Where the Light Falls (8 page)

He walked inside to buy a leg of lamb to cook for his mother for dinner. As he stood at the counter, he peered into the coolroom and saw carcasses hanging inside from hooks, skinned and vulnerable, their heads and feet removed, legs out in front of them as though to protect them from a fall.

10

On Wednesday he emerged from his bedroom at ten, managing somehow to have slept for eleven hours. When he entered the lounge room, he saw through the open bench his mother was at the kitchen sink, washing up plates. The gloves she wore were pink like irritated skin. He rubbed his face with his hands.

‘Good morning,' she said. ‘Sleep well?'

He nodded. His mother shook bubbles from the dishes and stacked them in the rack. He still hadn't told his mother about Kirsten. But his mother had known Kirsten and she would have to be told.

‘Mum, there's something you should know.'

His mother turned around slowly and looked at him and for a moment, as her gaze struck his, he had the
impression that she thought he was about to accuse her of something. He shifted his eyes to the floorboards; they were old and in places the varnish was gone and soft, raw wood remained. His father's bare feet had touched that wood, he thought sadly, before he looked back up at his mother. There were traces of his father everywhere in this house, in this city.

On the calendar his mother kept on the fridge, he saw that it was already the second week of February and his return flight was at the end of the week. The days were moving impossibly quickly and he felt he'd achieved nothing since he came back.

He took a deep breath before he spoke.

‘Do you remember Kirsten Rothwell? Had you been in touch with her recently?' He wasn't sure why, but when they were together his mother befriended Kirsten; the two of them talked on the telephone, sometimes they met for coffee. His mother never spoke about Kirsten to him, but every time they met in his absence he felt slighted.

‘No, I haven't heard from Kirsten in years. Not since before you left for Berlin. Why?'

‘She disappeared. Near Lake George. They think she may have drowned.'

‘Oh my god,' his mother said and covered her mouth with a gloved hand. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, she looked at him with a different set of eyes. ‘What happened?'

‘I don't know very much about it. Stewart sent me an email to tell me when I was in Berlin.'

‘God, that's just—it's terrible,' she said.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘it is.' He was aware of the inadequacy of his own words.

His mother's body slumped. ‘So is this why you've come back? Is it to do with Kirsten?'

He didn't want to answer her. He nodded and worried he might cry. She turned back around and continued with the dishes. In her reflection in the window, he could see her lips pressed firmly together. The mention of death had this effect on her. They could not speak of death in this house without it being a reference to the one that defined them.

He turned to go back to his bedroom then stopped. He was back in Sydney to confront the truth about Kirsten but suddenly he felt compelled to confront other truths too. Another person he had loved had died and now a need to know everything rose in him.

How many times, as a boy, had he been on the verge of asking? At night when they'd finished their evening meals, in the car after school or on the way to his aunt's house in the mountains. He'd look away from her and resolve to ask, but then when he turned back towards her he wouldn't say a word. He was too aware that he might hurt her. Somehow, he'd always lacked the courage, placing her need for silence above his own need for knowledge.

‘Mum,' he said now.

She turned around.

‘How did he die?' Speaking the words, he felt as though he was pushing through a false wall.

She looked up at him, her face turned smooth and white. ‘You mean your father?'

‘Yes, I mean Dad.'

‘I never told you?' she said softly, shaking her head, as though unable to believe this oversight. Her features looked heavy. She removed her gloves and moved closer to him.

‘It was an aneurysm. In his brain.'

‘I'd always assumed it was a heart attack.' He couldn't believe that he'd lived under that misapprehension for the past twenty-five years. All his life he'd felt ashamed for not knowing and now he felt embarrassed for not having asked sooner.

‘Oh, Andrew. I'm sorry. It was so difficult for me to talk about it. Most of the time I felt I was barely coping myself.' His mother was staring at the wall as she spoke.

She moved to the couch and sat down. ‘Maybe we should talk about it now? I know it was a long time ago, but do you think it would be useful?' She looked tired. His mother's words seemed to be floating, light and full of air, drifting towards him like paper lanterns.

His father had died twenty-five years ago and these were the first words she'd spoken to him about it. She opened her mouth to speak again and an impulse passed through him, a need to be away from her.

‘I should have been more open with you. I worry now. You were such a quiet child, afterwards.' Her voice was soft. ‘It was my fault, the way you were. I know you felt like you never fitted in. You were so lonely. So often I think about you as a teenager and I worry that I did that to you.'

Her words settled in his bones, sharp and new like fishing hooks. What disturbed him wasn't this information about the way his father had died, so much as that he had never known the truth of it and he felt ashamed for never having had the courage to ask. He could tell from the way his mother looked at him that she was seeking his forgiveness. But he couldn't forgive her; he left the lounge room and walked down the hallway and out into the day.

Outside, walking the streets, he knew that to other people he looked like a man on the cusp of middle age, but inside he still felt small and folded up inside himself like a young boy.

11

Later, when he returned to the house, he decided he would pack and return to Berlin straight away. Berlin was where his life was now. Whatever happened to Kirsten, it wasn't worth risking his relationship with Dom to find out. He knew how his father had died and that, at least, was something. Maybe it was enough.

He lifted his suitcase, pushing his knee into it, and manoeuvred it onto the bed. He took his t-shirts from the drawer in the wardrobe and pushed them into the corner of his case. He stood in front of his wardrobe. At one end, pushed almost from sight, hung a few of his father's old business shirts on wire hangers. His mother had kept them for him, unable in her thrift to throw them all away. Perhaps she even hoped that one day he would take the
sort of job his father had. Looking back, the conviction he had about photography still surprised him.

His father had worked in a bank. Before his death, he managed the branch in Leichhardt. Andrew wondered what sort of existence his father had led, going to the same place each day and attending to the same tasks, assessing loan applications, reconciling accounts and counting money. What pleasure had it given his father, that life of repetition and serving others? And what would his father make of his son's life now, this strange existence he lived, plucking ideas from the air and setting them down in pictures? Everything he did was so bound up in himself.

He laid one of his father's shirts over his arm. It had lost its stiffness, its fibres worn with age. There was a small hole above the chest pocket that might have been the nibble of a hungry moth. He moved his hand inside the shirt, the tip of his finger visible through the small opening in the fabric. The shirt was already decaying, although his memories of his father were not.

He rehung the shirt in the wardrobe and walked out into the lounge room. In the backyard was the vegetable garden his father had built and tended. His father died alone out there. It was also out there one golden afternoon that his father had given him his first camera, a birthday present, when he'd turned ten. He would always remember the texture of that fading day, how the shadows swept along the grass and the diminishing light made the world tilt. He must have known the
significance of the occasion, even as it happened, because his memory of it was still strong.

His father handed him the camera.

‘What is it?' Andrew said, although he knew what it was; he just wasn't sure why his father was giving it away.

‘It's a camera. My old camera. I hardly use it now. I thought you might like to have it.'

It was a Rolleiflex, quite different to the point-and-shoot camera with which they took their family photographs. This black box, with its two lenses, looked more scientific with all its dials and notches. He took it in his hands, afraid that he might drop it, that he might spoil this moment of connection between him and his father.

They went out onto the front step and as he looked through the viewfinder his father showed him how the needle at the side of the frame measured the light. In the last hours of the day's sun, the needle bounced up. He twisted the lens and talked about focus, something it would take Andrew years to understand properly. It was an old camera—even for its time it wasn't a particularly sophisticated device—but the only thing that mattered to him, then and now, was that it had been given to him by his father.

‘I loved taking photographs, when I was younger. I used to take a lot of photos. I even had one published in a magazine once.' His father smiled weakly, almost as though he was embarrassed to admit it now. It sounded impressive to Andrew and even then he had the idea that
one day he would also like to publish a photograph in a magazine. His father rubbed Andrew's back. It meant that the lesson was over, but he didn't want this intimate discussion with his father to end. The opportunities he'd had to be this close and quiet with his dad were rare. His father was busy, often withdrawn and distracted by work.

‘What sort of photograph was it?'

‘It was a photo I took when we went to Tasmania, before you were born. It was a picture of an uprooted tree.'

Andrew looked at the camera and suddenly felt he was taking something important from his father and immediately wanted to give it back. ‘Why don't you keep it then?' he said, and his voice was small. He held the camera out.

His father looked down as though in that instant he had seen something new in his own son. For a moment, he seemed to be contemplating taking the camera back, but then he shook his head.

‘I don't have time anymore, mate. As you get older, it gets harder to find the time to do the things you like.' His father stood slowly from his crouched position and a knee cracked.

As the light dwindled, Andrew thought he understood his father for the first time; the man who had been opaque to him became knowable in those few brief moments of afternoon sun. Just before they went
inside, he laid his hand on Andrew's shoulder gently, and Andrew turned his head and looked at his father's long fingers and then up into his face. He seemed gaunt, the skin following the contours of his skull.

There was something about the way his father had looked at him. As though, in that moment, as he looked at Andrew, he'd realised that one day his life would end. What he saw on his father's face that afternoon was something beautiful, a longing for his younger self unfurling across it like a great and heavy pain.

Later, Andrew had tried to capture that look on other people's faces, in photographs he had taken. Sometimes he thought this pathos was what he sought in every photograph he ever took.

•

He walked back into his bedroom, opened his suitcase and placed his folded shirts inside, but his movements gradually slowed. He thought about Kirsten and her soundless exit from the world. If he didn't find out about it now, the same thing would happen with Kirsten's death as had happened with his father's. He would never know and there would be no-one he could ask.

He pictured her walking across a flat landscape towards a silvery lake and disappearing into water. He had done nothing, really, to find out more about it. He'd made no real effort to contact her family. Maybe the
truth was he didn't want to know. His bed gave beneath him as he lay down on it. Through the mattress, he felt a few tight springs in his back. Maybe he was afraid of knowing.

He decided he should at least contact Kirsten's mother before he returned to Berlin. If he didn't do it now, he would have to live with not knowing and there'd already been too much of that in his life. He'd call Stewart and ask if Louise had Kirsten's mother's phone number.

•

Later that night, as his mother slept, he called Dom again. He tried to corral his thoughts, to concentrate on what he would say to her. He wanted to tell her, finally, how his father had died. He thought she would be pleased with him for finding out. But how could he tell her now, about his mother's silence, that they'd never spoken about his father's death? That he had been left to reconstruct the details of it for himself and never dared to ask?

He took the phone out to the back veranda. The plastic felt brittle in his hands, too flimsy to receive such serious news.

‘
Hallo?
' Dom said, answering her phone against a background of clatter. He heard the sudden racket of the train. ‘
Wie bitte?
' She mustn't have heard his voice properly.

‘It's me—Andrew,' he said, feeling he had to yell to make himself heard above the background noise.

‘Andrew?' Her voice seemed to drift, as though she was speaking over wind.

‘Yeah. I'm still in Sydney.' His voice was loud and earnest. Outside the night sky was not black but blue, illuminated by the glow of the city beneath it.

There was a surge of noise across the line. ‘I'm sorry, what was that?'

‘Nothing. I just wanted to say hi,' he said, loudly and slowly. The sound through the phone alternated between static and silence.