten was in the kitchen and he stopped in the middle of the lounge room, standing there with his bag over one shoulder. She was still made up from work, with fissures in her lipstick and a residue of red. He hardly needed to say anything at all. It was the week after his final-year show had opened and a gallery had contacted him to express an interest in representing him. He had an interview the following week and he’d spent the day assembling his portfolio with a mounting sense of excitement. From then on, he thought, his life would follow the clear and silver line of success, and everything that might hold him back from what he wanted would have to be cast aside. (As it happened, the gallery never called him back after his interview and it took him five more years to find representation. By then he was almost thirty and his youth lay behind him.)

  He could remember very few of the words he actually used, though he would recall saying, I just can’t keep doing this every day. The truth was, he wanted to help her but couldn’t. And he had to focus on photography; he didn’t feel he had a choice about it—everything else in his life was secondary. When he told Kirsten he was moving out, she stood in the kitchen with her red mouth open, gaping like a wound.

  6

  Stewart texted him the details of the memorial service early that morning. It was being held at a church in Lavender Bay, on the other side of the harbour. He knew Kirsten’s mother was religious, but in their time together Kirsten and he had never been into a church and he’d never heard her speak of God.

  He arrived at the church in a taxi, late, after the service had already begun. The church was dark inside and he stood in the aisle for a moment waiting for his eyes to adjust to the lack of light. He took a seat on the last pew, with several vacant rows in front of him. All he saw from where he sat were the backs of heads he didn’t recognise, all cast down. At the front of the church the minister read from a Bible. He spoke in waves of words, spoken hundreds of times before, about people who were now buried in the earth. They were words that knew nothing of Kirsten, about the way she lived. Behind him, the stained-glass windows glowed in green, yellow and red.

  He scanned the bodies in front of him looking for Stewart’s wife, Louise. Kirsten’s mother and stepfather were there too, presumably, though he wasn’t sure he’d recognise them; he’d only met them once. What would he say to them now? That he was sorry for their loss? But they had been losing Kirsten for years, since he’d known her and probably before then. He hadn’t really come here to express his condolences; he had come here to understand what had happened to her. To pick it apart and trace it back, step by step, to find out exactly where things had gone wrong.

  At the front of the church was a casket made from polished blond wood. The lilies on top were sullen and dark. The coffin must have been empty, since no body had been found. He wondered what would happen at the end of the service, whether they would pick up this weightless box and carry it down the aisle, going through those motions, pretending that this death was just like any other, though there were no bones to grieve over.

  With a sudden spasm of memory, Andrew thought of his father’s funeral. This was the first funeral he’d been to since; he’d always made excuses, he’d even told lies in order to avoid them. At his father’s funeral, he’d been a pallbearer and he’d helped carry the coffin from the church. He remembered feeling the gaze of the whole church on him, a congregation of pale faces, as he walked unsteadily down the aisle, and feeling as though he had to smile, that he was expected to look like he was coping, and that by gritting his teeth and wishing for all this attention to be behind him he was letting his father down.

  The only other coherent memory he had of that day was later, as his father’s coffin was lowered into the ground. He thought how shiny the casket was, that it was such new wood, and how strange it was that it would now be buried in dirt. He’d wondered whether it would stay that way, with the wood gleaming like a freshly varnished violin. He couldn’t even locate his mother in that memory, although she must have been there too, stern, steely, fending off grief with crossed arms.

  He hadn’t thought about his father’s death in years, though for a long time it was all he could think of, at school and when he was with his friends. He was constantly distracted by his thoughts, though nobody else seemed to notice this. He became the boy who had lost his father; his father’s death had defined him. It was a strange thing, to be defined by a loss. He remembered looking at himself in his school photographs and thinking how different he looked to his peers, that there was an awareness about him that had not yet impressed itself on any of the other children.

  Sitting at the back of the church now, he sneezed without warning. Once, twice, three times in succession. It must have been the dust in the hall. A few people turned around and looked at him with dark eyes. He sat completely still, but there was a tickle in his nose and he worried it might happen again. The rest of the room stood to sing a hymn and he tripped over the footrest in his hurry to exit the church. He pinched his nose with his fingers to suppress another sneeze. The church organ sounded distant and mournful. Outside the sunlight was brash; the heavy light and thick warm air made movement difficult.

  He sat down on a seat in the park nearby and stayed there for a moment with his head between his knees. When he sat upright, he loosened his tie. He turned and saw, behind him, the church starting to empty, bodies spilling out onto the grass. He tried to identify Kirsten’s parents among the people clad in funereal tones, blacks, charcoals and greys. In the sunlight those colours gave the mourners a definite outline. Their movements were slow with grief. There was a woman standing next to the minister and taking people’s hands in her own. He thought this might have been Kirsten’s mother, but from this distance he couldn’t be sure. From where he stood she looked to be swaying on her feet, perhaps swooning with sadness.

  He looked at the other people. Stewart’s wife Louise would be among them, but she was the only person he would know. If he walked over he would stand there awkwardly, trying to find someone to talk to him. A shadow fell on him. He’d had this experience often; it seemed to follow him wherever he settled, him standing apart from a larger group, unable to join in.

  He decided he would wait until the crowd dispersed and then he would approach the figure he thought could be Kirsten’s mother. He would explain who he was and that they had met before. Perhaps she would remember and be glad to see him there.

  He turned away from the mourners. Between the buildings, he could see a thin sliver of the harbour and he sat and watched the windswept blue. That was something he missed when he was in Berlin: he never saw the sea. Sometimes he longed for the definite blue of the ocean, something that helped him to understand where he was in relation to other things.

  A hearse drove by in front of him and when he turned back to the church, the crowd had dispersed; they were unlocking the doors of their cars and following Kirsten’s empty coffin down the road towards the place where she would be laid to rest. It was too late now to speak to her mother.

  He found himself hoping that Kirsten would be buried near water. He stood and watched the procession drive down the road and away from him.

  •

  He went home and called Dom in a daze of emotion. He told her about the funeral service, how they hadn’t found the body but there’d been a coffin anyway.

  ‘Was this woman special to you?’ Dom asked gently.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said evasively. ‘But I hadn’t spoken to her since I came to Berlin.’

  Dom had spoken of old lovers, but he
’d never been able to share his past with her. There had really only been Kirsten and he wasn’t even sure what to make of that relationship himself; it was too complicated to reduce to words. He’d left Sydney to escape it: the strange combination of love and aversion he felt for her.

  For Dom, there had been someone called Dirk.

  ‘Six years,’ she had said to him in the dark of her bedroom soon after they met. ‘Six years, four years ago.’ She spoke his name and he heard, caught up with it, a knot of feeling that was hidden to him, some old pain. He could tell from the way she spoke that it had once engulfed her.

  Part of him wanted to tell Dom about Kirsten now, how his relationship with her had coloured everything that came after. That he had allowed it to continue for too long; that he hadn’t been able to bring himself to end it cleanly. He wanted to tell Dom because her love was the only thing that could wash away this terrible feeling that what had happened to Kirsten might somehow be his fault.

  7

  Andrew woke early the next morning. It was just before six and the light outside his window was sheer. He dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and walked out to the lounge room. On the kitchen bench nearby, petals slipped suddenly from the roses in the vase. Through the window, the shadows were narrow and long in the backyard, stretched geometric shapes that might have been cast by tall buildings.

  He loved this time of the day in Sydney, when the city was still quiet, hushed; he could almost pretend in those moments that he had it to himself. Later, when it awoke and the noise rose to a clamour, he was aware that he would have to compete for space and quiet with the city’s other inhabitants.

  On his mother’s wall still hung his final year work, Porcelain. Over the years, he’d given her other prints of his more successful work, but this was the only photograph she’d hung in the house. He remained aware that photography was what formed the bridge between his old life and his new one. It connected what he had been to what he had become.

  When he took photography as a subject at high school, cameras weren’t yet digital and he preferred it that way. He still used film. He loved the smell of it, that it was something which could be touched rather than an amount of data measured in bytes. Digital photography had made things easier and less messy, it had made the whole process quicker and more efficient, but he couldn’t help feeling that some of the mystery had been lost.

  At high school, the darkroom was his domain. His teacher had given him the key and nobody but Andrew went in there outside class. It was downstairs in the basement and he had always liked descending those stairs, knowing that he was entering a space in which the rules were known to him. They only ever printed in black and white at school, but he had enjoyed the limitation of it; he liked the way it took everything that was bright and alive and reduced it to something less.

  He loved the warm chemical baths that he submerged his photos in, too; they smelt personal to him, like bodily fluids. There was always the moment of anticipation when the pictures started to emerge evenly, poured across the paper. He sometimes wished he could prolong that moment, the instant before the image was set, before he knew whether what had been recorded on paper had lived up to the idea he had had for it.

  Afterwards, he hung the photos up with pegs, like socks on a clothesline. He sometimes wished that his life had remained that simple, that he could spend hours alone in the darkroom and emerge blinking into the sunlight, more sure of himself and better able to face the world. He’d become a photographer in his last years of high school and those years had shaped him, formed his identity; laid down inside him like sedimentary rocks.

  Later, he went to art school and focused on learning his craft, becoming lean and serious about photography. Like an athlete, he became efficient at just that one thing; it had become the only thing he could do well.

  He hovered in the kitchen and opened the fridge; he was hungry, but reluctant to eat his mother’s food. He walked down the back steps outside into the yard and the cold air prickled his skin. He usually avoided coming out here. This was where his father had died and, from the age of eleven until he left home, he spent most of his time indoors. He wasn’t superstitious. He didn’t believe in ghosts. He’d had to contemplate death from a young age and he knew that there was nothing after death; that, with it, a person slipped beneath the surface of a vast black sea and they were gone.

  It wasn’t his father’s ghost that had done the haunting, but his own memories of him. When he was younger he’d wished that, since his father was gone, his memories of his father would leave him too. At that age it seemed unfair, even cruel, that his father could be dead, but the memories remained as though his father still lived. He wanted to push the memories aside, to expel them, to sink them into the same unreachable place where his father now lay. And on a day-to-day level, he felt this was possible, that he could manage to forget him, that the man who had been his father became an outline—until the whole man returned to him suddenly, in an irresistible flood of feeling.

  The vegetable patch took up almost half the yard and the plants had grown larger than he remembered: a knotted mass, tangles of tomatoes and a pumpkin vine that crept across the yard towards the garden shed in search of new territory. He pushed his way between the rows, the wet leaves brushing his legs as he passed. Hidden between the leaves of one plant was the curved shape of an eggplant, its skin secretive and dark. Along the back fence the old passionfruit clung to the palings, green fruit tugged at the vine and the flowers were delicate tendrils of white and purple, concentric circles, like pretty eyes that shifted in the breeze.

  ‘Andrew?’

  He heard his mother’s voice behind him. He turned suddenly with the same sick feeling he’d had as a boy, when he thought he had upset her in some way. Just by being out there, he felt, he was reminding her of his father’s absence.

  ‘I’m making breakfast for us,’ she said from the back veranda, standing in her dressing-gown. Dressed that way she looked small and frail, depleted by age. He walked up to the back steps, went inside and stood on the other side of the kitchen bench as his mother finished preparing their breakfast. The kitchen cupboards were painted a shiny lime green and the drawers were wooden and prone to jam halfway, having to be eased in and out with a wriggle.

  ‘Oh, I forgot—this came for you,’ his mother said, pushing an envelope addressed to him across the bench. Normally, she sent anything that came in the post for him over to Berlin, which meant he usually received his mail late. He picked it up—the envelope was clean and white and bore all the markings of a bill. But when he opened it, it was a letter from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney advising that two of his photographs would be included in an exhibition of contemporary photographs that was opening the following month. An invitation to the opening was enclosed, on which his name was printed in embossed gold letters.

  The museum had acquired two of his photographs several years before, but there had been no interest in his work from them since. By next month, he would be back in Berlin with Dom. He wondered if he should suggest to his mother that she go in his place, but he knew she wouldn’t.

  The electric stove in the kitchen was old; the hot element glowed in a coil of red. Steam from the saucepan had misted the kitchen windows. His mother turned the stove off and lifted the pan into the kitchen sink. She’d made hard-boiled eggs and toast, the meal she’d often made for breakfast when he was a boy; it was a nurse’s meal, quick, easy and nourishing.

  They ate together at the bench, then she readied herself for work. He still remembered the morning of his mother’s first day back at work after his father’s death. He said goodbye to her through the gauze of the flyscreen door, her fingers still attached to the door handle. It was the only time he’d seen her cry. She was frozen there behind the fine crisscross of wire, her face pixelated by the gauze. Her image was uncertain and blurry, though her sadness was palpable and real. She didn’t say a word, but withdrew her fingers from the door and turned to leave. H
er small, diminished body disappeared down the front steps and across the front lawn to the gate. In the sky a black cockatoo wailed over her head.

  When he removed his hands from the gauze they tasted of salt. It hurt him to see his mother engulfed in sadness and to know there was nothing he could do to help her. It caused a physical pain in his chest. From then on he made an effort never to show his sadness in her presence, never to even think about his father when she was there. He swore he would never cry in front of her and he never did.

  He knew photography was somehow connected to this. In photographs there were no feelings, only tangible objects. He accumulated images and eliminated emotions and every photo he’d taken, every success he had with it, was moving him away from this terrible time in his life.

  •

  That night, he dialled Dom’s number and took the phone out to the back veranda so that he wouldn’t disturb his mother as she slept.

  ‘Hi. It’s me.’ He thought of her strong jaw and her dark coiled hair. How it had smelt of lavender on the first night they’d spent together and every night since.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How are you?’ He could hear her breathing over the phone; she might have been standing at his shoulder, though he knew she was very far away.

  ‘I’m fine. I still feel a bit jet-lagged though. And I don’t really know where to start to find more information about Kirsten.’

  ‘You only found out about her death a few days ago and now you are on the other side of the world. It must be disorientating.’ Dom had always possessed a clarity he lacked, an ability to understand how another person felt.