Where the Light Falls (10 page)

‘Oh,' she said, sounding unsure what to make of his answer. ‘Well, if you do photograph her, I would want to be there. I mean, I feel I would need to be present. Photographs like yours—they take people and preserve them and that is something my daughter will have to live with for the rest of her life.'

Nobody had ever said anything like that to him before. Sometimes people said
no
, but usually the idea of being photographed for art was too alluring to resist. The idea of being captured on film was seductive; people usually associated photography with beauty.

‘Well, I can let you see the images before they're exhibited and you can certainly be there while I'm taking them.' He heard the sound of a bus outside, easing away from the stop, the breath of its brakes.

‘What if Phoebe and I don't like the photos? Will you exhibit them even if we aren't happy with them?'

He had never given another person control over his own work and he reacted badly to suggestions from galleries, turning his back on their comments. It was his work, he always felt, and if it succeeded or failed, it ought to be on the basis of his own choices. But it was also Phoebe's face and she was a child. ‘Well, if there's
something you seriously object to, I'll definitely consider your opinion, but usually I ask people to sign a consent form before I take the photograph.'

‘No, I think I would want to have the right to say “no”, especially if Phoebe changes her mind,' she said firmly.

This was getting more complicated than he'd intended. He knew it would probably be best not to proceed, to wait until he was back in Berlin and find another subject to photograph there. But instead he heard himself saying, ‘Well, okay. If Phoebe is unhappy with the image, I will agree not to exhibit it.' The shoot wouldn't be too expensive, he reasoned, and it would be worth taking the risk, as long as he could get it done quickly. He had a feeling about Phoebe; this could be the photograph he'd been searching for, the one that would make the impact he needed.

‘Okay, that sounds reasonable. When were you thinking?'

‘Are you available in the next few days?' He still hoped he could take the photographs and fly back to Berlin without changing his flights, but the timing would be tight.

‘I'm working tomorrow and the next day; I work at the library in Leichhardt. And the weekend might be difficult anyway, but what about Monday and Tuesday next week. Could we do it then?'

On Saturday he was due to fly back to Berlin. To take this girl's photograph, he would have to delay his
return flight. He bit his cheek and thought of Dom. He wasn't sure how he would explain this to her without upsetting her more than he already had.

‘All right,' he said, after a pause. ‘Yes, I'll check if I can hire a studio then.'

When he hung up, he stared at his phone. He thought of the photograph he was most recognised for, the photo that Pippa would have seen when she searched his name online. It seemed a sort of magic to him now, after years of trying to get his work exhibited, how quickly it had happened.

He was out to dinner with friends one night when one of them mentioned a man he had been to school with who had never lost his set of baby teeth. He knew immediately that he wanted to photograph him.

Andrew rented a warehouse in Redfern for the day, the cheapest studio he could find; the space had once been a mechanic's garage and there were still oil stains on the dusty cement floor and a smell of metal. When the man walked into his studio that day, he seemed stern, with a hard face, his handshake brief and his palm rough. He was a large man, and he stood with his feet apart, as though to distribute his weight evenly. Later, when the man laughed, his laugh was loud. It boiled through his body and filled the room. It was difficult to reconcile the sudden rush of happiness contained in that laugh with the sombre man who had first greeted him. Andrew understood then that he was a man who, because of his
appearance, treated the world with a certain suspicion, but underneath was otherwise happy.

It was a summer day and in the heat inside the warehouse, he felt himself slowly baking. The fan did nothing but stir up hot and stale air. They'd been in the studio for five hours and he was sweating, his clothes touching his body like clammy hands.

He opened a window to let the air in and when he was back in front of the camera, the man yawned and he had glimpsed something, maybe it was a brief glimpse into his own future, and he took the photo. He pressed the camera shutter down so hard his finger hurt afterwards. Inside the man's mouth was pink and damp and it took up almost the whole frame of the shot, so that Andrew might have been looking into the mouth of a lion. At the corner of one eye was a tear, a small, perfect droplet; in the photo it almost looked like a small diamond. When it was exhibited later, he called the photo
Teething
and with that image his life was changed.

Afterwards, he found a gallery in Sydney to represent him. Until then, he'd mostly had only group shows and his chief success had been a shortlisting for a photography award many years before. He'd had one solo show at a co-op gallery in Surry Hills where he hadn't even sold enough prints to recoup his own costs. But after
Teething
he was no longer dependent for his income on taking pictures of things he didn't want to photograph, like furniture, food and underfed women
in expensive clothes. The realm of commercial photography was behind him, its smallness and falseness no longer concerned him.

The next year the photograph had been exhibited as part of a group show in the Centre Pompidou in Paris and afterwards his photographs had been acquired by museums all over the world. And even though he still suffered setbacks and his existence was never extravagant, he could work quietly by himself from then on, pursuing only the things that mattered to him, working with ideas and subjects that he felt brought him some truth.

More recently, he wondered if his career would forever be defined by that single moment in time. Nothing he had created since had quite lived up to it—at least, not in his own mind. No other work he created had ever felt as clean. Sometimes, he felt he existed in the shadow of that photograph. No other picture had ever come to him so easily.

14

Andrew called his real estate agent and asked if they'd found new tenants for his apartment in Darlinghurst, thinking that if they hadn't he could stay there himself for a few days before he flew back to Berlin. It was difficult too, for him to live so close to his mother after her disclosure; his anger at her silence flared each time he saw her. He'd bought his apartment with the money that had been put aside for him out of his father's life insurance policy; the amount of money had slowly grown with him as he aged. By the time he was twenty-seven, he had just enough to buy a small studio apartment in an old building not far from where he had once lived with Kirsten. He'd managed to buy it before the property market in Sydney boomed a few years later. Now
it was worth double what he paid for it—it was his one piece of financial security in a life characterised by taking risks. He'd never renovated it and the low rent generally attracted students and short-term tenants.

When the agent said it hadn't been let, he asked her to wait a week or two before advertising it again.

When he ended the call, his thoughts careened towards Dom. Now that he had definitely decided to stay a few extra days in Sydney, he couldn't put off telling her any longer.

In the corner of his mother's lounge room, the television flickered on mute; the afternoon movie was about to start.

He dialled Dom's number. It seemed to take an impossibly long time to connect.

‘
Hallo?
'

‘Dom?'

She hesitated. Or maybe it was the delay on the line. ‘Andrew?'

‘Sorry, did I wake you? I suppose it must be quite early there.' Hearing her voice produced a softness inside him. It cushioned his insecurities.

‘Don't worry. I had to wake up for an early class anyway.'

He swallowed, not wanting to think about Dom living her life without him. He wanted her to stay immobile, like a butterfly under glass, until he was ready to return to her.

‘I'm sorry. I miss you. I needed to hear your voice.' Their movements on each end of the phone echoed.

‘Have you packed yet?' There was something about the way she spoke; the halting words, her accent made her sound as though she was savouring everything she said.

‘Dom, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to delay my return flight.'

‘Delay it? Why? What has happened?'

‘I've found a girl here I really want to photograph for the London show. She's really special—she has a very unusual face.' He was aware he was speaking too quickly.

‘You've been scouting over there?' He heard in her voice that she trusted him slightly less now, that she was testing his honesty.

‘No. It sort of happened by accident when I walked past my old primary school. But I can't photograph her until next week, so I'll have to stay a few extra days.'

‘Okay. So when will you be back now?'

He realised he couldn't answer her. He still hadn't spoken to Kirsten's mother, though he felt he had to before he could go back to Berlin. And still he didn't want to disappoint her. He fell into happiness with Dom. It wound around him soft as cotton, without him having any real sense of it happening. Love had made him feel endless, it had lulled him into thinking it could never end.

‘Soon,' he finally said. ‘The photographs won't take long.'

‘So another few days? A week?'

‘I don't know. A week or two? The thing is, I still have to get in touch with Kirsten's mother.' He couldn't put any brakes on his words. They were moving out of his mouth and along a downhill track.

‘Another
two
weeks? Why is this thing with Kirsten so important, anyway? I don't understand why you had to go back.'

‘I don't know, Dom. She's an old girlfriend of mine; I feel like I owe something to her, I guess.'

‘Wait, she was an old girlfriend of yours?'

Those words had slipped out, and he knew he should have told her earlier. Now it would sound like he'd been hiding it from her.

‘I didn't know that. You've never even talked about your old girlfriends with me.'

‘No, it was—I don't know. I should have said something.' He ran a hand over his face, realising how he had mismanaged things, though it would have cost him nothing to be open with her.

‘Well, I don't know either. You tell me you don't want me there and now it's an old girlfriend of yours. Sometimes I don't understand you.' Her words hurtled towards him.

When he hung up the phone, he looked out the window and outside a storm bird called, the call that sings in rain.

•

He drove to the storage unit where his belongings were packed away in cardboard boxes, to retrieve the few things he would need for the week or two he was here. He went through them one by one, finding things in unopened boxes he hadn't seen since he moved to Berlin, digging them out like an archaeologist uncovering the traces of a former life. His old possessions now looked strange, inconsequential, objects that served no function in the life he now led. The warehouse in Waterloo was a cavernous space with high ceilings and the noises of people sorting through boxes was amplified in the space around him.

The people who went to these sorts of places were single people, as he had been when he'd left Sydney, people making decisions about the things in their lives they could live without. The warehouse was divided into rows of locked spaces, cubicles partitioned by thin walls. Some spaces were small and others were almost large enough to live inside. One man in shorts and thongs unloaded a dining table from a trailer and the chairs that went with it. Andrew remembered that feeling of packing up his life, compressing it into the space allotted to him and of leaving that day for Berlin, feeling unburdened and free. He had tricked himself into believing there were things he could leave behind, parts of himself that wouldn't travel with him. He could escape his regrets.

This was a place of transition, like a train station, a place people passed through on their way somewhere
else. It had taken him a long time to understand that not all people were the way he was, that some people found the place they thought they belonged, the first place they came across, and settled on it. The fact that they knew they would never leave was a source of great contentment.

He opened the box he'd dropped off last time he was here—a plastic box so the photographs held inside wouldn't deteriorate. He had forgotten about the photographs he'd taken of Dom two years earlier—he'd left the proofs here after dropping the prints at his gallery in Sydney. He still remembered that bargain he had struck with himself when he met her: that he would do whatever he could not to lose her. That was when the feeling of love he had for her was still something he was constantly aware of, before it faded into the background of his life and became something he assumed would always be there.

The pictures were taken at close range, on a long exposure. He had developed them himself at his studio in Berlin, at night in the dead of winter, fixing black plastic to the windows and taping the door closed in order to block out all the light. He had used tea as a toner and the colours were dark and caramel, almost sepia. It was as much about the process of photography as the images themselves. In them she was naked, but the way they were taken it was difficult to see which of her body parts were in the shot; they were ambiguous dark stretches of
skin. There was a photo of her stomach, her navel and the skin stretched over her hip. Because of the colours and the stillness of those photographs, she might have been a sculpture in bronze. He'd brought them back to Sydney to show his gallery, but they felt the photos didn't fit with the rest of his work. They were more personal and different to his other work—there was nothing broken or damaged about Dom as there usually was with his subjects. They were a demonstration of feelings about which he had no doubt. In the end, the gallery kept only a few prints to show to select collectors.