Where the Light Falls

by Gretchen Shirm

  It was a summer day and in the heat inside the warehouse, he felt himself slowly baking. The fan did nothing but stir up hot and stale air. They’d been in the studio for five hours and he was sweating, his clothes touching his body like clammy hands.

  He opened a window to let the air in and when he was back in front of the camera, the man yawned and he had glimpsed something, maybe it was a brief glimpse into his own future, and he took the photo. He pressed the camera shutter down so hard his finger hurt afterwards. Inside the man’s mouth was pink and damp and it took up almost the whole frame of the shot, so that Andrew might have been looking into the mouth of a lion. At the corner of one eye was a tear, a small, perfect droplet; in the photo it almost looked like a small diamond. When it was exhibited later, he called the photo Teething and with that image his life was changed.

  Afterwards, he found a gallery in Sydney to represent him. Until then, he’d mostly had only group shows and his chief success had been a shortlisting for a photography award many years before. He’d had one solo show at a co-op gallery in Surry Hills where he hadn’t even sold enough prints to recoup his own costs. But after Teething he was no longer dependent for his income on taking pictures of things he didn’t want to photograph, like furniture, food and underfed women in expensive clothes. The realm of commercial photography was behind him, its smallness and falseness no longer concerned him.

  The next year the photograph had been exhibited as part of a group show in the Centre Pompidou in Paris and afterwards his photographs had been acquired by museums all over the world. And even though he still suffered setbacks and his existence was never extravagant, he could work quietly by himself from then on, pursuing only the things that mattered to him, working with ideas and subjects that he felt brought him some truth.

  More recently, he wondered if his career would forever be defined by that single moment in time. Nothing he had created since had quite lived up to it—at least, not in his own mind. No other work he created had ever felt as clean. Sometimes, he felt he existed in the shadow of that photograph. No other picture had ever come to him so easily.

  14

  Andrew called his real estate agent and asked if they’d found new tenants for his apartment in Darlinghurst, thinking that if they hadn’t he could stay there himself for a few days before he flew back to Berlin. It was difficult too, for him to live so close to his mother after her disclosure; his anger at her silence flared each time he saw her. He’d bought his apartment with the money that had been put aside for him out of his father’s life insurance policy; the amount of money had slowly grown with him as he aged. By the time he was twenty-seven, he had just enough to buy a small studio apartment in an old building not far from where he had once lived with Kirsten. He’d managed to buy it before the property market in Sydney boomed a few years later. Now it was worth double what he paid for it—it was his one piece of financial security in a life characterised by taking risks. He’d never renovated it and the low rent generally attracted students and short-term tenants.

  When the agent said it hadn’t been let, he asked her to wait a week or two before advertising it again.

  When he ended the call, his thoughts careened towards Dom. Now that he had definitely decided to stay a few extra days in Sydney, he couldn’t put off telling her any longer.

  In the corner of his mother’s lounge room, the television flickered on mute; the afternoon movie was about to start.

  He dialled Dom’s number. It seemed to take an impossibly long time to connect.

  ‘Hallo?’

  ‘Dom?’

  She hesitated. Or maybe it was the delay on the line. ‘Andrew?’

  ‘Sorry, did I wake you? I suppose it must be quite early there.’ Hearing her voice produced a softness inside him. It cushioned his insecurities.

  ‘Don’t worry. I had to wake up for an early class anyway.’

  He swallowed, not wanting to think about Dom living her life without him. He wanted her to stay immobile, like a butterfly under glass, until he was ready to return to her.

  ‘I’m sorry. I miss you. I needed to hear your voice.’ Their movements on each end of the phone echoed.

  ‘Have you packed yet?’ There was something about the way she spoke; the halting words, her accent made her sound as though she was savouring everything she said.

  ‘Dom, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to delay my return flight.’

  ‘Delay it? Why? What has happened?’

  ‘I’ve found a girl here I really want to photograph for the London show. She’s really special—she has a very unusual face.’ He was aware he was speaking too quickly.

  ‘You’ve been scouting over there?’ He heard in her voice that she trusted him slightly less now, that she was testing his honesty.

  ‘No. It sort of happened by accident when I walked past my old primary school. But I can’t photograph her until next week, so I’ll have to stay a few extra days.’

  ‘Okay. So when will you be back now?’

  He realised he couldn’t answer her. He still hadn’t spoken to Kirsten’s mother, though he felt he had to before he could go back to Berlin. And still he didn’t want to disappoint her. He fell into happiness with Dom. It wound around him soft as cotton, without him having any real sense of it happening. Love had made him feel endless, it had lulled him into thinking it could never end.

  ‘Soon,’ he finally said. ‘The photographs won’t take long.’

  ‘So another few days? A week?’

  ‘I don’t know. A week or two? The thing is, I still have to get in touch with Kirsten’s mother.’ He couldn’t put any brakes on his words. They were moving out of his mouth and along a downhill track.

  ‘Another two weeks? Why is this thing with Kirsten so important, anyway? I don’t understand why you had to go back.’

  ‘I don’t know, Dom. She’s an old girlfriend of mine; I feel like I owe something to her, I guess.’

  ‘Wait, she was an old girlfriend of yours?’

  Those words had slipped out, and he knew he should have told her earlier. Now it would sound like he’d been hiding it from her.

  ‘I didn’t know that. You’ve never even talked about your old girlfriends with me.’

  ‘No, it was—I don’t know. I should have said something.’ He ran a hand over his face, realising how he had mismanaged things, though it would have cost him nothing to be open with her.

  ‘Well, I don’t know either. You tell me you don’t want me there and now it’s an old girlfriend of yours. Sometimes I don’t understand you.’ Her words hurtled towards him.

  When he hung up the phone, he looked out the window and outside a storm bird called, the call that sings in rain.

  •

  He drove to the storage unit where his belongings were packed away in cardboard boxes, to retrieve the few things he would need for the week or two he was here. He went through them one by one, finding things in unopened boxes he hadn’t seen since he moved to Berlin, digging them out like an archaeologist uncovering the traces of a former life. His old possessions now looked strange, inconsequential, objects that served no function in the life he now led. The warehouse in Waterloo was a cavernous space with high ceilings and the noises of people sorting through boxes was amplified in the space around him.

  The people who went to these sorts of places were single people, as he had been when he’d left Sydney, people making decisions about the things in their lives they could live without. The warehouse was divided into rows of locked spaces, cubicles partitioned by thin walls. Some spaces were small and others were almost large enough to live inside. One man in shorts and thongs unloaded a dining table from a trailer and the chairs that went with it. Andrew remembered that feeling of packing up his life, compressing it into the space allotted to him and of leaving that day for Berlin, feeling unburdened and free. He had tricked himself into believing there were things he could leave behind, parts of himself that wouldn’t travel with him. He cou
ld escape his regrets.

  This was a place of transition, like a train station, a place people passed through on their way somewhere else. It had taken him a long time to understand that not all people were the way he was, that some people found the place they thought they belonged, the first place they came across, and settled on it. The fact that they knew they would never leave was a source of great contentment.

  He opened the box he’d dropped off last time he was here—a plastic box so the photographs held inside wouldn’t deteriorate. He had forgotten about the photographs he’d taken of Dom two years earlier—he’d left the proofs here after dropping the prints at his gallery in Sydney. He still remembered that bargain he had struck with himself when he met her: that he would do whatever he could not to lose her. That was when the feeling of love he had for her was still something he was constantly aware of, before it faded into the background of his life and became something he assumed would always be there.

  The pictures were taken at close range, on a long exposure. He had developed them himself at his studio in Berlin, at night in the dead of winter, fixing black plastic to the windows and taping the door closed in order to block out all the light. He had used tea as a toner and the colours were dark and caramel, almost sepia. It was as much about the process of photography as the images themselves. In them she was naked, but the way they were taken it was difficult to see which of her body parts were in the shot; they were ambiguous dark stretches of skin. There was a photo of her stomach, her navel and the skin stretched over her hip. Because of the colours and the stillness of those photographs, she might have been a sculpture in bronze. He’d brought them back to Sydney to show his gallery, but they felt the photos didn’t fit with the rest of his work. They were more personal and different to his other work—there was nothing broken or damaged about Dom as there usually was with his subjects. They were a demonstration of feelings about which he had no doubt. In the end, the gallery kept only a few prints to show to select collectors.

  He put the photographs back inside their plastic sleeves, because he was worried, now, that he might cry, knowing he upset the woman with whom he’d finally found a love that he could sustain. He looked up into the gaping space over this cubicle that stored all the things he owned and hadn’t taken to Berlin. He felt something in his throat each time he swallowed, like a piece of broken china lodged where his Adam’s apple should have been.

  When he looked up again, a young boy was standing at the door of his cubicle. He was wearing yellow from his neck to his feet, a baggy outfit like a sack that was not fitted to his body. He was playing with something in his hand that was connected to a cord and he had a collar of fur around his neck. It took Andrew a moment and a tilt of his head to understand the boy was wearing a lion’s suit. The boy couldn’t have been much older than six or seven, but Andrew could already see in his face the trace of the adult he would become; the man he would grow into was already waiting to devour him. He found himself wanting to tell the boy to make sure he enjoyed this time he had as a child, to make sure that he was aware of it, because he couldn’t know how quickly it would pass.

  ‘Are you going away too?’ the boy asked. His hair was parted to one side, brushed that way while it was still wet. Andrew could see the teeth marks where the comb had been run through his hair. His hair was the white sort of blond that cannot stay that way. When the boy moved closer to him, he smelt clean and alkaline, like soap.

  Andrew shook his head. ‘I live on the other side of the world. I’m only back here to visit.’

  ‘Where do you live?’ the boy said, sceptical, and he reached for the photographs of Dom in their plastic sleeves. Andrew had forgotten what it was like to be a child, to believe that all the world belonged to you.

  ‘Berlin, in Germany,’ he said. He wasn’t sure he should be having this conversation with a child now. At that moment, he wasn’t sure he could muster the energy he needed to be kind.

  ‘My pop’s from Germany. He was born there. He came to Australia on a boat.’ This was a child’s world, a world in which everything refers back to you. ‘We’re going to America to live. My dad’s got a new job there.’ He pulled the hood up over his head and there were two triangles on top with smaller, pink triangles inside. A lion’s small ears. ‘He doesn’t know how long for, though.’ He looked at Andrew uncertainly.

  ‘That’s a long way. I hope you’re taking a plane?’

  ‘I’ve flown before, you know.’ As though the boy suspected him of assuming he had not. ‘Sometimes they give you chocolate and it’s in the shape of the plane,’ he said and turned his head, looking at something that Andrew couldn’t see from where he stood.

  ‘Wow. I’ve never had chocolate like that before,’ he said, taping the box of photos closed. When he looked up again, the boy had left.

  He had all he needed: one saucepan, a frypan, some cutlery, a few bowls and plates. He could live this way. As it turned out, he hardly needed anything at all. He sat in his mother’s car, unable to turn the key in the ignition. The car smelt of synthetic strawberry from the fragrant cardboard leaf his mother had hung from the rear-view mirror.

  He was aware that he had made a decision to leave Berlin suddenly and this decision was one he now regretted. He wondered, sitting in his mother’s car, whether this was why he’d taken those photographs of Dom. Whether he had known in advance that one day he might sabotage his own happiness. Maybe he didn’t trust himself and he’d taken these photographs in order to be able to hold on to Dom in this one, significant way.

  He drove out of the warehouse, negotiating the ramp with a thump, and he saw the boy in the lion’s suit standing beside the boot of a car with a man. The boy gave him a curious look as he passed and he understood his sadness was confusing to a boy of that age. For the first time in his life, his own feelings frightened him. It was about Kirsten and now it was also about Dom. Everything he thought he knew about the world, the things he had relied on, seemed to be collapsing around him.

  It rained on his way back to Leichhardt in his mother’s car; the downpour was so heavy that the water sluiced across the windscreen between the strokes of the wipers. He could see the red tail-lights of the car in front of him and every time he stopped at the traffic lights, he found his eyes had filled with tears.

  15

  He called Stewart that afternoon. In the background was the heavy thud of a jackhammer working through cement.

  ‘Hey, Stew, it’s Andrew. How are you?’

  ‘Andrew? Good, man, just at work.’ He imagined Stewart on site, in his hard hat and business shirt.

  ‘Just wondering if you’ve got time for a beer before I head back to Berlin?’

  ‘We’re busy over the weekend, mate. Could we make it next week instead?’

  ‘Next week should be okay; I’ll let you know the day. How about you come over to my apartment in Darlinghurst? I’ll be there for a few days before I fly back.’

  ‘Sure, man, sounds good.’ Stewart sounded friendly but distracted, and Andrew couldn’t bring himself to say that all he really wanted from Stewart were the contact details for Kirsten’s parents. He didn’t feel he could ask for those details over the telephone.

  •

  On Saturday morning, he called Pippa to find out Phoebe’s dress size. That afternoon, he walked around level six at David Jones. Among the racks of small clothing, the shorts and jumpsuits in pastels for babies and primary colours for toddlers, he felt conspicuous. He felt large and grotesque, as if with every move he might be about to knock something from its place.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’ a woman asked. She was wearing a black jacket and a pencil skirt that made her movements look restricted. Her eyebrows were drawn at two sharp angles over her eyes.

  ‘Oh, I’m looking for a dress,’ he said.

  ‘Did you have anything particular in mind?’

  ‘Well, I’m thinking of an off-white colour.’

  ‘Well, let me see. How old is your daughte
r?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not for my daughter. But she’s eleven.’ His cheeks flushed with a heat that felt visible. The woman’s face went blank, as though she was trying to find some other reason for him to be looking at dresses for girls. ‘It’s for a photo shoot. I have to take a young girl’s photograph,’ he said and she looked at him as though she’d just bitten into something she didn’t like the taste of very much.

  ‘I see.’ She led him around the shop floor and showed him some dresses, lifting the plastic hangers from their stands and holding the dresses against her body to show him how they might look, but she turned her face away from him as she spoke. Her mouth was set in a serious line.

  In the end, he settled on a cream dress with a lace collar. He thought the texture would prevent the photograph from appearing too flat. As he walked away from the counter after paying for it, he could feel the woman’s eyes on him, aware that the world was less forgiving of him than it had once been, less prepared to assume his good intentions.

  •

  He had booked the studio for Monday and Tuesday. He woke early on Monday morning and packed his equipment into the car he had hired. The morning light was sparse and cast no shadows. At the studio, he had already set up the screen and lighting. He’d used his old lights and screens, the first equipment he’d ever owned, and the pieces had a battered look about them, scarred from overuse. The walls and floor of the room he’d hired were concrete, and the echoes of him shifting equipment returned to him off the walls. Until he had his equipment unpacked, until he had the lights arranged in the way he wanted, he could not work, he felt uneasy. When the studio was finally set up, he could believe that it might happen, that the idea he had for the photograph might become something tangible and real.