Where the Light Falls

by Gretchen Shirm

  After one of those silences, as he’d spun the last piece of spaghetti around his fork, her stepfather said suddenly, ‘Did Peter call today?’ There was something in his eyes, something cold and definite like glass that made Andrew think that her stepfather already knew what the answer to his question would be. That might have been the first time he understood that parents have this power over their children, one which it must be tempting to misuse.

  In response to those words Kirsten had pulled her arms into her body, like a person caught in an act of theft. She shook her head in a small, almost imperceptible movement.

  When the waiter had brought out her birthday cake that night, nobody sang ‘Happy Birthday’. Kirsten stared out from behind the glow of the orange flames and Andrew kept having to clear his throat.

  Later, on their way back across the bridge to their apartment, she told him as she looked out of the window of the train that Peter was her father’s name and that she hadn’t seen him in over five years. She rested her head on his shoulder as she spoke.

  •

  In court on the third morning, Kirsten’s mother gave evidence, sitting in the witness stand with her knees pressed together. Her voice was soft and difficult to hear, diffuse with air.

  ‘Could you state your name and occupation for the record?’

  ‘Renee Rothwell. I’m a chartered accountant. Retired.’

  ‘And what was your relationship to the deceased?’

  ‘Her mother.’ Her gaze drifted towards him, but her eyes never quite settled on his. Had she recognised him? He must have changed a great deal in the years that had elapsed. He was aware that he no longer looked like a young man; he had silver flecks through his hair, lines around his eyes.

  ‘What was your daughter’s occupation, Mrs Rothwell?’

  ‘She was unemployed at the time of the . . . the accident. She went back to university. She had been employed by my husband for a short while, but it didn’t work out. Before that, she worked for a barrister as his personal assistant.’

  ‘What did she do for your husband?’

  ‘She worked in the office, answering phones. Administration. Some accounts as well, I think.’ She looked beyond the people in the courtroom to the back wall.

  ‘And she was studying?’

  ‘She went back to finish her degree in fine arts. She’d started it straight out of school, but never finished.’ Renee looked down. ‘Kirsten could draw,’ she said, and there was a flash of pride on her face, a brief flicker, like the shine off a coin. Her eyes met his again for another brief moment and then glanced off somewhere behind him.

  Spoken in this room full of strangers, among people who would not know what those words meant, they sounded thin; they didn’t capture what Kirsten was capable of doing with her hands. Oh, how she could draw! She sat down at the desk in their spare room and the world was lost to her. While she was drawing, he didn’t exist. She would copy something—usually a painting from a book—and when he saw her sitting there, inside her fortress of concentration, he envied how easy it was for her to withdraw. While they lived together, she had copied all of the paintings from a book on Vermeer she picked up second-hand at the Glebe markets. She captured the same light of his paintings, a light that rained down like water. She could do it just with the shading of her pencil. Her drawings were precise, somehow more exact than the originals.

  ‘She was at the National Art School last year. I helped her financially, so she could go back and study, but I was told she dropped out. I hadn’t known that.’

  This was how Kirsten’s life was accounted for in the end, with these few things that she had attempted but at which she had never quite succeeded. If his own life were summarised at the end, and if he took away photography and Dom, it might look as empty and insignificant as Kirsten’s.

  •

  The faces he saw each day in the courtroom became familiar and he watched some of the journalists filing into court together and shuffling out again in the afternoon, exchanging comments about the proceedings. They were all waiting for that moment, for the critical revelation, the one fact that would unravel the mystery of Kirsten’s death, as though there were a single explanation, one way to understand what she had done that day.

  Outside the courtroom, Kirsten’s mother spoke to no-one. At lunchtime, she sat on the wooden bench outside the court room and ate a sandwich, taking very small bites. A journalist approached her during an adjournment and Andrew watched as she held her small palm up to him before he drew too close. He watched her from the foyer of the court, standing with his back to the wall, waiting for the right opportunity to speak to her, but in truth he was frightened of what her reaction to him might be.

  Would she blame him? Accuse him? There were moments in a person’s life, and once they had happened, one could not always recover from them. He felt that way about his father’s death: he was not the same person after it as he had been before it. Perhaps Renee Rothwell would accuse him of being that to Kirsten, of somehow breaking her. He feared she would tell him that all of this, Kirsten’s decline, had somehow started with him.

  He watched her intently. During the proceedings, Kirsten’s mother spoke to no-one except occasionally to counsel assisting the inquiry, when he swivelled around in his chair to ask a question during the course of the hearing, and even then her answers were restricted to one or two words.

  Andrew spent more time observing her than watching what was happening in the hearing. He observed how still she sat; she might have been a marble bust. There was something about the way she sat unmoving that suggested reluctance and made him think she was there against her will.

  •

  The police officer who’d been responsible for investigating the death gave evidence on the fourth day of the hearing. It was late in the morning and he sounded weary, the words he spoke dredged up from a dark and difficult place. Kirsten drove to Canberra from Sydney that morning in a car she had borrowed from her stepfather. It had been purchased by her stepfather’s company three months before Kirsten’s disappearance. Kirsten had stopped at Goulburn.

  ‘Was there any reason that you’re aware of for her making that stop?’ counsel assisting asked.

  The police officer shifted in his chair and his eyes flicked briefly towards her mother.

  ‘She bought fifteen dollars’ worth of petrol and a loaf of bread.’

  ‘Sorry, did you say a loaf of bread?’

  ‘Yes. She went back to buy it after she’d paid for the petrol. I reviewed the CCTV footage.’

  Bread, Andrew thought, clutching at this detail, holding it to his chest, trying to locate the significance it held within it. A person who buys bread surely intends to live. He wanted to stand up and say, There, you see, she wanted to eat! She wanted to live!

  He imagined her in the grainy black-and-white footage, walking in and out of the shop alone. There must have been footage of him like that everywhere, doing everyday things that, when you looked back at them, appeared strange and inexplicable to others. But when you died the way Kirsten did, this was what happened: people raked through the details of your life and tried to make sense of it.

  In Canberra, Kirsten went to Ainslie, where she’d driven up and down the same street—Campbell Street—a number of times. It had been reported to police as suspicious. The police officer said he wasn’t sure if there was any significance to that street and it was the only time Kirsten’s mother moved. She stood from her chair, rising above the seated bodies towards counsel assisting. She whispered something into his ear and the barrister tilted his head towards her. It looked intimate, even solicitous.

  When she sat down again, counsel assisting stood and said, ‘Your Honour, I’m informed by the deceased’s mother that Campbell Street in Ainslie is where the deceased’s sister resides, at number fifty-two.’

  Kirsten had spoken of her sister to him, although they’d never met. The tone of Kirsten’s voice whenever she’d uttered Lydia’s name was bright and
warm, like someone standing in darkness and speaking of light.

  Counsel assisting then asked about the search for her body.

  ‘We spent two days there conducting a full-scale search. We flew in divers from the search and rescue squad in Sydney,’ the police officer said, his voice higher, tighter, as though anticipating criticism. He looked to the magistrate and back to the barrister. ‘We didn’t have the manpower to search the whole lake,’ he conceded. ‘It’s twenty-five kilometres long and ten wide, and was fuller than it’s been in years. It holds hundreds of millions of litres of water.’

  •

  That afternoon at three, counsel assisting stood and declared there was no more evidence. Somehow, just like that, in a single sentence and a sweeping gesture of this barrister’s hand, the hearing was over.

  The magistrate stood abruptly and left the room, and everybody else stood and lingered, as if waiting for a more emphatic conclusion. Not Kirsten’s mother though. She stood and moved straight to the door with her head down, like a criminal absolved of a crime. Andrew hurried out behind her, pushing the weight of the heavy courtroom door away from him with both his hands.

  ‘Mrs Rothwell?’ he called, but she didn’t seem to hear him. ‘Excuse me?’

  She was almost at the front door when she turned around to face him. Outside, the traffic on Parramatta Road sped past, the sound reaching him through the door in snippets, like a radio station not quite tuned to a signal. He felt a nerve next to his eye twinge.

  ‘I’m not sure if you remember me,’ he said, wishing as he spoke the words that he could explain it to her more delicately, that he wasn’t always racing towards a resolution. ‘I used to—I mean, Kirsten used to be my girlfriend.’ He ran his fingers through his hair. He wasn’t sure what Kirsten had told her mother about them.

  Kirsten’s mother tilted her head, as though with this movement, she was trying to recall a younger version of him. She was wearing a small gold cross on her necklace that hung over the sunken space at the base of her neck where her collarbones met. She had a strong jawline and the wrinkles around her mouth were ambiguous, he couldn’t be sure whether they had been formed from laughing or pursing. As he kept talking, he had the sensation of swimming in dark water, aware that he couldn’t see the bottom and there might be something lurking not far beneath him.

  ‘I’m sorry. Someone else—a mutual friend—told me about the inquiry and I wanted to know more about it. I suppose this must be quite strange for you?’ He knew as he said it that the word strange wasn’t quite enough, that it did not carry the heft it needed, because what they were discussing was the death of this woman’s daughter.

  When she spoke, her eyes were fixed on his chest. ‘I see. Well. I think I remember you. I’m glad you introduced yourself,’ she said. But glad was not how she appeared. Her face was heavy and hard, set like a theatre mask. She took a step backwards and reached for the door. ‘It’s nice to know you still cared about Kirsten.’ She said this with an air of finality.

  He didn’t want her to go. His instinct was to reach for the door and press it closed, to prevent her from leaving. ‘I wondered whether you’d be willing to talk to me about her. You see, we lost touch and . . .’ He saw her frown. He licked his lips and continued. ‘I wondered if you could tell me a little more about what happened to her. I’ve been living overseas for the past few years. I’d like to know more.’

  Mrs Rothwell straightened and tightened her grip on her handbag. They stepped away from the door to allow other people to leave. He noticed the way she moved her hands, how she reached for the front door and held her hand now, to her bag, touching things so lightly she looked reluctant to make contact. Her hands might have been covered in gloves.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry. As I’m sure you can understand, the last few days have been quite difficult. I need some time. What if I call you?’ She looked past him. She was speaking in a breathy voice that sounded as though it should have been coming from another person’s mouth, someone younger and less sure of themselves.

  ‘I’ll give you my number,’ he said. ‘I’d appreciate it if you called me, when you feel ready.’ He didn’t actually want to leave it up to her, but what choice did he have?

  He handed her a piece of paper with his phone number on it and watched the door swing shut. Behind him the foyer had emptied.

  19

  That evening, he emailed the images to the gallery in London as thumbnails, including the photos of Phoebe. He hadn’t heard anything from Pippa and it had been more than a week. He hesitated before he pressed send, wondering if he should call Pippa just to make sure she had no objection, but part of him didn’t want to give her the opportunity to say no.

  The gallery called late that night, while he was asleep.

  ‘It’s Marten Smythe here,’ a clipped voice said when he answered the phone.

  ‘Sorry?’ He sat up in bed, his thoughts rushing back towards consciousness.

  ‘Marten Smythe, London Six,’ the voice said.

  ‘Oh yes. I’m in Australia—it’s late here. Could you give me a few moments?’

  ‘Oh, you’re back in Australia, are you? Of course, take your time.’

  He walked to the kitchen with the phone and filled the upturned glass on the sink with water. Through the kitchen window he saw the moon glowing through a thin layer of cloud as though behind silk, light bleeding out around it. He picked up the phone again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, still feeling foggy from sleep.

  ‘That’s quite all right. I was just calling to talk about your photos.’

  He worried suddenly that Marten was calling to say the images weren’t what he wanted. That he was calling off the exhibition and everything Andrew had been working towards would be for nothing.

  Instead, Marten said, ‘We’re really excited about this work. We’d like to have the prints ready as soon as we can. Could you send the high-resolution images over on a USB stick? By courier, if you could.’

  It took him a moment to readjust himself to this development and there was a sudden jerk of feeling, a leap from one place to another.

  ‘Oh right, wow. Yes, of course.’

  ‘Splendid. Also, the girl with the face . . .’ The girl with the face. He wanted to tell this man that her name was Phoebe and that she was a lovely, complicated girl. That she was more than her face. Marten continued, ‘It’s almost excruciating to look at, the level of detail, it almost makes me want to look away. I have a feeling about it. It’s unique. I think it will sell well. The photograph of the young boy with his eyes closed, too. I think you called it Smiling Alone. Very striking. Really, in my opinion this is your most sophisticated body of work yet.’

  He didn’t like to be reminded of the fact that art was a business and that, like any other business, in the end it turned on money. These conversations with gallery owners and curators stripped him of his naive belief that art was about art. And now he was acutely aware of how he was involving Phoebe in this fickle world of his. He thought of the images of Phoebe and started to worry that somehow they were too honest. They took advantage of her openness and maybe they were too exposing to be shown. Maybe if he exhibited those images, he would be putting on display a personal transaction that had taken place between him and Phoebe; an interaction that was essentially private and should not be shown to the world.

  In the morning, he put the exhibition photographs on a USB stick but saved the photographs of Phoebe on a separate stick. He sent the first lot of photos, but the photographs of Phoebe he kept. He put them in a drawer in his apartment. He would take a few more days to think it over.

  •

  The next day he went back to his mother’s house to collect some clothes he’d left there. It was just after one in the afternoon and he had chosen a time when he assumed his mother would be at work and he could slip in and out without seeing her. He didn’t want to risk her trying to talk to him again about his father. He had gone too long without speaking about
it and now his only natural response to it was silence.

  But his mother walked in from a shift at the hospital in her black slacks and white blouse just as he was about to leave.

  Since she’d brought up the matter of his father’s death, they hadn’t spoken properly. When he had seen her, the words that passed between them were reduced to what was necessary, they were quick and brief and spoken with no feeling.

  She made herself a cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table. He sat down opposite her.

  ‘I thought you were supposed to be heading back last weekend?’ his mother said, gently.

  ‘I was,’ he said. He wasn’t sure how much he wanted to share with his mother now. He sighed, trying to keep his lingering anger hidden from her. ‘But there was a coronial inquiry into Kirsten’s death. It finished on Wednesday. I stayed for that.’

  His mother looked up, eager for whatever words he was prepared to share with her. She might have accepted anything from him just then, even an insult.

  ‘She took some pills before she drowned.’ He heard the hardness in his voice, and the callousness in those words as he spoke them was aimed at her.

  He watched the words impact her.

  ‘Oh, Andrew. What happened?’

  ‘I still don’t know exactly. The coroner hasn’t handed down her findings.’

  ‘God, that’s terrible,’ she said. She went quiet, moving to the kitchen without saying anything more. He watched her closely in order to observe the effect his words had had on her.

  Darkness passed across her face. ‘She was always so . . .’ His mother hesitated. ‘She always seemed so troubled.’ She blew on her tea and continued before he could answer her. ‘I could always see that about her—that she was too fragile for the world. Everything always seemed to affect her very deeply.’ His mother’s words were faint. She looked out into the yard without saying any more, but he could tell that Kirsten was still lodged in her thoughts. There was something about Kirsten that always seemed to linger, a mystery, and he understood by looking at his mother now that he wasn’t the only one who had sensed it.