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That night, he had just stepped out of the shower when his telephone rang.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s Renee Rothwell.’
‘Oh, hello,’ he said, realising abruptly he was speaking with Kirsten’s mother.
‘My husband and I would like to invite you to have morning tea with us. Tomorrow if that would suit you?’
Morning tea sounded very formal.
‘Okay, that suits me.’ He spoke the words too quickly and tried to settle his own feeling of urgency.
‘Why don’t we say eleven, then?’
‘Great.’
She gave him her address and directions from the train station at Gordon. He had the feeling of having been summoned and that night, he waited and paced and ate and slept like someone waiting to receive bad news.
20
On the way to Renee’s house on the train, he realised that he should have brought something with him. Something to offer them. If he had thought about it earlier, he could have bought something from the sourdough bakery near his apartment. He thought of the pastel-coloured macarons in the glass cabinet, but they were too bright, playful. Or maybe he should have brought flowers, but he wasn’t sure how he would have decided on the right colour.
The metal struts slid across the window beside him as he passed over the Harbour Bridge. The harbour was a broken blue, the uninviting darkness of very deep water.
Exiting the station at Gordon, he saw a small bakery. Inside it was warm and smelt of yeast and sultanas. The bread was stacked on the shelves, loaves and loaves of it, the dimensions exact, pushed from the same mould, white, fluffy and lacking in nourishment.
He missed the German bread he’d grown used to in Berlin, heavy and substantial. He bought a fruit loaf that felt soft when he picked it up and light as he carried it from the shop. Further down the street, he slowed down. He was going to speak to these people about their dead daughter and what he had to offer them was a flimsy loaf of bread. He stopped and packed it into his backpack so it would be hidden.
The noise from the highway receded behind the lines of houses and he found himself on a quiet street. The wind jostled the trees around him, hostile. A crow flew past, its cry desolate and forlorn, three long pleas with no variation in tone.
There was nothing remarkable or grand about these houses. They were the sorts of red-brick dwellings that people lived in everywhere, but here, in these suburbs, they were spacious and well cared for—they said something about the wealth of the people who lived in them. They weren’t like the houses in Leichhardt that had been added to and built on and threatened to burst from their lawns. They were houses that remained confined to the seams that contained them. In these driveways were new cars of moderate tones, the types of cars that slipped through the world and attracted no dirt. In the gardens were hedges and topiary plants and in their windows, the curtains were drawn. The houses he passed were utterly still; they were houses from which all the children had gone.
When he reached Kirsten’s old house, there was a poinciana tree in the front lawn that had shed its leaves and its trunk was as scaly and smooth as a reptile. The branches were bare and, against the red bricks behind it, the frame looked ghostly. It stood in the yard obstructing the front lawn and it took him a moment to notice the path around it.
‘Good morning,’ Renee said when she opened the door.
The first thing he noticed was that she was wearing a knee-length navy skirt and stockings and he wondered what type of person dressed so formally on a Saturday in their own home. He walked in behind her and down a hall lined with photographs hung along the picture rail. It was as though these photographs constituted proof of what these people had accomplished with their lives, documentary evidence of a useful and productive existence. They were photos that asked no questions.
There was a photograph of a girl with dark hair, a toddler, sitting in the haphazard way of a child who hasn’t learnt to walk and is yet to find her centre of gravity. She was sitting on the edge of a roundabout with her feet dragging in the gravel. The girl’s nose scrunched up tightly and her hair was thin and wispy; there was barely enough to be pulled together in a ponytail. She was wearing pink and the smile on her face was one that had never known sadness.
The young girl might have been Kirsten, it looked like her, but it might also have been her sister, who he had never met. He lingered there, but ahead of him Renee had disappeared into a room so he followed her. He didn’t ask about the picture; it felt somehow impolite to ask about a dead woman in a photograph.
Inside, the furnishings were new. He had assumed that people like this, older people whose children had left home and whose careers would soon be ending, would hold on to the things they had collected over the years, that their furniture would accumulate in their house as they aged. But it was new and there was too much of it. It was placed too closely together and everywhere it looked to be in the way.
For a moment, he was distracted by the clutter and didn’t see Kirsten’s stepfather standing there. He was behind the couch so that Andrew could only see him from above the waist, like a puppet on stage.
‘Saul,’ he said, holding out his hand for Andrew to shake.
His beard had turned completely white since they’d last met, but if he had any recollection of Andrew he didn’t show it as he leant forward over the lounge and shook his hand. His hands were large and forceful like a boxer’s. He wondered whether Renee had explained to her husband exactly who he was and why he was here.
On the coffee table Italian biscuits were arranged on a white plate, the china so fine the light passed through it. They were delicate biscuits laid out like ornaments. Some of them were shaped like horseshoes, covered with flaked almonds, others were pistachio green. He thought of the fruit loaf in the bag that he put at his feet when he sat down, glad now it remained hidden and that he wouldn’t have to embarrass himself by offering it to Renee.
‘Can I offer you some tea or coffee?’ she asked.
‘I’d love a tea,’ he said.
She nodded and left for the kitchen and her husband stayed standing in the room. His features looked oversized, his nose and ears too large for his face; ageing had made his skin retreat from his features. His eyes were glassy, like the stuffed head of an animal on a wall. Those creatures had the same look about them as Kirsten’s stepfather, of not quite believing where they had found themselves.
‘What is it you do with yourself?’
‘I’m a photographer.’
‘Oh yeah? I suppose you work for a newspaper or a magazine?’
‘Well, no.’ He still found it hard to explain his occupation to other people. ‘My photographs are more like portraits.’
‘I see. I’m a salesperson myself. I own an office supply business.’ He coughed on the back of his hand.
Renee walked in with a tray on which was a delicate teapot the colour of crushed bones. She put it down on the table in front of her, making the movement awkwardly, without bending her knees.
She poured tea then sat on the lounge opposite him, crossing one leg over the other and tugging her skirt over her knees with her fingers. ‘Are you working at the moment?’ she asked.
‘I, well, I’m preparing for an exhibition that’s opening next month.’ A crease of anxiety unfolded inside him as he thought of the photographs of Phoebe he still hadn’t sent to the gallery. What he was doing would threaten the professional reputation it had taken him years to build.
Renee sat in the corner of the lounge, holding one hand inside the other as though she’d been taught somewhere the proper way of sitting and had practised the pose until it became her habit.
‘Oh, I see,’ she said softly, fiddling with the cross on her necklace.
Saul stayed standing with the cup in his hand. He couldn’t keep his hand still and the teacup rattled on its saucer.
‘You know, we saw Kirsten quite regularly,’ he said loudly, over the clatter of his teacup.
Renee pushed the sleeves of her cardigan up. ‘She came here to visit. She still had her own room here.’ He looked out the window as he spoke.
Andrew reached for a biscuit, but realised that neither Renee nor her husband had taken one. His hand hovered as he wondered whether they were only there for display. Renee nodded her head in a very slight movement that made it look as though she didn’t want to be seen. He took a horseshoe-shaped biscuit and held it in his hand, waiting for someone else to take one too. The biscuit grew sticky in his palm as he waited.
‘She asked to borrow the car for the day, you know?’ Renee’s husband started again. ‘She came into the office the week before to ask me. She told me she wanted to go to Canberra to see an exhibition. What was it again, Renee?’ He was a man who always spoke with a frown, a man for whom the world seemed to be a very confusing place.
‘She was going to visit the National Gallery,’ Renee said, looking down.
‘And when I found out what she’d done, I just—’ He stopped and looked into his tea. He spoke as though Kirsten’s death had offended rather than upset him. ‘How could I have known what she intended to do?’ His cheeks were sharply sunken, forming two divots in his skin.
Saul cleared his throat and looked at Renee, and Andrew understood that by coming here as a person from Kirsten’s past, he had invited this. Somehow Saul thought that, if he could explain himself to Andrew, explain how he thought he might have contributed to Kirsten’s fate, he would be forgiven, as though Andrew, being someone who had once loved her, had that power.
He was expecting the biscuit to snap in his mouth when he bit into it, but it was soft and crumbly and broke apart. He cupped his hand to his mouth to stop the pieces from falling to the floor.
‘Did she . . .’ he started to say. ‘I mean, had she . . . Was she all right before?’ He couldn’t say the word accident, the word everyone else kept using to describe what had happened to Kirsten, though it hardly seemed to have been accidental. It seemed to be thought out, planned and deliberate. If nothing else, that much was clear.
‘She seemed happy enough, didn’t she, Renee? Last time we saw her, anyway.’
‘Yes,’ Renee said, looking up, but there was a heaviness to her features, the way a person looks when they are speaking of one thing but thinking of another.
‘Well, Andrew,’ Saul said, taking the last sip of his tea. Andrew thought he was being dismissed, so he stood as well, but the other man continued, ‘I’m going out to work in the garden. Saturdays are the only chance I get. I’ll leave you two here to talk.’
He sat down again and felt relief as Saul left. Renee was still fiddling with the cross at her neck, as though some memory were attached to it. He was quiet and she was quiet and then they both spoke at the same time.
‘You go,’ he said.
‘I’m glad you came. I mean, when I saw you that day at court, it was very sudden.’
He supposed to her it seemed sudden, although to him it wasn’t that way; he’d been thinking about what to say to her for days.
‘I heard you say at the hearing that Kirsten had gone back to art school?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘She went back to the National Art School. I think she wanted to try to pick up where she left off from her old degree. But it had been too many years.’ She pressed her knees against her hands. ‘She was out of practice.’
‘She was . . .’ He didn’t know how to capture what he thought in words. ‘Her drawings were wonderful. It always upset me that she left university.’
‘Yes, they were, weren’t they?’ she said gently and he wondered if Renee had ever tried to dissuade her from leaving.
‘Do you know if there was someone else in Kirsten’s life?’ The words skittered from his mouth and her lips twisted in response to his question.
‘It’s so hard to say with Kirsten. She was a bit . . . I don’t know. In the end, she didn’t always tell me everything.’
He wondered, then, if they’d spoken about him, if Kirsten had told her mother how for years they’d lived apart and slept together. Maybe he should tell this woman that he had wanted to help Kirsten, but he just didn’t have what it took to do that for another person.
Then her tone changed, it turned warmer. ‘She worked for a few years for a barrister as his personal assistant.’ She articulated the last two words carefully. ‘She did enjoy that in the beginning.’ She rearranged her hands on her lap. ‘He was quite prominent and I think the work made her feel important.’
‘Did you see her?’ he asked. ‘Before it happened?’
She stiffened and pressed her knees together. ‘I hadn’t seen her properly for a few weeks. She picked up the car from Saul at work. She seemed busy. I thought that was a good thing.’ Renee looked up and her eyes narrowed. ‘We really tried. I mean, my husband gave her a job after she’d stopped working for the barrister. Even though she’d said some things to me about Saul that were hurtful.’ She looked into her lap.
He could see Renee was angry at Kirsten for dying the way she had. She took Kirsten’s death as an insult, a personal accusation. He looked at the biscuits on the coffee table, wondering if it would be rude of him to take another one. He wasn’t sure why he felt so hungry suddenly; there was an ache in his teeth for something sweet.
A dark look passed over her face. ‘The barrister she worked for was married,’ she said, filling her words with air, as though she was blowing them towards him. There was an edge in her gaze almost of menace. He shifted and underneath him the leather couch protested.
‘Had you seen Kirsten recently?’ she asked, looking across at him, her gaze steely. She had the look about her of someone who already knows. He thought for a moment that answering her question might be like handing her something he would never get back again.
He conceded that he had not and he knew what she was doing. With her words, she was questioning his right to be there at all. He felt a sudden urge to make a confession. He thought that must be what she wanted from him.
‘I know that I didn’t handle things with Kirsten the way I should have,’ he found himself saying. He felt distant from his words. ‘But we were both young.’
From the look on her face he could tell this was not what she had wanted to hear.
On the way out of the house he saw through a window, Saul on his knees in the garden. He wore a white terry-towelling hat and was tilling the soil with a small gardening fork, snail bait sprinkled over the garden bed. The pellets were an unnatural green against the soil.
‘Good-bye,’ Andrew said to Renee, turning back towards her as he left.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘God bless.’
Looking back towards her, the way she stood in the doorway of her own home, formally dressed with her arms folded across her body, he had the impression of someone being slowly smothered, of drowning on air.
21
On Monday afternoon he walked through Darlinghurst towards the National Art School where Kirsten had gone back to study. The only clouds in the sky were long webbed strands, like spidery veins. Though it was late in the day, the heat ebbed and moved across the bitumen in swirls. The sandstone walls surrounding the college were fat and tall, the large wooden gates painted green and held together by cast iron.
The buildings inside were oddly shaped sandstone blocks. One fat, round building in the middle of the grounds looked like a watch house. The buildings he passed obscured the path behind him and he turned back, feeling disorientated, as though navigating his way through a labyrinth.
Students stood talking in small huddles. One young man wore a waistcoat and the woman he was talking to wore a long, pleated skirt that almost brushed the ground. They stood together with their arms folded looking poised, like people waiting to have their photographs taken. He remembered this from art school: the feeling that people were looking at him as though they didn’t particularly like him. What the years had taught him since was that mostly what other people felt about
him wasn’t even as strong as dislike, but was something closer to neutral.
He walked into the building with an open door and it was bigger inside than he expected, the ceilings arched, wooden beams exposed. He might have walked inside the hull of an upturned boat. There were easels set up in the room for a class, but nobody was painting at them. The room smelt of linseed oil and turpentine, hard and metallic. In the centre of the room were stuffed animals on metal spikes. He walked a wide circle around them: a rabbit, a cat and a marsupial he didn’t recognise, all with thinning hair. Their eyes glassy and glistening, dead animals that had no other purpose but to be painted. Through a glass door at the back of the building, he could see someone moving about in the small room.
‘Hello?’ He pushed the door slightly ajar.
‘Hi,’ the man said, looking up. ‘Are you lost?’ His eyes were a pale blue, like a husky’s. His chin was prominent and he wore his jeans low around his waist.
Andrew stood in the doorway, while the man continued to work. ‘Just having a bit of a sticky beak. Screen-printing?’ he asked, looking at what the man was working on. The bench was cluttered; a wide brush with coarse black hairs, a pot of black paint and a spray can of fixative.
‘Woodblock prints,’ the man replied. He cut into a block with a small chisel and a fine shaving curled up, which he brushed away.
Andrew moved around to the opposite side of the table, in order to see the prints the right way up. The shapes were strong and bold, a print of a woman, her face elongated and limbs thick, like a stone sculpture from Easter Island.
‘Great shapes,’ he said.
Where the Light Falls Page 12