Where the Light Falls (20 page)

‘Your mother didn't mention me to you? I went over to her house.'

‘My mother and I don't talk regularly anymore,' she said, and there was a directness to her words, a finality, that made it clear the subject was closed. He wondered what it would be like, to shut a parent out of your life. He imagined that it was a door that wouldn't close easily.

‘Did you have much contact with Kirsten?' he asked.

‘Off and on. She lived with us for six months last year. She was looking for work down here. After she—when she stopped working for the barrister.'
The barrister
. There
was something about the way Lydia said those words, holding them up between them like soiled clothes.

She looked at him, regarding his clothes and shoes, appraising him. ‘But we hadn't spoken in months.' Her eyes were sharp and her mouth was narrow, giving him the impression that it was taking a great deal of effort to keep her feelings at bay.

‘Well, I can't imagine what it must have been like. I don't have any siblings myself.' His words made him sound like the coward he was. He looked down after he spoke and the carpet under him was the colour of crushed eggshells. ‘Well,' he said, ‘I know we never met, but Kirsten often spoke about you. I know you were important to her.' His skin went tight and he realised how cold it was inside the house. It must have been the air conditioning. It was colder indoors than it had been outside. ‘We fell out of touch in the last few years,' he said, when she didn't respond. He worried that his words sounded too thin and superficial, that they had been said too often before by other people. It was hard for him to swallow, his throat felt dry.

‘Yes, well, it's nice to know that Kirsten still had—' she hesitated, as if not quite sure how to describe him ‘—people who cared about her.'

He felt a tear in his eye, large and hot and threatening to fall. Emotions were welling in his chest and expanding as though inflated with warm air. He didn't dare to move or speak, for fear his feelings might engulf him.

‘Could you tell me about what she was like in the last few years?' he managed to ask, barely recognising his own voice. It quavered and leapt between words.

Her sigh before she spoke was long and draughty. ‘When she was well, she was fun to be with. Maybe I remember that most because I knew how dramatically things could change. You can give so much of yourself to another person; I didn't know that.' She looked up at the ceiling as she spoke and he had the impression she'd forgotten he was there when she continued. ‘Sometimes, especially in those months she was living with us, I started to worry that if I kept giving she would take everything I had. To be honest, the day I came home from work and found she was gone, I actually felt relieved. Having her here almost destroyed my marriage.' As she sat opposite him, she looked guarded and composed and not very much like a generous person.

‘Do you know if she was getting treatment?'

Lydia shook her head sadly. ‘It never really helped. For as long as I can remember, Kirsten had problems with anxiety. This was before the term was as popular as it is now. Even as a teenager, she just used to worry unnecessarily. Most of the time she was fine, but when it came it was debilitating.' She touched her fingers to her lips. ‘It never did become manageable for her.'

He wondered how it was possible for him to have lived with Kirsten and not to have known that she suffered from this condition. Maybe he'd been too preoccupied
with understanding himself to have ever really known anyone else. Maybe it had taken him this long in his life to begin to look outwards, to begin to understand others.

‘And it was something she was very good at hiding. Mum always used to tell her she didn't have a problem, that everyone felt the way she did sometimes.'

‘Did you know Kirsten came here?' Andrew asked. ‘That on the day it happened, she drove past your house several times?'

She stiffened. ‘My mother told me. Kirsten was always welcome here.' She looked past him. There was a pause and the house was so quiet, it might have been located amid empty fields.

‘Do you know what it was like in the end?' The way she held her mouth, the flatness with which she spoke her words, made him think she was saying something she'd been waiting a long time to say.

‘Talking to her, talking to Kirsten, was like waiting for glass to break. You know that moment when you drop something and you wait to see whether or not it shatters?' She looked at him, to see if he'd understood what she had said. ‘That's what it was like with Kirsten. You never knew if she would be upset by even the smallest thing. It was the same way with Mum, too, when we were growing up. We were always walking around the house on tenterhooks.' There were tears in the corners of her eyes, tears of anger more than of sadness. ‘For a long time, I used to forgive Kirsten for being that way
because I thought she didn't know the effect she had on other people.' She stood up and moved to the window. It was overcast outside.

On the coffee table was a
Vogue Good Living
and the house on the cover was open and airy; through the window the sky and the sea were the same effortless blue.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘To have upset you.' He felt he had come here into her house only to reopen old wounds, injuries she thought had healed.

She smiled at him, a smile that looked sore. She unfolded her arms. ‘No,
I'm
sorry . . . I wish I only had nice things to tell you about her.'

He rose to leave. When he was on the other side of the flyscreen door, she said, ‘She had a difficult relationship, you know.' She cleared her throat. ‘With our stepfather.'

He looked at her through the gauze of the flyscreen, wanting to know more, but she bore the expression of someone who knows something but doesn't know what to do with that information.

He walked back across the freshly mowed lawn to the hire car. The interior smelt of new plastic. He fitted the key into the ignition, but found himself unable to start the car. He wondered why Kirsten had come here that day but not gone in. He wondered whether there was something in Kirsten's life that she had come down here to share, but couldn't bring herself to speak of and so instead remained silent in her car.

He drove back to the city centre with a hard feeling in his chest, a knot of emotion that sat under his sternum. Was it possible for anyone to live without letting this hardness into their heart? Or was it something that set in with age, inevitable somehow?
The streets, wide and gentle, ushering him through the city and out the other side, heading back towards Sydney.

•

Half an hour out of Canberra, past flat, open paddocks where bales of hay were rolled into balls like oversized skeins of wool, he stopped at Lake George. The water had receded, exposing the dry grass, a dirty yellow that had formed the bottom of the lake when it was full. In the distance, the brackish silver water seemed still, a body of water that did not lap at its shores.

The water in the air sharpened the definition of the hills and the trees in the distance, but left a haze over the land. Behind the lake, wind turbines twirled in large, slow circles. The movement was mesmerising, the blades swishing through the air like pinwheels under a constant breath. The air glistened with water, evaporating and condensing, forming clouds, biding its time and waiting to rain.

Beneath the lake was a reservoir of water that the lake drained into, water settled onto the grass and eventually vanished below. He thought of it under the landscape,
surging, moving through channels of old rock, a dark underground sea roaring away beneath him.

‘It's a bit eerie, isn't it?' A voice behind him spoke and he turned, startled. A man sat with the door open, leaning from his car, eating an orange. He hadn't noticed him there. The man had a white head of hair and a beard that covered only his chin.

‘God, you gave me a fright,' Andrew said. ‘It's been a while since I last came here. I don't think I've been here since I was a kid.'

‘You should have seen it a year ago. Completely empty, it was just a field. There was cattle grazing out where the water is now.' The man nodded towards the lake then bit into the orange, dripping juice onto the gravel at his feet.

Andrew moved closer to a wooden post to which flowers had been taped. The petals had hardened and turned brittle and brown, like flowers used to make potpourri. The curled red ribbon that held the bouquet in place was the only colour that remained.

The man in the car closed the door. Andrew turned and watched as he reversed the car then drove away. It would have been a day like this when Kirsten had been there; a day when there were very few other people around. How long had she sat in her car?
What had she thought about but been unable to say?

He looked out into the haze of refracted water. What sort of numbness would it have taken to have walked out
there? There was a silence about this lake, as though the water had blunted every sound.

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.