‘I know. It’s also because they didn’t find the body. I’m not sure it will really sink in until I find out what happened to her. I haven’t really been able to speak to her family about it yet. They didn’t say anything about what happened at the funeral.’
There was a pause, then she said, ‘I was thinking, would you like me to come over? To Australia, I mean. I’m sure I’ll find someone who can cover the rest of my classes here. I’ve actually never been to Sydney—it might be a good time to finally make the trip.’ Her tone was tentative, the words halting. ‘And it would be nice to meet your mother.’
He knew immediately he didn’t want Dom to come. He wanted her to stay where she was until he could return to her.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘You don’t know?’ she repeated, articulating each word carefully. After almost three years together, this was all he had to offer her. This ambivalence.
He wanted to find out what had happened to Kirsten, that was all. He didn’t want the additional complication of having Dom there with him. He wanted to preserve their life as it was in Berlin, so that he could return to it.
Maybe, in truth, he didn’t want her to know this part of him, the part that belonged in Sydney. The version of him that had struggled for years without success, who’d treated Kirsten badly. He wanted to quarantine that part of his life from Dom, to protect her from it. In Berlin he could live with everything he’d made with his life; in Sydney he was aware of all the ways in which he’d fallen short.
When he didn’t respond, she said, ‘Tell me this, do you love me?’ The word was soft in her mouth, the ‘v’ pronounced as an ‘f’. Lofe, she always said; what she felt for him was lofe.
‘Come on, Dom, of course I love you. And I’ll be home soon—there’s no need for you to come all this way. I just want to get this done as quickly as possible then fly home and focus on the London exhibition. We can come out again together another time, when it’s less rushed. Maybe later this year?’
As he said the word ‘home’, he realised that something about the way he viewed the world had shifted. He understood that the place where he stood was no longer where he belonged; his home was the place that he and Dom had created for themselves. And now he had said something that threatened it.
Dom exhaled slowly, audibly, a low heave that sounded as though she was dislodging something from her chest. ‘I don’t know. You don’t want me there. What am I supposed to think? I’ve never met your mother. Sometimes I feel like I don’t really know you at all. Sometimes I think that’s the way you prefer it.’
8
On Monday afternoon, he walked around Leichhardt. The streets were so familiar to him that he didn’t even have to concentrate on where he was going. He tried not to think about the conversation he’d had with Dom. He hadn’t spoken to her the day before at all. Instead, he focused on the fact that they’d both be back in Berlin soon and he could smooth things over between them when they were together. Once he understood what had happened to Kirsten, once he knew how to make sense of things, he could explain it all to Dom.
He lost track of where he was, listening to the internal sounds of his body: his breath; his heartbeat, steady and rhythmic. As he walked, his thoughts scattered away from him like tossed coins. He found himself in front of a school. The buildings were tall, their thick walls made of red bricks. Pictures were taped to the windows, facing outwards, images drawn in crayon by small and imprecise hands. He read the sign leichhardt public school and had the sensation of moving back into himself. This was his old primary school, but it looked somehow more exposed than his memory of it, too close to the street and the chaos of the city. When he had been there, it had felt secluded.
Mostly, his memories of it were the view from inside, looking out the window during classes and realising, as other students put their heads down to work, that he hadn’t been listening to what was said and was unsure what he was supposed to be doing.
The playground was empty now. He glanced at his watch; it was quarter past three. He assumed that school must be over for the day. But even as he had the thought a bell rang and suddenly the school was swarming with green bodies. He stayed there gripping the fence, watching the bodies, small and busy, forming groups and separating, moving like ants.
His eye was caught by a young girl walking slowly through the bodies with her bag slung over one shoulder. Her hat dangled from one finger, bobbing on its elasticised band. The straw hat had buckled on one side.
Her hair was blonde, the colour of barley. When she came closer he thought at first that she was pulling a face because the left side of her mouth was slack. When she smiled at one of her friends, though, he noticed that she smiled with only the right side of her mouth. From where he stood, that part of her face looked melted. She moved around to his side of the fence, eyes on her feet, glancing up from time to time in the direction of Norton Street, as if waiting for someone to arrive. She was only a few metres away from him, and if she hadn’t been standing so close, he might have said nothing. He might have walked away and let the idea that had suddenly possessed him pass.
He took a step towards her. ‘Hi,’ he said.
Growing up, he had no younger siblings or nieces and nephews, and as an adult he’d played no role in the lives of his friends’ children. He’d had no experience in talking to children, apart from the models he’d used for photographs, and the young girl seemed to sense his nerves.
‘Is your mum or dad coming to pick you up this afternoon?’
Still looking at her feet, she said her mother was coming from work. She spoke so softly he could hardly hear her.
‘Okay,’ he said. They stood beside each other without speaking and he kept wondering what he should do with his hands.
After a few minutes a woman walked towards them. Her long, dark hair had a silvery sheen in the sun, where it had started to grey. She wore jeans and a tunic that reached her knees. On her feet were flat, practical sandals. She took the girl’s head in her hands and kissed her hair. It was a firm gesture that seemed to almost be an expression of relief at having found the young girl still there waiting for her. He wondered where the girl’s blonde hair had come from. She held her hat up to her mother, who frowned, and he saw the word broken pass over the young girl’s lips.
He moved towards them, a sideways movement like a crab’s. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you,’ he said. He hated scouting for subjects. It was like asking someone he didn’t know very well for a favour, even though he paid his models—whether they were professional or not—and most people were glad to be involved. ‘I’m a photographer,’ he continued. ‘I noticed your daughter as I was walking past. I wondered if you would let me take her photograph?’
The woman frowned. ‘What sort of a photograph?’ she said, moving her arm around her daughter’s waist and pulling her closer. The inside of her arm was pale, the two bones in her wrist visible like the underside of a wing. Behind him, the chatter of children peppered his thoughts.
‘I’m a photographic artist. You can look me up online. It would be a portrait. I’ll pay her. Your daughter has the right look.’
Look. The word repulsed him. It was a word that photographers used, but he didn’t like the way it implied that a person’s appearance could be slotted into a category. He hadn’t really been thinking about photographs at all until he’d seen her there and an image of her flashed before him against a soft, white background, her hair falling evenly around her face.
Behind the woman he was talking to, he noticed a figure moving towards them. It was a teacher whom he actually recognised, wearing a red shirt and shorts. His socks were pulled up to his knees.
‘Can I help you?’ the teacher said. A vein in his neck bulged and his face was slightly flushed, the colour of sunburn that hadn’t completely faded. Andrew wondered whether it was actually possible that a teacher who’d been there when he was a student was still teaching at the same school. Perhaps he was mistaken. Ov
er the years he had seen so many faces that maybe this man just appeared similar to someone else he knew. But no; Andrew looked at him again and the way he stood, the way he gestured with his hands as he spoke, as though he was demonstrating the dimensions of a box; they were the movements of a person he knew.
‘I’m just talking to this girl’s mother,’ he said. An exhaustion took hold of him. He had too much else to think about and wished he’d said nothing, that he could walk away now and pretend it hadn’t happened. ‘My name is Andrew Spruce. I’m a photographer. I actually went to school here.’ He smiled, trying to muster his charm from somewhere inside him, a place that felt welded shut. He tried to remember the teacher’s name.
‘You shouldn’t be here. These are school premises, not public property. If you don’t leave now, I’m afraid I’ll have to call the police.’
He couldn’t help himself. His reaction against being told what to do was automatic. He pointed out that he wasn’t actually on school property, that he’d simply been standing on the footpath.
Something twitched behind the teacher’s face; some deep instinct which, after a lifetime of being in control of a classroom, responded badly to being corrected.
‘You were talking to this girl without an adult present,’ the man said. His voice was low and quavered slightly in response to some suppressed rage. ‘There are rules for contacting students. You have to obtain the approval of the principal.’
At that moment, Andrew looked towards the girl’s mother and later, when he thought back on the scene, he realised that this was the moment at which she’d decided to give him the benefit of her doubt. There was a softness in her eyes and he understood that she felt sorry for him, was embarrassed by the way he was being berated.
‘I’ll be reporting this incident to the authorities,’ the teacher said, as he left, moving through the clusters of small green bodies remaining in the yard, and the woman moved closer to him, her eyes brown and clear, the colour of weak black tea. ‘Do you have a card or something you could give me?’ she said, gripping the calico bag that hung over her shoulder and which seemed to be full of books. Behind them the wind rushed through the leaves of a melaleuca tree, the sound, like water over stones.
‘I don’t have a card with me,’ he said. He’d had some business cards made a few years earlier, but they remained sealed in a box somewhere in storage because he was too shy ever to hand them out. ‘You can look me up online though; I have a website. I’ll write the address down for you. There’s an email address for me on the site and I’ll give you my mobile number.’ He patted his pockets for a pen and the woman found a scrap of paper for him to write on. It was a receipt for some library books; he wrote his contact details on the back.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll look you up.’ Then she took her daughter’s hand and walked down to the pedestrian crossing. There they stopped, the woman looking in both directions cautiously before stepping out, as though very aware of all the things that could go wrong.
He started walking in the opposite direction. He’d only gone about a block from the school when he heard tyres crunch up behind him and the sharp bleep of a siren. He jumped and his heart started to race. A male officer stepped out of the car first.
‘We’ve had a complaint, sir, about a man matching your description who was seen loitering around the school grounds. Was it you?’
He nodded and felt a tight pain across his chest. A female officer emerged from the car and they were talking to one another, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying.
‘Can you tell us your name, please?’
‘Andrew Spruce,’ he said. He told himself he’d done nothing wrong, that this was preposterous. He hadn’t set foot inside the school gates.
‘Do you have a licence or some other form of identification with you?’ The female officer was wearing thick black lace-up boots, a style that had been popular recently in Berlin. The gun in her holster was close; he could have reached out, unclipped it and taken it in his hands. He took his wallet from his back pocket and fumbled for his licence.
‘Your licence has expired, sir,’ the police officer observed.
‘I’m living in Berlin. I’m just back for a week.’
‘Are you staying at the address on this licence?’
He nodded.
She carried his licence back to the police car.
‘Okay,’ she said when she returned. ‘You’re not on our sex offenders register.’
Andrew cleared his throat. Something must have changed about him. It had happened gradually since he moved past the age of thirty. People had stopped giving him the benefit of their doubt. And now he seemed to be regarded as a potential threat. This is what had happened to him as he’d aged, the light illuminated him in a different way. It became less kind.
‘Are you on your way home?’
He nodded. He felt exhausted, suddenly overcome with jet lag and fatigue.
The female officer’s face softened with a sudden rush of sympathy. ‘Do you need a lift somewhere?’ she asked.
‘Could you take me home? To the address on my licence?’
The female officer looked at the man standing beside the car. He nodded.
When the police car pulled up, his mother emerged from the house.
‘Andy,’ she said. Her voice was high and unsteady.
He thought the situation might have even been funny now, being brought home by the police as an adult. That this might finally make up for his unremarkable years as a teenager when his peers were staying out all night partying and he spent his time in the darkroom alone sluicing photographic paper in shallow basins of fluid.
‘In future, try to avoid the school grounds,’ the male officer said as he followed his mother inside.
9
The next day he decided to go to Rushcutters Bay, to see again the apartment he had shared with Kirsten for two years. He caught the bus into the city and walked down William Street, a noisy, overwhelming thoroughfare. It had been raining earlier that morning and the cement and bitumen were wet. As he approached the building, there was a heavy feeling in his gut. He remembered that feeling from when he’d lived there with Kirsten, the conflict between the desire he felt for her and the need to have his own space. He loved her, but her way of returning his love was to need him.
The apartment block was built of dark red bricks with windows facing onto New South Head Road, where the traffic tore down the hill and off to the east. Their apartment had one small bedroom and their windows were in shadow for most of the day. It was so dark inside that they always had to have a light turned on, even in summer. The carpet was worn, with strange ambiguous stains left by those who had lived there before. The bathroom was the only room in the apartment that had been renovated, as though the owner had started the process but hadn’t followed through. Sometimes he had stood in the shower with the door closed; it was the only place he felt he had any privacy when Kirsten was also home. The sound of the stream of water hitting the recess around him had washed away the other noises of the apartment. He could almost pretend to himself he was alone.
Their furniture was mismatched and everything they owned had been given to them or was on loan. On the dining table they had set up their computers, one at each end, and they had sat there together, working on assignments, one of them getting up occasionally to make a fresh pot of tea. Their bed was behind a curtain, clothes were flung across the room. Their wardrobe was an open rack. Everything they owned was exposed and neither of them could keep anything to themselves. It was no way to live with another person; he knew that now. But in their youth and inexperience, they had thought this was what sharing a life entailed. In those first six months of living together, he would have given everything he had to her, without understanding what the consequences of doing so would have been. Thinking of that space now, a warmth passed through him, a memory that felt claustrophobic; it was a place where emotions had started off pleasant but had soured.
There was a day he remembered well, although the memory seemed faded, the colour drained from the scenes. He had been out all day, working in the studio on his major work, due at the end of that semester. Sometimes he slept in the studio for a few hours, woke and kept working, staying there through the night. He wasn’t sure where he got the motivation from and sometimes his interest in photography felt closer to an obsession.
He had come home one afternoon around five. It was late in the year, the air was warm, familiar, with the sense that things were ending. The apartment was still when he opened the door. The air was suddenly cold and he heard a deep-throated grumble, the beginning of a storm. He saw a bowl and a mug in the kitchen from when Kirsten ate breakfast before she left for work that morning. He washed them under the tap. From their apartment, they could sometimes hear noise from the stadium in Moore Park and there must have been a football game on, because the surge of voices drifted towards him, a chorus of exaltations.
He enjoyed those moments of solitude. Outside the traffic moved in bursts, the sound of it reaching him, the buses and trucks through his window like the groans and complaints of people he didn’t know, plaintive, full of sorrow and anger. The gruff exhale of a truck as it shifted down a gear. This was what he loved, this making sense of the world. When he was alone like this, the world could mutate and change; it could become what he imagined it to be.
Fat voluptuous clouds scudded low in the sky. The shadows had become thin, disappearing slowly in anticipation of rain. An old skip sat on the side of the road. Someone had moved out of an apartment in their building and deposited the refuse of their life into the metal bin. There was a plastic doll with its arm missing, its hair teased out. He could have stood there forever at that window, from where he could see the world but it couldn’t touch him.
Where the Light Falls Page 5