After the Darkness

by Brown, Honey

  The entrance to the gallery was around the side of the house, down the path. The door was made of a tall piece of blue, semi-opaque glass. There were little air bubbles and darker blue streaks through it. Bruce’s forearm flexed as he pushed the heavy door. There was no handle. The door swung both ways. Please Enter was etched into the glass. I followed Bruce into the foyer.

  The ceiling was the full three storeys high, and any first-time visitor would stop and look up. Bruce and I did just that. The top storey was a loft, and beyond the loft railing was an alluring glimpse of free-standing sculptures. We went from looking up to looking down at our feet. We were standing on a glass floor. It was thick and transparent, with the unsettling sight of the earth below. There were no beams supporting the glass or keeping it off the ground. It seemed to have been poured hot straight onto the earth, like clear molten magma left to cool.

  I lowered my voice. ‘As a flooring option I don’t think it’s going to catch on. It makes me think of being buried, or those ant farms. You know, with the dirt in between two glass panes, and you watch the ants inside making their little tunnels.’

  ‘How would you get building permits for it? Maybe when it’s a gallery you get special license to do weird shit?’

  ‘I’ll keep an eye out for the “weird shit” section on future forms.’

  I walked into the centre of the foyer. I couldn’t see a reception desk anywhere. There was no view of the ocean.

  ‘I don’t think you pay …’

  Bruce was crouching, knocking his knuckles on the glass floor. He straightened as a door opened and a man walked into the foyer. He had a buzz cut of salt-and-pepper hair, and the same grey bristle over his cheeks and jaw. He was dressed in long pants and a long-sleeved shirt. He wore thick-soled work boots. When he smiled, his face folded into myriad carved-up pieces. The lines were deep. He was older than Bruce, and also slimmer – this was perhaps why his face had such a craggy surface: no fat to fill it out. He loped with rangy ease across to us. His eyes were ice-blue and his teeth were small and chalky-white.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  Bruce shifted his weight. ‘How you going, mate? We saw your light on, so to speak, and thought we’d stop by for a look. We’ve been this way a couple of times and never seen the place before.’

  ‘Good,’ the man said. He held out his hand. ‘Reuben.’

  ‘Reuben … Nice to meet you, mate. I’m Bruce. This is my wife Trudy.’

  ‘Quite a handshake you’ve got there, Bruce.’ Reuben turned to me. ‘Trudy,’ he said with charm. His grip was firm and his fingers were soft and warm, as though they’d just been washed and dried. ‘I’m glad you saw the place this time, and stopped.’

  I was in a quandary. At a normal tourist stop I could talk to staff or gallery owners and leave my sunglasses on – the distance

  I wished to keep would be standard – but here it was as though we’d come into this man’s home – it would be rude of me not to properly show myself. I took off my sunglasses. My gaze swung away from Reuben. The only days I didn’t wear make-up were when I was home with family. At home, without make-up on, I felt fresh-faced, clean, nude – empowered, even – but today I felt a different sort of naked. I could feel Reuben’s blue gaze assessing me. My eyes were not a good brown colour – that rich chocolate that oozes appeal and melts hearts. Mine were mid-brown, undecided on whether they wanted to be fudgy and sexy or odd and out of place. Mascara and the right eye shadow helped them get fudgy and sexy, and a soft sweeping fringe made them seem mysterious. Today my hair was coarse after days on the beach and afternoons in highly chlorinated pools. I felt as bottle-blonde as my hair must have looked and as insubstantial as my eye colour. Reuben was suddenly all the more worldly for seeming to be so comfortable within his skin. Bruce was watching me.

  ‘The roadside sign is small,’ I said. ‘We only saw it this time because we’d slowed. I think if you’re travelling fast the culvert hides it until you’re right on top of it, and then you miss it. You must lose a bit of passing trade that way.’

  Reuben shrugged. ‘I’m torn,’ he said. ‘I want people to come, but I don’t want people to come. I always enjoy having them, but once they’re gone I tell myself – I can’t do that again.’

  I was about to say, Can’t do what again? But Reuben drummed his hands on his thighs and said, ‘Right. The art is all mine; it’s right throughout the house. Each piece has been made here on the premises. The best thing to do is to start on the bottom floors. Do you want to wander through yourselves or would you like a guided tour?’

  ‘Wander,’ Bruce and I said in unison.

  ‘Excellent,’ Reuben said. ‘If you change your mind, or find a piece you’d like explained, just cooee.’

  ‘Before you go,’ Bruce said, ‘I have to ask – did you design this floor?’

  ‘I did. The house is my design. I built it.’

  ‘How were you able to get this floor passed? I’ve had house plans rejected for having a clothesline five centimetres too far to the right. This seems to be breaking all the rules.’

  ‘Do you do a bit of building?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you got friends in local government?’

  ‘Not friends as such.’

  ‘There’s your problem. It’s always who you know.’

  My husband looked across at me.

  ‘Bruce is a bit of a stickler for the rules,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing wrong with that. I envy that quality in people.’

  ‘We won’t get lost looking around, will we?’ I said. ‘And walk in on your wife having a nap or something?’

  ‘No, you can go anywhere you like. The whole house is yours to explore. The beauty of having few personal possessions is that you have less to hide.’

  ‘So a wife would be a personal possession?’ Bruce whispered to me once we were through the first door.

  ‘He didn’t say he wasn’t married.’

  ‘I noticed you tried to find out pretty quick if he was.’

  ‘Oh, please.’

  ‘He made you blush.’

  ‘I was annoyed I had to take off my sunglasses.’

  ‘You like him.’

  ‘Yeah, I hanker non-stop for lanky grey-haired types.’

  ‘Rich lanky grey-haired types.’

  We found ourselves in an unremarkable room. The floor was polished concrete. The walls were white. There was a long low bench in the middle of the room. There were a few mirrors about. I sat down on the bench, no longer enthusiastic about looking around.

  ‘Is it just me, or is this place set up to be disconcerting? If you’re in a house by the sea, you want to see the bloody sea.’

  ‘All artists set out to mess with people’s heads. That’s their job.’

  I looked in one of the mirrors and watched myself sitting there; I tapped my shoes on the concrete and wondered if my white top had seen better days, and whether my wide silk skirt, with its swirly blue pattern, was as sweet and retro as I’d thought. I called it my ‘Carrie’ skirt, after Carrie in Sex and the City. My sunglasses were perched on top of my head. I took them off and slid an arm of the glasses down the front of my top, between my breasts. The weight of the glasses pulled my top down a little, exposing my cleavage.

  ‘You do like him …’ Bruce was softly sing-songing.

  Behind me, the room led into another. I looked over my shoulder and glimpsed the windows facing the back paddocks and the parking area. I slid along the bench until I could see our car.

  The second room led to various open spaces and a section that looked to be a living area. Even though I couldn’t see the ocean, I could hear it. It was muted, though. The wall where the coastal view should have been was white plasterboard, covered in mirrors. Instead of seeing the ocean, you saw yourself.

  ‘I bet the ocean is the last thing you see,’ I said.

  Bruce had gone through into the next room.

  ‘People like this aren’t too hard to work out,’
I murmured.

  3

  The next room opened into a long passageway that led into the kitchen. A wide, rustic fireplace took centre stage amongst the streamlined kitchen appliances and uncluttered bench tops. A soft and inviting armchair was by the fire. The kitchen was also home to a staircase. We climbed the stairs and found there were no doors on the second floor at all. Partitions separated the different spaces. We stopped near the master bedroom ‘space’ and I leaned my body across the invisible threshold. Reuben’s bed was king-sized, with no headboard or bedside tables. The high-sided mattress sat directly on the timber floor. The bedclothes were quilted and fluffy, the pillows were like giant powder puffs. I saw some white shirts hanging in the walk-in robe, and some black pants folded on the shelf. I caught a glimpse of a neat line of shiny Italian-looking leather shoes.

  ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ I said. ‘I hope that’s got a door.’

  ‘Do you need to use the toilet?’

  ‘No, I just want to check it out.’

  I left Bruce and went to investigate. The back wall was a false one. Behind it there was a toilet, vanity and an open shower. There were few personal items or products in the house, and the bathroom wasn’t any different; there were some shampoo bottles, and on the sink, a bar of soap, but that was all.

  ‘No doors,’ I said, joining Bruce again. ‘Nice showerhead, though. One of those massive rain-storm-breaking-over-your-head ones. He’s living under a roof with the catchment equivalent of a small town – something tells me he wouldn’t have to install water-saving devices or stick to three-minute showers.’

  There were more hollow rooms with single glass sculptures on display and mirrors on the walls. Still no ocean view. The sun shone through the windows on the paddock side of the house. Perhaps the place was open-plan for this reason – for the light to reach right through.

  ‘Let’s go now,’ I said. ‘I feel like we’re being cheated, or played, and it will be like we’ve succumbed if we do go in search of this ocean view. He must be pretty lonely if he doesn’t mind people traipsing through his house. Perhaps he gets off on it?’

  ‘Would you feel better if we’d paid?’

  ‘Yes. I would. We will pay him – that’ll put him back in his box.’ I laughed. ‘Big box. I think I’m annoyed because I can tell he wants to be quirky and memorable. I got the impression you didn’t like him either.’

  ‘Stop talking so loud,’ Bruce whispered. ‘I didn’t believe him,’ he continued in a quiet voice. ‘I didn’t think he’d built this place, or designed it, or even that he was the creative one. He looked like he’d taken those clothes straight from the packet, and those boots from a shoebox. Did you feel his hands? Not a working man’s hands.’

  ‘Sherlock,’ I said. ‘Maybe working with glass makes your hands soft?’

  ‘Shh. That’s what I’m thinking – not about the glass, but his woodwork is finished by hand, really finely sanded.’ Bruce reached out and touched the wooden sculpture beside us. He curved his hand over a protruding limb-like piece and slid his fingers back and forth over its raised bumps. ‘Feel that.’

  I did. It felt like the back of someone’s hand – a smooth bent wrist and the tendons running down to the hard bones of the knuckles. There were no fingers on this hand though, if that’s what it was meant to be.

  ‘That’s a fine finish,’ Bruce said. ‘Working with that grade sandpaper your hands would be soft. He’s not just sawing off hunks of unfinished timber and running them through a saw bench. I’m waiting to see his workshop, though. It must be downstairs, in the garage. It can’t be in the loft; that’d be bloody stupid. I’m happy to take this little journey he’s got going on here, but if he’s made it so he has to lug everything up and down two sets of stairs – I’ll have some serious doubts about the man.’

  ‘What if there’s no workshop, and no ocean view?’ I made the noise from The Twilight Zone. ‘What if there’s only … smooth hands?’

  Bruce pulled me close. He had his lips against my temple and wrapped his arms around me. He kissed me. ‘Then we run.’

  I had the giggles. Reuben was nowhere to be seen. We went back to the ground floor, came to another spiral staircase, and started up. It bypassed the first floor and wound its way to the loft. Our footsteps reverberated loudly. I kept looking at Bruce and widening my eyes to make him laugh. We stepped up onto the top floor, out of breath.

  The gallery was bright and airy, with a full bank of windows facing the ocean. Here was the spectacular view a person expected from a place like this – an unspoiled vista of the ocean and the cliffs. We walked towards the windows. There was no wood up here; everything was glass, in varying degrees of transparency. Some of the thinner sculptures were transparent, and, disturbingly, there were solid pieces of red glass embedded in them. The tinted glass was bleeding into the clear glass around it, like a heart melting inside a body, or a brain haemorrhaging inside a head. Where the red glass was situated lower in the sculpture, it seemed to suggest a woman’s womb, blood-soaked and revolting. In some sculptures there were two red eyes, staring out. I made a dismissive sound in the back of my throat and kept on towards the windows.

  I was lightly sweating from the climb, and pushed the hair from the back of my neck. The house had not made things easy for us. I looked out to sea. The sight of the ocean relaxed me. The cliffs swung out either side of the house. We were in the centre of a cove. The ocean surged against the vertical stone faces – a gentle swell today. The sea rocked and swayed as though in a huge bowl.

  Bruce looked away from the ocean and up at the ceiling. ‘How much would this place have cost?’ he whispered. ‘There are mega-bucks at play here.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said approvingly. ‘Mega-bucks.’

  Bruce shot me a look.

  ‘Perhaps Reuben is attractive after all.’

  ‘Don’t even joke.’

  I leaned in close to him. We stood in silence taking in the coast, watching the sea and the sky. Seagulls wheeled about.

  Bruce put his arm around me. ‘Worth the pretentious bullshit and the climb, you reckon?’

  ‘I guess. No sensory experience, though – unless you call sweating an experience.’

  Reuben was standing close behind us when we turned. My heartbeat had settled and my sweat had cooled, but my insides lurched and a wave of heat descended over me when I saw how near he’d come without us noticing. Bruce’s hand tightened on my shoulder.

  ‘Sorry,’ Reuben said, ‘didn’t mean to sneak up on you. I’ve been up here the whole time. I didn’t want to intrude on that moment where you saw the ocean.’ He pointed behind him, through the sculptures, over to where the gallery joined the back wall. There was a low partition, similar to an office cubicle. ‘My desk is back there.’

  Bruce moved forward, putting himself between Reuben and me. ‘Great place,’ he said. He planted one hand on his hip and rubbed the back of his head with the other. ‘Really quite amazing.’ He turned towards the windows.

  Reuben eyed my husband’s body. He looked at my husband’s chest.

  ‘Although the lazy part of me would want to be able to lie in bed and look out at that,’ Bruce continued, ‘or at least sit in the living room and take it in.’

  Reuben’s gaze dropped down the full length of Bruce’s body and ran slowly up again. It wasn’t – I didn’t think – a sexual thing. Reuben had an artist’s intensity about him: his gaze was openly curious. He seemed to be caught up in a moment of creative thought. Something about Bruce’s body sparked his interest. Reuben put one hand on his stomach and fluttered his fingers, impatiently, excitedly, against his shirt. He saw me looking at him and smiled as though his behaviour was perfectly normal. He slipped his hands into his pockets.

  ‘I suppose that’s why my place would be the same as any other coastal place,’ Bruce was saying. He spun on his heel and smiled. ‘Trudy and I have a small property-developing business, we’re always interested in how buildings come together. We don’t build an
ything on this scale, though. Actually, that’s not true – a block of units we built would have been about this size, but not with these grand dimensions.’

  Reuben stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking strangely like a kid in a lolly shop. ‘There are lots of times I think I’ve over-designed it,’ he said. ‘There’s always a risk of that when you’re passionate about a project. I think it’s one of the things I worry about most. When you spend lots of time in your head, it’s easy to lose touch with your gut instinct. Would you like a coffee?’

  Bruce brought his hands firmly together and rubbed them. ‘A coffee sounds good, before we hit the road.’

  We wound our way through the glass sculptures. I wanted to catch Bruce’s eye, to let him know I’d rather just go, but he was one step ahead. He was matching Reuben’s stride. If not for Reuben’s grey hair, Bruce would, from the back, look like the older man. Reuben’s body was lanky and adolescent; he had a spring to his step. Bruce’s steps were heavy and grounded.

  ‘Coffee, Trudy?’ Reuben said.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘We have arguments about this,’ Bruce said to Reuben. Bruce looked back at me. ‘You take longer to decide if you want tea or coffee than you do making life-changing decisions, don’t you, Trude?’

  ‘Sometimes I give up and go thirsty.’

  Reuben said, ‘You need someone to decide for you.’

  ‘No,’ Bruce said, ‘I’ve tried that. When you’re not looking she tips whatever drink you’ve made her down the sink, and makes herself the opposite.’

  ‘That’s because there’s no love in your drinks,’ I said. I didn’t mean it. It was an in-joke between us. When things appeared to be substandard – an ugly building, a dodgy meal, a Mazda or a Ford – we’d say ‘There’s just no love in that.’ We’d once said it about a friend’s newborn baby. It had been mean of us. Now we were super-enthusiastic about this child’s wonderful nature and beautiful aura whenever we were around her, as a way to make up for it. ‘No love,’ I repeated.