Where the Light Falls

by Gretchen Shirm

  He stayed there for a long time, until the moon rose up over the hill on the other side of the lake. It was an early moon that was almost full and, as it climbed, the lake amplified the moon’s light like an upturned spoon. This was a place in which there could be no certainty, the evaporating stretch of water, the lake that was always changing its shape.

  24

  On the way back through Sydney he noticed banners along William Street catching the breeze and collapsing. They were advertising the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Photography Now! exhibition and he remembered that two of his own photographs would be exhibited there. He thought about Phoebe; maybe he should take her to see the exhibition? If she was interested in photographs, it would help her understand his profession.

  There was something about Phoebe that made him curious. Her face fascinated him; he wondered how she would understand this part of herself as she grew older, what she would make of the way the world saw her and what type of person she would become because of it.

  He called Pippa when he got home, and he was surprised when she agreed without hesitation to let him take Phoebe to the exhibition. On Friday afternoon, when Phoebe finished school early, he went to their house to give her his old camera and show her how to use it. When he arrived she showed him her bedroom. Her room was painted green, the colour of an apple, and the light fittings were shaped like ladies’ hats. Her bed was under a window, small and narrow, and the bedspread was covered in flowers. It still looked like the room of a young girl, though Phoebe would soon be a young woman and all this would come to embarrass her.

  On her desk was a photograph of her with a man he presumed was her father. They were on a farm, the field behind them a parched and distant green. They were both wearing large smiles, the smiles that come at the end of a laugh, and her father was crouched on one knee with an arm draped over his daughter’s shoulder. There was something about the way her father held her there. It was an affectionate gesture, but one of ownership, as though with this photograph he was telling the world, This child belongs to me.

  Outside in their backyard, the magnolia tree had bloomed, but it was late in the season and the flowers were loose, the petals losing their grip on the stem. The tree was large, its branches sprawling out over the fence and into the neighbour’s yard, unwilling to observe the boundaries intended to contain it.

  He tried to tell Phoebe what he knew about taking photographs. If he could take everything he knew and give it to her, that’s what he would do. She might be the only person he had to tell about this. She might be the only opportunity he had to share what he had learnt. He thought of the similar lesson he’d been given by his father in his own backyard when he was ten. He wondered whether people were doomed to repeat these things that had happened to them earlier in their lives, to replay the things that had formed them again and again, to turn them over like stones.

  A magpie landed on a branch and stared at him with its head cocked, as though doubtful of his motives. Phoebe looked up at him with an open face, concentrating on what he was saying.

  ‘To take a good photograph,’ he began, ‘there are three main things you need to keep in mind. Composition—what is inside and outside of the frame. Focus, which determines where the viewer focuses their eyes. And, most important, you have to pay attention to where the light falls.’

  It was hard for him to explain to Phoebe that usually he thought about his photographs for so long that by the time it came to actually taking the picture, the act of opening and closing the shutter seemed almost incidental. How could he tell her why he loved taking photographs so much? For him it was so intimately connected with loss. He told her instead about the beauty of capturing something that would never happen again.

  •

  Afterwards, he drove into the city in his mother’s car and parked under the Opera House, spiralling down the ramp until he found a vacant space. It was the first time he had been in a public place with Phoebe and he noticed, as they walked around Circular Quay towards the museum, that people stared at her, but usually only until they noticed something wasn’t right with her face and then they looked away again. Phoebe seemed either not to notice, or to be used to it.

  She didn’t seem to feel compelled to be always speaking and he liked that about her. She was happy to allow quietness to pass between them. For most people, silence delivered only discomfort. He found it hard to understand the endless need those people had to fill their lives with noise.

  Tourists swarmed around the quay, distracted by the view and unable to walk in straight lines, snapping with their cameras and pushing the world away. The day was cool for the time of year and the air around them smelt of salt and diesel from the ferries pulling in and out of the quay. They stood for a moment and watched a man play an instrument that looked like a concave drum but sounded like a xylophone. As they watched, Phoebe leant in towards him and he could feel her body close to his. She thought nothing of closing the space between them and he realised how he’d shut this from his life, this easy intimacy with others. It had taken a child to remind him.

  Beside them, the ferries floated imprecisely towards wharves and lurched against the wooden docks. On the opposite shore, houses crept up a hill, staggered one behind the other like tiered seating. They walked towards the MCA—it had been so many years since he’d been there. He loved the building, the warm evenness of the sandstone; walking inside it always felt welcoming to him. On his first visit there, he had not been impressed by the art so much as the names beside the works. He saw the dates and places where the artists had been born and died. It was a revelation to him, that these were real people. People actually did this with their lives—they made art. It was the first time he understood that if he dared to want it, there was a life in which self-expression might be possible.

  As they walked into the shadowy recesses of the building, there was a long cry of a boat from the harbour, singular in tone and sorrowful, like the call of a wounded whale. As they stood in line for their tickets, Phoebe pulled out a plastic purse and a twenty-dollar note unfurled from inside it. She held it out to him, awkward and honest and beautiful.

  ‘No, it’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll get our tickets.’

  ‘But Mum gave me the money,’ she said, looking at the note in her hand. The right side of her face made a small, slipping movement.

  ‘Maybe you’ll see something you like at the shop when we come out,’ he said.

  As they walked through the exhibition, he found himself checking on her now and then, making sure she was within sight, convinced that nothing bad could happen to her as long as he could lay his eyes upon her.

  On the ground floor was a series of Tracey Moffatt photographs. They passed the self-portrait of her looking coyly out from the image, the saturation of red, yellow and blue and the background behind her that might have been painted. He had never felt he could work with such dramatic colours. To him, bright colours felt artificial.

  On the next level were three Bill Henson photographs and he worried as they moved past them that Phoebe was too young to be looking at them, the nakedness of them and the suggestion of sex they had about them. He had a sudden urge to cover her eyes with his hands, but maybe they suggested carnality to him and to her they suggested something different.

  He stood for a moment and watched the people around him. This was what he loved most about galleries, the way people slowed down in order to look at art.

  In the next room, there were two photographs by Loretta Lux, dream-like pictures of children who looked like incorrectly proportioned dolls. He didn’t say anything when they passed his photographs. The first was Teething and the next was a photo he’d taken of a woman with a cochlear implant which he’d called Silence. In that photo, the woman was parting her hair with her hands to show where the implant had been inserted and it looked like a computer port into her head. He had wanted somehow to capture what she experienced, the total absence of sound she lived with.

  He
was proud of that image, of the detail of it, but mostly he was proud of its stillness. The final photograph he had produced, somehow, didn’t look like her at all. It didn’t even look like anything that resembled life. Instead she looked like something carved from stone.

  ‘That’s you,’ Phoebe said, pointing to his name beside the photographs. His first reaction was one he knew well, but the feeling sank quickly. He wondered if this was why he had brought Phoebe there, to prove that his photographs were not the work of an amateur. That he was a professional artist.

  He looked at the little white sign beside the work. Andrew Spruce. Born 1972, Sydney. It always surprised him that he could be reduced to so few words and that his art said more about him than any description ever could. Alongside his photographs, these were the only facts that mattered about him.

  He moved into the next room and looked at a series of Nan Goldin photographs. A couple in bed, the woman naked, facing away from the man who sat on the edge of it with his chin caught in his hand. A man submerged in a bath, his nipples a ripe purple through the water; the bruised body of a man who looked to be recovering from surgery. Images of suffering and cruelty, of what it was like to live in a world populated by people who lived separately.

  When he stepped back from the photograph, his eyes swept the room. Phoebe wasn’t there. His thoughts accelerated from I lost her towards someone has taken her. And then he was thinking about what he would say to Pippa when he came home without Phoebe. His mind was trained this way, at rushing towards catastrophe. For him it was the closest destination.

  He moved into the next room and stopped. Someone was saying his name. Andrew, he heard. Andrew, Andrew.

  For a moment, through the bodies, he thought he caught a glimpse of Kirsten standing in the corner of the room, between two white walls, her hair the blackest thing in the room. Not even looking at the art, just observing people around her with small, ungenerous eyes, looking for what might cause her harm, actively seeking it out. He stepped to the side to gain a better view of the woman, but he lost sight of her. In that moment he thought he’d seen Kirsten and the look on her face was a wounded look, her stance was crooked, her body askew. He had never found out what it was that had made her that way, how she could look at the world and all she saw were its threats.

  He heard his name again and orientated himself towards the sound. Through the crowd he saw Phoebe, her little handbag over one shoulder, strapped across her body, the small pocket of plastic resting above her waist. She was smiling at him and saying his name, her voice bright, like something ripened in sunlight. She was waving him towards her. When he reached her she was pointing towards a photograph, her finger almost touching the glass. He felt himself draw breath.

  ‘I like this one,’ she said. It was a photograph of a dead bird, a native parrot on a white porcelain plate, sitting on a table next to a bowl of fruit. He smiled at her, unsure what to say, troubled that she liked something that had such a connection with death, concerned that because of his own taste in art he had encouraged this in her. He didn’t want to tamper with her view of the world until all she saw was its darkness.

  ‘How about we go and get something to eat?’ He found himself rubbing her back, a warm gesture, and he wasn’t sure where it had come from inside him.

  Phoebe nodded.

  Before they left the museum, he took a last look behind him to see if he could see someone, anyone, who he might have mistaken for Kirsten. There was a young woman with dark hair wearing a dark blue dress, but she was taller than Kirsten and he saw her only from behind before she disappeared into the next room.

  They walked out of the MCA towards a French patisserie he knew a few streets away in The Rocks. Outside, the light had turned thin and silken, falling over the buildings in folds.

  They sat out in the back courtyard and he brushed the scattered sugar crystals from the table with the back of his hand.

  ‘What would you like?’

  Phoebe looked at the menu. The waitress waited to take her order, poised, pen over her pad. He ordered a coffee for himself. Phoebe looked at the menu and bit the inside of her cheek, unable to make up her mind.

  ‘I’ll come back,’ the waitress said, looking towards another table.

  ‘Would you like something to eat?’ he asked Phoebe, feeling impatience rise in him. He was so used to being productive, to getting things done, he had forgotten that a child’s sense of time is endless. He envied her for that. He could no longer live his life without the awareness that the time he had was limited.

  ‘How about a milkshake?’ he asked.

  Phoebe nodded and licked her top lip.

  After he’d ordered, he noticed that the other people in the café were looking at them and he could see them wondering what the relationship between he and Phoebe was. For the first time he realised that people might assume she was his daughter. He arranged himself around that thought, knowing that he was easily old enough to fill that role. If his life had turned out differently, he might have already been responsible for another human being, but he had given himself, instead, to other things.

  From above, a flower from a frangipani tree fell to their table, its white petals bruised. ‘How often do you see your dad?’ he asked, thinking of the photograph he’d seen of them together in her bedroom. He thought of what he had seen in that picture, the sort of possessiveness in the way her father looked at her.

  ‘It depends. It’s supposed to be every second weekend and one week in the school holidays.’ She spoke these words very formally, as though reciting the orders of a court. ‘But sometimes he gets busy.’ She didn’t sound disappointed by this. It was something she had accepted long ago.

  ‘What does he do?’

  Their drinks arrived and Phoebe started playing with her straw, stirring her milkshake as though trying to decide whether it was okay to drink.

  ‘He’s an engineer,’ she said, lifting her head and fitting her mouth over the straw. ‘He has a girlfriend.’ There was a glint of something in her eye when she said those words, an invitation for him to agree this was a bad thing.

  ‘Do they live together?’ he asked.

  Phoebe nodded. He watched her milkshake lower in the glass as she drank it.

  ‘My dad moved into his girlfriend’s apartment last year, but I don’t have a bedroom there, so I sleep on a fold-out couch when I stay.’ It didn’t sound like this was something she resented.

  ‘Does your mother have a boyfriend?’ he said and felt himself turn red, worried she might think he had some interest in Pippa.

  She shook her head resolutely, as though she thought this was the proper order of things.

  ‘Did you enjoy the exhibition?’

  ‘I liked it, but I still don’t know what makes one photograph better than another.’ Her mouth hovered over her straw as she spoke.

  ‘That’s a good question. Even I don’t always know. Sometimes it’s the composition, or the idea behind it. Almost always it has something to do with light.’

  She lifted her straw from the glass and licked it clean.

  ‘I want to be a photographer,’ she said loudly, hopefully, and then looked back into her lap, recoiling from the strength of her own words.

  ‘Really? You don’t want to be something else? Like a doctor or a vet?’ he said, hearing his voice high and jangling, jostling for a sense of control over his feelings. He wanted to take her firmly, hold both her arms and say don’t. Don’t do what I did with my life. Don’t make your career so bound up with who you are at the expense of everything else. Do something that matters to other people.

  ‘I think so,’ she said less decisively, looking at him for some sort of encouragement, but he couldn’t bring himself to give it, knowing what sort of a life it might mean for her.

  They drove home down Parramatta Road in his mother’s car and the sun was in his eyes. He folded down the sunshade, feeling exhausted. Being with Phoebe was draining. She absorbed so much of his attention, m
ore than he was used to giving over to another person. The traffic started and stopped and he tried not to tap his fingers against the steering wheel or show his impatience to get her home.

  When they finally pulled up outside her house, Pippa opened the door almost immediately, as if she had been watching for them. The way she looked at that moment reminded him of a bird, with bright, darting eyes, sitting on a nest, aware of everything, of the way in which things could go wrong, the threats to her eggs. Phoebe disappeared behind her mother and inside the house.

  ‘How did you go?’ Pippa asked and her face looked awkward, her features bunched, as though a drawstring had been tightened behind her face.

  ‘I think she liked it,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you for doing this,’ she said, her words halting, hesitating between each one. He understood, then, that she was someone who hadn’t allowed herself to accept other people’s kindness very often.

  ‘Well, I was glad I could take her.’ Phoebe appeared at her mother’s shoulder. He could tell already that she was going to be taller than her mother when she grew up.

  ‘Bye, Phoebe.’ He waved to her and as he saw them there so close together he felt a stab of unexpected envy. Pippa had given her life to being a mother and, in return, she had produced this shy and glorious girl. It made the thing he had done with his life, these photographs he’d taken, seem very static and small.

  ‘Bye,’ he said to Pippa, turning suddenly, feeling he was on the brink of tears.

  ‘Thank you,’ he heard from Phoebe as he walked out to the car.

  As he left, he thought of Kirsten and how she had been his only real chance at a life like this, at children and a family. It was what she had wanted, to tie herself to the world through him.

  In the front garden, along the fence, was a plant with light green leaves and timid yellow flowers. They were the type of flowers that closed for the night and opened for the day in order to absorb the sunshine.