The photographs of Phoebe were still on a USB stick sitting on a bench in his apartment. He hadn’t sent them off to London yet. When he woke up each morning and thought of them, a tangle of nerves awoke in him as he wondered what he should do with them. He hoped that seeing Pippa now might help him make up his mind.
He also wanted to borrow a book on Diane Arbus. He remembered having bought a catalogue from a Diane Arbus exhibition the first time he’d seen her work exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, when he was still a young man, but he hadn’t found it in any of his boxes in storage. He must have taken it with him to Berlin.
There was something about her photographs, about the way Diane Arbus saw people, that he wanted to revisit. His need was specific and immediate. Sometimes he thought every photograph he had ever produced was in homage to her work: the strange people, the freaks, the oddness in the ordinary. The first time he’d seen one of her photographs it had reached in and stroked his bones. Seeing her pictures, he’d realised that everybody felt this way, this dislocation, though some people were better at pretending they didn’t.
He crossed Norton Street and walked through the arcade to the Italian forum, through the walls and floors of terracotta, descending the stairs to the library.
The glass doors parted with a sudden jerk and he was hit by the quietness inside; the absence of sound had a pull to it, a seduction. It drew him into it. He moved towards the closest shelf, but it was full of children’s picture books. Some of the names he recognised from his childhood: The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Where the Wild Things Are and Possum Magic. He would lose himself in the pictures and forget about the words.
The library smelt of ageing paper. The ceilings were low and the light was fluorescent and sharp. As he walked deeper into the room it felt like a bunker, a place protected from the outside world. He had forgotten this about libraries—that, like galleries, they were places in which quietness is encouraged.
He found the non-fiction shelves and stood in front of the books. It had been such a long time since he’d had to sort through books, to check a catalogue and to sift through information. When he couldn’t find a shelf of photography or art books, he walked to the counter. Pippa was standing right there with her head down and her brown hair falling across one shoulder. She looked up.
He smiled at her, wondering if she would remember him.
‘Hi Andrew,’ she said, her voice throaty and warm.
‘Hi,’ he replied. Above him a fluorescent light stuttered. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m well. I thought you’d have left Sydney by now?’
‘Yes, I was supposed to, but something came up.’
‘You certainly made a big impression on my daughter. She has it in her head now that she wants to be a photographer.’
‘Really?’ he said, feeling giddy as his thoughts struck Phoebe again. Soon he would be leaving for London, where the photographs he’d taken of Phoebe would be hung on crisp, white walls and people would stand and frown at them and appraise her image. The more he thought about it, he couldn’t see how the photos could be shown without causing some damage to her.
‘Actually, her birthday’s coming up. She’ll be twelve next week. She asked me for a camera.’ She held her mouth in a strange shape after she spoke, as though attempting to anticipate his reaction to what she’d said. ‘But I’m just not sure which one to get for her.’ She shook her head, remembering where she was and moved closer to the computer. ‘Are you looking for something?’
‘I’m after a book about the photographer Diane Arbus.’
Pippa typed something into the keyboard. ‘It looks like we have a biography and a book of her photographs. They should both be on the shelf.’ She moved out from behind the counter and he noticed again how short she was. He stood over her, feeling too tall in her presence and stooping slightly, like a giant, as they stood beside the shelf together. She deposited two books in his hands.
‘I’ll leave you to decide,’ she said and padded back towards the front counter.
‘Thanks,’ he called after her.
He flicked through Diane Arbus: Revelations and as he looked at the photographs, the rest of the world became a soundless, watery pool. There was something about looking at a photograph that made him hold his breath, drawn suddenly into the moment of the image. He flicked through the book and stopped at The Backwards Man. The photograph was of a man standing fully dressed in a bedroom. He looked perfectly ordinary until you saw his feet were facing in the opposite direction to his body. At first it appeared to be a sleight of hand, a photographer’s trick, but the longer he spent looking at the photo the more the man appeared normal. A photograph could do this: it could make strangeness seem normal and transform it into a thing of beauty. He had been thinking more and more that maybe this was what a photograph was for.
When he walked back to the counter to borrow the book, Pippa was serving another customer. Above him, the air conditioning hissed as he waited.
‘Find what you were after?’ Pippa asked when it was his turn.
He nodded. ‘Yes, I did. Thank you.’ He took his mother’s library card from his wallet and slid it, together with the book, across the counter.
She picked up the card and looked at it for a moment, hesitating.
‘It’s my mother’s card,’ he said. He thought she was probably the type of person who struggled with breaking rules.
‘Oh, okay,’ she said and smiled tightly. There was a beep as she scanned the card’s barcode. She held on to it for another moment, weighing it in her hand.
‘I don’t suppose you’d be able to help me decide what sort of camera to buy for Phoebe? I find the technical details in the catalogue confusing and I want to make sure I get one she can use.’ She didn’t quite meet his gaze as she said this.
‘Sure,’ he said, surprised by her question, that she would trust him with this. She struck him as a person for whom it was difficult to ask for help. She pushed the Diane Arbus book back across the counter to him.
‘I have a catalogue in my bag,’ she said, nodding over her shoulder towards the mirrored glass behind her, where he saw a dark shape moving. ‘I finish work in about fifteen minutes.’ She sounded hopeful.
‘Well,’ he said, looking at his watch, ‘I could get a coffee and wait for you?’
‘There’s a café just up the stairs.’
•
It was a Tuesday afternoon and the café was empty, apart from two old men in the corner speaking Italian loudly. The walls and furniture were an off-white, discolouring unevenly like old teeth. He sat in the café that smelt of garlic and red wine and realised how hungry he was. Lately, there was a space in the pit of his belly.
Pippa walked past the front window with a library bag over her shoulder weighed down with books. She wore a scarf tied loosely around her neck. On her way in, she gave the door a heave, but it offered very little resistance and swung inwards quickly. Her movements were flinty and determined. There was a seriousness about her; she was ready to attend to business, not wanting to waste any time. She dragged a chair from the next table to his and already had the catalogue out of her bag when she took a seat opposite him.
‘Would you like a coffee?’ he asked. He’d already started sipping at his, a warm, syrupy liquid.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. She pushed the catalogue across the table towards him then went to order a coffee for herself. He flicked through the glossy brochure, but found the number of cameras inside overwhelming. It had been a long time since he’d had to make a decision about a new camera. He’d used the same Hassleblad for over ten years and only bought a new, updated model a few years ago, with an influx of money from a successful exhibition. He liked this certainty, that it was settled and he no longer had to make a decision about this important aspect of his work.
Pippa walked back to the table, watching her cup as she walked. He had the brochure closed when she sat down.
‘Where’s Phoebe today?’
he asked.
Pippa lifted her head, but didn’t quite meet his gaze. ‘She’s staying with her father tonight.’ He saw that the mention of Phoebe’s father caused her some discomfort. She took a sip of her coffee. The lines around her eyes were set like scores in pastry.
‘You must have been young when you had her?’
She looked up at him quickly. ‘I fell pregnant when I was twenty-two. Her father and I separated before she was born.’ She smiled with the self-consciousness of a person unused to talking about herself. He made the calculation. She was younger than he was by about two years yet he had assumed she was the older. She sat on the edge of her chair, looking at the wall behind him more than she was looking at him. He could see from the way she sat that she was someone who didn’t allow other people into her life very easily and he was threatening to open a door that was more comfortably left closed.
‘It hasn’t been easy for Phoebe. Sometimes I think it’s hard for children of single parents.’ She stole a quick glance at him and looked to be worried that she’d given too much of herself away.
‘But you two have a great relationship,’ he said.
‘Sometimes I think we’re too close. I guess I was really too young to know how to bring up a child alone,’ she said. Her sudden honesty made him look away. They didn’t speak for a minute or two; the intensity of her words required a period of silence to pass between them.
He was the first to speak. ‘While I was looking through the catalogue, I remembered that I actually have an old camera I could give to Phoebe. It’s a very good camera, just an old model. She’s welcome to it, though it’s probably more sophisticated than what she needs.’
‘Oh, no,’ she said, holding up her hand. Like him, she had made a point of doing things on her own, and he wondered why they were both people who found it difficult to rely on others.
‘No, really, it’s fine. It’s just sitting at my mother’s house. I haven’t used it in years.’ Where had this sudden generosity come from? He wasn’t usually a person who gave away his things. The few possessions he had acquired and accumulated, he normally kept for himself, even if he never used them.
‘Well, I can pay you for it. Just let me know how much.’
A man and a boy in school uniform walked in and stood in front of the gelato freezer. The boy was wearing brown sandals and Andrew suddenly felt for him, thinking how the boy would probably be teased about those shoes at school.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. Honestly, I won’t use it again.’
She dipped her teaspoon into her coffee, stirred and pulled it out and tapped it twice on the rim of her cup. ‘When’s the exhibition?’
‘The end of next week,’ he said. For such a long time it felt a long way away and now it was upon him, he felt the sensation of hurtling towards a wall.
He hesitated over his next words, the question he had come here to ask, unsure if it was even worth raising with her now, given his own indecision about exhibiting the images. ‘I didn’t hear back from you after I sent the photographs of Phoebe. I wondered what you thought of them.’
‘No, I didn’t get back to you, did I? I guess I was in two minds about it and then I just acquiesced. They were very impressive, I have to say.’ Pippa sighed and looked away from him. ‘Phoebe liked the photographs—she was fascinated by the image of herself. She kept getting them out of the drawer to look at them. She’s starting to think about her appearance. I suppose it is her age.’ Pippa looked down at the table and drew her finger across it in an arch. ‘And, I don’t know, I couldn’t bring myself to say “no”. Part of me thought it could be good for her self-esteem. She never seems aware of her face, but I’m worried that as she becomes a teenager, she could become very self-conscious about it.’
It hurt him to hear this. He knew that a photograph could never really help a person with their self-esteem. Maybe this was all he needed to know. He could protect her from exposure by withholding the photograph from the exhibition.
‘What do you think people will say about it, at the exhibition?’ She sat forward in her chair, the position of someone who is anxious. He knew it well.
‘I don’t know. I can never predict what the response will be.’ He didn’t tell her that he might not exhibit them. He didn’t want to think he might have put Pippa and Phoebe through all this for no reason.
Pippa fiddled with her silver bangle, turning and turning it around on her wrist. ‘I’m glad it’s happening so far away. I’m not sure how it would affect Phoebe, if she knew she was being criticised.’
‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘keep in mind that any criticism would be directed at me rather than at Phoebe.’
‘I know. I can’t protect her from everything,’ she said, looking away, and he understood that she wished she could.
Maybe it was the fact that Phoebe wasn’t there that gave him the courage to ask the question, finally. ‘How did it happen?’
‘You mean her face?’ Pippa’s mouth was hard.
He nodded.
‘I was so young when I had Phoebe. Her father and I, we drank too much tequila one night at college and I fell pregnant. We weren’t in love. Back then, I was someone who used to be able to have fun. I suppose a lot has changed about me since. I was studying law at the time, you know?’ Her face was slack, as though it still caused her some pain to speak of this. ‘I wanted to work for the DPP after I graduated. I dropped out of law when I found out I was pregnant. I only managed to finish my arts degree. I guess I always thought I’d go back one day, but now that seems unlikely.’
‘It’s never too late.’ He hoped his words didn’t sound feeble.
‘No,’ Pippa said vaguely. ‘Well, her father—I don’t know how to put this any other way: he wasn’t the man I would have chosen to start a family with. It was one night and I got pregnant and I decided to keep the baby, even though we were both young. I told him he didn’t need to be involved.
‘Afterwards, when Phoebe was a baby, I didn’t want her to see her father. But I knew that when she grew older and started school, she’d begin to wonder about him. I knew that I couldn’t keep him from her, that it wouldn’t be fair.’ The way she said the last word, the way her other words seemed to halt around it, made him aware that fairness was something that was important to her.
‘He was just irresponsible, but he did try. He really did try to be a good father to her. And it didn’t go as badly as I thought it might, so I let Phoebe start staying with him overnight. Then over weekends.’ It struck him that what she was saying was something she hadn’t told anyone else, but had thought about over many years. Her words had an evenness, a pacing, that suggested she had already put them in order in her own mind.
‘I’ll never forget that day. It changed everything, even more than having Phoebe. That day set the course for the rest of my life. A friend and I drank a bottle of wine together in the sun on Bronte beach. It was the first warm day of the year. It had been so long since I’d been able to do anything like that and I felt, I don’t know, reckless. The way I used to feel before I had Phoebe, when I only had myself to worry about. Him taking Phoebe, it was the first time since having her that I had more time to myself.’
‘That sounds natural to me,’ he said.
‘When I walked in the front door that afternoon, the phone was ringing,’ she said. ‘And I knew. It was the doctor from the hospital. I was her legal guardian and they needed my permission to operate.’
‘What happened?’ he asked. He felt he was tilting in a direction he hadn’t expected to go.
‘He had let her ride in the back of a ute on his parents’ farm. She fell out when he was driving in a paddock and hit her head on a rock. She was knocked unconscious. A nerve in her face was damaged and they tried to repair it, but they couldn’t.’ Pippa looked at him with a resolute face, as if expecting to be blamed.
‘Oh, that’s awful,’ he said. ‘But it wasn’t your fault.’ He said this firmly, as though his words were capable
of changing something as large and painful as what she had told him. Even as he spoke he knew that what had happened was something that could only ever be mended inside her, and it was something that might not ever mend at all.
‘I don’t know. People do things. Things they don’t intend. It can cause just as much damage to a person. Maybe in some ways the things people do unintentionally are more difficult to understand,’ she said and her words resonated long after she’d spoken them, like the striking of a bell.
23
That afternoon at home, as he flicked through the pages of the Diane Arbus book, his telephone rang on the table beside him.
‘Hi, Andrew. It’s Renee Rothwell speaking.’
‘Oh, hi,’ he said. He felt himself clench. He hadn’t expected to hear from Kirsten’s mother again. When he had left her house that day, he had the impression that he’d been filed away in her life, like an unpleasant task she had completed once and would never have to repeat.
‘How are you?’ she asked, but her words sounded perfunctory, a necessary segue to something else.
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
‘I wasn’t sure if you’d still be here. I thought you said you were heading back to Europe,’ she said, pausing. He wasn’t about to explain to her the problems he was having with Dom or his exhibition. ‘You see, they just called me. From the coroner’s court. I thought you might like to know. The coroner handed down her findings. You can read them on the website.’
‘Thanks for letting me know,’ he said.
She didn’t respond, but he could hear her breathing. She was lingering, as though there was something else she wanted to discuss.
‘I haven’t read them myself yet,’ she said and gave a small, nervous laugh, a girl’s laugh.
‘Well, I’ll get online straight away,’ he said, anxious to hang up the phone and read the findings for himself.
‘Yes, okay,’ she said, hesitating. ‘Goodbye.’
Where the Light Falls Page 14