Where the Light Falls (4 page)

He continued to think about her in the years since he moved to Berlin. Sometimes he went through phases where he thought about her every day. He had loved her, but it was the sort of love that was like falling. It was young love, the love you can only ever have when you are still finding yourself. At the time he sometimes thought,
This is it
. He'd tried to make himself believe those words, but the sensation lasted only a short time. He'd loved her as best he could in that clumsy, incomplete way people do when they are too young to surrender themselves to another person. But she needed more from him than he was able to give. He wanted her, but he didn't want her problems.

They separated and lived apart. But he still saw her, sometimes regularly and other times not for months. Occasionally he thought he still loved her, but there was something very intense about Kirsten, and her need for him. He was never exactly sure what it was about her that kept reeling him back in.

•

Later, when he came home from the pub, the house was still and his mother was already asleep. As a shift worker, she had always taken her sleep when she could and he had learnt to be quiet and alone from a young age. He turned on his laptop and sat it on his lap, the spool of the hard drive whirring against his knees. He
searched for news articles about Kirsten, hoping for definite answers, but her disappearance was described in ambiguous and inconclusive terms. There were photos of Lake George, its surface mirrored, like a puddle of mercury that had settled on grass. The silvery stretch of water reflected the world the wrong way up. The abandoned car left beside the lake, cordoned off by yellow tape. All these articles about her—was this what she wanted, for the world to pay attention to her? Maybe, after years of silence, this had been her final scream.

There was an interview with a man who had been picnicking by the lake with his family and had seen Kirsten sitting in the car. He had glimpsed her walking out through the vaporous haze towards the lake. At the time of the interview, they were still searching for the body. He read article after article, but none of them told a coherent story.

He turned off the computer and as it slowed and wheezed itself to sleep, he thought about what it would be like to disappear. To leave the past behind, to walk away from it and all the ways in which it tarnished you and held you back. All you would have then was a future. He had felt this way when he left for Berlin: that he was stepping into his future and, as he did so, the door to his past would close permanently behind him.

•

That night he spoke to Dom.

‘How are the kids? Are you sick of them yet?'

‘Of course I'm not. They're wonderful. They try so hard, but I worry some of them try
too
hard. They want to grow up to be dancers, every one of them. And all I want to do is to tell them how difficult it is, about the injuries and the hours and hours of practice, but of course I can't spoil their dreams. That would be too cruel. I have to let them learn for themselves.'

Dom always felt this sadness for the children she taught, as though she saw in them the girl she had once been, young and supple and too full of optimism.

‘How is your mother?' she asked, and he could tell that she was lying on her back because her voice was caught in her throat.

‘Good, I think. She's glad to see me,' he said. ‘But I haven't actually told her about Kirsten yet.'

‘You haven't told her?'

‘I guess I just don't want to upset her. My mother can be a bit sensitive sometimes.'

Dom laughed. ‘God, she probably thinks we're fighting or something.' She paused. ‘Say hello to her from me.'

He said he would, although Dom and his mother had never met. He hadn't told Dom the whole truth about Kirsten either; for him it was somehow easier to be silent.

5

For a time they had been happy together, he, Kirsten, Louise and Stewart, their lives wound closely together. They studied at the same university, went out together and created a comfortable existence structured around their small group. And he could see the future, their lives ahead of them as they grew old together: the dinners, the gatherings, the careers and families, stitching themselves into each other's lives. It had given him a sort of comfort at a time of uncertainty.

He met Kirsten at a barbecue at Stewart's house on a bright Saturday that made everything appear new. Kirsten was a friend of Louise, and what he first noticed about her was her smile. It was large and generous, so broad it seemed to be compensating for something. She
was quick and stealthy, turning up at his elbow with a tray of meatballs in one hand and a jar of toothpicks in the other. Her skin was white, and her hair a black so complete that it absorbed the sun's light with a gleam.

She spoke in runs of words, lodging them into the conversation between other people's and looking upwards as though she was retrieving the words from somewhere over his head. Her voice had a lightness to it; it was so soft he sometimes missed the words. Even then he had a sense—from her eagerness to please, to be liked by other people—that she was hiding some sort of emptiness inside her, a small black void. He knew something about that feeling himself and he realised that they were drawn together because of what they both lacked.

Like Andrew, Kirsten was studying fine arts, majoring in drawing. It seemed like such a modest ambition. He asked her what she drew and she said she liked to draw faces best. The first time he saw one of her drawings he was mesmerised by the number of tiny strokes, as though the world she imagined was constructed from small lines.

They met for coffee and she drew a picture for him in pencil: a copy of an Alfred Stieglitz photograph of Georgia O'Keeffe with her hands held up before her. He knew that photograph well; he had studied at length the way shadow fell under the strong line of her jaw.

When he saw that drawing, he knew Kirsten had something rare: a feeling for light. Her shadings on the page mimicked the way light fell. She had produced this
just with her hands. He reached across the table and he pressed his lips to her fingertips, and then to her mouth.

They fell inwards together. For almost three years, their existence was a happy, domestic routine; they were creating a new life for themselves, the buoyant existence of two people in love. It was Kirsten who suggested they move in together. He'd always suspected that her childhood had been troubled, although she never spoke of it and he never invited her to. There was a stiffness about her when she mentioned her family; her body became tense, fighting something inside her, perhaps an urge to let everything out.

She was always in such a hurry to move their relationship along, to fortify their intimacy and make what they had into something permanent, wanting to bind them together at an age when nothing was fixed. She rushed to bring them together, to have them live in the same apartment, to commit to him, in the way of someone in a hurry to leave something behind. He didn't know, then, that there is a danger to going about life too fast.

He left his mother's home and moved in with Kirsten. It was only on leaving that he understood the sadness that had clung to his mother's existence. He had lived with it for so long that he had stopped noticing how it affected him, this sadness they both had, a thin white membrane around them, sticky and wet as a caul. Whenever he went back home to visit her, he experienced a sudden claustrophobia. The unspoken grief surrounding his father's
death had taken something from him. As he grew older he realised that the effortless way most people spoke about their own lives was more difficult for him.

•

The love Kirsten and he made in that time together was unlike anything he had experienced before. They seemed to be searching each other's bodies for something, as though they wanted to push each other's flesh apart and crawl inside. They wanted to get beneath the surface of their skin, to forget their own troubling thoughts. It became something dark and suffocating, an obsession, and for a while nothing else in his life held the power over him that Kirsten had in bed.

There was a window in the apartment they shared, facing onto the street, where the streetlight thrummed its orange light into the darkness. They couldn't afford curtains for their windows and the room was permanently illuminated, even at night. He still remembered one morning when they woke, the length of their bodies pressed together, and he rolled over and kissed her breast. The skin on her nipples was fragile and whenever he touched it, he had the feeling that it could be easily torn. She rose from the bed and walked to the window, naked. She stood there, as if she wanted the world to see her, to disclose herself physically, in a way she was unable to in words. She wanted to reveal and she wanted to
remain unseen. She wanted the world to know her, but the greater urge was the one that caused her to withhold. And it had stayed with her, it seemed, until her death.

They made love by that window more times than he could count, him behind her as she looked out, and there was something erotic about being inside her and yet unable to see the expression on her face. She would stand and walk to the window, beckoning him to follow. Kirsten could always pick her moments; just when he found himself wondering, when he looked at her and felt a cool flicker of disdain and the early shine of their relationship had worn away, she would walk to the window and reel him in.

He had asked other women to stand the same way, beside a window, naked, in an effort to re-create the feeling it had evoked when she was exposed but still his, the slippery sensation of ownership and control. But it never worked. He had looked at those other women, trying to feel something, but whatever he felt, it was always something less than desire. He had even tried it with Dom once, at the start of their relationship, when they were in his apartment with the window that faced onto the park.

‘Move over to the window,' he'd said that day, when she slipped from bed naked one morning, ready to stretch.

‘To the window?' she said. Her face was still marked with the creases of her pillow.

He nodded.

‘I'm naked and it's cold,' she said, gesturing at her body and laughing lightly at him. And with those words, she broke the spell. His relationship with Dom became something new; from that moment onwards he had stopped looking behind him for love.

•

There was a particular day that seemed to contain the moment when he understood that things between he and Kirsten could not last. He was in his Honours year. It was a hot day; the dense sort of heat that causes discomfort. He'd come home to their apartment one afternoon after a photo shoot for his final project.

He was photographing a still life, an image of a delicate porcelain teacup that he had broken along one side and glued together again with araldite. It was a Wedgwood teacup he'd bought new at David Jones for far more money than he could afford at the time and he had made the break carefully with a chisel and vice in the sculpture room at his college. He was pleased with how neatly it had broken in two; there had always been the danger that it would shatter or that the break would not be clean.

He'd been working on the photograph for days, arranging the lights so they caught the fine break in the porcelain, using wire and tape to lever the light in different directions. He'd photographed the cup
hundreds of times, until he had the feeling that he wasn't preserving it on film but was somehow destroying it. Eventually, he captured the image he wanted, so that the crack in the china was just visible, but the cup still looked delicate and whole. He called that picture ‘Porcelain'. Some people would look at that photo and see a beautiful piece of china and others would see only that it was flawed. He was speaking to two audiences and every piece of art he had produced since spoke this way, with a forked tongue. These were the small ruptures that, over the years, came to characterise his work.

Since college, he had devoted himself to photographing faces. He had become known for photographing people who were damaged in some way. If ever anyone asked him why, he would say that he wanted to take photographs that showed people's thoughts rather than how they looked. His photographs helped him see inside other people.

Kirsten, meanwhile, had deferred her studies for a year and took a job in an office in the city. She seemed to derive a sort of pleasure from the routine of waking up early each morning and preparing herself for the working day. He watched her sometimes, from bed, the way she eased herself into her skirt and slipped her legs into stockings. She had the look about her of performance, as if she was an actor playing a role and she had left her real self behind in the wings. She had said that she needed a year off to think things over. She wasn't sure she
was studying the right subject and she needed some time to make a decision, although she was already two years into her degree. It was almost as though she was afraid of reaching the end, because it would mean she would have to confront what came next; she would have to take her art out into the world and allow it to be judged.

Kirsten arrived home not long after he'd walked in. He was in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water. Outside, the clouds were dense in the sky, a dusty grey, the air still; a storm was about to break. He thought he heard a rumble from outside, but one so distant it might have been a passing truck. She sat down on the couch.

‘I'm not feeling well,' she said, leaning back on the lounge, holding the back of her hand to her forehead.

That was another thing about Kirsten: there was always something wrong with her. She never complained very strenuously and her words were always gentle, but almost always she had to tell him that in some small way she was ill. Sometimes it was her throat. At other times she had pains in her back. Once she even told him she thought the pain in her stomach might be an ulcer, that her father had once had a stomach ulcer and maybe she was getting one now too. Eventually, he learnt to ignore her; it wasn't that he didn't care, but that he never knew what he could do or say to help.